Solstice 2010

Solstice 2010

Dear Ones:
OK. I am under orders this year. “Make it funny this time.” says my wife. Trying, Dear, honest I am. No pressure, or anything. What were the last 18 years, chopped liver? The close of yet another year, and the annual failure of the sun to show its face in the entire month of December, causes me to sit down and take stock, to reach out to friends old and new, and to piss off my supervisors. So, in that spirit, I will burden you all once again with my annual blast.
Where do I start? It was not a very funny year, unless you consider an economy in the crapper, gridlock in government, the utter death of civil discourse and principled disagreement funny. I guess the Civil War was a real laff-riot, by that standard. I do take some comfort in our history, as we HAVE endured worse than the present, but it seems hard to imagine that is even possible. Fortunately, we have comic relief at hand. Dancing With the Stars as a Conspiracy Theory…Plane trips for the lonely…touch my junk, PLEASE! Picturing Christine O’Donnell as a US Senator…Now that’s funny, right there…The latest election results have left us with a lame duck Congress, though I don’t know how to characterize them before that. Three legged turtle? Giant slug? Lame excuse? WTF?? They got nothing done then, and it will only get worse. We have tax breaks for the wealthy, but we just don’t have universal health coverage, a Nuclear Arms Treaty with Russia, or an end to our entanglements in the longest war in our history.
We finally moved in January into our 3rd and last Pacific NW house, in Anacortes. It has a view that inspires “view envy”, and suits us very nicely in terms of space and flow. Catherine was so certain she didn’t want to live here, that she hadn’t even noticed that it has a nice walk-in shower, or that there were skylights. She only noticed that I loved it, and that was enough to start the campaign NOT to buy it. Then, when we finally DID buy it, she fell heavily in love with it, and has never looked back. To the point that it was obviously her idea all along. So the shower and skylights came in the form of a surprise bonus. Of course, the two downstairs bedrooms with views became her sewing room and office, but I have made a very passable man-cave out of my windowless storage room, and I don’t ever want to move again. We have spent the year fixing up minor things needing fixing, and meeting a few neighbors, most all of whom put their houses on the market and moved out, the week after we moved in. “Oh, shit, there goes the neighborhood,” they apparently said. Sorry to have touched off a slide in housing prices locally, but you get what you get, whenever Robertses move in next to you. They hadn’t even waited for the Elvis in a Bathtub lawn ornament to arrive.
Catherine has continued her more-than full time work with Quilts of Valor Foundation, promoting the cause, running the website, and producing videos of veterans receiving and even sewing quilts. She even quilts a bit herself, from time to time. She gets up early to begin interacting with east coast types during their workday, and knocks off in time for “Judge Judy” every afternoon. She says watching that show is just like going to law school, she is learning so much. Had I but known…I could have saved myself a lot of work and trouble. I get home from working nights just as she gets going, so we hot swap the bed like migrant workers in a shotgun shack, but it seems to work for us. Check out her site at www.QOVF.org, and again, consider a tax-deductible year-end donation. She has remained physically active to a remarkable extent, doing five-mile walk-runs at our local (very hilly) park, and serving as an inspiration and goad to me. Yee-haw—easy on the spurs, there, cowgirl.
Michele is still being a super-cool mommy in Columbus, OH, raisin’ young-uns Jack and Lily, now 5 and 3. They are, of course, slightly cuter than your grandkids, but not much, so don’t hold that against us. She is doing local triathalons, livin’ the dream, and still hasn’t discovered that they need to move out here, despite our best efforts to enlighten them. Husband Eric is still flying—he even gave me a lesson, on their visit out here this year. We rented a Cessna 172 and flew around the islands here. Very cool. It was wonderful having the grandkiddles out for a visit—we flew kites, planes, they did Seattle, all in a whirlwind week.
Nathanael is now doing physical training of Marines and their families at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego. As a Civilian, I hasten to add. He was recently promoted to manager, so he is discovering the joys of herding cats. He loves southern Cal, his rowdy boxer dog Kirby, who loves to leap through plate glass windows, and civilian life. He may soon be doing some more schooling on his hard-earned GI benefits.
Hannah remains in the Navy, stationed in Honolulu, on the destroyer USS Grace Hopper, DDG-70. She will be deployed again this spring to the Persian Gulf, by then as a Lieutenant, j.g. You can see a video feature of her Navy training in hostile ship boarding and pirate fighting on this link, broadcast on Honolulu TV: http://www.kitv.com/video/25680436/detail.html
She has been running a lot, again competing in the Cuyamaca 100 mile trail race, and nearly breaking 24 hours this time. She ran a race in Hawaii called the Peacock 54, and nearly won it outright, but was caught in the last two miles by a dude, and came in second overall, first among women, and setting a female course record. If she is a chip off the old block, I wanna meet the block, because it wasn’t me.
Everett graduated from St. John’s College on a lovely Annapolis spring day in May, and then spent the summer in Boston working for a Maine Medicaid contractor. Life as Dilbert, and Boston generally didn’t suit, so he returned to the District of Columbia, where Aunt Margaret graciously let him crash in her basement, until he could find an apartment. That turns out to be harder to find in D.C. than one might imagine, so he has remained crashed there for several months, but may have found a spot of his own as we speak. He remains uncertain of his next move, but is doing the hand-to-mouth thing waiting tables at a vegetarian restaurant. Since every joke deriving from this juxtaposition of College Education and Waiting Tables is already printed on T-shirts, and available today with free shipping at www.fouryearswasted.com , I will spare you, even though I am under orders.
As for me, I am feeling a little more settled in life in general. These past two years of change have proved, uh, challenging. I am finally starting to feel a little confidence come back, a feeling that maybe this move to this job is not just a passing fling, nor my worst mistake ever. I reckoned that it would take at least two years to become comfortable, and that has been about right. I am still not feeling up to wearing bow ties, and you needn’t fear my falling into complacency, because as an honors graduate of Suxtobee U., I know that things can blow up in your face in a quick minute. But as time has gone on, and there has been no “boom,” I have begun to feel less and less like the proverbial long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs¬¬¬¬¬. I am a Manx cat instead—no tail left at all after my last encounter with the rocking chairs. I guess insecurity is the way of the world, these days especially, though honestly, I have arrived at the Zen understanding, that security is really just an illusion we spin to let ourselves get some sleep at night. Or in the daytime, as the case may be. Anyway, to distract myself, and to keep up with my wife, I have returned to running a bit, doing a flat 4-mile jog in 36 minutes or so a couple-a-few times a week, and rowing on my old rowing machine when the weather sours. I just took a SCUBA refresher course, updating my 1969 YMCA certification. The instructors took a hard look at my tattered card, with Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s signature on it, and let me do the update, instead of the whole course. Now I can dive with Hannah in HI, when we visit in January. My next self-improvement project is to finish my private pilot license. I know, you have heard that one before, but this time I really mean it…
Meanwhile, we are dogless for the first time in forever. Not my druthers, but whatever. You will recall that I sought forgiveness, rather than asking permission last year, and got a bulldog puppy named Max. He and Tory, the Jack Russell, formed my “Pack”, the only organization of which I was top dog. But Max and the real top dog of the house did not get along so well. He did have a problem with coughing and barfing up dinner from time to time, and was better, but not cured, after surgery. So he was banished to “somewhere else,” and I found a new home for him with a family I know from work. Actually, he is leading the life of Riley, with teens to play with, and will soon be the mascot of the Mt. Vernon High School Bulldogs. But Tory took it hard, perhaps seeing that she, too, was expendable. She became morose, and started tearing things up in apparent frustration and depression. So she went home to Buffalo with Grandma Joan, and things have been better for her, too. Mom seems to have taken to having her own dog extremely well, and Catherine revels aloud in the newfound freedom nearly daily. So I guess it is for the best. I did parlay her momentary pang of guilt into the purchase (with permission, not forgiveness) of a small orange Catalina trailer sailboat, now named “Kumquat”, because it is small and orange. That has given me many happy hours ‘simply messing about in boats.’ As you all know, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so worth doing as simply messing about in boats. (homage a’ Kenneth Graham)
I do continue to work at the retail level, serving the general public in the E.D. “E.D.” doesn’t sound so good anymore, ever since the moniker was stolen by the marketers of Viagra. We may or may not suffer from ED, but we suffer in the ED, and also work there. Maybe we will go back to calling ourselves the “ER” again, or even “Accident Room.” Alas, no, we are now the “Convenience and No Up Front Payment Allowed Room,” (CANUFPAR) Not too catchy. That is actually fine with me, because I know that the number of true emergencies is small, and we would be making minimum wage, if emergencies were all that came in to see us. So bless ‘em all, bless ‘em all. Bring your nephew and cousins too. We need you. Still can’t fix a cold, but by gosh, we can prescribe Percocet® and unnecessary antibiotics. We really do need to get over ourselves, and embrace the modern realities of customers replacing patients, and market forces determining our very survival. We spend hours strategizing how to get our satisfaction scores into the high 90th percentiles, which basically boils down to resorting to the tactics used by car dealers. “Now after you leave here today, you may get a survey. It is very important to us that you feel you have had the best possible treatment. Is there anything additional I can do for you to make you feel comfortable rating us as a “5”? Out of work the rest of your life? Lifetime supply of Percocet, and a Medical Marijuana certification?” No worries, we got you covered. But every hospital has the same goal, being in the 90’s, so pretty soon, they are slicing and dicing the thirty responses we get monthly so finely, that one single “4” in the mix leaves us high and dry. We can’t ALL be above average, except in Lake Wobegon. But try we must. At least all the women are strong, and the men are good looking.
At least the patients don’t change much. Each one is unique and beautiful, like a snowflake. The trouble is, when you are driving in a blizzard, the unique beauty of each is not on your radar. They all know what they want, and I have it. I wish it were otherwise, since desire for controlled substances is a pox on the doctor patient relationship, as it ought to exist. In that fantasy, they come with a problem, state it truthfully, and I listen, examine, test, formulate a reasonable plan, present it to them, write appropriate prescriptions, and maybe make them better. But you do get better stories in the current reality. People come from out of town, out of meds, or robbed, or their dog ate their prescription. They come with packets of x-rays from faraway places, drop names of famous doctors I never heard of. They walk in in groups, stub out their cigarettes in the vestibule, commence to limp, and check in separately from their significant others, who also have pain complaints. They deny knowing each other, even though the front-staff see them come in together, but give the same P.O. Box address to the registrar. Then they compare notes and scripts on the way out. The latest was a woman who cried big tears, literally a bad-mascara performance, saying she had come from Arizona to take care of her sister, who had just died of breast cancer, and she would be stuck in the area another week, out of her Oxycodone. A call to the listed doctor revealed she had a sister alive and well back home, and a history of drug diversion and addiction a mile long. She is not likely to rate me a 5 on her survey, but I will deal with that when the complaint letter comes.
The biggest difference here, compared to back East, is the heavy presence of gang activity, and resulting hyper-acute medical needs. Despite our small town appearance, we see an impressive number of gunshot wounds, often involving teens. What is no different is that none of my patients has any idea who shot them, or why anyone would ever want to do that. Never mind the tats from head to toe, the bad haircuts, the doe-eyed innocence, and the rap sheets. They were minding their own business when the dude opened up on them. And he might just be in the mood to finish the unfinished business. We go on lockdown a few times per year. The hospital then turns into a Roach Hotel…you can check in, but you can’t check out.
I must pause, as always, to acknowledge the passing of a few notables from our midst, to wit: Jill Clayburgh, actress extraordinaire, Barbara Billingsley, Beaver’s mom, Leslie Nielson, of Airplane et. al., Johnny Sheffield, “Boy” in the Tarzan movies of my youth, and Tony Curtis, who needs no introduction. Lena Horne and Mississippi Slim have left us blue, and Fess Parker (Davey Crockett) has had his Alamo. He made some damn good wine in his later years, by the way. Robert Culp, the cool sidekick of Bill Cosby in “I Spy” has gone, and John Wooden, old-school UCLA basketball coach, is no more. I miss the days when players who committed a foul had to hold up their hand to acknowledge it, and I am sure Coach Wooden would have agreed. And who would imagine that JD Salinger was still with us until this year, but he was. I am re-reading Catcher in the Rye in celebration. Ted Sorensen lived a charmed life in Camelot, and Dan Rostenkowski lived large, but fell from grace into felony. And as a green scrub-clad ‘Gumby’ myself, I must note the passing of Art Clokey, Gumby’s creator.
And so, dear friends and friends of my friends, and administrators, into whose hands these words inadvertently fall, I wish you peace which passeth understanding, inclusion into the tax bracket favored by the current regime, courage to do right, as you understand the right to be, and success in all your endeavors. Let us talk through our differences, but accept each other without question, as valued friends, despite our disagreements. Let us circle against the forces of darkness, hunker together around the flickering flames of reason, and turn our backs to the long night of superstition and anxiety. Dark times are indeed upon us, but the return of light, and warmth, and exhibition baseball are not far away. Take heart, remain shoulder to shoulder, and do not falter in your resolve to do better. We must do better.
Oh, shit. That wasn’t funny. Never mind, there is always next year.
Cheers, Love, Best,