"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it." --- Jane Austen
In times of trouble and emotional tribulation, we turn to the calm outlook of Jane Austen. Love may come and love may go, but real estate lasts forever -- or nearly so.
And when Jane Austen talks about income, she means the income from the securest investment of all -- property, land.
With great sympathy to those underwater or facing foreclosure, a good home with the mortgage paid is a wonderful blessing.
A dear relative called me this weekend with news of a love affair gone bad. There were so many tears and such pain. But later, as things calmed down, we began to discuss her property -- the home she owns, what it might be worth on today's market, whether it might be a good time to sell. This was such a soothing topic.
Keeping the house is probably her best option, but prices in her neighborhood are still pretty good, and selling could be a good alternative.
But if you sell, then you have money. Money makes me nervous. It sloshes around and other people want to take it from you. It's better to take your money and put it back into land.
Therapists say we need to be grounded. I take that literally. A good fixed-rate 30-year mortgage is the ticket.
THANKSGIVING. I had Thanksgiving with very good friends in Anacortes. One of them, the one who sat next to me during the meal, insisted on talking about politics. I did not enjoy the meal.
But afterward, over pie, the hostess brought out her advertising inserts, listing all the special sales and bargains on Black Friday. She and her husband were going to make the 4 a.m. show at Wal-Mart, Kohls, Best Buy, and so on. I hate shopping and I am a life-long critic of American consumerism, yet their sheer enthusiasm and dedication won me over. With elbows sharpened, the two of them plunged into the crowd and fought their way to the best bragging deal in town.
They were buying things they could easily do without, but I'm not going to be a party pooper.
WHO'S HAVING THE MOST FUN? This might be the first weekend this year, when I had more fun than Tiger Woods. He's a wonderful man and a superb athlete. Did his wife really try to brain him with a golf club? It's none of my business, really.
FOUR POLICEMEN KILLED NEAR TACOMA. The execution-style slaying of four cops happened this morning in a suburb near Tacoma. This is awful and frightening. A Seattle cop was killed in this manner last month.
I have to think about this. I was going to write about how we all have blessings and so many things to be grateful for, but now I can't. I have to think about these four cops who were killed. What can I do about it?
BARBARA CRAM DIED. Barbara Cram died in the early hours of Thanksgiving morning, at her home in Seattle. I had a chance to say goodbye to her on Wednesday. She was calm and receiving very good care from her family and the hospice nurses. Barbara had so very many good friends in LaConner. For those who didn't know her, she was the founder of Friendship House in Mount Vernon, a homeless shelter.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Flight of the Owl
I got up before dawn this morning and drove four miles to the Conway Store because I was out of coffee, and on the way back to the farmhouse, an owl flew over the road, going home after a night’s hunt.
Owls fly so quietly in the darkness. But I am fairly glad to be a human being who gets his groceries at the store. If I had to fly around at night looking for mice to eat, I would starve. Then you have to eat the mice raw, fur, bones and all. I wouldn’t like it.
Speaking of groceries, I will be interviewing a local potato farmer on Monday for a story in the LaConner Weekly News. Skagit Red potatoes are the number one cash crop in these parts -- some 13,500 acres planted this year. We have a warehouse near our old farmhouse (one of several in the valley) which holds countless tons of red potatoes in a huge pile.
That’s why I live here. Sure the people are friendly and the scenery is beautiful, but I’m here because I’m close to the food. It’s the old Scarlett O’Hara instinct in me. “As God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.” Not with all those spuds just down the road.
That reminds me of one of the most important functions of the federal government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Conservatives object so strenuously to “government interference” and burdensome regulations and taxation and so forth.
I have seen some very conservative ranchers and farmers go on at length about this, like it was a matter of principle, and why can’t we just get the government off our backs?
But they change their tune when the farm bill comes up for a vote. All of a sudden agriculture becomes an essential industry that can’t be allowed to fail. Government money is not wasted on their livelihood.
I agree with that. Government support of agriculture has been highly effective over all. The evidence is our fertile fields and the abundance of low-cost food at our grocery stores. It works.
Now, these same conservative farmers and ranchers might consider that the government can provide some useful assistance to other occupations and other problems, don’t you think?
OFF THE ISLAND. I will be moving off Fir Island in a few weeks. I have been living in this beautiful old farmhouse for two years. The view from my window, across the fields to Mount Baker, is a daily inspiration, watching flocks of snow geese in the winter, and flocks of sparrows in the summer.
But it gets cold living in a house with wood heat, and I’m ready for a move into town, to civilization and central heating, where you just twist the dial on the thermostat and pay the bill every month.
Besides that, I feel like being more sociable. In a compact town like LaConner, you just walk to the grocery store or the post office and you see people you know, and there’s always someone to talk to, and generally we talk about the other people we live with -- not that I’m a gossip.
I will be engaged in a three-month house-sitting situation, which is a great opportunity to concentrate on the book I am writing. Having this low-cost housing plus an advance from the publisher will make it possible.
Speaking of the manuscript -- the working title is “Best of Frog Hospital” -- it will be edited. The publisher and I have agreed to find a good editor and get that thing done just right. This is very re-assuring, because a writer can look at a page of his own words and stare at that page for an hour and know that something just isn’t right, but he can’t quite put his finger on it.
But when a good editor comes along, he or she reads the page, identifies the problem, gets out the old red pencil, and tells you what to do. It’s a wonderful process, although it can be testy at times, because the writer often feels that his own formulations are almost sacred and perfect. When that happens a discussion may ensue between the writer and the editor and things get worked out. For the best, I hope.
LONG-TERM LEAVE FROM THE HOSPITAL. Besides moving off the island, I am taking a long-term leave from the hospital where I have worked the past two years. It is very stressful working on the medical unit in the midst of pain, suffering and death, and I’m not being dramatic in describing it that way because that’s just what goes on at the medical unit.
It’s stressful. Most of the full-time nurses and nursing aides are well under the age of fifty. When nurses get past fifty, they tend to work part-time or to find less stressful assignments
I’m 63, so I need a break. I had a talk about this with a retired doctor and he recommended a long-term break, until mid-January at the earliest. He said to take some long walks and spend time playing with children, and that is what I am doing.
I wish you and your family peace and prosperity and the very best of Thanksgiving.
GARBLED TRANSMISSION. Several readers reported receiving a garbled transmission of the text last time. Thank you for telling me this. I may have identified the problem.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
Owls fly so quietly in the darkness. But I am fairly glad to be a human being who gets his groceries at the store. If I had to fly around at night looking for mice to eat, I would starve. Then you have to eat the mice raw, fur, bones and all. I wouldn’t like it.
Speaking of groceries, I will be interviewing a local potato farmer on Monday for a story in the LaConner Weekly News. Skagit Red potatoes are the number one cash crop in these parts -- some 13,500 acres planted this year. We have a warehouse near our old farmhouse (one of several in the valley) which holds countless tons of red potatoes in a huge pile.
That’s why I live here. Sure the people are friendly and the scenery is beautiful, but I’m here because I’m close to the food. It’s the old Scarlett O’Hara instinct in me. “As God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.” Not with all those spuds just down the road.
That reminds me of one of the most important functions of the federal government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Conservatives object so strenuously to “government interference” and burdensome regulations and taxation and so forth.
I have seen some very conservative ranchers and farmers go on at length about this, like it was a matter of principle, and why can’t we just get the government off our backs?
But they change their tune when the farm bill comes up for a vote. All of a sudden agriculture becomes an essential industry that can’t be allowed to fail. Government money is not wasted on their livelihood.
I agree with that. Government support of agriculture has been highly effective over all. The evidence is our fertile fields and the abundance of low-cost food at our grocery stores. It works.
Now, these same conservative farmers and ranchers might consider that the government can provide some useful assistance to other occupations and other problems, don’t you think?
OFF THE ISLAND. I will be moving off Fir Island in a few weeks. I have been living in this beautiful old farmhouse for two years. The view from my window, across the fields to Mount Baker, is a daily inspiration, watching flocks of snow geese in the winter, and flocks of sparrows in the summer.
But it gets cold living in a house with wood heat, and I’m ready for a move into town, to civilization and central heating, where you just twist the dial on the thermostat and pay the bill every month.
Besides that, I feel like being more sociable. In a compact town like LaConner, you just walk to the grocery store or the post office and you see people you know, and there’s always someone to talk to, and generally we talk about the other people we live with -- not that I’m a gossip.
I will be engaged in a three-month house-sitting situation, which is a great opportunity to concentrate on the book I am writing. Having this low-cost housing plus an advance from the publisher will make it possible.
Speaking of the manuscript -- the working title is “Best of Frog Hospital” -- it will be edited. The publisher and I have agreed to find a good editor and get that thing done just right. This is very re-assuring, because a writer can look at a page of his own words and stare at that page for an hour and know that something just isn’t right, but he can’t quite put his finger on it.
But when a good editor comes along, he or she reads the page, identifies the problem, gets out the old red pencil, and tells you what to do. It’s a wonderful process, although it can be testy at times, because the writer often feels that his own formulations are almost sacred and perfect. When that happens a discussion may ensue between the writer and the editor and things get worked out. For the best, I hope.
LONG-TERM LEAVE FROM THE HOSPITAL. Besides moving off the island, I am taking a long-term leave from the hospital where I have worked the past two years. It is very stressful working on the medical unit in the midst of pain, suffering and death, and I’m not being dramatic in describing it that way because that’s just what goes on at the medical unit.
It’s stressful. Most of the full-time nurses and nursing aides are well under the age of fifty. When nurses get past fifty, they tend to work part-time or to find less stressful assignments
I’m 63, so I need a break. I had a talk about this with a retired doctor and he recommended a long-term break, until mid-January at the earliest. He said to take some long walks and spend time playing with children, and that is what I am doing.
I wish you and your family peace and prosperity and the very best of Thanksgiving.
GARBLED TRANSMISSION. Several readers reported receiving a garbled transmission of the text last time. Thank you for telling me this. I may have identified the problem.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
If You Feel Guilty You Are
In LaConner you're a local if you were born here, or if you went to high school here, or if you no longer give a shit whether anybody thinks you're a local.
This is where I used to live, but I am moving into town:
Room to rent in a lovely old farmhouse on Fir Island. $400 includes utilities. Spacious room with a view to die for facing east across the fields to Mt. Baker. Nice quiet house, good people. Available December 9. Call Patty Detzer 360-445-6281.
This is from Old Frog Hospital -- the kind of thing that will be included in the book I am writing:
If You Feel Guilty You Are
Why do people say “I feel guilty”? Why don’t they say “I am guilty”? If you feel guilty because you are guilty, that means you are doing something you shouldn’t do, and you should stop doing it. If you feel guilty, but you are not guilty, then you need to visit the Head Doctor, or take some Clarification Pills, because you cannot actually feel guilty unless you are guilty.
Do you feel guilty because of what somebody else did? Then you have your emotions on backward. You might feel sad because of what somebody else did, or disappointed, or angry, but you cannot actually feel guilty about what somebody else did.
Ah, but what about collective responsibility? There is a group, a social unit, that you identify with, that you belong to, and this group has done something wrong. Now this is the right way to talk – we say, “We are guilty,” not “We feel guilty,” certainly not “I feel guilty.” To say that “I feel guilty” because of what the group has done is to give yourself an unwarranted importance.
But, in most instances, people say “I feel guilty” because they don’t actually want to take any responsibility – it’s a clever way to avoid saying “I am guilty.” It’s a clever way to avoid making a judgment – either you are guilty or you are not, being fully contextual and using your very own standards, not someone else’s, not what you were taught, but what you actually know – Did you or did you not do this thing? And was doing this thing right or wrong?
Come, come, it’s not that hard. We have the well-known grey area of course. Does everything fall into the grey area? Actually, not.
So let’s say, having gone through this exercise, you reach the conclusion of “I am not guilty” and “I didn’t actually do anything wrong.” Then it’s not your fault – this harm. Either it was not a harm, or else someone else did it.
But if you reach the conclusion of “I am guilty” then you better stop doing it. That is the point of the exercise – to stop doing it. Making amends and apologizing does not serve much purpose, but to reach a decision and then to change behavior, that is character development.
Guilt is not a feeling, it is a state or condition. Feelings, famously, just are, and we accept them–we do nothing. Guilt is the result of a decision or judgment, by ourselves or by others, which points to an imperative--to do something about it.
I could edit this essay, written in 2004, and stop it right here, because the point is well-made, in a general sense. But I wanted to put this exposition on guilt in a context, so I went on to describe this meeting I attended in the town of Langley on Whidbey Island.
I recently attended a meeting of the Peace & Reconciliation Network in the town of Langley on Whidbey Island, at Neil’s Clover Patch Café. The invitation said:
“The Whidbey Peace and Reconciliation Network invites you to a relaxing evening of conversation with your neighbors. We believe that community spirit can be nurtured through good conversation – and great pie and coffee! All points of view are most welcome as we discuss the question: Given the world situation, what do you regard as beautiful and worth preserving on Whidbey Island and, what are you willing to do to preserve it? We will use a process called the Conversation Café…”
I especially like the Conversation Café format of small group (6-8 people) discussion, because I feel awkward speaking to larger groups, and I get very bored. With the smaller group, I get more chances to talk, and because I know I will get a chance to talk I am more likely to listen. The facilitator urged us to listen to each other and not rehearse our own speech – well taken.
Langley is a small town on south Whidbey Island – even cuter than LaConner. Lots of arts & crafts, many long-distance commuters to Seattle via the ferry at Mukilteo – no farmers, no Indians, no Hispanics – it is a liberal town, Democratic.
And I didn’t go there to make fun of these people, or to characterize them – I drove
there, and it takes more than one hour, to join with them and to see if they finally got their act together and their heads on straight. But I was disappointed – they still feel guilty.
But guilty of what? A competent group with mastery of social and technical skills that assures a high standard of living, yet in the context of this group discussion they expressed doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity. George Bush runs they country and they do not. Bush spearheaded the war on Iraq, which they opposed. They’ve lost money in the stock market, and they have lost environmental battles with developers on Whidbey Island.
Given the question about preserving the beauty of Whidbey Island, they felt unworthy even to live there. They said that right-wing fundamentalism was the bane of America. Yet they provided the opposite and contrary attitude of excessive doubt, confusion and inaction – stalling, feeling guilty, avoiding decision.
In conclusion ( a formulation rarely used in Frog Hospital ), the prime directive is “Do the Right Thing,” citing the Spike Lee version of that phrase.
This essay is good, but it needs a better ending. I’ll work on that.
A rare Frog Hospital poem follows, from July 2003:
Mercy
Mercy for Slobodan Milosovic,
Mercy for War Criminals,
Mercy for Cop Killers,
Mercy for Drunk Drivers and Deadbeat Dads,
Mercy for Wife Beaters,
Mercy for Tyrants and Manipulators,
Mercy for Drug Addicts and Winos.
Well, it’s easy to be merciful to people you like.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
This is where I used to live, but I am moving into town:
Room to rent in a lovely old farmhouse on Fir Island. $400 includes utilities. Spacious room with a view to die for facing east across the fields to Mt. Baker. Nice quiet house, good people. Available December 9. Call Patty Detzer 360-445-6281.
This is from Old Frog Hospital -- the kind of thing that will be included in the book I am writing:
If You Feel Guilty You Are
Why do people say “I feel guilty”? Why don’t they say “I am guilty”? If you feel guilty because you are guilty, that means you are doing something you shouldn’t do, and you should stop doing it. If you feel guilty, but you are not guilty, then you need to visit the Head Doctor, or take some Clarification Pills, because you cannot actually feel guilty unless you are guilty.
Do you feel guilty because of what somebody else did? Then you have your emotions on backward. You might feel sad because of what somebody else did, or disappointed, or angry, but you cannot actually feel guilty about what somebody else did.
Ah, but what about collective responsibility? There is a group, a social unit, that you identify with, that you belong to, and this group has done something wrong. Now this is the right way to talk – we say, “We are guilty,” not “We feel guilty,” certainly not “I feel guilty.” To say that “I feel guilty” because of what the group has done is to give yourself an unwarranted importance.
But, in most instances, people say “I feel guilty” because they don’t actually want to take any responsibility – it’s a clever way to avoid saying “I am guilty.” It’s a clever way to avoid making a judgment – either you are guilty or you are not, being fully contextual and using your very own standards, not someone else’s, not what you were taught, but what you actually know – Did you or did you not do this thing? And was doing this thing right or wrong?
Come, come, it’s not that hard. We have the well-known grey area of course. Does everything fall into the grey area? Actually, not.
So let’s say, having gone through this exercise, you reach the conclusion of “I am not guilty” and “I didn’t actually do anything wrong.” Then it’s not your fault – this harm. Either it was not a harm, or else someone else did it.
But if you reach the conclusion of “I am guilty” then you better stop doing it. That is the point of the exercise – to stop doing it. Making amends and apologizing does not serve much purpose, but to reach a decision and then to change behavior, that is character development.
Guilt is not a feeling, it is a state or condition. Feelings, famously, just are, and we accept them–we do nothing. Guilt is the result of a decision or judgment, by ourselves or by others, which points to an imperative--to do something about it.
I could edit this essay, written in 2004, and stop it right here, because the point is well-made, in a general sense. But I wanted to put this exposition on guilt in a context, so I went on to describe this meeting I attended in the town of Langley on Whidbey Island.
I recently attended a meeting of the Peace & Reconciliation Network in the town of Langley on Whidbey Island, at Neil’s Clover Patch Café. The invitation said:
“The Whidbey Peace and Reconciliation Network invites you to a relaxing evening of conversation with your neighbors. We believe that community spirit can be nurtured through good conversation – and great pie and coffee! All points of view are most welcome as we discuss the question: Given the world situation, what do you regard as beautiful and worth preserving on Whidbey Island and, what are you willing to do to preserve it? We will use a process called the Conversation Café…”
I especially like the Conversation Café format of small group (6-8 people) discussion, because I feel awkward speaking to larger groups, and I get very bored. With the smaller group, I get more chances to talk, and because I know I will get a chance to talk I am more likely to listen. The facilitator urged us to listen to each other and not rehearse our own speech – well taken.
Langley is a small town on south Whidbey Island – even cuter than LaConner. Lots of arts & crafts, many long-distance commuters to Seattle via the ferry at Mukilteo – no farmers, no Indians, no Hispanics – it is a liberal town, Democratic.
And I didn’t go there to make fun of these people, or to characterize them – I drove
there, and it takes more than one hour, to join with them and to see if they finally got their act together and their heads on straight. But I was disappointed – they still feel guilty.
But guilty of what? A competent group with mastery of social and technical skills that assures a high standard of living, yet in the context of this group discussion they expressed doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity. George Bush runs they country and they do not. Bush spearheaded the war on Iraq, which they opposed. They’ve lost money in the stock market, and they have lost environmental battles with developers on Whidbey Island.
Given the question about preserving the beauty of Whidbey Island, they felt unworthy even to live there. They said that right-wing fundamentalism was the bane of America. Yet they provided the opposite and contrary attitude of excessive doubt, confusion and inaction – stalling, feeling guilty, avoiding decision.
In conclusion ( a formulation rarely used in Frog Hospital ), the prime directive is “Do the Right Thing,” citing the Spike Lee version of that phrase.
This essay is good, but it needs a better ending. I’ll work on that.
A rare Frog Hospital poem follows, from July 2003:
Mercy
Mercy for Slobodan Milosovic,
Mercy for War Criminals,
Mercy for Cop Killers,
Mercy for Drunk Drivers and Deadbeat Dads,
Mercy for Wife Beaters,
Mercy for Tyrants and Manipulators,
Mercy for Drug Addicts and Winos.
Well, it’s easy to be merciful to people you like.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
why men don't go to yoga class
dunja, the yoga teacher asked me one day, “Why don’t men come to yoga class?” I said to her, “Let me think about that.”
It’s true that most of her students are women, with the odd guy here and there, and dunja correctly chose me as the odd guy who could explain masculine psychology to her.
I came back with the answer the next week, “dunja, men don’t go to yoga class because there’s no equipment and you don’t keep score.”
Which is obvious, once you thinks about it. There’s no gear. I mean, if they had a yoga launcher or yoga stimulator or something like that, than I could buy one. But then one of the other guys would buy a yoga launcher with chrome bushings and a genuine leather handle, and then he would have bragging rights in yoga class, until I bought a four-point turbocharged yoga massicator with a built-in electronic monitor.
Yoga would be more exciting, instead of all this “breath in, breath out, keep your center, be mindful” stuff.
Then we need to have teams, like five-man squads -- the Yoga Bears versus the Dharma Dudes and cheerleaders going “Down Dog! Down Dog!”
We’ll give dunja a whistle, and she could put people in the penalty box for e Egocentric Manipulation and Past Lives Interference. They would put this on ESPN and all the guys would show up for yoga class.
YOGA WITH DUNJA. Sunday at 9:30 a.m., Tuesday at 8 a.m., Wednesday at 7 p.m., Thursday at 8 a.m. and Friday at 9:30 a.m. Classes are $15 for drop-in or $108 for eight classes. Held at Keystone Center, 619 Commercial Ave, Anacortes. Call 360-770-7891, if you have any questions. Classes have been cancelled for Nov. 18 and Nov. 19, but will be held as scheduled for the Thanksgiving holiday.
RUMANIAN WOMEN. An Anacortes resident and world traveler returned from a long journey to Rumania, the Eastern European country with one of the most corrupt governments on earth, its stream fouled with pollution from Stalin-era factories, it’s economy in shatters. It seems to be such a mess.
“The women are too beautiful,” the world traveler said. “Rumanian women are the most beautiful women I have ever seen. And the men are all crazy. There’s no one left to run the government. I was in a daze myself the whole time I was there. The women are so beautiful that I couldn’t think straight.”
An interesting comment, but not confirmed by other sources.
THE MUSIC MAN. Meredith Wilson’s wonderful musical, The Music Man, opens at the LaConner School Auditorium Thursday, Nov. 19. I have sat through several rehearsals and the singing is wonderful. Watch your friends and neighbors as they transform themselves by the magic of theatrical drama and become the characters they portray.
You will really enjoy this show. And Meredith Wilson is a genius. Anybody who can write a song about Gary, Indiana, deserves the highest praise.
FROG HOSPITAL SIGNS A BOOK DEAL. Fred Owens, referred to as “Author,” has signed a two-book contract with an independent publishing firm. The contract involves a cash advance from the Publisher, and an obligation from the Author to produce one manuscript on May 15, 2010, and another manuscript September 15, 2010.
The first manuscript will be a collection of essays. The working title is “Best of Frog Hospital.” The second manuscript will be a story or collection of stories written by the Author.
The contract has all kinds of neat bells and whistles with clauses about royalties and clauses about good faith, etc., etc.
This is such a good deal. The cash advance makes all the difference in the world. It will give me the chance to concentrate on the work, which is necessary for a good completion. Plus, the publisher has on obligation to publish same.
So it makes you think it’s really going to happen.
The publishing firm will be making its own announcement at a later date, so this is all I can tell you right now.
The Best of Frog Hospital. We really have to have a better title than that, but I am going through the old stuff and picking out what I am not tired of. If you have a favorite, please let me know.
Here’s one from last year, kind of serious, called “Poverty is a Misfortune.”
POVERTY IS A MISFORTUNE. Poverty is a misfortune, it does not provoke nobility or generosity. It must be accepted, endured, fought, and overcome.
Poverty is no blessing, except in the larger sense that all life is a blessing, or pancreatic cancer is a blessing.
Certainly one can learn from the experience. One can exhibit grace.
But to say, Wouldn't it be fun to be poor, is like saying, Wouldn't it fun to be sick.
One does chose the state of poverty as better than a dishonorable life, but one does not seek it for its own sake.
Poverty is not simple living. In fact, it can be both immensely complicated and continuously boring.
But simple living is a happy state. Defined as this: You are living simply if your income is greater than your expenses. Poverty is the reverse of that condition.
AND, a bit of political satire
we’re not like that here (written Nov. 2008)
I was reading about the scandal in Illinois and how Governor Blagojevich
was arrested for selling favors. Like many Washingtonians I was shocked at the depth of corruption coming out of Chicago. I am so glad that we're not like that here.
Take our Governor, Christian Gregoire -- she is an angel of the highest ethical standards. It's true that the tribal casinos made substantial contributions to her campaign fund, but does that grant them any special access? Of course not, Gregoire doesn't even return their phone calls.
Bud Norris, the mayor of Mount Vernon, is so careful not to do any favors for his friends that he doesn't even HAVE friends.
Our Skagit County Commissioners are utterly beyond any attempt at influence. It's true that they sometimes play golf with local business leaders. And it's true that those same business leaders might benefit from zoning changes, but of course those subjects are not discussed. Our commissioners simply cannot be bought.
No, we're not like those crooks in Chicago and thank goodness for that. We can trust our local leaders. In Skagit County, we pay our property taxes with the complete assurance that every penny will be honestly allocated.
AND “RARE DISEASES AND ROUTINE SURGERY,” a medical drama
"It's a routine surgery."
What?
"Well, it's a fairly common procedure, and the outcome is almost always positive."
But....
"Of course, in a very small number of cases, it's possible that..."
That's what I thought, I'm gonna die.
"Look, it'll be over before you know it, and you won't feel a thing.... I mean, again, there is the slight possibility of some discomfort, but that's not likely, and we have very good pain medication."
I'm gonna die. You're going to put me unconscious and cut me open with a knife. I can see my guts spilling all over the place and there's blood everywhere.
The patient screams. The surgeon makes a wordless, reassuring gesture. The patient shakes his head, looks out the window for a moment and says, "Okay, whatever, give me the form, I'll sign it."
Thus concludes the world's shortest medical drama.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
It’s true that most of her students are women, with the odd guy here and there, and dunja correctly chose me as the odd guy who could explain masculine psychology to her.
I came back with the answer the next week, “dunja, men don’t go to yoga class because there’s no equipment and you don’t keep score.”
Which is obvious, once you thinks about it. There’s no gear. I mean, if they had a yoga launcher or yoga stimulator or something like that, than I could buy one. But then one of the other guys would buy a yoga launcher with chrome bushings and a genuine leather handle, and then he would have bragging rights in yoga class, until I bought a four-point turbocharged yoga massicator with a built-in electronic monitor.
Yoga would be more exciting, instead of all this “breath in, breath out, keep your center, be mindful” stuff.
Then we need to have teams, like five-man squads -- the Yoga Bears versus the Dharma Dudes and cheerleaders going “Down Dog! Down Dog!”
We’ll give dunja a whistle, and she could put people in the penalty box for e Egocentric Manipulation and Past Lives Interference. They would put this on ESPN and all the guys would show up for yoga class.
YOGA WITH DUNJA. Sunday at 9:30 a.m., Tuesday at 8 a.m., Wednesday at 7 p.m., Thursday at 8 a.m. and Friday at 9:30 a.m. Classes are $15 for drop-in or $108 for eight classes. Held at Keystone Center, 619 Commercial Ave, Anacortes. Call 360-770-7891, if you have any questions. Classes have been cancelled for Nov. 18 and Nov. 19, but will be held as scheduled for the Thanksgiving holiday.
RUMANIAN WOMEN. An Anacortes resident and world traveler returned from a long journey to Rumania, the Eastern European country with one of the most corrupt governments on earth, its stream fouled with pollution from Stalin-era factories, it’s economy in shatters. It seems to be such a mess.
“The women are too beautiful,” the world traveler said. “Rumanian women are the most beautiful women I have ever seen. And the men are all crazy. There’s no one left to run the government. I was in a daze myself the whole time I was there. The women are so beautiful that I couldn’t think straight.”
An interesting comment, but not confirmed by other sources.
THE MUSIC MAN. Meredith Wilson’s wonderful musical, The Music Man, opens at the LaConner School Auditorium Thursday, Nov. 19. I have sat through several rehearsals and the singing is wonderful. Watch your friends and neighbors as they transform themselves by the magic of theatrical drama and become the characters they portray.
You will really enjoy this show. And Meredith Wilson is a genius. Anybody who can write a song about Gary, Indiana, deserves the highest praise.
FROG HOSPITAL SIGNS A BOOK DEAL. Fred Owens, referred to as “Author,” has signed a two-book contract with an independent publishing firm. The contract involves a cash advance from the Publisher, and an obligation from the Author to produce one manuscript on May 15, 2010, and another manuscript September 15, 2010.
The first manuscript will be a collection of essays. The working title is “Best of Frog Hospital.” The second manuscript will be a story or collection of stories written by the Author.
The contract has all kinds of neat bells and whistles with clauses about royalties and clauses about good faith, etc., etc.
This is such a good deal. The cash advance makes all the difference in the world. It will give me the chance to concentrate on the work, which is necessary for a good completion. Plus, the publisher has on obligation to publish same.
So it makes you think it’s really going to happen.
The publishing firm will be making its own announcement at a later date, so this is all I can tell you right now.
The Best of Frog Hospital. We really have to have a better title than that, but I am going through the old stuff and picking out what I am not tired of. If you have a favorite, please let me know.
Here’s one from last year, kind of serious, called “Poverty is a Misfortune.”
POVERTY IS A MISFORTUNE. Poverty is a misfortune, it does not provoke nobility or generosity. It must be accepted, endured, fought, and overcome.
Poverty is no blessing, except in the larger sense that all life is a blessing, or pancreatic cancer is a blessing.
Certainly one can learn from the experience. One can exhibit grace.
But to say, Wouldn't it be fun to be poor, is like saying, Wouldn't it fun to be sick.
One does chose the state of poverty as better than a dishonorable life, but one does not seek it for its own sake.
Poverty is not simple living. In fact, it can be both immensely complicated and continuously boring.
But simple living is a happy state. Defined as this: You are living simply if your income is greater than your expenses. Poverty is the reverse of that condition.
AND, a bit of political satire
we’re not like that here (written Nov. 2008)
I was reading about the scandal in Illinois and how Governor Blagojevich
was arrested for selling favors. Like many Washingtonians I was shocked at the depth of corruption coming out of Chicago. I am so glad that we're not like that here.
Take our Governor, Christian Gregoire -- she is an angel of the highest ethical standards. It's true that the tribal casinos made substantial contributions to her campaign fund, but does that grant them any special access? Of course not, Gregoire doesn't even return their phone calls.
Bud Norris, the mayor of Mount Vernon, is so careful not to do any favors for his friends that he doesn't even HAVE friends.
Our Skagit County Commissioners are utterly beyond any attempt at influence. It's true that they sometimes play golf with local business leaders. And it's true that those same business leaders might benefit from zoning changes, but of course those subjects are not discussed. Our commissioners simply cannot be bought.
No, we're not like those crooks in Chicago and thank goodness for that. We can trust our local leaders. In Skagit County, we pay our property taxes with the complete assurance that every penny will be honestly allocated.
AND “RARE DISEASES AND ROUTINE SURGERY,” a medical drama
"It's a routine surgery."
What?
"Well, it's a fairly common procedure, and the outcome is almost always positive."
But....
"Of course, in a very small number of cases, it's possible that..."
That's what I thought, I'm gonna die.
"Look, it'll be over before you know it, and you won't feel a thing.... I mean, again, there is the slight possibility of some discomfort, but that's not likely, and we have very good pain medication."
I'm gonna die. You're going to put me unconscious and cut me open with a knife. I can see my guts spilling all over the place and there's blood everywhere.
The patient screams. The surgeon makes a wordless, reassuring gesture. The patient shakes his head, looks out the window for a moment and says, "Okay, whatever, give me the form, I'll sign it."
Thus concludes the world's shortest medical drama.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
Monday, November 09, 2009
What Is A Lie?
EDITORIAL: A jobless recovery is not a recovery. The recovery has not yet begun. It doesn’t begin until the rate of unemployment goes down.
WHAT IS A LIE? If I tell you a lie and you don’t believe it, then I didn’t tell a lie, I just attempted it. It takes two people -- one to tell the lie, and one to believe it.
Most of the time when someone tells you a lie, you know it’s a lie, and you let it go. That makes you a co-conspirator. I’m not being too hard about this. The average human being can’t get through the day without telling one or two small lies. Except for my first ex-wife -- she was the most honest woman I ever met, but sometimes the truth hurt too much, and I wish she had told a few lies.
Jesus began preaching at the age of 30. He didn’t tell a single lie for three years straight and it made everybody so mad they crucified him. His record still stands, by the way. The rest of us tell lies now and then. Although I wouldn’t say I was a liar, or that you are a liar. To me, a liar is someone who is in the habit of telling lies all the time, and has no regret or conscience about it, whereas most of us feel a bit squirmy when we tell a lie because we know it isn’t right. Most of us try not to tell lies.
Unless it’s a story, of course. Like here at Frog Hospital, which is almost always the truth, except when I make things up. I have standards, I don’t bend the truth, not ever, but sometimes I make the whole thing up from scratch, like this summer when I wrote about Sheila the Tarot card reader on Beaver Marsh Road. There is no Sheila, she was a complete fabrication, but it kind of ruins the story if I say that.
In the past year, I have only told ten or twelve lie that I know of, which is as good as anybody in the business.
WRITING A BOOK. I am finishing a book I started two years ago. I half-wrote it, but I began to have doubts about whether it was good or not. That’s foolishness, I now realize. I’m not in charge of deciding whether it’s good or not, I’m just supposed to write it. So I think I can finish it now.
What’s hard is living with these characters who are traveling through South Texas in 1973 and then going into Mexico -- that’s the story I’m telling, but after a few hours of concentration in this world I have created, I start to feel like I’m in outer space and it's time to come back to earth -- like a transition.
I wrote two hours early this morning on the book, and then went to Rexville for coffee, but the transition made me feel shaky. This is real work, this book-writing, and I am making this place and this story for readers. You’ll like going there if you read it, you’ll enjoy the ride. I want the book to be enjoyable and exciting. I don’t care for a rough story or anything bizarre. And I want to work as hard as I can to make it look like I wasn’t trying at all. When you read this book, you won’t see me sweat. You won’t even think about me, but you will just be in the story. That’s my goal.
But I need to learn this in-and-out business and make it smooth, so that I can work on the book with focus and concentration, like nothing else is happening -- but it’s just me and this gang of thieves in South Texas in 1973 and I’m finding out what happens next just like I’m in a movie.
I keep expecting to run into Marlon Brando playing Emiliano Zapata. Zapata was never in South Texas, but I can put him there, because it’s story. In fact, they filmed Viva Zapata in South Texas, in a little town called Roma, which is near where things happen in the book.
That’s the fun part of book-writing -- finding out if Brando or Zapata wants to be in it or not. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
But after writing for a few hours, living in this other world, I need to have some breathing exercises, as a way to get back to Planet Earth, and be here this November 9, 2009, on Fir Island, Skagit County, Washington state, USA.
WHAT IS A LIE? If I tell you a lie and you don’t believe it, then I didn’t tell a lie, I just attempted it. It takes two people -- one to tell the lie, and one to believe it.
Most of the time when someone tells you a lie, you know it’s a lie, and you let it go. That makes you a co-conspirator. I’m not being too hard about this. The average human being can’t get through the day without telling one or two small lies. Except for my first ex-wife -- she was the most honest woman I ever met, but sometimes the truth hurt too much, and I wish she had told a few lies.
Jesus began preaching at the age of 30. He didn’t tell a single lie for three years straight and it made everybody so mad they crucified him. His record still stands, by the way. The rest of us tell lies now and then. Although I wouldn’t say I was a liar, or that you are a liar. To me, a liar is someone who is in the habit of telling lies all the time, and has no regret or conscience about it, whereas most of us feel a bit squirmy when we tell a lie because we know it isn’t right. Most of us try not to tell lies.
Unless it’s a story, of course. Like here at Frog Hospital, which is almost always the truth, except when I make things up. I have standards, I don’t bend the truth, not ever, but sometimes I make the whole thing up from scratch, like this summer when I wrote about Sheila the Tarot card reader on Beaver Marsh Road. There is no Sheila, she was a complete fabrication, but it kind of ruins the story if I say that.
In the past year, I have only told ten or twelve lie that I know of, which is as good as anybody in the business.
WRITING A BOOK. I am finishing a book I started two years ago. I half-wrote it, but I began to have doubts about whether it was good or not. That’s foolishness, I now realize. I’m not in charge of deciding whether it’s good or not, I’m just supposed to write it. So I think I can finish it now.
What’s hard is living with these characters who are traveling through South Texas in 1973 and then going into Mexico -- that’s the story I’m telling, but after a few hours of concentration in this world I have created, I start to feel like I’m in outer space and it's time to come back to earth -- like a transition.
I wrote two hours early this morning on the book, and then went to Rexville for coffee, but the transition made me feel shaky. This is real work, this book-writing, and I am making this place and this story for readers. You’ll like going there if you read it, you’ll enjoy the ride. I want the book to be enjoyable and exciting. I don’t care for a rough story or anything bizarre. And I want to work as hard as I can to make it look like I wasn’t trying at all. When you read this book, you won’t see me sweat. You won’t even think about me, but you will just be in the story. That’s my goal.
But I need to learn this in-and-out business and make it smooth, so that I can work on the book with focus and concentration, like nothing else is happening -- but it’s just me and this gang of thieves in South Texas in 1973 and I’m finding out what happens next just like I’m in a movie.
I keep expecting to run into Marlon Brando playing Emiliano Zapata. Zapata was never in South Texas, but I can put him there, because it’s story. In fact, they filmed Viva Zapata in South Texas, in a little town called Roma, which is near where things happen in the book.
That’s the fun part of book-writing -- finding out if Brando or Zapata wants to be in it or not. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
But after writing for a few hours, living in this other world, I need to have some breathing exercises, as a way to get back to Planet Earth, and be here this November 9, 2009, on Fir Island, Skagit County, Washington state, USA.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Easy Street
Hot cocoa and a warm fire. Good friends and lively music. A lake of stew and candy for the children. Robust health and money in the bank.
Man, that sounds like easy street. Just thinking about it makes me feel better -- my destination, my goal, my well-deserved reward. And I know I’ll get there someday, but first I need to shake off this gloom.
I feel the gloom when November comes, and the fear of winter creeps over the land.
November brings the Day of the Dead. And if you’re in rightness, you will feel no dread, and laugh at the skeletons and bones.
But if you’re not in rightness, you will tremble and your dreams will be disturbed by dark visions of winter -- because the landlord is cruel, he wants his coin. Heat isn’t free but hoarded and sold.
Now, gather in closer and hear my words. You can’t act on the fear, if it’s the fear of winter or any other demon. When you act on the fear, the winter-bully keeps coming back. You pay him off today, and he comes back tomorrow and wants more. He will never go away and you will always be afraid.
But we have learned to prepare for the winter months. This is not acting on fear, but simply being prudent. We learned that in the old hippie days Up River, when we lived in camps and learned how to cook over a fire and grow a garden.
In November of 1970, this conversation between Honcho and Rico may have taken place:
“Well, dude, it sure has been raining a lot. It’s cold all the time now. Man, it’s not that much fun. I was thinking we could, like, get some firewood or something, get a big a pile, you know, stay warm. We were working on that forest fire this summer -- I saw this big slash pile up by Kindy Creek.”
Okay, Honcho, you’re talking a major effort, like you have a plan. Far out, we don’t just go out and find some sticks, but like serious stuff -- a big pile of wood.
“Yeah, Rico, dig it, we stay warm all winter. We could use your truck and go to tomorrow. I’ll come by in the morning. You roust up Toothless Tom and Bobby and we’ll make it a gang. I’ll come by about nine o’clock.”
Uh, nine? Like on the clock nine? Dude, we threw the clock away. We’re just not into that time thing. You know, the rat race, the pressure, buy a new car….
“Okay, forget nine o’clock. I’ll just come by in the morning and we’ll get going.”
But the truck don’t work. The battery’s no good. I mean, we could jump start it, but then it will just die again.
“All right. I got a plan. I come by in the morning. We take the battery out of my car, put it in your truck, and we’re good to go.”
Yeah, that’ll work, but we gotta get the chainsaw from Glenn, swing by his place.
“That’s a problem, you know. It’s not like it’s his chainsaw, like he owns it. I mean, it’s our chain saw. I mean, we’re all in this together, right?”
Yeah, but Glenn kind of figures he’s in charge of the chainsaw. He’s on this like power trip.
“All right, I need to tell him the truth.”
That was the conversation between Honcho and Rico, huddled by a smoky November fire in a tepee up by Marblemount in 1970.
The chain saw in question had been liberated from the Forest Service that summer. It was Glenn and his sidekick Andy who stuck it in their duffel bag and brought it back from the fire.
The August forest fire over on the Eastside was a big burn, thousands of acres in flame, hundreds of fire fighters -- loggers, winos, Mexicans, hippies. We lived in a big fire camp with hot showers and free food, all the steak and mashed potatoes you could eat, and getting paid to work 16 hours a day.
And all that government equipment just laying around like it didn’t belong to anybody -- which is why Glenn and Andy liberated the chainsaw.
This was discussed in council while passing the pipe. “Like it’s ours now. I mean, this is America, and we’re Americans, so this is like our chain saw.”
Everybody saw that was righteous. It was ours, but it always seemed to be sort of more Glenn’s chainsaw than just anybody’s.
Anyway, he cut loose of it when Honcho and Rico and came by the next morning. They had swapped the batteries and brought some food, and picked up Toothless Tom and Bobby.
They found the slash pile on Kindy Creek, cut wood for a few hours, and drove back to camp.
Sure, they had a big pile now, but the wood was green and wet. You spent half the morning on your knees blowing into a smoking fire, you could hear the water sizzle in the wood. Yeah, it burned, if you kept puffing on it, but it didn’t keep you warm at all.
All winter it was cold and wet. No easy street. No lakes of stew. Half the hippies bailed and went back to California, or drifted down to Seattle or got food stamps, or borrowed money from their parents.
It took the hippies two or three years to learn what was easy to see and plain as day. You only had to look at the long, dry, nicely stacked woodpiles alongside the old timer’s place.
Like at Old Jim Clark’s cabin. Old Jim was on easy street. He lived in a small cabin with a wood cook stove, and it was almost hot in there -- so much wood -- but dry wood, and he was cooking beans on the stove all winter, laughing and telling lies.
“You damn fools, I cut this wood in the summer when you were all skinny dipping at the pond. Now you’re freezing your ass off and coming by my place to get warm. That’ll learn you.”
Some of the hippies did learn and they stuck it out and they still live Up River with lots of dry wood stacked outside the door, wood they cut in the early summer, and laid by.
Now, that’s easy street. And the fear of winter -- be gone!
Man, that sounds like easy street. Just thinking about it makes me feel better -- my destination, my goal, my well-deserved reward. And I know I’ll get there someday, but first I need to shake off this gloom.
I feel the gloom when November comes, and the fear of winter creeps over the land.
November brings the Day of the Dead. And if you’re in rightness, you will feel no dread, and laugh at the skeletons and bones.
But if you’re not in rightness, you will tremble and your dreams will be disturbed by dark visions of winter -- because the landlord is cruel, he wants his coin. Heat isn’t free but hoarded and sold.
Now, gather in closer and hear my words. You can’t act on the fear, if it’s the fear of winter or any other demon. When you act on the fear, the winter-bully keeps coming back. You pay him off today, and he comes back tomorrow and wants more. He will never go away and you will always be afraid.
But we have learned to prepare for the winter months. This is not acting on fear, but simply being prudent. We learned that in the old hippie days Up River, when we lived in camps and learned how to cook over a fire and grow a garden.
In November of 1970, this conversation between Honcho and Rico may have taken place:
“Well, dude, it sure has been raining a lot. It’s cold all the time now. Man, it’s not that much fun. I was thinking we could, like, get some firewood or something, get a big a pile, you know, stay warm. We were working on that forest fire this summer -- I saw this big slash pile up by Kindy Creek.”
Okay, Honcho, you’re talking a major effort, like you have a plan. Far out, we don’t just go out and find some sticks, but like serious stuff -- a big pile of wood.
“Yeah, Rico, dig it, we stay warm all winter. We could use your truck and go to tomorrow. I’ll come by in the morning. You roust up Toothless Tom and Bobby and we’ll make it a gang. I’ll come by about nine o’clock.”
Uh, nine? Like on the clock nine? Dude, we threw the clock away. We’re just not into that time thing. You know, the rat race, the pressure, buy a new car….
“Okay, forget nine o’clock. I’ll just come by in the morning and we’ll get going.”
But the truck don’t work. The battery’s no good. I mean, we could jump start it, but then it will just die again.
“All right. I got a plan. I come by in the morning. We take the battery out of my car, put it in your truck, and we’re good to go.”
Yeah, that’ll work, but we gotta get the chainsaw from Glenn, swing by his place.
“That’s a problem, you know. It’s not like it’s his chainsaw, like he owns it. I mean, it’s our chain saw. I mean, we’re all in this together, right?”
Yeah, but Glenn kind of figures he’s in charge of the chainsaw. He’s on this like power trip.
“All right, I need to tell him the truth.”
That was the conversation between Honcho and Rico, huddled by a smoky November fire in a tepee up by Marblemount in 1970.
The chain saw in question had been liberated from the Forest Service that summer. It was Glenn and his sidekick Andy who stuck it in their duffel bag and brought it back from the fire.
The August forest fire over on the Eastside was a big burn, thousands of acres in flame, hundreds of fire fighters -- loggers, winos, Mexicans, hippies. We lived in a big fire camp with hot showers and free food, all the steak and mashed potatoes you could eat, and getting paid to work 16 hours a day.
And all that government equipment just laying around like it didn’t belong to anybody -- which is why Glenn and Andy liberated the chainsaw.
This was discussed in council while passing the pipe. “Like it’s ours now. I mean, this is America, and we’re Americans, so this is like our chain saw.”
Everybody saw that was righteous. It was ours, but it always seemed to be sort of more Glenn’s chainsaw than just anybody’s.
Anyway, he cut loose of it when Honcho and Rico and came by the next morning. They had swapped the batteries and brought some food, and picked up Toothless Tom and Bobby.
They found the slash pile on Kindy Creek, cut wood for a few hours, and drove back to camp.
Sure, they had a big pile now, but the wood was green and wet. You spent half the morning on your knees blowing into a smoking fire, you could hear the water sizzle in the wood. Yeah, it burned, if you kept puffing on it, but it didn’t keep you warm at all.
All winter it was cold and wet. No easy street. No lakes of stew. Half the hippies bailed and went back to California, or drifted down to Seattle or got food stamps, or borrowed money from their parents.
It took the hippies two or three years to learn what was easy to see and plain as day. You only had to look at the long, dry, nicely stacked woodpiles alongside the old timer’s place.
Like at Old Jim Clark’s cabin. Old Jim was on easy street. He lived in a small cabin with a wood cook stove, and it was almost hot in there -- so much wood -- but dry wood, and he was cooking beans on the stove all winter, laughing and telling lies.
“You damn fools, I cut this wood in the summer when you were all skinny dipping at the pond. Now you’re freezing your ass off and coming by my place to get warm. That’ll learn you.”
Some of the hippies did learn and they stuck it out and they still live Up River with lots of dry wood stacked outside the door, wood they cut in the early summer, and laid by.
Now, that’s easy street. And the fear of winter -- be gone!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Confessions of a Medical Tourist
Considering that no country will ever have a perfect health care system, it makes sense to cross borders in search of a better deal. Americans go to Mexico to get their teeth fixed, and they drive to Canada for prescription medicine.
Canadians get stuck in the MRI line, so they come down here where they don’t have to wait, if they have the cash.
This is going to expand. If a common surgery costs $20,000, and a round trip ticket to Europe or Asia cost a little more than a $1,000, we can see that various countries will offer competitive deals, to offer the same surgery for $15,000 plus airfare.
Right now, Filipino women come to America to work as nurses and nursing aides. But it could work the other way -- if you needed six weeks to recover from an illness or a surgery, and it’s winter here -- why not fly to the Philippines and get your rest at a seaside care center. Insurance companies have started to offer these options on an incentive basis.
Or fly to India or Bulgaria and buy a kidney -- oops. People sell kidneys in poor countries, to unscrupulous middlemen, who then forge documents and pass on the kidneys and other body parts to people in desperate need of same and not willing to question the source.
In fact, if you can imagine a way to abuse new choices in international health care, there’s probably already some shady character who is already in that business. The corrupt mind is highly creative, being motivated by greed. The mind of the honest reformer is usually one or two steps behind.
Medical tourism will expand and -- cover your years, Libertarians -- it will be regulated by international agreements that make sure your new kidney was honestly donated.
I’m only writing about this because I don’t want us to get stuck in a deadlocked debate over the health care reform bill. This is not a two-dimensional situation, it is far more complex and far more interesting than that.
Reform? A hundreds ideas come to mind. I think that no one should enter nursing or medical school until they have served at least one year as a nursing aide. Everyone in health care needs to begin at the beginning. As it is, doctors today do not know what nursing aides do. They think they know, but they do not know, because they have never done it.
If a doctor or nurse had, for that one year, the experience of being a nursing aide, then they would never again treat nursing aides like idiots. This is such a good idea, but it’s too simple and too easy to understand, so it’s not in the health care reform bill.
Tort reform is not in the bill either. Conservatives are crying for tort reform. They’re right about that. It is a corruption of the Democratic Party to ignore health care reform because of the enormous financial contribution of trial lawyers.
And we need a new army of nurse practitioners to spread out across the land and do battle with the common cold, the flu, the aches and sprains and minor injuries that make up half of all the medical problems we deal with.
I went to the doctor two weeks ago because I had the flu. He was overqualified for that. It would have been much better if I had been seen by a Nurse Practitioner. The flu is her game and she’s good at it.
In Massachusetts where they have tried to insure everybody, they discovered that they did not have enough doctors to handle a flood of newly insured patients. Not enough family physicians, not enough pediatricians, and not enough nurse practitioners.
It’s not in the health care bill -- the means and the cost of training thousands of more people to do primary care.
But they have a surplus of barefoot doctors in Cuba. Could we induce some of them to immigrate to our shores, as part of the long overdue mutual recognition between our two countries?
Most objective reviews of American health care state that we are good at the high end and poor at the low end. Good at dramatic interventions and end-of-life care, but poor at the broadest primary care and prevention.
At my hospital, we have a brand new portable kidney dialysis machine. It has to cost near to $200,000 and it can be wheeled into a patient’s room -- for patients with kidney failure so advanced that they cannot be transported for dialysis at the kidney center.
If it was you or your relative, you would be glad we have this machine.
That’s what I mean by the high end. At the low end, where we are not very good at all, you only have to look at the waiting room of our Emergency Department -- full of people who should have seen a doctor or a nurse practitioner, but who did not, primarily because they lacked the money.
Transparency is needed. My hospital is owned by the residents of the hospital district it serves, and yet if you tried to find out just how much the hospital paid for that kidney dialysis machine -- paid partly with our tax dollars and partly from other sources of income -- they won’t tell you, which is why I am guessing it cost $200,000.
We should know the cost of that machine to the penny. Such information should be instantly available on the hospital’s website.
But it’s not and that makes you think they’re might be some monkey business going on. I sometimes see the medical equipment salesmen waiting in the lobby. They wear very expensive suits.
So, be a medical tourist and take a cruise through our wonderful but troubled health care system. And don’t just talk to the people who already agree with you, because that accomplishes very little.
Canadians get stuck in the MRI line, so they come down here where they don’t have to wait, if they have the cash.
This is going to expand. If a common surgery costs $20,000, and a round trip ticket to Europe or Asia cost a little more than a $1,000, we can see that various countries will offer competitive deals, to offer the same surgery for $15,000 plus airfare.
Right now, Filipino women come to America to work as nurses and nursing aides. But it could work the other way -- if you needed six weeks to recover from an illness or a surgery, and it’s winter here -- why not fly to the Philippines and get your rest at a seaside care center. Insurance companies have started to offer these options on an incentive basis.
Or fly to India or Bulgaria and buy a kidney -- oops. People sell kidneys in poor countries, to unscrupulous middlemen, who then forge documents and pass on the kidneys and other body parts to people in desperate need of same and not willing to question the source.
In fact, if you can imagine a way to abuse new choices in international health care, there’s probably already some shady character who is already in that business. The corrupt mind is highly creative, being motivated by greed. The mind of the honest reformer is usually one or two steps behind.
Medical tourism will expand and -- cover your years, Libertarians -- it will be regulated by international agreements that make sure your new kidney was honestly donated.
I’m only writing about this because I don’t want us to get stuck in a deadlocked debate over the health care reform bill. This is not a two-dimensional situation, it is far more complex and far more interesting than that.
Reform? A hundreds ideas come to mind. I think that no one should enter nursing or medical school until they have served at least one year as a nursing aide. Everyone in health care needs to begin at the beginning. As it is, doctors today do not know what nursing aides do. They think they know, but they do not know, because they have never done it.
If a doctor or nurse had, for that one year, the experience of being a nursing aide, then they would never again treat nursing aides like idiots. This is such a good idea, but it’s too simple and too easy to understand, so it’s not in the health care reform bill.
Tort reform is not in the bill either. Conservatives are crying for tort reform. They’re right about that. It is a corruption of the Democratic Party to ignore health care reform because of the enormous financial contribution of trial lawyers.
And we need a new army of nurse practitioners to spread out across the land and do battle with the common cold, the flu, the aches and sprains and minor injuries that make up half of all the medical problems we deal with.
I went to the doctor two weeks ago because I had the flu. He was overqualified for that. It would have been much better if I had been seen by a Nurse Practitioner. The flu is her game and she’s good at it.
In Massachusetts where they have tried to insure everybody, they discovered that they did not have enough doctors to handle a flood of newly insured patients. Not enough family physicians, not enough pediatricians, and not enough nurse practitioners.
It’s not in the health care bill -- the means and the cost of training thousands of more people to do primary care.
But they have a surplus of barefoot doctors in Cuba. Could we induce some of them to immigrate to our shores, as part of the long overdue mutual recognition between our two countries?
Most objective reviews of American health care state that we are good at the high end and poor at the low end. Good at dramatic interventions and end-of-life care, but poor at the broadest primary care and prevention.
At my hospital, we have a brand new portable kidney dialysis machine. It has to cost near to $200,000 and it can be wheeled into a patient’s room -- for patients with kidney failure so advanced that they cannot be transported for dialysis at the kidney center.
If it was you or your relative, you would be glad we have this machine.
That’s what I mean by the high end. At the low end, where we are not very good at all, you only have to look at the waiting room of our Emergency Department -- full of people who should have seen a doctor or a nurse practitioner, but who did not, primarily because they lacked the money.
Transparency is needed. My hospital is owned by the residents of the hospital district it serves, and yet if you tried to find out just how much the hospital paid for that kidney dialysis machine -- paid partly with our tax dollars and partly from other sources of income -- they won’t tell you, which is why I am guessing it cost $200,000.
We should know the cost of that machine to the penny. Such information should be instantly available on the hospital’s website.
But it’s not and that makes you think they’re might be some monkey business going on. I sometimes see the medical equipment salesmen waiting in the lobby. They wear very expensive suits.
So, be a medical tourist and take a cruise through our wonderful but troubled health care system. And don’t just talk to the people who already agree with you, because that accomplishes very little.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Murder in Cambridge
These are weeping birches by the slough. I thought Patty had planted them, but she said they were volunteers, she said they sprang up after the flood in 1990 when there was five feet of water in the yard.
It’s a brisk wind blowing the branches. It’s raining all day out here. It will never stop raining. Rain and Rain until the Day of Judgment. Biblical rain today.
We have Buddhist rain too, it comes slow and steady and it bores you to death.
At times we have Scandinavian, suicidal, stay-drunk-all-winter rain, but I see a glimmer of hope out there -- somewhere the sun is shining.
That would be the Irish rain. If we just had a little bit of luck, then things would turn out right, and the blessings of heaven would sweeten our hearts and enrich our bank accounts too.
The birch trees and the giant cottonwoods still have their leaves on. I give the leaves just a few more days and they will be coming down. We don’t have to rake leaves out here, the wind takes care of that.
ESCAPE FROM FIR ISLAND. I’m planning my escape. I can’t tell you any of the details, because when you’re really serious about something, you can’t waste energy with idle talk. You have to focus. You have to want it. You have to hold it inside and let it build.
So I look out the window. The window faces east, across the fields, five miles to the foothills. All rain, all day on muddy fields. Riley drives the potato truck, but he said they have stopped working -- they would just get stuck in the field.
Jimmy said they left four rows of Yukon Gold potatoes in back of his house. He went out and dug a bucket of really fine potatoes, but it was muddy work, he said. I’ll go over there later and get some for our house.
For the Irish rain. We’ll have buckets of Yukon Gold potatoes and eat good all winter. Gold ! Good luck and pretty women. Or when you’re lucky, the women look prettier. Either way.
But this Thomas Hardy landscape gets to me -- the desolate moors, the faraway cry of the geese
I can tell you this. One day, poof, I’ll be gone. Because I have a plan.
“But you’re coming back, Fred. You always come back.”
SOME READERS OBJECT. In the last issue, we discussed Suicide and Depression -- a dismal topic. Some readers out there in Frog Hospital land turned away, averted their eyes, and tried to ignore the whole thing.
I got a call from Vicki in Spokane. Years ago, we worked together in the Forest Service. Now she and her husband are in real estate.
“Fred, can’t we have happy, pleasant things to read about? Or exciting, dramatic things to read about? We don’t care to discuss these unpleasant topics. We really don’t want to know what you do when you go to work at the hospital. It’s too icky.”
So, I should spare you the details because it’s not appetizing.
“Right.”
And you want health care reform.
“Oh, yes, we want health care reform very much -- so we can write a check, pay a tax, and have it done.”
Wouldn’t that be nice?
MURDER IN CAMBRIDGE. Mary Joe Frug was murdered by a knife-wielding assailant on a quiet street in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1991. No one was ever been arrested for the crime, and no motive has been established. I lived only a few blocks from where the killer stabbed Frug, and many days I walked down that quiet leafy street on my way to Harvard Square.
Mary Joe Frug was murdered on Sparks Street on a Thursday night, right outside the Armenian Trinity Church while the choir was practicing and making so much noise that nobody could hear any screams, if there were any screams. Frug, 49, a law school professor and mother of two, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant with unknown motives, on her way home from the grocery store -- the same grocery store where I shopped
The next day, Friday, carnations and daffodils were strewn over the pavement near the curb at the corner where she died. People walked by slowly and gathered in knots.
At Pentimento, a neighborhood restaurant where I worked, everybody was talking about it. Diane, the owner and chief cook, was very distraught. We discussed the crime while we made soup together.
“I knew her,” she kept saying. “She was a very beautiful, intelligent woman....Oh, damn it, I burned the apricot crumble,” as she rushed to the oven to pull it out.
I said, “You’re upset. This is very terrifying.”
“I’m going to get more locks on the door,” she said. Talk about the murder had been buzzing about the restaurant all morning. Bob, her 23-year-old son, walked into the kitchen. “Locking yourself in is not the answer, you can’t give in like that,” he lectured.
I was about to agree with him, but I held my tongue.
Diane brushed the hair out of her eyes. She said, “I have this recurring nightmare of being beaten to death. Can you imagine how horrible it was to die that way? I knew that woman.”
After work I called Nora. She had read about the murder in the Boston Globe. She said, “It was somebody who knew her.” That was her intuition. A day later the newspaper reported that “police were investigating reports of a man lurking in the bushes near the scene of the stabbing. The man, described as white, in his 20’s, with brown hair, 6-feet tall and wearing dark clothing, is being sought by the police.”
THEY NEVER FOUND THE KNIFE. Where is the knife that killed Mary Joe Frug? Or, I should say, the knife that was used to kill her. The police never found it. But unless it was thrown back into the furnace like the Lords of the Rings, that knife exists somewhere, at the bottom of the Charles River buried in sediment, or rusting in a landfill…. or laying in plain view in someone’s kitchen -- if the murderer had loaned it to an unsuspecting neighbor, wiped clean.
Now Mary Joe Frug merits an entry in Wikipedia for her legal scholarship. Her radical feminist views were controversial at the time. She taught at a non-prestigious Boston law school and her husband, Gerald Frug, taught at Harvard Law School.
This was all common knowledge and very small-townish, if you lived in Cambridge, especially if you lived in that neighborhood -- who the Frugs socialized with, what faction they belonged to in the intensely partisan atmosphere of the law school, and who wrote bitter denunciations of the Frugs in obscure law journals.
I don’t know why this crime came back to my memory 18 years later. I went to the website of the Cambridge Police Department to discover if there had ever been an arrest for the Frug murder. No, it’s a cold case.
But they won’t forget, not in Cambridge, not in New England. They never forget anything.
I bet, if I were there today, and walked down Sparks Street, past the site of the murder, and then spoke to somebody, on the street, or at a nearby store - I bet they will remember this crime in great detail. I bet many of the same people are still there, in the same houses and flats, in the same jobs, going to the same summer resorts every summer -- because nothing every changes in New England.
Where is the murderer? Probably still alive, walking the streets of Cambridge.
Why did he kill Mary Joe Frug? Did he know her and hate her? Or was it a random act? Some people, admitting to a guilty selfishness, hoped the killer was known to Frug, a personal enemy, because that was less frightening than a random stranger who might have attacked anyone -- just killing the next woman who walked by.
In that calculus, you felt safer, because none of the people that you knew were crazed and mad enough to kill you.
Sparks Street intersects with Brewster Street. Robert Frost, the great poet, once lived in a house at 35 Brewster Street. They have a plaque near the front door of 35 Brewster Street telling of Robert Frost.
Two blocks past Brewster Street, you will come to 22 Reservoir Street, the home of Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor, a colleague of the Frugs, and a very well known scholar of great controversy himself.
I had an opinion -- very negative -- of Alan Dershowitz, but one day, when I lived in the neighborhood, I walked past his house, and there he was -- in the driveway in his front yard, playing basketball with his son.
How could I dislike him after that? He was a good guy that plays ball with his son. He lived in a house down the street from me -- two blocks from Reservoir Street.
I lived at 42 Blakeslee in the first floor of a two-flat building.
It was two blocks to Alan Dershowitz’s house, then over the hill, down Brewster, past the Robert Frost house, then to Sparks Street, the site of the murder.
When I got there, I looked around to see if there was a good hiding place in the shrubbery, but there were only low plantings near the sidewalk, so it was more likely that Frug was attacked suddenly from behind, as she walked.
The homicide detectives know where the knife wounds struck. They would know if she put up a struggle. They will never tell us, unless there is an arrest and trial, which is now very unlikely.
Yet there is a very thick file kept secret by the police, compiled in 1991, with photos, and forensic reports, and interviews with neighbors.
“Did you hear anything? Did you see anything?”
And, “Where were you last night?”
Nineteen years later the homicide detectives will pull out the file in a yearly ritual, and try to make it more than a ritual, try to bring it back to life, not just be a memory of a horrible crime. As if it happened last night.
If she screamed, why did nobody hear her? Possibly, some one heard her scream, but still has not come forward, and nineteen years later those same people live on that street, because this is New England, and people never move.
I think she screamed, but nobody heard her. Sparks Street has a very lovely kind of classic New England feel to it.
Screams become absorbed in the historic stillness.
A scream was heard faintly, but from what century? 1991, or 1854, or 1743, or 1697 ?
It goes way back to other crimes, other murders not solved, going back centuries to ghosts from long ago.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. But we’re safe in LaConner, here, all the way across the country. Nothing like that will ever happen here. No knife-wielding assailant brutally murdering an unsuspecting woman -- her screams not heard, a pool of blood, and no answers.
It couldn’t happen here.
It’s a brisk wind blowing the branches. It’s raining all day out here. It will never stop raining. Rain and Rain until the Day of Judgment. Biblical rain today.
We have Buddhist rain too, it comes slow and steady and it bores you to death.
At times we have Scandinavian, suicidal, stay-drunk-all-winter rain, but I see a glimmer of hope out there -- somewhere the sun is shining.
That would be the Irish rain. If we just had a little bit of luck, then things would turn out right, and the blessings of heaven would sweeten our hearts and enrich our bank accounts too.
The birch trees and the giant cottonwoods still have their leaves on. I give the leaves just a few more days and they will be coming down. We don’t have to rake leaves out here, the wind takes care of that.
ESCAPE FROM FIR ISLAND. I’m planning my escape. I can’t tell you any of the details, because when you’re really serious about something, you can’t waste energy with idle talk. You have to focus. You have to want it. You have to hold it inside and let it build.
So I look out the window. The window faces east, across the fields, five miles to the foothills. All rain, all day on muddy fields. Riley drives the potato truck, but he said they have stopped working -- they would just get stuck in the field.
Jimmy said they left four rows of Yukon Gold potatoes in back of his house. He went out and dug a bucket of really fine potatoes, but it was muddy work, he said. I’ll go over there later and get some for our house.
For the Irish rain. We’ll have buckets of Yukon Gold potatoes and eat good all winter. Gold ! Good luck and pretty women. Or when you’re lucky, the women look prettier. Either way.
But this Thomas Hardy landscape gets to me -- the desolate moors, the faraway cry of the geese
I can tell you this. One day, poof, I’ll be gone. Because I have a plan.
“But you’re coming back, Fred. You always come back.”
SOME READERS OBJECT. In the last issue, we discussed Suicide and Depression -- a dismal topic. Some readers out there in Frog Hospital land turned away, averted their eyes, and tried to ignore the whole thing.
I got a call from Vicki in Spokane. Years ago, we worked together in the Forest Service. Now she and her husband are in real estate.
“Fred, can’t we have happy, pleasant things to read about? Or exciting, dramatic things to read about? We don’t care to discuss these unpleasant topics. We really don’t want to know what you do when you go to work at the hospital. It’s too icky.”
So, I should spare you the details because it’s not appetizing.
“Right.”
And you want health care reform.
“Oh, yes, we want health care reform very much -- so we can write a check, pay a tax, and have it done.”
Wouldn’t that be nice?
MURDER IN CAMBRIDGE. Mary Joe Frug was murdered by a knife-wielding assailant on a quiet street in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1991. No one was ever been arrested for the crime, and no motive has been established. I lived only a few blocks from where the killer stabbed Frug, and many days I walked down that quiet leafy street on my way to Harvard Square.
Mary Joe Frug was murdered on Sparks Street on a Thursday night, right outside the Armenian Trinity Church while the choir was practicing and making so much noise that nobody could hear any screams, if there were any screams. Frug, 49, a law school professor and mother of two, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant with unknown motives, on her way home from the grocery store -- the same grocery store where I shopped
The next day, Friday, carnations and daffodils were strewn over the pavement near the curb at the corner where she died. People walked by slowly and gathered in knots.
At Pentimento, a neighborhood restaurant where I worked, everybody was talking about it. Diane, the owner and chief cook, was very distraught. We discussed the crime while we made soup together.
“I knew her,” she kept saying. “She was a very beautiful, intelligent woman....Oh, damn it, I burned the apricot crumble,” as she rushed to the oven to pull it out.
I said, “You’re upset. This is very terrifying.”
“I’m going to get more locks on the door,” she said. Talk about the murder had been buzzing about the restaurant all morning. Bob, her 23-year-old son, walked into the kitchen. “Locking yourself in is not the answer, you can’t give in like that,” he lectured.
I was about to agree with him, but I held my tongue.
Diane brushed the hair out of her eyes. She said, “I have this recurring nightmare of being beaten to death. Can you imagine how horrible it was to die that way? I knew that woman.”
After work I called Nora. She had read about the murder in the Boston Globe. She said, “It was somebody who knew her.” That was her intuition. A day later the newspaper reported that “police were investigating reports of a man lurking in the bushes near the scene of the stabbing. The man, described as white, in his 20’s, with brown hair, 6-feet tall and wearing dark clothing, is being sought by the police.”
THEY NEVER FOUND THE KNIFE. Where is the knife that killed Mary Joe Frug? Or, I should say, the knife that was used to kill her. The police never found it. But unless it was thrown back into the furnace like the Lords of the Rings, that knife exists somewhere, at the bottom of the Charles River buried in sediment, or rusting in a landfill…. or laying in plain view in someone’s kitchen -- if the murderer had loaned it to an unsuspecting neighbor, wiped clean.
Now Mary Joe Frug merits an entry in Wikipedia for her legal scholarship. Her radical feminist views were controversial at the time. She taught at a non-prestigious Boston law school and her husband, Gerald Frug, taught at Harvard Law School.
This was all common knowledge and very small-townish, if you lived in Cambridge, especially if you lived in that neighborhood -- who the Frugs socialized with, what faction they belonged to in the intensely partisan atmosphere of the law school, and who wrote bitter denunciations of the Frugs in obscure law journals.
I don’t know why this crime came back to my memory 18 years later. I went to the website of the Cambridge Police Department to discover if there had ever been an arrest for the Frug murder. No, it’s a cold case.
But they won’t forget, not in Cambridge, not in New England. They never forget anything.
I bet, if I were there today, and walked down Sparks Street, past the site of the murder, and then spoke to somebody, on the street, or at a nearby store - I bet they will remember this crime in great detail. I bet many of the same people are still there, in the same houses and flats, in the same jobs, going to the same summer resorts every summer -- because nothing every changes in New England.
Where is the murderer? Probably still alive, walking the streets of Cambridge.
Why did he kill Mary Joe Frug? Did he know her and hate her? Or was it a random act? Some people, admitting to a guilty selfishness, hoped the killer was known to Frug, a personal enemy, because that was less frightening than a random stranger who might have attacked anyone -- just killing the next woman who walked by.
In that calculus, you felt safer, because none of the people that you knew were crazed and mad enough to kill you.
Sparks Street intersects with Brewster Street. Robert Frost, the great poet, once lived in a house at 35 Brewster Street. They have a plaque near the front door of 35 Brewster Street telling of Robert Frost.
Two blocks past Brewster Street, you will come to 22 Reservoir Street, the home of Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor, a colleague of the Frugs, and a very well known scholar of great controversy himself.
I had an opinion -- very negative -- of Alan Dershowitz, but one day, when I lived in the neighborhood, I walked past his house, and there he was -- in the driveway in his front yard, playing basketball with his son.
How could I dislike him after that? He was a good guy that plays ball with his son. He lived in a house down the street from me -- two blocks from Reservoir Street.
I lived at 42 Blakeslee in the first floor of a two-flat building.
It was two blocks to Alan Dershowitz’s house, then over the hill, down Brewster, past the Robert Frost house, then to Sparks Street, the site of the murder.
When I got there, I looked around to see if there was a good hiding place in the shrubbery, but there were only low plantings near the sidewalk, so it was more likely that Frug was attacked suddenly from behind, as she walked.
The homicide detectives know where the knife wounds struck. They would know if she put up a struggle. They will never tell us, unless there is an arrest and trial, which is now very unlikely.
Yet there is a very thick file kept secret by the police, compiled in 1991, with photos, and forensic reports, and interviews with neighbors.
“Did you hear anything? Did you see anything?”
And, “Where were you last night?”
Nineteen years later the homicide detectives will pull out the file in a yearly ritual, and try to make it more than a ritual, try to bring it back to life, not just be a memory of a horrible crime. As if it happened last night.
If she screamed, why did nobody hear her? Possibly, some one heard her scream, but still has not come forward, and nineteen years later those same people live on that street, because this is New England, and people never move.
I think she screamed, but nobody heard her. Sparks Street has a very lovely kind of classic New England feel to it.
Screams become absorbed in the historic stillness.
A scream was heard faintly, but from what century? 1991, or 1854, or 1743, or 1697 ?
It goes way back to other crimes, other murders not solved, going back centuries to ghosts from long ago.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. But we’re safe in LaConner, here, all the way across the country. Nothing like that will ever happen here. No knife-wielding assailant brutally murdering an unsuspecting woman -- her screams not heard, a pool of blood, and no answers.
It couldn’t happen here.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
You Almost Made It, Frankie
(this is a story, not a factual account)
I’m telling this story to get it off my mind. Patients don’t usually stay with me. I put my heart into the work when I’m on the unit, but I forget the whole thing by the time I get to the parking lot when I’m going home at 11 p.m.
It’s a good rhythm. You go home, read a book, have a glass of wine, and sleep without troubles. The next day you do it again
But Frankie stayed with me. He was 78, in assisted living. His wife had just died and he was in pain from hip surgery. He overdosed on his pain medication and the medics found him on the floor with seven Fentanyl patches pressed to his skin.
Fentanyl is a powerful narcotic and widely used in the form of dermal patches to relieve pain.
The patch releases the medication in a careful slow way and -- sometimes with unpleasant side effects -- it works.
But seven patches all at once will send you through the door, down the river and on your way to the next life.
Such a patient will not be left alone in the hospital, lest they try to harm themselves again. Standard procedure. Suicide watch.
Frankie was deeply asleep when I got there at 4:30 in the afternoon. Comatose? I don’t know the medical term. But past danger, I think.
Kelly was the nurse. She’s one of the angels. They make you feel good just walking in the room. I don’t know about the patients, but I know I feel good when she’s around.
Frankie had a heart monitor, just in case. These are four wire leads pressed to the chest, connected to a monitor room where someone could watch his pulse and breathing rate.
The monitor, besides being watched by a live person, is set with ding-ding-dings if the patient’s heart rate exceeds the parameters.
They have ding-ding-dings all over the hospital. You can’t relax for a minute.
So there’s Frankie, on his back, sleeping peacefully, with thick white hair closely cropped, a trim spade beard, round face, and good skin color. He looked healthy, if you asked me, and he was resting well.
I was sitting beside the bed and I turned on the TV to watch the baseball game -- kept the volume low. It makes good background noise -- the sound of a murmuring crowd.
No ding-ding-dings at the baseball game.
Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. How can anybody get any rest at this hospital? It’s a process of continuous interruption.
Kelly floats in and out of the room. She gives Frankie a bladder catheter. He barely wakes during the procedure. The urine bag fills up promptly. He needed a good pee, but he was too out of it to use the urinal, and the narcotic relaxed his muscles over much, so he wouldn’t just go without help.
If there’s one thing that matters around here, it’s urination. They get really worried if you’re not peeing, and they get happy if you do.
It’s all about moving the fluids -- things you’ve been managing by yourself since you were two-years-old, but when you’re sick you need help.
Kelly leaves. Frankie sleeps, I watch the game -- Dodgers and Phillies.
That’s it. Six hours and I go home. Only this time, when I get to the parking lot, I keep seeing Frankie’s peaceful face.
I keep thinking -- Frankie, you almost made it.
DISCUSSION: Depression and Suicide. (making no claim to any expertise on this subject) Everybody gets the blues now and then. But real depression is much worse than having a bad day -- real depression is staying in bed all day, being unable to leave the house, no appetite, insomnia, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.
One of the things I do at the hospital is suicide watch. Obviously, I don’t see those who have made a successful effort to end their lives. But I see the attempts and the failures. These are some mighty unhappy people -- everything’s going so wrong and they can’t even kill themselves.
Usually it’s an overdose -- a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs. The doctors would sure like to know just what it is you took when you get to ER -- perhaps if you pinned a note to your shirt before you passed out.
Either way, when you get to the ER, they give you the charcoal syrup which soaks up the poison. The charcoal looks awful, but it has no taste.
Don’t try suicide with Tylenol. A sufficient amount of Tylenol will kill you, but a less than sufficient amount will merely damage your liver, resulting in prolonged hospitalization and enormous medical expense. The opiates are actually better, because recovery can be fairly quick after a less than fatal dose.
Wrist slashing requires determination, and a failed attempt will leave scars that might embarrass you later in life.
As I said, I deal with the failures, and my medical knowledge is strictly anecdotal -- I only see the patients after they have been medically cleared -- when they just need to be watched.
The patients are almost always quite young, 20 to 35, and two thirds female. They are very withdrawn. They seem to be terribly embarrassed. They just lie in bed and I make no attempt at conversation.
I don’t think they want to die.
I don’t have much faith in therapy and social work, but that’s what happens after the attempt. You have to talk to somebody. This somebody comes into the patient’s room and an earnest conversation ensues -- as in, let’s find out what’s going on, and let’s see what we can do about it.
This is just my bias, but I don’t see the point of “doing anything” about it. I’m quite glad to be alive myself, and I would recommend that status to anyone who asked.
But it’s your life, not mine. The social compact requires us to live until we die, so I would not help you if you wanted to kill yourself.
Having said that, I think the highest respect and kindess for someone is to let them be the way they are. Are you depressed? Yes, that happens. Do you want my help? Ask for it. Do you want my attention? Then do or say something that interests me.
I just don’t want to treat a patient as if they were pathetic. I stay in the room with them and we’re going to get through the day together. I can promise that -- we’ll get through the day. And we’ll see about tomorrow.
Now Frankie was different than the others, in my own limited experience. He was much older, for one. And he made a fairly serious attempt to die, taking seven Fentanyl patches. As I said, he almost made it. If they hadn’t checked his room for another hour, he would have been gone for good.
So what happened to him after I left him at the hospital? I don’t know. I suspect they won’t let him have his own supply of Fentanyl anymore, but will give it to him one dose at a time. He’ll get counseling, but I hope it comes with respect.
There’s a time when you might tell a younger person that she’s a fool and that she’s throwing her life away. That can be a good thing to say.
But the old folks -- you really shouldn’t tell them anything. They are way past the rest of us.
A doctor or a nurse, no matter how experienced or how well trained, will have no idea what it takes to be 78 until they get there themselves.
FACTS ABOUT FENTANYL (Wikipedia is the source) The opioid Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960 by Dr. Paul Janssen. Its chemical formula is C22H28N2O. It is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine. It is used as an intravenous anesthetic.
In the mid 1990s, the Duragesic dermal patch was introduced, and the patch is now used for long-term pain management.
Fentanyl can be abused as a substitute for heroin. For that reason it is a Schedule II drug according to the Controlled Substances Act.
A Schedule I drug has no approved medical use. Schedule II drugs have approved medical uses, but are also illegally manufactured and abused.
Fentanyl, Duragesic, and their generic equivalents are often the first choice to control pain in cancer patients.
Fentanyl has side effects in 10 percent of patients -- diarrhea, nausea, constipation, dry mouth, sweating, and confusion.
Fentanyl and Duragesic are trademarks of Johnson + Johnson, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations. Sales of Fentanyl and Duragesic exceed $1.3 billion worldwide.
WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE LAWYERS? An Internet search, in pursuit of information regarding a drug or medical procedure, will easily produce the website of a law firm which makes a living suing those same purveyors of drugs and medical procedures.
I found this website, YouHaveALawyer.com (a real website, I’m not making this up) which hypes the diligent adversarial talents of Saiontz & Kirk, a law firm in Baltimore, because, if you have a problem, it must be someone’s fault and they should be sued.
Take our fictional patient Frankie. It wasn’t his fault. He was depressed because his wife died. Surely the doctor knew that. Did Frankie have a history of suicidal thoughts and attempts? Did the doctor ask him?
And what about the pain management? Was Frankie carefully instructed in the use of his Fentanyl patches? Was he warned of the danger of an overdose and that it could kill him?
Or maybe he was told about the danger of an overdose, and that’s what gave Frankie the idea of putting on seven patches all at once.
Has the law firm of Saiontz & Kirk sent one of their attorneys to lurk about the lobby of the hospital where I work, to press his or her business card upon weeping relatives? “Aye, I will take up your battle, I will smite the physician and pursue the drug company, I will obtain damages. We will fight and fight until justice comes.”
Saiontz & Kirk is eager to help, dear citizen, if you have had any problems with your Duragesic patch. Call them today. You can find their number plastered on the side of the nearest Metro Bus.
ADOPTION. Now, I’ve finished writing about Frankie. I will send it to the Frog Hospital audience and then I get closure.
But I’m afraid not. I’ve done patient care for five years, not all at once, but a year here and two years there -- at a hospital, a psychiatric hospital, and a nursing home, but it adds up to five years.
In those five years, I have adopted about 12 patients. It just happens. These are the ones that get into my psyche, make themselves at home and just stay. That’s why I call it adoption.
I see their faces, and I mean going back thirty years, and I still see their faces.
It looks like Frankie has joined the roster, along with Rachel, James, Eddie, and the others.
Twelve patients are enough. You don’t want to encourage this adoption. You want to shake them off by the time you get to the parking lot, but it happens anyway.
Seeking a Room to Rent. I am looking for a room to rent in LaConner. I am accustomed to sharing a kitchen and bathroom. I have a steady income, moderate habits, and good references. Call 360-739-0214.
I’m telling this story to get it off my mind. Patients don’t usually stay with me. I put my heart into the work when I’m on the unit, but I forget the whole thing by the time I get to the parking lot when I’m going home at 11 p.m.
It’s a good rhythm. You go home, read a book, have a glass of wine, and sleep without troubles. The next day you do it again
But Frankie stayed with me. He was 78, in assisted living. His wife had just died and he was in pain from hip surgery. He overdosed on his pain medication and the medics found him on the floor with seven Fentanyl patches pressed to his skin.
Fentanyl is a powerful narcotic and widely used in the form of dermal patches to relieve pain.
The patch releases the medication in a careful slow way and -- sometimes with unpleasant side effects -- it works.
But seven patches all at once will send you through the door, down the river and on your way to the next life.
Such a patient will not be left alone in the hospital, lest they try to harm themselves again. Standard procedure. Suicide watch.
Frankie was deeply asleep when I got there at 4:30 in the afternoon. Comatose? I don’t know the medical term. But past danger, I think.
Kelly was the nurse. She’s one of the angels. They make you feel good just walking in the room. I don’t know about the patients, but I know I feel good when she’s around.
Frankie had a heart monitor, just in case. These are four wire leads pressed to the chest, connected to a monitor room where someone could watch his pulse and breathing rate.
The monitor, besides being watched by a live person, is set with ding-ding-dings if the patient’s heart rate exceeds the parameters.
They have ding-ding-dings all over the hospital. You can’t relax for a minute.
So there’s Frankie, on his back, sleeping peacefully, with thick white hair closely cropped, a trim spade beard, round face, and good skin color. He looked healthy, if you asked me, and he was resting well.
I was sitting beside the bed and I turned on the TV to watch the baseball game -- kept the volume low. It makes good background noise -- the sound of a murmuring crowd.
No ding-ding-dings at the baseball game.
Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. How can anybody get any rest at this hospital? It’s a process of continuous interruption.
Kelly floats in and out of the room. She gives Frankie a bladder catheter. He barely wakes during the procedure. The urine bag fills up promptly. He needed a good pee, but he was too out of it to use the urinal, and the narcotic relaxed his muscles over much, so he wouldn’t just go without help.
If there’s one thing that matters around here, it’s urination. They get really worried if you’re not peeing, and they get happy if you do.
It’s all about moving the fluids -- things you’ve been managing by yourself since you were two-years-old, but when you’re sick you need help.
Kelly leaves. Frankie sleeps, I watch the game -- Dodgers and Phillies.
That’s it. Six hours and I go home. Only this time, when I get to the parking lot, I keep seeing Frankie’s peaceful face.
I keep thinking -- Frankie, you almost made it.
DISCUSSION: Depression and Suicide. (making no claim to any expertise on this subject) Everybody gets the blues now and then. But real depression is much worse than having a bad day -- real depression is staying in bed all day, being unable to leave the house, no appetite, insomnia, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.
One of the things I do at the hospital is suicide watch. Obviously, I don’t see those who have made a successful effort to end their lives. But I see the attempts and the failures. These are some mighty unhappy people -- everything’s going so wrong and they can’t even kill themselves.
Usually it’s an overdose -- a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs. The doctors would sure like to know just what it is you took when you get to ER -- perhaps if you pinned a note to your shirt before you passed out.
Either way, when you get to the ER, they give you the charcoal syrup which soaks up the poison. The charcoal looks awful, but it has no taste.
Don’t try suicide with Tylenol. A sufficient amount of Tylenol will kill you, but a less than sufficient amount will merely damage your liver, resulting in prolonged hospitalization and enormous medical expense. The opiates are actually better, because recovery can be fairly quick after a less than fatal dose.
Wrist slashing requires determination, and a failed attempt will leave scars that might embarrass you later in life.
As I said, I deal with the failures, and my medical knowledge is strictly anecdotal -- I only see the patients after they have been medically cleared -- when they just need to be watched.
The patients are almost always quite young, 20 to 35, and two thirds female. They are very withdrawn. They seem to be terribly embarrassed. They just lie in bed and I make no attempt at conversation.
I don’t think they want to die.
I don’t have much faith in therapy and social work, but that’s what happens after the attempt. You have to talk to somebody. This somebody comes into the patient’s room and an earnest conversation ensues -- as in, let’s find out what’s going on, and let’s see what we can do about it.
This is just my bias, but I don’t see the point of “doing anything” about it. I’m quite glad to be alive myself, and I would recommend that status to anyone who asked.
But it’s your life, not mine. The social compact requires us to live until we die, so I would not help you if you wanted to kill yourself.
Having said that, I think the highest respect and kindess for someone is to let them be the way they are. Are you depressed? Yes, that happens. Do you want my help? Ask for it. Do you want my attention? Then do or say something that interests me.
I just don’t want to treat a patient as if they were pathetic. I stay in the room with them and we’re going to get through the day together. I can promise that -- we’ll get through the day. And we’ll see about tomorrow.
Now Frankie was different than the others, in my own limited experience. He was much older, for one. And he made a fairly serious attempt to die, taking seven Fentanyl patches. As I said, he almost made it. If they hadn’t checked his room for another hour, he would have been gone for good.
So what happened to him after I left him at the hospital? I don’t know. I suspect they won’t let him have his own supply of Fentanyl anymore, but will give it to him one dose at a time. He’ll get counseling, but I hope it comes with respect.
There’s a time when you might tell a younger person that she’s a fool and that she’s throwing her life away. That can be a good thing to say.
But the old folks -- you really shouldn’t tell them anything. They are way past the rest of us.
A doctor or a nurse, no matter how experienced or how well trained, will have no idea what it takes to be 78 until they get there themselves.
FACTS ABOUT FENTANYL (Wikipedia is the source) The opioid Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960 by Dr. Paul Janssen. Its chemical formula is C22H28N2O. It is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine. It is used as an intravenous anesthetic.
In the mid 1990s, the Duragesic dermal patch was introduced, and the patch is now used for long-term pain management.
Fentanyl can be abused as a substitute for heroin. For that reason it is a Schedule II drug according to the Controlled Substances Act.
A Schedule I drug has no approved medical use. Schedule II drugs have approved medical uses, but are also illegally manufactured and abused.
Fentanyl, Duragesic, and their generic equivalents are often the first choice to control pain in cancer patients.
Fentanyl has side effects in 10 percent of patients -- diarrhea, nausea, constipation, dry mouth, sweating, and confusion.
Fentanyl and Duragesic are trademarks of Johnson + Johnson, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical corporations. Sales of Fentanyl and Duragesic exceed $1.3 billion worldwide.
WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT THE LAWYERS? An Internet search, in pursuit of information regarding a drug or medical procedure, will easily produce the website of a law firm which makes a living suing those same purveyors of drugs and medical procedures.
I found this website, YouHaveALawyer.com (a real website, I’m not making this up) which hypes the diligent adversarial talents of Saiontz & Kirk, a law firm in Baltimore, because, if you have a problem, it must be someone’s fault and they should be sued.
Take our fictional patient Frankie. It wasn’t his fault. He was depressed because his wife died. Surely the doctor knew that. Did Frankie have a history of suicidal thoughts and attempts? Did the doctor ask him?
And what about the pain management? Was Frankie carefully instructed in the use of his Fentanyl patches? Was he warned of the danger of an overdose and that it could kill him?
Or maybe he was told about the danger of an overdose, and that’s what gave Frankie the idea of putting on seven patches all at once.
Has the law firm of Saiontz & Kirk sent one of their attorneys to lurk about the lobby of the hospital where I work, to press his or her business card upon weeping relatives? “Aye, I will take up your battle, I will smite the physician and pursue the drug company, I will obtain damages. We will fight and fight until justice comes.”
Saiontz & Kirk is eager to help, dear citizen, if you have had any problems with your Duragesic patch. Call them today. You can find their number plastered on the side of the nearest Metro Bus.
ADOPTION. Now, I’ve finished writing about Frankie. I will send it to the Frog Hospital audience and then I get closure.
But I’m afraid not. I’ve done patient care for five years, not all at once, but a year here and two years there -- at a hospital, a psychiatric hospital, and a nursing home, but it adds up to five years.
In those five years, I have adopted about 12 patients. It just happens. These are the ones that get into my psyche, make themselves at home and just stay. That’s why I call it adoption.
I see their faces, and I mean going back thirty years, and I still see their faces.
It looks like Frankie has joined the roster, along with Rachel, James, Eddie, and the others.
Twelve patients are enough. You don’t want to encourage this adoption. You want to shake them off by the time you get to the parking lot, but it happens anyway.
Seeking a Room to Rent. I am looking for a room to rent in LaConner. I am accustomed to sharing a kitchen and bathroom. I have a steady income, moderate habits, and good references. Call 360-739-0214.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Goose Hunting on Fir Island
I can hear them, but I can’t see them -- a flock of snow geese flying through the morning fog. I can’t see past the birch tree in the back yard, but I can hear the pop-pop-pop of the hunters’ guns.
Yesterday I was walking along the road, and a sparkling red SUV came to a stop near me. The driver rolled down the window to speak. She was very pretty and so was her companion.
“Are they allowed to hunt snow geese?” she asked me. “Yes, they are,” I replied with a big, toothy smile. I felt like an ambassador of the NRA sent to explain the facts of life to urban visitors.
“Yes, we, that is the human race, have been hunting water fowl, such as the snow geese, since the dawn of time, for many thousands of years, using shotguns and other implements.”
I might have said that, but the sparkling red SUV had driven off, I could heard them tut-tut-tutting about those poor little snow geese getting shot at. Pretty ladies, though. I’ve always liked pretty ladies.
Pop-pop-pop. It gets annoying after a while. Some hunters are so dumb that they can’t tell the difference between a snow goose and a house. I live here -- in this house in the middle of the field
You could put giant letters on your house that spells H-O-U-S-E, but that wouldn’t help.
Hunting season goes on for several months, and then the hunters go home, the human ones. But the coyotes and eagles continue. It’s serious. They get hungry and a snow goose is a meal.
I hardly see the coyotes, they move around more at night. But the eagles perch at the top of the cottonwood tree in the back yard.
It’s a very tall tree. Eagle eyes can see for miles. It’s not sport. They’re not looking for a fair fight, but scan for the wounded, aged, or sickly birds.
I look for a bird out there in the field, amid a thousand snow geese, but this one bird is hobbling, as if something were wrong.
The eagle saw that bird too, before I did, and that crippled goose will not live out the day.
I can walk in the field the next day and find the feathered remains. That’s how it goes.
Eagles are inspiring, but for them it just gets cold and windy sitting up there on the top of the tree. They’re not trying to impress anyone, they’re just looking for their next meal and hoping to stay alive until spring.
Tourists pull their cars to the side of the road, and take photos of the eagles in the tree tops. They are part of nature too, human nature.
We humans bring justice to nature. It could be our defining quality, compared to other creatures.
We instinctively recoil at the unfairness of the eagle’s predation, saying, “Pick on somebody your own size.”
From a sense of justice comes law and government and the whole shebang, with me walking by the side of the road, and the ladies in the sparkling red SUV, and the hunters going pop-pop-pop.
All trying to decide what is fair, and doing it poorly, but it is our Star-Trek human prime directive. Be fair.
FOLDING SWEATERS. As I have declined the social ramble and spent more time on the farm these past few weeks, I did something I have never done before in my life. I folded my sweaters.
I have a nice collection -- a maroon Pendleton sweater that is so thick and warm, I can’t even wear unless it’s bitter cold.
I have two light merino wool sweaters. My daughter helped me find them at the thrift store. I didn’t know about merino wool -- it’s extra warm.
I have two light-weight cotton sweaters, one maroon and one baby-blue. I bought them two years ago at Target for $10 each.
Then the red cotton sweater and the cashmere -- which I mentioned in the previous issue of Frog Hospital.
And, my 100 percent cotton, No Logo, earth green XL sweatshirt.
I had my sweaters all jammed into a shelf on top of a rack of clothes in my closet. But I took them all out on Sunday, and folded them in the proper manner, and placed them back on the shelf.
Why did I do this? It seemed to mark a change in my life, a beginning which I have hoped for, a new direction.
This may not seem important. Very little of what I do is important. I want my life to be interesting and meaningful. But I can’t think of anything that’s important about it, except that my niece Rosie in Colorado is hoping that her husband Travis will come from Iraq for Christmas. That’s important.
Yesterday I was walking along the road, and a sparkling red SUV came to a stop near me. The driver rolled down the window to speak. She was very pretty and so was her companion.
“Are they allowed to hunt snow geese?” she asked me. “Yes, they are,” I replied with a big, toothy smile. I felt like an ambassador of the NRA sent to explain the facts of life to urban visitors.
“Yes, we, that is the human race, have been hunting water fowl, such as the snow geese, since the dawn of time, for many thousands of years, using shotguns and other implements.”
I might have said that, but the sparkling red SUV had driven off, I could heard them tut-tut-tutting about those poor little snow geese getting shot at. Pretty ladies, though. I’ve always liked pretty ladies.
Pop-pop-pop. It gets annoying after a while. Some hunters are so dumb that they can’t tell the difference between a snow goose and a house. I live here -- in this house in the middle of the field
You could put giant letters on your house that spells H-O-U-S-E, but that wouldn’t help.
Hunting season goes on for several months, and then the hunters go home, the human ones. But the coyotes and eagles continue. It’s serious. They get hungry and a snow goose is a meal.
I hardly see the coyotes, they move around more at night. But the eagles perch at the top of the cottonwood tree in the back yard.
It’s a very tall tree. Eagle eyes can see for miles. It’s not sport. They’re not looking for a fair fight, but scan for the wounded, aged, or sickly birds.
I look for a bird out there in the field, amid a thousand snow geese, but this one bird is hobbling, as if something were wrong.
The eagle saw that bird too, before I did, and that crippled goose will not live out the day.
I can walk in the field the next day and find the feathered remains. That’s how it goes.
Eagles are inspiring, but for them it just gets cold and windy sitting up there on the top of the tree. They’re not trying to impress anyone, they’re just looking for their next meal and hoping to stay alive until spring.
Tourists pull their cars to the side of the road, and take photos of the eagles in the tree tops. They are part of nature too, human nature.
We humans bring justice to nature. It could be our defining quality, compared to other creatures.
We instinctively recoil at the unfairness of the eagle’s predation, saying, “Pick on somebody your own size.”
From a sense of justice comes law and government and the whole shebang, with me walking by the side of the road, and the ladies in the sparkling red SUV, and the hunters going pop-pop-pop.
All trying to decide what is fair, and doing it poorly, but it is our Star-Trek human prime directive. Be fair.
FOLDING SWEATERS. As I have declined the social ramble and spent more time on the farm these past few weeks, I did something I have never done before in my life. I folded my sweaters.
I have a nice collection -- a maroon Pendleton sweater that is so thick and warm, I can’t even wear unless it’s bitter cold.
I have two light merino wool sweaters. My daughter helped me find them at the thrift store. I didn’t know about merino wool -- it’s extra warm.
I have two light-weight cotton sweaters, one maroon and one baby-blue. I bought them two years ago at Target for $10 each.
Then the red cotton sweater and the cashmere -- which I mentioned in the previous issue of Frog Hospital.
And, my 100 percent cotton, No Logo, earth green XL sweatshirt.
I had my sweaters all jammed into a shelf on top of a rack of clothes in my closet. But I took them all out on Sunday, and folded them in the proper manner, and placed them back on the shelf.
Why did I do this? It seemed to mark a change in my life, a beginning which I have hoped for, a new direction.
This may not seem important. Very little of what I do is important. I want my life to be interesting and meaningful. But I can’t think of anything that’s important about it, except that my niece Rosie in Colorado is hoping that her husband Travis will come from Iraq for Christmas. That’s important.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
It's Raining
I usually write Frog Hospital at the library or the café, where they have a wireless connection to the Internet. The Internet is handy for checking facts. For instance, in the last issue I wrote about Cape Ann in Massachusetts and its wild, granite seascape.
But was it spelled Cape Ann or Anne with an “e” ? I checked the spelling on the Internet.
Besides that, I just like being connected, and being able to interrupt my writing so that I can dash off an email to a friend. This is called multi-tasking, but when I was a kid, this was called a lack of concentration.
Somehow, the world turned upside down in this respect. To be able to do one thing well and ignore all distractions -- that was good.
Now it is the mark of a dullard -- you’re only doing one thing at a time? -- you must be a little stupid.
I am writing at home this morning, at the farmhouse on Fir Island, and we don’t have the Internet here, thank God.
….Pause. Sip coffee. Look out the window at the rain coming down across the field. The branches on the weeping birch are not moving -- almost perfectly still, meaning that the wind is calm.
The clouds behind the birch tree are not moving either. The clouds are very low to the ground, and I can’t see the foothills, which are five miles east of the farmhouse, across the flats.
It rained all last night. It was the first real rain for many months, and the fields are puddled like a sheet of water.
The monsoon is here, although to what degree? Will it rain every day for months and not have a spot of sunshine until next summer? It could happen.
Or bitter cold and snow in January, like last year with icy roads, and we were marooned in the house for days? Maybe.
Or a thaw and a burst of warm weather in the middle of winter -- so warm and sunny that fruit trees burst into blossom.
Or a winter unknown and terrible with weather worse than a nightmare and storms of climactic extremes?
This cannot be known, except that it rained last night and it has begun.
All this without recourse to the Internet, I simply looked out the window.
Also, I have a way to check spelling -- a paperback dictionary. I can look up “recommend.” It’s one of those words that trouble me -- is it two “c” s or two “m”s ?
Traveling has only one “l” -- I think it should have two “l”s, but it does not.
Pause. Go into the kitchen, prepare cold cereal with brown sugar, let it set for a few minutes to make the flakes less crunchy. Let the dog out. Wash a few dishes from last night. Do a quick dry mop on the kitchen floor. Eat the cereal.
I can see my cashmere sweater lying on the un-made bed. Janet Laurel had a yard sale at her home in LaConner this summer. That’s where I found the cashmere sweater. I bought it for only one dollar -- that’s a pretty good find. And it’s so warm that I practically can’t wear it without sweating.
So I think I’ll bring out my red cotton sweater and wear that instead.
I was sick last week. I had the flu. I had to stay home, in my room, and under the covers for several days. It was an interesting experience. I discovered that I liked staying home all day and I was tired of running around all the time, and the things that I could not do because I was ill were things I hardly needed to do, and that it’s much better to relax on my own premises and read a book.
Or draw, or cook, or walk around the field. I discovered this is actually my home and it’s good to be here.
It’s still raining. The clouds are very thick and low. The wind is starting to blow -- I can see the branches moving on the birch trees.
I can’t see any birds, but I know the birds are out there somewhere. There’s lots of birds around here, especially the snow geese.
So, what I’ll do, is just stay home all winter. We have tons of firewood. I have to go to work and make money, and I need to go into town to buy groceries, but otherwise who needs it?
But was it spelled Cape Ann or Anne with an “e” ? I checked the spelling on the Internet.
Besides that, I just like being connected, and being able to interrupt my writing so that I can dash off an email to a friend. This is called multi-tasking, but when I was a kid, this was called a lack of concentration.
Somehow, the world turned upside down in this respect. To be able to do one thing well and ignore all distractions -- that was good.
Now it is the mark of a dullard -- you’re only doing one thing at a time? -- you must be a little stupid.
I am writing at home this morning, at the farmhouse on Fir Island, and we don’t have the Internet here, thank God.
….Pause. Sip coffee. Look out the window at the rain coming down across the field. The branches on the weeping birch are not moving -- almost perfectly still, meaning that the wind is calm.
The clouds behind the birch tree are not moving either. The clouds are very low to the ground, and I can’t see the foothills, which are five miles east of the farmhouse, across the flats.
It rained all last night. It was the first real rain for many months, and the fields are puddled like a sheet of water.
The monsoon is here, although to what degree? Will it rain every day for months and not have a spot of sunshine until next summer? It could happen.
Or bitter cold and snow in January, like last year with icy roads, and we were marooned in the house for days? Maybe.
Or a thaw and a burst of warm weather in the middle of winter -- so warm and sunny that fruit trees burst into blossom.
Or a winter unknown and terrible with weather worse than a nightmare and storms of climactic extremes?
This cannot be known, except that it rained last night and it has begun.
All this without recourse to the Internet, I simply looked out the window.
Also, I have a way to check spelling -- a paperback dictionary. I can look up “recommend.” It’s one of those words that trouble me -- is it two “c” s or two “m”s ?
Traveling has only one “l” -- I think it should have two “l”s, but it does not.
Pause. Go into the kitchen, prepare cold cereal with brown sugar, let it set for a few minutes to make the flakes less crunchy. Let the dog out. Wash a few dishes from last night. Do a quick dry mop on the kitchen floor. Eat the cereal.
I can see my cashmere sweater lying on the un-made bed. Janet Laurel had a yard sale at her home in LaConner this summer. That’s where I found the cashmere sweater. I bought it for only one dollar -- that’s a pretty good find. And it’s so warm that I practically can’t wear it without sweating.
So I think I’ll bring out my red cotton sweater and wear that instead.
I was sick last week. I had the flu. I had to stay home, in my room, and under the covers for several days. It was an interesting experience. I discovered that I liked staying home all day and I was tired of running around all the time, and the things that I could not do because I was ill were things I hardly needed to do, and that it’s much better to relax on my own premises and read a book.
Or draw, or cook, or walk around the field. I discovered this is actually my home and it’s good to be here.
It’s still raining. The clouds are very thick and low. The wind is starting to blow -- I can see the branches moving on the birch trees.
I can’t see any birds, but I know the birds are out there somewhere. There’s lots of birds around here, especially the snow geese.
So, what I’ll do, is just stay home all winter. We have tons of firewood. I have to go to work and make money, and I need to go into town to buy groceries, but otherwise who needs it?
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Blue Lady
A friend of mine is visiting Boston this week, so I told her -- "Get out to Halibut Point if you have the chance."
You drive north from Boston, past Marblehead and Salem, out to the Cape Ann peninsula and the Gloucester harbor full of fishing boats.
You keep going until you get to Rockport, an impossibly cute tourist town, although it's not anyone's fault. People come from all over to buy saltwater taffy and t-shirts, so a man would be a fool not to sell them.
In New England, nobody moves over to make room for tourists, and they charge them plenty just to park their cars. People come anyway.
But don't stop in Rockport, take the small road up the coast about four or five miles. It's a pretty drive. You get to Halibut Point State Park, and then it's a short hike out to the point.
Pure granite. Everything on Cape Ann is made of pure granite with a little bit of soil between the cracks to nourish a few pine trees.
Walk out to the tip of Halibut Point where the waves crash and heave against the granite boulders.
Then look out to sea. Look for the Blue Lady. She floats above the waves and she's very beautiful. You might hear her say something, but it won't be words.
If you go out there you might see the Blue Lady. I saw her once.
Regrets and Resentment. Now it's time for Frog Hospital's annual "Regrets and Resentment" issue.
It has become quite fashionable to disparage these essential human qualities, to say, as if it were definitive, that "I have no regrets." Or to blithely dismiss every insult and injury, and say, "I have no resentment."
These people are lying, or else devoid of consciousness. Regret is part of a meaningful life. The things I have done -- my God, my whole life is an embarrassment. I have only to pick a year, and like an apparition, comes a parade of far from harmless misdeeds.
I do not forget these errors. I regret them.
Regrets are for the stupid things I have done, which hurt myself and others.
Resentment is for what other people have done to me. How can we forgive if we do not first savor and store up the grievance?
There is a lifespan to an injury. People do hurt us, through carelessness and through intent. These are real wounds.
And, does a real wound heal instantly, miraculously? No, it hurts and it bleeds, and it begins raw and painful, and transforms, over time, into a deeper ache.
Real forgiveness only comes in time, after resentment has served its purpose. That's the healing that ennobles us.
Soulful Songs from the Sixties. First a 1966 live recording of Lou Rawls singing "The Shadow of Your Smile."
Then the incomparable Sarah Vaughan sings "I Can't Give You Anything but Love."
It's so smooth.
Speaking of Smooth. I liked President Smooth when he came back from Copenhagen without gaining the Olympics Games for Chicago. I really don't think our President believes his own charm, not with a wife like Michelle. He came back from Copenhagen empty-handed, as if to say, "I tried, but only because you asked me. I can't waltz the scales off a snake. I can't turn the devil into sponge cake. And you shouldn't expect anything like that."
I liked Obama defeated. This nonsense with the Nobel Peace Prize has a lot to do with the silly expectations of five Norwegians, and very little to do with Obama.
He's the President. He has real work to do, and I hope he does it well.
Illness. We should all spend the whole day in bed once in a while and not wait for illness to force this resting state upon us. A sweating episode of outdoor labor followed by a sudden chill put me out of business for a few days, down with the flu, confined to the house, huddled under blankets, forced to read long books and look out the window for hours..... I'm glad it's over.
Frog Hospital Financial Report. Frog Hospital, as an email newsletter and a blog, has earned close to $1,200 so far this year, making it a huge success by the standards of this particular medium. Thank you for your support.
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
send mail to:
Fred Owens
Box 1292
LaConner WA 98257
You drive north from Boston, past Marblehead and Salem, out to the Cape Ann peninsula and the Gloucester harbor full of fishing boats.
You keep going until you get to Rockport, an impossibly cute tourist town, although it's not anyone's fault. People come from all over to buy saltwater taffy and t-shirts, so a man would be a fool not to sell them.
In New England, nobody moves over to make room for tourists, and they charge them plenty just to park their cars. People come anyway.
But don't stop in Rockport, take the small road up the coast about four or five miles. It's a pretty drive. You get to Halibut Point State Park, and then it's a short hike out to the point.
Pure granite. Everything on Cape Ann is made of pure granite with a little bit of soil between the cracks to nourish a few pine trees.
Walk out to the tip of Halibut Point where the waves crash and heave against the granite boulders.
Then look out to sea. Look for the Blue Lady. She floats above the waves and she's very beautiful. You might hear her say something, but it won't be words.
If you go out there you might see the Blue Lady. I saw her once.
Regrets and Resentment. Now it's time for Frog Hospital's annual "Regrets and Resentment" issue.
It has become quite fashionable to disparage these essential human qualities, to say, as if it were definitive, that "I have no regrets." Or to blithely dismiss every insult and injury, and say, "I have no resentment."
These people are lying, or else devoid of consciousness. Regret is part of a meaningful life. The things I have done -- my God, my whole life is an embarrassment. I have only to pick a year, and like an apparition, comes a parade of far from harmless misdeeds.
I do not forget these errors. I regret them.
Regrets are for the stupid things I have done, which hurt myself and others.
Resentment is for what other people have done to me. How can we forgive if we do not first savor and store up the grievance?
There is a lifespan to an injury. People do hurt us, through carelessness and through intent. These are real wounds.
And, does a real wound heal instantly, miraculously? No, it hurts and it bleeds, and it begins raw and painful, and transforms, over time, into a deeper ache.
Real forgiveness only comes in time, after resentment has served its purpose. That's the healing that ennobles us.
Soulful Songs from the Sixties. First a 1966 live recording of Lou Rawls singing "The Shadow of Your Smile."
Then the incomparable Sarah Vaughan sings "I Can't Give You Anything but Love."
It's so smooth.
Speaking of Smooth. I liked President Smooth when he came back from Copenhagen without gaining the Olympics Games for Chicago. I really don't think our President believes his own charm, not with a wife like Michelle. He came back from Copenhagen empty-handed, as if to say, "I tried, but only because you asked me. I can't waltz the scales off a snake. I can't turn the devil into sponge cake. And you shouldn't expect anything like that."
I liked Obama defeated. This nonsense with the Nobel Peace Prize has a lot to do with the silly expectations of five Norwegians, and very little to do with Obama.
He's the President. He has real work to do, and I hope he does it well.
Illness. We should all spend the whole day in bed once in a while and not wait for illness to force this resting state upon us. A sweating episode of outdoor labor followed by a sudden chill put me out of business for a few days, down with the flu, confined to the house, huddled under blankets, forced to read long books and look out the window for hours..... I'm glad it's over.
Frog Hospital Financial Report. Frog Hospital, as an email newsletter and a blog, has earned close to $1,200 so far this year, making it a huge success by the standards of this particular medium. Thank you for your support.
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
send mail to:
Fred Owens
Box 1292
LaConner WA 98257
Friday, October 09, 2009
Advice about Men
Flash: Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize. After a careful reading of various news sources to get the reaction, I realize I don't have anything to say that hasn't already been said.
We take our readers to heart. Sometimes they face difficult decisions in their personal lives and ask us for help.
Dear Dr. Frog,
"Mamma Mia" is such a good movie. I've seen it three times and everybody sings along. But my husband would not go with me. Keith is such a good man in every respect, but he just won't go. So when "Mamma Mia" came out on DVD, I thought we could watch it at home together -- just the two of us. But he refuses! Honestly, I cried.
Maybe I'm making too much of this, so tell me what I'm doing wrong. Or am I doing anything wrong? I try to be a good sport about things. I have sat with him on the couch and watched at least a hundred football games, but one little movie that I like and he won't do it.
---from Sally in Shelter Bay
Dear Sally,
Thanks for having the courage to share this with me. My heart goes out to you and I will try to help with what little I know.
It's true that a man can be difficult to deal with and no more responsive than a block of wood, but the fire is in there, believe me. I can understand why Keith doesn't want to see "Mamma Mia." None of the guys do. It's more than a chick flick. It's like the total, ultimate chick flick and word gets around.
Sally, why you like it so much is why he doesn't like it all. It's a little gooshy -- you know what I mean. I'm sure Keith knows what I mean. I'm a rugged dude and a man's man, but I am also a serious researcher of human nature, so I watched "Mamma Mia" last night on the DVD.
You're right. It's a wonderful movie. Just the scenery from the Greek islands is worth the price of admission. And those cheesy Abba songs, sincerely dramatized by Meryl Streep and Pierre Brosnan -- who sang in their real voices. It was all very well done. This movie is good schmaltz. Of course, you loved it.
But your question to me was -- should you somehow insist that Keith watch it with you, or should you be hurt that he has refused to do this?
This is my answer: Leave him be. Because a man resting on the couch watching a football should be allowed his repose. He doesn't want to talk, he only wants to munch pretzels. Let him rest. Be glad he's at home. He's not doing any harm when he's not doing anything at all.
Even for a hundred football games.
But he does have to do one thing for you. He has to take you to the opera this winter in Seattle. Good seats, top dollar. He has to buy the tickets, wear his very best clothes and pretend he's having a good time. The full deal. Maybe he should buy you a corsage too.
That's what he has to do. Tell him I said so.
The Public Option. Support is building for the public option. The arguments against it run flat. Has the post office driven Fedex and UPS out of business? Have public universities driven private colleges into bankruptcy? Have public libraries forced all the bookstores to close?
These are three examples of a successful market-sharing relation between public and private entities. It could also work well in health insurance.
The Government Can't Do Anything Right. The government can't do anything right -- except for the Internet, a defense communication project, or the Interstate Highway System, or the dams along the Tennessee river that brought electricity to country people all over the South in the 1930s.
Or the Erie Canal. Or the Louisiana Purchase.
All stupid, all a complete waste of money. Especially that last one. President Jefferson spent millions of dollars to buy worthless land. We should have stopped him.
Actually, historically, over time, it has been hit or miss. The federal gov't has many times wasted billions of dollars on programs that do nothing or even harm people. Like when they bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867 -- nothing but worthless frozen waste and tundra
But I'll take a chance with Obama's public option. It might work.
Who Paid the Taxes that Built the West. Look at Bonneville Dam and the Grand Coulee Dam that have provide cheap electricity and abundant water for agriculture to the Pacific Northwest. Built with federal dollars. Paid for by taxes from the Midwest.
It was the industrial and manufacturing power of the Midwest that made the jobs and generated the income and paid the taxes which the federal government collected to build the highways and dams and military bases and national parks and flood control and irrigation projects throughout the sparsely populated and under-developed Western states.
There is a four-lane limited access Interstate highway, I-90, that crosses the entire state of Montana from west to east. Do you think the people of Montana paid for that road? There never was enough people in Montana to pay for that road. But they ride on it all the time, while cursing the federal government, while sticking that federal money in their back pockets at the same time.
The money came from tax dollars generated in the Midwest, from the farm implement factories in Iowa -- John Deere and Massey-Ferguson. From the heavy equipment factories in Illinois, like Caterpillar. From the powerful steel mills along the Lake Michigan shore in Indiana. From the mile-long car factories in Michigan.
Those once mighty engines of democracy generated the wealth that built the West.
But the factories decayed, and the manufacturing system fell afoul and the jobs dried up and the Midwest has not been the powerful engine it once was. Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country now. It's hard to believe what Michigan is now, compared to how powerful it once was.
Fortunately, for the Midwest, there's a new President in the White House, a man who put his roots down in the South side of Chicago. Obama represents the new energy and the resurgence of the Midwest.
Places like Illinois and Michigan aren't cool. Everybody on the West Coast thinks it's much cooler to be out here, and so many of us came from back there and we didn't like it back that there because it was so conventional and boring and flat.
But, Michigan and the Midwest are the future of our country. Put it another way -- if Michigan has no future, than the USA has no future. It's not going to happen any other way.
That's why a young man with ambition who grew up in in Hawaii and Indonesia decided to begin his life's work in the un-coolest part of the country, the Midwest.
In the center, in the middle.
I have written enough, and this will be continued.
Courage. I want to make a special thanks to Peggy in Marin County who has helped me get my courage back.
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
We take our readers to heart. Sometimes they face difficult decisions in their personal lives and ask us for help.
Dear Dr. Frog,
"Mamma Mia" is such a good movie. I've seen it three times and everybody sings along. But my husband would not go with me. Keith is such a good man in every respect, but he just won't go. So when "Mamma Mia" came out on DVD, I thought we could watch it at home together -- just the two of us. But he refuses! Honestly, I cried.
Maybe I'm making too much of this, so tell me what I'm doing wrong. Or am I doing anything wrong? I try to be a good sport about things. I have sat with him on the couch and watched at least a hundred football games, but one little movie that I like and he won't do it.
---from Sally in Shelter Bay
Dear Sally,
Thanks for having the courage to share this with me. My heart goes out to you and I will try to help with what little I know.
It's true that a man can be difficult to deal with and no more responsive than a block of wood, but the fire is in there, believe me. I can understand why Keith doesn't want to see "Mamma Mia." None of the guys do. It's more than a chick flick. It's like the total, ultimate chick flick and word gets around.
Sally, why you like it so much is why he doesn't like it all. It's a little gooshy -- you know what I mean. I'm sure Keith knows what I mean. I'm a rugged dude and a man's man, but I am also a serious researcher of human nature, so I watched "Mamma Mia" last night on the DVD.
You're right. It's a wonderful movie. Just the scenery from the Greek islands is worth the price of admission. And those cheesy Abba songs, sincerely dramatized by Meryl Streep and Pierre Brosnan -- who sang in their real voices. It was all very well done. This movie is good schmaltz. Of course, you loved it.
But your question to me was -- should you somehow insist that Keith watch it with you, or should you be hurt that he has refused to do this?
This is my answer: Leave him be. Because a man resting on the couch watching a football should be allowed his repose. He doesn't want to talk, he only wants to munch pretzels. Let him rest. Be glad he's at home. He's not doing any harm when he's not doing anything at all.
Even for a hundred football games.
But he does have to do one thing for you. He has to take you to the opera this winter in Seattle. Good seats, top dollar. He has to buy the tickets, wear his very best clothes and pretend he's having a good time. The full deal. Maybe he should buy you a corsage too.
That's what he has to do. Tell him I said so.
The Public Option. Support is building for the public option. The arguments against it run flat. Has the post office driven Fedex and UPS out of business? Have public universities driven private colleges into bankruptcy? Have public libraries forced all the bookstores to close?
These are three examples of a successful market-sharing relation between public and private entities. It could also work well in health insurance.
The Government Can't Do Anything Right. The government can't do anything right -- except for the Internet, a defense communication project, or the Interstate Highway System, or the dams along the Tennessee river that brought electricity to country people all over the South in the 1930s.
Or the Erie Canal. Or the Louisiana Purchase.
All stupid, all a complete waste of money. Especially that last one. President Jefferson spent millions of dollars to buy worthless land. We should have stopped him.
Actually, historically, over time, it has been hit or miss. The federal gov't has many times wasted billions of dollars on programs that do nothing or even harm people. Like when they bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867 -- nothing but worthless frozen waste and tundra
But I'll take a chance with Obama's public option. It might work.
Who Paid the Taxes that Built the West. Look at Bonneville Dam and the Grand Coulee Dam that have provide cheap electricity and abundant water for agriculture to the Pacific Northwest. Built with federal dollars. Paid for by taxes from the Midwest.
It was the industrial and manufacturing power of the Midwest that made the jobs and generated the income and paid the taxes which the federal government collected to build the highways and dams and military bases and national parks and flood control and irrigation projects throughout the sparsely populated and under-developed Western states.
There is a four-lane limited access Interstate highway, I-90, that crosses the entire state of Montana from west to east. Do you think the people of Montana paid for that road? There never was enough people in Montana to pay for that road. But they ride on it all the time, while cursing the federal government, while sticking that federal money in their back pockets at the same time.
The money came from tax dollars generated in the Midwest, from the farm implement factories in Iowa -- John Deere and Massey-Ferguson. From the heavy equipment factories in Illinois, like Caterpillar. From the powerful steel mills along the Lake Michigan shore in Indiana. From the mile-long car factories in Michigan.
Those once mighty engines of democracy generated the wealth that built the West.
But the factories decayed, and the manufacturing system fell afoul and the jobs dried up and the Midwest has not been the powerful engine it once was. Michigan has the highest unemployment in the country now. It's hard to believe what Michigan is now, compared to how powerful it once was.
Fortunately, for the Midwest, there's a new President in the White House, a man who put his roots down in the South side of Chicago. Obama represents the new energy and the resurgence of the Midwest.
Places like Illinois and Michigan aren't cool. Everybody on the West Coast thinks it's much cooler to be out here, and so many of us came from back there and we didn't like it back that there because it was so conventional and boring and flat.
But, Michigan and the Midwest are the future of our country. Put it another way -- if Michigan has no future, than the USA has no future. It's not going to happen any other way.
That's why a young man with ambition who grew up in in Hawaii and Indonesia decided to begin his life's work in the un-coolest part of the country, the Midwest.
In the center, in the middle.
I have written enough, and this will be continued.
Courage. I want to make a special thanks to Peggy in Marin County who has helped me get my courage back.
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
The Boys from Chicago
The Boys from Chicago
It only took Fox News one year to figure out that the boys from Chicago are running the country now. I would love to see the whole team -- Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck -- take on Mayor Daley. It would hardly be a fair fight. Daley wouldn't even break out in a sweat.
Fox News did find ACORN. That was a gimme, small potatoes. They found Barney Frank -- lots of fun and noise from Massachusetts, but they never realized, until it was in plain sight, that His Honor is the Number Two man in the country.
So President Obama borrowed Air Force One for the weekend and flew to Copenhagen to promote Chicago's Olympic bid. He did what he was supposed to do. He showed up and made his pitch, disregarding the fallout if he should fail, which he did.
Back home, it didn't matter. Obama made his effort without trying to disguise the favor, and Daley's team is consoled by the fact that they still have the White House, Air Force One, and control of the federal government.
You can tell who runs things -- they're the quiet ones. You can tell who isn't running things -- the guys making all the noise.
I was conflicted myself, being from Chicago. But a disclaimer -- I am from the North Shore, an affluent suburban region of Chicagoland and would never say I was from Chicago, except I am out here near Seattle, where no one knows the difference.
Anyway, I was conflicted, because I was glad Rio de Janeiro got the Olympics in 2016. It was simply South America's turn and they deserved it.
I also felt the warmth of losing. From Chicago, we're used to it. When I was a kid, when baseball really mattered, the Cubs always came in last place. So I decided to become a White Sox fan and that was even worse, because the White Sox played well, but they always come in SECOND, and the Yankees always won. Always losing, it's tough. And the climate is ferocious, terribly hot in the summer, bitter winds in the winter, and the countryside is flat as a pool table. That's Chicagoland.
As for the Olympic Committee -- they are as gods, invisible and inscrutable. It is not for mortals to decipher their meaning. Obama's charisma did not play well before this committee, and he knew that. But he took one for the team and that's what really mattered.
Fox News misses the point when they call Obama a socialist. He's not. He's a Daley-ist.
The Daley program is higher taxes for the upper half and higher wages for the lower half. The Daley program is urban-oriented and anti-Wal-Mart. It's about strong government for strong people. It's not heaven on earth, but it's way better than Dick Cheney running the country.
It only took Fox News one year to figure out that the boys from Chicago are running the country now. I would love to see the whole team -- Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck -- take on Mayor Daley. It would hardly be a fair fight. Daley wouldn't even break out in a sweat.
Fox News did find ACORN. That was a gimme, small potatoes. They found Barney Frank -- lots of fun and noise from Massachusetts, but they never realized, until it was in plain sight, that His Honor is the Number Two man in the country.
So President Obama borrowed Air Force One for the weekend and flew to Copenhagen to promote Chicago's Olympic bid. He did what he was supposed to do. He showed up and made his pitch, disregarding the fallout if he should fail, which he did.
Back home, it didn't matter. Obama made his effort without trying to disguise the favor, and Daley's team is consoled by the fact that they still have the White House, Air Force One, and control of the federal government.
You can tell who runs things -- they're the quiet ones. You can tell who isn't running things -- the guys making all the noise.
I was conflicted myself, being from Chicago. But a disclaimer -- I am from the North Shore, an affluent suburban region of Chicagoland and would never say I was from Chicago, except I am out here near Seattle, where no one knows the difference.
Anyway, I was conflicted, because I was glad Rio de Janeiro got the Olympics in 2016. It was simply South America's turn and they deserved it.
I also felt the warmth of losing. From Chicago, we're used to it. When I was a kid, when baseball really mattered, the Cubs always came in last place. So I decided to become a White Sox fan and that was even worse, because the White Sox played well, but they always come in SECOND, and the Yankees always won. Always losing, it's tough. And the climate is ferocious, terribly hot in the summer, bitter winds in the winter, and the countryside is flat as a pool table. That's Chicagoland.
As for the Olympic Committee -- they are as gods, invisible and inscrutable. It is not for mortals to decipher their meaning. Obama's charisma did not play well before this committee, and he knew that. But he took one for the team and that's what really mattered.
Fox News misses the point when they call Obama a socialist. He's not. He's a Daley-ist.
The Daley program is higher taxes for the upper half and higher wages for the lower half. The Daley program is urban-oriented and anti-Wal-Mart. It's about strong government for strong people. It's not heaven on earth, but it's way better than Dick Cheney running the country.
Friday, October 02, 2009
The Gettysburg Address
In the last issue, I wrote a spoof on the historic revision of the voyages of Christopher Columbus, and I took a sideways swipe at Howard Zinn and his very popular book, A People's History of the United States.
It's a good book, a useful corrective to the unalloyed adulation of American heroes. But it seems that younger people take Zinn's book as a founding text and the basis for a new orthodoxy.
"New orthodoxy" is a most horrible concept. An old orthodoxy has at least the warmth of tradition, even if it's wrong. But a new orthodoxy, uncritically accepted, is a cold and barren tyranny.
Or, it could be an adolescent phase. It's like when you get to be 12 or 13 and you discover that your parents are complete frauds. Mom and Dad weren't telling you the whole truth. You see all the holes and discrepancies in the family story. This is a necessary disillusionment that causes anger and rebellion in the young. But hopefully, we continue to grow and develop a more measured appreciation of our ancestors and the people who made us what we are.
No, Christopher Columbus was not a very nice man. He did make it across the Atlantic Ocean and back again and kept a careful account of his voyage. That makes him a discoverer. As a result, half the human race found out there was another half -- quite a world-changing event.
When the human race re-united, the microbes wrecked havoc and millions died. No one expected this. Also, people failed to see the value of other cultures. You could say casually that they weren't impressed with each other or were horrified by exotic customs. Or maybe, because they were so far away from home, they were simply scared and acted the way people act when they are frightened -- with violence.
Well, greed, lust, and the other vices played a part as well.
In the new orthodoxy, there are no great men. We're all just people and things just happen. There are no individuals who drive events, and no makers of history. Sooner or later, somebody would have made a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and there were surely a few who made it across before Columbus -- they just lacked a good PR machine to hype the journey.
Still, it was a good thing. Rivers, cities, provinces and one nation are named after Columbus. There's no need to change that.
Another great man, who, until recently, rated his own holiday, was Abraham Lincoln. His life has been subject to endless revision which does not seem to diminish his stature. We have him on the penny, the five dollar bill and Mount Rushmore. He doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.
This is the Gettysburg address, only 278 words. It's so short, even the attention span of the Internet can hold it:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work"
Us, the living, you and I, all citizens, and the current President -- we are challenged to take up this unfinished work and face the great task remaining before us.
The speech was given in 1863, 146 years ago. The words humble any writer -- to say so much in only 278 words. The language is so clear. I read Garry Wills book, Lincoln at Gettysburg which explains the meaning and importance of this speech.
Old Abe calls down to us and says -- you think you have problems? I gave this speech on the grounds of a battlefield where thousands of men died, North and South, because of an argument that could only be settled by blood and the sword.
He says we can’t give up, and we can’t go our separate ways.
It's a good speech that, like a work of art, means just as much today as it did a long time ago. It's not old, it's fresh. It's not about the past, but it points to the future and what still needs to be done. We can't give up. We can't go our separate ways. The current turmoil gives no excuse for despair.
"That all men are created equal." I should explain this to younger people. Until around 1970, the word man had two proper usages, depending on the context. In one context, man meant a male person. In another context, man meant human being. In the Gettysburg address, it means human being. That's easy enough to understand.
But equal. That's a stumper. What does equal mean? Because President Lincoln said our nation was dedicated to this proposition -- that we are all created equal, and not just Americans. He said "all men."
We are all created equal. Is this an intention or a fact? Not meaning all the same in every way, as in mathematics .... because we can so easily distinguish one person from another ... we strive to be different ... we take pride in being unique ... so how can we be equal?
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
It's a good book, a useful corrective to the unalloyed adulation of American heroes. But it seems that younger people take Zinn's book as a founding text and the basis for a new orthodoxy.
"New orthodoxy" is a most horrible concept. An old orthodoxy has at least the warmth of tradition, even if it's wrong. But a new orthodoxy, uncritically accepted, is a cold and barren tyranny.
Or, it could be an adolescent phase. It's like when you get to be 12 or 13 and you discover that your parents are complete frauds. Mom and Dad weren't telling you the whole truth. You see all the holes and discrepancies in the family story. This is a necessary disillusionment that causes anger and rebellion in the young. But hopefully, we continue to grow and develop a more measured appreciation of our ancestors and the people who made us what we are.
No, Christopher Columbus was not a very nice man. He did make it across the Atlantic Ocean and back again and kept a careful account of his voyage. That makes him a discoverer. As a result, half the human race found out there was another half -- quite a world-changing event.
When the human race re-united, the microbes wrecked havoc and millions died. No one expected this. Also, people failed to see the value of other cultures. You could say casually that they weren't impressed with each other or were horrified by exotic customs. Or maybe, because they were so far away from home, they were simply scared and acted the way people act when they are frightened -- with violence.
Well, greed, lust, and the other vices played a part as well.
In the new orthodoxy, there are no great men. We're all just people and things just happen. There are no individuals who drive events, and no makers of history. Sooner or later, somebody would have made a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and there were surely a few who made it across before Columbus -- they just lacked a good PR machine to hype the journey.
Still, it was a good thing. Rivers, cities, provinces and one nation are named after Columbus. There's no need to change that.
Another great man, who, until recently, rated his own holiday, was Abraham Lincoln. His life has been subject to endless revision which does not seem to diminish his stature. We have him on the penny, the five dollar bill and Mount Rushmore. He doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.
This is the Gettysburg address, only 278 words. It's so short, even the attention span of the Internet can hold it:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work"
Us, the living, you and I, all citizens, and the current President -- we are challenged to take up this unfinished work and face the great task remaining before us.
The speech was given in 1863, 146 years ago. The words humble any writer -- to say so much in only 278 words. The language is so clear. I read Garry Wills book, Lincoln at Gettysburg which explains the meaning and importance of this speech.
Old Abe calls down to us and says -- you think you have problems? I gave this speech on the grounds of a battlefield where thousands of men died, North and South, because of an argument that could only be settled by blood and the sword.
He says we can’t give up, and we can’t go our separate ways.
It's a good speech that, like a work of art, means just as much today as it did a long time ago. It's not old, it's fresh. It's not about the past, but it points to the future and what still needs to be done. We can't give up. We can't go our separate ways. The current turmoil gives no excuse for despair.
"That all men are created equal." I should explain this to younger people. Until around 1970, the word man had two proper usages, depending on the context. In one context, man meant a male person. In another context, man meant human being. In the Gettysburg address, it means human being. That's easy enough to understand.
But equal. That's a stumper. What does equal mean? Because President Lincoln said our nation was dedicated to this proposition -- that we are all created equal, and not just Americans. He said "all men."
We are all created equal. Is this an intention or a fact? Not meaning all the same in every way, as in mathematics .... because we can so easily distinguish one person from another ... we strive to be different ... we take pride in being unique ... so how can we be equal?
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Christopher Columbus was a Very Bad Man
Let us revile the memory of this supposed Discoverer. Let us question the sanity of our foreparents who made this day a holiday. For Christopher Columbus was a very bad man, his crimes innumerable, and his vices legion.
He was a pronounced Catholic bigot with no respect for other religious traditions, counting Moslems as heretics, and Native Americans as devil worshipping heathens.
He was in league with the supreme anti-Semites of his day, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who sponsored his brutal voyage of conquest and cruelty. The Spanish monarchs had only recently expelled all Moslems from the Iberian Peninsula, and were about to launch the Inquisition, to torture, evict, or convert the Jews who had lived in Spain for centuries.
Christopher Columbus was also a male chauvinist and despicable sexist. Staffing, "manning," he would have said, his three vessels, he insisted that not a single female be recruited, going so far as to say, with no apology, that it was bad luck to have a woman on board.
As leader of this pestilential fleet, Columbus assumed dictatorial powers, never once consulting his crew, or even his mates, but making all decisions himself. There was no vote, there was no consensus. To disobey the orders of this tyrant meant the lash.
Furthermore, besides being a bad man, Columbus was profoundly stupid. Discoverer? Pah! He was lost. he thought he was in China.
It is important to mention these crimes, alongside with his well-known role as enslaver and killer of Native American peoples.
We, his descendents, especially those of us from Italy, where Columbus was born, can only consider ourselves to be the evil spawn of this malignant monster.
It is entirely appropriate that this most awful day in human history, October 12, be a day of mourning, ashes and weeping.
It was all wrong, and everything that happened since then was wrong -- truly there is an Original Sin, but it was not Adam and Eve, but Christopher Columbus, who destroyed the Garden of Eden that was once America.
Only we need to call it something else besides America, which comes from the name of a self-promoting mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci -- another one of those damned Italians.
--- I posted this on my blog two years ago. I am amazed that so many people thought I was being serious, and they agreed with me entirely.
Well, listen to me, ye sons and daughters of Howard Zinn. What I just wrote is a SATIRE, and I do not believe a word of it.
I actually have a pretty high opinion of Christopher Columbus, a great man, a great discoverer, and truly he was the man who showed us the way to the New World.
He was a pronounced Catholic bigot with no respect for other religious traditions, counting Moslems as heretics, and Native Americans as devil worshipping heathens.
He was in league with the supreme anti-Semites of his day, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who sponsored his brutal voyage of conquest and cruelty. The Spanish monarchs had only recently expelled all Moslems from the Iberian Peninsula, and were about to launch the Inquisition, to torture, evict, or convert the Jews who had lived in Spain for centuries.
Christopher Columbus was also a male chauvinist and despicable sexist. Staffing, "manning," he would have said, his three vessels, he insisted that not a single female be recruited, going so far as to say, with no apology, that it was bad luck to have a woman on board.
As leader of this pestilential fleet, Columbus assumed dictatorial powers, never once consulting his crew, or even his mates, but making all decisions himself. There was no vote, there was no consensus. To disobey the orders of this tyrant meant the lash.
Furthermore, besides being a bad man, Columbus was profoundly stupid. Discoverer? Pah! He was lost. he thought he was in China.
It is important to mention these crimes, alongside with his well-known role as enslaver and killer of Native American peoples.
We, his descendents, especially those of us from Italy, where Columbus was born, can only consider ourselves to be the evil spawn of this malignant monster.
It is entirely appropriate that this most awful day in human history, October 12, be a day of mourning, ashes and weeping.
It was all wrong, and everything that happened since then was wrong -- truly there is an Original Sin, but it was not Adam and Eve, but Christopher Columbus, who destroyed the Garden of Eden that was once America.
Only we need to call it something else besides America, which comes from the name of a self-promoting mapmaker, Amerigo Vespucci -- another one of those damned Italians.
--- I posted this on my blog two years ago. I am amazed that so many people thought I was being serious, and they agreed with me entirely.
Well, listen to me, ye sons and daughters of Howard Zinn. What I just wrote is a SATIRE, and I do not believe a word of it.
I actually have a pretty high opinion of Christopher Columbus, a great man, a great discoverer, and truly he was the man who showed us the way to the New World.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Seven Uncles and One Missing
I think we should call this The Owens Chronicle, because it sounds like a spy movie starring Matt Damon. But Lane Dexter, who lives way up in the mountains while he awaits the collapse of civilization, wants to call it Fog Hospital. Further suggestions are welcome.
When I grew up I had a lot of uncles, seven and one missing. I knew I had an abundance of uncles, but I had a high opinion of my own worth and felt that I deserved all those uncles. It was like a collection -- except for the missing uncle, number eight, and that bothered me.
We'll start at the beginning on my mother's side. Uncle Ted's real name was Ambrose Cuny. He had an enormous nose. Otherwise he was boring. He was my Mom's oldest brother, which earned him a certain amount of respect, and he only lived a few miles from our house, on Prairie Avenue in Evanston. But we didn't visit very often -- because he was boring, I guess.
Uncle Ted was a high-flying stock investor until the crash of 1929 -- as the family story went. After the crash, he still had a few dollars left and figured the market was at the bottom, so he doubled down and lost every penny. After that he was a defeated man and took a back office job somewhere in downtown Chicago.
The next uncle was Uncle Chuck. He was cool, tall and bony and robust. Uncle Chuck had six kids and they lived on the South Side of Chicago and we lived on the North Side. It was a long drive to see them and we didn't go too often, but between their six kids and our five, we could raise a riot and we loved going there. Uncle Chuck had a job at United Airlines in the credit department. He worked at Midway Field, the older, smaller South Side airport.
Years later he was transferred to O'Hare Airport on the northside of Chicago, so the family moved to Arlington Heights, a kind of meaningless suburban place full of tract homes. It was a nicer neighborhood, but Uncle Chuck's new house wasn't as cool as going to the South Side.
Uncle Jerry was a high school teacher. He was earnest and congenial, but, unfortunately, he was married to Aunt Grace. One year Aunt Grace gave me a very nice ballpoint pen for Christmas -- that's how lame she was -- you give kids toys for Christmas, for Pete's sake.
But it wasn't Uncle Jerry's fault, and many years later, after Aunt Grace died and when it no longer mattered, he told me about his younger days and the love of his life, the woman he wanted to marry, but could not. It was a sweet story, and I thought better of him after that.
Uncle Ralph was the youngest of four brothers and lived very near to us. He was close to my Mom and always coming over to the house. Relatives didn't knock when they came, they just opened the door and peaked their heads and said hi -- that was our custom. Uncle Ralph would peak his head in -- his nose was almost as big as Uncle Ted's, but he always smiled and we liked him the best. My dog would go crazy whenever Uncle Ralph came over -- dogs, small children, everybody liked Uncle Ralph.
He was a milkman. He didn't finish high school or have a white collar job like my other uncles. My Mom would say he's just a milkman. Even when I was seven years old, I heard that dismissal "just a milkman," and I thought Mom was mean to say it that way. We all loved Uncle Ralph. He never married. He drank a lot and he died in his mid-fifties.
On my father's side, I had Uncle Earl. If you didn't have an Uncle Earl when you grew up, then you missed out. Uncle Earl had a good job at Sears and a pencil mustache. He smoked cigars and he liked to frighten small children in the most delicious way.
My folks would have Uncle Earl and Aunt Mary over to play cards sometimes, and Uncle Earl would get mad if he lost and start cussing, and stink the house up with his cigar. He was really cool.
My next three uncles, all on my father's side, were down in St. Louis, where my Dad grew up.
First was Uncle Dick. Uncle Dick was detached from the family mayhem, like a silent partner to my full-busomed Aunt Florence. As a child, I felt that Uncle Dick might possibly be interesting -- his aloof character had some appeal.
In any event, Uncle Dick could not stand out like Uncle Bob -- absolutely the most fun of all my uncles. He had a nickname for everybody and he called me Uncle Fud. And he drank Pepsi-Cola for breakfast.
That was so wicked. I mean, my Mom let me have one Coke per week and no more, and there was Uncle Bob having a Pepsi every morning just because he wanted to.
He also kept a pitcher of Manhattans in the frig and he lived to be 93 -- a loud and boisterous man who embarrassed his children.
We should all embarrass our children and be more like Uncle Bob. A child is lucky to have an uncle like that.
That adds up to seven uncles, but there was still one missing -- Uncle Skip. When our family drove down to St. Louis to see our relatives, we didn't go over to Uncle Skip's house. He was my Dad's older brother.
They never explained that me, but I didn't like it, and I felt, as a reasonably self-centered child, that I had EIGHT uncles and I was entitled to every single one of them.
But nothing was said. My Dad and Uncle Skip just didn't get along. There wasn't a feud or bad blood or anything like that, and they did speak to each other -- but rarely.
Years later, after Dad and Uncle Skip were both dead, my Aunt Mary gave me the background about how things were when they were growing up, but mainly, she said, the two brothers were just so different from each other.
So there was really no breach to heal, it was just the way two brothers worked things out.
Anyway, when my son was born, I named him Eugene -- which was Uncle Skip's real name. I did that just so I could get the missing uncle back in my life.
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
When I grew up I had a lot of uncles, seven and one missing. I knew I had an abundance of uncles, but I had a high opinion of my own worth and felt that I deserved all those uncles. It was like a collection -- except for the missing uncle, number eight, and that bothered me.
We'll start at the beginning on my mother's side. Uncle Ted's real name was Ambrose Cuny. He had an enormous nose. Otherwise he was boring. He was my Mom's oldest brother, which earned him a certain amount of respect, and he only lived a few miles from our house, on Prairie Avenue in Evanston. But we didn't visit very often -- because he was boring, I guess.
Uncle Ted was a high-flying stock investor until the crash of 1929 -- as the family story went. After the crash, he still had a few dollars left and figured the market was at the bottom, so he doubled down and lost every penny. After that he was a defeated man and took a back office job somewhere in downtown Chicago.
The next uncle was Uncle Chuck. He was cool, tall and bony and robust. Uncle Chuck had six kids and they lived on the South Side of Chicago and we lived on the North Side. It was a long drive to see them and we didn't go too often, but between their six kids and our five, we could raise a riot and we loved going there. Uncle Chuck had a job at United Airlines in the credit department. He worked at Midway Field, the older, smaller South Side airport.
Years later he was transferred to O'Hare Airport on the northside of Chicago, so the family moved to Arlington Heights, a kind of meaningless suburban place full of tract homes. It was a nicer neighborhood, but Uncle Chuck's new house wasn't as cool as going to the South Side.
Uncle Jerry was a high school teacher. He was earnest and congenial, but, unfortunately, he was married to Aunt Grace. One year Aunt Grace gave me a very nice ballpoint pen for Christmas -- that's how lame she was -- you give kids toys for Christmas, for Pete's sake.
But it wasn't Uncle Jerry's fault, and many years later, after Aunt Grace died and when it no longer mattered, he told me about his younger days and the love of his life, the woman he wanted to marry, but could not. It was a sweet story, and I thought better of him after that.
Uncle Ralph was the youngest of four brothers and lived very near to us. He was close to my Mom and always coming over to the house. Relatives didn't knock when they came, they just opened the door and peaked their heads and said hi -- that was our custom. Uncle Ralph would peak his head in -- his nose was almost as big as Uncle Ted's, but he always smiled and we liked him the best. My dog would go crazy whenever Uncle Ralph came over -- dogs, small children, everybody liked Uncle Ralph.
He was a milkman. He didn't finish high school or have a white collar job like my other uncles. My Mom would say he's just a milkman. Even when I was seven years old, I heard that dismissal "just a milkman," and I thought Mom was mean to say it that way. We all loved Uncle Ralph. He never married. He drank a lot and he died in his mid-fifties.
On my father's side, I had Uncle Earl. If you didn't have an Uncle Earl when you grew up, then you missed out. Uncle Earl had a good job at Sears and a pencil mustache. He smoked cigars and he liked to frighten small children in the most delicious way.
My folks would have Uncle Earl and Aunt Mary over to play cards sometimes, and Uncle Earl would get mad if he lost and start cussing, and stink the house up with his cigar. He was really cool.
My next three uncles, all on my father's side, were down in St. Louis, where my Dad grew up.
First was Uncle Dick. Uncle Dick was detached from the family mayhem, like a silent partner to my full-busomed Aunt Florence. As a child, I felt that Uncle Dick might possibly be interesting -- his aloof character had some appeal.
In any event, Uncle Dick could not stand out like Uncle Bob -- absolutely the most fun of all my uncles. He had a nickname for everybody and he called me Uncle Fud. And he drank Pepsi-Cola for breakfast.
That was so wicked. I mean, my Mom let me have one Coke per week and no more, and there was Uncle Bob having a Pepsi every morning just because he wanted to.
He also kept a pitcher of Manhattans in the frig and he lived to be 93 -- a loud and boisterous man who embarrassed his children.
We should all embarrass our children and be more like Uncle Bob. A child is lucky to have an uncle like that.
That adds up to seven uncles, but there was still one missing -- Uncle Skip. When our family drove down to St. Louis to see our relatives, we didn't go over to Uncle Skip's house. He was my Dad's older brother.
They never explained that me, but I didn't like it, and I felt, as a reasonably self-centered child, that I had EIGHT uncles and I was entitled to every single one of them.
But nothing was said. My Dad and Uncle Skip just didn't get along. There wasn't a feud or bad blood or anything like that, and they did speak to each other -- but rarely.
Years later, after Dad and Uncle Skip were both dead, my Aunt Mary gave me the background about how things were when they were growing up, but mainly, she said, the two brothers were just so different from each other.
So there was really no breach to heal, it was just the way two brothers worked things out.
Anyway, when my son was born, I named him Eugene -- which was Uncle Skip's real name. I did that just so I could get the missing uncle back in my life.
FACEBOOK. "LaConner Views" will get you to my Facebook page. I make frequent posts, often with interesting photos of local people.
SUBSCRIPTIONS. It's all right to buy a subscription any time of the year. Like right now. For $25 you can become one of the honored subscribers to Frog Hospital. Subscribers have no special influence over what gets written, yet they are held in the highest esteem by this writer. You can mail a check for $25, made out to Fred Owens, and mail it to Box 1292, LaConner, WA 98257. Or go to my Frog Hospital blog and hit the PayPal button and pay that way.
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