Solstice 2005

Solstice 2005


Dear Ones,
I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours...You first................... OK, OK, I started this. I’ll go, but you are still on the hook. Off we go again into the little-read and less-remembered latest episode of “Year of Our Lives”. For starters, the good stuff—we are most happy and relieved to have Nathanael back from Iraq, in one piece and more mature than anyone should ever be in their 20s. Meanwhile Michele gave birth to Jack Antonio McCarty, our first grandbaby. He is a big beautiful happy baby, and subject of complete obsession to his grandmom. He really is a good natured little guy, a credit to incredibly patient full-time hands-on rearing by Michele. He has the adorable habit of barfing on anyone he especially likes, so many of us now bear the mark of his favor. Nat treasures this most especially.
I don’t even know how to start to grapple with this year of fear and loathing. We know of so many who have suffered the loss of a child in The War on Terror®. We see the postures and spins and layers of deceit and measured disclosure, and know as always that this is, was, and ever shall be about oil. Our greed inflames the bastards, and our money finances them, and we can’t step away to let them thrash out their hatreds unmolested. So we send our best, our treasure, to be spilled in the sand and wasted. We stoop to torture, but claim moral superiority. And still we drive our planet-killing SUV’s, and squeal when gas goes over $2.50 a gallon. Are we as crazy as they are? Or just blind piglets on the teat, too young to have our eyes open yet? I don’t know anything for sure anymore, except I am weary of lying politicians, and heartsick for grieving families. Now the rest...
Life in Delaware is fine...hard to believe we have been here twelve years and more. I can’t use the word “routine” with any accuracy to describe our lives, but there is at least a rhythm to it that works in lulling us into staying year in year out. We are the proverbial frog in the cooking pot, enjoying the warming water, and too inert to leap out. What is changing is that our kids are growing up and out, and I am having a hard time seeing over the horizon to being here without kids, and with adults we raised calling us from afar for advice and money.
Hannah is in her Plebe year at the Naval Academy. She is 19, harder than woodpecker lips, and yet all about adolescent doubts and idealistic goals and inner battles, bundled into a very disciplined and determined young woman. She is playing Rugby for Navy, working out some well earned frustrations by delivering massive tackles. We have had her home a couple of times, the benefit she has over her shipmates whose parents live far away, and we are able to get over there pretty readily for rugby games and the like. But I miss having her home for ice skating, shooting the breeze, and all the rest. Her goal is “EOD”, the only Special Forces billet available to women. That involves jumping out of planes, swimming with trained dolphins, and blowing things up. Just what every parent desires...She is exploring for a major at the moment, battling with Calculus and Professional Knowledge, and of course with nasty rank-glorying upperclassmen, and doing well.
Everett is a senior, back in little Seaford after a year abroad in Beijing. He had a little premature exposure to college life living away as a H.S. Junior, and is now predictably a little rammy being back home, under the watchful eye of his mom. He refers to us as Warden and Doc. He is a wry little fellow. The school, unfortunately neither cares to challenge him, nor even occupy his time, so he is out the door for a class three mornings a week, and back home in an hour, with a day to kill doing whatever the hell he does at the computer. He might have a one hour interruption in his afternoon, or might not. His only real hurdles are the courses he takes in the evening at the local community college. He has been working at the local pharmacy chain, Euphoric Harold’s, (Happy Harry’s) learning a love of the general public, and customer service above all else. We compare notes constantly. His year in Beijing was spectacular. He enjoyed the food, including a most excellent fried dog in black bean sauce. (They broke it to him during dessert.) His Mandarin is excellent, or so we are told, and he is certainly a more mature and accomplished young man than the fuzzy little squib we sent off so anxiously a year and a half ago. And we get really generous portions from the local Chinese restaurant, with his intercession.
Michele, as noted, has added one to the ledger on the side of the well-adjusted, responsible and productive. She and Eric are in Columbus, OH, where Eric is now Assistant Chief Pilot with NetJets, a fractional jet company. He is living a more regular schedule and traveling less, so that is good. M. is thinking of going back to school, thinking of having another child, thinking of world peace and all the rest. She thinks a lot.
Nat is in his last year with the Army, just staying low profile at Ft. Detrick in order to finish his commitment where he is right now. That basically involves not getting all up in his sergeant’s grill, a Herculean task of self-control on Nat’s part, apparently. But the stakes are high, since a stateside billet is a desirable thing, and never guaranteed, under the circumstances. Don’t annoy the bears, and don’t piss off the Sergeant. Nat is stylin’ in his black Nissan Maxima with blackout windows and grill bra we bought together the next day after he got back, and burning up a good bit of the oil our government risked his life for. He deserves to. He has stuck with some of the same buddies the whole 5 years in, and has made some good friends. They are some very nice, very mature young men, burdened with the horrifying memories of war they didn’t deserve and shouldn’t have endured. But they did their duty, and we love them and thank them.
Catherine is fully retired from midwifery, and fully immersed instead in making quilts for wounded service members. She has arranged the making and distribution of nearly 4000 Quilts of Valor® to wounded soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen. And even a few Coasties. You can check out her website at www.quiltsforsoldiers.com She has arranged for a §501(c)(3) charity status for Quilts of Valor Foundation, Inc., with donated lawyer and accountant time. She is most intrepid and amazing in getting things done. She has a whole network of little old ladies (and a few little old men) quilting quilts, and chaplains at all the military hospitals in America, and some in Europe and elsewhere doing the presentations.
As for me, I am done, done, done with Law School! Just this week I sent the last of my assignments in and closed out the last module. The Bar looms ahead in February, just prior to graduation in LA, but the degree is done. I ordered new business cards, with more letters after my name, just to celebrate. I am actually numb just contemplating it. No pressure for papers, readings, cramming for finals. I put up all my piles of books onto a shelf, and cleared my desk for the first time in four years. Spooky. The Bar Exam will be rough, a three-day pounding which is passed by only 40% of attempters—the lowest percentage of any state. I will git er done, one way or another. I may be throwing smoke from both engines, with ailerons hanging by a hinge, and more daylight than paint showing on my fuselage, but I will land the bitch somehow. I got a little panicked this year that I could hardly get out of my own slime-pool at my desk, and at Hannah’s suggestion, I started to jog again. She wanted to run the Marine Corps Marathon with me, and I always wanted to run a marathon, so I started training and we signed up together. The first runs were pathetic, limited to a mile or so. The weather in January chased me indoors and to the treadmill, and I actually wound up doing the whole thing on the treadmill. I was able to build up eventually to 6 miles every other day, at a 9.5 minute per mile pace. My projected long run ended in a knee cartilage injury, which was a setback, but with my commitment to Hannah and the goal in mind, I built back to the prior pace with only a few weeks to go. Just prior to race day, Hannah sprained both ankles in a rugby game, and could only watch from the sidelines. So I put on my sneaks and stepped to the line, alone in a crowd of 20,000 runners. I ran with the 4:30 pacing team until after the halfway point, and then some amazingly painful cramps took hold of my legs. I tried to stop and stretch, but it was immediately obvious that stopping was going to make me ball up like a pill-bug, and require evacuation by stretcher. So I shuffled onward through the last 10 miles, at little old lady pace. I actually passed a 77 year old lady, bent over with osteoporosis, still running at the 24 mile mark. She had a beatific smile on her face I will never forget. She gave me enough gumption to finish, and I did, in 5:41:45, about an hour slower than I expected. But I did it, anyway. Most impressive to me were the people on the sidelines doing the “WooHoo!” marathon. How long can you keep saying WooHoo without your lips cramping and losing your voice? Do you hit a “WooHoo Wall”? I also loved the guys running while talking on cell phones the whole time. Is anybody actually where they are? Fully half of the people I saw were lost in IPod land, or yakking on their Bluetooth® equipped cell phones at the top of their lungs. I was just trying NOT to yak. If nothing else, the marathon is off my life list, which still includes such unlikelies as “summit Mt. Everest”, and “sex with Japanese twins”. Hannah wants to run it again next year, and perhaps I will run it with her...I still have a 4:30 marathon in me, I am sure...
Work leaves me ever more dubious that we deserve to survive as a species, but I work a lot less, so the alternative viewpoint has at least equal time. We struggle now with “customer service” as our mantra and “performance metrics” as our scourge. Which means only that the satisfaction survey of every disappointed drug addict now drags us down in our average score, and administrators can stop visiting the department to see what’s really going on, and just crunch the numbers. Many departments have responded to this by going with the flow, and just handing out Percocet® like Skittles®. Boy do they have good numbers. And you see so many more interesting tattoos when you deal with that slice of Demographia. We do see some amazing tats...worst so far was the fifteen year old girl with pseudo-latin script, all caps, across the top of the pubic hair, rendering the heartwarming sentiment “FUCK ME”. And right up there was another independent minded little lass of 16 with “Ghetto Bitch” tattooed above her butt cheeks. Her mom was there, and just gave me a gap-toothed grin when I could only say, “How nice, how very nice...” I have to remind myself I can’t fix that problem, and stick to what I CAN fix, which ain’t much. People who check in stupid generally remain stupid on discharge. And we can’t raise the dead. We only do resuscitation, not resurrection. But otherwise we are all things to all people in the ED... Dr. Spock to the young mother in need of advice: “Generally, Ma’m, we recommend that when the kid starts smoking, it is time to wean her.”... Dr. Feelgood to the chronically pained and anxious: “Sure, I totally understand that your dog ate your narcotic prescription, while leaving undisturbed the piece of meat you were using to keep it from blowing away—I’ll just write you another prescription for a thousand Oxycontin® right away!”...Dr. Ruth to the sexually hyperactive: “No, as far as we understand it, you can’t get gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia, warts and pregnant all at the same time without actually having sex.”...Dr. Phil to the self-justifying self-destructive idiot who is our stock in trade: “How’s that working for you?”...Dr. Marcus Welby to the chronically useless: “Let me just remove that brain tumor, and get your social services, free prescriptions and lifetime work excuse arranged in this office visit. Is there anything else at all I have overlooked?”...Dr. Scholls for the footsore: “Dude, those are some evil-smelling dogs you got there...You might want to wash them this week.”...Dr. Seuss for the under 8 crowd: “This shot of Pen, this shot of Pen, you will not like this shot of Pen.”...Dr. Leonard McCoy for the “DRT” (dead right there): “He’s dead, Jim!”...Dr. Laura Schlesinger for the ones who know what’s right but don’t want to do it: “What are you?? Stupid?? Listen to yourself lying to yourself and get a life!!”...Dr. Dre for the disadvantaged youth: “Yo, yo, ‘Suup, Yo, you know wumsayin, know wumsayin?”...And Diet Dr. Pepper to just about everybody: “So cool, so light so refreshing, so available.”...Too bad we just can’t be Dr. Kevorkian...
We pause each year to note the passing of various fellow travelers on our orb, including our beautiful, sweet boxer dog, Rudy. He was just 3, and our loving, obedient companion, when a lymphoma overtook him in a very few sad weeks. We are still heartbroken over it. His pawprints aren’t even gone from the yard yet, and I can’t speak of him without a catch in my voice. I guess that is part of the bargain you take on with a dog—a short, intense relationship, and a certainty of sadness and loss in exchange for the unconditional love they give. More generally notable, we bid farewell to Don Adams and Bob Denver, of my TV childhood and Scotty (James Doohan) beamed up when I wasn’t looking. Ann Bancroft graduated, and Johnnie Cochran was forever estopped from making frivolous motions, while August Wilson and Arthur Miller made their exits, stage left. R.I.P. to poor Terry Schiavo, free at last; Good night, Folks, to Johnny Carson, and a very fond farewell to Saul Bellow, whose novel Herzog caught me at that life-stage of just noticing the infinity of possibilities. Hunter Thompson wrote his own ending. We will miss Peter Rodino, Jr. from Watergate hearing days, and I am sad to say we may soon miss Mr. Chief Justice Rehnquist more than we knew possible, once the new boys come to town. Arrivederci and do widzenia to Pope J2P2, and a special goodbye to Shelby Foote, whose rendering of The Civil War introduced me to a love of history and made me understand America for the first time ever. And by the way, a glad welcome back to the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.
And so, dear friends, we pause again at the year’s longest night to take in a cold breath of winter’s blast, and turn our backs and huddle against the darkness, holding fast to the certainty of the return of edible fruit and daylight in non-working hours. Let our friends become legion, our deeds become legend, and our enemies forget where they left their cheaters. May each of you find time and inclination to renew acquaintance with an old friend, keep close to present ones through good times and bad, and welcome new ones into our widening circle of fellowship and reason. Be firm in the raising of young’uns, for the easy path only leads to madness. Be stout in resistance to easy lies and seductively simple solutions, offered by politicians with no heart and no care, but for power. I wish for each of you a year of peace, and progress toward a worthy goal, and satisfaction with your own best efforts, even if the goal remains distant. And mostly I wish for peace.

Yours, like it or not, truly