Lilly Belle

Today Lilly gets her left eye removed, her right eye, already blind and injected with some magic solution used to keep it stable. Last year, the cornea operation on her left eye had been a failure. Now in the last few months that eye bulged and turned an ugly shade of purple, a rotting jellyfish trying to ooze out of its socket. The vet said it had to go. While under anesthesia she will be shaved clean to give the dermatitis shampoo a clean palette. Almost completely deaf, when we pick her up tomorrow, she won't know that it's me until I put my hands on her...this overweight, hairless throw-away dog wearing a clown collar, a newly concave socket sewn tightly shut as she shivers with her own nudity, I'll hold her in a blanket very close and sing loudly, directly into her ear: “Lilly Belle, Lilly Belle!”

Her truncated tail spinning, she'll love it, be comforted by it, and so will I.

Lilly's been home for almost two days now, hitting the ground running upon arrival. She's elated to be back, it's almost as if she can't believe how wonderful it is, waging her tail constantly as she takes an olfactory inventory of everything familiar. The vet's cage must have reminded her of the early years, locked in a small wire prison with only the occasional company of a stranger/rapist given access to impregnate her to create more “pedigreed” pups destined to be sold at the flea market. All of them victims of inbreeding that will leave them blind and deaf within three years, long after the puppy farmers have paid an electric bill or two. When she held no more value to them, they left her at a shelter to be adopted or destroyed, it didn't matter which. She thinks the smell of my feet, covered in sweaty gym socks, is about the sweetest perfume she knows, often just sniffing and wagging. I feed her pain pills and antibiotics in bits of hot dogs, like caviar to her. Life is good again for Lilly. The revengeful part of me kind of hopes it's not so smooth for the original owners.

RIP John...

I went all through school with John Ketchum. This picture is from 5^th grade. He's sitting on the bottom row, fourth from the left. I always knew him, but we rarely spoke. Just different clicks. I believe he lived on Hillside Avenue, between me and Tina Savage. He was a “jock” in my eyes, but a smart, upbeat, energized kind of guy, friendly, no threat. But we had little common ground. I just couldn't care less about the sports thing. Apparently he went on to Dartmouth, a business stint in Hong Kong, and wound up with a prestigious accounting firm that his dad had built. Not too shabby. I went on to a long internship in life, looking for something that felt right. He and I were on different paths, but he had always been there when we were kids. Kind of like family. After 20 years, I saw him at our 1986 WHS reunion. It gave me comfort to look two tables over and see this guy I had known forever. And he knew me. There was a strange comfort in that. Jesus, I thought. “That's John Ketchum!” Kind of like seeing Mr Robinson, our next door neighbor when I was a kid, and he had been dead for 30 years. John and I never spoke, but I hope that at some point, he, saw me, recognized me as I had him and felt that all was right with the world, taking comfort in that, even after all those years...

A golf Course View...

A “golf course view” so revered and celebrated, leaves me cold, somewhat troubled. Where did the trees go, the animals who busied themselves there, the wild grasses in shades of rust and henna... fields now turned into manicured lawns, wet with poisons and little signs. We try to do that wherever we go, seeking Disneyland heaven. So we can chase a ball? What we're given isn't enough, we need to change it, homogenize it, squeeze out all the flavor as we run unthinking after some vague need for control and familiarity...rape wrapped up in a beautiful fur coat, and called progress. I won't argue the point, it is what it is. Sometimes I just feel bad about our clueless, heavy handed stewardship, and about myself. We are our own worst enemy and I suspect our inevitable evolution to end in extinction. The ants won't care, they never even noticed our brief, Jackbooted stompings.

Till Death Do Us Part...

I told Carla that in the not so distant future when I face the inevitable decline of old age, as things break down and the end of the line is looming, I plan to face it with a good attitude. After all, I've had a great run. No, no tears or morose gatherings. I want to be surrounded by the people who have meant everything to me, the ones I love the most. I just hope we can track down all those Patel’s who ran all those liquor stores over the years...

Easy Rider

My friend, Marty Lewis, spoke of the cheers prompted by the Kennedy assassination, the attitudes he lived with at a small Methodist college in Texas, 1963...

I had a similar experience in a little spec of a North Alabama town in 1969. Athens College had recruited hippies from the Northeast to enroll there two years prior in order to pay for the new dorms they had just finished building. If you had money and could fog a mirror, you were in. Mostly we stayed on campus, smoking pot and drinking beer smuggled in from the only “wet” county within driving distance, just over the border in Pulaski, Tennessee. Proud to be the birthplace of the KKK. Long hair was a call to arms for locals when we ventured out beyond the campus, so we mostly circled the wagons and stayed close. But when “Easy Rider” hit the musty old movie theater three blocks up from campus, so did many of us. Filling the first several rows, staring up at the big screen, ramped up on pot and horse tranquilizers, we owned that flick. Although we were used to the whistles from the crowd of good old boys behind us, taunts for guys who “looked more like girls”, the rift was never more clear than when a huge roar of applause shook the back of the room. Dennis Hopper got what he deserved. Shotgunned into oblivion, by a squirmy little redneck sporting an untreated tumor on his neck and a nasty grin. Pointing his double barrel out of the passenger window of his buddy’s 56 Ford pickup, he blew that particular easy rider off his chopper and into movie history. That blast was cathartic for the boys in the back, one orgasmic, celebratory exclamation point that sent a strong message. We knew that the shared sentiments uncovered in Woodstock, NY earlier in the year were still light years and a decade away from walking openly in the light of that little town.

Six Things of Many...

Six things about me no one knows:

1) If you asked me to name the thing that I feel most guilty about, I would probably tell you it was the time I killed a goose in San Miguel, Mexico. We spent summers there when I was a young teenager. While out walking the grounds of the Institute where we stayed, a goose came at me from behind, flying up at me in attack mode. Never having been around geese before, it scared me and I just reacted. Grabbing a heavy stick from the ground, I bashed that white blur squarely on the top of his head and he dropped like a stone. I didn't mean to kill him and I'm sorry.

2) The first time I saw what a woman’s vagina looks like, I was 9 or 10. Certainly I had seen naked women before, like when I was over at a neighbors house and her mom rushed out of the upstairs bathroom, wet and dripping from her shower, to get a towel from the linen closet in the hall. But no one shaved in those days so there was little to see. That changed when Bill Rosenving brought a very crumpled page torn from a medical book to choir practice. A line drawing, with arrows that named each part. The fact that he had it at all seemed terribly dangerous and exciting. Not because of the actual image of that unappealing and almost alien line drawing but because I thought it was so forbidden, like having a loaded gun or a human toe in his pocket.

3) When I drink liquids, I always count the gulps as they go down, and I always inadvertently skip gulp #12, going straight from 11 to 13.

4) I collect high-end fighting knives: neck knives, automatics, assisted openers, fixed blade, punch knives, armor piercing, carbon fiber to go undetected through airport security, hand hatchets...and many custom tactical knives made with beautiful Damascus steels, carbon fiber, and rainbow anodized titanium. Many are stashed all over the house and in my car. I always carry and feel truly exposed and vulnerable if for some reason I have to be without one.

5) If our house started to burn down, the first material thing I would try to save are two oil portraits of my fifth great grandparents. They've been in our family since they were painted in 1852. I don't particularly like them, especially the one of great, great, great, great, great grandma. She looks so sour and nasty. But the paintings aren't mine. I'm just the current caretaker and I take that responsibly very seriously.

6) I've never been scared by monster movies or fictional characters that defy logic, but I'm very frightened by my own over-the-top reaction to bullying of all kinds. Sometimes, I'm scared of me.

Yes please...

Carla and I drove South down the coast yesterday, A1A blacktop stretching out to the horizon, a thin black line sandwiched between breaking waves to the East and beach houses, huddled close, silhouetted by the sun to the West. An exceptionally clear, perfect day with sunshine so bright it stabbed my eyes with each explosion through an oak canopy. A thousand flashbulbs, paparazzi shooting down from overhead, their red carpet a mottled stretch of blacktop tunneled through massive oaks, arms intertwined, a roadbed slashed cleanly through dense Florida hammock. 

Our destination was the Flagler Fish Company, a laid back seafood joint, one block West of the beach. 

Lounging on the outside patio, a cold Anchor Steam Beer dripped sweat rings onto my napkin as it flapped white edges, and the hair tumbling down Carla's back, in unison with each hurried gust. Salty winds dancing excitedly, circling and chasing, spawned by the back and forth battle line where surf meets sand, just a block away. Hot seafood chowder, chunky with bites of shrimp and clam, lightly browned crab cakes, fat with fresh-picked lumps of savory white flesh, crisp fried spinach leaves freckled with toasted garlic, warm Asiago potatoes, melty with cheese...all trumped by Lobster rolls, heavy with pink meat that had been chilling in the cold algae coated tank only moments before, pressed up against large swordfish and tuna, frozen forever in a blue mural that covered the wall, floor to ceiling. A side of real butter, humble and perfect, sat quietly at the ready.

We talked excitedly, as we often do, 38 years and still learning who we are with each other. She looked much younger than her chronological age, natural, oblivious to her own beauty, long hair streaked with sunlight, waving in the wind. Growing quiet as she continued with great detail about an observation her friend had made, my gratitude for all of it was every bit as palatable as the dinner itself, now a scattered scrum of food and drink paused at halftime on the chaotic field of the paper covered table. That moment spoke to the essence of our years together, side by side, itself, an amazing meal of shared celebrations. And I knew that I was still hungry... for dessert, yes, but mainly for an ever evolving “more of the same”, for us, and this, together...yes please!