in so many words

Last Saturday (June 21) we had some big thunderstorms that came through our area, and the lightning strikes from the storms started fires in the wooded hills and mountains surrounding our town. In fact, lots of fires started - over 100 different fires in our county, and over 600 in this part of the state. By the middle of the week we felt like we were surrounded by fires, and the air had gotten so smoky that our air quality was considered hazardous. By Thursday the wind had started to pick up, but that was a mixed blessing… while the wind cleared out a lot of smoke and improved our air quality, it hampered the firefighters’ efforts to contain the fires. There have been a few homes lost on our area, with thousands of acres of forest burned. In some remote forest areas where there are no structures threatened the fire authorities are letting the fires burn because fire departments are spread thin and don’t have the resources to fight all of the fires. As of today most of the fires are not contained, and smoke continues to surround us… my son took the above photo from his front yard last night.

And our weather forecast for this weekend - thunderstorms.

‘Cause I’m smokin’, baby, baby

Back in the middle of May, I caught a head cold. No big deal, I thought, it’ll be over in a few days. But it wasn’t… a week later I was still blowing my nose and coughing. That’s OK, I thought, I usually get over these things quickly…just a few days more and I’ll feel fine. Another week goes by… still blowing my nose and coughing. But I’m thinking that it’s just a little bit of a tough cold, and I’ll be OK in another few days. Now, in the midst of my illness, Emily and I hosted a family reunion with all our kids and her parents and sister, and that kept me busy and preoccupied for the Memorial Day weekend - in fact I took extra days off work, so I had a nice little mini-vacation, and I thought it would be good for me to be off work and rest. Well, I was off work, but with 14 extra people in our home, there wasn’t much rest for anybody. By the time that weekend was over I wasn’t feeling any better and had been sick for over two weeks. So I started back to work - I had been working while I was sick - and I began to think that I really needed some rest to help me feel better. So I worked a couple of half-days, going home early to an afternoon nap, but I was starting to feel even more tired, and I was amazed at the amount of “fluid” constantly being produced by my sinuses that needed to be blown out of my nostrils. But now whenever I blew my nose, in addition to the rivers of viscous mucus flowing out, I was also starting to feel pain behind my eyes, and that pain developed into a headache that felt like it was pounding the inside of my forehead every time I coughed or blew my nose. By now I had had this cold for over three weeks, which is not a good thing, and Emily was starting to suspect something more than a cold. It was time to visit my doctor, and he confirmed Emily’s suspicions: I had a sinus infection. He prescribed a 5-day dose of Levaquin which, although it is a bit expensive, is a very effective antibiotic. I just finished my treatment and I’m still a little tired, but my head is all cleared up and the coughing has finally stopped. And best of all, my mucous membranes have cut back on their production of extraneous amounts of nasal secretions.

And I didn’t even say “snot”.

Fifteen years ago today the woman I had been married to for 17 years moved out, leaving me and our two kids. That was a very traumatic time and for the next few months all I wanted to do was to try and save my marriage. But I discovered that if one marriage partner no longer wants to be married, there isn’t much of a marriage to save.

A lot has happened in 15 years, and some of it I would have never guessed. Fifteen years ago, I never would have thought that I would:

1. Be divorced.
2. Be a single parent.
3. Be able to live contently through ten years of being single.
4. Lose both of my parents within 12 years.
5. Enjoy flying.
6. Find myself drinking Margaritas with my friend Tom at Papas and Beer in Ensenada, Mexico.
7. Be employed in the computer industry, about which I knew almost nothing in 1993.
8. Enjoy being a grandfather.
9. Spend a 4th of July on an Army base in Kosovo.
10. Sleep at a hostel in Zurich, Switzerland.
11. Own (and enjoy driving) a Honda Accord.
12. Be married a second time.
13. Honeymoon at the Hotel del Coronado.
14. Be a step-dad.
15. Raise another teen-aged daughter.

Or be married to an Africa girl.

A few weeks ago Emily and I were driving through town and stopped at an intersection. On the corner there were a few women, dressed in black and standing quietly while holding signs in protest of the war in Iraq. I later discovered that these women are part of an organization called Women In Black and that is one of the ways their group protests, by standing in silence dressed in black. A couple of weekends later, on another street corner, there was a small group of people holding up more signs protesting the Iraq war. This second group were dressed in normal multi-colored attire and were waving their signs, and some were even shouting at the passers-by. This is probably a lot more typical of anti-war protesting here in America, but the thing about this kind of protest, no matter how you are dressed or how noisy you are, is that it really doesn’t do anything to stop the war. Sure, the protesters like to say that they are raising awareness. But it’s a pretty safe bet that everyone driving by already knows about the war and already has an opinion about it, an opinion that isn’t going to be changed by a few Magic Marker signs being waved around over on the side of the road. So really, the only awareness that is raised is the awareness of whatever group is protesting - basically, it’s just advertising for the protesting group/organization. And it has always seemed to me that if these groups really want to make an impact on worldwide violence, protesting in America is only addressing part of the problem. These groups should also be protesting on street corners in Baghdad, Kabul, Bukavu, Harare, Tehran or Beirut. Of course, it’s much safer to protest in America - you can stand all day on any street corner in America and the worst thing that might happen is that some right-wing war hawks might shout out an F bomb while driving by, while on the other hand you probably wouldn’t last 20 minutes standing on a street corner in Mosul carrying peace signs and dressed in black. Nonetheless, I have a difficult time taking these street-side war protesters seriously, because I think that if they really wanted to make a difference, they won’t be standing in relative safety on a street corner distracting uninterested drivers who are trying to simultaneously drive and talk/text on their cell phones. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to stop war. War is hell, right? Isn’t that what eleven seasons of M*A*S*H taught us? (Actually, most of us realized that war was bad well before M*A*S*H - what M*A*S*H really taught us was that we were supposed to find it humorous that a narcissistic alcoholic chauvinist was allowed to sexually objectify women - but I digress.) I hate war and want to see it ended - I want the U.S. to be able to leave Iraq with no further violence there after we’ve left. I want to see peace in the Congo and an end to the horrible travesties against the women there. I want to see peace in Israel, in Afghanistan, in Sudan. I want to see Albanians and Serbians living together in peace with no threat of war. I would like peace to encircle the Earth for centuries to come…

But that’s not going to happen. No matter how much you and I want that, there is not going to be that kind of peace on Earth. Even if we convinced everyone we know, and eventually convinced our whole country, even if all countries and nations and governments decided to stop war, even if the whole world agreed… we still would not be able to sustain a real peace. Even if the whole of the Earth, in a moment of united humanity, decided to stop war, we could only stop war for the briefest of moments. And that’s because once the whole world had visualized world peace and put down its weapons and stopped fighting, once everyone had stopped the wars and the violence, once we had attained that covenanted moment of global peace… someone, somewhere would take advantage of this peace for his or her own selfish gain. Someone, somewhere would try to take control or steal or harm another or murder or rape. It may not be you or me, or anyone we know, but without a doubt, somewhere, somebody would certainly do this - and again we would not have peace. And this sin of selfishness - of putting one’s own desires ahead of the needs of others - is buried deep in our human nature. It’s in all of us, although most of us try to control it. But it will always be there within us to some extent, and there will always, always be some who do not care to control it, and that is why we will never have true peace as long as humans are living on this planet.

Now you may think that I’m being cynical, that I’m looking at the worst of our human nature, that I’m a philosophical pessimist, a naysayer and a really bad egg. Except for maybe the egg thing, I’m really not those other things - I believe in the “better angels of our nature”, that there is immense good in most people everywhere, that most people want to live in peace, that many people from all over the globe would help someone in distress or share out of what they have for the less fortunate. In my life, I have been the recipient of that kind of goodness, and my belief in the good of human nature is based on my experiences. But, like many of you, I’ve also experienced the ugliest underside of human nature, and we all experience it even more now that the Internet brings stories and pictures from all over the world into our homes and offices. This dark side of humanity has always been with us, as far back as history can reveal, and it will always be with us. This isn’t about declaring that the glass is half empty - this is about looking realistically at our strengths and flaws, and preparing ourselves for both the best and the worst in people. And this is what convinces me, in spite of the incredible human capacity for goodness, that short of the Second Coming of Christ we will never have peace on Earth.

But that doesn’t mean that we should give up and wallow in hopelessness. I try to remember that catch phrase from the 60’s: “Think Globally, Act Locally”. I can’t personally feed the starving Nigerian children, I can’t end the fighting in Iraq and Darfur, and there’s very little I can do about the atrocities happening in the Congo (yes, I know that I can give money to help most of these causes; however, actually going to these people and making an immediate difference in their lives is beyond what most of us are able to do). But I can support and donate food to the homeless shelter here in my town, I can buy a sandwich for the lady sitting on the ground next to the exit of a shopping center, I can offer a ride to a safe place to the woman who just had a fight with her boyfriend and is walking down my street at night carrying her suitcases, I can buy a pizza as a way of saying “Welcome to the Neighborhood” for my new neighbors who just moved in, and I can buy a fan belt and install it for a UCSB student who’s Volkswagen broke down at a dark, lonely Highway 101 offramp. And I can decide to respond peacefully even when I’m wronged, like I was recently by the jerk who kept my daughter’s $50 deposit after she decided not to buy his car. Even though I often feel that selfishness welling up inside me, the desire to either get ahead or get even, the temptation to put what I want ahead of what might help others, in spite of all of this - in spite of myself - I can try to do what I can to bring peace to my small portion of the world. And I think that that may be the most peace on Earth that most of us will ever know.

All we are saying…

Emily and I were eating out at a restaurant the other night, having a nice dinner and enjoying our time alone. We both work full-time 40-hour a week jobs and it’s always nice when we get an evening to ourselves, so we were at our table eating dinner and talking, when suddenly there was a commotion in another area of the restaurant. Several of the restaurant’s servers had gathered around a table of diners, and the servers began to sing the “Happy Birthday” song (you know - “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday Dear Whomever… yada yada me too”). So the servers start singing, loud and out of tune, and everyone in the restaurant could hear them and turned to watch. To anyone in the States who has ever visited a nice restaurant (and we’re not talking Denny’s here) in the last 3 decades, this is no surprise. I remember the first time I saw this happen - back in the mid-seventies I was having dinner with some friends, I believe that we were at a Marie Calendars restaurant, and the servers sang “Happy Birthday” to someone at another table. And my friends and I thought this was a great idea, funny and entertaining, not just for the birthday person but for everyone else as well. I don’t know where this tradition started, but soon most restaurants were doing this. Many restaurants began to customize the song being sung, like singing “Happy Birthday” to the tune of the theme from The Flintstones, and the different variations have been quite entertaining for many years. But in the last few years I have been feeling that, after 30+ years of hearing “Happy Birthday” sung in restaurants, I don’t find it quite so entertaining anymore. In fact, it’s getting a bit annoying. Really, think about it… you’re sitting in the restaurant with family/friends, talking and enjoying each other’s company, and suddenly the waiters and waitresses begin singing loudly at a table near you, interrupting your meal/conversation. You have to stop talking and wait until they finish, especially if they are singing close to your table. And then several minutes later, they might do it again at another table because, lo and behold, there is more than one person at the restaurant celebrating their birthday on the same day. I’ve been in restaurants where the servers sang the same song to three different tables during the course of my meal, and I’m sure that in busy restaurants it happens more than that.

OK, I know this really isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of life, but I like to lighten things up sometimes and not always blog about divorce or the death of a friend. And I’m really not being a crotchety old fart here, I just think that restaurants have been doing this for quite a while now, and it’s become predictable and cliché. I think it’s time for something new - after all, it’s the 21st century… isn’t there a better way for restaurants to entertain their guests? And I also think it’s time for us to be able to eat our dinners in peace and quiet. Or at least Emily and I would like that.

They say it’s your birthday… well it’s my birthday too, yeah

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my spouse.

Several years ago I noticed that the number 5 seemed to follow me around - I realized that it turns up at several places in my life in random ways that are out of my control. Now before I go any further, I want to clarify that I am not preaching numerology, and I don’t believe that our lives are controlled or guided by the study of numbers. But even in the Bible there are numbers that have significance, like 3, 7 and 12, and that causes me to wonder if the number 5 has some significance in my life. Maybe someone who studies statistics could tell me the whys and wherefores of the random appearance of the number 5 in my life. Or you could say it is just circumstance or coincidence, but I’m not so sure and besides, I don’t believe in coincidence. So here’s my “List of 5″:

I was born in 1955.
I was born on the 15th of the month.
There are 5 letters in both my first name and my last name.
My dad was one of 5 children in his family.
I was one of 5 children in my family of origin.
The address of the house where I grew up contained a 5.
My drivers license number contains a 5.
My Social Security Number contains three 5s.
My daughter is 5 years older than my son.
My wife is 5 years younger than me.
She was born on the 5th of the month.
Between us, we have 5 children.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5… let’s go for a drive

My wife Emily is talented in many ways, and being an artist is one of those ways. She loves to paint watercolors, and I think that she is very good at it. She has a personal blog where she sometimes posts photos of her watercolor paintings, but today she decided to create a blog dedicated to her artwork, called Art Endeavors. Each post is a brief description of one of her paintings along with a small photo.

When I met Emily, she was very shy about letting anyone see her paintings. Before we were married she lived in a small townhouse down the street from me, and in her garage she had a little desk set up where she painted. I was visiting one day and we went into the garage to look for something. I noticed the watercolors on the desk and complemented her on her painting. She immediately stepped in between me and the desk and began turning over her paintings so I couldn’t see them. So for her to put up this new blog, publishing her paintings to the world, is evidence of the freedom she now feels. And I think that her freedom is reflected in her art. And I am proud of her.

My new year hasn’t started off quite the way I would have liked. The week of Christmas I had a head cold - no big deal, just a lot of blowing my nose and mainly that tired feeling you get when your body is fighting off an infection. So I spent that week working for a few hours, then sleeping most of the afternoon, then getting up to eat, then going back to bed - repeat for about 5 days. By the weekend before New Year’s I could tell that my cold was clearing up and I was feeling better - except I started to notice that when I blew my nose, I felt a little dizzy. On New Year’s Day I woke up dizzy, without any nose blowing, and by evening I was feeling dizzy even when I was simply sitting down on the couch. The next day I was so dizzy I couldn’t walk straight, so my daughter Rachel drove me to my doctor’s office. I discovered that it is not uncommon to have symptoms of vertigo after a cold - I guess the cold virus can get into your inner ear system and wreak havoc with your equilibrium. It surprised me, though, because never in my life have I had any problems with dizziness - for example, I have always been able to ride and enjoy roller-coasters without any side effects, and I don’t get seasick or carsick. I used to do my own car repairs, and never got dizzy all those times I banged my head on miscellaneous auto body parts, so I am a bit surprised now to experience a level of dizziness that incapacitates me. My friend Mark says that now I know what it’s like for him trying to ride “Space Mountain” at Disneyland, although I still don’t see that as a good reason to ride “It’s A Small World”. Anyway, this morning I am a bit less dizzy, so I’m hoping that I’ll be feeling normal by Monday.

His name was Mr. Siqueiros. I eventually discovered that his first name was Leo - Leo Siqueiros. And he walked fast - very fast. Being only in fifth grade, I would practically have to jog to keep up with his pace. But that’s not the only thing I remember about Mr. Siqueiros. I remember that he liked me. I don’t know why he liked me, or what he saw in me that caused him to show me favor. Perhaps he was someone who simply enjoyed working with kids. Perhaps my dark hair and brown eyes reminded him of himself as a young boy, or of a son that he wanted someday. Perhaps he could tell that I didn’t have anyone at home to encourage me. I don’t know which of these it was, if any. But he liked me, he encouraged me, he helped me. He went out of his way to help me, sometimes doing things like giving me rides to school events or having his wife make a sandwich for me (although one time she made me an “American-cheese-and-mayonnaise” sandwich, and since I don’t care for American cheese I couldn’t finish the sandwich, but I was too self-conscientious to admit I didn’t like the sandwich, so when Mr. Siqueiros and I were in his car I nibbled at the sandwich until a moment when he wasn’t looking and then I crammed the sandwich in the space between my seat and the passenger door, where I’m sure it was found at a later date. Sorry, Mr. Siqueiros). When I won a prize - $20 gift certificate at a craft store - for helping with a class project, he drove me to the store in his Dodge and waited while I picked my items. When my fifth grade year ended, I secretly hoped that Mr. Siqueiros would teach 6th grade the following school year. But he left our school, which disappointed me until I discovered that he had transferred to the local junior high as one of the Spanish teachers. So I had him again as my teacher in the 7th grade. But by that time I was a teenager preoccupied with teenaged things, and although I didn’t spend as much time with Mr. Siqueiros as I had in 5th grade, he always had a smile for me when I saw him the the school hallways. In 9th grade I moved on to high school and lost track of Mr. Siqueiros. Years later I heard that he might have moved to Arizona. Where ever he ended up, I have never forgotten him or his effect on me, which I think may be one of the best things anyone could say about a teacher.

And people have asked me why I walk so fast…..

My daughter Cyndi thinks I was a pot-head when I was a teenager. I wasn’t - I really didn’t smoke very much marijuana at all and I never did hard drugs - but because of a couple of stories from my past she has the impression that I was a real reefer addict. I do admit, though, that some stories from my teenaged years probaby fueled her imagination. One of these stories is about the time I smoked pot with Don Johnson. Yes, the guy from Miami Vice, although I knew him before the TV show made him famous. It all starts with my high school friend Steve. I always enjoyed blaming things on Steve when we were young, so putting this all on him now is pleasantly nostalgic.

After I left high school mid-term I was out of a job, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do to keep myself busy and make money until my first semester of college started that fall. But Steve had a proposal for me. Steve’s dad is the actor L.Q. Jones, and L.Q. was also a producer. He had previously produced two or three low-budget movies, and in the spring of 1973 was starting production of a sci-fi movie tentatively titled “Rover Blood”. The movie was based on a short story by Harlan Ellison and was being filmed in the Mojave Desert. Steve asked me (and several of our friends) to come out to the filming site and act as extras during Spring Break. I actually wasn’t very interested at first - it was a +2-hour drive to get to the site - but Steve finally persuaded me to go, even lending me a car to drive… an early-70s Toyota Corolla that overheated outside of Victorville and had to be patched together with duct tape. So I found my way to the location, which was out in the desert about 50 miles past the middle of nowhere.

The first day I arrived on the set I recognized the actor who was starring in the film. It was Don - I had seen him in a movie called “Zachariah“, and he was impressed that I remembered him from that movie. I spent the first week helping out around the set, including acting as a sort of ad hoc personal assistant for Don. When the first week was over, the other teenagers headed back to school but since I was an unemployed high school grad, I asked L.Q. if I could stay on as a production assistant, and he hired me. I did everything from making beer runs for the cast/crew to hiding in bushes holding microphones during scenes to playing dead bodies. My biggest scene was towards the beginning of the movie… I was in a gunfight with Don. I had him pinned down, but he shot me in the mouth and got away. It’s a pretty short scene, and there was a longer scene that was shot where my dead body was propped up as a decoy, but it’s like they say in the business, your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.

So for the next 5 weeks I worked on the film crew, and since I was basically a gopher I did whatever anyone wanted me to do. One day Tom the Assistant Director asks me to take a car and drive Don into Barstow, the city closest to our filming location, where Don had left his car for repairs. So I pick up the keys and head for the car, thinking I was going to be Don’s chauffeur into Barstow. But Don walks up to the car and asks “Where’s the keys?”. So I hand over the keys and we get in, with Don driving, and head for town. I would like to point out here that the car we were using belonged to an older female production assstant, and was a very-faded-greenish mid-60s Buick station wagon in a moderate state of disrepair that looked like it hadn’t been driven over 60 MPH in a long time. But Don was a very high-energy type of person, and he got in the car and got it going as fast as it would go, which I believe was around 90-95 MPH, and we headed down the long desert road into Barstow. The faster we went, the louder the old Buick rattled, although at this point I was close to being scared spitless and had stopped paying attention to the random but consistant nuts-and-bolts noises. After we had driven a couple of miles, Don pulls out a plump doobie and lights it up, takes a big toke, and passes it over to me. So we’re crusing along at a high rate of speed in an older vehicle that is in need of maintenance, smoking grass, talking and laughing, when Don suddenly says “Do you hear that?”. I listen, but all I hear is the wind blasting into my open window at almost 100 MPH, and even if there were no wind, the rattling of the car would have blocked out any other noises. I indicate that I don’t really hear anything, but Don insists that he is hearing something, so he slows the car down and we pull over and stop. We get out and circle the car, looking for indications of something amiss, when Don notices a lump on the inside tread of one the rear tires. So we jack up the car and pull the tire off to inspect it, and discover that it is mostly bald and has a spot that had grown a rather large bubble where the tread used to be, and the bubble looked like a ripe zit about to pop. Despite our recent intake of a psychoactive drug, we were very aware of the possible ramifications of the tire’s bubble, which Don pretty much summed up by saying “It’s a good thing I heard that or we’d be assholes and elbows all over this road!”. So we pull out the spare and mount it, throw the bubble tire in the back, and hit the road, again doing 90-95 MPH all the way into Barstow.

So I worked on the set for the next few weeks and then I was unemployed again. And Don and I never got together for more doobie parties, in spite of what Cyndi may think. I believe the next job I took was with a private security company, sitting in their office all night long and watching the alarm panel for a break-in at their subscribers’ businesses while playing guitar to keep myself awake. I didn’t last very long at that job - I was bored to tears, but then again there was no way it could be as exciting as driving with Don Johnson, or as interesting as making a movie, which by the way was finally released in 1975 as
A Boy And His Dog.