The Fairness Doctrine

It’s been a hellacious month (a hellacious year, actually — more on that in a minute), with big changes at work (two new employees to train), a major home construction/repair project going on, and a near-fatal case of the avian flu (well, it felt like bird flu… ) from which I am just now barely rebounding.

The past year or so has been phenomenally difficult in many ways — with an aging mother-in-law who has had two falls with resulting long-term disability and a rocky recovery (but who is now doing well); a major family brawl arising out of her care decisions; a contentious dispute at work over a 401(k) discrepancy; two car accidents (my wife and I, no injuries, just the expense and hassle of dealing with body shops and car insurance); a medical lawsuit filed against me; a daughter who’s 8-month marriage ended in divorce despite her heroic efforts to salvage it; the death of the family dog; the loss of two long-term employees (in a three-employee practice) which has — temporarily, I hope — nearly doubled my workload as I train their replacements. And this is the short list.

Oh, and one more thing: our house is falling down. Seriously.
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Delivering the Cookies

It is, after a fashion, a legend of the fall.

Not mine, mind you — although one could say my fall was in some ways greater.

My wife’s mother was, though elderly, quite strong and independent — alert, cantankerous, losing a little memory here and there, in nearly constant pain from vertebrae once tall and straight but now arched and foreshortened. It seemed simple enough: bend down to retrieve the dropped utensil, a task done mindlessly a million times before. But this time, different: muscles weakened by nearly nine decades, joints worn thin and crepitant by a century’s steps, she could not maintain balance and fell backwards to the floor.

The call came shortly thereafter, and was not the first: a prior fall six months before had broken no bones but nearly broken her spirit — months of slow recovery, fighting pain and hopelessness, had by some small miracle been conquered, with much relief among us but a lingering fear of an even-worse encore. The curtain call came, to no applause and much apprehension.

The hospital stay was long, and replete with the consequences of falls in the elderly: rapid loss of strength from recumbency; mental confusion from requisite opiates; quiescent health problems charging to the fore to complicate a recovery trivial for the young but disastrous and often deadly in the eighth decade of life. When she was finally discharged to the nursing home, she was hardly recognizable as the same individual who had fallen little more than one week before.

She had sustained no fractures, but there were fractures aplenty developing. The enfeeblement of an elderly parent quickly finds the fault lines in a family, as the stresses of disrupted schedules, new financial strains, and disputes about responsibilities and recovery find old tapes playing and new resentments kindling. The lid blew off at mom’s birthday dinner, when a planned family meeting found my wife and her siblings squaring off, two on two, with one storming out and all looking for lightning rods to discharge their pent-up passions.

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Santa Sighting

SantaI know you’re all already jaded about Christmas, with the Costco and K-Mart displays showing up in September, the endless bad Christmas TV commercials, and the growing pressure to figure out the perfect present for a gaggle of worthy recipients who already have more stuff than they could possibly use in several lifetimes.

But it’s important to keep the myth and the magic in the celebration — not to mention the profound miracle of grace which this ancient and holy holiday celebrates.

So I am sure you will be excited to know that Santa has been sighted a bit earlier than normal this Christmas. My hunch is he’s been taking productivity and time-management courses this year, and has come to the conclusion — reluctantly, no doubt — that this night-before-Christmas-and all-through-the house stuff, while magical and all, is just not working for him any longer. Last year’s last-minute wildcat reindeer strike nearly wrecked visions of dancing sugarplums for a whole slew of sleep-deprived, sugar-addled munchkins, so Santa’s playin’ it safe this year. If he misses Christmas, the resulting class-action lawsuit would leave the Elves on welfare and the reindeer eating bark again.


Santa, I might add, has also gone high fashion — even the Manalo would approve of his new couture: silks, jewels, natural furs. No more frumpy red suits with bulging buttons and black buckled belts for him — it’s Project Runway, baby!
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Light Posting for a While

Virginia V Mosquito Fleet ferry
Virginia V – Mosquito Fleet ferry
 
I’ve been a bit out of pocket of late, in no small part due to an ongoing family crisis (which I alluded to here) which has consumed a lot of time and even more emotional energy. So I haven’t had the time or mental wherewithal to put many cogent thoughts together for posting. Hopefully this will change in the near future, but in the meantime I’ll repost a few of my earlier essays which some of you may not have read, or may do some shorter posts as time and energy permit. I may also post some photos I’ve got lying around: the above is the Mosquito Fleet ferry Virginia V, which made its maiden voyage in Puget Sound in March 1922, and is the last remaining steam-powered ferry of the Mosquito Fleet, seen above, restored, sailing in the Tacoma Tall Ships Festival in July 2005, where I took the above shot.

The Breaking of Waves


 

There are times when the feebleness of prose fails; when clarity of language and reasoned arguments cannot do justice to the cries of the heart. In the depths of our souls there are emotions, experiences, pain, joy which defy the pathetic limitations of mere words; whose depths and complexities, whose heights and depths, defeat the poor tools of the spoken or written word. It is at such times, perhaps, that the poets take over; where language becomes a tool of another part of the soul, of the spirit. It is a time when the sound and the image of language — for language is the only tool our soul possesses to reach outward — comes to the fore, where images and emotions trump simple structure, where sentences fail but evocative words must bear the unspeakable pain or unsurpassable joy which the soul knows, but the mind cannot grasp.

It was at such a moment that I wrote a poem — where images formed and fleeting could not be expressed by any other means, where deep pain and lifelong experience, where emptiness and hope, joy and agony, swirled together in a violent whirlpool seeking voice which could be found no other way. Such was the purpose, I now understand, for ancient icons painted in gold and the faded red of blood spilled and eyes swollen by tears, of hope and heartache hand in hand, which line the ancient walls of Eastern churches and the fading art of ages past.

Someone very dear to me — my own flesh and blood — is going through a very dark valley. No words can express the joy and satisfaction which a child brings into your life. It is a deep thing of the heart — inexpressible through words, better expressed through the countless deeds of shepherding them through their early years; investing your life, often inadequately, often distracted by false priorities and our foul selfishness so profoundly shortsighted. There comes a time, after years of joy and agony, frustration and fear, when you finally set them free — like some young child learning to ride a bike, watching them swerve and struggle for balance, wandering left and right, falling and getting up again, fearing for their safety and flinching at their pain, knowing and praying that the balance will be found and their road thereby made straight.

Yet once on their road, a large part of your soul rides with them. Lost is the ability to easily check and correct their wrong turns — to even know if every turn which seems wrong may instead be a new road toward greater purpose and joy, or a downward path to pain and destruction. To lose such control over something so dear — a control we truly never have had, but which in our delusions of parental power we had believed — can be an unbearable agony, for it shows us the fragility of life and how foolish are our pretensions of manipulating our own journeys, much less those of another.

The veneer of life may be smooth or turbulent, rolling or roiled, and our eye sees only its very surface, placid or violent. Yet forces far vaster drive its movement, tides and tempests, currents and continents. The very violence of a hard wave breaking upon jagged rocks, transforming its placid swells into a fine and fleeting misting foam which arcs high and falls again to the sea, is but a the final act of a unimaginably complex play, whose actors and plots are unseen and unknown. Yet the culmination of these forces transform while they transfix: the wave is shaped by the rocks as the rocks are sculpted by the wave.

It is a small thing to speak of grace, of prayer, of transcendent power transformational, of wisdom and foolishness, in the words smooth and rhythmic belying the power of the forces thus described. It is in the violence of the wave crashing on the rocks that such deep forces rise to the surface, testing the mettle of the soul, bringing forth fear and apprehension from the depths of our being which belie and challenge the trust in something greater and higher than ourselves. We may at such times turn in many directions, as the surf and mist may fall slowly back to sea or lie stagnant in pools of desiccated brine. Such times demand wisdom which we do not possess; such times demand strength which we utterly lack; such times demand peace when only fear and confusion seem possible.

Such times are, for this poor fool, seasons of much prayer — as if every moment of our life should not be — but a merciful God still listens and touches the heart though his treasured child has wandered afar. It is at such times that one sees how frail is faith, how cheap are words, how empty are our souls though our lives be filled with hollow riches unimaginable.

If you are among those who pray, and are given a few moments’ grace to do so, your prayers will be cherished and valued beyond measure by myself and my family. I cannot say at this time how the events of the next few days will play out — as if we ever know such a thing — but I have come, through many years of foolishness and failure, to a point where trust trumps knowledge, for He whom I trust has never let me down — though my eyes have often seen Him but dimly.

When Waters Break

waves
 

When waters break, their power spent in fine mist on the breeze,
to thus retreat, and gather up and hurl again
against those jagged boulders yet unfazed;

What purpose, they, whose molten age in fiercest shapes did freeze,
their faces polished now by salt and sand,
igniting foaming fury upward raised?

And why the rolling wave from distant endless seas,
a trifling ripple swells in vast expanse,
to end its path in agony and praise?

And thus thrust skyward power breaks to knees,
in roar of prayer with lifted pleading hands,
now gently laid to rest on rugged place.

When waters break, He draws the fine mist high from troubled seas,
in glory does the breaking fury stand,
to shape the hardened heart which wounded lays.

The Path – II:
Exodus

A journal of one fool’s journey, and the faith which found him.

 
It happened by accident.

Really.

Just off the lot, spanking new, a canary yellow convertible Beetle with black canvas top: her first car. She never saw the woman as she backed out of the parking stall. Fender-bender, to be sure–but deeply distressing, as only the first wound on new wheels can be. “Why?!” her muttered prayer, angry yet submissive by will, seeking to understand what could have no meaning beyond divine capriciousness. Her unintended target, an older women, gracious and composed, proved more merciful than mad–and by twists quite serpentine, two women met by accident that day, mangled fenders forging new friendship. The older woman’s daughter–a remarkable young lady who lost her sight in early adulthood–soon became Cynthia’s good friend as well. And before long she was introduced by this new friendship to another woman–who was a medical student.

Linda was funny, smart, sassy, and tough as nails. One of only ten women in a medical school class of 200, she could throw a punch as well as take one–a highly useful skill in the days before robust friendships between men and women were castrated by PC speech codes and university thought police. She excelled in the dark, sarcastic humor of the urban Northeast–a skill I too had learned in home and high school, a drop-forged survival shield guarding wounded spirit with sarcastic put-down humor.
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Exodus”

Goodbye, My Old Friend

Lucy
 
Today is a day filled with many tears and much heartache: a loved one has passed on.

The call came late in the day. Lucy, our 13 year old chow, had been showing her age, but still seemed in good health, generally happy and active. Over the past few weeks, however, she had had some days of pronounced lethargy, and had been eating very little and losing weight. Nevertheless, she seemed herself most days — until today. She refused to eat, was unable to stand, and was taken to the vet. The news was grim: she had widely metastatic cancer, and was in her last days. The choice was difficult, but we knew it was the best for her, and after saying our goodbyes, she was gently put to sleep in my wife’s arms.

I stayed late at work, doing nothing either urgent or important, but simply passing time, not wanting to go home. My family was together at my wife’s mother’s house, and I knew our home would be empty. I drove up to the house, dreading my destination. No raucus barking proclaiming my arrival. No smiling face at the back door, no gently wagging spitz-curl tail, no pinned back ears joyful at this reunion, no vocal squeals nor licks on legs.

There was only, silence.

I walked around the house, knowing she was gone, but still in some irrational hope thinking I might see her. Her spot by the window, where she spent endless hours watching the neighborhood, stood empty. Her food dish, barely touched, sat where final attempts to give her nourishment had failed. The fire in my heart burned hot, its acrid smoke tightening my throat, and tears flowed freely.

Lucy as puppy
 

She had been a fine dog, noble, reserved, deeply affectionate with her family, loyal to a fault. She was strong of will, and needed a firm hand at times, but always came around. You could always get her to lie down — even against her will — but you’d better expect some sassy backtalk when she hit the ground. She had her idiosyncrasies, as most pets do: a passionate love for Kleenex, cookie dough, marshmellows–and toilet paper. If you left the bathroom door open, you could always find Lucy: just follow the paper trail, carefully unraveled–and there she’d be at the end, happy as a clam, munching on her paper snack. Her sweet spot sat beneath her curled tail — an area which you simply could not scratch enough. We used to joke that you could go for days without seeing Lucy’s face: she would butt her hind end right up to you like a trucker at a loading dock, demanding that you scratch her back. “No” was not an acceptable answer, as she snapped her head around and sassed you until you complied. Give her a new bone, and she would trot in circles around the house, proudly parading the spoils of her most recent kill, until finally, in sheer exhaustion, she lay down to savor her repast. She was inconsolable when any one of her pack left the house: whimpering, crying, pacing from door to window, desperately hoping to see you. It mattered not one whit that everyone else in the family was still inside with her: she only wanted to be with the one who had just left.

There are some who will not own a pet, because they cannot bear the thought of losing it. The pain of loss can be so great as to overshadow the joy of their companionship. But the years of friendship, humor, affection, — and yes, maddening frustration — cannot be replaced at any price — even at the price of so great a loss. Our animals bring out the best, and sometimes the worst in us, drawing forth our love and affection in almost boundless measure, even while testing our sanity and patience — and always crushing our hearts and breaking our spirits when they leave us.

Lucy
 

The death of an animal is the death of its spirit: so say the philosophers and pundits. But they are wrong. Our animals are redeemed by the passion of love which we pour out upon them — a passion which enlivens their spirit throughout eternity, as they live in our hearts, and in our memories, and in the richness they have brought to our lives. I have no doubt that this fine animal is now at peace, and that our spirits will never be separated from her throughout eternity.

UPDATE: Thank each of you from the bottom of my heart for your thoughts and expressions of sympathy. Frank Porretto, of the always-excellent Eternity Road, has also written about his loss earlier this year of Bruno, his Newfie, in prose far more moving and powerful than my simple words. If you have ever lost a beloved pet, read this, for you will understand–and weep.