Remembering the Rain

"I get all the news I need from the weather report." - Simon and Garfunkel

("The Only Living Boy in New York")

It used to rain here. I'm sure it did.

The sky would gray over. Thunder rumbled at the horizon like some kind of hooved beast on the move. We watched through the windows. Drops began to spot the sidewalks and streets. Rivulets ran down the glass and gutters.

It usually didn't last long. Less than an hour. But it was something. Our son became excited and asked us to go to the closet and take out his green rubber froggie boots. 

                                                      We knew what that meant...

When the lightning danger had passed, along with most of the rain, we unfurled the umbrella and took him outside. He splashed through the puddles. The biggest one always accumulated at the end of the street. In an inflated appropriation of the aquatic abundance up north we called that puddle "Lake Michigan."

I'm remembering this wetness because it's starting to seem like a dream. As if it never happened. As if it has never rained a single time in this unexpectedly cursed place where I live.

D-R-Y as a B-O-N-E
The original Rip Van Winkle lay down in the woods of upstate New York and for twenty years he was covered by the elements. When he awoke he had to shake off cobwebs and the leaves that had piled up on him.

This Van Winkle is covered by drought. The soil around here is beyond parched. It blows away as dust. The rest of it opens up like this crack that has appeared in my front yard. I've never seen anything like it before.

Walking across the oatmeal colored lawn results in crisp crunching noises.

I water the grass on the two days I'm allowed per week, but it's like trying to put out a fire with teacups of water. Every day the temperature spikes to 101, 103, 106, 104, playing around in the triple digits like some devil cavorting in the flames of hell.

When it's that hot the land has no moisture to feed back into the air. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing: hot and dry, hot and dry.

To make sure I'm not just some kind of whiner I looked at the official records for this year so far. It was worse than I remembered. Since winter ended, it has rained only once or twice each month. Some of the amounts hardly count, in the hundredths of inches. In July it didn't rain a measuable amount on any of 31 days.

Living With It
So what can a person do? Even if there were hope held out in this month's weather forecast (there's none whatsoever), we would tend to disbelieve it. In the best and wettest of times August always goes down as our hottest and driest month.

When we get to this time of year that's when people start to look forward to the Fair and Rodeo that takes place in mid-September. There's a saying: "It always rains during the Fair..."

It's like waiting for a lost child to return of its own accord. Our one and only beloved rain.

And, generally, it's true. The rain wanders in during the Fair with cotton candy clouds and ozone on its breath and lightning and thunder disclaimers as if it's amazed that we ever missed it. And like happy fools we hold out our arms and embrace our lost Rain and shout because it's so good to have it back.

I found an old photo of it raining during the Fair and I look at it to give me heart and hope as I stagger through the unbearable heat.

And now that I'm thinking of umbrellas and beautifully drenched streets, I'm remembering I once saw in person at the Art Institute of Chicago a grand canvas by Gustave Caillebotte. It has the wonderful title "Jour de pluie a Paris" which means "Day of rain in Paris" or, more conventionally, "Rainy day in Paris" and, if you pronounce it correctly, it rhymes in a very satisfying, wet way.

Singing in the Drought
The other thing I've been doing to keep my spirits up is thinking of songs about the rain.*

• Singing in the Rain (Gene Kelly)
• Riders on the Storm (The Doors) with those comforting rain sound effects
• Texas Flood (Stevie Ray Vaughn)
• Here Comes the Rain Again (The Eurhythmics)
• I'm Only Happy When it Rains (Garbage)
• The Rain Song (LedZeppelin)

I even thought about taking the Led Zeppelin song, which appears on their fine album Houses of the Holy, and playing it every night before I go to bed until it finally  rains. I came to the conclusion that this was a bad idea.

Want more rainsongs?
775 of them? Try here.

If I play "The Rain Song" until it rains, as beautiful as it is with its bent Jimmy Page guitar chords and lush synthesizers fingered by Jon Paul Jones and that nostalgic voice of Robert Plant, I'll get sick of it before I ever feel a drop of rain hit my head or I put my feet in "Lake Michigan."

Trust me. It happened years ago to "Stairway to Heaven." Thanks, F.M. radio...

So like someone who has lost a loved one, I'm going to skip the gimmicks, including rain dances and rain prayers and rain songs, and make do with all I have. My memories. It used to rain here. We had such good times together. See, I have the pictures in my mind to prove it. - V.W.

.

Twisted Plots and the Wrinkles in Life's Fabric

I keep reminding myself that if a person is "Van Winkled" to what's happening elsewhere on the planet, then the only news that remains available is "local" and "personal."

Specifically, "news" becomes whatever seems of import that happens directly to him or her. It's the solipsist's news beat.

Or Welcome to Me-World...

Of course, the blogosphere is replete with this sort of daily diary stuff.

Most of the time, I find myself unwilling to risk a Twitter-style yawn by sharing nuggets of the monstrously mundane aspects of my life (e.g., I had a BLT for lunch, yum! e.g., Just took a Gas-X tablet, ugh!). There's nothing in my daily routine worth reporting on this blog.

Every day is average. Every day goes much as expected. So I write about other matters.

But the last couple of days! Whew! I won't claim it was as if we were on board the Titanic, but our metaphorical ship of life sure wasn't reaching its ports of call in an expected fashion.

All Is Well (Or Is It?)
It began with a planned Easter holiday junket to the nearest major metropolitan area to seek some cultural nourishment not available in our little burg of 110,000 people. We set out on our adventure on Saturday afternoon by getting in the car and driving two hours east of here.

There have been rampant wildfires in this part of the state. For weeks now the daily temperature has approached the summer heat levels of July and the wind has ripped across the arid plains and there has been no rain and no rain. It's a recipe for out of control flames to sweep unimpeded across the landscape.

For weeks, the weather app on my computer desktop
has delivered the same "alert" nearly every day...

Pastures have blackened. Houses have burned. Cattle have been barbecued alive in the field.

Many days I'd stepped outside the house and smelled the smoke in the air. One night my wife drove home with the car's sun roof open. Mistake. She found ash drifting down onto the seats and into her hair.

During our drive on Saturday we checked for places where the fires had burned. We saw one small charcoaled patch alongside the road. Not too impressive. I think it was at this point we began to relax.

The Nonexistent Noodles
So for our Saturday night dinner we selected a Vietnamese restaurant we  had discovered on our last trip to the big city. They featured the kind of delectable, well presented food we can't obtain back home. But wait. Something was wrong. Yes, I mean wait. Really wait. Our appetizers arrived and the server said that our orders were coming. But you know where this is headed.

So March was "National Noodle Month" (seriously) and we
missed it, so we thought we'd atone by ordering up some serious
platefuls of Asian noodle dishes...

We waited. We waited. Our glasses of ice water ran dry. Outside we could see through the tall windows the sky was being illuminated by giant scribbles and lassos of lightning.

Mother Nature was having a blast. Not us.

When the food finally came it was with apologies. At least it was delicious. The manager knocked a few dollars off the bill and gave our son a free cup of chocolate ice cream.

To conclude the evening we headed over to the used bookstore. The night sky still appeared apocalyptic. But the Four Horsemen remained at bay and only scattered drops of rain fell on us. We went back to our hotel with a bag of books and used LPs. We were feeling pretty good about life...

The Empty Church
The main reason we had journeyed all the way to this lovely large metropolis was that I'd picked out an  elegant, Spanish-styled church associated with a major university at which we would attend Easter services. It was near our hotel, but we still had to hustle to pull our best clothes out of bags, dress, and get ready to go.

We arrived on time. Hurray! But another twist, another wrinkle awaited us...

A man accosted us in the parking lot and told us that the service had been moved from the church. "There's been a power outage," he explained. We were redirected to the nearby campus. Church would be held in the student center where they still had power.

Such disappointment! We had wanted to hear the bells toll in the tower. See the robed choir process down the stone tiled aisle. Watch the morning light pouring through stained glass. Feast our eyes on the vaulted ceiling.

The church we hoped to attend...

It was too late to amend our plans. So we joined a line of Easter church goers who, like us, had found that the grand old church on this morning was only an empty, non-electrified, darkened tomb. Plan B was to gather in what resembled a hotel banquet room. Industrial carpet, rows of banquet chairs, cheesy chandeliers. Everyone made the best of it.

Sometimes life doesn't go according to plan. This isn't necessarily bad. Isn't that the message of Easter?

Ah, the MOMA, the perfect venue for our Easter brunch...

Spill the Wine
We were really looking forward to our Easter brunch.

We had reservations in the cafe at the Museum of Modern Art.

Soon as we arrived we knew: this was it! The architecture was wonderful, the food the other diners were tucking into looked aesthetic and palate pleasing.

Indeed once our food arrived my son and I whipped out our cameras and started acting like tourists and taking pictures of it. That's where I became incautious. My blazer sleeve snagged my champagne glass.



A glimpse in the foreground of the glass of sparkling wine moments
before the tragic (and messy!) fall...


The glass tumbled. It shattered with a LOUD  pop!! on the table. I was splashed with golden wine and, with my synapses firing like military grade ordinance, I leaped up by reflex before I even realized what had just happened. Behind me my chair fell over. The nearby diners went "oh!" just like they do when a waiter drops a plate.

"Are you all right?" the waitress asked, hurrying to my assistance.

Some part of me was. All right. The rest of me? Not so much.

I tossed a wadded napkin in the direction of the puddled wine. I excused myself to head in the direction of the bathroom.

The Seventh Plague
It was almost time to go home, but what else could go wrong? Hadn't we had our quota already?

In fact, I refuse to count as an adversity that we had planned to finish our visit with a visit to a large super market that features gourmet and natural foods that we can't buy back home. We had even brought a cooler that we planned to fill with ice and then pack with organic meats and vegetables.We arrived and found the parking lot empty.

Closed for the Easter holiday.

So we began the two-hour drive back. Again, we relaxed. Then, only half an hour from home, the sky began looking gray and grim. It appeared to be storming off in the distance. We were within fifteen minutes of home when the rain began to fall. Heavily.

Photo by Greg Kendall-Ball (who V.W. personally knows!)

The windshield wipers had to be put on full speed and visibility was only as far as tail lights of the vehicle ahead of us. Still, we could proceed, albeit at a slightly reduced speed.

Then hail began falling.

Not good. We sought shelter under a highway underpass with a crowd of cars, SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks. We were now on the outskirts of town, only five minutes from our driveway. Soon the rain slackened .

We and the other highway travelers took shelter, huddling beneath the underpass. while rain and hail poured down

I started up again. Only a mile from our house the hail started falling again. Big hail. Verging on golf ball size. I screeched to a halt beneath the gas pump awning of a car wash. The entire town appeared be swamped with water. This came after months and months of drought.

Eventually the hail relented and sun began to poke through and I got the three of us home. Hail stones still littered the front yard. Our roof might have to be replaced. But that was it, right? Nothing else untoward would happen to us on this day? There as to be a time limit on such things?

Apparently so. Which makes me happy. You see, it may have been a lot of trouble, but at least I derived a blog post out of the weekend. What I don't want, though, is an entire series. - V.W.

Home again.

To Be Seizure Free

I will miss the National Walk for Epilepsy which takes place this Sunday in Washington, D.C. Since I'm "Van Winkled" I won't know what the turn-out is like either.

But I do know that with the cherry trees in blossom, thousands of people will gather on the National Mall and walk together to draw attention to this disease and lobby for more research to find a cure.

It's an American habit to walk or run for this or that malady. We gather, listen to speeches, collect money from the sponsors of our walk, and then we go home and hope something changes over time...

...that the life of someone whom we love gets better. Or, if it's too late for that, that others don't have to live with the disease.

But what about epilepsy? In the past I would have shrugged my shoulders. It wouldn't have mattered if you told me that 200,000 people will be diagnosed with it this year. It wouldn't have caught my attention if you said that the prevalence of epilepsy would fill 30 cities the size of the one I live in.This disease was invisible to me.

Not any more.

It Looked Just Like He was Dying
There was a bright, happy only child living an idyllic life. He was a straight A student, he loved to read and draw and make things. He sang in the shower.

I speak of our son.

My wife and I sometimes joke that for two melancholics like ourselves to have such an upbeat, cheerful offspring amounts to a natural cure. As long as he's in the house and pulling us toward sunlight and rainbows, we'll never have to start taking anti-depressants.

But a cloud came over this ideal family portrait. On May 26, 2008, our son had his first seizure.

Quickly, it went like this...

He had been running a fever for several days. He had a stomachache and he vomited several times. He was a bit better and napping with his mom that afternoon. Suddenly he began to tremble and moan.

His mother, phone in hand, punching 9-1-1, ran to the outbuilding where I was lifting weights and listening to loud rock music. She screamed at me. She then ran barefoot across the street to where our neighbor, a fireman lived.

I ran into the house and reached the bedroom. Our son's eyes were rolled up. He was pale, shaking all over, and completely unresponsive.

I held on to him and said, "It's all right, buddy. Stay on your side. Be comfortable." I was terrified.

This had come out of nowhere.

It looked like he was dying.

He was turning blue.

The EMTs arrived.

I"ll always remember what record was playing on my old turntable when my wife interrupted my workout. I ran out of the room with the needle still riding in the groove. It was the second album by a band called Steppenwolf. The song was "Magic Carpet Ride."

I have never listened to the song since.

A Literary History of Epilepsy
What little previous knowledge I had of epilepsy came from literature.

We read William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in high school. The mighty ruler collapses early in the play and is said to have "the falling sickness."

I was surprised to learn that Shakespeare hadn't just stuck this in for dramatic effect, but that it was believed to be historically true. Caesar had suffered in his adulthood from what appeared to be what today we call epilepsy . At school I was assigned to lead discussion of the play. I thought I was clever when I began by writing on the chalkboard.

My other literary exposure to this disease came around the same time when I read The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The great Russian writer, afflicted with epilepsy himself, knew what he was doing when he gave his Christ figure protagonist, Prince Myshkin, the disease.

Through Myshkin's perceptions we understand the sort of pre-seizure halo effect that some epileptics experience. It's a feeling of connectedness and calm that is so great that Myshkin briefly considers that it might be worth be dying for just to have those few seconds.

Prince Myshkin decides this exquisite feeling isn't worth dying for. The violence and the distress of the seizure upon himself and others are horrific. At one point he is attacked by a knife wielding adversary. The shock of the assault causes him to go into a "fit" and he falls down a set of stairs. This actually saves him from being stabbed to death.

At the time I thought, "Oh nice! This Russian writer guy may have a reputation, but this is pure melodrama!"

I didn't know what I was talking about. I would have to wait almost forty years to read the scene right. With tears in my eyes.

Diagnosis

When a second seizure occurred a week later (after our son's other symptoms had gone away) we knew he not had a "febrile seizure," i.e., one brought on by a fever. Something else was going on. An MRI revealed a "white area" in the temporal lobe, an indication of excessive neural activity and a clearcut diagnosis of epilepsy could be given.

He began taking 300 mg. of Tegretol each day. He would do this for two years. Last year, because he had remained seizure free, the doctor took him off the medication.

Anti-seizure meds are a blessing and a curse. For most people they are powerful enough to keep the brain from kicking into the hyper activity mode that causes seizures. However, they can eventually lead to side effects including sexual dysfunction and organ damage and a shortened lifespan.

This is why it's fortunate that 70% of epileptics are eventually able to be taken off medication.

Still, this is not the same as being "cured." All these years after Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, little is understood of this disease. A Newsweek cover story a couple of years ago explored this--how epilepsy is as widespread as breast cancer, yet research dollars directed toward it are only a fraction. Why is this? Could one reason be that the disease is invisible? That it is kept further "undercover" by an unwillingness to talk about it?

Hence the need for a Walk for Epilepsy.

By the Cherry Blossoms
In Washington, D.C. there will be several messages conveyed by the walkers.

1 - This disease strikes primarily the young and the old. It does not single out more than anyone else the gifted like Julius Caesar and Fyodor Dostoevsky or, most recently, it has been theorized the great composer and pianist Frederic Chopin. Thus there is no silver lining: have the disease and you'll be compensated with some special talent or genius.

2- Epilepsy can happen to anyone. Chances are someone you know has it or knows someone who does. The woman who comes to clean our house has a grandson with epilepsy. You can tell how he's doing when you see the expression on her face when she arrives at the door each week.

3 - Epileptics and their families live in the shadow of not knowing. Will it happen again? What if I'm driving a car or operating equipment or standing in the bathtub when I have a seizure?

4 - People are afraid if they happen to see someone having a seizure. Little wonder. As I've tried to relate it's one of the most frightening things one can witness. This is why in old days epileptics were considered demon possessed. It was so bad looking it had to be happening at the behest of forces of evil or because the person was an "idiot." There's still that social pariah aspect of the disease. This needs to change.

So they are walking in Washington, D.C. to show everyone we are your neighbors, we are just like you except we have this thing we have to live with. We seek your acceptance and your understanding. We walk in the hope that something can be done. - V.W.

.

Chance Meeting - Two Veterans

When I created this blog I vowed that there would be no political or religious opinions expressed herein. The reason for this is that I feel such material tends to divide people from one another wherever they are in the world.

Instead, I'd rather write about everyday wonder and memories and what strikes me as humorous. These are things that humans can mutually love and appreciate and they might bring us closer.

But I suppose it's possible something historical and harsh can bring us together as well. If nothing else, I hope in the wake of what I'm about to share we can stand shoulder to shoulder and affirm that the pain some military veterans still suffer is worthy of concern and grief. 

What follows then, in true Van Winkle style, isn't likely in the news headlines that I've forbidden myself to consult. Instead, it amounts to a wholly accidental, face-to-face discovery. I sat down to eat dinner and I ended up hearing the tale of Margaritte and Tyrone (names changed to respect their privacy), a husband and wife who were caught up in a horrific war.

There was no agenda as they told me their stories. It was an outpouring, as if they felt, "I have to finally tell someone what happened over there."

He fell in love with her hands...

AN INNOCENT QUESTION
So I am at a writing festival this past Thursday-Saturday and it is on the campus of a college which happens to be a few miles away from a major U.S. Air Force base.

At dinner on Friday night I see a neatly dressed twenty-something couple sitting by themselves at one of the tables in the Theater Building. I get my shrimp cocktail, sit down beside them, and we introduce ourselves.

Margaritte works in the human resources department. Her husband Tyrone, who is wearing a sport coat and tie, has just begun his first week at a new job with a technology based organization.

Margaritte and Tyrone have not come to attend the writing festival. What happened is that Margaritte got an email earlier in the day from the festival organizers saying there was extra food and the university staff and spouses were invited to join us at the dinner at no charge.

So she told Tyrone about it and there they are--a free delicious meal is before them; it's a smart thing to do.

I finger a shrimp and begin to ask the first of my get-to-know-you questions.

":How did you two meet?"

"In the Army."

"Oh, really. What did you do?"

"I was a dental assistant and x-ray technician," Tyrone says.

"I was trained in heavy weapons and chemical weapons detection," Margaritte says.

"We met," Tyrone says. "when I took x-rays of her hand."

"Yeh, I slipped in the shower and I thought I broke my hand. It hurt!." Margaritte laughs. "Then I get it x-rayed and Mr. Suave here tells me I have beautiful hands."

I tell them that's a nice story. Then I do it.

It's like stepping on a mine. Except at first it doesn't go off. If anything maybe there's just a little "click." The "click" is in their eyes when I ask, "Did you ever go to Iraq or Afghanistan?"

They're thinking. Should we tell this stranger or not?

INVASION
Margaritte: I moved up to the Kuwaiti border 48 hours before the deadline we gave Saddam expired. I was inside a tank. The deadline came and went and we rolled in. It took us a week and a half and then I was in Baghdad.

VW: Did you think you would find weapons of mass destruction?

Margaritte: No. But we tried! We found stuff. All of it was ours.

VW: What do you mean ours?

Tyrone: The U.S. gave Saddam weapons in the '80s when he was fighting a war with Iran.

Margaritte: We knew he had it. We gave it to him.

VW: If it wasn't about WMD, why did you think we were invading the country? Was it for the oil? Or bad intelligence?

Margaritte: We wanted to have a government in there that would be friendly to us and do what we told it do. That's all. It was regime change.

EARLY DAYS OF THE WAR
Margaritte: At first they wouldn't let us shoot unless we were shot at. We couldn't believe it. It was crazy!

Tyrone: Saddam had his Republican Guards, but most of the Iraqi army was just a bunch of men who they found and stuck guns in their hands. A million of them. All of these people are suddenly out of work. And we're surrounded by them.

"We were told to do things we had no training for..."

Margaritte: The Army told us we had to go on patrol. We were told to do things we had no training for. They should have called in the scouts, but they'd tell me to go clear a house. I have no idea how to clear a house. I refused.

Tyrone: I'm a dental assistant. They put me on street patrol. There was looting going on and we just watched it. They told us to report it. So we'd get on the radio and tell them where the looters were and where they had moved to next.

Margaritte: One of the myths was that women weren't in combat. I was walking around with a rifle in my hand. Before that I was manning the 50-caliber machine gun on a tank. I was in a fire fight. After three hours I couldn't hear anything. I could only see the tracers and RPGs going by. It all appeared in slow motion. We'd move to a new position, they'd find us and start shooting again. After 24 hours I couldn't do it anymore.

Tyrone: There was no "insurgency." It was all various tribes fighting us and each other. They started sending women suicide bombers to check points because they knew Americans wouldn't pat them down the same as men. After one week when 9 Americans got blown up that way the higher ups changed the plan. Now we could shoot and ask questions later.



"It was totally misreported..."

 Margaritte (still thinking about the women's role in the Army issue): That Jessica Lynch thing. It was totally misreported. She was injured all right, but she ended up in an Iraqi hospital. The Iraqis tried to give her back to us twice. But we wanted to stage a rescue to look good for the folks back home.

Tyrone: And they didn't report, too, that the Iraqis after they killed everyone else in that convoy, they beheaded the bodies and buried the heads in the sand. They thought it would keep them from going to heaven. I know. Because I was involved in identifications. You know, dental records.

IT GETS REALLY BAD
Tyrone: We met some special forces from Macedonia. I said you're from Macedonia? What are you doing here? And they told us. We don't follow the Geneva Convention. That's why you want us here.

Margaritte: Abu Ghraib that was all misreported. You can look today. None of the military personnel they identified as the perpetrators are in jail. You look at those photos and you know these people didn't do this torture because they were just sitting around and felt bored.

Tyrone: Yes. Look at the photos. It's all done according to the textbook. The torturers were trained. Then they left and the reservists were fall guys.

Margaritte: That's why I got out. I couldn't take any more of the Geneva violations. The stuff we were willing to do.

Tyrone: You want to know about the Surge? The Surge isn't what stopped the bombings and the violence. Adding those troops wasn't enough to make that kind of difference. What happened was that they turned loose the special forces and they went out in  assassination teams. At Fallujah they surrounded the city and they let out the women, the very young, and very old. They made the males age 9 to 60 stay inside. Then they killed them. All of them.

VW: If the media failed to cover this, why didn't soldiers speak out about some of these things. Or at least tell their families? They had access to the Internet and...

Tyrone: The Army controlled what you sent on the Internet or said on the phone.

Margaritte: If you were standing in line to use the phone and someone ahead of you said something they shouldn't, they'd suddenly say the phones were down. In the whole country! Once I sitting around while some officers were talking and I had a notebook. I was doodling in it. An officer came over and took it away from me. Even after I showed him I hadn't written anything.

GOING HOME
After the couple got out of the Army it was clear that Margaritte suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something the Army has been reluctant to acknowledge is a legitimate combat caused disorder. She is now part of a class-action lawsuit (Sabo v. United States) to receive benefits and care for this injury. She admits, "No one thinks you have it. You look normal on the outside. But you're not normal on the inside."

When Margaritte enrolled in college one of the first classes she took was history. She dreaded the possibility that the class might reach the Iraq War as it moved forward in time. It did. When she spoke out about a few things she experienced she was told by two 18-year-olds, "You were never there!" Another student took another line of attack and called her a "baby killer."

Hearing that I understood why the couple was so reluctant to speak in the first place. But I couldn't help thinking they deserved to be heard. Maybe they weren't eyewitnesses to everything they claimed, but they actually had their boots on the desert ground while the rest of us were sitting at home in comfort. They put their lives in harm's way every day.

I'm sad to see them end up this way. Conflicted about what they did. Feeling used and abandoned by the people in power.

I hope they are successful in what they're trying to do nowadays. Move on, raise their son, and forget about those bad years of their lives except whenever the nightmares still overtake them in the dark. - V.W.

.

Death and Taxes and Super Bowl

What I did in lieu of watching the big game... in seven movements...


1 - I'm At Home

I piddle around on Sunday afternoon. I look out the window and I'm glad to see that what was left of the snow and ice that trapped us inside the house for nearly three days last week is gone.

I try not to think about my friend.

When will the services for her be held? What is going to happen to her office down the hall from mine? What about the 120 students she would have taught this semester?

I'm almost certain I'm violating some unwritten rule of blogging.

Don't write about death.

Keep everything light and frothy. People mostly read these things to be amused. And it's Super Bowl Sunday.

I should act like a real American.

Americans don't want to cry. That's why we have "celebrations of life," not "funerals." We always look for the silver lining...or we just don't look. And we move on...

2 - I Go Shopping
At 5:25, as one team is kicking off to another in Dallas, Texas, I head to the grocery store. It is raining lightly. I look at the parking lot and I'm surprised. I'm not the only one who isn't at home watching the big game.

Attention, shoppers. It's 5:25 CST and there's
a Super Bowl on Aisle XLV...

The store isn't crowded, but it is far from empty. Of course, earlier in the day one can assume it was a madhouse of shoppers stocking up on treats for their Super Bowl parties.

I can see the evidence on key aisles [photo below].

As I am checking out, the young,  blue-eyed, red-headed clerk who has a tag that says "Hailey" asks me, "Why aren't you watching the Super Bowl?" I think, "Why are you asking me and not the 200 other people in this store?"

Before I can briefly tell her about the VWP, Hailey blurts out, "The Packers are ahead by two touchdowns."

"Actually, I'm avoiding all the news and the game as part of a year-long project I'm blogging about," I interject.

"Oh no! Then I wasn't supposed to say that." I can't tell if Hailey is apologetic or just amused. Maybe both.

"Don't worry. People say things that I can't help overhearing. Or they wear the jerseys. I'm not blind. I knew it was the Steelers vs. Green Bay. You just gave me one more thing to blog about."

I wonder how many people bought rice, corn and wheat Chex cereal
to make "Chex mix" for the big game? More than a few?

3 - I Work on My Taxes
Once the groceries are put away I begin the second part of my alternative to watching the Super Bowl.

The Van Winkle Tax Bowl.


At 7:25 CST as half-time nears, I'm loading
TurboTax and getting down to business...


I load TurboTax onto my computer which unexpectedly takes 20 minutes and then five more minutes for the program to search for and load on-line updates. But I'm not complaining.

Each year the simple Q & A format and the built-in calculators spare me the agony of puzzling over the tax forms and the impenetrable IRS instructions and then punching calculator buttons.

Without the tax software it would take me hours of work instead of 45 minutes. I would likely have some kind of breakdown and have to be hospitalized...

There it is again. I'm thinking about my friend. The last time I saw her was on Monday of Super Bowl Week. She was on pain meds and speaking softly. She was reconciled, imagining, as she put it, "Not waking up one morning," and "then I'll be in a better place." She spoke of all the people who kept coming by to express their love for her.

"You can have money in the bank or a job title," she said. "It isn't profound. Everyone knows. All that matters is love. I can't go to the bank and take dollars out, rub them on my forehead and feel love."

4 - I Look at the Numbers
Then I am done. Super Bowl XLV is likely gone into the record books. This year calculating our taxes took more time than in the past, partly because I wasted 15 minutes looking in the garage for an official DIV statement on a money market account in which we have a decent nest egg that earned a sum total of interest in 2010 of around 55 cents. Welcome to America post- financial collapse.

Still , there is the good news I hoped for: We don't owe the U.S. Government any money. Instead, we are going to get back a decent tax refund.

What I really want back is my friend.

5 - I Relive the Shock
My friend now has something in common with me. She doesn't know who won the Super Bowl either. You see, she passed away in hospice the day before the game. A few weeks ago she was like me. She stood at the photocopier and made copies of her syllabuses to hand out at the start of the new semester. New students, new names. She was ready to go!

Except she wasn't feeling well. She was in pain. Another professor took away her papers and told her to go home.

The next day they put her in the hospital for tests. Exploratory surgery would follow. Someone purchased a card and put it in the work room for everyone to sign. A cheerful card that would prove wildly inappropriate.



Someone got a get well card like this for us to sign...
After we heard the diagnosis we knew.
Such a card would never be sent.

She had Stage 3C ovarian cancer that had already spread throughout her abdomen. Because of a virus her heart was working at only 20%, and that meant they couldn't give her chemo or operate further. At that point she calmly accepted these facts and began preparing for the end.

It came little more than a week later.

And now begin the summations and orations. With words we try to hold onto a body and soul.

6 - I Grieve
She loved frogs and her office was decorated with them in every shape and form. Her students used to give her plastic frogs. She told them that f-r-o-g stood for "fully reliant on God."

She had a life-size cardboard cut-out of Spock from Star Trek standing in a corner of her office.

At home she loved her pug dog.

Even though she had strong competition from the wits and cut-ups and grown-up class clowns that populate English faculties she was, in my estimate, the funniest person around.

She audited two of my creative writing classes because she always was interested in learning. She was a darn good poet and story teller.

She wrote a story about a one-armed man who could roll cigarettes with one hand and who thought he saw a panther in a Texas alfalfa field. Years later, I still remember it.

She was middle-aged, but she sometimes dyed her hair magenta and wore jeweled glasses.

She was white, but every Sunday she attended an African-American church.

She grew up among rednecks, but from an early age she recognized racism for what it was. She spoke with horror of being in school the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The class of white children broke into applause. She would spend the rest of her life speaking out against that kind of ignorance and evil.

She died at the beginning of Black History Month. That time always held significance for her.

She came to academic late in life after a career in business. That's why she only had an M.A. and her title was "instructor." This meant that effectively she never gained the same respect as the profs who had PhDs and terminal degrees. But she had other credentials that in my mind exceeded most of those our

résumés boasted about.

7 - And Some Day Comes Acceptance?
Another year's taxes are  now done. After 13 years of knowing her, my friend is dead. Life keeps subtracting from my accounts, but I think she would remind me to look at the other side of the picture. Every day something is added into my life.

I just have to pay attention and find out what it is. - V.W.

The outside of her office.

.

Tow My Heart Away

"The Reaper - After Millet"
by Van Gogh ( Sept. 1889),
Private Collection, UK

A little scene took place in the driveway on Thursday. It lasted about ten minutes, but it represented the end of a relationship that had endured almost a decade, one that began when our son was still a toddler back in those few remaining months before September 11 ceased to be just another date on the calendar.

I said goodbye to our emerald green 1997 Toyota Corolla which we acquired in April 2001 from a college student. I watched as a decade of our life was chained up to the back of a tow truck.

It was time. The car, while still driveable and trustworthy, was dated. Anyone have use for an in-dash cassette player these days? And when you started the engine it vibrated so much that it felt like one was behind the wheel of a Kenworth.

I wasn't sentimental about this car like I was when we finally parted with our Swedish car that so effectively reminded me of days in Alaska. The Corolla was about basic, around the town, mundane transportation. In a given year we hardly put 5000 miles on it.

I thought about taking a picture, but why bother? This wasn't a grand separation.  It was nothing like the things the aged tow truck driver told me when I innocently asked him how he got into the towing business.

Now here was a story! I was standing in the presence of an old, slightly stooped, graying man who had lost the love of his life. He was the man who used to cut the wheat.

The Harvest
 

Bringing in the harvest with a high-tech combine.

For 45 years Lonnie (I'll call him) followed the grain belt. He started in the south and he worked his way north all the way into Canada.

He stood out there at the curb, hooking up my car, and simultaneously fondly recollecting the life he'd been squeezed out of by crush of the new economics, which involves so much money that a man catches his breath. And it involves something else: the persistent pattern of technology replacing human beings.

"When I first started out I had a combine that cost $6000. In the end each machine was $320,000. Course the old ones didn't even have a cab, much less air conditioning. The new-uns, they have a row of monitors in the cab  that shows everything going on outside."

A lot of what Lonnie told me involved numbers like this. It's not weather that changes a man's life. One can forge past weather. It's not always illness or injury. With the grace of God one can recover. But numbers! You can't fight the numbers once they cease to be in your favor.

"We had 5 combines and 12 people and a vehicle when we went out. Today to have that many machines would mean I'd have $3 million tied up just in equipment."

"I read last week about someone who bought 60,000 acres of wheat in Canada. Paid $40 million. That's what? $700 an acre? Used to be you could buy land for $45/acre and make $80 acre for the wheat you grew on it. The wheat paid for your land."

"I found an old receipt from 1973. I paid 27 cents for gas and 19 cents for diesel. Nowadays diesel is how much? Way over $3."

"My son is driving a truck these days. He says he'd like to go back to combining, but I tell him not to. It's too hard to make a living...last year we had a good harvest, but the price of wheat was bad."

A Life After Wheat
So Lonnie has been moving along on his gimpy leg for the past six years and driving a tow truck. "I have more money now than I did back then," he tells me. His job? To pick up vehicles like mine that are being donated to charity or, more often, to haul away wrecks after insurance companies have decided they're totaled.

If the air bags "blew," it's quite likely totaled and Lonnie
will be taking it to auction to be sold for parts and scrap.

"Doesn't take much to to total a car these days," he observes. "If  you're in any kind of accident and the front air bags go off, it's $3000 right there to replace them with factory ones."

So there are plenty of cars for Lonnie to haul to the grim place beside the railroad tracks where they'll be broken into parts and scrapped.

At least he doesn't have to pick up vehicles being repossessed from their owners by the bank.

'I know a guy who did that for a while, then quit. He got shot at too many times."

The Way It Was
All things must come to an end. I know this because my grandfather was a farmer. He had some dairy cows, then he grew old and it got too hard to get up and milk Bessie. He got himself some heifers. He continued to raise beef, some alfalfa, and wheat on his little 110-acre farm until he was in his seventies.

This is what it looked like when my grandfather harvested the wheat
on his Oklahoma farm in the 1960s.

I remember going out into the wheat field when I was a kid and following the orange Allis Chalmers combine as its wooden paddles turned and pulled in the tall golden grass. The separated chaff blew out a stack on the side of the combine. The wheat kernels poured into a bin.

Those kernels reminded me of some form of tiny bright treasure. The warm grainy scent was like inhaling a wealth of sorts. You just knew that with such things sprung from the earth, humanity always could always find flavor and sustenance.

All that's left of our '97 Corolla...
oil spots on the driveway.

In Memoriam
It's not what anyone would call tragic to see one farmer like my grandfather or Lonnie retire. It's not desperately sad to part with a car that I don't need anymore.
What does move me to concern and something beyond a cloying form of nostalgia is pondering if an important way of life is being lost.

When the machines become enormous and complicated, and as expensive as a mansion, we drive away the people who once placed their calloused hands tenderly upon the things we long to consume.

What was once of the earth has become a product, a commodity, removed from the smooth, wheaty kernels I remember digging into and letting pour through my fingers.

I'm sorry. I don't want technicians or robots harvesting my food. I want someone like Lonnie who cares about what he's doing. But I don't think that's going to happen as much as before.

You see, we've reassigned Lonnie to the same fate as that man Van Gogh painted over a hundred years ago, the man who had to put down his scythe. Instead of going out into the field to bring in the treasure, the harvester now gets paid to handle the chains and haul off  our dented and smashed trash.

That's quite an inversion and, unfortunately, it's the kind of "news" that's happening every day. Whether I choose to read about it or not. - V.W.


.

Monsieur Fénéon's Tragedies



M. Félix Fénéon

NEWS LEAKAGE: For various reasons that I won't go into, I have a sense there's been a recent violent tragedy in America. Nothing that follows is intended to be an indirect comment on the event, whatever it was, and I remain "asleep." - V.W.

He was a thin man with an outrageously sharp nose and a beard like a goat's. He slipped in and out of Parisian society, striking others as gifted in language, but austere in his use of it.

It was his destiny to become a person of some influence in the late 19th century at a time when artists and political activists flocked together.

This man, Félix Fénéon (prounounced fay-nay-own), would discover the pointillist painter George Seurat and soon be promoting the work of other post-impressionists.

Likewise, he became an advocate for many important writers within the pages of literary magazines he either started or edtied. One of these publications became the first to print the work of an obscure Irish writer in France. The writer was James Joyce.

Fénéon also was, in his early years, an anarchist, There is hearsay evidence that he may have planted a bomb during a time of unrest and anger that makes our own age of terrorism seem mild. In 1892 alone, for example, 500 bombs exploded in the U.S. and over 1000 in Europe.

Fénéon had a reputation for writing a great deal, but true to his self-effacing disposition, and also in order to keep a low-profile because of his anarchist activities, he tended not to sign his articles.

He once said, "I aspire only to silence."



Paul Signac's psychedelic-looking rendition of his friend Fénéon ,
lily in hand, which Fénéon did NOT like...

Later in life he found himself working for newspapers. In 1906 he was assigned for six months to cover brief stories for Le Matin.

It is with his short tenure with the newspaper that Fénéon makes his lasting mark as a writer. His mistress clipped out his stories and saved them; otherwise, we would not know they were the work of Fénéon as they were printed in the standard way, without a byline.

Years later the merits of these little, true and tragic news stories, so poignantly and artfully expressed, were recognized. They were collected in a volume called Novels in Three Lines and published in English in 2007.

Life and Death as Filler
The great daily  newspapers were an invention of the 19th Century. In many countries, including France, the news of the day included a column of miscellaneous accounts that were judged not to merit in-depth reporting.

In France they were called "fait-divers" (pronounced fay-dee-vair) which might roughly translate as "various happenings."

Each item has to fit
in 3 lines of text.

The fait-divers are an interesting, non-fiction type of micro-narrative. They inform the world with the briefest of descriptions about domestic violence, suicide, assault, murder, brawls, vandalism, theft, accidents, deaths, and sometimes political unrest.

They also capture the dangers of the new industrial age as many of the subjects meet their ends through some encounter with a locomotive, automobile, or piece of steam-driven equipment.

Today we might see some of these notices placed under the "police blotter" or in a toned-down version within the obituaries.


Fénéon was assigned to write the fait-divers on p. 3 of Le Matin under the title "Nouvelles en Trois Lignes" (news or novellas in three lines). Fénéon set out to exploit his natural austerity, choosing his words so carefully and arranging them in such a way that each item became an exceptional example of minimalist prose style in which the aesthetic is "less is more."

 

The writer assumed that what was left out could imply a larger whole. In Fénéon's hands some of the fait-divers even achieved the poignancy and profundity of poetry or haiku.

Writer and translator Luc Sante enthuses in his introduction to the book:

"They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage. His politics, his aesthetics, his curiosity and sympathy are all on view, albeit applied with tweezers and delineated with a single-hair brush."

Fénéon's effort to obtain the maximum effect from the fewest number of words, a notion that was popular in the literary movement that would later be labeled "Modernism," reminds me of the kind of incredibly compacted short story Ernest Hemingway tended to write.

According to a possibly apocryphal story, Hemingway once bet someone he could write a complete story in ten words or less. He penned on a napkin a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

          For sale: Baby shoes.
    Never worn.

This is exactly the kind of thing Fénéon wrote multiple times a day, every day, for six months in 1906.


Fénéon's Miniatures
Since, per the parameters of this project, a person who is Van Winkled is not allowed to read today's news, I've decided to compensate by reading a bit of the news from 115 years ago...

Over a thousand of Fénéon's fait-divers are collected in Novels in Three Lines. Here's a trio of typical ones that even in translation bear the imprint of Fénéon, whether it's his sarcasm or sense of the ironic or his way of unexpectedly carving up sentences.

Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up.


It was believed that work would start up again today at the steelworks in Pamiers. A delusion.


A thresher seized Mme Peccavi, of Mercy-le-Haut, Meurthe-et-Moselle. The one was disassembled to free the other. Dead.

Some of the fait-divers are rendered in such a way that they register as very darkly, even morbidly, humorous:



A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.


At Sainte-Anne beach, in Finistere, two swimmers were drowning. Another swimmer went to help. Finally M. Etienne had to rescue three people.


The 392 from Cherbourg to Caen halted; the engineer dislodged from the cowcatcher the corpse of Thiebault, 2, and gave it to the boy's mother.

Some I appreciate for how Fénéon has paced them and focused on a perfect detail:

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.


Equipped with a rattail file and deceptively loaded with a quantity of fine sandstone, a tin cylinder was found on Rue de l'Ouest.


Finding her son, Hyacinthe, 69, hanged, Mme Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she could not cut him down.

Some are simply bizarre:

The parish priest of La Compote, Savoie, was walking through the hills alone. He lay down, naked, under a beech tree, and died of an aneurysm.


Portebotte got 12 years in the penitentiary. In Le Havre he murdered the exuberant Nini the Goat, on whom he thought he had claims.


All the News That's Fit to Print? or Just Some of It?
Fénéon brings news of the relentlessly downbeat and depressing. These are tragedies, many of them as old as Cain and Abel.

The dispassionate reporting of all this malfeasance and misfortune actually has a paradoxical effect upon me. I see the event more vividly than if Fénéon had been allowed to indulge himself and use many more words, burying the heart of the story in voyeuristic detail and editorializing or melodrama.

The faits-divers are like crime scene photos in prose; they do not allow gilding of the awful. As in the following:

Medical examination of a little boy found in a ditch on the outskirts of Niort showed that he had undergone more than just death.

I cannot help but feel devestated when I think of the little boy lying in the ditch. I am forced by the absence of details to I think of the life he had, all that's implied by "little boy." Then I consider the cruel way he may have lost his life. By the time I reach the end of this simple 24-word sentence I mourn.

At the same time this is a clear case of what passes for "news" being the result of a highly selective and even biased process.

Six months of the faits-divers are not representative of the totality of French life in 1906 or most places on earth at any time in history.

Left out are the weddings, the births, the good food, the children playing, the teachers teaching and all the other unspoiled fruit in the barrel.

If life were composed mostly of the sort of things we find in these grim news tidbits, it's hard to see how we could go on living.

Which has led me to wonder: Could someone utilize Fénéon's highly compressed method to convey other news of the world? To possibly bring us some good news? C'est peut-être, M. Fénéon? Stay tuned. - V.W.

  COMING FRIDAY: Monsieur Van Winkle's Comedies  

.