Category Archives: Reflections

Sights and Sounds

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Be it sight, sound, the smell, the touch.
There’s something inside that we need so much.

“Departure”
Graeme Edge-1968

I got stranded on a two lane blacktop outside Champaign, Illinois on an unusually warm spring afternoon in 1974. I sat by the side of the road while waiting for help, listening to the light traffic on nearby Interstate 74. Having nothing better to do, I surveyed the landscape: the newly planted fields; the few clouds on the horizon; a few tiger lilies blooming along the shoulder. The relative silence was comforting, leaving me alone with just my thoughts.

Forty-one years later I was driving from Dayton, Ohio to Chicago because bad weather had cancelled all flights to and from O’Hare. I’d rented a nice new Chevy Impala in Dayton, so I traveled in comfort with the air and the sound system blasting. But as I drove through Champaign I decided to get off the interstate near the same area where I’d been stranded. It brought back the memories of that afternoon and the sights and sounds I took for granted before life became an endless cycle of work, sleep and trying to make sense of life.

I fear those experiences are lost on a generation glued to their smartphones, shutting out the world with their earbuds. They appear to fear the absence of natural sound, light and constant interaction as if they will miss something monumental should they look away for even a moment.

So, before it’s too late, take my advice. Nourish your senses before they atrophy.

Find a rural road, far from a city or town. Stop, get out of the car and just listen. There’s no city traffic noise. No radios or TVs or stereos blaring from someone’s window. All you can hear is a few insects buzzing like a high-voltage wire, maybe a breeze going through the cornfields, and the occasional car. The sound gradually grows as the car nears. It passes with that familiar but very solitary rumble, gravel crunching if it strays too near the shoulder, then fades in the distance. The day’s heat becomes almost audible, the waves rising from the asphalt and the mind trying to fill in the sound gaps. The silence makes you think; makes you far more aware of what’s around you.

I remember the smell of sheets hanging from a clothes line, gently waving in the breeze when I was five years old. I was small enough to lay in one like a hammock and look up at the sky, watching the few clouds drift by. Put up a single line and hang some towels or shirts. Rub your face in them when they are dry. Fabric softener can’t come close to creating that smell.

Go out in a forest or field in the middle of nowhere in the winter and listen to the almost imperceptible sound as the snow falls. The air is cold and the scent is comforting, and again, almost audible. There’s that soft crunch as you walk through the snow, competing with the sound of your breathing, magnified by the hood around your ears. Remember those winters past, when you would play until the light faded and dinner awaited.

A summer thunderstorm washes the air, leaving a fresh aroma and a stillness broken only by the sound of tires running through the puddles on the streets. It’s a smell one is hard pressed to experience living in the city, but it’s possible. Go out to a park after a good rain. Hear the water dripping on the leaves and revel in the new found atmospheric purity.

In the fall the wind makes the dried leaves that haven’t fallen from the trees rattle like a rain stick and the ones swirling on the ground scratch like mice feet in an attic. If you are outside raking, stop. Close your eyes and open your ears. This is the annual death many fear, but it is temporary. Life will resurrect in the spring.

I never believe a babbling brook existed until I stumbled onto one outside of Conway, New Hampshire. I’d stopped by the side of the road near the Swift River and wandered into the woods. I heard what I thought was a radio playing All Things Considered, but the words were unintelligible. I went a little farther and found a shallow creek running over thousands of smooth stones—the source of those “voices.” It was warm, pleasant and inviting, like a family gathering. If you are lucky enough to find a babbling brook, sit by its side and maybe it will tell you something.

The closest I’ve come to absolute silence was 3000 feet in the air, slowly drifting back towards the ground under a parachute. I was in college; it was the first time I’d ever jumped. The pilot sang Casey Jones as we took off. “Flyin’ my plane, high on cocaine.” I was first in line for the drop since I’d been the last one on. As we neared the drop site, the door flew up to the overhead wing.

“Hold onto the strut. Put your left foot on the platform and let your right foot dangle.”

That was simple enough.

“Now let go.”

At first I floundered like Wile E. Coyote falling off the butte, but within a couple of seconds the static line had pulled my rip cord and the chute opened. I couldn’t hear the plane. I couldn’t hear any birds or wind.  There was nothing but silence, an oddly comforting science. I imagine that was the Zen definition of “being one with nature.” Landing on the ground was almost a disappointment.

If you are too scared to strap on a parachute, go out to Colorado Springs and drive up Pikes Peak. This is where Katherine Lee Bates was inspired to write “America the Beautiful.” Ponder the purple mountains majesty in the distance and the fruited plain below and do not be surprised at the tears in your eyes.

Light pollution has become so bad that governments are creating “dark-sky preserves” so we can see that which we took for granted 50 years ago. Drive into the darkness of the countryside on a clear night, far away from the lights of civilization. Look up into the sky at the billions of stars. Your problems pale when set against such a sight.

Do this while you can still appreciate it.

 

Departure
Be it sight, sound, smell, or touch,
There’s something inside, that we need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound,
Or the strength of an oak, with roots deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers, to be covered, and then to burst up,
Through tarmac, to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing;
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing;
To have all these things in our memory’s hoard
And to use them,
To help us,
to find…… Continue reading →

Dia del Daddy

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I don’t have any memories of my father as he died when I was two months old and my stepfather…well, that is best left in the past.  But over the years I’ve collected many memories of being a father to my kids: the joys; the sorrows; the embarrassing stories I use as payback.  Here are a few.

When Aaron was about six I bought him the big, red plastic bat that came with a big, white, very hard plastic ball. I was pitching to him in the back yard when he connected. I caught a line drive at crotch level, which sent me to the ground. As I’m writhing in pain, Aaron came up to me and said, “Are you tired, Daddy?”

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One Sunday morning Aaron treated me to breakfast; a glass of orange juice and a bowl of Cheerios, into which he’d poured the milk about 10 minutes before I got up. He was really proud of himself; when I looked at the bowl he said, “It’s a little soggy.” I said, “No, it’s just fine,” as I started eating. Never discourage a child trying to do something nice, since the impulse disappears when they become teenagers.

Nathan was voted Most Likely to Get His Butt Swatted, largely because he was usually the source of some mischief or aggravation. One evening, sensing the inevitable, he stuffed a hard cover book into his pants just before the hand came. The little twerp just laughed as I nursed a very sore hand. His siblings thought it was funny as well.

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Nathan assumed adults were gullible from a very early age. We were watching television on the family room couch when he got up and said, “You stay right there. I’ll be right back.” Not being born yesterday, I quietly followed him, and caught him pilfering cookies from the pantry. Some months later, he got into the pantry and closed the door before climbing the shelves to the cookies. Mom almost had a heart attack when she opened the door and found him hanging on a shelf. He jumped off quickly and said, “Can I have a cookie?”

Corey learned how to get her brothers in trouble by the time she was two: poke the animals and then complain when they retaliated. One time, however, the boys protested. “Corey started it!”

“Corey, is that true?”

A moment of silence preceded the howl as she exited, stage left, having been busted. Later she learned to be far more subtle, especially with Nathan.  Light the fuse, stand back and watch the fireworks, because he would never see it coming.

corey dad

As Corey got older, she developed the uncanny ability to outwit Nathan in any argument. I finally told him, “Once you start arguing with your sister, you’ve already lost.” He’s 31 now and STILL hasn’t learned.

Many years ago, about the time my I.Q. dropped 50 points, some gremlin kidnapped my kids and replaced them with eye-rolling, heavy-sighing sullen replicants. I couldn’t possibly understand what they were going through because life was soooo much easier when I was their ages. (I did, and it wasn’t, but what do I know?) Separation is inevitable but that doesn’t make it any easier.

AaronBeingaDick

Now they are adults, alternately making me proud and breaking my heart. I didn’t have a father to guide me and regretted it well into my forties. They have a father but seem hell-bent on graduating from the School of Hard Knocks. The relationships between fathers and sons can be substantially more difficult than those between fathers and daughters, although the latter has its own landmines. I worry about alienating my sons; I worry about disappointing my daughter.

It’s difficult to understand how hard it is to watch and remain silent until you have kids of their own. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.

I take some comfort in the lyrics to Gino Vanelli’s “Father and Son.” Listen to the link and reflect.

It takes more than time to discover
That for both the young and old the truth is sometimes cold but right

I love you, my children, even if you do make me crazy sometimes.  No, even more when you make me crazy sometimes.

MyFather

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. And Happy Father’s Day to the guy I never knew.  Wish you were here.

Angels in Scrubs

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Physicians taught me how to treat diseases. Nurses taught me how to care for people.

It’s no secret that I feel more of a kinship to nurses than I ever felt to physicians. I was an orderly working eight-hour shifts with nurses long before I went to medical school. I saw what the nurses did, how hard they worked, and how the orders physicians gave, with little thought to implementation, affected them directly. They also treated me as part of a team, not as cheap labor to be abused and berated.

During my internship I quickly learned that nurses can make a physician’s life easy or a living hell. I threw myself on the mercy of the head nurse at the beginning of my ICU rotation and she guided me, suggesting drug dosages, ventilator settings and letting me know when to call for help.

Obstetric nurses taught me about the natural progression of labor: when a woman entered active labor, when she was in transition, when to intervene, and when to leave well enough alone. (Thanks, Marj B!). One threatened to teach me about labor: “We’ll shove a bowling ball up your butt and then tell you not to push.”

Clinic nurses taught me to treat Medicaid patients with kindness, respect and a little tough love. They also taught me I could not solve everyone’s problems.

Once in practice I realized I couldn’t do my job without nurses. They spent an eight or twelve hour shift with a labor patient while I was in the office or tending to someone else. Sometimes they would stay past shift change if the woman was close to delivery. They started IVs, ran Pitocin, magnesium sulfate, antibiotics, and blood. They comforted a woman while she got a spinal or an epidural anesthetic. And they were the first to resuscitate a baby in trouble.

Nurses watched over my patients after surgery, while they recovered from serious illnesses, and while they slept. One seasoned med/surg nurse told me what drug to order for a little old lady whose daily cocktail was a lot more than “mostly ice;” she went into “D.T.s (acute alcohol withdrawal, the night after her surgery.

Nurses are not afraid of anyone, including physicians, who sometimes do really stupid things. Chocolate and contrition goes a long way towards appeasing them. Not pissing them off in the first place goes even further.

Physicians live by “every man for himself,” with, until fairly recently, an emphasis on “man.” Nurses support each other, and physicians who stand up for them. They don’t have massive egos (for the most part); they just have to deal with those egos every day.

Nurses will cry with you after you’ve delivered a dead baby, or when someone with a terminal illness finally loses the battle. They’re eternally grateful when you have the foresight to buy everyone lunch because the day is going to hell and they will never make it to the cafeteria.

So Happy Nurses’ Week to all the nurses of various species I’ve known: registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, advanced practice nurses, nurse practitioners, certified registered nurse anesthetists, and my favorite, certified nurse midwives and L&D nurses.

 

The Thunderbird

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The 1950s and 1960s were the heydays of America’s love affair with the open road. Gasoline was cheap–20¢ to 30¢ a gallon—and flying was expensive, so during summer vacations many families hit the road in search of adventure or just a break from tedium. They would need a place to stay if they weren’t camping or dragging a trailer, which opened up an opportunity for roadside sleeping accommodations.

There were a few major hotel chains: Holiday Inn with their enormous green, yellow and orange signs; Howard Johnson’s, which added lodging to many of their numerous restaurants in the 1950s, and the Phoenix, Arizona-based Ramada Inn, which opened its first motel in Flagstaff. But many vacationers stayed in small mom-and-pop establishments along highways and near small towns. They were initially known as “motor lodges,” “motor inns,” “motor courts,” or “motor hotels,” which was eventually shortened to “Mo-Tel.” Out West they had romantic-sounding regional names like Aztec, Apache, Desert-Aire, El Sol, Ghost Ranch, Monterey Court, Sun God and Thunderbird. One could park right outside the room and haul everything inside without having to climb stairs or wait for an elevator. They were relatively Spartan compared to now but it was adequate and exciting.

We never took extended family vacations when I was growing up because we didn’t have much money. I lived in Arizona; I finally saw the Grand Canyon 30 years after I’d left the state. And going to Disneyland was completely out of the question. I didn’t miss anything, though. I made it to Disneyland in 1989 during a business trip and was surprised at how small it really was compared to Disney World.

Sometimes, instead of trekking back to Bisbee after visiting friends, we’d stay overnight, or a couple of days, at the Thunderbird Motel in Tucson, on a strip of four-lane highway known as “The Miracle Mile.” We usually got Room 25, one of the few with two double beds. It had real air-conditioning unlike the ubiquitous evaporative “swamp coolers” found in most desert homes. The beds were made with white linens stretched so tight and smooth you could bounce a quarter off them. I’d never used a shower before staying there. And I remember that crisp, clean smell that welcomed us when we walked in, untainted by cooking, wet animals or old beer farts.

The swimming pool was the best part: bow-tie shaped; going from two feet at one end and eight feet at the other end where the diving board sat, and surrounded by tasteful desert foliage. I’d change into my bathing suit as fast as I could and run out the sliding glass door. I can still remember jumping feet first into the water and the abrupt change in sound from outside noise to that other-worldly SCHWOOOOOP as the water closed in around my ears. There was an underwater light at the shallow end; I’d swim up to it, sometimes with my eyes closed because it was so bright.

I don’t ever recall my mother or step-father sitting poolside to make sure I didn’t drown. Maybe they watched from the room or listened for a distress call. Maybe they trusted me not to do anything stupid. Or maybe they just weren’t as paranoid as parents have become.

The Interstate Highway System marked the beginning of the end for the roadside motel. I-10 bypassed the Miracle Mile and by the mid-1970s it had become a haven for prostitutes, drug dealers and gangs. Many of the landmarks were demolished and in 1987 the Miracle Mile returned to its old name, Oracle Road. The golden era had come to an end.

Time heals some wounds. The Thunderbird has found new life as a men’s residential recovery center for Teen Challenge Arizona, an honorable use of an old building. The nearby Monterey Court now houses galleries, specialty shops, a café and an outdoor venue for live performances. The Ghost Ranch Lodge is on the National Register of Historic Places and was converted to senior housing.

I spend a lot of time in hotels, but none of them compare to the thrill I got staying at the Thunderbird. T

Bright Lights, Small City

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I spent most of my childhood in Bisbee, Arizona, a small mining town tucked into the Mule Mountains 90 miles southeast of Tucson. Many people made a decent living working in the mines; some, like my father, lost their lives there. The mines closed in the mid-1970s and the miners have been replaced by hippie artist types. One can get a bumper sticker: “Bisbee, AZ. It’s Like Mayberry on Acid.”

Living in Bisbee wasn’t bad at all. We had a Safeway grocery store, a movie theater and a Dairy Queen—all hallmarks of civilization. But every so often we’d trek two hours north and west to “the big city” of Tucson to buy groceries a little cheaper or to shop for stuff at Sears. Highway 80 took us out of town, through Tombstone, St. David and Benson until it dead-ended at Interstate 10. From there we drove the modern, four-lane into Tucson.

Sometimes we’d spend the day with one of two families we knew. Barbara and Art lived in South Tucson. There was a sign propped up against the wall in Art’s garage—a cartoon worm with a bow tie, top hat and a big smile saying, “Howdy, Folks!” My sister and I would play with their three daughters, Troy, Debbie and Laura, while the adults did whatever adults do when kids aren’t bugging the crap out them. One evening, when we were getting ready to leave, I put my fingers in the wrong place and the back door closed around them. It hurt like hell and prompted a trip to Tucson Medical Center’s ER, where an x-ray showed nothing broken.

Woody and Dolores lived farther east, near the intersection of East 22nd and Wilmot Road, where the Oxford Plaza was built in 1960, making it the second largest shopping center in Tucson. The backyards of all the houses were enclosed in 6ft cinder-block walls that opened to an alley running by a drainage ditch, known as a “wash.” Pantano Wash, a couple of miles away, is a much larger canal, usually dry as a bone until monsoon season, when sudden thunderstorms beget raging torrents carrying all sorts of debris and the occasional car driven by some dumb-ass who didn’t think the water was that deep or powerful.

Their older son, Jim was in high school and starting to become rebellious. He had a poster of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet on the wall of his bedroom, the infamous Phi Zappa Krappa. Richard was closer in age to me, so we hung out together, playing in the back yard or prowling the neighborhood. My sister usually wasn’t included but I’m sure she was around since my mother would not have left her home alone.

Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time, so even in the summer it’s dark by about 7:00-7:30pm. When it was time to leave we’d pile into the back seat of our Chevy for the long trip home. I’d usually look out the window until we turned off the Interstate at Benson. There was a long house outside of town that, when the lights shone through the full-length windows looked a lot like the Wright brothers’ first airplane.

There was a lot of nothing along desert highways back then and even less traffic. Sierra Vista was a small speck of light 35 miles away—not the massive beacon it has become. I’d lay down on the back seat and listen to the soft rumble of tires on the road, interrupted only by the headlight dimmer, a small cylindrical switch in the floor near the driver’s left foot. Ka-Click. The lights would dim for an approaching car. Ka-Click. The high-beams came back on as the other car passed by. Punctuation in the ongoing conversation between the car and the asphalt that continued until we were back home.