Bitchy, dogs, France, toothpaste for herpes

The dogs are pissy, because I haven’t taken them for a run. They ran ten mountainous miles yesterday, and I say that that should cover for today too. They disagree. Like everyone, dogs develop expectations, and my dogs expect a four-mile run everyday. “Just let me have today off, please?” I ask. “Feckless bastard,” Bonnie answers. “Pusillanimous son of a bitch,” intones Baxter. (I’ll never get used to the way modern dogs talk to their masters.)

“What do the two of you know about my mother? She was dead years before you were born, but if you had known her, you would have loved her. She would have accused me of never feeding you, and would have given you treats until you were as bloated as wood ticks. ‘Mother,’ I would have said. ‘They act hungry because they are DOGS, and dogs are GLUTTONS. They no longer have waists, for god’s sakes. Can’t you see that?’” No, she couldn’t have.

The partially remodeled den is a mess. Sheetrock dust everywhere. The house is beyond needing to be cleaned, but there’s no point in cleaning it until I’m done making dust. If I could devote full time to the den, it wouldn’t be so bad, but I had a Masonic meeting today and an IOOF one tomorrow, and then there was yesterday’s bike ride in the mountains. It’s 10:00 p.m., and I’m tired. I just want to relax and write a little before I eat a late supper and bike home with Peggy when she gets off at midnight. That’s why I don’t want to take the dogs for a run. Besides, I have a rash down below, right where groin hits bike seat. Something fungal maybe. Peggy suggested herpes. “You would know,” I retorted, as I wondered where the hell she thought I would have picked up herpes. She advised that I put toothpaste on the rash. Peggy is a big believer in toothpaste. “Will I grow teeth down there?” I asked. “Only if I grow teeth on my nose,” she said, and I wondered why she had toothpaste on her nose. Like the comment about herpes, a lot doesn’t get addressed in a marriage. Sometimes, the conversation moves too quickly; other times, the potential querier simply doesn’t want to know.

Peggy’s speculation that I might have herpes wouldn’t seem to fit either of these categories, but what might I have said: “Dear, do you think I’m fooling around on you?” Well, yes, I might have said that, and she would have probably said that the thought had crossed her mind, me having done exactly that kind of thing a couple of dozen times by now. Then I would have been obliged to assure her that she was wrong. But I did assure her that she was wrong with my “you would know” remark and my look of surprise. I wisely cut out the rest, the tedium of a discussion about a non-existent liaison.

We did discuss her coming trip to France. I am opposed to it, but what would be the good of insisting that she stay home; of insisting that she avoid plane crashes, crazy motorists, Arab terrorists, scam artists, transcontinental germs, an outrageous financial expenditure, the silliness of attending an opera and touring Mozart’s house when she has never been to Eugene’s opera or listened to Mozart on her own stereo? Maybe she would stay home, but I would have become the poop of her party, the rain on her parade, the despoiler of a “special once-in-a-lifetime trip” with her sister and Francophile niece.

Marriage is terribly limiting, terribly restrictive, so there’s no point in making it worse than need be. Therefore and wheretofore, I have to give her space to go to France. “It won’t break us,” as she’s fond of saying, and I know that, in all likelihood, she will survive—and maybe even avoid the flu, and maybe even have a good time. After all, it’s France. Not the Middle East. Not some bacteria-riddled dump in the tropics. It’s France. They’re civilized and sanitary over there. Maybe even more than we are here. I wouldn’t know. I’m unlikely to ever see France. I’m content with Oregon. I love that which is at hand simply because it is at hand.

Do I have no curiosity then about the history, culture, and natural aspects of a faraway place? Am I THAT provincial? Well, if I won a trip to France, I would probably go (that is if I couldn’t sell the trip to someone else), but otherwise, it wouldn’t occur to me. Peggy doesn’t like it that I am this way, but the secret of a happy marriage is not so much in shared preferences but in accepting—if not delighting in—your partner’s differences.

Right now, her desire to go to France is a difference that I am finding hard to accept. She will be halfway around the world, and what if she needs me, or I need her, or what if some catastrophe should make it impossible for her to come home. I won’t rest easy until next she’s back.

Grand Lodge, a downhill biking adventure

I attended the 151st Oregon Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows last week. It was held at a casino, which struck me as ironic since gambling was once grounds for expulsion. I hated the thought that we were supporting a business that was created for the purpose of profiting from greed and stupidity. Like I told Peggy, sure I’ve chased women, done drugs, gotten drunk, am crazier than hell according to the DSM, and never been great at holding a job either; but, by god, I’ve never gambled. If the preachers are right about there being sins of omission versus sins of commission, then it makes sense that virtue runs in the same directions.

I took my new bike to the convention, and rode it during breaks. The first day, I got a kick out of screaming down a hill that overlooked the casino. I passed a cop in a curve, but there was good visibility and no double lines. I then swung through a large truck stop and wove my way among the slow-moving eighteen-wheelers like a fighter plane among bombers. Next came a stop sign, but nothing was coming, so I didn’t slow down. I was traveling too fast to make the first turn into the casino parking lot, so I gracefully arced into the second. Large yellow arrows pointed in the opposite direction, but no one was coming. I biked right up to the doors of the casino and had just wheeled my bike inside when an angry policeman came running in after me. As he outlined my many offenses, I realized that he must be the same cop I had passed, and that he had been trying to catch up with me the whole time. His list grew tedious, and if I had not been in fear of a ticket, I would have asked if he was always so negative. He let me off with a lecture, leaving me to suppose that casino towns must be the opposite of speed traps. Whereas the latter are looking to issue tickets, the former make their money by leniency.

I didn’t enjoy Grand Lodge, but neither did I didn’t hate it the way I did last year when it was held at a grungy Holiday Inn surrounded by freeways and parking lots. Having my bike and being in a small town both made a tremendous difference, because, after several hours among people, I have an urgent need to be alone and stretch my legs. I have but little to contribute to Grand Lodge, but my home lodge keeps sending me, and I keep going.

Oregon’s outgoing Grand Master was the first woman in the United States to serve in such a position. Women were only allowed to join the lodge within the last ten years, so her rise was truly meteoric, and would have been impossible had she not grown up in an Odd Fellow family and worked as an employee in the Grand Lodge office. She was kidded about being the first Grand Master to kiss the brethren on the cheek, but I never heard a serious word against her.

Snaky day

Yesterday was a snaky day—nine to be precise. They were all Northwestern Garter Snakes, and were all sunning nonchalantly on the gated Weyerhaeuser road where we found them. I lay beside one, petting it gently and admiring its intelligent expression. Its tongue was red on top, black underneath, and so soft that I couldn’t feel it touching my fingers.

I biked over another. Peggy spoke to it lovingly, but its back was broken and blood trickled from its mouth. I gently laid it upon a rock and stomped it until it was flat. Even then, the tail twitched spasmodically. I said nothing, but felt much. When we resumed our ride, I asked Peggy what she would have done had she been alone, and she said she would have killed it with a rock. I considered euthanasia the only honorable alternative, but I didn’t know if she would be able to do it.

The secret of uniformity

I went to a Church of Christ with Carl last night, and heard songs that I heard regularly during my first eighteen years, but hadn’t heard at all in the last forty. “This World Is Not My Home,” “Fairest Lord Jesus,” and “I’ll Fly Away” came back to me as clearly as if I had sung them yesterday. I was wrecked, absolutely wrecked, by memories of places and people from long ago and from the unparalleled beauty of the songs themselves. I tried valiantly to join in on hymn after hymn, but invariably lost it by the second line. I hid my tears as best I could, but that wasn’t very well, so I’m sure a lot of people wondered what kind of a vile sinner they had in their midst that Christ was working on him so.

The text was Romans 7, and Carl loaned me his leather-bound Bible—with Jesus’ words in red—so I could follow along. I immediately turned to Romans, and chuckled to think that most of my present-day friends would have to look for it in the table of contents. Come to think of it, Peggy would too. Eighteen years of Southern Baptist church services, revivals, Bible studies, Sunday Schools, Vacation Bible Schools, and mid-week prayer meetings; and through them all, she maintained her virginal ignorance of all things Christian. You’re really got to admire such strength of apathy. An ordinary person would have some tiny but flabby pore somewhere in her membranes that would admit at least a little knowledge through osmosis, but not Peggy. She knows scarcely more about Protestantism than she does about Islam, yet she is a far more ethical person than I ever so much as aspired to be. When someone tells me that you have to believe in God to live with integrity, I wonder how well they themselves would measure up against the woman I had the good fortune to marry.

It wasn’t just the songs that hadn’t changed in the Church of Christ. As I looked around, I asked myself what might give the place away as being from 2007 rather than 1967. The balding preacher had a beard, I noted, and he didn’t wear a tie. Also, we were using a twentieth century version of the Bible, and there were two black people in the audience, one of whom was the preacher’s wife. Now, that was really different, but everything else was pretty much the same. The women still couldn’t ask questions or make announcements much less preach; the music was still a cappella; stacks of metal trays still held tiny communion glasses; there was still a baptismal pool in a three-sided room behind the pulpit; and there was still an invitational hymn after the sermon.

I thought it a wonder that the Church of Christ can have no governing body beyond the individual congregation, yet remain so nearly uniform across time and space. Then it struck me that maybe the lack of a governing body is the reason for their uniformity. Governing bodies usually become the object of partisan struggle with the party that wins forcing the party that loses to either go along or get out. Because the Church of Christ lacks a governing body, there can be no large-scale struggle and therefore no mass exodus. Instead of stifling revolutions, centralized governments make them all but inevitable.

“I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing…. Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner…. What a wretched man I am!”
the Apostle Paul

As was the case with the hymns we sung, I had not heard the verses we read for many a decade. Such passion! Such angst! (Such harmony with the hymn “Amazing Grace” that I so recently criticized.) How little the human condition has changed in two millennia. Whatever it is that a person is fighting, who cannot relate to the above?

The preacher said that when he was a teenager, he would look at the failures of older Christians and wonder why they acted so badly, why it was that they couldn’t get things right after all their years of practicing. He said he now knows that the struggle just keeps getting harder. Yes. At least for me it does, and I don’t even have Christ to back me up. I will never have Christ to back me up. Yet, I enjoyed myself tonight. When the preacher greeted me, I told him that the only thing wrong with his talk was that it ended too soon. His expression said that he didn’t often hear that particular compliment. How odd he would find it if he knew that it probably came from the only person in the building who makes no claim to Christianity.

Carl exhorted me to bring my wife to church some Sunday, and I didn’t even laugh. This was no easy accomplishment, but probably worth the struggle.

Phil's funeral and thoughts about worship

Phil’s funeral was held today, eleven days after he died. It was a corpseless affair—funerals here often are—on a day that was gray throughout. Seven a.m. looked like noon, and both looked like seven p.m.; the whole day being one protracted and depressing affair that neither happened nor knew when to quit.

I was little touched by the words that were spoken, so I had no need of the paper towels that I tucked into my pocket at the last minute. The first songs were country songs that Phil liked. Then came “Rock of Ages” and “Amazing Grace.” Miserable song, “Amazing Grace.” I know that it was written by a slave-trader turned Christian and all that, but describing oneself as a worm and a wretch strikes me as just so much sucking-up. “Abide with Me,” now there’s a song I can get behind. Pretty imagery. Touching sentiments. Mournful tune. Good funeral song. We didn’t sing it.

The elderish Nazarene preacher pushed the microphone aside because “microphones scare me,” and proceeded to drone on in a low monotone for so long that the sermon itself seemed like a metaphor for death. He tried to add authority to his words by quoting chapter and verse, although a good part of the audience didn’t give a rip. Still, if his church weren’t a long bike ride distant, I would visit it because I have more faith in the goodness of inept preachers, and because I miss going to church.

For me, church is a mostly futile endeavor, but, as I said, I miss church. Unlike Peggy, who grew up thinking of it as something she had to endure until the first Sunday she was out of her parents’ house, I loved church. Church MEANT something to me. Church still means something to me, because I have a great and insatiable urge to worship. I can’t worship anyone or anything in particular, because I don’t believe in anyone or anything in particular, but this in no way diminishes my urge to surrender myself to the beauty and wonder—if not the goodness—of the universe.

On the other hand, why subject myself to certain disappointment? Most especially, why go to a fundamentalist church when there are at least three churches nearby that don’t give a rat’s behind if I even believe in God. The answer is that churches that don’t give a rat’s behind are not churches in which there is much worship happening. They are often little more than an intellectual smorgasbord of world religions with Sunday schools that make prayer flags one week, draw the Star of David the next, and celebrate Beltane the week after.

In regard to religion, they are without FOCUS—sort of like an ad hoc committee that can’t come to a conclusion. But in regard to politics, it’s another story, because they are utterly and unapologetically liberal. Sure, they say they’re creedless, but they’re really humanistic with a creed that is as narrow as the Nicene, and they themselves are as intolerant as any fundamentalist.

Optimists versus pessimists--what's the difference?

I just biked to my Masonic Lodge on the right night but the wrong week. Life can be confusing sometimes. I was biking yesterday when I looked at my speedometer and saw that I was going 53.5 miles per hour. I knew this had to be wrong, because I only felt a slight breeze, and because my schnauzer was running alongside.

Yet another example…I was wondering today if an optimist can be depressed, or if he would have to first give up his optimism. I should think that a “depressed optimist” would be an oxymoron: he could be a sad optimist, maybe but not a depressed optimist.

Then I remembered that, in experiments, chronically depressed people rate their abilities and amount of control accurately whereas chronically happy people overrate theirs. I observed this with Phil (God rest his soul) who believed almost until the end that he was going to get well. This led him to neglect doing things he should have done, and now other people must do them.

I have another friend who never saved money, because he figured he would always have enough or, barring that, could easily find a job. He was wrong on both counts, so what did he do? He looked for a pessimist to loan him money. Said pessimist (I won’t name names) agreed to do so in the belief that said optimist had learned his lesson. He too was wrong. Optimists are slow learners.

Futility is but a value judgment that I impose over reality

I didn’t see Phil today, and he was asleep yesterday, his breath shallow and five times the speed of my own. His coming death is unexpectedly hard for me. As I saw it, he and I were supposed to be among the few who would carry on the lodge when the older members died out.

I am so depressed over his imminent loss that I am having trouble coping. I am in my third day of failed attempts at a carpentry project that should have taken but a few hours. As for my studies in natural history, I can scarcely see the point. I reflected tonight that if all the seconds of all the lives of every human who ever lived were added together, the number would compare unfavorably to one raindrop against the totality of all raindrops. Where is comfort to be found in our brief temporality?

This is hardly the first time that I have experienced depression, and I worry that such intermittent moroseness will undermine my health. I can well imagine Virginia Woolf walking into the surf, or Ernest Hemingway blowing his head off after a failed attempt to throw himself into an airplane propeller. The desire for death becomes almost too great to be denied by the earliest and most certain method available, no matter how grotesquely unthinkable it would appear in ordinary moments. I do not know how to survive such times other than to wait them out, my marriage negating any genuine threat of suicide.

I sometimes think that I should at least get drunk in order to buy a brief respite, but I am blessed in that I have no great appetite for alcohol, and actually tend to drink more when I feel good than when I feel bad. Thus deprived of all obtainable comforts, I carry on as normally as I can, confident in my belief that the darker the night, the brighter will be the coming day—or so it has been in the past. But always, I know that there will come another night, and that I can no more resist it than I can resist the revolution of the planets.

And so I thrash about for any ready diversion. Last night, I read about the Confederate general, John Bell Hood. He lost an arm in one battle, a leg in another, and finally succumbed to yellow fever at age forty-eight. “At least, I have beaten him,” I say to myself, “for I am a full ten years his senior, and my limbs are intact.” It seems a very odd thing to simultaneously wish for dissolution and to rejoice in reading about the people I have outlived. It’s as though some remote part of me is mocking my misery. This part serves to remind me that, even if all the dire things I might say about the state of the universe and my part in it are true, sadness is not a given. While sadness might be a given for some other reason (hormonal, perhaps), it is not a given due to futility, because futility is not reality. Futility is a value judgment that I impose upon reality, and sadness is but the outcome of that value judgment.

Another visit with Phil, misplaced compassion

I spent a few agreeable hours with Phil today. He was awake and talkative, but I could understand little of what he said. “I am miserable,” I caught, along with, “I am going to die.” Frustrated with his inability to speak, he often tried to point at what he wanted, but his muscle control was no better than his control over his voice. The twenty-year old CNA was happy for me to take over most of Phil’s care. I told him I would return tomorrow—if Phil is alive tomorrow. And Phil might well be alive tomorrow and for several subsequent days as well. People who bet on how quickly someone will die are prone to underestimating the tenacity of the human body. (I read today of a British man who, when he was ninety, bet $200 that he would live to be 100. The bookmaker figured the odds at 250 to one, and lost $500,000.)

I felt little pity or repulsion today, just a firm resolve to never allow myself to die in such a manner. Phil remains too proud to let anyone feed him, yet he is too helpless to perform his basic bodily functions unaided. I imagine a contradiction here, but then I believe in suicide and euthanasia as an honorable way to avoid suffering, waste, and indignity, whereas Phil regards life as a gift that only God can give and that only God should take.

I used to be a CNA, so I know what it is like to be awake at 6:00 a.m. shaving the faces of drooling idiots (not that Phil has sunk so low). When I did such work, I would ponder the millions of dollars a year that taxpayers spend to keep such people alive, and I came to regard it is a criminal act. There never has been and never will be enough money for everything, so why waste it on those who are so hopeless that they don’t even understand the concept of hope, on those who are so brainless that it is hard to tell their good days from their bad or even to determine whether they have good days and bad days?

I often find myself in such extreme opposition to the values of society, especially in regard to compassion and justice. Tonight, there is a hip-hop concert at the fairgrounds. The band last appeared in Salem, where their performance was brought to an early end by gang gunfire and fistfights. I am therefore under some small apprehension that a bullet could come flying through my wall. Yet, I don’t blame screwed-up kids for the existence of gangs; I blame society for the existence of gangs, because we could stop them, and we don’t.

One approach would be to simply kill the bastards. A complementary approach might be to set aside parcels of land, and make them into law-free zones where gangs could do as they pleased. They could die of overdoses; they could kill and torture one another; they could rape one another’s hoes; they could do anything whatsoever without the least apprehension that anyone would help or hinder. Hip hop “artists” would try to shame anyone who lacked the courage to visit such enclaves, while those who buy into the values of hip-hop could have a gay old time of it for however long they wanted—just so they stayed at least twenty-four hours.

The smell of cancer

I visited Phil in the hospital today. He was neither awake nor asleep, and his hands kept grasping at things I couldn’t see. He gurgled like my father did as he lay dying, and the percolator-like sound made the last thirteen years disappear in an instant. Tears that never fell for my father, fell for my friend. An aide asked if I was his brother. I said I was, realizing for the first time that Phil and I could be mistaken for relatives. The staff treated me more familiarly than they would had I said I was his friend. They even left him in my care for a while.

Phil awakened, and tried to eat from a tray that had been in the room when I got there. He waved his spoon over his food like a magician trying to conjure a rabbit. Now and then, spoon and food would touch, and he would lift the resultant smudge of gravy or tapioca to his lips. I offered to feed him, but he would have none of it. I sat on my hands in frustration. An hour later, he gave up on the spoon, and tried to eat his applesauce directly from its plastic container. He couldn’t get the container turned so that the opening was toward his face, so I removed the foil completely, and watched as he tried to lap the applesauce with his tongue. I began to laugh. Phil didn’t care. He knows me too well.

He was in a talkative mood, but his speech was as amorphous as his movements, and I could only catch one word out of twenty. “Here I am,” I told myself, “missing out on what might well be my friend’s dying words.” This too struck me as funny.

The stench of cancer caused me to choke down vomit at times. A physical therapist asked the belligerent man in the next bed where he was. “Sacred Heart,” he replied confidently. “Can you tell me what kind of a place Sacred Heart is?” she persisted. He paused. “A large industrial complex with office buildings.” “Not bad,” I thought. The nurse continued, “Do you know what year this is?” “1976.” “Good guess,” I told myself—“close enough for working purposes anyway.” “Do you know what time of year it is?” Under my breath: “Geez, lady, he’s already missed the year by three decades. What is it you want here? Are you really going to chart” ‘Patient off on the correct year by thirty-one, but hit the month dead-on.’”

Phil’s room was six stories up and directly over Hilyard Street. I wondered if I could aim well enough to land in the back of a passing pickup (it tickled me to imagine how high the people in the front would jump), but reflected that the pavement looked more welcoming. I thought it a good day to die. Not the best, perhaps, due to a chill wind and a growing cloud cover, but not the worst either. I looked across Hilyard at the parking garage from which a woman jumped onto the top of the Subway Restaurant. She had told the shrink in the ER that she was suicidal, but he didn’t believe her. That’s the way it is at “a large industrial complex with office buildings” when you don’t have insurance.

I pictured Phil lying in that bed until he drowned, just as my father had. Give me a bullet to the head any day. Seriously. Take me to the woods; shoot me in the head; and leave me for critter chow. It’s a lot to ask, of course, and so I asked myself if I would do as much for Phil. “Yes,” I thought. “If Phil wanted it, and if I wouldn’t go to jail, I would blow Phil’s brains out, and watch the smoke waft from the hole in his head.”

I wondered if a wild animal would eat a malignant tumor. Some creatures will eat shit, and a lot of creatures will eat carrion; but I find it hard to believe that anything but a fire would eat cancer.

But then Phil wouldn’t want to be put away. Phil would choose life no matter what. I live everyday with the thought that I am dying. Phil didn’t think he was dying until this week. Long after everyone else accepted the fact that good old Phil wasn’t going to be good old Phil much longer, Phil was saying that he was going to beat this thing. It’s easy to think that we’re all basically alike, but we’re not. Phil’s tough. Phil’s a great deal tougher than I, at least emotionally, yet he’s going to die younger.

I caressed Phil’s thigh as he tried to eat. At my touch, his spoon paused in midair, and he tried to look at me through his remaining eye, but he couldn’t raise his head enough. The spoon resumed its arcs through space, and we sat in silence as I held his leg, and wished so very, very much that I could give him a long life. I left a note for Molly in which I offered to stay with Phil overnight, but as I biked home, the smell of cancer seemed to grow stronger with every passing block. Still, I will go if I am called, and I will be honored.

Biking Winberry

Peggy got her new bike yesterday, and we biked up Winberry Mountain today. Winberry is not a prestigious peak, but after three miles of a continuous 20% grade, we found it adequate, and our bikes found it more than adequate. Bikes, we’ve discovered, dislike hills, and despise mountains. I cannot say why—although I have certainly wondered. If a bike were a car or even a motorcycle, I could understand a certain amount of antipathy, but their riders are their motors. My best guess is that they are afraid of heights, because the steeper the slope, the more frozen—as with fear—their pedals become, and the greater the determination of their handlebars to go in any direction but up. And if the road is tilted to the side—as was today’s road—their back tires evince an appalling determination to slide off the gravel and down the mountain, leaving the front tire and the rider to carry on as best they can.

We—Peggy and I—are weary tonight. Her thighs are cramping, and my knee hurts more than a little, but not so much that I am screaming and writhing, at least not noticeably. Upon returning home, we exchanged our new bikes for our old ones, and rode to the U of O to hear a presentation entitled Amphibians of the Northern Oregon Cascades. Peggy found this final cycling insult galling to her thighs, and the fact that she was nearly run down by a speeding woman at an intersection did not improve her outlook. The driver apologized profusely, cried, offered us money, apologized profusely again, hugged Peggy, apologized profusely a third and a fourth time, hugged Peggy a second time, and walked away trembling. Peggy was also upset, but the driver’s emotions were so intense that Peggy found it necessary to comfort the very person whose bumper had just brushed her fender. I was not sure at first but what the driver was going to leave the scene, so I wrote her tag number on my palm. She saw me do this, and it could explain her apologetic reaction.

The dogs accompanied us easily on the trip up Winberry, but the trip back being downhill, Bonnie (who is now nine) was especially fatigued despite numerous stops. I really don’t know how to reconcile the dogs’ needs with ours. The most isolated roads near Eugene are in the Willamette National Forest (a tract the size of New Jersey), and they are all mountainous. This means that finding roads and trails that are both isolated and doable is all but impossible. I study topo maps, not to find a lot of places we can all comfortably go, but simply to find a few places.

I was surprised by Peggy’s considerable speed coming down Winberry since she was so cautious on her old Raleigh. In places, the gravel was loose and the road a washboard. There were also curves, low-hanging limbs, winter storm debris, and potholes. I enjoy the challenge of such an environment, yet I lack the experience to know my limits. Peggy and I later spoke of numerous moments when our back wheels were no longer following our front, and they were not comforting moments. There were even times when I was bouncing so rapidly that I had trouble focusing upon what was in front of me.

My biggest fear of bicycling (in town or in the woods) is that I won’t see something coming. Just last night, I ran up onto a curb that I didn’t see. Luckily, it was rounded at the top so I was able to stay upright, but barely. When I consider how many close calls we have had on bicycles, I almost wonder if we should ride them. Since I can no longer hike, and Peggy’s knees aren’t holding up so well either, the answer is not difficult.

Virginia Tech

If 32 Americans were killed in Iraq, how many hours of news coverage would they get? Or if 132 were killed in car wrecks during prom week? Without the media to tell us, we wouldn’t know what was important.

I heard of the Virginia Tech shootings over Fox News while I waited in the service lounge of the local Chevy dealership. I heard of it, and heard of it, and heard of it; for three and one half hours, I heard of it. In the background, Barry Manilow sang romantic music, and the grill of a $66,000 Cadillac truck reflected a harsh fluorescent glow against the gray day that drooped beyond the floor to ceiling windows. Occasionally, I would take a walk among the acres of cars. Battleship-size SUVs are not a thing of the past, I thought, as I noted the twenty inch tires on Tahoes and Escalades.

Fox had nothing new or remotely reliable to show or report, yet it couldn’t keep from showing and reporting, with split screen coverage no less. Every few minutes, the same police dogs sniffed the same spot of grass on one side of the screen while the same photographers photographed the same other photographers on the other. The announcer interviewed a student over the telephone. “Like, me and my roommate heard that the killer chained the doors,” she reported dutifully over a bad connection. “Did I understand you to say that the killer chained the doors?” the announcer asked in what I took to be mock horror. “Well, like, that’s what the man on the TV said.”

The “fair and impartial” network decided early on that Virginia Tech was to blame for not closing the campus after the first shootings, and every question was framed to prove it. The day dragged on, and I wondered why I didn’t care more. I felt bored in advance by the coming days of eulogies, analyses, and blame; and I wanted to go home. Beyond that, my thoughts were as lifeless as the machines by which I was surrounded, any one of which cost more than most people in the Third World earn in a lifetime of making things for Americans. A dozen other customers watched the flat-screen TV alongside me, and no one said anything. No one looked like they felt anything. Maybe they too just wanted to go home.

The dealership had a café, and outside the café there stood a fountain that kept throwing water back into the rainy skies, but the rain just kept on falling, and falling, and falling. I wished I had a new lover. A new lover would make me feel alive. A new lover would make me feel that something mattered. A new lover would give me a new illusion, and a new illusion would devour my thoughts, at least until she wasn’t new anymore.

I had wine for supper tonight, and I will blame what I just wrote on it, because the responsibility simply cannot be my own. The shooter at Virginia Tech—was he responsible? All the explanations we are likely to hear will be either dismissive or excusatory. They will prove that he was crazy or evil, or they will prove that society is crazy or evil, but that’s as far as they will go, and it’s not very far. Maybe we don’t really want to understand him because “…if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you.” Surely, the shooter at Virginia Tech stared into the abyss for an awfully long time.

Don't come unless you're whole-hog enthusiastic

I just sent a letter about city priorities to the Register Guard. If it is printed, my name will be mud in the bicycle activist community just as it is already mud in the peace activist community. Most groups prefer no support at all to support that is qualified or ambivalent. This makes me a marginal member, at best, in every group I join. I am marginal in my lodges, because I do not believe in a personal god. I am marginal in my mineral club, because I have no interest in lapidary. I am marginal in the butterfly society that I recently started attending, because I am more interested in plants.

One of the things I valued about the anti-tax protest was that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians, all came together in harmony to gather signatures, and no one thought it necessary to discuss our differences. I think it safe to say that we even delighted in the fact that our differences didn’t matter. I only wish I could feel that way in other groups. What I have often found—with cause-oriented groups especially—is that, because many of the members think the same about a variety of other issues, they don’t realize how exclusionary they are. Liberal groups are worse about this because people are blindest to their failings in areas they pride themselves on most, areas such as tolerance and openness.

Ralph and Rhonda

We went dirt biking yesterday—really and truly sliding through diarrhea-like mud and flying down steep and curvy hills, all while dodging stumps, roots, and rocks. The dogs thought our new hobby grand: lots of inviting mud puddles, water to drink whenever they pleased, and a speed suited to canine legs. We discovered the trail entirely by accident while biking logging roads. Someone had even installed ramps on the curves, so bikes could round them really fast. Not that Peggy and I rounded them really fast. No, not us. We walked them really slow, because we don’t have mud tires on our bikes. We have all-terrain tires, and all-terrain tires are not really meant for ALL terrains, and they turn to squirrels in mud. One minute they’re gliding along nicely, and the next minute they’re either lying down for a nap, or sliding sideways to the direction of travel.

We discussed these traits—Peggy and I—and we determined that we did not like them. They are thrilling traits, to be sure, but we agreed that it is better to have at least some idea of what one’s bike is about to do. Although nothing in life is guaranteed, even a vague notion about ones future is superior to no notion at all.

Because Peggy’s new bike is on order, she was on her Raleigh commuter with its two-inch tires. Having christened my new bike Rhonda, I determined that Peggy’s bike needed a name too, so I named him Ralph. Peggy liked the name Ralph, pointing out that since we had B names for out last four pets—Bonnie, Baxter, Becky, Buster, it is only fitting that we have R names for our bikes. That way, we can tell our dogs from our bicycles without looking at their undersides. Inspired and uplifted (although more the former than the latter) by her sentiment, I named my other bike—the one that was home in the garage—Ramon; and Peggy named her other bike—the one that is on order—Rufus. I thought Rufus was too bookish a name for a mud bike. I thought Rufus sounded more like a sedentary pipe smoker in loungewear, and I generously offered to donate the name Ramon to her for her bike, but she was obstinate as usual. On my gloomier days, I suspect that the woman lacks good sense as evidenced by the fact that she so often disagrees with me.

Ralph cost $400, yet he performed better on mud than Rhonda who cost $1,700. I was naturally perplexed—and even a little put out—by this, and I began thrashing around in my mind for a comforting explanation. Ralph is heavier by ten pounds, I told myself, so maybe his greater weight made for greater stability. That sounded plausible, but I could hardly stop with one theory lest it turn out to be wrong, and leave me with no theory at all.

My next theory was that Ralph’s 26-inch diameter wheels are more stable than Rhonda’s 20-inch wheels. I didn’t like that theory much, because I could see no upside to it if it were true. The next thing that came to mind was that Ralph is a boy, and Rhonda is a girl. No that couldn’t be it, not in our enlightened age. If women firepersons are the equal of men firepersons, then women bicycles should be equally equal to men bicycles.

This left me with but one possibility: Peggy is a better biker than I, at least in the mud. I liked this explanation best of all, because it was the only one subject to change. When a person has spent a lot of money for a bike, and said bike does not perform as well as another bike that costs a quarter as much, any explanation that excuses the bike is preferable to any explanation that blames the bike.

Thoughts of hunting and war

Carl is a Masonic brother with whom I feel a kinship. Our grandparents were from Southern Appalachia. We were raised in the Church of Christ. We never leave home unarmed. Tonight, I discovered another commonality when we somehow started talking about World War II. Carl knew a lot more about it than I, but it wasn’t the subject that was the common bond, but our feelings about the subject. Carl was only seven when the war ended, but he grew up listening to the stories of veterans, and as he related some of these stories, he began to cry. I assumed that this would prompt him to change the subject, but he stayed squarely on World War II, and with each anecdote, he cried some more. I too cry about World War II, but only when I am watching documentaries, and only in the company of Peggy. To cry in the company of other men (we were in the proxmity of many men) would mortify me. Yet, I thought well of Carl for doing that which I would not. Mine is a strange world, and it gets stranger all the time.

For example, Carl is a bow-hunter. I’m appalled by sport killing, and I’m especially appalled by killing with inefficient weapons. So, how do I reconcile Carl’s compassion for the suffering of soldiers with his callousness toward the suffering of animals? I cannot. It is like the respect I have for his tears, although I would be ashamed if they were my tears. To be human is to live in contradiction.

If all I knew of Carl was that he killed animals with arrows, I would think very poorly of him. It is only because I know him as a sensitive and complicated man that I don’t feel inclined to condemn him for hunting but to seek to understand him. This is a hopeless task, because there is nothing he could say that I have not heard, or that would change my mind. There comes a point at which further comprehension of another person’s experience would require that I abandon my own. This point marks the difference between intellectual understanding and emotional understanding.

I can accept Carl as a worthwhile person who has a cruel hobby only because I have seen other sides of him, but it is often hard to see other sides of people. It is often hard to even want to see other sides of people. In lodge tonight, for example, I muddled my way through the ritual, not because I didn’t know it, but because I was so distraught over a war protest in Portland last weekend. People at that protest burned an American flag and an effigy of an American soldier. One man even defecated upon a flag.

I am so upset by this that I am considering ending my support of the antiwar effort on an organized level. I deplore, detest, and despise the Portland protestors so intensely that I actually could (not that I actually would) shoot them on sight. If anything, I hate them more than I would hate them if I were not actively opposed to the war. They defile my idealism, and they show me something about myself.

What they show me is how easy it is to turn my desire to oppose the war in the spirit of peace completely upon its head. I am so intent upon love and goodwill that every fiber of my being wants to annihilate these people for their hatefulness. They make me as they are, or rather they elicit a part of me that is like a part of them.

How am I to deal with such feelings? That is what I struggled with during lodge. I was so focused that I literally forgot what lodge I was in, and performed a segment of the Odd Fellow ritual. After my talk with Carl, I thought about how wonderful it would be if I could see these flag burners as I see him—as complex people who sometimes act badly for, what are to them, good reasons. This is easier said than done, because I don’t know them. I only imagine them. I imagine how empowering it must feel to don black hoods, and to make a statement so powerful that it reaches millions. They don’t feel the evil they do, because they are too intoxicated by their power.

They are like the American soldiers who, having seen their comrades killed by the very people they were trying to help, massacred two-dozen Iraqis. Maybe they will feel badly someday, or maybe they won’t, but, in the moment, they saw themselves as the worms that had turned; and it felt good. I suspect that these demonstrators also regard themselves as people who have no power; as people who can neither tolerate the status quo nor change it; as people who believe that almost no one knows or even cares about the pain they feel over the direction their country has taken.

I can relate, but no matter how hard it is to be constructive, anything less makes a person into what he hates. I suspect that I am able to see this from a more mature and thoughtful perspective than that of the demonstrators in Portland, yet I am finding it nearly impossible to heed my own best thinking.

Indian plums, John Denver, and a bike named Rhonda

Yesterday, Peggy and I took my new bike to the woods. I was going to bike alongside her as she walked, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t go slow enough uphill to match her pace, and it was no fun braking all the way downhill. We decided that she needs to get a bike, and that we need to revamp the van so we can both camp in it and carry bikes in it. We might even need a bike trailer for the dogs—if not now, in a year or two.

I tried my bike on hills and in loose gravel. It climbed as lithely as a mountain goat and descended as stolidly as an army tank. I decided that it wasn’t a bike after all, but a mythological being come to life. I had never seen anything like it. I had never known there was anything like it. The only hills that I was unable to climb were so steep that the bike threatened to somersault backwards. It was limited by me, not me by it. If it were a woman, it would have already gone off to find someone younger and more exciting. If I called it a slut, I would mean the word as a compliment—it is cherry red. The only thing it can’t do on its wide tires is to roll really fast, but I didn’t buy it to roll really fast. I bought it to climb like a mountain goat and to descend like an army tank. I think I’ll name it Rhonda.

The day was sunny, the temperature around seventy. It was my first trip to the woods in many months. After my surgery, I pretty much stopped going, because I didn’t know what to do once I got there. Going was just too sad, and I felt just too bad that my limitation was weighing on Peggy. She didn’t complain, but I knew how I would feel if I were her. Hiking has been too much a part of our life for too many years.

So, yesterday was my first time out of town in a long time, and the day was perfect. There were new leaves and new flowers. One book described the Indian plum this way, “It’s flowers smell like a cross between cat urine and watermelon.” Tell me, is that a good odor smell or a bad odor? Regardless, it a very alive odor.

Peggy napped while I threw a stick into Winberry Creek for Bonnie. She quickly learned to swim at a trajectory that would intersect the stick. I was surprised by how fast she learned this, because the concept of gravity is a challenge for her. For example, she will take her tennis ball to the top of a set of steps and roll it down for me to fetch. Only sometimes when she drops the ball, the ball won’t roll. When this happens, she stares at it as if to say, “I have done my part, ball, and now it is time for you to do yours.”

I could tell that Bonnie needs the woods too. A blue heeler is too near the wild to be a town dog. In town, Bonnie is only half alive, but in the woods, she’s 1 1/2 times alive. It’s magical to see a creature become so alive that she can’t contain it all. It’s as if she has crossed some boundary. We usually think of a creature—or a human—as being either alive or dead, but maybe that’s a little like thinking of something as either healthy or unhealthy. Maybe nothing IS. Maybe everything exists on a continuum.

Peggy and I had been playing a CD by John Denver about his love for water, and sunshine, and mountains. I looked at the water, and the sunshine, and the mountains; and for the first time, I felt the full depth of my sadness over losing these things, and I could not contain it. I have gone to the woods since my earliest remembrances, and I saw that I must go back, no matter what. I cannot imagine how people survive without the woods. How can they not experience a void? For most of our history, our species has lived intimately with nature, and even when people don’t know they need that intimacy, I suspect they suffer from the lack of it.

John Denver died at 53, and this makes his songs the more poignant. I understand death about as well as Bonnie understands gravity. Phil (my friend who is dying of cancer) was at lodge this week, much to everyone’s surprise. He arrived late, and walked across the room slow and stooped, like an old, old man. Even those who can no longer hear well could hear Phil breathing, because he breathed like a man who had run a marathon. The lodge grew very quiet as we watched him walk to his seat. I told myself to memorize how he looked, because I knew I would never see him cross that room again.”

Death is one of those things that all the money in the world, and all the militaries in the world, and all of everything else that is powerful in the world, can neither prevent nor reverse. Even if all the powerful of the world tried as hard as they could at the same time, they wouldn’t be able to force so much as an amoeba to live—or bring it back to life. Such thoughts put our power in perspective.

The question then becomes how I should feel about us, given our limitations. Sometimes, it’s easy to take the route of the people at the anti-war rally this morning, and hate the weakness that I see all around me, but, again, hatred is not useful except that it makes killing easier. And even though killing is necessary sometimes, I’m not sure that hatred is a good thing even then. If I’m being attacked by a bear, will it help to hate the bear that I am about to shoot? I actually doubt that there is any situation in which hatred does more good than it does harm.

Two events

I attended two predictable events today. First, a large peace rally. Unlike the small ones, it had speakers, booths, and hard feelings. On one sign a picture of President Bush was covered by a swastika; in another, he was shown alongside Nazi war criminals. I saw posters screaming, “We are Fucked,” and “Fuck the USA.” “One World Socialism” was touted alongside other liberal causes. Many people had tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks, and freakishly colored hair. After the speakers were done, longhaired men stood in a circle drumming.

I saw only one person who held a pro-war sign. I asked him if he was a veteran. “Special forces,” he said. I shook his hand and thanked him for his service. I tried to engage him in conversation, but he assumed that I too was a veteran, and he wouldn’t speak to me when he learned otherwise. He shouted at the news media; he accused me of blocking his sign; his lips twisted with rage. I moved on. Reuben, a rat-terrier appeared. I don’t know his owner’s name—although she often brings him to my house to play with Baxter—so I call her Mrs. Reuben. Reuben the dog was distressed. “This is his first demonstration,” Mrs. Reuben explained.

What is the good of all this hatred, I wondered. Really, who does it reach? What is the benefit of saying by implication, “I’m for peace, and if you don’t agree with me, I’d just as soon shit on your grave.” As least this was the sentiment that I heard screaming at me from many of the signs and many of the faces. I thought of the French Revolution, and I surmised that, like Robespierre, these people lacked the ability, or even the will, to do anything but destroy.

I saw nothing that I didn’t expect, yet it still depressed me, utterly depressed me, because, as I thought, if so many of the people who are for peace are filled with hatred, where is there room for hope? Where is the rosy glow before the dawn? There is none. It’s all darkness, darkness, and more darkness. I went not to support but to observe, and I had wrongly thought that this would protect me from being so strongly affected.

There were also cops on bicycles and motorcycles, and, a block away, a white van that had Department of Homeland Security on the sides. Brawny, crew-cut men stood near the van. They are all caricatures, I thought—the demonstrators, the cops, the feds…. It’s like a movie set.

I then biked to my mineral club’s meeting and picnic. The new president is only interested in lapidary, and every meeting is devoted to it. This event was supposed to last five hours, but I only stayed an hour and a half—just long enough to eat and socialize before the rock saws and polishers were brought out. People didn’t understand why I was leaving. They wondered (or so I thought) if I was mad. I went out of my way to be nice so as to reassure them.

Two mineral club people had asked me over lunch if I was new to the group. I said that no, I served as the membership officer last year (I didn’t add that I had given oral reports at every meeting). Such is the impression I have made on the Eugene Mineral Club. For two years, I’ve been simultaneously inside and outside. It’s this lapidary thing that pushes me away. So then, why do I go? I go partly for the scant geological knowledge that I receive, and partly because I feel sorry for a club that is dying. I can neither help them nor abandon them.

Bikes versus cars

The common morality in regard to the automobile is based upon obeying the law, and this makes it easy for people to dismiss their own driving as having little impact upon pollution or our dependence upon foreign oil. I even know a great many motorists who hate bicyclists, because, as they claim, bicyclists use the roads without paying a gas tax. Most road funds come from other taxes, but even if this were not true, shouldn’t bicyclists be given a break for the harm they don’t do? They don’t stink up the air; they don’t contribute to global warming; they don’t make noise; they don’t leak oil; they don’t wear out the pavement; they don’t increase our dependence upon the Middle East; and they almost never kill people. None of these factors are relevant in the minds of people who hate bicyclists. I think that if they were honest, they would have to admit that they mostly hate bikes because bikes are not the common mode of transport (they’re damned near un-American to hear some people tell it), and because they slow traffic.

I just returned from the supermarket. I was obliged to bike on a busy street for part of the trip, and his gave me two choices: I could ride in the right-hand traffic lane, or I could ride where people park. The traffic lane had been paved repeatedly since the parking area had been paved, so the pavement in the parking area was rough, cracked, and potholed. It also contained an occasional parked car along with such roadside obstacles as rocks, broken bottles, and sand from street deicing. But the traffic lane was filled with motorists who wouldn’t hesitate to honk, curse, and pass without changing lanes. When a motorist is in a hurry, and something that is slow and small blocks his way, the impulse is to show the offender who owns the road. This means that dozens of times per mile, two and three ton hunks of steel piloted by drivers of varying abilities and degrees of sobriety pass within twelve inches of my handlebars at forty miles per hour.

Since most motorists exercise considerable caution when passing that close to a stationary car in a parking lot, I must conclude that they place little value upon my life as a bicyclist, although I’m sure they would be extremely sorry—for themselves at least—if they were hauled into court for killing me. Unfortunately, juries are composed largely of drivers who could just as easily be on trial themselves, and are therefore eager to pardon their brethren.

Cars hit bikes so frequently in Eugene that such accidents aren’t mentioned by the press unless someone was killed or the motorist fled. There was an incident last weekend in which a man in a Jeep Cherokee hit a woman on a bike (and in a bike lane), jumped from his SUV, cursed her as she lay on the pavement, got back into his SUV, crushed her bicycle, and fled the scene. The very idea that someone of driving age would choose to ride a bicycle when she could be driving a car absolutely infuriates a some people even in this city that is known for being bicycle friendly.

Pedestrians are treated some better if only because they are in the road less. But let one try crossing the road. (Two blocks from where the bicyclist was hit by the Jeep, a pedestrian was killed by a hit-and-run driver the previous weekend.) Eugene recently installed a great many pedestrian/bicycle crosswalks, yet not more than one out of fifty cars will actually allow a pedestrian to cross. I see person after person waiting in the crosswalk, not until a car yields to him, but until no more cars are coming. I’m not so timid. No privileged class gives up privileges until forced.

Don's car is broken into

Don, one of my Masonic brothers, discovered after lodge tonight that his new Toyota station wagon had been broken into and a leather briefcase stolen. I listened in astonishment as he went through his car and listed the items that were not stolen—his cell phone, his .45, his other leather briefcase, his set of electrical tools, and his billfold with cash and credit cards. “That thief was really dumb to leave all this!” he exclaimed. I bit my lip.

No, Don is not dumb. Don is an optimist. As he put it, “I knew something like this could happen, but I never thought it would.” By comparison, I assume that “something like this” is practically guaranteed to happen, but that I can minimize the damage by preparing for it. I had not even left my bicycle outside during lodge, but had taken it indoors and locked it, and before lodge, I had been searching the Internet for ways to beef up my window security despite the two keyed locks and protective film that I already have on every window.

During lodge, I had listened in awe as Don spoke untold—and unwritten—pages of Masonic ritual flawlessly. Dumb he isn’t, except in a selective sort of way.

Lodge ritual is both sacred and something that is not to be taken too seriously. As with church liturgy, it is more beautiful when performed well, but it must also have heart. Otherwise, computers could be programmed to speak the words, and the people could sit back and listen. There are two parts to an ordinary meeting. There is the ritual part, and there is the business part, and the former is as beautiful as the latter is mundane. I thrive on the former. It lifts me out of myself. I speak and perform in an altered state. I simultaneously experience reverence and laughter. I feel connected with something that stretches around the world and through the centuries.

Don told us tonight that he recently met the Masonic Grand Master of Iran. If the man lived in Iran, he would be killed, so the temporary headquarters of the Iranian Grand Lodge is in Los Angeles. In this day of diminishing freedoms and privacies in my own country, I can at least be grateful that my situation is not so bad as what people in most times and places have suffered.

Six hours in a parking lot

I spent six hours today standing in a parking lot collecting signatures to force the county income tax onto the November ballot—the same income tax that was defeated on last November’s ballot. One hundred volunteers collected signatures in eight locations. My location had a steady stream of voters despite the fact that the Register Guard and at least one local television station reported that the commissioners were “probably” going to do away with the tax anyway. When I asked people why, having heard this, they still came—thirty miles in some cases—they all said that they don’t trust the commissioners or the media. Many people appear to place a negative truth correlation upon what they are told by the powerful. A local TV station sent people to the wrong location for our rally last week, and the Register Guard sent them to the wrong location for my signature station today—in a paid ad, no less. Accidents? Even if they were, they would suggest that the media is untrustworthy.

I asked one of the three men who started the petition how it came about. He said that he and the other two work together, and that they often threaten to take action against one government outrage or another, but that, until now, their threats had fizzled. This time, one of them donated $10,000 for legal fees and advertising, and they all took off from work to support the effort.

The volunteers at my station thanked everyone who signed. Many of those we thanked pointed out that it was we who were doing all the work, but we didn’t see it that way. As one volunteer said, “We could stand behind these tables all day, but if people didn’t care enough to show up, we would be wasting our time.”

A perfect fit bike, fun with my internist

T’was a big day. I got my new bike out of the shop after leaving it overnight for its second fitting adjustment. I paid $100 extra for a “custom designed perfect fit” only to discover that the only way I could get it was to go home and measure everything about my old bike, and have the custom design team redo the new one to match it.

I’m reminded of a woman who told me that she had a contractor come out to see about replacing her patio door. The man failed to notice that the door was closed, and he walked into it and broke it. His replaced it with a new door of her choosing, entirely at his expense. Obviously pleased with her sagacity the woman assured me that she would “never hire that klutz again.” I concluded from this that she was a hard and silly woman indeed, because it is not the perfect workman who is to be cherished but the workman who is willing to keep plugging away until the job is right.

Another reason it’s a big day…. The results of my follow-up blood-work were in, so I went to the doc to talk about why it was screwed up. He said I have low testosterone. He added that the problem is easily and cheaply remediable with shots, and so he shotted me. I feel better already, like a bull rather than a steer (as he put it). Come to think of it, I felt like a bull anyway, and was astounded that my testosterone was low, so maybe I’m aroused by my new bicycle rather than my new testosterone.

A strange arousal, perhaps, but surely not a bad arousal. Better a bike than a farm animal, I always say, if for no other reason than that bikes don’t kick or transmit hoof-and-mouth disease. Besides, I don’t know where I would keep a farm animal, although, come to think of it, Bonnie is a herd dog, so she would probably enjoy having something to herd—something other than Baxter who just lies on his back and looks despondent when she tries to herd him. But, on the other hand, there’s Peggy to consider. If your spouse told you, “Look, I’ve absolutely, positively got to have a romantic relationship with either a bicycle or a farm animal—you choose;” what would you say—“Get a cow, honey. I’ve been wanting to try my hand at cheese-making.” I don’t think so.

So, Bonnie votes for a farm animal, whereas Peggy would no doubt prefer a bicycle—if I had enough testosterone to ask her—but Peggy can give me infinitely more grief when she’s frustrated. Easy choice, no? Wife—ten. Dog—zilch.

Now for some doctor jokes, or rather jokes told to me by my doctor.

“Why do men have holes in the ends of their penises? So their brains can get oxygen.”

How are bulls able to screw three times a day? They get a different cow each time.”

“Yeah, men are different,” I said. “With women, sex is mostly a function of what’s upstairs. They’re defective that way.”

“You’re right,” he said sadly, as we gave one another a manly hug. “Too bad we don’t know how to fix them.”

“Well, maybe you can work on it after you learn how to cure the common cold,” I offered.

“Yeah, maybe we can,” he answered, but, with a notable lack of optimism.

Another demonstration with Peg

I had a good birthday. Shirley gave me daffodils and chocolates; Walt gave me comb honey from his hive; Peggy’s parents gave me their usual $25; others sent cards; and I got word that my new bike was ready. I didn’t pick it up until Saturday (my birthday being on Thursday), because I wanted to take my first ride without getting rained on. This bike “feels” the pavement more than my other one, and the vibration puts my hands to sleep. I took it back today for some modifications, but the problem wasn’t eliminated, and I anticipate it being even worse when I go off-road. I can get my money back within thirty days, but I am loathe to ask for it. Although I went to lengths to make a prudent decision before I ordered, I obviously failed to go far enough, and for that I feel badly. On the other hand, I’m not about to eat $1,700. My hope is that further handlebar adjustments will remedy the problem.

While I was at the bike store today, an elderly couple arrived to pick up their new bikes. I spoke with them for a long while, and the man said he and his wife have been tandem enthusiasts for years, but that Parkinson’s has made it unsafe for him, forcing them to return to “beginners’ bikes” as he scornfully called a regular bicycle. I know nothing about tandems, but thought he looked ready for a trike. I considered saying as much, but since he was already indignant about his “beginner’s bike,” I bit my lip. I felt sorry for his wife who quietly endured his bitterness, and I felt disgusted with him for ruining what might have been a joyous occasion. Later, I realized that his unhappiness might not have been entirely a result of selfishness. He might have also felt remorse that his failing body had deprived his wife of something she loved. I know the feeling since I can no longer hike with Peggy.

I went to the monthly neighborhood peace vigil last night. We had fourteen this time, which was about double last month. I also went to the federal building today to stand with Peg. She was in the twelfth day of a two-week fast, and confessed to feeling sickly. I caught her at her second of three demonstrations today. The first was a sit-in at Congressman DeFazio’s office. She said that people were arrested, but that she was not among them. “We take turns,” she explained. Since no mention of these arrests ever occurs on the news, I don’t know what the point is.

I have observed that the spiritually oriented protestors (like Peg, who is a Quaker) act on the basis of what feels right rather than on what seems pragmatic. This causes me wonder if the point of their protests is more to feel good than to do good. Since I am out there with them, I am forced to ask myself the same question, and I can but offer that I support them because their dedication makes me ashamed to do otherwise, and because of my hope that, together, we can inspire others to join us until our numbers become great enough to end the war. If nothing else, our efforts might bring more thoughtfulness and compassion into the lives of those who see us. For this reason, I would never knowingly demonstrate with anyone who planned to use harsh words or destructive behavior. To paraphrase a Quaker admonition: When you work to end war, be sure that you are free of the spirit that causes war.

Right after her daily stint at the federal building, Peg crossed the street to protest with “Women in Black.” True to their name, they all wore black. I biked home, sick as always from exhaust fumes. I asked Peg if the exhaust doesn’t bother her, especially in her weakened condition. She said, “I worry about it, and many people have had to stop coming because of it, but I always think about how much worse the people in Iraq are suffering.”

Peaceniks in the snow

I went to the federal building for a peace demonstration today. As I biked, a stiff wind blew wet snow into my face, stinging me with surprising sharpness. No one was there when I arrived, so I speculated that maybe I was the demonstration, and this posed a problem because I had no sign. Then I saw a woman slowly approaching with a five-foot high poster that read “Vigil and Fast for National Repentance and World Healing.” Her name was Peg, and she said she hadn’t eaten in a week, and that her back was killing her. Her every word and movement was in slow motion, and, although she showed a friendly interest in me, she had trouble tracking what I said. Others began to arrive singly until we numbered five women and myself. Hearing my accent, someone asked what part of the South I was from, and said she had lived ten miles from there. Finally, another man appeared. I was the youngster of the group.

Unlike on Saturday, I was very much in the mood for a protest, so I stood right next to the curb holding a borrowed sign. I alternated between waving and smiling at the four lanes of traffic from the west, and—when they had to stop for the light—waving and smiling at the three lanes of traffic from the north. Hundreds honked and waved back, including a cop and a bus driver. I chatted amiably with my companions, all of whom seemed pleased-as-punch to be out demonstrating on one of the foulest days of the year. I commented that we were surely a scraggly looking group in our comfortable but unstylish raingear. Someone replied that, as peaceniks go, we were more scruffy than scraggly. I could but defer to the voice of experience. After an hour, we formed a circle, held hands, and chanted: “May all beings be safe. May all beings be well. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free,” before going our separate ways. Peg said she comes everyday, so maybe I will see her tomorrow.

This was my third demonstration in a month. I also wrote to Republican Senator Gordon Smith to thank him for his bravery in opposing the war, and I had a letter about bicyclists published by the Register Guard. Even if nothing I do makes the least bit of difference, I feel better for having done it. The hardest thing is to say nothing. The next hardest thing is to speak out alone. The easiest thing is to speak out as a member of a group.

I felt increasingly sick during the demonstration. My chest is congested, and the exhaust fumes were torturous. The cold and wet didn’t do me any good either. By the time I got home, I was close to vomiting. Two hours and a hot shower later, I am still close to vomiting.

I asked Peggy to go with me to the demonstration, but she said she worried that some Marine with PTSD might come by and blow us all away. When I told one of the demonstrators this, she said she had been spat upon and hit, but never shot. She speculated that the spitter must have been a smoker, because the sputum was green and thick.

Anti-tax, anti-war

Local voters rejected a county income tax in November only to have county commissioners authorize it this week. Today, I attended a protest in front of city hall. Hundreds of motorists honked in support, but none offered to stand in the rain with us. One yelled (humorously, I supposed), “Get a job!” to which someone of our group yelled back, “That’s the problem—we have jobs.”

I hate standing on a street corner holding a sign. At first, I assumed a deadpan expression simply because I didn’t know what else to do. After awhile, I thought I might be more useful if I smiled and waved. I could do the latter easily enough, but I was in no mood for the former.

Eugene being Eugene, there was another protest across the street (the city hall, the courthouse, and the federal building are on adjacent blocks), this one against the war. I noticed three men with a Marine Corps banner approaching the peace activists, and I wondered if they were for or against the war. I suspected they were for it, because they looked really pissed-off. Sure enough, they placed themselves between the peaceniks and the street, willfully obscuring the signs of the former. One of the Marines screamed that anyone who opposes the War in Iraq shows contempt for every Marine who ever died in any battle of any war (he then listed a dozen or more battles). I was appalled by his logic, and even more appalled when the leader of my group yelled back, “We are with you and the United States Marine Corps, and not with those guys behind you there.”

“Wait just a minute here!” I said to myself, but I held my peace because I didn’t want to take energy away from the protest I had come to support. When the Marines crossed to our side of the street, I worried that the pro-war people and the anti-tax people would look like one big happy family, but I couldn’t think of anything to do about it. When I could stand the situation no longer, I yelled to the people on the other corner, “I hate the damn war. We never should have never gone there in the first place, but now that we’re there, we should come home yesterday.” The people on my side ignored me, and the heavy rain and traffic noise kept the people on the other side from hearing me, so I crossed over. They welcomed me warmly, but I didn’t stay long because I didn’t want my anti-tax placard to dilute their protest.

In less than an hour, all three protests disbanded, because the rain was drenching us and destroying our signs. On one side of the street, I had volunteered to gather signatures for an anti-tax ballot measure, and on the other, I volunteered to attend the next war protest. As with the recent neighborhood war protest, I don’t expect the ones at the Federal Building to shorten the war, but I like the idea of supporting those who support issues that I believe in.

Boots returns home

As I sat in Peggy’s recliner last night in the wee hours (which were my worst hours when my father was dying), I remembered a runaway cat named Boots from thirty years ago. My Georgia cousin, Carrie, had given Boots to me because she was allergic to his fur. I drove him 450 miles back to Mississippi, and he soon disappeared. I said nothing about this to Carrie, but she called nine months later to tell me that Boots had come home. He scratched on the door, she said, and went straight through the house to where his bowl used to stay.

Bonnie and Baxter have a strange way of appearing unheralded when something of interest is about to happen. Like if I take cheese from the refrigerator. Even if I try to be sneaky about it, they are capable of awakening from a deep sleep at the other end of the house and making their way to the kitchen before I can get the package open.

My species has habitually demonstrated the capacity for one generation to declare whole groups of people as hopelessly, obviously, and unarguably inferior, only to have their own children declare them a hopeless, obvious, and unarguable embarrassment. I suspect that our feelings of superiority over other animals is similar, only they present our bigotry with a greater challenge because they compare to us so poorly in some ways even while possessing gifts that we can scarcely imagine in others. What pet lover has not looked at his dog or cat and wished mightily that he could see through their eyes? Whole worlds at our fingertips, yet they might as well be on the far side of the galaxy.

Boots returns home

As I sat in Peggy’s recliner last night in the wee hours (which were my worst hours when my father was dying), I remembered a runaway cat named Boots from thirty years ago. My Georgia cousin, Carrie, had given Boots to me because she was allergic to his fur. I drove him 450 miles back to Mississippi, and he soon disappeared. I said nothing about this to Carrie, but she called nine months later to tell me that Boots had come home. He scratched on the door, she said, and went straight through the house to where his bowl used to stay.

Bonnie and Baxter have a strange way of appearing unheralded when something of interest is about to happen. Like if I take cheese from the refrigerator. Even if I try to be sneaky about it, they are capable of awakening from a deep sleep at the other end of the house and making their way to the kitchen before I can get the package open.

My species has habitually demonstrated the capacity for one generation to declare whole groups of people as hopelessly, obviously, and unarguably inferior, only to have their own children declare them a hopeless, obvious, and unarguable embarrassment. I suspect that our feelings of superiority over other animals is similar, only they present our bigotry with a greater challenge because they compare to us so poorly in some ways even while possessing gifts that we can scarcely imagine in others. What pet lover has not looked at his dog or cat and wished mightily that he could see through their eyes? Whole worlds at our fingertips, yet they might as well be on the far side of the galaxy.

Everyone knows that old people are senile.

I caught a cold three weeks ago, and was hit by a second one just as I was getting over the first. Within minutes yesterday, it went from my head to my chest. I can no longer breathe lying down, and breathing sitting up isn’t any great shakes either, so I suppose I either have pneumonia or close to it.

Dad was the last person to have pneumonia in this house. I remember the gurgling, coffee maker sound of his slow drowning, and the green froth that ran from his mouth in a steady stream. I found his death hard to watch and worse to listen to, but then he was my father. Attending a death is a privilege, and attending a parent’s death is a privilege many times over.

Thank God, my father died here at home, sans tubes, sans blood draws, sans all that kind of stuff that is a miracle to those who have a chance but torture to those who don’t. Save me from hospitals and nursing homes, if you please. If all else fails, and I am in pain, hide me in a ditch with a little bottle of morphine or, if you’re short on morphine, my .357, so I can die on my own terms, so I can embrace death as my final friend.

When Peggy was a young nurse, she took part in tying old people to their beds and treating them against their wills. After all, everyone knows that old people are senile even if they don’t act it. Besides, no person in his right mind would refuse everything that modern medicine had to offer, would he? No rational person would choose to die today if she could survive until tomorrow, regardless of the terms. Yes, Peggy did things then that she would not do now, and that were probably illegal even when she did them. But that’s one of the funny things about the law: large and respected institutions can simply ignore it when they think they’re helping someone, especially when the person they think they’re helping is powerless to resist. As it is said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

ORCAS is gone, I bike across town

Peggy drove across town today, and I later went to meet her on my bike. It was a two-hour trip—the way I did it. I biked streets that I hadn’t been on in a decade and others that I had never been on. I passed the Oregon Center for Applied Science (ORCAS) where I worked as an on-call handyman for years. Several blocks later, I realized that I hadn’t actually seen the two large buildings, so I biked back to discover that they were gone, torn down, all the way beneath the ground. Only the trees and parking lot remained. I could see where I parked, where I set up my sawhorses, and where I entered the buildings. I never imagined that all my work would be so quickly destroyed, and I felt bad about it, although the knowledge quickly came to me that I was but a minor player at ORCAS and therefore a minor loser. The irredeemable devastation before me became a metaphor for the end of all things as I stood in the gray overcast.

Shortly afterwards, I passed the Shari’s where Don and Dorrie took Peggy and me to eat. They were millionaires, so I expected something better, but Shari’s was their favorite place. Don died twelve years ago, and Dorrie soon followed; leaving their money to a son who is characterized by the arrogance and sense of entitlement that follow most rich men’s children.

On one part of my journey, I passed through a residential area of curving streets, most of which were named for trees that don’t grow naturally within a thousand miles of here. The day being cloudy, I might have lost my bearings if not for occasional sightings of the Coburg Hills. I forget how big Eugene has grown, how many hundreds of thousands of people carry on lives that I am in utter ignorance of, all within a short distance of my home.

I wasn’t exactly lost in these suburbs, but I didn’t know my route out either, and the thought came to me that a flat tire would present quite a problem. It would prevent me from either meeting Peggy or letting her know what had become of me. I saw no place except people’s yards to leave my bike; and I doubted my ability to walk out. I knew that I would have to knock on doors; and I knew that if I were the people behind those doors, I probably would not open them for fear of a home invasion robbery. I resolved to carry tools in the future.

Later, I passed two teenagers on a bike path. I studied them as they approached because they were on bikes that were so tiny—and with seats so low—that their knees practically touched their chins on the upstroke. One smiled at me and said, “Hi, how are you doing?” The other also smiled and said, “Do you want to fight?” I said nothing, and they screamed profanities. I took comfort in the thought that I could easily outrun them, not that I bothered to look back to see if they were in pursuit. I later wished (or half-wished) that I had talked to them in an effort to understand why they would abuse an old man (for I must have looked old to them) on a bike path; but this would have put me at risk of underestimating both the extent of their meanness and the extent of my ability to elicit their goodness. Riding a bike exposes a person to things he would never experience behind two tons of steel.

Cheap versus frugal

A year ago to the hour, I was having knee surgery. Today, my application to an experimental drug study for people with severe arthritis was accepted. I feared it might not be because, after all, how severe is severe? Surely, there are people who are worse off than I.

I upgraded my order for a new bike, putting it at $1,700. If my father knew I was spending that much on a bike, he would declare me a fool. The difference between us is that I am frugal whereas he was merely cheap. It’s a distinction that few people make. I rarely eat out because I place no value on eating out and because I can eat more economically at home, but when I do eat out, I order a cheap entrée. If the cheap entrées cost too much, I order a cup of soup or even a cup of coffee. I know plenty of people who think nothing of spending $30 on a meal but would turn pale at the prospect of a $1,700 bike. Few of us have unlimited money, so we must either prioritize or spend until we run out.

My father took another route. He carried thousands of dollars in his billfold (he never much trusted banks), rarely bought anything he didn’t have to have, and spent as little as possible on that. Even his carpentry tools were chosen more from a standpoint of price than of quality. But as I see it, he could have done worse. He could have said to hell with tomorrow and lived in debt. If he had, I would have pronounced him the fool, although being a fool in one area doesn’t disqualify a person from being brilliant in others.

Peggy and I share what I suspect are the two most important values to a happy marriage. We value money about the same, and we value housekeeping about the same. She’s a little freer with her spending than I, and I’m a little more opposed to clutter than she; but at least we’re in the same ballpark. We also excel in that each of us encourages the other to loosen the purse strings from time to time—as with this bike. If Peggy had balked about the price, I wouldn’t have ordered it, but the only time she balked was when I returned to the store to make an alteration, and she somehow thought I was going to cancel the order due to the cost. When I came home after spending hundreds of additional dollars on a stronger and more versatile frame, she was as pleased as I with my prudence.

I study Spanish to keep my brain young

I’ve been studying Spanish for two hours a day for the last ten days. I heard that it’s important to exercise your brain as you age, so I figured I should either do math or learn Spanish, and Spanish seemed the more practical.

Spanish has a lot of charming words like la falda (skirt) and funny words like el excusado (toilet), and it seems logically constructed compared to English, which is more like a house that was added onto by each of its twenty owners, none of whom had any talent for carpentry or design. This isn’t to say that I don’t love English. I adore English, but that’s because it’s my language and the language of my cultural forbearers. On the other hand, if I were a Spanish speaker who was trying to learn English, I would be pulling my hair out. The only thing that bothers me much about Spanish is that every noun in the whole language is either a boy noun or a girl noun. Who thought that up? The wall (la pared) is feminine, but the floor (el piso) and the ceiling (el cielo raso) are masculine. Go figure.

My first peace rally

I just came from a neighborhood candlelight peace vigil. We were two men, four women, two kids, and a dog—a peaceful dog, unlike my dogs, which I left at home. We stood in the middle of 17th and Van Buren; lit candles; sang a song; ate cookies; watched two nutria amble by; and were kept on our toes by four passing cars. I went mostly to please the woman who invited me. I had only met her once before (ten years ago), and found her to be true to her reputation as aggressive, argumentative, and all around obnoxious. Still, she lives but a block away, so when she interrupted my work to invite me to attend an event that she was hosting, I saw a chance to mend our relationship. I doubt that the event contributed anything to world peace, but maybe it helped on a smaller scale.

I daresay that I was the only person at the peace rally tonight who would want to do other than help society’s enemies, and this is one of the reasons that I rarely attend peace rallies. In fact, I don’t recall having ever attended a peace rally. Six adults, two kids, and a dog…guess I started out small enough. I suggested that we start a riot, but peaceful people are more, well, peaceful than they are amused by my offbeat humor. Of course, I am more prone to making sweeping generalizations than I am to peacefulness, so I guess we’re even.

Phil is dying, optimist versus pessimist

My friend, Phil Conners, has cancer. His bones are breaking; his body is no longer producing blood; he is struggling to breathe; and he has run out of treatment possibilities. He is handling all of this surprisingly well. When your every other option has been taken away, you can still inspire people by the way you die.

Since I met Phil in 1992, his house burned to the ground, he lost an eye, his son drowned while trying to rescue a stranger, his wife had cancer, and he himself has fought cancer for years; yet I have never seen anything get him down. When I ask him how he is, he says, “Well, I’m breathing, and I can still walk for short distances, so I guess I’m doing pretty good.” I would need a lot more than that to pronounce life good, but I see no reason to rain on Phil’s parade.

I would like to think that Phil’s bravery is a choice, but I suspect that there are those among us who are congenitally upbeat. It’s as if they have a net beneath them that softens their every fall, no matter how far the drop. That stated, I can’t say that I too wouldn’t face death well. I haven’t faced an arthritic knee well (it being the worst thing that has ever happened to me), but I see no reason to conclude that despondency over a relatively small thing would necessarily indicate despondency over any and all great things. Just as an ordinary toothache might hurt worse than a fatal stroke, so might people’s emotional reactions vary.

At least if I were dying, I would know that the indignity of using the toilet was near an end. At least, there would be that advantage, whereas I can’t think of any advantage to an arthritic knee. The damn thing hurts so bad right now that I can hardly sit still. It keeps me awake at night; it threatens to collapse during the day; it has robbed me of the ability to engage in the activities I enjoyed most; and there is no good solution. There might be something that I could learn from it, but I don’t know what.

Peggy went skiing last week with a couple of fellows named Rick and Doug, who got into an argument on the drive to the mountains. Rick said that he is, and always has been, prone to depression, but that he has learned that there is a benefit to his depression; namely, that he has more philosophical and emotional depth than people who are inveterate optimists. Doug being an inveterate optimist, an argument ensued that got so nasty that the other people in the car ducked down and stayed quiet.

Most traits probably do have their upsides and their downsides, and these aren’t always obvious or even discoverable. Of course, I pretty much have to think this way, because if I were to judge my worth as a human being by the way I am handling this knee issue, I would come out looking bad; just as Phil Conners would come out looking bad if he were judged by how clean he keeps his house.

Okay, so maybe dying well is more important than keeping your furniture dusted, but then again, maybe it isn’t. Maybe all that God really cares about is cleanliness (it being next to Godliness), which would mean that Phil is doomed to burn in hell and me to have a front-row seat in heaven (where I would probably be put to work polishing something). Which one of us would be more content with our fate is another issue.

The tux search continues

I went to my Masonic lodge last night prepared for my first night in the junior deacon’s chair. As we were donning our aprons, the master told me that lodge would be conducted in the Entered Apprentice degree instead of the Master Masons’ degree, the latter being the usual degree and the part I had memorized. I protested his failure to tell me sooner, but there was nothing for it but to say the lines that the degrees have in common and wing the rest (either that or run from the building). I served as best I could, and felt that I conducted myself well.

I find beauty and comfort in the precision and predictability of a well-conducted Masonic lodge. It is like a formal garden in which every walkway is swept and every flower is in bloom, the difference being that Masonry changes but little and slowly. If I could travel back in time and emerge in the earliest Eugene lodge at the time of its inception in 1850, the primary differences would be the antique clothing and the absence of electricity. If I were to go back even earlier and attend lodge with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, I would still recognize the essentials and most of the superfluities.

After lodge, the senior deacon renewed his determination to find me a tuxedo. To this end, he engaged the help of another. They looked me up and down while debating what size I needed. I suggested a 42, but they agreed between themselves on a 40, and I saw no point in arguing over something that I was only 99.9% sure of. While they searched, I stood behind them, hoping fervently that nothing would be found. And nothing was found, at least nothing that was not moth-eaten, white, powder blue, or velvet. Just when I thought the danger was past, they decided to seek the assistance of the Scottish Rite. 750 of its 1,000 members have died over the last few decades, so this leaves a potential warehouse of tuxedos.

It might seem ironic that I am as determined to know my part well as I am to avoid wearing a tux while performing it. My reason is that the former reflects upon my resolve and my intelligence, while the latter is a matter of taste. I accepted the post only after being assured by the master that I would not have to dress for it. Last night, I wore a sports coat without a tie. No one complained, although I take this determination to find me a tuxedo to be a tacit complaint.

Two Years Before the Mast, thoughts on hardship

I am reading Two Years Before the Mast, an account of life aboard a U.S. merchantman in the 1830s. The author was nineteen when he left Harvard and shipped out, and the book was published when he was twenty-five. If I were to cite only the most memorable passages from the fifty pages I have read, I would need ten pages. I could not have approached such poetic insight or descriptive powers when I was so young, and I seriously question whether I could do so now. I might, after all, mistake my talent for writing just as I mistake my talent for singing, for my every note is as soothing from within as it is grating from without. Some people have even doubted that I am capable of forming a note—or at least more than one of them.

On Monday, November 19, 1834, a young Englishman on Dana’s ship fell from the rigging into the sea. He was so weighed down by ropes and tools that he never surfaced.

“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much as at sea. A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and ‘the mourners go about in the streets;’ but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness to the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which gives to it an air of awful mystery. A man dies on shore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. You are often prepared for the event. There is always something that helps you to realize it when it happens, and to recall it when it has passed…but at sea the man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then too, at sea, to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and, for months and months, see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is suddenly taken from among them, and they miss him at every turn…. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit has made them seem almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.

“All these things make a death peculiarly solemn, and the effect of it remains upon the crew for some time…. There is more quietness and seriousness. The oath and the loud laugh are gone. The officers are more watchful, and the crew goes more carefully aloft. The lost man is seldom mentioned…”

How much more beautifully poignant is this description of grief because of the last sentence. I suppose it is true at all times and in all places that there is much that men do not share with other men.

“Whatever your feelings may be, you must make a joke of everything at sea; and if you were to fall from aloft and be caught in the belly of a sail, and thus saved from instant death, it would not do to look at all disturbed…”

Yet, I cannot say that there is no good in this prohibition. I have read many accounts of men who were trapped on mountains or in Polar Regions, and I have learned from them that the Stoicism, if not the outright cheerfulness, of some made the survival of others possible. Indeed, Earnest Shackleton’s men were so elevated by his bravery that they reported having been ashamed to voice their own discontent during the long months of cold, hunger, and mortal danger. Yet, how often have men like Shackleton survived unimaginable hardships with a cheerful countenance only to become despondent when those hardships were past. The ability to flourish in times of peril does not insure the ability to so much as exist on ordinary days.

When I consider my own state, I cannot see that I have a genius for either times that are good or times that are bad. While it is true that I have never been tested by the worst that man or nature offers, it is also true that I have never sought to be tested. The men who I read about went looking for the worst time after time. I’ve read of men whose fingers and toes were lost to frostbite, yet still climbed mountains. I do not know what to make of them, and so I continue to read. Especially when the long months of winter are upon me, and I can barely muster the will to get out of bed each day, I seek the literary companionship of those who were determined to keep going no matter what.

Books entitled Angels in the Wilderness, In the Land of White Death, and Ice, helped me survive December. Now that the daffodils are tall, the willows are swollen with buds, and each day is longer than its predecessor; I know I will last until better times. I am tempted to say that a forlorn day in summer is more agreeable than a happy day in winter, but this would make no sense, so I will not say it.

In her regard for the seasons, as in many things, Peggy is my opposite. The only good she can say about sunshine is that it makes the snow to sparkle most agreeably.

Questions of respect, of morality

I watched Saddam’s hanging, both the authorized photos and the secret taping. Peggy speculated that he died bravely because he lacked normal human feelings. Perhaps. Perhaps the presence of cameras helped too.

Would George Bush have died as well? Would I? Hang me outdoors on a warm sunny afternoon, and maybe. But in winter, before dawn, in a room that was cold and gray, surrounded by people who tormented me.... Peggy said she wouldn’t want to see the tape because she wouldn’t want it to get stuck in her head. I am glad to have it stuck in my head because it was a powerful—and even an inspirational—moment.

There was nothing in his life that so became him as the leaving of it. -Shakespeare

His last words were, “You go to hell.” They weren’t good last words, but defiance surely beats cowardice. Peggy thinks that terror would have been a more appropriate response. Maybe it’s a gender thing, but, despite the understandability of fear, who wouldn’t prefer solace, and what better solace than courage? Even if Peggy didn’t think less of me because I died trembling, she think better of me if I died with dignity.

If Peggy is right about Saddam’s lack of normal human feeling making his death easier, what does this say about the desirability of normal human feelings? And what does it say about good men like Nathan Hale who died bravely, or other bad men—like Ted Bundy—who died as cowards? I could not look at Saddam Hussein standing tall and proud in the midst of his masked haranguers and not feel respect. It is a grudging respect to be sure, but even the devil deserves his due.

Another difference of opinion arose between Peggy and me this morning. We were talking about our little dog, Wendy, when Peggy said she would give $100,000 to bring Wendy back to life. I never thought that Peggy loved Wendy more than I, but I would not give $100,000 to bring Wendy or anyone else back. So what then, would I give $10,000? Yes, but I hate to be forced to admit that I only value the life of a beloved dog—or a beloved friend—to the tune of a certain number of dollars. Besides, the issue is more complex than that.

For example, I might not pay a large sum to bring Wendy back, but neither would I have accepted any amount of money to end her life prematurely—except for humanitarian reasons—even if she hadn’t been my dog. There seems to be a paradox here. While I make little effort to rescue ailing and destitute dogs, I would not choose to profit from their deaths. But how might I defend this position? After all, I could use the money to help many other dogs. This leads me to wonder whether I care more about dogs or more about my self-image. It is the kind of dilemma that would never torment Peggy, because the right way would be obvious to her, and she would follow it regardless.

Of course, the proper use of such money as we already have is not an issue that concerns just me. Almost every dollar that either of us spends is a dollar that could have been used for what we would acknowledge to be a higher end. Instead of a new computer, we could have fed hungry children. What does this about our values?

I shudder to think, so I won’t think. I will go to the bank and deposit a $506 check that just arrived from the woman who bought my father’s house.... I like having money because money makes me feel safer than most of the other things that make me feel safe, and the truth is that I value my safety—and even my comfort--more than I value the lives of destitute children. Their numbers are unending, but there is just one me.

....The rain started back as I was leaving for the bank, so I didn’t go.

Peggy and I don’t talk about deep things much because they make her eyes glaze over. I consider it another paradox that she is more ethical than I, but that her values don’t arise from reflection. This used to frustrate me no end until I went through a string of lovers who could talk about deep things all day long, and still go out and act badly. This made me appreciate Peggy more. Now that Gerald Ford just died, I think of her as a little like him. She might not be razor sharp in some ways (although she is smarter than I in others), but if you’re looking for someone of unquestioned integrity, she’s your woman. When Ford replaced Nixon, someone asked him if he had considered creating a list of ethical guidelines so his staff wouldn’t get themselves into a Watergate-like fiasco. He replied that his own behavior would serve as their guideline. Like Ford, Peggy would consider it redundant to enumerate such standards.

An observer might suggest that, in many cases, my own depth appears to be a prelude to rationalization, but I would argue that, even though this is sometimes true, only one who cared about ethics would bother to rationalize. I would also argue against the possible implication that people who don’t think much about what their behavior means are more likely to behave well. Right and wrong are not always so obvious. If they were, life would be easier. Even in my own head, I often find myself in dilemmas in which my ambivalence is such that I feel screwed no matter which way I go. Some problems don’t admit of outcomes that are fair to everyone.