A Day in the ER

My excuse for not writing much this week? Spending a day in the emergency room.

Usually when people ask me how I’m doing, I respond by saying, “Well, I haven’t been in the hospital for seven months!” (or however long it’s been.). This is because it seems that every six months I have some sort of crisis. Usually it’s my heart medication that does a good job most of the time, but once in a while the electrons get the upper hand and send my heart into overdrive.

Sometimes people call their hearts “tickers”. Unlike most people, my heart really does tick. In fact you can hear it if we are sitting in a quiet room. There it is…the noise that resembles a dripping faucet. That comforting sound is produced by a mechanical mitral valve that I had installed in 1999 during my second open heart surgery. In the first go round, the highly regarded surgeon I chose tried to repair the valve, but it didn’t work. I picked someone else to go in and make it right.

I come by this problem honestly, with an uncle who’s had the same operation and by my mom who had two tissue valve replacements. She died in 1998, just months before my own cardiac travails began. I always wished I could say, “Mom! I understand what you meant—look! I’ve had the same thing done.” I’m sure she knows and one day maybe we’ll compare notes, but when I get to that point, who really cares about such things?

Here on earth, I’ve had many 911 calls and ambulance rides to the hospital, but they have diminished in frequency since my pacemaker was installed a couple of years ago. Unlike my valve, it doesn’t make any noise, but just sits there quietly working. Someone at work likes to call it my “bottlecap” since it looks like one sitting under my skin.

Yesterday, due to some problem with medications interfering with each other, I spent a pleasant six hours or so in the emergency room. Pleasant, because there were so many familiar faces there, though it’s pretty sad when you know the nurses and lab techs by name. A CAT scan was negative, other tests showed a possible infection, but in the end they sent me home. I have appointments with four different doctors over the next two weeks for various issues, so I should be in good shape soon.

Fortunately, my regular doctor looks out for me and takes a personal interest in what happens to me. What other doctor gives you his home and cell phone numbers? Years ago I started calling him by his first name instead of “Doctor”, which is the sort of relationship we have. One time he had to call me about test results or something and he pretended to be a carpet salesman. I hung up on him. He called right back and played it straight, though I felt bad once I recognized his voice.

What's that sound?

Just a short one tonight. Tomorrow is Spring Career Fair, and we have 149 employers coming. There will probably be 1500 people through the doors. I have to go to bed early and get down there at 6:30am.

Tonight I was over at grandson Max's house. He is an energetic two and half year old. After we rolled around on the floor and chased each other for a while, we rested for a moment and he said, "What's that sound?" I realized he was talking about my heart. You see, I have an artificial heart valve that was installed in 1999. That's a story for another time.

But the valve makes a clicking noise that usually no one but me can hear. If the room is quiet, though, other people can hear it too. And so it was with Max tonight. I explained that it was my heart, and he said, "Show me."
"I can't show you. It's inside!"
"Where's my heart?"
"Right here, behind this bone."
"What bone?"
"This bone, right here."
"Show me."
"I can't show you. It's inside!"

He laid his head on my chest and listened for a moment, then said, "I don't like that sound." His father pointed out that it meant that "Da" (me) would be around for a while. He put his head on my chest again, listened and repeated, "I don't like that sound."

Well, I like that sound. It's very comforting when I am lying in bed, falling asleep. It gets kind of noisy, though, when Kathy and I are, um, active. It's a fun sound when I'm at the office working with someone on a project and the room is still enough to have them ask, "Is that your watch?"

It’s always in the last place you look

This past week was my big heart health event. I had my TEE on Monday, where they run a camera down your esophagus to look at your heart, and then the “procedure” on Wednesday. It’s properly a PVI—a pulmonary vein isolation.

There was an electrical problem in my heart that would send me to the ER at odd moments. There didn’t seem to be a particular trigger. Sedentary reading could set it off. Walking down the hall—completely random. The electrophysiologist was 70% sure he could fix it so we gave it a try.

They put me under general anesthesia instead of the usual “twilight” state that they use. Good thing too, since the whole thing lasted eight hours. When I woke up, the doctor said he’d found the problem and fixed it. He was about to give up when he got one more idea about where to look and that did it.

Eight hours! That was impressive. He never took a break; just kept on working straight through. Kathy and her sister were waiting that whole time without a single word of his progress or lack thereof. He did warn us that that could happen and that they shouldn’t read anything into it. Also, they take the family into a separate room to explain the results, and again they were warned that the private session did not imply that any disaster had occurred.

He said that I was “tough”. Imagine that. My blood pressure stayed steady through the whole deal—guess all that swimming and biking paid off.

When I got to the room, I was woozy and kind of out of it. Then the phone rang. Stupidly, I picked it up.

“Hello?” says I, groggily.
“Arak?” a gruff voice barked.
“No.”
“Arak?”
“No.”
Arak?”
“You have the wrong room.”
Click. He hangs up, no word of apology.

This happens three more times, with calls for three different people. Finally, after the fourth call, this woman says, ‘”Oh, they moved him, huh?” I said, as politely as I could, “Ma’am, I just came out of eight hours of surgery. I have no idea.” She at least apologized, and that was it, since they turned the phones off on the floor at that point.

A pair of nurses came in to introduce themselves. Get this: They were named Faith and Sara. I love it! God’s gift to us, and God’s faithful servant. And there they were. I knew I was going to be fine.

Of course they checked my vitals every half hour—I mean it—they were in there every thirty minutes all night. So sleep was impossible.

The next day I was a sleep deprived goof. I was supposed to be discharged by 11am, but my neck was bleeding where they had put in a catheter. It took them five hours to get the bleeding stopped. There was a hierarchical parade of nurses, residents and one of the partners in the practice as they each tried a remedy. Finally, the partner came in with some needles and injected lidocain and epinephrine (Nora Ephron?) and for some reason, that did it.

So, much prayer brought us all through this. We thank God for his Spirit, guiding the doctor, giving him “one more idea”.

Now if I could only wake up.

Nothing to see here...

Nothing to see here—move along, folks. Show’s over. I’m out of the hospital and safely home. Earlier this week, on Tuesday, I had a racing pulse and a heart flopping around like a freshly caught sunfish twisting on a boat dock. By the time I got to the electrophysiologist’s office, everything was fine. The car always runs great when the mechanic drives it. On Friday night, the heart palpitations returned. The moment my head hit the pillow, it took off again. I decided to sleep through it and see how I felt in the morning.

On Saturday morning, Kathy and I debated about whether or not to call the doctor, and finally I did leave a message with her service. After talking to the service, then a nurse then a couple of “fellows” (fellows in an academic sense, not goodfellas sense) from the hospital, they sent me to the ER at Parma hospital. They took me right away of course, slapped the EKG leads on me and then parked my butt in an ER cubicle down the hall. Four hours later I was admitted.

One of the EP’s from the practice came and tuned me out of the PVC blues by using my pacemaker. He then prescribed an additional medication to control the arrhythmia and kept me overnight. I was discharged Sunday afternoon at 2pm. The hospital chaplain spilled the beans in the sacristy before 9am Mass t one of my friends and then the word went out through my network. He came to see me just as I was leaving. Mostly he talks about his own problems when he comes to visit you in the hospital, which is kind of funny. Today he was having back problems from trying to move fifty bank boxes of books to a different rectory.

So, we’ll see how it goes with the new pills.

Good news—my landscaping project in the front yard seems to be working as planned. We’ve got little green shoots all over the place. I felt like a farmer fretting about the crops and weather, nursing the lawn along.

Heaven must be filling up

Here are the people I know who died last week:
Rose, my brother-in-law's mom (heart)
Rudy, from our Social Justice Group (prostate cancer)
Ray, the husband of Theresa from our Social Justice Group(heart)
Jan, a nurse that Kathy worked with (breast cancer).

What's your favorite song?

The other day someone asked me to name my three favorite songs of all time. I think he was talking about rock, so that’s how I started to think about the songs that I never grow tired of listening to. If you grew up with the Beatles, it’s easy to pick some of theirs. I was shocked when iTunes classified them as “Pop”. I never really thought about them as anything other than rock and roll, but maybe it’s so, that they don’t really fit that category. I did include them on my list, since I decided to keep going past the “rock” category and add some more types of music.

My sisters were listening to rock before I was, and they were the ones who turned me on to WMCA in New York City and the “Good Guys” collection of DJ’s who worked there. There was also WINS with the famous Murray the K disk jockey. I even have a cassette tape from one of those Golden Oldies collections from 1964 that features his show and his goofy catch phrases.

I had no idea that that beautiful, amazing music was out there. I was too busy playing baseball and doing guy stuff to realize that my younger sisters were onto something good. We pooled our resources to get the three dollars it took to buy The Beatles’ first album and then shared it carefully. Later I would be in the record stores each week looking for the next big single, gradually accepting that maybe people other than The Beatles would also be worthy of inclusion in my collection.

So, without further ado, here is my list along with an explanation of why each song is meaningful to me.

Rock::
1. Gimme Shelter--Rolling Stones
2. Let the Day Begin --The Call
3 All Revved Up and No Place to Go --Meatloaf

Gimme Shelter became some kind of anthem in the small group of friends I hung out with sophomore year in college. One stoner pointed out to me that little bit where Merry Clayton’s voice cracks on “oh, baby” and even now, 36 years later, I still wait for it. The way the song builds in intensity, driving and driving thrills me every time.

Let the Day Begin was a song I didn’t pay much attention to from a group I didn’t know about. In fact, this is the only song of theirs that I like. When the Clinton-Gore campaign bus rolled into our town in the summer of 1992, “Let the Day Begin” poured from the speakers at the campaign stop just a half mile from my house. Maybe it was kind of sappy, but I heard what I wanted to hear in it, and identified immediately with its message. Was it hope? I think so.

All Revv’d Up and No Place to Go is the song I played when I was finished studying for my masters degree comprehensive tests and just wanted to get them over with. “Bat of Hell” is still one of my favorite albums—hardly a clunker on it.

If you are talking about blues:
1. Angel from Montgomery --Bonnie Raitt
2. Piece of My Heart --Janis Joplin
3 Can't You Hear Me Knockin' --Rolling Stones

Angel is chock full of wonderful feeling. I always liked angels (married one, in fact), so I was naturally drawn to this song. “How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?”

Piece of My Heart kind of sums up poor Janis’ life to me. I was lucky enough to see her in concert once. Her wrenching vocals haunt even to this day. How could she dredge up such emotion and put it out there as a voyeuristic feast?

Knockin’ has this wonderful passage in the middle, a classic blues passage where you feel as though you are being led down into a tunnel where you are shown both the mysteries of and maybe some of the answers to life. Gradually you climb up out of the depths into the sunlight, but maybe you pine for the dark passage just a little.

If you are talking about folk:
1. Widow with Shawl: A Portrait --Donovan
2. Simple Twist of Fate --Joan Baez' version of Dylan's song
3. Tangled Up in Blue -Bob Dylan

Widow--now before you get all up in my face about it being Donovan—just listen sometime to the story. I like it because I love the ocean and I know what a “widow’s walk” is. The prayer expressed so plaintively here is, well, touching.

Fate is just a hoot the way Baez handles it, especially as she does her Dylan impression at one point. Sometimes it really seems like a simple twist of fate that brings people together or keeps them from ever meeting.

Blue is my favorite color. Besides, I like to think I’m “the solid type.”

If you are talking about pop:
1. Here Comes the Sun - The Beatles
2. Rocky Raccoon - The Beatles
3. Things We Said Today - the Beatles

Here Comes the Sun became Kathy’s and my song. I shan’t describe the circumstances that led to this momentous decision since my children sometimes read this blog.

Rocky Raccoon. What’s not to like? It’s just a fun story, and you can’t help pulling for good old Rocky.

Things We Said Today hit me just right in high school. It seemed to articulate my feelings about girls and relationships in general.

If you are talking about country:
1. I've Been Everywhere - Hank Snow
2. Wild One - Faith Hill
3. Long Black Veil - either Johnny Cash or The Band

I’ve Been Everywhere. Now come on—how does he remember all the names of all those places? Someday I will memorize it just to see if I can.

Wild One is a nice jumpy little song. I always think of Daughter Ann and her strong willed contrariness. In sign language class, this is the song I signed. Everyone else picked slow songs—they were shocked when the opening strains of Wild One started up.

Veil tells a great story—one I first heard by The Band. A tragic story, but a classic. Son Patrick sang it for us in Ireland when we were at Peter’s parents’ house. Peter’s mom and sister started singing one of their classics and Patrick answered with “Veil”. That was a fun night.

OK, I'll stop now.

When someone asks about a favorite song, it’s very difficult to pick one. It seems to depend on my mood, as melodies shift like albums in a six-disc CD changer.

So, how about you? Can you pin down your favorite songs and justify your choices?

I got the message

Change of plans. Shane's father in law had a heart attack yesterday--Saturday. He was out fishing all morning on Lake Erie and kept vomiting. He attributed it to seasickness, but once he was home, he had chest pain that radiated to his jaw, and then he knew he was in trouble. He drove himself to the hospital, walked in to the ER and announced he thought he was having a heart attack. They agreed and swarmed over him, eventually doing a cath and putting in some stents. He is doing much better now and will probably come home in day or so.

Kathy and I will be watching Max this week, since the other grampa is out of commission. So that's why I never could arrange a romantic getaway for this week. Perhaps God had a better use for our time.

A record of existence

Bantering back and forth in a email exchange today with my children, the youngest decried the fact that his baby book was empty, that there was no record of his existence. This is a running family joke, but I took it to heart today and answered him:

A record of existence.

You were born between two blizzards in January 1978. God gave us a breathing space to allow you to appear. I went to work that morning of January 11, thinking we still had some time before you would enter the world. When I got the call, I remember driving home in that 1974 Volkswagen bus, and having the accelerator cable stick—frozen in its long passage from the rear engine to the gas pedal up front. I was turning the corner at 82 and 21, using the side roads because I was afraid of the interstate in that weather. I threw it into neutral as the engine raced and I thought—great--my child is about to be born, and I’m about to die. Miraculously, the cable came unstuck and I worked my way home.

I was working nights and your mother was working days. One morning I woke up and found you sitting quietly on the couch in the living room. You must have been about two. Apparently you thought you were alone in house. I was sleeping and you didn’t realize I was there. I hugged you and told you not to worry because everything was alright.

We had a conversation once when you were older, in eighth grade? High school? You told me how you had been a nerd pretty much up to that point, but you made a conscious decision to change direction, and I remember how proud I was of you in that moment. You decided not to let people pick on you, but to stand up for yourself, and it worked.

High school football didn’t work out, but elementary school was fun. I remember that one assistant coach who thought I was a spy, videotaping the games for some opposing team. What a goof. All I was doing was preserving those memories for us.

Teachers remember you. That high school was never the same after you.

Who was the driving force behind the first ever John Carroll Habitat for Humanity house? Who would never tell us how much money he had accumulated for the project because…because why? You didn’t want to jinx it? That was a stunning achievement, never equaled.

How many people have you touched in your HFH trainings, your campus meetings, in all your work so far? The well of inspiration that you are for all those people seems bottomless—but be careful to take care of yourself in all this, too.

A record of existence indeed.

Retire?

In the wonderfully arcane public retirement system here in Ohio, there is a marvelous provision that allows you to buy time earned elsewhere in public service, thus resulting in an earlier retirement date. Having taught for a couple of years in New Jersey back in the 70’s, I filled out the paperwork and sent it off into the bureaucratic void to see what would happen.

I had gone through this exercise once before and had never heard anything back. This time I followed up with a phone call to my former employer in the Garden State. The woman I spoke to said that my records were stored off site in a trailer somewhere, and may have been lost in a flood (no—not the Great Flood. I’m not that old.) Buoyed by this cheery bit of news, I anxiously awaited her letter which would surely tell me that my paperwork had been washed out to sea some years ago.

Instead, imagine my surprise when I received a nice note with a copy of my application, saying that she had forwarded my records on to the Great State of Ohio. Then, another heartening piece of correspondence arrived from said State, requesting eleven thousand dollars for 1.8 years of service.

That may seem like a lot of money, but it’s really not. A friend of mine got a bill for forty thousand for six years. I can handle eleven.

But the strange part was my not so subconscious reaction to all this. My brain ricocheted around my head like a cartoon bullet as I struggled to get its smooshy mass around the idea that I can retire in a scant four years.

What does one do in retirement?
Will we have enough money?
Can I keep it together at work for the next four years?
Why do I suddenly feel so insecure?

I would be 63, not the 66 I had originally thought. This is good, right? So what’s wrong with me?

Jeepers! I just realized there are three operations I want to have before my health insurance changes! (The heart ablation my electrophysiologist wants to do, a new pacemaker and oh yes—a knee replacement as long as we’re at it.)

Like Steve Martin’s “Jerk”, all I need is this ashtray. This ashtray and this paddle game. That’s all I need. This ashtray, this paddle game and this ablation. That’s all I need…

Sorry I missed your call...

Seeing first run movies is not something I usually do. “Public Enemies” was an exception last week. Kathy said she would treat for rental movie—one I would watch, since we rarely agree on what’s “good”. Blockbuster has a deal right now whereby for ten dollars you can take out as many movies or video games as you like for one week, one at a time. Woo-hoo! I went for it. Wish I had known about it during my vacation week.

There were four movies that I knew I wanted to see: Taken, Defiance, Gran Torino, and Knowing. I watched Taken tonight and promptly switched it out for Defiance, which I will watch tomorrow some time. Have you seen Taken? It’s sure to ruin many college age daughters’ plans for a European adventure this summer. It is a guy movie, I suppose, with lots of car chases, fighting, shooting and the like. It was also the fastest movie I ever saw as the 90 minutes or so just shot by. I felt my heart rate rocket and honest to goodness I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.

This afternoon I knocked off another Robert B. Parker novel, a western called “Resolution”. Very fun read with wonderful good guys who hardly say two words at a time—in other words, typical Parker dialogue.

So why this burst of entertainment-seeking activity? I caught up on my New Yorker magazines.

Back on Wednesday three of us from the office volunteered at a local TV station to work a phone bank where people called in with job search questions. The first call I took was from a woman in her fifties who had been temping for the past ten years. I was on with her for half an hour. She managed to shoot down every idea I came up with. I felt I was kind of representing the TV station, so I didn’t tell her what I really thought. Shall I tell you? Well, she’s dug herself a pretty good hole over the last ten years—employers might now wonder what’s wrong with her, that she hadn’t taken a full time job in all that time.

Many of the other calls I took were from people whom I am not equipped to help, at least not over the phone: lots of blue collar guys who did die casting, mechanical assembly—that sort of thing. One poignant call was from a guy who did have some college and I was able to encourage him to get back to school somehow. As we talked he eventually told me he had a felony arrest, but no conviction. I didn’t ask him about the details, nor did he volunteer them.

Another was from a nice little old lady (I imagine) who had been retired for the past fourteen years. She had worked for thirty years in one company, and was now concerned about people who could have served as references, but whom she can longer find. I think that thirty years is reference enough. Why was she returning to work? She had been raising her grandson since the day he was born. Now he’s a teenager and no longer needs her 24/7 care. See what I mean? Nice lady.

It is hard to stay optimistic with announcements like last week’s of another 400,000 jobs gone. Makes you wonder where we will be in another year or two.

Bridge freezes before road surface usually

Here is another scene. It’s New Year’s Eve day—today in fact. I’d been rushing around for the past week of my ‘vacation’, shopping, spending hours in the basement rearranging junk into more appealing piles of junk, blowing an afternoon cleaning out a bookcase—removing some books to make room for still other books, getting rid of various bits of paper stuck here and there: generally not ‘vacating’ much at all.

Today it must have caught up to me because a couple of hours after Kathy left for work, I fell asleep in my chair for an hour. Then I was still tired so I went up to the nice cozy warm waterbed and slept for another hour. Coming downstairs, I thought it seemed a little chilly, so I checked the thermostat. Set for 66 degrees, the room temperature had dropped to 63. The furnace had quit working.

It was twenty degrees outside with wind blasting the house with forty mile an hour gusts, producing an uncomfortable wind chill, and the house was cooling fast, hitting 58 degrees very quickly.

So I called the people who had installed the furnace, the same people who had serviced it in the fall, and thankfully they were able to get a guy out here in about an hour. It turned out to be the same man who had worked on it in September. He got it working in short order and said I should probably replace the doppelganger doohickey and the frissen mast chunk-a-blunk and I agreed. He went back to his truck, called his boss and explained the situation. The upshot was they did not charge me for the parts, just the labor to install them which was great news given the price of doohickeys these days.

By that time, Kathy was home from work. So what, right? Well, you don’t understand. Kathy hates to be around when someone is working on the house. She really had nowhere else to go, so she had to break one of her rules and stay in the house while the furnace guy worked. It turns out that she was so distracted by a harrowing escape she had had on the highway, that she wouldn’t have cared if John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy were tinkering with the heating system.

We had some snow overnight and the wind kept spreading it around over the roads, such that some stretches were fine, while others were fit for a Red Wings-Rangers game. The past couple of days, I had accompanied Kathy to work so I could run around in the car doing useless errands, but today she ventured out alone. She made it to work driving very slowly along the treacherous mountain passes in the eight miles between our house and her office. (OK, but the road does take a little dip there at that one point.)

She decided to take the “Big Girl” way home on the interstates—something she rarely does. There is a tricky bit where three highways converge and no one ever yields to anyone else lest they appear weak. Some character came whipping past Kathy going about 70 when he hit a hockey rink strategically placed at the merge. He spun violently around, hit the gas and ran up the hillside whereupon clouds of white smoke issued ominously from under his hood. Tree branches festooned the fuselage as he flattened two tires. Undaunted, he slide back down to the highway and tried to continue his mad dash. The car would have none of that, though, and he mercifully gave up and limped to a stop alongside the road.

Her heart in her throat, our terrified heroine wisely eased up on the gas and watched this solo ballet unfold before her, all the time fearing that the crazy driver would carom into her car next. She came home full of her tale of horror on the highways, and regaled our guests with all the details later that evening.

Everyone went home early this year, so it’s a quiet New Year’s. Every year we say why bother to stay up? and every year we’re standing in front of the TV as the ball drops. I wish my readers (all two of you) a year in which you have everything you need, and even a few things you don’t really ‘need’ need; and a year in which you make even more progress in your spiritual journey. And let’s have some fun along the way. See you next year.

It's my birthday

Today is my 59th birthday. This means I am still in my 50’s, in case anyone asks.

So what did I do on my big day? Stayed home from work and napped. Does this sound like something an old person would do? To be fair, I am recovering from a bad cold which went to a sinus infection, as my colds are wont to do. It was a good call, since I do feel better. I saw my regular doctor last night for some antibiotics and that seems to be working.

I am reading “The White Tiger” by Aravind Ariga. It won the Man Booker prize—an award for fiction for writes from the British Commonwealth and Ireland. It took me a while to get into it. My daughter and I have rules for books. Give it a hundred pages—if you can’t get into it by then, forget it. This one was oddly seductive. It draws you in and before you know it, you’re speeding along with the story. Give it a try.

Cardiac News Department: On Monday I have a TEE (transesophageal echocardiogram) scheduled. It’s the third one I’ve done so far. The last one was about ten years ago, though. I do remember you have to gargle with this stuff to freeze your throat, then they spray your throat with something to numb it further, then they sneak up on you and slip a camera down your gullet before you realize they’ve done it.

On Wednesday, I go to the hospital for the ablation procedure. They will try to induce the arrhythmia that typically sends me to the ER. by using my pacemaker to fiddle with my heart’s electrical system. “Fiddle” of course is a technical term. If they can do it, they’ll stick a laser thingie (another technical term) in there and burn out the offending circuits. The doctor is “70%” sure he can do it. If it doesn’t work, I guess they’ll stop and that’s it. I’ll have to ask if they can try again when the rhythm kicks in naturally next time.

Work was so busy lately that I didn’t really think about next week. Now I am free to obsess all I like.

Lazin’ on a sunny afternoon

We went to 7:30 a.m. Mass this morning and saw our friend Kathy in the parking lot. Kathy’s husband died two years ago of ALS. He went very quickly, a victim of a fast moving version of the disease, probably a blessing, but still a very difficult thing for Kathy. How she wept at the gravesite—it was heart rending.

She spends much of the week caring for her preschool grandchildren, but Sundays are especially hard. The day seems to drag on, as she has nothing to look forward to. Knowing this, we asked her about her plans for the day. Grocery shopping seemed to be the highlight, so we invited her out to breakfast with us. We had a great time laughing for about an hour in the restaurant. We asked the server for extra cinnamon on her French toast, and got it. She laughed at our sharing a single breakfast, each taking what the other doesn’t like (my hashbrowns go to Kathy, her sausage to me).

We dropped her off at her house later and that was that. Or it was until we came back from some errands and noticed police cars down in the next block in our street. Being curious cats, we drove down to check it out. When we saw officers with their guns drawn, we skedaddled out of there and came straight home. All this action was happening right in friend Kathy’s backyard, so I called her to see if she was all right.

“Kathy, are you OK?”
“Sure, why?”
Well, there are police with their guns drawn standing on your patio!”
“OMIGOD OMIGOD OMIGOD!”

She said she had been taking a nap on the living room floor when all this started and she was completely unaware of the bizarre happenings. I suggested she might want to get back on the floor. Instead she cracked open the back door to speak to the police. Turns out a teenager in the house next door had threatened to kill the police and blow up the block. The mom and the children are druggies and have acted strangely in the past, but this was more dramatic.

The police asked her to open her garage so they could hide in there, so she hit the remote control for the door. We hung up then, as she promised to let us know what transpired.

Ten minutes later they had the kid in handcuffs and it was all over. She hopes that this incident might be the catalyst to get that family out of the neighborhood, but who knows?

Woke last night to the sound of thunder...

And so we have survived another Fourth of July. If you have to be anywhere on the 4th, you should either be in Boston or Washington DC. Here, people were popping off fireworks long and loudly, way past midnight. Poor Kodiak was beside himself, keeping us up all night as he seemed to be hyperventilating, pacing around our bedroom, going from one side of the bed to the other, breathing huskily into our faces. Phew—talk about dog breath. We were afraid he’d have a heart attack, he was so nervous. The only other thing that bothers him as much is a thunderstorm. In fact, he knows he’s not allowed in the kitchen, but he will come in and plop himself on the kitchen floor, and won’t move no matter how much we berate him. Then we’ll hear some distant thunder and understand.

This week we have big news: four year old Max now wears glasses. They are, of course, very cool. He has rectangular lenses on thin frames, with little images of Spongebob Squarepants on the inside of the ear pieces. The moment he put them on he said, “Mom, everything looks bigger!” Apparently he needs them for more than just reading and driving. He looks very cute in them.

I’ve lately discovered an author named Anita Shreve. Everyone else already knows her—she wrote The Pilot’s Wife. I read her Sea Glass and just finished All He Ever Wanted. I went to the library today and took out The Pilot’s Wife. Might as well read them all. Her characters are compelling and stories spin out in a fascinating way. So far I’ve read twenty-five books this summer. Painting took up this week, but I have lots of time yet to reach the fifty or so I’d like to do.

Phone home...or is it?

We had the best time in New Jersey last weekend! Our trip got off to a rough start though. Here’s what happened. I am not making this up:

This trip was going to cover a thousand miles in just a three day visit. Get there on Saturday, party on Sunday, leave on Monday, so we knew it was going to be tiring. We set off on Saturday morning at about seven, no great rush. The fun started when we were about ten miles from home and Kathy asked me,

“Do you have the cell phone?”
“Um, no. I left it right by the back door. We’re not too far away yet, let’s go back and get it.”
“No, I’m not going back. We’ll just have to do without it.”

So we fussed about that for a while, and finally settled down. One hundred and fifty miles later, I started in my seat, remembering that I had forgotten to do something. I had left some booklets that the lectors would need for Palm Sunday sitting on the dining room table. I had to call the church office to tell them to print the booklets out again! We had to find a phone.

Kathy managed to maintain, I’m sure suppressing a whole bunch of “I told you so’s”, as we pulled off the interstate and into a restaurant parking lot. I poured quarters into a pay phone and couldn’t get it to work. After several tries, I got back into the car and we tried a Holiday Inn down the road.. There was something strange about the hotel though, as we realized there were no guests, just contractors’ vans. They were renovating the place—it was closed. I was getting frantic when Kathy pointed out that there was a Wal-Mart down the hill.

It was my turn to suppress something—my distaste at having to shop in the Heart of Darkness. I left Kathy circling the parking lot while I went in and bravely asked the greeter where the cell phones were. She directed me to Electronics and a very nice salesperson named Shannon. I asked if they had the kind of cell phones you just buy without contracts and such and she said sure. I was standing right in front of them .

“You’ll need one of these and one of these and one of these. Do you need a car charger? And one of these.”

Realizing we were in the middle of our trip, she very nicely called the cell phone company and activated the phone. This all took about twenty minutes, but I wasn’t worried about Kathy—I knew that she would know that something good must be happening if I hadn’t come right back out of the store.

The phone came with a whopping ten minutes on it, so I bought a card with 120 minutes. Shannon said, “See this little triangle on the lcd screen? I can’t add minutes until that little triangle goes away.” Fine, I said, and sixty dollars later, I triumphantly went back to the car with my new communicator.

I used my ten minutes to call the church secretary and explain the problem and asked her to print what I needed and she said sure.

I dutifully read the little book that came with the phone and discovered the “little triangle” meant I was roaming. Well, I was going to be roaming for three days, so this wouldn’t do. We stopped at a rest area and I called the customer service number. Another very nice person was on the other end, but she was very difficult to understand. We both kept shouting “What? What?”, until she was speaking very slowly, as if to an idiot (yes, I suppose I did fit the bill). We finally got my minutes loaded after she made me enter an impossibly long string of random numbers. I’m sure she only did it for fun.

We went tootling down the highway, happily playing with our new toy. I plugged in the charger and left the phone in the console tray.

After a while I went digging in my backpack for something and I pulled out...our Verizon cell phone. Again, Kathy maintained. She refrained from snapping off the turn signal and lunging at me with murderous intent. After a moment of absolute speechlessness, she philosophically remarked, “Well, we always said we needed another phone.”

After wasting hours chasing around after a phone, we finally got to the hotel at about 5pm on Saturday. It was a wonderful place. Our room had a panoramic view of the mountains and was very comfortable. Even though we were tired from the trip, my brother had invited us to his house that night, so he picked me up while Kathy slept. I saw my nieces and sisters and nephews and just sort of chilled for couple hours there.

On Sunday we went to church and the choir was magnificent. They brought in a kettle drum and some brass for Palm Sunday. The cantor had such a wonderful voice, Kathy whispered to me that he could sing on Broadway! I answered that he probably did, since many artists live in North Jersey and work in Manhattan. Later brother Brian told me that actually the man we heard was not good enough for Broadway—he drove down from Connecticut just to sing at this church.

In the afternoon we put on our finery and made our way to the restaurant for the extravaganza. We were celebrating Brian and Gail’s 25th anniversary as well their 50th birthdays, so this was kind of like a wedding reception. The two families pretty much stayed separated, but that was OK because we wanted to visit with our own kind, after all.

I loved seeing everyone doing so well. My one nephew has had internships with newline cinema and has a chance for a good job in the film biz in New York. His brother is a junior (I think) in college. We have five nieces, two in college, two in high school and one teaching in Boston. They are all gorgeous. Pix to follow.

We danced; Kathy got a kick line started during “New York New York”—she characterized it later as doing what other people wish they had to nerve to do anyway. We talked, we ate, some of us drank, including a certain underage nephew, but hey—it’s all in the family. Brian put together a funny and touching Powerpoint of photos of his wife Gail and his family growing up, and each of the girls made a speech about their mom.

At some point, Kathy blew out her knee on the dance floor and could barely walk to the car. That ended our plans to go to ‘afters’ at Brian’s house. We drove back to the hotel, put our feet up and fell asleep.

I wish I could say that the drive home was uneventful. It wasn’t. We were stopped on Route 80 for an hour and a half due to an accident five miles down the road. We were sitting for so long, that people just turned off their engines. After a while, you could see individuals leaving their cars and racing into the woods to go pee. Mind you, there are no leaves on the trees yet, so you had to find an evergreen for protection. Thus, you were screened from our side of the road, but not the other.

When we reached the site of the accident, there was only a mangled guard rail to mark the spot. It struck us then that what was a minor inconvenience for us was a devastating moment for someone else. The embankment dropped straight off at the point, so if a car had gone over the rail, it’s unlikely the people survived. Chagrined at our insensitivity, we said a prayer for the people involved and hoped they would be OK.

We pulled into our driveway about ten hours after we started out, tired but happy that we had been able to go at all and see my Dad and the sibs and their children. The only downer was that our own children could not go, but maybe another time. It was just important to share at least a little time together, check each other out face to face instead of always over the phone or email. I hope it doesn’t take so long for us to do this again.

It happened again

How did this happen? Another birthday. Just like that I’m 56. Seems like only a year ago I was telling you I was 55. If I live to be 110, now I’m more than halfway there. According to McDonald’s, I’m a “senior”. In other places I would be called “middle aged”. How come I don’t feel like either?

They show us pictures of us on TV to appeal to the baby boomers, but I don’t look like them, do I? Maybe I do, but I feel more like an undercover agent, pretending to fit in, while underneath it all, I am someone else entirely different than the person I appear to be. For instance, when I was in college, I would come home in the summer and have to get my hair cut short. All the while, though, I knew I really was the sort of person who had long hair, even if you couldn’t see it anymore. Now I look older than I really am. Gray hair and beard disguise the twenty-something I know I am. I like my appearance though. When I see photos of myself with brown hair, I think how dorky-looking I was. I much prefer the distinguished look.

Now see, what’s this? An envelope with my name on it. Kathy hid my card by my computer where she knew I’d find it. Usually we leave such things on the kitchen table to be discovered later, but here’s mine. Now she’s made me cry. Here is what the card said:

“We’ve come a long way
from the days we were dating,
when it took me ten hours to get ready
and when you stood
fidgeting on my doorstep.

These days, you’re more apt
To find me in a t-shirt and jeans
And you, sacked out on the couch.
Married life has rounded our edges,
Widened our perspective,
And given us the courage to be
Our honest-to-goodness real selves….

But you know what?
I love you now more than ever.
The countless thoughtful things
You do for me are like
Little love poems.
You give me such unconditional
Love and acceptance,
Even when I’m undeserving.
And what gift is better than that?

What we have is not the stuff of fairy tales,
But a lived-in love…
Tested, stretched, comfortable,
And very precious.
So thanks to you,
My wonderful husband,
My heart has found a home…
Forever.”

I just called Kathy at work to thank her. She said when she was reading the card in the store, big tears were rolling down her face, such that the manager (a friend of ours from church) came over to ask if she was OK! She explained that yes, she was fine, but the card had just touched her so.

It helps having someone you love with you—someone who is also frozen in time, a time when everything was possible, a time when you knew that with this person, you could weather anything. To others, we may just be two old people walking into the store holding hands, but to us, we’re nineteen forever, with that same shock of newness and a special familiarity all come together in that touch.

Anniversaries

It gets dark so early now that I almost always wind up walking the dog by streetlight. I’m always struck by all the big blue screens I see flickering in the households I pass on our nightly hike. I get to thinking about how everyone is plugged into the same soporific. We must be entertained. We must be amused. We must be isolated.

We share a common popular culture though. We all watch reruns of Friends, Seinfeld (even if we never saw these shows when they originally ran). There are reality shows that resemble nothing in my particular world; lots of home makeover programs; and channels running old black and white movies and last year’s blockbusters. We just have regular old cable—no hundreds of channels for us—there is plenty for us right there without NFL Ticket or that other stuff. I do wish I could see “Six Feet Under” and some of those other great HBO shows, though. I have to wait for a business trip to a hotel to catch that.

Some people have these huge TV’s—I saw one tonight that must have been four feet wide. And what were they watching? Beavis and Butthead. Sigh.

My mother used to do that in her writing. Make on observation on some subject and remark, “Sigh”. The seventh anniversary of her passing was this week. Hard to believe. She used to mix in all sorts of bits of Irish wit and wisdom, 40’s cultural stuff, snatches of songs into her speech and writing. Just now I was listening to “Prairie Home Companion” and they closed the show with what sounded like an old country song. It had the line “Beautiful beautiful brown eyes—I’ll never love blue eyes again.” Mom used to sing that one line, but I’d never heard the song it came from till now. Kathy says Mom is talking to me…maybe!

Since we only have blue eyes and green eyes in our family, just who was Mom singing to? I remember now--she'd croon that one line to the dog.

Another anniversary slipped past me this week as well—it’s been six years since my artificial heart valve was installed. Woo-hoo! I love that clicking sound. Very comforting, especially at night when I crawl under the quilt and listen to it reverberate through the waterbed. I always send the surgeon a thank you card on the date along with a photo illustrating something I can do thanks to his work (and His work as well). Lately it’s been a photo of Max and me having fun. Gotta get to the card shop tomorrow.

Sensing

As an ISFJ, I must occasionally satisfy my “Sensing” side, that is, the bit of me that wants to work with tools, to be practical, to be outside. How can one do all that at once? Three little words: home improvement project!

When grandson Max was first born, he and his parents lived with us for while. To make some space for them, I cleared out a closet of my dress shirts and pants and then hung them on a length of copper pipe in Kathy’s and my bedroom. I just set one end of the pipe on a bookcase and the other on my dresser. It worked fine. Everything I needed was right there. The arrangement wouldn’t win any design awards, but who sees it anyway?

Later, when we absorbed furniture from Kathy’s mom’s house, I replaced my dresser with a beautiful highboy—the match to the dresser that Kathy has been using for years. There was no room for my clothes rack, so everything went back into a closet in another bedroom. After a while I realized I was using three different rooms to get dressed, with my stuff spread all over the upstairs. I looked for, not exactly an armoire, but something that I could hang my shirts on once again, but there didn’t seem to be anything that would really work for me. So I decided to build one myself.

Overnight I thought about what I wanted, then measured everything and drew a diagram with several views (my father was a civil engineer so I must have picked up something from him). I figured out how much wood I would need and what sort of hardware and then went to Lowe’s at 6am on Labor Day to buy the supplies.

(The intention for the Mass that day was for a good friend of ours who died from Lou Gehrigs’ disease a year ago, and his wife was doing the readings, so I went to church before starting the project. It gave me a chance to pray for help, and of course everything went great.)

I spent the rest of the day in the garage happily sawing, screwing fastening and gluing to my heart’s content, all according to the plan I had drawn. When I was done woodworking, I stained my creation a couple of times and let it sit overnight.

Kathy was very impressed. I, however, wondered why it looked like one of her father’s basement projects and then it came to me—I had used a can of stain that I rescued from his basement after the house had been sold. No wonder it resembled his work—he had used the same stain on a bookcase he built some years ago.

It now sits next to our bed, loaded up with dress shirts—just the way I hoped it would work out. Kodiak just harrumphed when he saw it, since it means he can no longer sprawl out in the little nook by my side of the bed. That’s fine with me, since now I won’t be stepping on his furry self whenever I get up in the night.

Maybe I should call Buzz

I always tell Kathy that I just want to be a normal kid. Whenever I’ve had surgery or gotten put into the hospital for one reason or another, I am anxious to get on with my life and put the physical problems behind me. Over the past few years, it seems that things go smoothly for six months at a crack and then I have another setback. Such is the case now.

After days of pain and hours of tests over the past week, I have been scheduled for surgery on May 11. There is some sort of blockage in my right kidney. They don’t know exactly what it is, so they will go with lasers blasting to take care of whatever they find. Suffice to say, my symptoms are not exactly table talk, so I won’t detail them here.

Working for the state of Ohio has its advantages. I once accumulated over 1100 hours of sick time. I tend to show up for work every day. Wouldn’t you know it? I needed almost all of those 1100 hours when I was out for six months with two open heart surgeries. I’m a little nervous now as there is only about 100 hours showing up in my account. There are about 250 vacation hours stored up, so I could use that if need be.

Max came over tonight. We spent a fun hour or so in his new Buzz Lightyear tent. Kathy found one on sale at the Disney store. Max immediately decided that I was Buzz and he was Woody. He is so serious about our roles. He would pretend to “fall” out of the spaceship tent and I (as Buzz) would have to rescue him from the space aliens. He brought his favorite toys into the tent and we had a riot in there. He makes all my problems disappear with one of his hugs, or a “Don’t worry, Da!”.

I’d appreciate your prayers for May 11.

Tink's Challenge

I'll never approach Tink's eloquence in her "How well do you know Jesus" challenge, but here goes: as she said, you must tell how well you know Jesus, but you cannot refer to anything from the Bible. Thus, it's only your experience that counts.

He has brought me through two open heart surgeries unscathed. One is enough to put you into a stroke or some other complication, and I had to have two of them. He granted me many tiny miracles as I picked my way through the minefield of recovery. Whenever some issue would crop up, I would turn it over to Him, and He would smooth the way.

He has given me countless chances to witness, as a reader in church. I love this passage from Isaiah 50--"The Lord has given me a well trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them." It's never a chore, but a blessing, to proclaim the Word of God at Mass, and I am grateful for that chance.

A while ago I posted about the Jesus is lost prayer and it belongs in this post as well, as even mundane things such as finding lost keys count. It doesn't have to be an earthshaking miracle of the sort likely to wind up on CNN, because after all, according to 1Kings 19:11-13, the Lord was not in the heavy wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the tiny whispering sound. In the end, I suppose that is how I know Him--by that tiny whispering sound by which He shows me the way and offers to take away my pain and my worry.

(Uh oh, I think I broke the rule about referring to the Bible, but we're not being graded, are we Tink?)