Interlude and "Girl with the crooked smile, Ask her if she wants to stay awhile"

Recently started listening to some work by Maroon 5, because some stuff just starts rolling around in my head (which happens far more frequently then I care to admit) and some of their tunes just appeal to me (along with Adam Levine's stated desire to create a well-designed, marketable music style (one which does appeal to me particularly on the hustle to the morning stand-up status meeting at 8:30)). Rather than going on at length (I do usually get to my point), I'll just post them with some minimal comments. The first is from "Songs About Jane" and titled "She Will be Loved" (I've told Janet I think of it as "Songs about Janet" during what, thankfully, thinking back, was the beginning of the end for "Night2night, the lost years"):





The second tune is from the more recent "Red Pill Blues" (Love the tucked in reference to "The Matrix") and is titled "Lips on You", because I've never been able to lose the inclination we're designed to fit together and you're missing something remarkable in the human experience if you avoid the opportunity when it presents itself, or believe it limited to the shallow depths of casual liaisons; we're capable of so much more if you'll just allow yourself to believe and be that person with someone else. The vagaries of the human heart are infinitely more complicated and varied than what can be perceived on initial meetings. I think it's worth taking the time to really come to "know" the intimate partners of our life in more than the usual sense.





Analogously (at least for me!), following years of moves, studies, unexpected detours, raising children, surviving a severe surgical accident and pursuing degrees, Janet got an opportunity this past January to participate in a long dreamed of Haiti Medical Mission Trip with a number of volunteers from Good Shepherd Lutheran. Outside of the challenges of creating a sustainable health care enterprise in a desperately poor country and under-served population (subject for another day), Janet's joy in participating was palatable in this picture; a validation of the notion of love being greatest in the service of others and also of Janet's favorite "Grand Theory of Nursing" from her MSN studies, "Nursing is Caring" (succinct, but true). Maybe, particularly following Good Friday, we need to recognize real love is not always simple, or natural (we never fight (LOL)), exists most fully in the service of others, and aspire to empower and elevate our loves to actualize in the highest possible terms those capabilities God has blessed them with.

Reboot

It's been a while. The last nine months of 2010 were consumed with proving that where we claimed we were, was actually where we were; which was a heck of a lot more complicated than it sounds and mainly involved little sparkly pieces of plastic and a bunch of statistics. Following that we had an unscheduled end to a 3 year brawl involving some friends in high places who stuck their necks out and the leave taking of "The Nemesis" (nothing personal dontcha know), and then a really frantic push to validate about 7 test methods (validation implies adequate resolution and limiting the amount of variation due to repeatability (system noise) and reproducibility (user interface variation)) which ran for about 11 hours a day for 6 days a week for 6 weeks. And then we finished (sometime in May). The protocols and reports were filed, the PDF's were created and stored, I looked around, and took a very self-conscious and relieved breath, and, then, squinted out into the internal mental room I really live in; which, at least for me, stores my evolving identity, consciousness, beliefs, and perception.

Whenever I indulge in that exercise I always spend some time remembering the things I didn't do (or simply let slide), like this blog (which sometimes is an excuse for not attempting more serious writing with the focused discipline it would require). Still, while this exercise is a personal vanity, it helps to focus my thoughts and, sometimes, clarify my arguments. It's always, somehow, more rigorous (or maybe real) in writing. Of course, if I could develop more of a sense of myself as a "writer" that wouldn't be bad either.

A few month ago, after foregoing the opportunity to see "Tron Legacy" with "the boys" in the theatre, I finally got around to see the Blu-ray version during one of our Friday night "pizza and a Blu-ray movie with surround speakers on" at home events (Gawd, I love Friday nights). The story is silly, and yet, the movie stuck in my head due to a couple of marginal themes buried in the plot and the music of "Daft Punk" (who I never had heard of before this flick, but composed a great soundtrack). With the movie still stuck in my head (appropriately, or not), I'm attaching one of my favorite penultimate clips from the movie to conclude today's post (which, after all, is titled "Reboot"). Reflecting on a friend's question to me numerous times on "Where am I going with this?”, I'll mention a few pertinent personal themes I'll probably write about in the future as a "lead-in" to the clip:

1. We may not be able to control the circumstances of our existence, but we can choose those beliefs and responses, we believe, or desire, to define us.
2. Our largest nemesis, and ally, is our earlier incarnations.  The child truly is father to the man (or the genesis of our destruction).
3. Even if forgiven, mistakes in real life must be atoned for.  Actions have consequences, and those seeking true redemption must at least recognize the potential for self-sacrifice as the only adequate penance.  Likewise, for the granter, forgiveness implies the "debt" is forgiven without remaining prejudice.
4. Life, without love, is at best an accounting exercise, a strategy for playing a time consuming, but pointless game.  The real treasure in life is the relationships we have and the time we spend on them.
5. No one gets out alive, you might as well do the right thing.

Welcome to Wednesday.

And some came running.

I went to the Fort Lauderdale Corporate Challenge 5K Run this past Thursday (I'm trying to make an effort to generate "real time" blog entries, but time is always limited, and, so, here I am playing catch-up with my own online enterprise. Sigh.). Anyway, it was a nice night (typical for southern Florida this time of year) and a chance to traverse and linger in some places I don't usually get to. The number of participants was smaller than in the past two years, but I'm guessing that probably reflects the economic downturn of the past year. The race itself has the competitive, "seeded", runners staged in the front of the field, and the "hoi polloi" (which includes your humble correspondent) in the rear. For myself, the days of running a six minute mile across a 5K course are somewhere behind and north of here.

I spent the two days after the race dealing (or, better yet, suffering through) with the side effects of an acute bout of Achilles tendonitis (which infuriates J, who sees a refusal to deal with a problem which should be fixed; I, of course, see only reminders of an inevitable decline which concludes with nothing left to decline). More curious yet, I suspected that might be the most concrete outcome of the evening and still found it hard to relinquish my performance, if not my participation. So I hung out amid the corporate tents, talked with some coworkers about things other than work, broke some bread (over veggie lasagna), and covered 3.1 miles in about 33 minutes.

Still, for that evening, I was in a semitropical, semiurban outpost with fountains framing the high rise condominiums of the Fort Lauderdale skyline.  My old sneakers were laced up and my running shorts were on.  There are some moments it's just good to be there, in that moment.  This was one of those times.

Some companies run as teams with their team members sporting shirts with corporate colors or logos.  They line up with everybody else under the city parking garage and wait for the starter's gun to go off.

And when it does, the seeded runners burst forward to hopefully establish some personal best record for themselves.  The remainder of the pack slowly surges forward, first walking, and finally passing beneath the balloon festooned starting gate.

Eventually, the pack breaks up enough for us to all find our personal pace, and our associated "personal best".  I've come to prefer starting behind and coming forward, rather than starting with an unobjective bravado and falling back in exhaustion.  I find my place in this river of middle class, middle aged denizens of the corporate woods and look for the ocean with them.

Eventually we finish, congratulate each other, inquire after finish times, bust chops, and watch the sun set overhead behind the towers fencing the park we're gathered in.  I hope the ankle supports I'm wearing might spare me any real discomfort in the next days, but time and circumstances have moved on, as has that day.

Altered States

Really stormy day yesterday (a weak tornado touched down somewhere in southern Florida flipping trailers, knocking a commercial garage door off it's tracks, and splintering a fair number of trees). I'm tired of this winter (at least relative to what out winters normally are). Pressure's on at work (again, and again, and yet again). Get the project clean; put together a solid set of DHF deliverables; understand the risks, mitigate appropriately; specifically identify those requirements necessary to meet functional requirements and overarching QSR dictates and then verify you met them (Go ahead, make me shiver, say it again, verification and validation.  Ohhh, I've got goosebumps.). Get to commercial release on time while conjuring up real challenges before they materialize on critical path. Stay ahead of the attention of eyes looking for things amiss.

Take a breath and stop growling.

There now, feel better?



So we conclude a happy looking corpse is better than an anxious one and leave for the day.

And found ourselves back at the YMCA pool as the temperature drops back into the fifties, the sun sets, and the wind again picks up.  The younger lifeguards sulk and hide air cooled brows beneath knit snowcaps while waiting for the opportunity to unfurl the pool thermal covers and sail off into the night.  Meanwhile, the recalitrant patron slips into the warm (relative) depths of the deserted lap lanes and falls into his 40 year old freestyle rhythm and seeks transcendence in much practiced motions with small opportunities to draw breath.

And yet the world is turned oddly about during my sojourn here.  The eternally young and tanned guards sit shivering in winter garb overlooking the slowly emptying olympic sized pool (water polo practice concluding).  The scent of chlorinated water is less than one normally experiences during the height of the summer when the pool is heated by the sun to almost bathtub temperature.  Now, the water temperature is heated to almost 78 degrees F (a good 15 to 20 degrees warmer than the air temperature), so, the water beckons as I tread across the uncommonly cool concrete deck,  "Come on in.  Immerse yourself.  Find your rhythm within my world, within my body, and forget the assassinated smiley face.  The only reality is the lap count and the ability to draw breath.  Follow the blue lane markers.  Are you comfortable drawing breath?  Follow the blue lane markers."  And I do.  And begin to count.

So I settle into the routine of 36 laps, or 72 lengths, or 1 mile.  I alternate flip turns with wall touches and advance stroke by stroke to my goal.  I'm late (again), so the staff has already started to roll out the thermal plastic blankets covering the body of the pool overnight, working from the ends in toward the middle where I progress stroke by stroke.  Normally the air is warmer, and the water cooler, but now the situation is reversed with the water providing warmth the air will not.  So I feel like I'm swimming low in the water, beneath the cooler air where I draw breath.  I unconsciously, or consciously, maximize my time and depth immersed, timing my breathing to still maintain my comfort in this "other" place I transit, where I guess we all originated from and now only visit, like me, beneath the blue halogen lights.

I'm most acutely aware of my need for air at the flip turns.  I normally exhale through my nose until I've leveled out and reversed, but sometimes I run short of breath and can feel the sting of the chlorinated water up high in my sinuses and think "find your rhythm. . . ", but there's always that little hit of desperation, of not having enough air and wanting to inhale deeply.  The count progresses.  As it does, my peripheral vision first picks up the shadow of the thermal blankets darkening the water.  They advance inexorably toward my location.  Sometimes I think, I'll feel the snap of the nylon rope over my shoulder and find the blue tarp being pulled over my head in this place I'm visiting, but where I don't belong (get to the side and lift yourself out!).  But, Chris is out there, and we talk together, and he makes sure I get the most time possible.  And I keep pulling myself through the water until length 72 is behind me, and slowly blow bubbles while floating just beneath the water before lifting myself up onto the concrete deck and pulling my goggles up onto my forehead.

Of course the night ends and I wash as much of the chlorine scent as I can off myself in the locker room shower and change into shorts, t-shirt and birkenstocks for the final trip home.  As I start the car, the check engine light comes on as it has for the last month.

"his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

Quote above is from Molly Bloom's soliloquy in chapter 18 of James Joyce's "Ulysses". I guess it's a nice counterpoint and historical bookend to John Meyer's reported Playboy interview this past week on his varied sexual exploits. I like John Meyer's music, but his Tweets seem to attract more attention for his apparently undisciplined commentary (which I guess is a form of some discipline in terms of his consistent behavior) then any insight into his art. I'm at a loss to explain our attraction to monied outrageousness, label its practitioners as celebrities, and then grasp at translations of their twisted thoughts and pronouncements for some type of insight. I suspect John, his denials to the contrary, is simply an attendee at his own personal “all you can eat” buffet. Does he derive any satisfaction from his own experiences? Who knows? I suspect his representation of some type of postmodern courtship is more of a “tweet level” justification for his personal hedonism than anything else.

As for the rest of us, the question of what we are pursuing never seems to be totally clear. Is it a desire for companionship, a coupling with our “soul mate”, or a loss of self in some pleasurable hormone mediated carnality? Maybe it’s a little bit of all these things, with the true origins lost in misty memories of our own adolescence. Maybe we wake up one morning and find ourselves in a deep sea of emotional and physical intimacy, whose depth and breadth we could not have understood, or suspected, when we entered these waters so many years ago. Maybe we’re glad for some degree of meaning and significance beyond ourselves, glad simple fortune allowed us to participate in this old dance with a good partner, and thankful for an opportunity to somehow stretch the bounds of this mortal frame and for short durations simply “be”, free of even a consciousness of our own finite nature.

I guess I'd rather sign up with Molly than John.

Liberty and the failures of markets

After all the spin masters have finished commenting on the implications and (later tonight) results of the Massachusetts special election, I still believe what we're witnessing is a general pushback against the insistence of progressive political elements that the social safety net we operate above is not sufficient for it's task, or in possession of enough prescriptions to assure our confidence in it.  Of course all of this has to do with the level of individual and social risk we feel comfortable living with as a society.  In the health care reform debate I wish we had been more explicit about what the tradeoffs involved here really are.  Are we willing to trade a certain level of medical treatment development for the a guarantee of a government funded minimum level of care for individuals?  The markets can't decide that question for us although they will eventually show after the fact the broad decisions of the population in terms of preferred purchases.  Can we live with the individuals who either through fortune, or poor decision making, make a decision which results in their harm?  Is the government responsible for constraining the many, to protect the few?  Do the majority of citizens wish for such a government?

In my work I'm often forced to think about "What is safe enough?", and "How do we know we're done?"  The strictly business types don't exactly welcome this line of questioning.  They want to get to market.  Who's right and protects the greater public good?  I don't know, but I want to at least know the process so I can hold someone accoutable.  Here's my process flowchart for addressing failure modes and effects analysis for medical device risk management.  It doesn't tell you how to do a good job, but it gives you a framework to make decisions in.

The Quality of Mercy is not Strained

Saw an article in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago regarding some former CEO/banker who having been dismissed from his rather lucrative employment in March 2008 has been living off his serverance and savings since then.  The rather staggering thing about the subject of the article was his absolute incapacity to deal with changing circumstances (still paying 2 kid's tuitions at private schools at 13K a pop, giving up Starbucks for a 7Eleven coffee run (and adding up saved money on recycyled cups without taking into account getting into the car every day for coffee) because nobody in Maryland uses a coffee maker; wife still doesn't work (even with a set of professional credentials) because the jobs offered didn't extend enough consideration to her child rearing schedule in original family life (apparently unemployed hubby can't watch the kids)).  Really staggering display of a total incapability to deal with anything outside of the very comfortable lines drawn in his earlier existence.  This got me to thinking (yeah, I know, big surprise).

We pray for deliverence, but want to quiz the messengers.  Sometimes we want to know the motives of "the calvary" before we agree to ride out with them. 

Two weeks ago, I dodged a bullet for reasons that truthfully elude me.  I suppose the reasons don't really matter, but sometimes when we survive unfortunate events our thankfullness is also seasoned by some humility (it didn't have to work out like this, and the world would have little noted or cared if it didn't).  So, as to my original question on whether the higher quality of mercy is "not strained", I guess it doesn't make any real difference.  We live to fight another day and best keep a sharper eye out, the next time we may not be so fortunate.

Have Faith

Early stage modification trials are in place with both Bank of America and Aurora Loan Service for our mortgage loans, but American Express is potentially complicating the outcome with their filing of a key derogatory against my gold account with them (seemingly not in conformance with the negotiated agreement we had). As usual, correspondence to address the issue and disposition are pending. On the positive side, the IRS approved the 1040X we filed for our 2004 return which resulted in a sizable (and timely) refund. Thanks is due the Tax Payer Advocate office in Plantation. Still, the ultimate conclusions at this stage in time are still impossible to predict with any sense of certainty. Yet I still "believe" things will work out. The facts supporting that belief are more nebulous than the belief itself. And yet. . .

Facebook has been a useful tool for me to organize my thoughts and start writing again (I'm more of a blogger than a twitter user), but sometimes an unexpected observation from acquaintences almost forgotten does help clarify things in an unexpected manner. An old HS friend describes his religious orientation as "Not superstitious". I like that because I think it addresses the core issues in what we really mean and need to consider when we make these generic statements about belief and faith. In this summer of change and challenge it brought to mind conversations I had a long time ago.

While an undergraduate at Columbia, I had slowly started to drift from attending services at the church I grew up in. I thought the pastor was some type of dispirited warped scholastic (his expression of faith seemed to be more in tune with the repeated performance of ritual than anything else). His family appeared to be a mess; his sons didn't appear to respect him; his attention seemed to be consumed by the small political intrigues of even smaller people, who led thoroughly unremarkable lives even by the standards of my hometown. So, I attended when Mom and Dad asked on religious holidays and began a mental walkabout among the questions in my own mind, which concerned themselves more with the vageries of one doctrine versus another and questions of text translation accuracy. I took courses in religious studies with Elaine Pagels at Barnard, Catholic Theology Post Vatican II with Ewert Cousins at Columbia, and spent some free time at the Union Theological Seminary Library exploring the different theorized editiorial voices in the Book of Job. It created a sense of smug satisfaction with the depth of my inquiries, answered nothing, and perhaps confused a third person analysis of the sublime and mystical with questions I refused to verbalize.

Somewhere during that time I spent an afternoon with Pastor B, who delivered the eulogy at my grandfather's funeral (with a delightful Musto Catholic/Protestant schism just barely contained for the day). Pastor B's eulogy was elegant and thoughtful, and drew me into starting a conversation with Pastor B, who I don't believe was more than 10 or 15 years older than me. So we talked on a long ago Sunday afternoon regarding the seemingly contradictory voices of the Book of Job. Pastor B in a nod to my geeky undergraduate presence and ego, complimented my scholarship, and said, "I would like to ask you a question first, if that's Ok". I agreed, and Pastor B asked me, "Do you think God exists?". I looked at him sitting there with his clerical collar and black shirt on (yet so different from other ministers I had known until then) and didn't respond fast enough for someone sure of that answer and he knew it. We talked further, but I left that day for a religious sabatical that covered four years and a parallel existence I don't believe anyone would characterize as christian in nature.

I'll probably write more on this, but when I next entered a church I was mainly convinced Pastor B's question could be answered yes because I had come to believe our sentience and complexity could not be viewed as the probabilistic outcome of evolution driving biological mechanisms. I also found resonance with the concept the author of our existence would not be succored by our petty sacrifices and attempts at embracing any moral code. Redemption of creatures who are both divine and depraved would best be achieved by the grace of their creator. Ironically, this belief, as Montaigne pointed out so many years ago, could not be argued definitively, and was forced to reside in the house of personal faith.

I think we're kidding ourselves if we believe we can progress to the arguing of the relevancy of various theological doctrines, if we can't answer some of the basic questions first. As for Pastor B, my understanding is he died of AIDS some years ago, along with his lover, an excellent ER doctor, who in one of those weird six degrees of separation moments, was also the instructor for the cardiac section of the paramedic course I took in NYC during 1979-1980. I suppose, with no irony intended, if the answers can be known, Pastor B could provide them now. Still, in the loss of two really talented individuals (one who I considered a good friend and sounding board) it's hard to see the hand of a loving God. I suppose I've come to believe the anthropomorphism we indulge in characterizing actions we believe should fall under the domain of an omniscent and onmipresent God say more about us than (him?). Which simply brings us back to the first question Pastor B presented me (or perhaps the type of God we would have).

So, while I wait for conclusions to reveal themselves and continue to lead my life, I choose to "Have faith", recognizing that choice is impossible to defend with a rigorous proof, and yet is still a reflection of of an intuitive core belief of mine.

In Memoriam

He wasn’t planned for (by me). I had just completed nearly 9 years of employment with PC’s PED group in Upstate, NY (future boss in initial phone interview during 1990: Uh, you know we’re in upstate NY. Me: Oh, yeah, sure (matter of factly, before getting to Upstate County, where as I informed people years later we had more cows than people). PC was getting out of the OEM business, and simultaneously, the N2N business. It was the first time I had left a job I had no plans on leaving from. Fortunately, my new boss, a recently minted PhD from Cornell, informed me my failure to pay attention to the outplacement councilor provided by PC was yet again another example of my failure to be a Cornell graduate student. I informed M as politely as I could that ship had sailed and concluded my last conversation with him for the rest of eternity.

I left PC with about 3 months in severance pay, a 28 week horizon for NYS unemployment benefits, a wife still working on her undergraduate degree and tending to her dying mother in Phoenix, Arizona and 3 young children who needed meals, clothing and reassurance the world was not ending. I was depressed and viewed my future with an attitude somewhere between anxious and panicky. J came back from Arizona, and after a less than stirring home coming at Syracuse airport, informed me we were getting a standard poodle because she had always wanted one (black if possible, due to some obscure aesthetics requirement). Apparently, with a finite cash supply, we would buy a puppy, and without a job to occupy my waking hours, I could focus on training said dog while looking for a new job. It was totally inane and worked out perfectly.

Moses the young dog.

He was the family dog and a companion to all (even if he seemed slightly addled sometimes). We crate trained him and in the late spring of 1999 he was my constant companion in the 3 season room which served as my office and where I eventually found employment with J&J further upstate. His crate was the safe place where he would bark at us and then retreat within because that was his safe place.

He loved walks and winter runs and rides in the van once we got him past the car sickness which troubled him as a puppy. During J's spring commute from Rochester to Syracuse to finish her BSN, Moses would ride along and then nap in the car while she attended her classes. He knew his pack and , I think, in his dog society, I was the alpha dog. He brought a toy to the door to greet any family member returning and liked laying on a bed where he could watch the street. He loved smells; whether flowers, or sheep manure, it was all good. For more than a few years he was my running companion. The sight of my shorts or sneakers, or the shaking of his collar was enough to bring him running. He was devoted to his pack members, but would let someone else investigate a stranger first (as long as they presented no threat) and would first be seen by visitors peering around behind J at the top of the stairs.

He loved removing wrapping paper from anybody's gift, but then expected to retain something for himself, whether a glove, or slipper, or stuffed animal. He would go at stuffed animals until the squeaker was removed and then seemed to feel amiss it was broken so fast and would take more time when another toy presented itself. He became a traveling companion and traveled with us to vacations in North Carolina and Florida.

Moses at the beach.

In life, death waits for us all. It advances inexorably, not with patience, or rectitude, but simply with the certainty of a cannonball’s trajectory in Newtonian physics. Some days we watch the slow deliberate arc in the sky, and some days we don’t, although I believe as Shakespeare said (I think), “Like the sun, no man should stare at his own mortality for too long.” Moses received chemotherapy for his lymphoma at CS Animal Hospital. Median survival time with treatment is about one year (Moses received the short version of a treatment protocol for canine lymphoma developed at the University of Wisconsin Veterinarian School). Twenty percent make it to two years. Moses’ remission lasted for 1 year and 10 days. The same treatment could be repeated with the same drugs for a second round, but median survival time was now 6 months. A long time ago, a doctor who lectured on the public health impact of asbestosis for a Sierra Club working group I belonged to told us statistics were lives with the tears wiped away. With my stats background I simply believe the house not only has the advantage, but ultimately wins every hand. Never bet against death.

In Moses last year (6-7 human years?) we enjoyed our time with him all the more due to our realization of it's very palatable limits. The chemo drugs had little noticeable effect on his temperament and he was soon back to his normal idiosyncrasies. The boys, aware of the endgame, took him walking or skating every night before bed. Ultimately, he would sit and stare at them on the couch every evening if the normal activities had not been concluded, and certainly refused to accompany Mom to bed if he hadn’t had his constitutional. He would run with a chew toy, or ball, into the backyard and bark for people to come play with him. Someone always did. I reflexively greeted him with, "Hi, good boy", because it always invoked a tail wag.

His last night was really hard because we wanted to give him and us every minute possible, but understood what the last treatment was. His breathing was increasingly noisy as his lymph glands pressed in on his larynx and the prednisone giving him little relief from the tissue inflammation. He waited for J to come back from Arizona. He was unable to sleep comfortably and roamed about our bedroom. On his last full day he couldn't be bothered to eat or drink. Upon rising the next morning, he did drink and pee and laid out in the grass under the palm tree in the fenced yard he loved and protected. During that last night, I think he had a seizure about 4:00 and I knew we couldn't continue this. His muzzle was now twice normal size with the lymphoma clogging the lymph glands along his jaw.

Moses last week.

I had talked originally talked about Moses life expectation with Dr. L almost two years ago, and now, after that original horrifying diagnosis last year the moment appeared to be upon us. Was there still time? Should we have waited longer? The boys had said their goodbyes and the last ride was done. Moses paced the room and then laid down as the vet techs prepared his last IV. In calculus, there is always the last delta T before we complete our approximation of f(x), but limits in the real world are not asymptotic eternally. Moses ate some special last meal with some gusto, and I'm filled with doubt. Did we misread his condition. Dr. L says no, he would have told us.

Running in upstate NY with Moses, late winter and his collar jingling, and stop

Barking for us to come out in the yard and play, and stop,

Running downstairs to see if he can ride along on our errands, and stop,

Climbing off the bed next to J as I come into our bedroom at night, and stop,

The last delta T, and stop and then just memories.

That last delta T for Moses will stay with me until my last day comes. The first drug hits Moses and he turns back to me as I stroke his back and looks at me as he surely has a 1000 times, and wags his tail and lays his head down in J's lap. I can't tell him "Good boy", because I can't talk and anything that would come out of my mouth would be convulsed and I don't want him to hear that in his last moments. J convulses in sobs and keeps repeating, "Oh, look how handsome you are", and I hold onto to her because there is nothing I can do, the children J bore us are grown, I'm no longer 20 myself and our family pet is dying in my wife's arms. Moses quietly stops breathing and for the first time in a month, a room with him in it is quiet, except for the quiet sobs of J, Dr. L and myself.

It is now almost three weeks since that morning, and I miss Moses quiet, but constant companionship, as does everyone in the house. Still my shoulder appears to be healing and there are things I need to attend to beside my memories. The personal things of his are gone, and the reusable ones are put away because I believe if things stay on the path they appear to be there will be another dog in our life and hopefully the boys can help train him (or her) during the summer. Moses made me realize I will always like having a good dog as a companion. Moses ashes sit in a small box with pawprints on it with a small plaster cast of his pawprint in the corner of our bedroom. I think about their disposal (St. George Island?), or getting a small urn, but for the present time J keeps them in the small plastic wrapped box in the small plain plastic shopping bag we received them in next to her dresser and refuses to let me place them out of sight. Considering my original opinion of her dog deliberations it does not seem like a large request to honor.

I think Moses taught us it was a good thing to be a good dog with the other dogs in your pack, and it was a good thing to ride and run with the other dogs and smell those things which had any type of scent. I will miss him, but also will remember that in my heart I'm a dog person with my own pack, and my pack knows me as well as I know them and we all depend upon each other, each playing the role assigned by birth and other accidents of fate. And of Moses final trip, I believe Moses, who could barely wait to clear the next ridge at any given time, has run ahead, but we follow the same path.

Auld Lang Syne

A weekend well-positioned for considering the ramifications of "woulda, coulda, shoulda" and bookended by two movies I enjoyed which also complemented the aesthetic, "Into the Wild", and "Up". "Into the Wild" was Sean Penn's movie of the Jon Krakauer book of the same name chronicling the last years of Christopher McCandless and his ultimate death in the bush country of Alaska. Chris was a well-accomplished, sometimes gregarious, student athlete who allowed himself to be consumed by his self-developed form of ascetism (particularly with regard to material possessions and money). Ultimatedly, this vow took him to a rather isolated portion of Alaska where his rigidly enforced self-dependence created an environment where simple logistical mistakes (lack of supplies, inability to call for help, lack of knowledge of the back country) created a fatal trap with no escape. The irony of Chris's demise is compounded by the fact that in the movie, as in real life, he seemed to have realized a basic error (happiness is shared and his relationships, perhaps, had as great a value to him as his "code"). From my perspective, his larger sin was one of "hubris". He was as much part of the human fabric as any member of his family, and limited by the same physical constraints limiting us all. In the end, his beliefs simply did not have the same capacity to affect his well-being as much as the simple facts of the reality he dwelled in ("There's more under heaven and earth than there are in your philosophy Horatio").

The second movie, "Up", seen in the theatre with J, chronicled the winter adventures of an elderly man who has lost his lifelong love to disease and is haunted by the fact he never delivered on his promise as a young boy to that same young girl he would accompany her on the adventures she fantasized about. Genius thing about the Pixar folks is how they can make a kiddie movie, but also an adult tale about loss and coming to terms with your life. Here, our protagonist, Carl, thru the post mortem discovery of a note from his dead wife, realizes he may not have been as big a failure as he feared. Here again, I don't think we can separate ourselves via our beliefs (or fears), from the real music in our life.

Postscript. Our canine companion of the last 10 years, Moses, appears to have his lymphoma redeveloping. With the costs we incurred in his chemo treatment last summer and fall, and the decreasing effectiveness of a second round (same drugs with a median survival time of 6 months), we can not reasonably pursue another course of treatment and I fear he will likely not see the fall. So for Moses in the winter of his life, who simply experiences and who I shall miss, he's a very good dog.

Fun things to do.

I've followed a number of blogs for some time, but usually as a lurker (with an occasional comment). I'm most intrigued by our lifes and those things that happen to us and how we respond. I'll also admit a certain reticence about the knee jerk uses of ideologies of any stripe to justify our actions and inactions (not that there is anything wrong with justification). I also like to write to help clarify my thoughts. So, here is my blog, Rightofthekeys, my impression of life from southern Florida, in a location somewhat north of Key West, where the warm waters of the Carribean swallow everything without prejudice.