Making things happen

This was going to be a very busy month. My personal goal was managing to ride BRMA, my friends' four day bicycling extravaganza through central Wisconsin. For me, this is a particularly big deal because it meant starting the summer in much better condition than I have in a long time. We were riding 50 miles per day and were about 30 miles into day three when I took a curve too hot and went into the ditch. In one sense, mission accomplished. I was definitely keeping up, although we all know I took more stops on those monster hills than anyone else.

Upon return from BRMA, I was headed to Minneapolis to learn more about a peer norming model for dealing with young adult alcohol abuse, then a big family trip to Ithaca New York to see Greg and John (senior brother in law and spouse) and then visit New York City.

Things happen in slow motion and they happen very quickly. I remember feeling the rear end of the bike coming around and realizing that I was not going to make the curve and saying, out loud "ooooh, nooooooooo!." Then I remember being on my face in the tall grass, feeling a lot of blook gushing from my nasal area, and realizing that my back hurt badly. I also remember wiggling toes and fingers and feeling pretty good that they wiggled back.

Two of of the boys were behind me and went right by me, since I flew quite a way over my handlebars and was not visible from the road. I crawled to the road and used the phone in my fanny pack to tell my pals they were going to have to ride back over two hills to come find me. Didn't take them long either. Keith took a good look, called 911 and said "we're going to get you a ride." We all decided I should lie down again.

The folks from the local ambulance service came out and quickly summmoned a helicopter. The sherriff said I did not smell like beer. This is because it was bloody hot out there and I was one big metabolizing boy. I mentioned "good insurance" and they were all over that helicopter. No one wanted to be the first to move me.

Life flight to Madison was claustrophobic and someone said somehting about a torn lung which didn't help. I was just panicking at the time, trying to get air, and people had all kinds of stuff in my face. I knew my lungs were okay, or was pretty sure, but couldn't talk to anyone about it. All I could see was an air vent overhead. They did give me some very good drugs on the 'copter.

At Madison, they did about 300 CT scans and an MRI, mostly without pain meds. All you guys who snoozed through Lamaze class and didn't learn to breathe through pain, you have only yourselves to blame. Best class I ever took. The verdict:

C 1 - the section of your spine that connects to your head - fractured and intact.
T2, T3 - spine behind your heart, between your shoulder blades - smooshed. These bad boys will be fused.
Fosset fracture of the facial region - means that my face was broken all sorts of ways and kind of mashed in.

My friend Geof describes this all in terms of "crumple zones" to protect the brain. My face took it, and my spine took it, so my brain can still function.

While all this diagnostic work was going on, everyone in the Central Wisconsin area was busy getting into worse trauma than me. I mean really, how does a middle aged bike accident compete with an SUV full of boy scouts? Poor little fellas with their futures ahead of them, lying strewn all over the Emergency suite trying not to die. I on the other hand, was perfectly stable (miserable, and stable), a redundant baby boomer recreationalist taking up space. Bottom line, after 10 hours of surgery my spinal dude made me wait a day. A 97 hour, flat on the back, thank God U Madison nurses are beautiful day.

Spinal surgery on Monday was a trip. Because no one was totally sure what the damage was to C1, which is pretty damned important connection, I got to be intibated while awake. Now this is something I don't recommend. It's all about not gagging when the nice man puts a tube down your airway. Counerintuitive to say the least. It took a while, and he was very patient.

My neurosurgeon, Dr. Sillay, is a very nice man and really seemed to know what he was doing. What impressed me is the degree to which he was truly "winging it." You don't know what things really look like until you're "in there." It's all about position. Once I was unconscious, they screwed into my skull and suspended me face down so that I was absolutely fixed in place. They monitored my brain and nerve function throughout the procedure, which took about 6.5 hours. Apparently the monitoring did not always indicate good news. At one point I was not responding well. When I awoke in recovery, Robyn told me my toes were wiggling! I remember none of that. I remember the next day, though, when they took the intibation out, looking at my wiggly toes over and over again. Wiggly fingers, too!

Thanks to Katie and the Crawley sisters for the visit, plant (Bromeliad!), and good wishes. Sorry I was such a zombie.

The day after surgery I was a star. I walked and talked and demonstrated my happiness that I could walk and talk! We decided to get back home and then arranged for the facial reconstructive surgery in Iowa City. My friends located the best plastic surgeon in the area and we set up a consult for Friday morning. I was discharged on a Thursday morning and Robyn drove me home. I don't recommend riding in a car as part of post-op rehab. We got me into bed and then bright and early Friday, off to UI we went to see the plastic surgeon, who I want to call Lambert. This turned out to be an all day thing, and I was just NOT on enough pain meds. Ow!

Next day Dr. Lambert re-wired my face. Yikes! The good news is that I'm solid and that this will heal. Bad news? No way can a fella eat like this. I'm constantly trying to get food in and it just doesn't on-load that fast. I'm losing weight like, well like a guy with his jaw wired shut! It's also hard to enounciate. This involves peeling my lips back from the wiring and then talking with parts of one's mouth that are "inside" the wire. A little like ventriloquism, maybe. I was a little worried that I'd just not be able to breathe inside here, but it's working pretty well. I'm learning to slam protein shakes and smoothies. I can also still drink coffee. Yay. Coffee.

I am having to learn to be glib. I need to choose a phrase and get it said during the small window of opportunity that may arise when someone can hear me. I suspect I won't be working much until I can get my jaw loose.

At any rate, that's what it's like in here and where I'm at physically. I think there's enough information here to catch most folks up and to serve as a springboard for further musings. It's not the physical stuff that is really messing with my head at this point. What a surprise!

Detroit metal

When I was a three year old boy I knew the name of every car that went by my house. I really liked the ones that were foreign cars. Those were the exotic ones. Bolksbagens and Mercedes Benzes.

Dad was pretty crazy when I was four. I guess he thought Mom was out with other men and he didn't like it when she went to tutor the kids down the road. Our house was on top of the hill and there were woods in back and small caves in the sides of the hills. Dad would stand out in the yard and watch the road until Mom drove home. One day he left in the brown Ford and came back with a little black car with fins and a back window that was slanted backward.

Ray Riggs was the landlord and he was a Mercury dealer and drove out every month to check the horses and collect the rent. He always drove a new demonstrator and must have sold Dad the Anglia. "It's an English Ford," Dad said, "a poor-man's sports car!" The Anglia was black had red bucket seats that came forward on hinges in front to allow passengers access to the back seat. The seats had no latches, so the seats also came forward during sudden stops. Mom got very good at reaching over and interrupting my progress toward the dashboard.

I always liked the American cars best. In the coming years we didn't own one. We drove the Anglia to the hospital to visit Dad and to enroll me in school and I always had to explain what it was, why my Mom worked, why my Dad stayed home and wrote. "What kind of job is that?" and I'd say "It's hard work." I always thought that regular families drove Chevrolets, Fords, and Mercuries. Buicks! They drove those Oldsmobiles with the chrome holes in those long hoods and all their rear windows slanted down the normal way, and on each rear deck, a baseball cap.

I drove a Buick for a while when I was a young man. It didn't help that much, really.

Sprung

Over the next four days, we'll be experiencing quite a harmonic convergence, as it were. Tomorrow is the first day of Spring, followed by Benito Juarez's birthday and then Mothering Sunday (UK). Many years ago, in fact the day the war in Iraq started, we were in England and got to honor Robyn on Mothering Day. Many years ago, the year we started the Iraq war, we were in England for Mothering Day. We honored Robyn for her mothering. British Mother's day is understated, compared with ours. More a smile and an approving nod. I think we ought to celebrate this fine combination of holidays. Benito loved a party. Wasn't he the father of Mexican something?

Walker and I are ready to kayak. I've started to run (stumble, gasp) again. Jeff's going to tune up my bike. We sense the faintest stirrings of something. It's brown as far as you can see, but in the squishy cold muck underfoot roots stretch and grubs stir. Inside my head the chill fog clears. I stop counting cost and smell the air.

I'm going to go rouse Robyn. Go look out the window!

An heroic exit!

I always said that I want to die rescuing a child from a burning bus. This is no longer true.

In my youth, Verne Gagne was a famous pro wrestler ("rassler"), the master of the "sleeper hold." He was one of the original pro wrestlers who made it big with the advent of black and white televisions all over blue collar suburban America. The sweaty burly drama fit well on a flickering black and white screen, and featured black and white morality plays perfect for the concrete understanding of 10 year old boys.

Vern has Alzheimer's disease and like my Mom, lives in the present, and in a memory care unit somewhere. Somewhere new, now, poor fella. It seems at the last place he was staying, he took it into his head to pick up a 97 year old companion and body slam him.

The un-named 97 year old gentleman suffered a broken hip and did not survive the shock of the injury. He would have died faster had Vern remembered the sleeper hold, but Vern hasn't wrestled professionally in some time and was probably somewhat rusty.

If I am 97 years old, living in a memory care unit someplace, I beg you: Please send a demented pro wrestler to body slam me into the Great Beyond. If the body slam does not do the trick and I am still kicking, please apply the sleeper hold and the iron claw. Please have him climb the ropes and teeter, sweaty and intent, soaking in the jeers and yells of the other residents and staff, before dropping on my ribcage in a perfect pike position.

No tag team allowed. Drop kick me, Jesus!

now

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-- e. e. cummings

e e cummings is probably my favorite poet. My Dad's best friend Woody was a poet and he would introduce me to poets -- e e cummings (who never capitalized), Richard Brautigan -- numerous others whose names I don't remember.

I remember the attention he gave me and the fun we had with words, and I remember that I love the beat and the rhythm of language. That's probably why I write lyrics and sing them, that and a craving for immediate gratification. But I digress.

I struggle, these bleak days, with being in the present. Distracted from the now, I find myself gnawing old bones, polishing the cold stones of my resentments, rehearsing my responses to anticipated conflicts.

What I love about this poem is how entirely present it is.

Last night Caitlin wanted to be with her boyfriend and we forbade her to travel on the icy roads and so the intrepid young man drove to her in his jeep and we tried to leave them alone. I read and fell asleep early, to some television show linking secret symbols on the dollar bill to the "new world order" and probably the trilateral commission or something. I don't know because I fell asleep. I'm probably dead meat, trilateral commission-wise.

In any event, I awoke especially early this morning, at about 5 a.m. I've been reading the new Atlantic and drinking good strong coffee. Soon Tye will give in to his bladder and climb off Caitlin's warm bed. Robyn and the kids will be up in a while.

I'm going to try, this weekend, to pay less attention to the syntax. Keeping score is for suckers, right?

And stay away from T. S. Eliot. He's really gloomy.

Poop

Anyone who has raised a boy knows that this is what we are about. This and penises. Our humor, our symbolism (practically 2/3 of Freud), and our points of view revolve around scatology.

In the beginning we struggle for mastery over our poop, or over others' dominion over it. As we get older, and hair falls from the popular places, only to colonize in far less popular places, our thoughts return again to the lowly sphincter, center of our Universe. Nothing like a good poop. Shouldn't have have that second helping of meringue pie at Bishop's.

Small wonder that colonoscopy becomes our rite of passage. It's a simple procedure and relatively noninvasive, medically speaking and a very good idea to do. If I've got polyps, I certainly want them removed before they consider morphing. My rational mind is settled.

Unfortunately, there's the rest of me, which occupies what Monty Python called "the Pied Piper of my attention squad." This has been, thus far, a messy business. I certainly hope my insides are clean enough because I'd be pretty annoyed if I had to "do over." Then there's the little matter of having my channel inspected: yikes. Dr. Qiao is going to snake a cable up there and see what he can see. Thank God he is administering the good medication, the stuff that helps you forget indignity. (I only hope I don't blather on. What do you suppose the chance of that is!) My women friends will have long since gone off on tangents about cold speculums (speculae), mammograms and childbirth, shaming me into perspective, and missing the point.

As insignificant as my loss of dignity may be, as minor as the inconvenience is to my marginally violated sphincter, the fact remains that I am a man. Even now the good doctor is readying the anal probe. Forgive my lack of personal perspective.

Happy travels, Dr. Qiao.

What I look like

I was sitting in my office yesterday morning, and I noticed my old employee badge. I had it taken about 18 months ago because I had been wearing a beard for more than a year and figured my badge should look like me. I stopped in the middle of the day and got it done. I remember being in a pretty good mood

Anyway, I looked at the photo on the badge yesterday morning and what I saw was puffy, baggy eyed, and very stressed. It appeared that my face had been a little distorted and the effect was that I was quite misaligned. This photo would have been taken at my nadir (I believe that's the word for low point. If it's not, my apologies.).

I will scan that badge in as soon as I get my printer hooked up. With 8 inches of fresh powder on the ground, this chore may wait until next week. The best thing about feeling better is awareness. I love being more of a factor. I'm reading more - much more , thinking more, asking more questions and generally being more of a participant in my life.

Now that I work in a National Service capacity, all of this happy gratitude has me thinking about ways we can serve each other, and others. My kids have agreed to go volunteer on Martin Luther King day, so we'll go help out a local museum that needs cleaning up. These young AmeriCorps hooligans are always volunteering someplace and I'm definitely a slacker by comparison. More importantly, what our almost-president is asking us to do is to step up and let our bodies and our efforts reflect our values. I believe in the idea that we should all do something to improve our community because we live here. How often I actually do something that reflects this belief is a little embarrassing. I used to tell myself that because I was grossly underpaid and worked 50 hours per week working to get low income folks access to quality mental health care, my martyrdom excused me from participating.

On reflection, the martyrdom thing is over-rated. If one is martyred because one stands up for principle, then I'm all for one. However, the feeling of martyrdom, kissing cousin of self-pity, is just an excuse, license to allow one's self all sorts of negative liberties. And some damned fine martinis. With garlic olives. Jumbo. Mmmm.

But I digress.

Today good friends are coming south to join us as we play in a lot of very good snow. It's light and powdery and there is an abundance of it. We have about 7 inches of the new stuff on a base that's about 5 inches deep. It was bitterly cold. Here: a picture of a frozen sparrow!

I used to dislike sparrows. As a boy I was a bird watcher and liked the interesting birds. Sparrows are mundane and scrappy. I'm reading a book about China and in it is a story of how Mao decided that sparrows were undesirable. He required the workers and peasants to go stand near where sparrows roosted and yell and bang pots and pans all night. This exhausted the sparrows and after a week of this they died. Later during the Great Famine there was no one to eat the bugs.

Imagine being so powerful you could decree the doom of an entire species. We feed sparrows and starlings and in exchange we accept visits from mourning doves, juncos, cardinals and a spunky little downy woodpecker who always climbs up the pole as though it were a tree and helps himself to suet. The sparrows have a subtlety and an inevitability that I find reassuring. I used to think of myself as a flashier bird, but I am more sparrow like than I used to think.

My good friend Kevin, who knows me all too well, has always commented that I was born middle aged and am trying to get younger. Swinton used to comment on my "boyish enthusiasm" but I often settled, too fearful of chance to risk the big risks.

I am filled with joy this day and I don't care who knows. I invite you, whenever you read this, to do something good. Lay down a little positive karma in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Let your eyes scan the world about you and linger on the beauty you see. Kick a little snow on the dog shit and put a good picture in your head. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

--Bob Dylan