Little vow

Week, we should have to have this is a crack... any but the time.  Tomorrow I will addow...

Less than before, but hope more offen

I have been finding that I just do not have the ability to cover these in my old talent, not at all, but I sure still want to toss out some words, for now and then.  Words not as long, but maybe more often than over the past nine months.

First I've thought I'd send out a couple pieces that I have kept, but they hadn't been big enough.  Wound up killing off one, keeping one for later, and sending out one now.

So let's see.  I say "let's see" on the theory that more than one person will read this stuff.  Maybe.  What I do know it that a fly has become a living guy here in the home, for several days.  Maybe he will become a friend.  I have wonder ones already but one more can't hurt.

Hard easy easy hard

It's probably a good concept, write as I can, stay away from the great big words.  But getting together at a place where people talk and drink (even I, who only drinks thinks like coffee) sure seems a better place, or at least for me a plate where my fairly huge set of stuff not working is hidden.  Unless there's a very important reason I have to be heard, in which case, well maybe.

One more time?

So, still around.

Since the last one of these I've been way down, and now back up.  My ability to write, here or anywhere, has fallen off, and I am missing some other stuff that I always had.  Faced through efforts that were intended to stretch out the timing - so hey, you can get another year, or maybe even two.   But in what form?

My conclusion at this point is, no more, no thanks.  I have gone now to absolute minimum on the medical stuff and, I think, was able to walk back up to being me, more or less.  It may not last a year, or even less, but I'd rather do it that way and be me.

And especially to be with my beloved wife, and carry forward.  She and I have have been together 30 years, and I have never loved her more than now.  She is brilliant and I am a lucky, blessed man.

Plus we have a great dog.  She's at my feet now, and stays with us, the 3-year westie.  As far as I can tell she loves us, other folks, and other dogs.

Back to town

OK so the current choice seems to be Florida v. Missouri.  Not to say that Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York (city and state, under separate analytical approaches), New Jersey, DC, and California (north and south, also quite separate) aren't also in the running, or at least in the memory bank, and maybe Illinois and Texas too.  Hey, it's been a trip, these 63 years, and I'm not even planning to go back abroad to live, as I used to think I would, or to places I haven't been to yet. Say, Alaska.

The real point is whether, wherever I am, I'm living the balance of my time in a way that doesn't waste a day.  Or at least to think about how to do it, as a coming play - since I'm currently in a spot where the results are not in, I'm just told to cool it for another couple of weeks, then we can decide what's next, the 12-month version of stuff they will next apply and then say, basically, OK that's our best.  A total of six weeks of waiting for my brain to get back to whatever constitutes my normality, and then how to take it ahead.  Coming attraction.

Well, I have to say that right now, if not yet going forward, that this working with something less than 100 percent of the previous capacity is OK part of the day, and damn strange in other parts.  An example, right now right here, is the typing of this talk.  Every third or fourth word is typed wrong and I see it immediately and I fix it.  Includes spellings that are not even close to what I mean.  It's a very active version of composition correction, which even in smart days I used to make once in a while.

But the good news is it isn't today like trying to skip through a badly wrecked piece of landscape, as it was right after the head was first grilled and carved in December.  Just a practice that is somewhat slower than before, and probably not with vocabulary at the the same level.

And so-what to that?  I think I've moved to simpler patterns of thought and friendship.  Simpler language as well?

Oh OK.  Part of me wishes it were French.

Eastern coast of Florida

We're in Florida for a few days to stay with a great newish friend, in an oldish house in a part of Vero Beach, one of those long islands running off the east coast.  A relatively reasonable cost way to leave the Midwest for a few days, go someplace worthy, and, as it turns out, stumble into some of your greatest friends almost by accident. I guess Florida is now where most of our post-60 bunch goes, at least in winter, maybe more so than ever. Hmm.  A lifeplace I never thought I'd sign up for but man, now, dealing with medical stuff that is way off any previous-understood set of charts, maybe now I will, as least more than before, hang out in Florida.

Or not.  Who really knows where all this goes?  Me, least of all.

The trip here brings back strongly some old memory, of Fort Lauderdale and the lives my grandmother and uncle led there, with homes, water and boats, and the idea that  - 60-70 years ago - there could be a life there that differed from life in, say, Cleveland.  My grandmother, after brilliance in the Cleveland society of 1910's and '20's and loss and rescue in the '30's, lived her final years in a house on the water in Fort Lauderdale. Where I learned a lot in Spring visits, and in particular how to look out to the water that lead out to the ocean, and how that could mean future, not just that day.  Then my uncle, a fine-looking man with beautiful cars and boats, who went out of his way to live a fine-looking life which, as far as I could tell, he pretty well did.  Miss you, Uncle Greg, and the world, old Lauderdale, you lived in with residual class.

No. Six weeks since the last one?

One of the odd aspects of this brain surgery world is that days, then weeks, can drift by and you don't really even notice that you aren't doing what you should.  Used to be, over the past few years or so, that I felt bad about backing off from Strays and my other ways of tossing out mostly non-legal ideas.  But after the serious crap shoot in December, and especially over the recent six weeks of brain zap, I didn't really feel bad about quiet and non-reply.  I just saw the days and nights go by, and let notes from dear people go unanswered, and just thought, oh.  Did my life really consistent mostly, and without regret, of getting zaps and conversation at a hospital and otherwise watching the tube?

Well, I'd better return to more that that or pretty soon I will wish that December 23 had been the finale (as, for a few weeks, I wasn't sure it wasn't - an interesting time - wondering if this was post-surgery or post-everything, a sort of dream).  But naa, I'm still alive and it's all been just one life, bouncing from Cleveland to Concord to Princeton to Boston, back to Cleveland, to St. Louis, to Washington DC, back to St. Louis, to London, back to St. Louis, to Hong Kong, back to St. Louis.  More or less, and so far.

Many places still to go to, if not to inhabit.  Maybe not a lot of time to get there, though, and flying from continent to continent would undermine an option I have thought about so often, my version of Travels with Charley - a work that was as important to me, decades ago, as any, but which did not involve world air travel.  At least as to the far-off stuff, maybe it will be better to follow Stevens, do it mostly by thought.  We'll see, no decisions right away, but I can't and don't want to wait for long.

Not so bad, this life thing

I had cancer a few years ago.  Took a while to sort it out - two episodes and about 18 months, actually. And then, when things seemed to be running off track again last Fall, the first question was whether it was a recurrence of the old neck cancer.

Then, as we went through surgery and the information it revealed, it became as clear as things get in this world (which isn't 100 percent clear) that I was dealing with a new cancer, brain version, that really didn't have much to do with the old one.  Number two (or three?), and about four years later.  Bad luck Mikey!

Ah well.  You know, you go through these things two or three times and really, at least in my case, it just gets to... here's the deal, play your best hand.  Not a terrible hand - hey, I didn't just get hit by a truck and pulverized - if not a great one.  The consensus at this point seems to be that I'm not looking at clearing things up 100 perfect and living for decades.  More like holding things off and living well for some time.

Since I'm now 63 and a half, well, it's not terrible.  The final number isn't what most folks seem to be looking at these day  - it could be kind of cheezy on post-age-65 retirement benefits  - but it sure could have been worse.  There was a time in my 20's when I really doubted if I'd make it to 30; the parties were pretty dangerous.  Then, law school, marriage (one), foreign work, marriage (two and still pumping), children, Europe in the 80's, Asia in the 90's, kids graduating from colleges, getting married, having babies, and me, more or less throughout, practicing law... really, not sure how much more than that I deserve.  Many people much finer than me have had much less.

So, here I now go into more treatments, some well established and maybe some experimental -  and after that, maybe lots more time and law practice and maybe not.  Either way, lucky me, as ever, lucky and blessed.

A new life.

So this one is it.  It.

I will try to get it out - but it will be many days.  My able to write has gone into a strange place, and who knows how it comes back.

So you know... I start today, December 26, 2013.  I am 63 ages old.  And I am now as young as I have been in many years.

****************************

(1/13/2014... seems hard to believe.)

OK I really couldn't write for beans at first, nearly three weeks ago, and I still have some amazing flaws.  Like I can't remember names.  NOT AT ALL.  Amazing stuff.  I do seem to remember the people, and I do seem to want to talk to them.  Writing?  Emails?  Even Strays, Morgan's written word? We'll see.  I'm going down the road into a new life.

So below is what I sent out to lots of folks yesterday and today.  Says what it says, and for today. Tomorrow will be... tomorrow.  And many tomorrows to come, they will be what they are.  No predictions; no promises; nothing but joy to be alive.

*****************************

I have been trying to stay quiet about Morgan's latest medical adventure, but just cannot any more. Each of you is important to me for reasons that in some cases go back decades. I want you to have an idea what happened.

Just a quick first note: in the past, with these sorts of status reports, I have done carefully different versions for different groups. No more. You're all on this one.

On December 23 I went in for surgery on my brain. It was a big deal. Five hours later they had pulled out about a baseball's worth of cancer.

The amazing part is that since then I have never been more in love with my wife and family or more fond of my clients, partners, and friends.  So hey. There is a really interesting dynamic going on here. I have a batch of issues to come, and my doc says I have to take at least month off. So I will. But in the meantime I hope to hear from each you a lot,  legal stuff or other.

From here:  It may not be a long future but I sure plan it to be interesting.

All the best to each of you.  I will forget a few pals on this  - hey, I never was perfect and still ain't - so please forward to anyone you think might want to know.

M

And walking into the sunset, grabbing the sun, and pushing back

After a life of having so few serious issues, so many great days, so much luck on friends and family and career... then, the last few years, especially the last few months, especially the last few weeks, especially the last few days...  facing the possibility of a drop, into an ocean, into some level of loss of all the things that used to fly me high up over the water.  Yes?

No.  No.  No, not going there, not giving it up, not even a mild concession.  Not letting any of this take me, or pull me down, or slow me down, or be a last chapter.  It is not the last, or the second last, or an end in the farthest sight.  Showing me the bottom and asking me, hey, ready to cave in?  No.  Me, pulling my head up, dropping the smile, giving instead a stare of eyes back to the devil, to the death angel, and saying once again, now, tomorrow, next month, next year - not even close, not now, not ever.  Will fight on and on and on.

After Thanksgiving

The problem isn't lack of gratitude.  It's more like suspicion of New Year's resolutions.  What is there to resolve?  A graceful decline?  The late matinee?  What happened to... a killer band?  Bringing home justice?  Saving a stranger?  I'm thankful for what's home, but not for what I haven't brought home yet, or that it may never be.  Thankful for the future, but not convinced that it will be a new and righteous chapter, epiphany, celebration.  For now, not yet coming back, not yet fading away.

Early check-out

It was a term I used to use more often, back when I considered self-destruction a more arguable proposition, but didn't want to give it more seriousness than I thought it deserved.  OK to consider, but not OK to consider gravely, so to speak.

Now as I am sailing through completely different waters, with a lot more natives chucking spears at my ship from the shore, I am thinking more about involuntary early check-out, and wondering about a new term.  Early departure.  Early exit.  And maybe not so early?  If I go tomorrow, it isn't a case of the good dying young, even if I were to claim "good."  Not yet at three score and ten, but not early.  Lincoln was 56, Kennedy 46, Mozart 35, Alexander 32.  Now that's early.

So just, as my mother always recommended, leave 'em laughing?  Tipping the cap, glad for what you had, and with a smile?

There's the ticket.  The late matinee.

The tedium of old guy medical stuff

Once more into the ring.

Used to be that I was a healthy dude.  Always, for years and years, maybe a cold, maybe a broken bone or a gash, but nothing light's out.  Nothing even light's dimmed.

But for the last five years the dimmer has been twisting back and forth, letting me know that this health thing that everyone seems to know about is something I should know about, with big bills and scary prospects and a lot of science that is, at least, interesting, and language that catches on and catches up.  Like, a few years ago, vertigo, then cancer, metastasis, and radiation.  Last summer, a clavicle, then a stroke, or no maybe not.  A flock of acronyms: CT, PET, MRI, TIA, EEG.  And now a new one, a word that I never really thought medical, but now learn is.  Very medical.  Seizure.

I guess my first thoughts about seizures are combative, or at least physically assertive - he was seized. The platoon was seized.  Or credit remedial - the assets were seized.  Taking possession by force. 

But now I learn  that it's about a whole panoply of stuff that can happen to your brain.  The wonderfully European gran mal and petit mal.  Epileptic.  Partial.  All of it, more or less, an electrical fault across the circuits.

It is now my current diagnosis, this time of a short period of really falling off the vocabulary/grammar bus, unprovoked, just something that happened, just something.  Couldn't talk right for a while, then it came back.

J’étais saisi. 

But you really don't want a seizure, 63 years into the play.  You don't know the lines and you really, really don't know the last scene.  They really don't know how you got there, or if you will get there again, or was last summer a seizure, and this, or just this, or neither.

J’étais saisi.

Sounds better in French, non?

Baseball has been very good to me

I live in a great baseball town.

Just an example from the stats (and baseball is all about stats):

Boston has about 7.9 million people in its SMA, and attendance at Fenway Park this year was 2.8 million.  St. Louis has about 2.9 million people, and at Busch Stadium this year the total was 3.4 million.

And Boston isn't bad.  It's just that we are different here, the Cardinals are a civic asset that identifies us.  In Boston, the Red Sox are great but they probably define the city less than do the Celtics or the Bruins.  The Cardinals were for years the westernmost team and still are the team from just south of Chicago to north of Dallas, west past Kansas City (Oklahomans are big fans) and east into Eastern Tennessee.  It's not just KMOX and its amazing reach, it's all the territory of Cardinal Nation, with stations all over the Midwest.

So tonight there is a deciding game of the World Series, and if the Cardinals win there will be another, all at Fenway Park in front of a crowd that will be... well, impolite.  Boston may not be as bad as Philadelphia, where they toss batteries at the players, but they will show a lot more love for their team that for the sport.  As opposed to the fans here, who applaud when a guy from the other team makes a really good play. 

Whether we win or lose - and it looks like a tough road - the Cardinals will come home to a welcoming city, happy to know that the Winter Warmup for 2014 is less than 3 months away.

The scent of fresh Lenin

The way the class issues in America are coming up - food stamps, one percent, 47 percent, etc.  - sooner or later, seems to me, will coalesce not with the old Marxism we knew, but with what really may be an inescapable fact.  We and the Chinese and the other smart econo/socio/politico engineers are putting together societies with a huge, increasing gap in income and wealth.  It may be forever.  It may be inescapable. We all get the idea that free unregulated markets are a good way to balance supply and demand.   But are they a good way to balance wealth?  All the evidence says no.

Sooner of later we have to face the fact that there will be many more people than jobs, jobs that are worth a damn with incomes that are enough to raise and educate children and put away enough to create an annuity that will enable old people to live well.  Walk around in America.  Ask the working guys you know in their fifties and sixties if they are really going to accumulate enough money to do anything but work until they drop. And that's the middle class.  The poor folks will just look for handouts.

That's a really big failure, and I think it's coming everywhere, over the next few decades.  The way these things have been addressed in the past have always been through the Four Horsemen.  Are they the only ways out?

Seems bleak, I know, and I'm a basically pretty cheerful dude, but I really can't solve this one.  If this is how America looks, what about the rest of the world?  Asia's markets seem to be based on the US Federal Reserve System.  What?  Don't they have their own central banks?  Is it all here, all dependent on Harvard and Chicago grads?

 Trouble, my friends, trouble.  Right here in River City.

Terrorism, the label

The baby-gassing leader of Syria refer to his opponents as "terrorists" and it makes me wonder - is there a definition?  

Evidently there are hundreds.  And there is a big political issue baked in - can a state be a terrorist?  Can a state be the sponsor?  The answer is hell yes, with plenty of examples, like Lockerbie.  Or is a terrorist someone who is domestic, and only violates the law of the state?  Timothy McVeigh - was he a terrorist or just a criminal?

I'd say he's a terrorist, for two reasons.  The first has to do with the true origin of the term - it seems to come from the Terror, La Terreur, in the French Revolution, when the idea was to use terror to win at revolution and to rule.   Said Robespierre:

"We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

"If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."

McVeigh thought this, that his action was somehow civic.  So did Bin Laden.  So, I suppose, do the Syrian revolutionaries.

But to me the second and equally necessary test is whether there is the deliberate slaughter of innocents. 9/11 yes, Oklahoma City yes, and now, Damascus - yes.   So it's Bashar Al-Assad, who's the terrorist. If the shoe fits, Mr. Baby-Gasser, wear it.

Swimming to Nantucket

Spalding Gray died nine years ago but for me he's still around, still showing that life is humorous enough but maybe not humorous enough to survive.  When we were at the beach a few weeks ago I looked across to Martha's Vineyard, and knew that Nantucket lay beyond, over the horizon, but there.  It's a distance you can put in your head and wonder -  if that were the test, would you pass or fail.  Probably no sharks. But a long swim.

Spalding jumped off the Staten Island Ferry.  Was he going to see if he could make it, swimming back to Manhattan?  I guess not, but still  I'd like to think so.  Otherwise it's just too linear.

Back to summer

Every year I do a post of some kind about the summer heat in St. Louis.  But this year we haven't had it; you'd think we were Michigan.

Is that why we had practically no Japanese Beetles this year?  (Or was it the nasty chemical I sprinkled at the base of the most JB-savory plants?)

Now, late August, we seem to be back to days with that oven-like heat blast when you walk outside.  But with this very  decent summer, we seem to still have cool mornings and even the occasional dew.  This much hot summer, this late, before September walks in .  Good with that.

Isabel

I guess there is something pathetic about saying your dog is your best friend, but I do think that, as to Isabel now and as to Valerie before and pretty much back to my first dog.  Whose name I can't say because he's the answer to about 50 security questions.

But not really a friend, right?  Because a dog's a dog.  We don't know really what they are thinking, whether they are self-conscious, whether what looks like devotion is really a sense of making sure the relationship is strong with the guy who puts kibble in the bowl.

I have pretty much lost all attitudes based on what people are thinking, because I don't know what they are thinking.  I never did; I only thought I did.  Now, I basically try to base my convictions on what people do.  And why not the same with dogs.  I don't know what they think.  I know what they do.

Isabel hangs around me, most of the time.  When there are children or other dogs, she will hang with them, but come back to me when she's called.  She runs after varmints.  She sleeps.  She drags herself across the grass, looks up, rolls over.    She wakes me up in the morning by standing on my chest and licking my nose, once.  When we are out in new territory she sits and looks around, like a sentinel and a guard.

This is not doctorate thesis material.  It's just peaceful and doggy, and also it is doing things - not thinking things - that to me constitute friendship.  So yeah.  She is a friend, a great one.

Clambake

The idea was to do a clambake in a Weber kettle.  I looked, and of course there was a pretty good guide on the Internet.  Is there anything left with no guide on the Internet?

In fact there was a big complicated version that made you wonder why you wouldn't go a beach with a shovel and do the real thing.  But the simpler version... as elegant as beer can chicken.  Stuff a burlap bag with seaweed, lobsters, clams, spuds, corn, and onions, wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil so it's like a big ass pillow, and put it on the grill for an hour with a lot of charcoal.

Came out great, looked like we'd done it on the beach in Maine.  But not entirely lucky.  I did a trial the day before, and it kind of sucked, and I made adjustments.

• Not too riverine.  Rinse the bejeesus out of the seaweed.
• Hot.  You don't have to worry about too much heat.  That's a lot of moisture.  It will be hard to dry this stuff out.
• One lemon, not sliced, in the sack.
• Corn in the stalks but with the silk removed.

So the good part wasn't just that we could do a clambake without turning it it into a WPA project.  It went beyond the letter of the Internet.   A hundred bucks of lobsters came out looking right.