On elimination, extortion and heirarchy of need.

Lying down with dogs, one awakens with fleas. We are living with Maggie, the black curly rapidly growing puppy whose bladder is still roughly walnut sized. In the end, I think she will have trained us to let her out whenever she barks at the door. She rewards us with one of two forms of elimination. For this reward, we also let her sleep with us.

Our rationale for sleeping with a dog is that she doesn't eliminate where she sleeps (except for the first night when she "baptized" my leg not once but twice!). Looked at another way, it's a matter of "let me sleep with you or I'll shit on your floor!" This is a very effective form of persuasion, one I should have considered as a desperate and lonely young man.

Sleeps is a euphemism for what happens, really. Maggie alternates between lying near our legs and lying on our about our heads, on our pillows. It must be difficult to choose, because she alternates these positions with some frequency, occasionally using her scratchy back toenails to push off from our foreheads. This is an effective method of propulsion for her, but for us is a problematic interruption of REM sleep. "Let me sit on your head or I'll shit on your floor!"

This morning, Walker came into our room at 5:30 a.m. in order to iron his shirt for work. He was at a party until midnight last night and so did not have time to iron his shirt at a more traditional hour. "Do you mind if I turn on the overhead light so I can see to iron?" he asked thoughtfully. We declined. Maggie suggested that Walker take her outside for her duties (our reward), and Walker thoughtfully declined, suggesting that he was busy ironing. Maggie began barking at him insistently. Walker submitted to the will of the puppy and took her out. "Let me iron shirts in your room at the butt crack of dawn or I will shit on your floor!"

Soon Walker drove off to work, neatly pressed shirt and all. Robyn fell back to sleep. Maggie and I lay around in bed and she eventually came up and gave me many wet licky kisses. Cuteness, softness and cuddliness are evolutionary adaptations which enable dogs to survive their formative years. (How does this explain the survival Chihuahuas and Yorkshire terriers, or those hideous Chinese Crested dogs with no hair except for a stringy mohawk?)

I got up, made coffee and assisted our canines in once again visiting the back yard. I have diverted Maggie from chewing on multiple household items, including me (reduced as I am to the status of household item). After about an hour of this, both dogs are lying peacefully on the floor, convincing imitations of the reality I dreamed I'd inhabit when we added a puppy. Dogs living in harmony, sprawled on the floor in postures of domestic bliss. Soon I'll drive to Iowa City to see a client or two. I will stay awake for a while due to massive doses of caffeine administered orally.

Later I'm coming to YOUR house. "Let me take a nap, or I'll shit on your floor!"

Dahlia

Dogs are good for the soul. We felt our souls would benefit from more doggy karma and so we have added another mutt. She's a mix between a large poodle and a lab or a golden retriever. Time will tell, I guess. At any rate she's soft black and curly.

Maggie and Tye are settling in pretty well now. First Tye ignored her and played catch furiously. Next he growled at her when she came near and took all the toys for himself. At this point Maggie realized he was harmless and began to torment him mercilessly. At this point we got to see some fine doggy drama as Tye did his best imitation of a HUGE ALPHA DOG and Maggie yi-yi-yiped her way under the sofa. Balance was soon restored and Maggie was more respectful.

Now we have reached the air humping stage. Perhaps my dog is the only one that does this, but I suspect not. At some point, he will become so overwhelmed and aroused that he gets a doggy erection and humps air right there in the room with you. Tye is now air humping directly above Maggie. My daughter says this is wrong in so many ways. She points out that in dog years Tye is 63 years old and Maggie is 14 months old.

Friends, my dog is a creepy old guy.

Every time I think about where I was a year ago, I shudder a little. Then I stand up, walk across the room, bend over, pick something up, turn my head and smile. Every day this summer feels like a gift. Having sat and looked at summer passed through a series of windows, enjoying it as a participant is gratifying.

I had a flat on the way home Friday afternoon. The flat tire light came on on the console and I pulled over to see a small metal screw punching into my tire. There was a hissing noise as air escaped around it. I figured that I'd had the screw there for a while and that it was probably a slow leak, so I tried to make it closer to home before I ran out of air. It was a sunny afternoon and I pulled way over on the shoulder and changed my tire. I also discovered that my car has a full size spare! Who knew?

Good to change a tire, not to be helpless in an untoward circumstance. Good to feel self-sufficient. Good to go back to enjoying Friday afternoon off.

You just don't realize how fragile it all is. We slip at the top of the stairs, we give in to impulse, we apply the brakes and nothing happens but a fishtail and a sick feeling.

That bastard ahead of me may be doing fifty-five in a sixty-five zone in the left hand lane, holding up a parade of traffic trailing behind, and me trapped in it. I may be tired and hot and maybe even a little sore. . . but. . . my jaw is not wired shut, and if I want to I can go out into the front yard and jump up and down. I can wiggle my toes, ears too, for that matter.

I had lunch and a couple beers with some old friends outside the Bread Garden yesterday. It was sunny and we compared notes as old friends will. The city is putting upright pianos around the pedestrian mall, apparently at the same time they're trying to stop musicians for playing outside and putting out a case for donations. A guy in a ball cap sat down and played some boogie-woogie and the sun shone and children ran toward the play equipment.

I have a list of tasks as long as a leg to which I must attend this week. I have been undisciplined and far too easy on myself. I must get some check-marks put into some little boxes, goddammit! But for the rest of the evening I'm going to lie around the shack.

It's too wet to plow. Too dark to mow. To windy to stack buckshot.

You got to ac-centuate the postive, e-lim-inate the negative, hold on to the affirmative and don't mess with Mr. In Between.

YIt was a pretty good day out at LeRoy's. I gave us a bit of a pep talk along the lines of choosing one's attitude, to uncertain effect. Robyn had to work at the grocery store this afternoon and so we had a firm exit strategy. We all drove in Walker's new car, Walker proudly at the wheel.

I remember the first weeks I had my '69 Mustang I drove very carefully. After Richard Rivera said I drove like an old lady I began to experiment. Walker is in the careful stage and I hope it lasts a long time. The Forester is kind of "truckish" in a way that discourages sharp cornering. Walker says it goes through mud really well. (I wince.)

After we ate our Amana Breakfast, we went outside to walk around digest and avoid a comatose state. Walker and his cousins Caleb and Noah were playing wiffle ball. More cousins and other kids followed and soon there were two full teams dressed in their out to breakfast best playing wiffle ball in the late June morning sun. We stood and watched and cheered and the big boys were nice to the little boys, let them pitch and bunt and steal and feel like somebody. "Boy World" at its best can be a generous fair and honorable place.

I found that LeRoy's highway patrolman neighbor is an enlightened student of American Popular Music. He saw Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper in Iowa City!

After a while everybody called it a game and we headed over to LeRoy's and sat on his great big deck. We swept the water off the boards and sat in the dappled sun and shade. A doe and fawn ran across the clearing at the bottom of the hill.

The knuckleheads who can make this gathering tedious were not any less knuckle headed than they usually are. I just don't give them any more attention than I have to. My better self tries to find someone interesting to talk to or engage a cousin in a game. My darker self stews and fantasizes elaborate social revenge strategies. We usually try to keep my darker self in the car.

A year ago I was lying in a hospital bed, impossibly bruised and substantially broken, as helpless as the day I was born. Today I'm going to make some coffee and drive to see my mother and pay the bills. This year I've seen my daughter graduate and my son turn sixteen. My wife holds my hand sometimes, when no one's looking. I can wiggle my toes.

We're not going on vacation this Summer. We're going to hang around home and enjoy ourselves doing nothing. Come watch if you want.
Posted here are a couple more portraits from my weekend in Mt Horeb. Kris Rugland took my camera and took the shot of me.

And for my next trick. . .

A year ago this morning, we were on a 4 day bike trip in Wisconsin. We woke up and biked over to a restaurant in Mineral Point for breakfast.

The night before, we'd run into a bartender who was new on the job and poured "straight" drinks with outlandish generosity. Geof and I ordered Absolut on the rocks. I went the rest of the evening on that huge drink. We talked about divorce. I was chafing and resentful, Geof, a more recent veteran than I, was cautionary.

After breakfast we headed out on a spectacular ride, the sun shining and the wind at our backs. Toward 3 in the afternoon, I missed a curve at the bottom of a hill on the way to New Glarus and flew out in a helicopter, bound for Madison and the world of trauma. My family was thrown into a Summer of stress, drama and interdependence, Robyn and I were thrown, no hurled together at a time when we were emotionally the farthest apart from each other.

This morning, as I wait for the coffee to boil, I'm mindful of all the changes in my life. I'm an inch shorter, a little bent, sometimes I'm stiff. Robyn and the kids and I are close and much, much happier. In a year, I'm recovered to the point that folks are surprised when I mention the accident. We were commenting that it seems more than a year since it happened.

I was talking to Robyn the other day and wondered out loud if we'd have made it through this year as a couple if I hadn't been rendered totally helpless, if she hadn't been forced to care for me, if we hadn't had to spend all that time together with my healing. We don't know.

If God had said, "Hey Tuna, your life will get a lot better if you can fly through the air, break your back in three places and smash your face to bits." I don't think I'd have taken him up on the opportunity.

That's what happened though. Happy Father's day.

An afternoon

Sometimes technical accidents can masquerade as technique. If I send this picture to Porter's, they'll call me.

"This isn't a standard size photo. How do you want me to crop it?"

"I don't want you to crop it. Fit it into the next largest format."
"That's gonna look funny. I'm just saying."

So, what's "wrong" with the picture here? It's the reason I particularly like it. I am learning that people get used to a camera after a short while. I absolutely didn't give a damn and got a few nice shots, which I think is good, considering the material I had to work with. People stop posing after the camera has been out for a while. They go back to what they were doing. I'm hearing my buddy talk about his mother's terminal, progressive disease. I know from whence he comes, of course and tried to listen well. When the skids finally come out from under a loved one's competence, it's a depressing ride. There are some strategies. . . hanging out with your friends is one of them.

Waiting

I'm not feeling particularly grim. It's just that the most recent photos I have are of this old graveyard, plopped down in the middle of nowhere and filled with people buried by other people who have long since passed away. I like the sense of distance and flatness behind the attempts at permanence left by those wanting to remember their loved ones. The graveyard also sports a magnificent scary tree.

My friends and I used to take our dates to old Kansas graveyards and use flashlights to read the old stones. It was spooky and the young women stood close to us, which we appreciated. We didn't push any stones over. I'd like to think the denizens of the cemeteries appreciated our youthful vigor (horniness) smiling to themselves and remembering standing close to someone lovely in the dark. An optimist, I always imagine ghosts are friendly.

For reasons I won't go into, I found myself accompanying a young woman to a local woman's health clinic so that she could have an abortion. She has a boyfriend, and was 5 weeks along, and was in no position to carry or raise a child. I found myself acting on my values and supporting this young woman's choice. I also found myself spending the morning in an abortion clinic waiting room, a place where there appeared to be very few middle aged men. Very few. One. Me.

I have been a supporter of this health clinic for many years and was pleased with the care and professionalism displayed by its employees, as was the young woman in question, who opted for an option involving taking some medication and waiting for a number of hours. This was somewhat uncomfortable for her, but certainly preferable to dilation and curettage. We waiting and passed the time with a minimum of angst. This is a very practical and matter of fact young woman.

The waiting room was truly a feast of human interpersonal dynamics. There were a number of couples: mostly young women, college age, and their boyfriends, who sat quietly, dutifully, and held purses. One woman was pretty verbal about the wait, her discomfort, and was accompanied by her grandmother, a very patient older woman very comfortable in her own skin. There were a few daughters and mothers, and a couple whom the staff appeared to know by name, perhaps "frequent fliers" abhorred by anti-abortion activists who claim abortion becomes an "easy" form of immoral birth control. Nobody seemed very comfortable.

Behind us, a carpet of music, a sort of marriage of gentle jazz and Zamfir, master of the pan-flute. It was innocuous and constant, new-age muzak, at once calming and annoying. Best of all, there was a television, large and high on the wall behind me. It was not hooked up to cable or dish and it played, one after another, episodes of "Maude." That's right: "Maude."

Maude was the Norman Lear sitcom in the seventies that was the "answer" to "All in the Family." Maude was supposed to be the liberal foil to Archie Bunker, everyone's favorite bigot. She showed that we liberals could laugh at ourselves, sort of. Maude failed artistically, in my opinion, because it couldn't quite skewer Maude the way Family skewered Archie. Maude tended to teach us things, rather too overtly I always thought. My Mom was a serious politically active feminist and she hated Maude. And here we were, sitting and waiting for the biologically inevitable and preternaturally evasive result of a chemical procedure, listening to episode after mediocre episode of a situation comedy so dated as to be totally irrelevant to all but a couple of the people in the waiting room. Grandma and me.

It didn't take us long to realize that the first episode of Maude playing was - I'm not making this up - "Maude gets an Abortion." Maude, creeping up on menopause, finds herself pregnant, and Arthur, her impossibly patient and long suffering doormat husband, and Maude do an endless dance of "I want the baby because I think you want the baby," when, of course, neither of them want the baby. One direct conversation would have solved the whole issue and saved us from the rest of the episode. No one talked about when life begins or the potential of the alleged zygote sprouting in Bea Arthur's still fertile loins. The plot was more Lucy and Desi meets a controversial issue than any useful explication of what was, and is, a highly charged and difficult moral and religious issue. We sat in a waiting room, securely locked out of the medical and business portion of the clinic, the receptionist tastefully protected behind artful bullet proof glass, our phones and back packs safely stowed in the entry areas, listening to Maude patter on about Arthur wanting a late in life child and so she should want it . . . him . . . her. . . it.

At one point a very cool staff person came out and apologetically changed the CD. Hopes rose and fell. More Maude. She explained that the Board of Directors had discussed music and television in the waiting room and the result was all they could agree upon. Maude and Zamfir. She explained that Maude was historic in that it was the first prime time program to openly address abortion during prime time.

Several seasons later, the young woman and I made our way out of the clinic. Her care was excellent and she was gratified by the treatment she received from the professional staff. These are dedicated activists who risk their lives daily to provide necessary care to women and I'm grateful for their spirit. Activism can often subsume art and insist that art serve mission. Thus it becomes tone-deaf, oblivious to irony, particularly it's own. A little Sinatra, perhaps: The Lady is a Tramp.

Lady Godiva was a freedom rider
She didn't care if the whole world looked
Joan of Arc with the Lord to guide her
She was a sister who really cooked

And then there's Maude. . . .

What did Columbus do for his mother?

Would you tell this guy he didn't discover the route to India? What an opportunist!

I'd add a recent photo, but my last batch was at a local graveyard and while I like those photos I don't feel like a black and white graveyard this morning. I don't feel like extolling the virtues of Mother's Day, either, although we're having quite a nice one. Columbus, if he was here, would no doubt claim to have discovered it.

Celebrating a day without scheduled obligations is what I'm about here. Yesterday I sat among new corps members queuing up for physicals, agonizing over urine tests, quaking over injections, sat through three sessions of therapy in which no one had an epiphany, not even me, dropped by my pal Chris's house after work for a couple beers, reported home to mow the front yard in the crisp, really crisp evening air, did some Mom's Day shopping then came home and went to bed early. I used to get resentful about running around, working Saturdays, sessions without epiphanies, but I can usually talk myself out of that now. I put Beck on the car stereo and cranked him. Very satisfying!

I think there's a point where we don't separate work from home from chores from leisure so much. Barnes and Noble was cool when I got there. The yard looks great. My clients deserve the same right to struggle that you and I deserve. Nothing meaningful comes without some struggle. My privilege is sometimes to sit with them as they struggle. If work is meaningful, does it really take away from my life? I think not. Doing something pleasant for my wife is not so much of a chore, really and I love the way the yard looks when the grass is freshly cut. I even enjoy successful weed whacking. Being with my Mom every Sunday morning has become something of a moment of "worship" for me. As part of a routine, it puts me in a regular place in what's left of her life. Sometimes we have a "moment," what passes for epiphany, and sometimes we don't. She can be unsure of my name, my identity, my place in her shattered history, but she recognizes me and smiles, letting me interrupt her snooze. I take my regular place in the final stage of her journey, however long it is to last. Then I'm going to run a few errands, do the back yard, whack the weeds, make some soup or stew for supper because it's still a chilly spring.

I think I'm through my Spring depression, as predictable as - well - Columbus Day. Depression is an opportunist as well, sliding into the spaces between things, reminding us of the dark places. Dad died about this time six years ago, our good friend Diana died the end of April. Anniversaries are more predictable than epiphanies, but I'm always surprised to recognize that I have again slid into a darker mode. I'm naturally optimistic and always believe I can soldier through. I swear I don't think about the end of April, the beginning of May, in negative terms, at least not in advance. Once I realize that my mood has darkened, I have become better at talking back to myself, at honoring the sad dark earth between the green shoots, and taking in the rhythm and contrast of my moods. Would I avoid this seasonal sadness if I could? How is it not part of me, like my history, like the inevitable losses of those I love? How is it not like meaningful work, necessary chores, rituals of mowing, trimming, repairing? An only child, I have always talked to myself. Now I talk back to my darker self, remind myself to enjoy the sun, the green, my friends, my family and to honor the sad things in life.

David Bromberg wrote "I have somebody else's blues / in the midst of an almost perfect day." My therapeutic self urges him to integrate. One's blues are one's own. One's bathroom, one's laundry, one's work, the closeness and laughter with old friends, the sudden distance between some of us where closeness always seemed inviolable, these are part of life's syncopation. Hop into the conga line and dance!