death penalty commission hearing

The joint hearing room in Annapolis was frigid yesterday. When I left, after only three hours of testimony, my feet felt like small blocks of ice and my fingers would not straighten out. I sat a few seats away from the daughter of a murder victim. Her parents were horribly murdered over 25 years ago and she’s been waiting this long quarter century, attending every hearing and court session, for the murderers to be executed. She’s in her 80s now and she will say, if asked, that she is waiting for justice. I don’t fault her for framing the death penalty that way, she occupies a unique and terrible position. But the death penalty is justice for no one – not the victim, not the survivors, not the killer, not the community. It was an exercise in respect to sit near her and her husband, ever reminding me to be respectful in my treatment of the issue. It must be terribly painful for them to attend these hearings as most of the expert, and even citizen, witnesses speak eloquently against what she so fervently wants. She knows that she has several supporters in the room. But, although they are outnumbered, they remain current practice – even if in name only. Repealing existing law is always far more difficult than not putting it there in the first place.

sarah palin

The election is two months from yesterday. We will soon be rid of the jackass who came into the presidency appointed by five supreme court justices. They made a mockery of the democratic system – stopped the recount and then ruled that it could have gone forward but alas, the deadline had passed.

This Palin woman makes me very nervous. Her picture with him on the official McCain website is the photo from her governor website – they didn’t even get a picture taken together. Leaning into the camera, she wears a beehive hairdo, tailored suits with cinched waists, rimless glasses with dark arms, and yes, she looks like a Tina Fey parody of someone. Her five children all under 19 are supposed to be attended to only on her terms (look, I have a big happy family) and not in any sense of reality (17 year old pregnant daughter not exactly a poster child for abstinence only sex ed in school). Her record is malicious – she fires, or has fired, anyone who gets in her way (including a state trooper who used to be married to her sister). She lies and twists facts, as do they all, about the things she brags about – yes she turned down the bridge to nowhere, but she kept the funding. She is a barracuda. But one problem is that in this misogynistic world it remains difficult to debate a woman. And Joe Biden has a big mouth. He will need special training and have to be exceptionally careful. It’s so easy to look like a bully, and she will milk that for everything she can. She is almost more frightening than McCain, if only because of her severely limited experience. No foreign policy experience, even though she is governor of the state closest to Russia – and you cannot run the state department like a small town in Alaska. I have, yes – literally , been having nightmares about her.

prison break-in, part IV

After five hours of shooting I was exhausted. There was still so much to shoot, but my judgment was failing and my knees would no longer go up and down as requested. Although it didn’t really seem like it from where we were, daylight would soon be gone. And we still wanted some outside shots (always taken last in case of discovery). We wound our way back out through the tunnels, past Phantom’s threat, and stepped out into the fresher air. By the time we headed back into the woods dusk was creeping. If not for my companion’s expert sense of direction in the bush, I think we might we wandering around still. I led us in the opposite direction – apparently my interior compass works only on city streets. Finally we emerged right back where we’d entered the forest, and within 15 minutes it was dark. It was kind of a big “phew.”

It’s a great feeling – you imagine that you’ve really pulled off a secret mission, getting into and out of a complex without detection, especially when security monitors the grounds. The wait to see the pictures is almost unbearable and we usually pull out our cameras at some point on the way home to look. Although we’re filthy and exhausted, we always feel satisfied and excited.

Next mission in two weeks. I don't know why, but blogger keeps blowing out the color in the photos (any help appreciated!). But you can see them here.
(Tomorrow: Sarah Palin, she’s been giving me nightmares.)

prison break-in, part III

We went to work doing recon on the buildings. My companion is a much more diligent scout than I and she went deep into the buildings. I’m trying to learn to be a better explorer, but I’m so eager to start shooting I can barely contain myself. The main hall in which we found ourselves was filled with interesting things to photograph: a guard box was flanked by two low rows of visiting stools – the windows between the sides boarded up, seven or eight doors lead from the hall – at least three of them permanently locked, the others wide open, the mess hall faced the box, an observation room one floor up looked out on both rooms. I wanted to eat our lunch sandwiches in the mess hall, but it was too filthy – coated with dust, grime, and rust.

We stayed in the buildings for about five hours altogether. Stacks of file drawers filled with old records were piled by a window in the recreation hall. X-rays littered the infirmary wing. The kitchen freezers were marked supplies, milk box, juice box, and meat box. Too close to the end we discovered the main tiers in what was probably the oldest building on the campus. The cells were tiny, far too small to house a human being. I could reach out my arms and touch both walls, one floor had two beds to a cell. Much had been removed already from the prison, it was to be torn down. But much still remained. The sun moved across our canvas as we went from floor to floor.

More than once we felt as though we weren’t alone. Both of us were certain we heard footfalls and voices. We found a crowbar in the entry hall and carried it with us for a little while. Afterward we figured that whoever was in the building had heard us, thought we belonged, and fled before being discovered by us. On the way in through the dank tunnels, and in many other rooms, we’d seen a tag by someone named “phantom.” In the underground darkness he’d spray painted on an electrical cabinet “in here, you’re prey.” Neither of us mentioned until we were out and away how creepy it was, but we were both thinking of it as we strained to identify noises in the distance.

prison break-in, part II

Getting into the buildings was a more difficult challenge. Not only was every door we tried locked, but we kept going down passageways between buildings that dead-ended in imposing stone walls topped, also, with razor wire. A close maze of trailers had been laid out next to one of the main buildings. At first I thought we were looking at construction trailers, but quickly it became evident that they’d been there a long time and were built to house inmates. We extricated ourselves from the labyrinth and made our way in a large arc around the building complex. We’d need another point of attack. I think we walked through what had once been an exercise yard, the vegetation was high, and found what was left of a road leading around and down. More locked doors, and windows – a usual point of attack for break-ins – were all barred. It was, after all, a prison. Finally, in what looked like the hospital building, a door leading downstairs off its hinges. We descended into the bowels of the building, pipes, dirt floors, cut off from any outside light. Just keep walking, we knew, and usually such tunnels would emerge into some part of the building. And it did. Coming up out of Alice’s rabbit hole, we found ourselves in what looked like the administration building. It, as we suspected, was connected to a prison building, and it, as we hoped, was connected to other prison buildings. We were inside.

Most interior doors stood ajar, many removed from their hinges or with the locking mechanism cut out. The doors to our prison were thrown open.

A building unattended deteriorates swiftly. Many think that no activity would be good for a building, nobody to cause any damage. But just the opposite is true. Once a window is broken – and a window will always be broken – wind and rain wreck havoc. Water is the enemy of order. Paint peels quickly, leaving an expanding layer of chips on the walls and floors. Papers are blown around, wood and even metal begin to decay, animals get in the building and live and die, vandals rip out anything that was left and tag the walls with territory marking graffiti, furniture is rifled through, plant life takes hold. Rust, mold, dirt, even sunlight rapidly eat away the thin veneer of order that contains our lives.

prison break-in, part I

Yesterday we broke into a prison. We had advice from others who’d been there on the best places to enter. But when we arrived in the manicured community we found a Labor Day Weekend block party just exactly at the intersection we needed to depart from for the short trek back into the woods to the prison fence. Children were hopping round everywhere like crickets. Adults were glaring at us as though illegal aliens might shortly invade their picture perfect day and require escorting off the premises. We drove around looking for another entry point; none was visible, but we did find a park that backed up onto the woods about a quarter mile up the road. The park’s lot, and all the surrounding dead end streets (that’s how you can tell an exclusive community) had temporary no parking signs tacked to naked birch stakes and pounded forcefully into the ground. They did not want anyone who didn’t belong taking part in their local festivities. What had we been thinking that a holiday weekend would be good for an adventure because people would be away? What?

We changed into our exploring clothes in the park’s completely empty lot and left the car in front of a house where we hoped the inhabitants would not summon the police to investigate our out of state tag. Then we walked back into the woods. As we trudged I had the nagging feeling that making our way back might be difficult; there were no landmarks and it was impossible to tell what direction we were going. Eventually we encountered the first layer of fencing, but the prison was still beyond our sight. That first fence was high, at least 20 feet, the links were small and it was topped with razor wire that still looked as though it’d been put up yesterday. We knew that somewhere there was a hole in the fence, but the grounds map was in the car. We walked a length in one direction and then in the opposite direction. Finally, around a corner, was the large enough for a hippopotamus hole. Great. Second layer, we were sure there had to be a simple way in. This fencing was temporary, put up to protect the construction site. The uprights anchored in concrete blocks, the links the standard larger size. And off to the left was an open gate. We were on the prison grounds.

party

Terrific mojito party last night at upsidedownhippo. Goblin was in wonderful form demonstrating her fully healed mobility. I wish I’d brought more Obama buttons to distribute, I easily gave away the six I brought along. One partygoer had a secret theory that McCain picked Palin to throw the election. Somehow I doubt that. I see her now on his official website which is, itself, so packed with billboard crap it looks like a cheesy commercial site. The blue they’ve picked is a wishy washy turquoise and the busyness of the front page makes the site look like something McCain himself might have built in an intro to web design short course. There she is, her hair in a tight conservative up-doo, looking like a parody of a soccer/hockey mom. Nervous smile, leaning forward, staring eagerly into the lens. Although many of us will say he’s shot himself in the foot, we need to learn from the last two elections to never make simple assumptions.

veep choice

Sarah Palin is John McCain’s vice presidential selection. I suppose he thinks she will bring on board the disaffected Hillary supporters. I find it somewhat insulting since she’s opposed to pretty much everything Hillary stood for. About the only thing they have in common are the breasts and vagina. However, democrats underestimate her at their peril. She’s young, strongly conservative, attractive, has executive experience, and can present a terrific narrative. Furthermore, it’s very difficult for men to debate women. We’ll see how she does in the carbon-arc glare of a national campaign. She may have vulnerabilities we don’t yet know, she may become a star. We’ll see.

corn

Ever since reading Omnivore’s Dilemma I’ve felt discouraged whenever I shuck corn. Having learned that there is a piece of silk for each kernel I just know there’ll be no getting it clean.

Beau Biden

Glued to the TV watching the democratic convention, I was enormously moved last night watching Beau Biden introduce his father, the vice presidential nominee. Beau told the story of the automobile accident that occurred between Biden’s election and the time he took his first oath of office. The accident killed Joe Biden’s wife and 1-year old daughter and left the two boys seriously injured. He wanted to step away from the senate seat he was about to take as the youngest senator ever elected. But of course the old lions of the senate, Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, talked him into taking his place. The story was emotional and now, as we all know, even more than 35 years later, its impact can still be felt. I expected the shot of Jill, Joe Biden’s current wife, sniffing back a tear. And the brief brush of Michelle Obama felt a little gratuitous. But I did not expect the shot of Jon Stewart wiping a tear away. That was an odd surprise.

However this is not what moved me. I was sad for his story, yes – such a thing is always tragic. What touched my soul deeply was what he said next. Five years later, he said, they “Dad, my brother and I, married my mom Jill.” My heart heard him say “mom” and I felt a rush of gratitude for someone who understands. My mother married my father when I was five, after my mother had died very young of cancer. She gave birth to my two brothers. I have never called her my step-mother, nor called my brothers half-brothers. Others sometimes insist on naming the distinction, but these words are meaningless to me. In fact I find them offensive. They seem to call into question the relationships, questioning not only their closeness but their validity. This woman is my mother. These men are my brothers. The fact that blood may not tie us to one another is inconsequential. We made our lives together and not one of us every thinks for a moment that we are not “related” to one another. Relationships are what we make them. Those other words are only what the culture dictates by terminology.

convention II

Hillary Clinton’s classy act tonight brought tears to my eyes. It was better, even, than her insistent speech last night. I never thought I would see in my lifetime a serious candidate for the presidential nomination who was a woman, or a person of color. Never. And now here we are. Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination was historic. But no one ever really believed she and Walter Mondale would win that election. Running against the hugely popular actor turned acting head of state their chances were measured in a thimble. But this is real. This intellectual powerhouse will be the next president. Shattering the image of president as a guy you’d like to have a beer with, this is a person of many dimensions. Always, always, misogyny is stronger than racism – Shirley Chisholm my congressperson from NYC – who ran for president in 1972 said she always felt more discrimination based on her gender than on her race. It is a fight we must continue. Progress is happening, the majority of delegates at the convention this year are women – 100 years after the first five women delegates attended a convention in Denver. But for the moment, this moment, this man is the right candidate.

Rest in Peace, Rachel

I first met Rachel King during my very first abolitionist event. I participated in a civil disobedience action at the Supreme Court on January 17, 1997 – the twentieth anniversary of the execution of Gary Gilmore. There were 18 of us – we called ourselves the DC 18 – and Rachel was one of the support staff who remained on the outside. She was an attorney, but was mostly there as a photographer. But she’d broken her foot about a week earlier. Hobbling around was hard and carrying her camera bag was even harder. She wasn’t necessarily graceful about the entire situation, but her foot was bad, the situation was difficult, few of us knew each other, and making requests in that environment was tricky.

Rachel and I struck up an email correspondence almost immediately after that and the emails were deep revelations of the nature of both our connections to the movement. We connected instantly. When she came down to attend the first session of our journey through the DC courts she stayed with me. I was shocked to see her, even though she’d warned me that she’d accomplished one of the things on her list of things she wanted to do before she died – shave her head. In fact, Sam Sheppard, son of Dr. Sam Sheppard the man on whom The Fugitive is based, did the shaving for her. I was impressed with her celebrity hairstyle but it made her head enormous. And cold. I had to lend her several hats and I wondered out loud about her timing. The dead of winter is not the best time for head shaving.

This was the beginning of a fast friendship that lasted the dozen years until now. Last night came the news that she’d finally lost her battle with breast cancer. She died in her home in Maine surrounded, yes, by friends and family. Only 45 years old. The abolitionist community, to which she was completely dedicated, will miss her sorely.

Convention

Well Olympics jail is over and I’m now in Democratic Convention jail with a kicker from the US Open in case there’s a break in the Convention schedule. I’m such a sap, I love hearing all the hopeful speeches talking about how we’re going to make a difference. It reminds me of the 60’s Bobby Kennedy rallies I stood at cheering my little heart out. I love seeing the big tent of all the authentically diverse people at the Convention – not like the created diversity of the other party. Attending a Democratic Convention is on my list of things I want to do before I die. I really want to go as a delegate, but I’d go in any capacity if I could. I wish I were at this one, it’s going to be historic. If I were there, I’d be on the floor every possible minute just drinking it all in. It’s almost 8 PM and Nancy Pelosi will be out to speak in a few minutes. Then Teddy if he’s well enough – that’ll be a moment. I remember leaving work one day in 1980 to attend a Teddy for President rally in midtown. He was challenging Carter for the nomination that year and maybe if he’d have defeated Reagan. Maybe. I wish I were in Denver. Tonight is apparently American flag night. Maybe later they’ll have Michelle signs.

Staunton

Every night after we’ve been out on an abandoned site shoot I lie in my bed and feel for coal miners who suffered from black lung disease. Having seen an actual black lung recently, I think of the way coal dust accumulates in the breathing apparatus – clogging the alveoli, hardening the bellow and shrinking it to an unusable size. The air in yesterday’s buildings was heavy with asbestos, black mold, lead paint dust, and decades of sweat and toil. In Staunton, VA, the DeJarnette facility began as a Lunatic Asylum that later became Western State Prison. Now it’s being converted into condominiums. One building is completed the others in various stages of readiness. Most of the flavor of the prison, and the asylum, has already been removed. We went into rooms where dust and paint chips had been swept into a neat pile at the side of the room, garbage bags full of peeled paint and construction trash were carefully grouped by the door awaiting pick up. Doors and fixtures had been removed, and evidence of new construction was pervasive both inside and out. Mostly it felt like shooting a building renovation. The occasional remnant of prison life reminded us of the place’s second purpose. But from this shoot the biggest souvenir was that fiberglass feel in my lungs with every inhale as I slept.

olympics jail

Olympics jail is almost over. Tomorrow the closing ceremonies will finish us up until February 12, 2010 in Vancouver. Although on Sunday they will say 2012 in London, those of us who watch Olympics look forward to the winter sports between summers and the summer sports between winters. We love it all; each one is a break from the other and each one a major event between off seasons.

The eighty million hours of television we’ve seen this time has been tolerable in what we’ve missed. Always too much, never enough. The real time coverage is exciting. Even the taped coverage is nicely done. We’ve learned about NBC’s upcoming series, especially Kath and Kim. We’ve seen Jeremy Warner’s too-close-together eyes when he finally removed his shades for the 400-meter medal ceremonies. We’ve seen Michael Phelps and his huge “that’s gold” after number eight. We’ve seen Nastia Liukin get silver for tying for first on the uneven bars. We’ve seen both USA men and women drop the baton at the handoff from three to anchor in the 100-meter relay. We’ve seen the Chinese take, amazingly, only seven of eight possible golds in diving (but not a single medal ceremony). We’ve seen the last of Olympic baseball and softball, for eight years at least – until they can be reinstated.

The men’s marathon will take us to the end, and who will carry the American flag? Who could it be? Who?

about a dog

I love the sound a dog’s floppy ears make when he shakes his head. As I sit in my office at home, across the alley a yard houses two springy pit bulls. Just jaws with eyes, they have enormous heads. They’ve not suffered the indignity of cosmetic surgery, which animals definitely do not require, so they have their velvety ears and slappy tails. As I drive through the alley the male meets me at his back fence, the female is tied up on a long chain and can’t reach the fence. They’ve recently made her chain longer so she can get to the fence in only one spot – but she can get there and she’s happy about it. I get out of my car to pet the smiling beasts, they’re always happy for a pet. I pet them because it seems inevitable that they will one day escape. They can jump so high that clearing the fence is only a matter of time and will. No doubt they can get out if they feel like it (well, not the girl – she’s tied). I want them to like me for the time they’re running around loose and panicked. They’re not trained for meanness, I’ve seen small children out in the yard playing with them.

As I sit up in my office trying to concentrate on work they’re lying down out of my sight. But every now and then I can hear the flop-flop-flop-flop of the soft ears swinging around the head like those balls on the tiny plastic drums. That sound makes my heart sing. It means somewhere a dog is relaxed and happy and just being a dog. And every time I hear it I wish I could be a dog too.

driving

Baltimore is not even an easy city to drive. Entire sections of the city – not outlying sections, but close in popular destination sections – are cut off from traffic in many ways. No grid here. The center part of the city, like a long fish, is traversed by three main north-south streets. To the left and right lie several popular neighborhoods: Hampden, Fells Point, Canton. But you can’t get to any of them easily, they require roundabout approaches through winding streets that backtrack and circumvent large obstacles like a college campus and a slash of highway that runs downtown. There are simply no good east-west routes, all speed is to the up-down and none to the cross. This is magnified by the setting of the lights, every one is red as you try to drive east or west. Trying to get from side to side is an exercise in frustration. Trying to get up and down can go smoothly except for the war-torn quality of the roads themselves. A city that forces you to drive should not then impede your progress in this manner. Chicago, they are proud to tell you, is laid out entirely in a grid. And if you look at a map it is, indeed, laid out that way. But all the streets have names, no numbers at all. Unlike Washington or some suburban DC cities like Arlington, VA, the street names indicate no relationship to one another. So although the grid is easy to traverse, it is not easy to navigate. But at least Chicago provides its citizens with decent public transportation. Baltimore is scraping the bottom of that public transit barrel. You are forced to drive in Baltimore if you want travel to take less than an hour at minimum. Decisions made over the last century have reduced Baltimore to simply a large town with bad transportation and no help on the way. If those who run the city really cared about public transportation they’d make it expensive and difficult to drive instead of continuing to try and accommodate the cars. Although it’s difficult to get to the neighborhoods, it’s simple to get downtown. The way a beltway removes life from the interior of a city, Baltimore has set up its north-south routes to be straight shots for getting to work fast. None of this will be good, all must be reconsidered.

walking

In Baltimore when you walk somewhere, unless you’re in the inner harbor part of downtown, you can count the number of people you pass on two hands and still have seven fingers left over for making shadow puppets. You can say hello to each person you pass, although in Baltimore different races look through each other as though they don’t exist. You can walk for thirty minutes and not pass a single public trashcan. You can, however, pass dozens of dead trees. It’s a town where bike lanes “end.” And a town that requires you use a car but where the streets are pockmarked as if by war and warped like a record in the sun. Not a place for pedestrians.

low tech

I actually prefer the low technology to the high. I’m a pencil sort of girl as opposed to notes in a blackberry. I like ice cream cones rather than a low calorie, factory processed, fudgecicle on a stick. I want my paper Sierra Club calendar, not iCal. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give up the pictures I get to see each week in a paper calendar. It’s a small bit of pleasure taken away by the electronic environment. The new storage is easier and smaller, but the retrieval is always riskier. I can put my hands on a note I wrote 44 years ago making a bet with a friend about who’d be married first (not me). But I no longer have any way to access my dissertation stored on five and a quarter inch floppies and composed in WordPerfect. (WordPerfect, by the way, does not merit a spellcheck underline as it’s obviously now a “word” in our vocabulary.) The virtual world we inhabit now leads us to believe that the electronic is real and the real is merely stone-age sentimentalism. It leads us to reverse metaphorical and literal meanings. When we say “Jane comes home from school and literally glues herself to the television,” we mean figuratively. And when we use “figuratively” we mean literally. Metaphor is turned inside out and accomplishment is reduced to moving and storing pixels.

one photo

One building viewed from another at HCB.

stand by

Blogspot is not letting me add images. I'm trying to troubleshoot. Please stand by!

shooting at HCB

Another photography excursion yesterday (resulting in the late, late entry last night). Went up to Ashley, PA to the abandoned Huber Coal Breaker. What is a coal breaker, you might be asking. Apparently it was a factor where coal was broken up for use. It’s long closed down, and, oddly, pretty much completely open. As we climbed up into the bowels of the tall buildings kids on dirt bikes, grown men on ATVs, and middle school girls did their thing near the buildings. The middle schoolers wandered by as one of us was shooting outside. They asked if she had a myspace page and told her about the coal miners who haunted the breaker. For a building that’s completely open the graffiti is minimal.

Shooting inside was difficult. It presented the double problem of being enormous and being difficult to move around in – hard to get far enough away for a good vista shot. Structurally the building was filled with disasters waiting to happen. Catwalk metal plates worn through, stairs missing, coal dust floating in the air creating all kinds of lens flair. When I got home and tried to sleep I could understand the black lung disease I saw last week in the Bodyworlds exhibit. Even after a single afternoon trudging around in an abandoned coal factory, not even a mine, my lungs felt as though they were filled with fiberglass. Breathing felt scratchy and labored.

I wasn’t particularly pleased with the shots I got, but I’m working on managing raw images. Blogspot is not letting me add any right now, but I'll do it later.

drug commercial

And now for a commercial interlude: I’m so glad that teenage boy found out about Plavix for his mother who’s suffering from PAD (what the !@#$ is peripheral artery disease?). But she’ll need to be careful about the side effects: “if you develop fever, unexplained weakness, or confusion” (confusion? confusion? what are we talking about here?) “tell your doctor promptly as these may be signs of a rare but potentially life threatening” (oh man, (whining) it’s always life threatening) “condition called TTP” (what the !@#$% is TTP?) “which has been reported rarely” (phew) “sometimes in less than two weeks” (what!?) “after starting therapy” (I’m not in therapy so I guess I’m safe) “other rare but serious side effects may occur” (omigod what could they be, I’m confused).

ticket exchange

Everything so surreal these days and we don’t even notice any longer. I recently exchanged a couple of symphony tickets. I remember days, long ago, when you'd walk up to a box office and hand the seated woman wearing a black sweater two tickets asking for an exchange. She'd reach behind her into a small cubby and pull out a stack of tickets held together with a thick rubber band. Flipping through them, she'd suggest a couple of locations and then take out the two you wanted and hand them to you. Then she'd take your tickets and fit them back into the stack for the date you were exchanging out of. The entire interaction took about 90 seconds.

No more. Now I walk up to the window, give the intern on the stool my tickets and tell him what I want. After about two minutes of fiddling with his computer he tells me why I have the tickets I have. “These are your regular subscription seats.” I smile and say OK, but I really don't care why I have these tickets, I just want to exchange them. Back to the computer for him: tap, tap, tap, tap -- vacant eyes staring into the computer screen. Finally he looks up at me and says "OK."

OK? I'm done? "yep." I walk away from the window. No tickets in my hand. No receipt. Nothing. The exchange has been made (I suppose). The interaction took over five minutes.

I have a distinct feeling of dis-ease. Do I have tickets? He tells me they'll come in the mail. The mail?

garbage cans

In London there are no garbage cans in the tube. Only when you emerge from the underground and then you can find a place to dispose of it on the street. They do this, I’ve heard, to deprive terrorists of places to leave bombs. Not bad thinking, I suppose. And I didn’t mind at all carrying a banana peel from Marble Arch all the way to Westminster (not all that far, but two subway lines away) and up into the street to find a place to throw it away. Stowing a banana peel in one’s bag is messy so it made the journey in my hand, but it was a small sacrifice in the global war on terror.

On the other hand the trashcan shortage here in Baltimore seems without rhyme or reason (especially reason). When I moved here I found that I could walk from my apartment to my office and pass not a single trashcan, but five mailboxes. I considered mailing my garbage, but that would be a federal offense. Now, years later, the mailboxes are mostly gone – fallen victim to workforce shrinkage at the postal service – and the garbage cans remain conspicuously absent. The current mayor seems to be trying to give us a place to toss our refuse, a couple of garbage cans have been appearing here and there. But the need still far exceeds the presence. No reason, like the eternal GWOT, supports this no-garbage can mentality. It seems to be simply a resistance to public trash. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of garbage, but Baltimore seems to just want to keep it inside. Yeah, keep it hidden, that’s the ticket.

back to work

Vacation is over. Back to work today. Already during the course of the day at least four emails from the anally controlling AD about things I need to take care of. I don’t dislike the AD, just wish she’d dial it down a couple of notches. We do need someone who pays attention to detail (especially at this shop), but the love affair with what the technology tells us often spins things right off the table. Wish me luck.

thy neighbor's bike

My neighbor is getting ready to go out on his motorcycle again. He always starts the thing up and lets it loudly percolate for a while before he mounts and rides off. There have been times the bike’s been out there running for twenty minutes before he finally silences it by taking it out of range. It’s one of those noises that gets in your head as just annoyingly noisy. The motor sounds like it’s in my house. I don’t know what kind of bike it is, but I’m betting, just based on the noise, that it’s a Harley. Why does it have to warm up for a decade before he putters off on it? Finally, he’s gone.

medal hunt

Olympics jail is closing in on me. My Olympics partner wants to watch Michael Phelps try to make history with his quest for eight gold medals. For some reason I don’t find the pursuit all that compelling. It’s nice, I suppose that this hometown boy is trying to win eight races. But the thousandths of a second the timing is down to make victory feel almost inconsequential. How, I wonder, can we just keep going faster and faster? Is there no ceiling, or floor rather since the numbers keep sinking lower, to how fast human beings will eventually be able to swim? Will we soon see the 100 meters won in 11.27 seconds? Will swimmers one day finish races before they even enter the water? I don’t have anything against competition. And I adore all the pomp and circumstance and ritual and challenge attending the Olympic games. Somehow, though, the Phelps set up feels too culturally loaded. The deal being made of his medal hunt feels too much like it comes not from him but from some newsish desire to create a 2008 hero after the grueling primary season that gave us an old man and a black guy, after the last seven and a half years of an oaf in the White House, after five years of endless war. It’s a pseudo-event waiting to crack apart. I want to see Phelps race. But I just want to see him swim his best in a field of swimmers also doing their best. It’s not that I don’t care whether he wins. But the medal count jingoism feels dangerous and explosive.

Last Last Comic Standing

I’m not sure why, but I watched this year’s version of Last Comic Standing. My LCS partner checked out after last year, but I love comedy and was up for it again so I checked in. But this has got to be the last time. It’s not that the comedy was awful, although it was pretty poor, the show format defied any sort of explanation: logic, entertainment, snarkiness. Lots of preliminary comedic “challenges,” comics performing at car washes, at the playboy mansion, in Bed Bath and Beyond. But none of these lunacies were really had any impact on the outcome of the competition. Three, count ‘em three, actual challenge “competitions” and performances saw one of two (and one immediately eliminated) female comics perform three times. And then it was over. “America voted” and then, even though the votes were in the remaining seven performed again. After they’d after they’d done their best two were sent packing based on a vote that had nothing to do with the routine they’d just performed. Then there was a “finale” – ninety minute snoozefest featuring Jon Lovitz and Triumph the Insult Dog who performed with exceedingly poorly attended continuity (cigar in the mouth, cigar out of the mouth, eyes askew, cigar dropping out, oh hell what does it matter anyway). Repeatedly the two hosts stood like popsicle sticks trying to figure out what to do, three times they told one of the lined up comics they were eliminated. Then down to two, they took 15 minutes of air time (including a five minute commercial break) to announce that the winner was the woman who’d survived three challenges. The first female winner of Last Comic Standing. But it’s hard to imagine anything more anti-climactic. After they reminded us of past winners, including the mediocre Jon Reep and Josh Blue, it was hard to imagine this winner making anything of this terribly choreographed “opportunity.” The best winner, Alonzo Bodden, wasn’t even included in the role call because the year he won the show was cancelled after the penultimate episode; the audience didn’t even get to see the winner. Not a good sign. The format is altered every year; but a fix has been elusive. The elusive format does nothing to create either a following or any desire to appear on the show since there’s no way to know what you’ll be asked to do. Shrinking audience, bad comic contestants. No reason to watch.

Olympics

Olympics are under way and I’m in Olympics jail – wanting to watch as much as possible so never leaving the television. I’ve heard that something like 3500 hours of Olympics will be on TV over the next two weeks. I don’t think I can do that much, that’s almost 146 days. I don’t have quite that much time before school starts. Just FYI my spellcheck automatically capitalizes the word Olympic. Interesting. What if you want to use it as an adjective?

Eckford

My visiting houseguest friend is trying to change the name of my cat. This large, completely black cat came to live with me four years ago. I went through several different names for him and felt dissatisfied with all of them. Finally, in desperation, I settled on Ivan – so he could be a black Russian. But it never felt right and I never called him by that name. Instead I always called him buddy. Not so much as a name, but as a description of our relationship. A couple of years later I realized what I really would name a black cat is Eckford. Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock 9, was the woman in that famous photo by Will Counts (one of the top 100 photographs of the twentieth century). As behind her a white woman, mouth contorted in hatred, is shouting venomously at her back, Elizabeth walks calmly on. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette called it “hate assailing grace.”

I could never tell anyone that the cat’s name was Buddy because I thought that was far too commonplace as a name for an animal. As my godson always said with disgust when I let slip a “hey buddy” when talking to him “Buddy is a dog’s name.” I was just too embarrassed to admit I had named an animal Buddy. So his name was always reported as Ivan, but I’ve always called him buddy. After I figured it out I thought Eckford would be a great name for a black cat. But I felt unable to change his non-name of Ivan. It seemed stupid to give him another name I wouldn’t use.

So my visiting friend has been calling him Eckford since she arrived (and heard the story). I think another two weeks of her doing that and his name might actually change. I will ask my graphic designer friend to make up name change cards for us to sed out announcing his appellation alteration. And I can start calling him Eck. I wonder if it will stick now since she is going home tomorrow. We shall see. What do you think?

colonoscopy

We’re getting closer to eight-eight-oh eight. The opening of the summer Olympics and my friend CH’s 50th birthday. Woo hoo.

A friend is visiting with her new beau. He is going through treatment for colon cancer, the cancer that killed my mother over half a century ago. I’m reminded of my reluctant quest for a colonoscopy several years ago. Nagged relentlessly by my family and urged on firmly by my doctor I finally agreed to go see a doctor of the rear. First I insisted on a woman and found one who then joined in with the eternal nagging. She was nice. She seemed concerned. She kept calling me saying I really needed this, the family history indicated it, I should have started having them at age ten…that sort of thing. Once she called me from her car. This doesn’t sound unusual now, but it was eons before every grade schooler had a cell phone – I imagine it was one of those enormous car phones that required hooking into the automobile’s electric system and were mounted permanently and inconveniently directly at the driver’s elbow. Ultimately at that point, being honest with my insurance company made us all think they would not pay. The quest was, thankfully in my eyes, on permanent, in my eyes and again thankfully, on hold.

Years pass, I can’t remember how many. And the family nagging – why didn’t I just lie? – was intolerable. A new doctor was even firmer, and in a quieter way which was that much more irresistible. Another visit to another doctor of arrears, this one a wacky sort of guy. I sat in his office listening to him be thrilled about being a butt doctor. “I love what I do. Love it. I love being a doctor. It just so happens that I examine colons all day.” I think he loved it because he didn’t have to deal with patients – they were all, of course, unconscious and silent. His large dark wooden desk was completely empty. His office looked like a furniture showroom – no signs of anyone actually working in there, just a desk with chairs, a matching dark wood credenza, and some quiet industrial carpeting. So I agreed to the procedure.

His office called the insurance company. I called the insurance company. The insurance company created that well-known situation in which you are actually required to lie. As I hung out on hold waiting to talk with someone I listened to their cheerful loop of medical advice. I must have heard five or six times of the importance of screening for colon cancer. So their recording probably would have green lighted the procedure. But the agent would not. Of course they’ll never, ever (ever) tell you before you do something whether they’ll cover it or not. They’ll only say “probably.” A final decision can only be made after the procedure is completed and the bill submitted. But family history was not enough for a colonoscopy. A sigmoidoscopy, maybe. But let’s not go overboard and explore the whole colon. Nah. The only indicator that could get you an actual colonoscopy was the presence of actual symptoms. So when they said cancer screening, what they really meant was cancer confirmation.

I was about to walk away again. But the butt doctor called me up and with an audible wink asked me if I had any of these symptoms. And he read me a long list. Finally I agreed. Yes, I have this one. (I won’t share here, you’re not my doctor. Nor will I say whether it was actually a lie or not.) And so I came to have my first, and so far only, colonoscopy. I must say – it was awful, I never want to do it again. So don’t bother nagging.

the commission

The Death Penalty Commission hearings are underway. Commissioners are hearing testimony from invited witnesses who speak for as long as necessary and the public who are asked to “make it brief.” Scott Shellenberger, State’s Attorney of Baltimore County, is overeager in his desire to discredit witnesses who discuss problems in the death penalty’s application. My hope is that even those who may be on his side of the issue will see through his transparent attempts to imply people like Deborah Fleischaker, former director of the ABA Moratorium Implementation Project are not credible. He accused her of traveling the country testifying that the death penalty wasn’t working. Well of course she travels speaking, she was the director of an implementation project and people wanted to hear the results. Commission Chair Benjamin Civiletti actually cut him off as he was starting to run down the list of places she’d spoken. The only pro-death penalty testimony heard from invited witnesses yesterday was from Phyllis Bricker, the daughter of the couple murdered by a man currently on Maryland’s death row. Her story is heartbreaking, her elderly parents were murdered 25 years ago and the case has been in and out of the courts that long. When she said she and her family have been waiting that long for “justice” Civiletti said “which you interpret to be his execution.” Finally. Someone points out that justice does not necessarily equal execution. Far too many people phrase it this way without even a second thought. I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched news reporters standing outside the SuperMax saying they were, we all were, waiting for “justice” to be done as if this were how we all thought about executions. When Civiletti made his remark she seemed not to even understand it, as if her singular interpretation was the only one possible. Justice requires fairness.

I was moved by the story told by a citizen witness of his violent father. The father tried to kill him and eventually murdered his step mother and step sister. He spoke of what it was like to be the son of a man convicted of murder, what it’d been like to testify at his father’s trial, and how the experiences had shaped him. His powerful story continued as he told of his nephew’s murder twenty years later. At the trial he spoke of seeing the to the son of a man who’d murdered his nephew and thinking about what this poor 9-year-old boy was going to have to go through. He never mentioned the death penalty. But his message was clear. Even a violent murderer has a family; his actions have an impact on those people too. The relationships are never simple, a web always connects us to one another. Even if the connections are invisible now, later they will manifest.

bifocals

I’ve been wearing my new bifocals for about a week now and the headache they gave me in the beginning is starting to go away. I didn’t think I could get used to them and I’m still not sure that I can. These are not for close and far, they are for close and really close. I found myself swapping out different strength pairs of glasses when I was working on the computer: one for the computer, a stronger pair for reading books or papers. It just felt ridiculous. So I went for the bifocals for computer (arm’s length as the eye doc said) and reading. But I’m having a tough time getting used to shifting my eyes and my head every time I want to read something. If something’s arm’s length – like the computer – I’m looking through the top part. But the hard line – I’m not sure why he ordered a hard line, but he did – seems to be right in my line of vision so I have to slide the glasses a little bit down my nose which makes them not quite right. As I approach the bottom of the computer screen I have to either drop my head or lower the glasses because I don’t want to be looking through the lower, stronger, part of the glasses – it’s too strong and it blurs the arm’s length stuff. Then if I want to read actual paper I have to slide the glasses back up toward my eyes and tilt my head counter-intuitively up instead of down so I can sink my eyeballs to look through the reading half of the lenses. Oi. The entire operation still requires way too much fiddling, although now with a single pair of glasses. The line in the middle still gives me a headache. It feels like my vision is literally resting on that line. Sometimes it feels as though I’m looking directly through it and that makes me feel like I’m an old camera lens where you brought top and bottom halves of your screen together to adjust focus. Everyone with bifocals told me I’d get used to it quickly and then I’d do it without thinking. Still awaiting that conversion moment.

some shots

My arm is sore from the tetanus shot I got for the two gouges from going over the fence, but it’s better that I got the shot now since I plan to do more shooting in such environments. My excitement about photography is completely reignited by this shooting expedition. Here we were seeing mill life at a sudden cessation. Papers left on desks now blown all around the room, work shoes lying in piles of paint chips and rusted dust. Water is the enemy of order always. As the windows break and the weather comes in the mill everything begins to break down. Some papers in one of the offices were dated 2002 so it’s been only six years. But the disintegration of the environment is rapid. The stillness of the abandonment, even with the occasional small animal creating a noise, is palpable. I’m hoping to become a much better photographer as I keep on doing this. Here are a few photos from my very first expedition.



Greased gears















Window Seat




















Portrait of the artist as a long exposure photographer.

clamshell

I just opened and set up my paper shredder. There’s nothing really remarkable about that, except that the shredder has been sitting, packaged, in my office for about four years. This is how unpleasant opening clamshell is. I moved the thing around my office for four years, tossing thousands of credit card offers whole into the recycling, rather than attack the thick impenetrable plastic it came in. I know I’m not alone in hating that clamshell packaging. Ellen Degeneres has a joke about it: listing what’s wrapped in it but then pointing out that lightbulbs…“thin, thin plastic.” It’s true, of course. The packaging is a cultural statement on our habits. It’s hardly ever to protect the product, but almost always to prevent pilferage. Opening the stuff is a dangerous exercise. Scissors are ineffective, box cutters dangerous, I’ve heard can openers are safe, but I’ve never figured out how to use one with the shell. Rare is the packaging that permits the buyer to neatly pull the sides apart. I usually wind up bloody and of course the cuts aren’t clean – the ragged edges gouge the flesh. Fingers are at the biggest risk and it seems incredible that deaths have not resulted from slashed arteries. And then of course there’s the environmental impact. I’d like to make a vow not to buy items thusly packaged. Let’s see how long I can go before I run into something I need that can’t be found any other way.

mill shot

I’m sorry I missed August One. But here I am on two. I was actually in a place with no Internet connection, how strange did that feel? On the way to my brother’s house to help with the kids/move my car turned over to a hundred thousand miles. That’s 100,000 with five zeros. I am now the fave of the littlest of those children: An-def is my name. Middle child has a favored object: a small, child sized rainbow umbrella. She does everything with it, including sleep. My first night there I checked on them before I turned in and there she was, splayed out on her back left hand hanging over the edge of the bed, loosely holding the umbrella handle as it rested jauntily on the floor. She would absolutely not be without it.

Today I met up with another friend for a photo shoot in an abandoned mill. The oldest mill in Delaware, apparently. I injured myself climbing the fence – two pretty bad scrapes that tore my pants and are now cushioned in brightly colorful bruises. My tripod broke and I punctured my knuckle trying to make it do what the broken part was supposed to do. As a topper I lost the back of an earring, but the earring stayed with me. Through all this I did not complain. Rather I was delighted to be shooting in this enormously rich environment. Will post a shot or two after I get them out of the camera.

beginning

“There is no beginning too small.” This is a bookmark I’ve had sitting on my desk for over a decade now. It’s faded and warped and a cat has given it what looks like two little staple holes in the upper right hand corner – uniform and a quarter inch apart. I’m late for my departure to go up to my brother’s to help them all move into their borrowed house while he builds another one. The boy is airborne at this moment in his five thousand nine hundred mile journey to the Middle East. Big beginnings work too.

bye

The boy leaves tonight for the Middle East. Even though he left here twelve days ago at least I knew he was on the same continent. But tonight he flies 5900 miles away to a very different land. I hope he will be safe and happy. I hope his experiences will be engaging. I hope he will allow himself to be present and paying attention.

I’m sure his adventures will equal the adventures of the woman in whose life I am entangled: Belle. She, too, went East. And also Doreen, who just a few years after Belle, sailed off to the Middle East. The boy will be jetting, not sailing. And adventures now feel both more tenuous and dangerous. Tenuous because the adventure part feels secondary to the grind of finding an existence. The girls went off in search of adventure, not required to work or attend in any way to the requirements of their lives. Doreen was with a group of girls living in a hotel and attended by many “brown” men as she lovingly calls them. Although she was already ten years out of college, Belle was simply searching for something to do and wrote on her passport application that she was traveling for leisure. Dangerous because that part of the world is so much more volatile today than it was 75 years ago when the girls went. At the time of their stays the world was simmering – about to erupt in the conflagration of WWII. But the Middle East still had some years to go before the carving up the West had done burst into the firestorms of today’s poisonous environment.

He has rules for his existence in the Middle East: answer all emails promptly, stay in touch generally, if anything happens within 500 miles of him he must get in touch immediately to say he is OK. And I sent him off with my current words of wisdom. First from the Dalai Lama: whenever possible, be kind. It is always possible. And from me, the three things to guide a good life: Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth.

Godspeed.

phone bank

Phone banking for Barak Obama tonight, I just can’t imagine how this makes one scintilla of difference. I hate receiving those phone calls and the only good thing about making them was that most people I called were not home. It was leave-messages night, though, so I had to continually repeat that there was to be canvassing in their area this weekend if they’d like to “get involved.” Maybe this calling makes a difference. Maybe some people are pried off their seats by receiving a phone call from a stranger cheerfully offering them the opportunity to canvass. Maybe. But I just can’t imagine it.

vegetarians

Last night was the finale of The Next Food Network Star. (Another television admission. I do enjoy the reality competitions where people must actually have skill: Project Runway, Shear Genius, Design Star, Top Chef, et cetera.) I’m sure Aaron McCargo Jr.’s new show will be delightful. I’ve recently found myself addicted to the Food Network and I’m loving learning something about cooking with every show I watch. But I have to say I absolutely incredulous that an entire network devoted to shows about cooking doesn’t have one show about vegetarian cooking. Not one single show.

Every chef’s show on the network presents two or three dishes in each episode and they always have a vegetable. But almost never do they have a vegetarian entrée. I’m pretty sure the number of vegetarians in the country is increasingly rapidly. And even meat eaters are advised to not eat dead animal daily. How is it that a network that focuses on preparing food doesn’t address this growing segment of the population? Do vegetarians not watch television? How can they have missed this segment of their audience?

A letter must be written.

sick, postscript

To finish up with my West Nile Virus tale, I must add a postscript. I spent last summer recovering from my encounter with this exceedingly unpleasant virus. I slowly got back on the treadmill, starting at a crawl and working back up to the low speed I normally do. I jog on the treadmill, but my jog is about the same as my quick walk. I went back to the gym and started climbing again; it took several months to get back to where I’d been before and eventually I surpassed it and started getting better again. Climbing is hard to take time away from – you begin to lose endurance and strength almost immediately. My exhaustion dissipated slowly I could get through an entire day without hitting a wall of “omigod, I’m just done.” One moment I was awake and active and the next moment I had to put my head down and nap, totally beyond my control. By the time school began again in the Fall I was better – just as my doctor had predicted, a little less than three months.

In early September I looked at my email one morning and saw the name of one of my brothers in the subject line. I thought “oh this can’t be good,” and it wasn’t. The email was from his 9-month-pregnant wife telling us that he’d been admitted to the hospital with a mystery virus that a couple of days later was diagnosed as viral myocarditis. It’s a virus that causes inflammation of the heart muscle. When I told my doctor friends what he had, they all said “oh, that’s serious.”

The very next September day I got another email from my other sister-in-law with my other brother’s name in the subject line saying it was his “turn.” Oh, that can’t be good either. And it wasn’t. He was in the hospital with viral meningitis. So one heart virus, one brain virus.

Both boys (middle aged men, really) made full recoveries. But they had the same recovery experience as I did. It took far longer than expected and the reignition of the energy was a slow and ponderous process. Viruses are serious business.

My brothers and I don’t live anywhere near each other, and besides all three viruses are totally different. But somehow we managed to all get so ill we needed to be hospitalized within three months of one another – the two guys at the exact same time. A particularly odd coincidence.

As a postscript to the postscript: This summer I was nervous about mosquitoes – the beasts from whom I’d gotten my virus. I asked several doctors whether I was now immune to West Nile Virus and they all uttered exactly the same sentence in exactly the same intonation: “I think so” looking up and to the right in an unnerving wondering tone.

visiting Belle's brother, part I

On November 18, 1996 I visited with my Uncle Sam and Aunt Mollie about an hour north of Miami, Florida. I wanted to get at information about Sam’s older sister, Belle. Instead, as I should have expected, I was treated to a parade of family disagreements and a tattler’s tale of Belle and her beau. First the tale.

According to Belle’s brother Sam, Belle and Gabriel Welter had an 8-10 year relationship. He was a scandalous individual, Belle and Sam’s father would have been ashamed. But, said Sam, Belle didn’t know about all his terrible deeds. Only some. He was a quisling and Belle didn’t know about it. Although Sam supplied only vague details of Welter’s quisling-ness, he was certain of it. Belle and Welter had entertained all of Hitler’s henchmen in their house. (I can see it now, Goebbels, Göring, and Hess marching up the dusty road to Belle and Welter’s home on the tiny island of Aegina, taking tea – teacups balanced smartly on their knees. It seems unlikely.) Sam felt certain that Welter had promised to deed to Belle the land upon which she’d built her Greek home, but that he’d never actually turned over the land. Welter had been a close friend of the Kaiser’s.

The strength of his opinions about Welter were belied by his lack of specific knowledge about the fellow. I needed to find out more…much more.

BN, page two

The next entry in the blue notebook is a chat I had with a friend who was working on her own book. She gave lots of advice on approach strategies. For interview requests: always write first and give your phone number – people don’t like to be surprised by phone calls. Transcriptions of interviews are best – listening and taking notes is second. Try not to take notes while the interview is being done, eye contact is more important. Then listen to the tape immediately and make notes.

Use a magnifying glass to get clues from photographs, there’s a lot of tiny detail not obvious to the naked eye. Think about other people who might have been impacted by her life, like other archaeologists. Start with small goals. Research all organizations and people she knew or mentioned. Set aside specific chunks of time and keep to that always.

However, I’ve done almost none of this. I’ve used the magnifying glass on the photograph, but much of the rest of it I’ve done differently and with somewhat less vigor than my friend. The many notes of many interviews performed follow in the three blue notebooks. To be remembered here.

blue notebook, first page

I have three small blue notebooks containing notes pertaining to Belle. None is completely filled. They are numbered, and some of the notes have dates. I’m starting with the first one here. Going back to the beginning of the project to try and figure out where I am. This reconstruction will be a chronology of the discovery – usually not how texts are constructed. But in it I might find a clue to the trajectory of the narrative.

The first page in the first book is dated 5/9/96 – 12 years ago. It begins with the simple question “what’s in the box?” And then asks other questions: what’s the theme, what about the German guy…and then a bunch of possibilities for finding the German guy? The German guy, time-wise, is a minor part of Belle’s story. She lived 85 years, and knew him for maybe 15 at he most. It’s certainly possible that his presence colored her life for many years afterwards. She once told me he died in prison. “Better to die like that than to be killed by the Germans like a dog,” she said. But that’s the only mention of him I recall. Besides, it’s not even true. He didn’t die in prison. And the Germans were not set to kill him.

After the question about the German guy I have a few suggestions for how I might find him: the library, the German Archaeological Institute, a woman teaching Ancient Studies at UMBC, someone at Princeton, a question about Brits that might have known him. Oddly, I think it several years later I contacted the woman at UMBC. I also tell myself on this page to Xerox everything, which I did. But these first couple pages of notes are scattered – vague and general ideas on how to get started, meetings with friends who’d done projects of their own, broad suggestions on where answers might lie, and a reminder that the Biblical town of Shechem is now Nablus.

storm

Thunder is rumbling through the area. I wish some rain would come along with it. Thunder and lightening woke me up last night, but I’m pretty sure there was no precip to water my thirsty flowers. They’ve promised rain today – 90% chance – but so far just darkening skies and big noise. Some sort of cosmic warning system: the skies are about to split open. Take cover or just put on a swimsuit. My satellite dish loses its signal at the slightest storminess. The installer said “oh they barely have that problem any more” when I wondered about weather related outage. But, of course, he was pretty far wrong. It goes out when it’s just raining, let alone a major storm. I’m grateful for two winters of almost no snow. But that’s bound to change (and I shouldn’t be grateful for global warming so I can have a television signal) and I’ll be up the creek with no TV. And I am pretty attached to television, I have entirely too many shows in my regular weekly schedule.

broke toe (cont'd)

Wow. The Traumeel I’ve been putting on my toe has really worked miracles with the bruising. It’s been only four days and it’s almost all disappeared. But it’s like that Mandrake cartoon satire I saw years (and years and years) ago and still, to this day, remember. Mandrake the magician and his crew are on the side of the road looking at their flat tire. He’s telling them that he can hypnotize them into believing that the tire is not flat, and he can even hypnotize himself into believing it. But he can’t hypnotize the tire into not being flat. I’ve gotten rid of the bruising, but the toe is still broke. It feels like a foreign object attached to my foot. I put a sneaker on today for a short walk and it felt pretty crowded in there. I am determined to climb tomorrow even if I have to climb in sneakers. Yeah, it’ll be clunky. But it’s been so long since I climbed I’d have to drop so far back anyway, some clunkiness probably wouldn’t impact the climb anyway. We’ll see how it turns out. In the meantime, my friend who broke her foot has removed her cast. “I went swimming. It got wet.” “Well of course it got wet – you went swimming!” She just took the thing off because she couldn’t stand wearing it and has decided to find a doctor who she can “work with” – in other words someone who’ll confirm her diagnosis. “You’re not a doctor.” I say. “Yes. But I could be,” she replies.

houseguest

My good friend from many years ago – so many years ago that I met her in a totally different part of my life – has been visiting for a few days. I enjoy having her here, we always commit a whirlwind of shopping, usually at antique and consignment stores. Even though it is wearying, the hunt for the perfect set of candlesticks that someone else once used and that I absolutely do not need is great fun. I’ve developed the ability to use shopping trips as gallery expeditions so the actual spending is only a tick or two above necessities. One more day and then she’ll return to the north, the opposite direction of her origin.

double letters

I’ve noticed on my new computer that the keyboard doesn’t like to type double letters. I suppose it could be my fingers hitting more softly on that second strike. But I think it’s actually the keyboard saying “are you sure you want two O’s in this word?” This results, for instance, in good often appearing as god – a particularly odd transliteration of my intention. It’s, perhaps, the beginning of artificial intelligence. It often corrects my spelling (I know this isn’t the keyboard, but the machine’s thinking is all of a piece), which I like (since I was born without a spelling gene). But the spellcheck is limited and it often, as we all know, wants words it doesn’t know to become words it does know. I’ve often thought we should simply adopt the spellings it suggests to us so we can avoid the continual argument that such a thing is a word (I refer you to my complaint about the spelling of Obama in the June 6 spellcheck post). The double letter thing feels even more AI-ish as it seems to be making a judgment not just about spelling, which can be mechanically hooked to a dictionary, but about typing skill. Is my keyboard calling my typing dexterity into question?

the toe

Well, that toe is definitely broken. It’s entirely purple, all the way around. Looks like a nice ripe little grape. Blood from the bruise has spread about two and a half inches down into the foot, making a nice moon of faint blue under the skin. The swelling makes it feel like a foreign object attached to the side of my foot. I’ve been putting Traumeel on it – a homeopathic lotion containing a lovely combination of ingredients including arnica, the magic homeopathic bullet. I think it’s actually helping.

This is not the first time my little toe has been so abused. I’m reduced to flip flops since managing the toe into anything even remotely closed feels like a stretch. I won’t be climbing for a bit. And it’s already been something like three weeks since a serious climb.

in the house

Well, the guy living with me just left for his worldly adventure. I will miss him greatly. I wish him godspeed on his exciting journey. He’s off to two states North and then to the middle east. He will learn Arabic, meet fascinating people, start a new way of life, and become. I miss him already. Plus, as I walked by his bag I stubbed my toe; it’s swollen as a little grape. Just in time for walking-around-houseguest weekend. She arrives in two hours. Next!

presentations

Well the semester has ended but now I have to actually read all the papers I collected. The final presentation today was painful, poorly conceived and with almost no organization. Although I could see what was in her head as she presented it, none of that “planning” made it to the way she actually thought about the paper. It was such a sad and ordinary problem – all the folks who want to go on the last day of presentations do so because their work is poor in every way. Poorly conceptualized, poorly written, poorly presented. All kinds of problems in every crevice of the presentation: Powerpoints that don’t work, movie clips badly selected and improperly imported, written portions of the presentation that make little sense, speeches with large words that don’t even begin to mean what the presenter thinks they mean. The first day, when the people brave enough to go early and first – that’s the day to hear presentations. I detest grading papers.

hot night

My three year old nephew must have given me that cold that made him sick for a single day during our reunion. I feel miserable. I couldn’t sleep last night and kept wandering around the house looking for a cool spot to land. The inside of the house simply wouldn’t get as lovely and cool as the outside. I would go downstairs, open the front door, and just stand there breathing in the delightful night air. But my bedroom was like a hotbox, no circulation and a top-hat of hot air in the attic. Now that I have my new windows – which I absolutely adore for the light they let in – I can no longer fit my fan in the window where I used to put it to draw in outside air. Finally, around 3 AM, I found a tiny fan for the window and it helped. But what I really want is one of those double window fans – one that draws in, the other that pushes out – next week I’ll go searching for one. I fell asleep fitfully for a few hours, tossing and waking up all through the night. Now I’m spent after driving two hours for work today. Hoping tonight at least the temperature can be better.

speed hump hell

I’d like to return to Baltimore traffic policy for just a moment. We live in an ever increasing one-way hell here in this town. Regularly, streets are turned into one-way streets forcing traffic to find another way into where it needs to go. Then the side street that is suddenly being used to get from point A to point B gets annoyed and asks the city to install speed humps. Which it does. But traffic is like a balloon – you can squeeze it off in one place, but it needs to find another place for the air to go. So the major traffic that’s been sent packing from what used to be a regular street is now shunted off onto a side street which complains of suddenly finding itself a cut-through. Speed humps are multiplying like mice here in Baltimore. I walked to the farmer’s market one Saturday down one street and when I walked home a half an hour later it had speed humps. Some sort of solution must be found that satisfies both the neighborhoods and the traffic that Baltimore requires because it has no decent public transit. I wonder when that’ll happen.

return

Oh dear – two days in a row unblogged. Was very busy with the family reunion weekend. We had one sick child, one very complex and overdeveloped meal, many bottles of wine, the happiest baby in the family, tours of the new borrowed house and the new lot to be built on, plans of the other new house, a wonderful day at the pool after a poison ivy-aborted walk in the woods, and early to bed every night.

I’m not quite ready yet to write about the nitty gritty of the weekend –that may come later. The moment I arrived home was hit with a little bit of shopping necessity. So out to the store to buy some work clothes for the guy going to Jordan. Still more needs to be done so we will again to the stores today. He leaves Friday. I’m going to miss him.

outta town

I'm north at my brother's for a family reunion of sorts. It's a short weekend because one brother can tolerate family only in brief doses (sometimes made even briefer by his inviting other people to join us). I wish we could be together longer. I really enjoy seeing the kids and generations all together. But this is all we can manage and I'm grateful for what we have.

sick, part VI

I asked how long it’d take me to feel normal again. “Well, we say under 30 six weeks, over 30, three months.” That didn’t seem fair and I was determined to be better immediately. But age betrayed me in a big way. I was nervous in the shower because sudden moves – we make them more often than we think – caused unsteadiness and I really didn’t want to be found naked in the bathtub with a broken back. Just walking out to my car exhausted me. Because I had to pay such close attention through my exhaustion, everything felt foreign, as though I were doing it for the first time with my new handicap. I’d go to the office and after an hour and a half of doddering effort I’d be done. Just done – could do no more. And I’d have to drive home very carefully so I wouldn’t have an exhaustion-caused accident. I was sick long enough for people to bring me food and send cards.

Slowly, I did push myself. I started going back to the gym and climbing baby climbs, walking on my treadmill at a snail’s pace, trying to stop watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Twice, my cardiologist (I did not want to have a cardiologist, and told him so) made me wear a holter monitor to measure my heart rate for a full day. Clean slate. I saw a rheumatologist who agreed the virus had left no lifetime scars – no arthritis, no deadly time bomb. When we went to his office for the final consult he looked at my test results and matter-of-factly said I’d had West Nile Virus. I was just a little bit stunned. The next day my own doctor called me to tell me I’d had West Nile Virus. He was disappointed to hear he’d been scooped.

West Nile Virus. I looked up more about it on the CDC website: 80% of the people who have it never even know they have it – some don’t even develop symptoms, others just have a cold. A few people die. And then, among that other 20%, some people get really sick. Like I did. I was a statistic.

I did make a full recovery, no lingering effects – a common problem with viruses, no worries about re-sicking. Here, a year later, it’s hard to imagine I was ever that ill. But boy oh boy, was I ever. A tiny little virus, an organism we have no defense against, tried to kill me. I understand how a less healthy person could have died from what I had. I felt lucky to have made it through. My symptoms were innocuous: fever, blurred vision, exhaustion. Anything else that happened to me happened invisibly. And even after I was better it still felt like something of a sham. But I became acquainted with being vulnerable and it was a frightening, aging feeling.

sick, part V

The nurses got over their shock that I was being allowed to leave, but as I wheelchaired down to the lobby I was having second thoughts. The exertion of gathering my things and riding the chair downstairs just wore me out completely. I couldn’t even wait outside because it was too hot. Getting into the car was a task and when I was finally in the front seat I was totally exhausted. My front stairs felt like Everest. I was so tired by the time I landed on my couch I thought I’d just moved the Great Pyramid.

It was amazing how diminished my energy level was. I could not get above empty. Taking a shower – something I was so looking forward to because I’d been trapped in the hospital for 4 days – was an ordeal. I was so unsteady I wasn’t sure I’d be able to shower without passing out. I needed one of those shower stools that old people use. Since I didn’t have one the experience was pretty dicey. I couldn’t stand for more than a few minutes at a time. Sitting down, or even moving around in the shower was kind of frightening because of the slippery factor. I was pretty sure I’d fall and break my neck. I couldn’t make any sudden movements, not because of the slipperiness, but because my energy level wouldn’t accommodate that sort of thing. Everything was in slow motion. And everything was done with no fuel. I was always exhausted.

Just to show me who was boss, that night I got a bad case of hives. Big huge ones. Itchy beyond belief. My nurse neighbor gave me some Benedryl and it made me feel drunk on top of the exhaustion. The hives made me look like Richard Nixon, all jowly. I wondered what I’d look like if this thing ever went away. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be able to go up the stairs without having to stop and rest halfway. I wondered if my fever would ever go away. I wondered if whatever virus this was – they’d finally decided on viral – would leave a bad calling card if and when it finally released me. I wondered if I’d ever have my appetite back. Although it concerned me the least, I wondered what in the world I had.

sick, part IV

I donated many little bottles of blood for testing. I was awakened at 4 AM as a matter of course for bloodwork and just more crap. However, I couldn’t get them to come when I wanted them and my many tubes and monitors kept setting off alarms that they never, ever responded to. I figured out how to unhook myself to use the bathroom. I’d call them when I got back to bed and say my monitors were unhooked. That way if they wanted them hooked up they’d have to come do it and I got to go to the bathroom without having to wait for them. What a bunch of bozos they were. Yet still, I felt safe in the hospital. Like maybe I wouldn’t die, or if I came close to dying someone could stop it. Since no one had any idea what was wrong with me, and I didn’t feel sick except for being totally wiped out and having a fever I couldn’t get rid of, I wasn’t sure what would happen. And now this heart thing. My normally hands-off doctor kept ordering tests, winding up with a CT scan that I almost refused.

I entertained a continual parade of specialists. The drugs they were giving me were making me sick. The infectious disease doctor med students trolling along behind came every day to tell me he’d no idea what I had. The two students would stand quietly looking very solemn in the background as he grilled me and then say “hope you feel better” as they left. The cardiologist ordered an echo, I was hooked up to a heart monitor three of the four days I was there. I slept in a different room each night – moving on that first ward to a private room on night two, and then to a regular ward the third night. It was hard to find me.

All I could do was watch television. My fever sapped me of the ability to concentrate for more than a few moments and unfocusable vision was one odd effect of whatever I had. One of many visitors brought me coloring books, which I’d thought would be fun. But I couldn’t focus well enough to see the intricate pictures she’d brought. These were very complex draw inside the line drawings. I think I saw every episode of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Too many people were visiting. I’d said I’d love visitors, but I didn’t think when I’d said that that I’d be so frigging exhausted.

The last indignity was that CT scan that my doctor made me undergo. I knew it’d find nothing. But some test had indicated possible X (probably low crit, but I can’t quite remember). And even though X was a possible side effect of medication Y, which I had been fed intravenously in large doses, my doctor insisted that we needed to check for X with a CT scan. I pretty much lost it that last morning as I called him in tears and insisted that I didn’t want the damned scan. But the deal was I could be discharged if I had it, if I didn’t I’d have to stay another night. The nurses couldn’t believe I was going to be allowed to go home because my fever was still spiky and my heart rate still badly elevated. But was adamant. I wanted out. Since no one knew what was wrong with me, other than it was viral not bacterial (the only thing they’d settled on), I saw no point in staying. Being hospitalized did nothing for me, I was miserable away from my couch and TV, and it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to die.

A small child was ahead of me in the CT scan room. I didn’t even care that she had some kind of broken leg and threw up most of the CT-prep liquid she was forced to drink. I wanted to throw mine up too. I was mad that whoever had sent the orders for the scan had written them incorrectly and I had to wait until they found someone to rewrite them. When I got back from the procedure I started packing up all the crap I’d collected in the three preceding days waiting for my discharge. A nurse came in to take my temperature and pulse and insisted that my doctor would not discharge me in this condition. I sat on the edge of my bed waiting for the CT results. I’d made a bet with the resident that it’d show nothing. She arrived bearing chocolate. We were both right. It showed something, but it was pretty close to nothing. I could go home, she’d write me out.

sick, part II

My doctor ordered me to the hospital when he heard I had a sore neck and headache. The headache, I was convinced, was from severe dehydration. I hadn’t been hungry in days and drinking was difficult. But never tell a doctor you have a sore neck and headache – he was afraid of meningitis, but when I got to the hospital everyone was distracted by my elevated heart rate of 175 – more than double what’s normal. They tried everything to lower it, including stopping my heart. The nurse in charge said “You’re going to feel a little flush.” What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I’d like to know exactly what they’re thinking when they say “flush” in a situation like that. What I felt is that I was dying – couldn’t breathe, everything in my chest seized up. They didn’t even tell me they were stopping my heart – yet another example of hospital personnel giving out falsely sunny information.

But backtracking a moment: before I wound up in the hospital I’d emailed my doctor saying I’d had this fever for several days and asking if I should be worried. I went to see him. He thought I might have Lyme disease and gave me fluids and antibiotics. The next night I collapsed in the bathroom in the middle of the night. I laid there a long time trying to figure out whether I cared. The moving friend that I wasn’t help move was staying at my house in between apartments and so there was someone there I could yell to. I was lying on the cool part of the floor reeling with dizziness and feeling particularly nauseated. It didn’t seem to make much sense to call out for help when I was just going to want to stay in the bathroom. After I’d laid there for a while and felt pretty certain I could go back to bed without throwing up I summoned my friend who was pretty alarmed to find me on the floor (“where are you?”). When morning dawned that next day I dictated emails to her for me because my fingers were too swollen and stiff to type. I could barely make it up and down there stairs by that point and really sympathized with my friend who’d complained years ago that I didn’t have a bathroom on the first floor (her paralysis from a high school car accident makes stairs a bitch). The email I sent to the doctor was what made him order me to the hospital. When my staying-here friend came down stairs with the phone in her hand I knew I was in trouble. I argued that I did not want to go to the hospital. And when I finally gave in, I insisted on having spaghetti first. I knew I’d not get any good food there, and I was finally a little bit hungry.

So after spaghetti we went to the hospital where my elevated heart rate had everyone running around madly. I went in through the emergency room and I have to admit that when I was finally hooked up to fluids and in that tiny room where you hold court I did feel some measure of relief. The exhaustion and the dehydration were really flattening me and I knew I’d at least be taken care of there. No one ever figured out why my heart rate was so rapid, several doctors and nurses told me I’d have to worry about it for years. No one could figure out what was wrong with me and when I finally went into the actual hospital part of the hospital I was on the one-step-down from intensive care ward. Because they didn’t know what I had. They figured I had some kind of infectious disease, but which one? There are so many.

sick, part I

As I was putting a blanket down for yesterday’s picnic my host pointed out the poison ivy. “It won’t matter if you cover it up.” I’ve never actually had poison ivy, and I hope to maintain that record, but I was reminded of our fragile relationship with a natural world that’s trying to kill us. Last summer I rode my bike to a memorial service at the Meeting House a little over a mile away from here. Throughout the set-up, the service, and the reception afterwards, I never recovered from that short ride. I felt exhausted, hot, and not fully present for those four hours. When it came time to ride home, I wanted to be home, but I really didn’t want to get back on the bike. I was resentful, almost as if the bicycle had caused my exhaustion. At home I felt tired, very, very tired. And after two or three days of this I wondered if I was sick and took my temperature – I needed the confirmation of an outside source to believe something was actually wrong and I wasn’t just shirking. My good friend was moving and I thought I might just be playing tired to get out of helping. Would that be just like me? (Would it?) I had a fever. Not a high one, but a fever nevertheless. On Tuesday, the second week of summer school, I bought a large freshly squeezed orange juice at the restaurant next door to my office and went to class. I told the class I wasn’t feeling well and would make it as long as I could. That was about half way through the class – I just put my head down on the table and told them I was done.

It was sort of amazing how sick I got. And how there were not symptoms other than exhaustion. I wound up in the hospital with mystery disease. Just the sort of patient everyone loves. Not that boring, every day illness, but who-knows-what and who can figure it out first. A medical student followed me from room to room wanting to take my history, all manner of specialist came to see me every day – usually with medical students in tow, my usually very reserved doctor suddenly became an aggressive seeker of answers. But none were forthcoming. Infectious diseases specialist, rheumatologist, cardiologist, residents of all stripes, attendings, med students: I was very popular.

To be continued....

tree

The limb that split off from the master trunk in last week’s thunderstorm is beginning to die. I look out my window and see two different shades of green: the lush deep green of the living leaves and the fading, dehydrated green of the cracked limb. The branches are all twisted among themselves and I know the best thing would be to take the tree down entirely. But, although I would love to never have to rake up those monstrous leaves once more, I know I’d hate to have a clear vista into my neighbor’s yard and them into my office. I’d detest seeing the depressingly disintegrating alley every time I sit at my desk. It’s the lovely green wall between me and across the alley. One winter day, although of course the tree wasn’t green, I had a moment of great grace looking at the tree through a thick fog. It’d been raining slightly, but more than rain the air was dense with impenetrable fog. Only about ten feet away, I stared into the tree as I avoided whatever was on my desk. Slowly my attention started to focus on the tree and I saw a beautiful morning dove hunkered down on a branch, its head drawn deep toward its body, motionless on its perch as its branch swayed. It warmed me to see how this bird took shelter against the storm. And then, as I was focused finally on the tree, I slowly noticed another dove, and another, and another. Until I realized the entire tree was filled with doves waiting out the rain. Through the fog I counted about fifteen doves attached firmly to their branches in the winter drizzle.

declaring

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

So yeah – if events compel us to change our ways, we should inform those folks we’re changing from. And then, following that: this is what we think, if the guy in charge tries to bend us over a barrel we have a right to kick out the barrel. We know we’re more likely to just stay bent over, but let’s have a little guts, shall we.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

two nevers

Dinner tonight with a mortician friend and his partner. “Everything is always death this, and funeral that… Could we not talk about dead bodies, please?” But I think it’s interesting. It’s not that I’m so interested in anal leakage or vacuuming out the thoracic cavity, but I do like a good story and what better than the end? One thing we learned is that you should never embalm a friend. Did that once and it was much harder than anticipated and gave him nightmares for weeks. Another thing we learned – Clay Aiken is having a baby with a good friend. Artificial insemination. So, never personally impregnate a friend either. Don’t get personally involved at the beginning or at the end, its simply too much entanglement.

eye doctor: part dos

A follow up on June 25, eye doctor. I’ve decided to go ahead and get glasses for distance. They will not be strong, but they will make things clear. No longer will I be unable to see street signs until I am to close to change lanes. I’d asked the eye doctor if I could get them just for driving at night, movies, and such and he felt convinced that I’d never wear them. “You’ll put ‘em in a drawer and it’ll just be a waste of money.” I’m middle aged enough to know that when someone says “in my experience” they probably know what they’re talking about. When I say it I know what I’m talking about. So when he thought I’d never wear them I decided he was probably right. Then I talked to a friend who agreed. “You’ll probably never wear them. I mean, I have glasses that I just wear when I’m driving at night or in the movies.” Then we just looked at each other. She has glasses just for those times and she wears them. I know I’d love to see the street signs especially at night. I think I might wear them too. Movies could be clearer. I know see names of streets instead of estimating word length. It sounds like it might work out. So I called and had them send me a prescription. I will get those glasses. And I will wear those glasses. Yes sireebob.

not much...

Tree in the yard is precarious. Course is heading into final stretch. New technology is coming online at work. People are leaving. Others, we don’t know them yet, will arrive in the future. Eyes are dry and tired. Energy draining quickly having been up since 5. Why? Cannot answer that, although I wish I could.