Resolutions from the Mastiff side

Hey, if "distaff" can refer to the female half of a couple, then "mastiff" should be the male half, right?  And it would make the distaff happy if, along with our 65 nations, we had a blog viewer who was a mastiff...

So I've read Nora's resolutions, and I'm deeply humbled.  (That happens often for me; I learn things from her—about forbearance and resolve and compassion and curiosity and a hundred other ideals—and I think about the rest of my day a little differently.  I'm a better person because I know her, and the more I know her, the better I am.)

I'm still very aware, six months in, of all the things that are happening for the first time.  Our first married Thanksgiving, our first married martini, our first married joint holiday cards.  And tomorrow will be another, our first married New Year's Eve.  In many ways, we've been here before.  But because it's our first, because we've had our share of elsewhere, we are going to stay home, have some friends drop in. We'll sit in the living room and talk and laugh and have a toast at 12:00. This one feels different.

More importantly, 2012 feels different.

I once wrote to her that she was magic in a bottle.  I repeated those words on our wedding day half a year ago.  And I'm thinking about them again tonight.

In fact, this is the letter that I wrote to her on June 25th, and that she read to the community that afternoon.

My Nora,

I’m sure that you never imagined all of this when I asked you last August if you would marry me.  I’m sure that you never imagined all of this when I woke you up on New Year’s Eve with a date in mind.

I’m sure you never imagined the blog.  Or the spreadsheets.  Or the rings. 

It’s been a whirlwind of the unimaginable, but now we’re here.  And I just wanted to take a minute to remind you of a couple of things.

I want to remind you that you are a generous and gracious friend.

I want to remind you that you have changed my life. 

I want to remind you that you are magic in a bottle.  Still, and always.

I want to remind you to stop, right now, and look at our friends.  Go ahead, stop.  Right now, for twenty seconds or so, just stop and look.

These are the people who have held us.  These are the people who make us more than we might otherwise be.

Just as you make me more than I otherwise am.

We are better together than apart.  We are better here than anywhere else.  I was contented on that evening last summer when you said yes, and put on that carrot bracelet.  Not happy, exactly.  Not excited.  But fulfilled, completed, at home.

And today is the same.  Happy, certainly, and a little excited. 

But also fulfilled.

And completed.

And at home.

With my full love,
Herb

So what does that mean for 2012?  It means that no matter how many demands I receive from work or from professional colleagues, I will remember that she, and we, deserve consideration as well.  It means that I need to do my writing, to and help her do hers.  It means remembering every day what "home" is, and ensuring that I help to make it.  It means focusing on what we have and what we can do rather than what we don't and can't.  It means fitting our jobs to our passions rather than the inevitable diminshment of working in the other direction.  It means being creative about the kinds of work that might lead to the values we hold.  It means remembering that everything we choose to do means that we are not doing other things, and that we should weigh the balance consciously rather than default to habit.

It's too easy to fall into labels and categories.  I'm "a college administrator," or "a teacher," or whatever it is.  But really, underneath those job titles, I'm trying to accomplish some things in the world, and I might have those effects more fully or more broadly through some other medium.  2012 needs to be a year in which we keep those values and goals more visible than the roles we use to achieve them.

And I resolve to hold all of you close in this coming year as well.  As the cliche goes, you never wish on your deathbed that you'd answered just a few more e-mails or read one more issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education... no, you wish you'd spent more time with your friends and your family, more time making the world better for yourself and others.  That's the work of 2012.

Nora closed her resolutions by wishing you all a "bounteous" 2012.  And I concur, but I'd also add the wish that we all think this year about the "bounty" we most desire.

Resolutions - of course...

It's the day before the night before. Tomorrow is New Year's eve and the next day, somehow the clocks are presumed to start over because of some arbitrary calendar thing. If I were Herb, I would probably look up the origins of calendaring, but I am not Herb. But I am not immune from the desire to start over at many of the things that are part of the daily patterning. And I am as unlikely to succeed in those resolutions as most, though I am determined to try. Of course I expect to lose weight and become more fit. Of course I vow to balance my life better and spend more time doing the things that nourish, instead of focusing on the toxic tasks and those that are do-able and can be checked off the list rather than the ones that are more consuming. But as I sit beside the wood stove, I am thinking of all this year has brought - a marriage at the top of that list. It is not something I would have predicted a year earlier. And I wonder, like most of us, where I will be on the day before the night before 2013. And this year, the stakes seem different. 

I know this much.

We are blessed in our broad circle of friends and I am only sorry that I haven't spent more time with each of those we love. I am sad at how much of the casual dropping-in friendships that were part of our earlier lives have disappeared under  the mounds of to-do's. I resolve to be better at that, and at keping in touch.

Because of our commuting lifestyles, I have been unable to make the contributions I wanted, to the communities in which we live. I have allowed passive acts like reading the news on-line, to substitute for action. I resolve to try to act in some small way each week, to make the change I want to see. Because of the logistics of life in early 2012, most likely, that will mean writing, rather than running for office or funding campaigns for change. While Vermont is blessed with terrific state officials, I agree with Paul Krugman that "too often political journalists mistake the theater of policy for reality (or don’t care about the difference)" and therefore the politicians spend their time grandstanding to those who are most likely to get them a media moment or who will support them financially. Certainly there is too much distance between a constituent's pleas and the passage of policy. But I have been speaking to "the converted" and I need to act on what I have been saying, and act where it might, maybe, just possibly, make a difference in the way one person votes or acts, or in one place.

I resolve to work on work. I have spent less time than I should, on the things that can make a difference in the lives H and I lead. We are apart too often, and I am responsible for not thinking hard enough about how to build the change we want to see in our personal lives. It is easier to do what is familiar than to imagine something new. A colleague sent a Christmas card quoting Nelson Mandela: "It always seems impossible until it's done." I commit to that - to making the work we want rather than fitting the niches that others provide for us. That entails believing that I can make what I want, and right now, that may be the hardest task I set for myself, but  I commit to tilling that ground, though right now, that looks about as unclear as where we will be on Dec. 30, 2012.

There are other resolutions... to front-burner the book I have been working on for decades now, to get out of the desk chair for something other than eating and sleeping, to listen more carefully and not multi-task while I should be paying attention. But most of all, I resolve to push the demons aside, for part of each day, and be grateful for what entered my life with great joy in 2011. And that includes you ...and my dear H.

A bounteous 2012 and peace to all, and much much love....

Six Months and One Day

And the six months were pretty good, but the one day has caused us to rethink the whole thing.

We both got a terrible night's sleep last night, for far too many reasons.  We got up around 8:30 and packed and said goodbyes, and loaded the luggage cart.  But the big suitcase was too big to fit through the elevator doors, so we had to take everything off the cart and do it over.  The same was true again at the bottom, where the suitcase was too wide to fit on the cart through the door to the street.

But we got everything into the car, got the cart back into the lobby.  I went around the corner to Oren's for a coffee and a tea... closed.  So we drove over to Greenwich to RouRou, another nice little coffee shop.  The young proprietor was rolling out his awnings as we arrived, and he welcomed me in.  "Nothing like the smell of fresh croissants in the morning," he crowed.  I got an iced coffee for Nora...but he had no ice.  Oh, well, it had been refrigerated, so good enough.  I ordered an iced tea for me... but he doesn't do iced tea, so I had hot tea instead.

We got underway, not very much traffic.  The cats were whining.  We've discovered this stuff called Comfort Zone which is an attempt to replicate happy-cat pheromones–it really does seem to calm them down when you spray it around on the seats and floor.  But the can was back at home in my car.  So we stopped at a PetSmart, where I stayed in the car and Nora went in.  She returned many minutes later with Comfort Zone, a scratching post and a scratch board made with emery crystals so that it supposedly does a better job keeping their claws trimmed back.  But she realized that she hadn't gotten any paw-safe snowmelt, so she went back in while I sprayed a little happy mist around the car.  Two spritzes on Nora's seat, two on the center console, two on the floor of the back seat.  And then I wanted to shoot the little rug that's behind my seat, so I put the can into my left hand to reach around... and hosed myself directly in the right eye with a full stream of it.  90% ethanol right in the eyeball.

Ow.

Read the label.  "Eye Irritant," it says. Duh.

So my melted eyeball was dripping down the front of my jacket, but the stuff really does keep you pretty calm.  So I got out of the car and let the alcohol evaporate, and after about a minute, I could open my eye again, upon which I discovered that I still had vision and depth perception and really good tear-duct productivity.

Nora returned again, by which point I could pretty much see again.  So we drove off, bought gas, and proceeded on to the Woodbury Commons outlet center near Central Valley NY.  I need some new shirts for work, and Mom has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Philips Van Heusen, which gives her a card good for 40% of on any purchase of Van Heusen, Bass, Izod or other PVH brands from one of their stores.  We had that card today.

Can you even begin to imagine how busy it is at one of America's largest outlet malls on December 26th?  No.  Trust me, no, you cannot even begin to imagine how busy it is at one of America's largest outlet malls on December 26th.  We got there at about 11:45 am, and even the extended, overflow, distant, cowpasture parking lots were full.  (Honest, we saw one family who'd parked across the eight-lane access road at the nearby high school and walked across all that traffic rather than try to fight their way through Woodbury Commons parking.)  So we parked way out by the tour buses and snow plows, and walked into utter consumer hell.  There were rope-lines outside some of the stores, forty or fifty people waiting just to get IN to the Fendi store, for instance.  We found a map kiosk, located the Van Heusen store, and walked over.  Elbow to shoulder in there.  Long lines for the dressing rooms, lines for the registers.

I had an interesting conversation with the store manager while waiting to try on a shirt; he said that the rope lines we'd seen outdoors were more due to preventing shoplifting than managing crowds.  If the really high end stores let in only ten or fifteen people at a time, the staff can watch them all.

Nine shirts and a nice jacket later, we were done, and the price was admittedly crazy low, like about 80% lower than retail price. And the Comfort Zone left on my face probably kept me calmer than I otherwise would have been.

Walking back out at 1:30, the parking was even MORE full than it had been.  We walked past one little altercation, where one group of young people in a Scion and another group of young people in some anonymous ZipCar were both inserted at opposing angles about 30% of the way into a single parking space.  The two groups were standing around arguing about whose spot it was and who was wrong and all that, and the security guard on her Segway scooter said, "If there's an argument about a parking spot, neither car gets it.  That's the rule."  What a great sort of Dad-wisdom that is.  "If the twoaya's don't shut up, neither one'a ya's is gonna get any!" 

Nora hadn't had enough outlet therapy yet, so we went to another nearby shopping center and the Eileen Fisher Factory Store, where she got a nice mid-length coat.  And then we got back in the car and drove, and drove, and drove.  The cats were champs: eight hours, no food, no peeing, no puking, and after I melted my face off with the Comfort Zone, they were pretty placid about it all.

Finally, at 6:30, we were in the house.  Cats fed and watered, all luggage inside, and we were eating a mediocre takeout pizza that had the HUGE advantage of having required no time or labor to produce, so it tasted heavenly.  But we've used up just about all of our emotional reserves.  Fortunately, tomorrow, I'll be driving away for another two hours in each direction to go use my new pool cue for the very first time.  (If you want to see it, go to this link above, click on "cue collections," then "standard collection," then find the Grand Slam in natural finish.  Absolutely stunning, and the photos really reveal little about just how beautiful this thing is.)

I should probably shoot a little Comfort Zone around my car before I leave, just as a back-up...

2.5 Down, One to Go

Well, we promised three Christmases, but had a surprise visit this afternoon from our friends Sjoerd and Michael from next door.  We discussed politics, talked about having Frisian horse butts outside your kitchen window, and had a glass of prosecco in the middle of the afternoon.

Last night, we had a lovely dinner with Grazyna and Howard, consisting of:

• Prosecco (seems to be a theme...)
• Cocoa truffles
• Grilled salmon
• Cabbage and mushroom perogies
• Borscht with dumplings
• Steamed asparagus
• Steamed fresh potatoes
• Couscous with cranberries and pecans
• Chardonnay
• Brussels sprouts
• Apple strudel
• Kutia - Polish / Ukranian/ Slavic charoset
• Kenyan coffee liqueur
• Israeli honey liqueur
• Tea

I don't know if all of that was authentically Polish, but it was authentically pretty terrific.  And then we stayed up until just past midnight solving the world's problems; although, since we didn't fully agree on everything, we have some work left to do.

Back home, crashing into bed.  Then up this morning at about 9:00 to finish wrapping the last of packages, and then Christmas morning with Mom.  A fun fabulous time; as Mom said, every gift was clearly intended to be exactly for whom it was for.  There were no generic "oh, gee, that's really nice..." moments.  (It's unseemly to talk about one's Christmas loot, but Nora and Mom conspired to have a brand new Theirry Layani pool cue delivered from Montreal...  My gosh, it's gorgeous!)

We made scrambled eggs and bagels and cheese for lunch, then cleaned up enough (both the apartment and Nora & I...) to be presentable for Sjoerd and Michael's arrival.  Now we're cleaning up once again, and will leave for Ellis and Joanna's in about half an hour.

A lovely weekend thus far, with more to come.  We hope that yours has been terrific as well.

Three Christmases

We're about 20 minutes from loading the cats into the car as the final step before leaving for NYC.  Tonight, we'll have dinner and Christmas with Grazyna and Howard -- Grazyna still holds to many of her Polish holiday traditions, so that's always a lot of fun.   (Clear borscht is really good, too!)  Then in the morning, we'll have breakfast and Christmas with Mom.  And then in the evening, we'll have dinner and Christmas with Mom and Ellis and Joanna.

We hope that all of you have wonderful Christmases as well, regardless of how many you indulge in.

Herb & Nora

Cookies and Movies and Adventure

Yesterday was a very fine day.

Once we got up, I prepped the kitchen, laying out all of the flours and spices and sugars and bowls and spoons to make cookies.  We put together two different kinds of sugar cookie dough to chill in the fridge, along with a double batch of rugelach dough.  Then we made brownies, blondies, and oatmeal cookies.  (The blondies didn't set well, but I figured that letting them cool overnight would turn them into blondie brittle.  Turns out they just became very dense, and very good, blondies.)

Highly Recommended

Then we cleaned ourselves and the kitchen, and drove into Glens Falls NY to our favorite haunt, Aimie's Dinner and a Movie.  The drive through the countryside was great, as was the conversation.  We'd planned on stopping at a grocery store to restock a couple of things, but we didn't really need them right away, so we went to Aimie's sister business, Wallaby's Jazz Bar.  We sat.  After brief conversation, the bartender took up our challenges. Nora wanted a martini, something like a Cosmo but not too sweet.  I wanted a beer, bitter.  "Say no more.  I've got just the thing."  And soon, Nora had a martini made with grapefruit and lemon vodkas, and I had a pint of Old Man Winter, by Southern Tier Brewing of Lakewood NY.

Speaks with Doorknobs asked the bartender about the barback, a stunning display of woodworking with a bust of a horse looking over the bar from the top center.  Well, there are some folks who, once you crack the tap, can't stop.  There were scarcely any other patrons, so with a little urging, we learned about the history of the bar, the politics of working with bar owners, the residential and commercial real estate conditions of Glens Falls and Saratoga... and then we learned that our bartender was back in school to train in radiology.  We got a MARVELOUSLY graphic depiction of a hip replacement surgery, complete with stainless steel mallets and pulling the old hip out of the socket with the puller having one foot braced against the operating table for leverage, blood and bone chips flying around the room.  He said at one point, "I have a moderately weak stomach, and this was my first full surgery.  I thought I'd have not look until after the incision was done, so that I wouldn't pass out. I was sure I was going to become a secondary patient.  But I finally told myself, 'Just get outside yourself and go do this.'  And I was okay."  The orthopedic surgeon was someone our bartender had played high school football against 21 years earlier.

Then we went in to the theater, got a very nice seat back-row center (back row at Aimie's being the equivalent of about the eighth row in a normal theater), and had a remarkably low-quality dinner.  We keep TRYING to have a good meal at Aimie's, but they can't pull it off.  The concept is so wonderful that we want to support it, but their kitchen staff or procedures are just not up to the task.  (Same ownership as the bar, which is nearly empty four nights a week and only has real business on Friday and Saturday nights once the bands start up.)

But the movie itself, Hugo, was remarkable.  It wasn't a very credible story, and the acting ranged from bland to awful.  Ben Kingsley would not have gotten his Oscar for this, and Sacha Baron Cohen was channeling John Cleese from the Fawlty Towers era.

What was remarkable was the way in which 1920s Paris had become a larger-scale analogue for the clockworks that Hugo tended.  This was a movie with ten million moving parts, all of which were visible so that you could see the gears turn and the cam-wheel pivot and the pawl catching on the ratchet.  It was a movie about the craft of movies, made by a director, Martin Scorcese, who clearly loves the craft of movies.

In every movie, there are a few lines that I take away as ideas worth testing.  From Hugo, the passage was when Hugo was breaking into a theater with his compatriot Isabelle.  Since young Hugo was a mechanical wizard, it was a simple matter for him to pick the lock on a side door.  Isabelle said, "We could get in trouble!"  And Hugo looked at her and said, "I know.  That's how you know it's an adventure!"

Nora and I have talked a lot about risk and certainty.  Hugo may have some wisdom for us both.

Good news and bad news from the Twilight Zone

Cancer care is another planet. No news there. We have been wandering without a guidebook - neither Fodor's nor the Lonely Planet. And we have been stuck in a bad hotel in a decent neighborhood with Anthony Perkins for a hotellier (click on the link!) - OK so I exaggerate a bit. A bit.

Mom was diagnosed with non-small-cell carcinoma sometime in early August. She found her oncologist through a beloved primary care physician who recommended someone on his hospital's staff. We made an appointment and went through the testing associated with pinning down the what's and where's. That included X-rays, blood work and PET and CT scans in a lead-lined room below the street, with the sounds of banging from the other rooms. Creepy. A little like listening to the torture of other prisoners, though I liked our "jailers".

Then began the readings of the readings of the tests. I began to understand slowly, that cancer is not linear. We heard that she had stage 4 cancer from her primary care doc. Not good news. But that it was confined to the lung and the pleural cavity. Good news that it wasn't in other places like the kidneys or liver or brain. We heard that lung cancer likes bone. It wasn't in the bone. Cause for near celebration.

She began to have difficulty breathing. She met a pulmonologist who we liked. A lot. He stuck some kind of drain in her side to withdraw the fluid in the space between the lung and the chest wall, so the lung could fully expand. I guess that is what qualifies as bad news and good news. Three times. A liter and a half of fluid each time. Over the course of less than three weeks.  Bad news. She had a "pleurodesis" in which they spray some kind of talc in the cavity and the body is so annoyed that it forms a scar which closes the cavity so the fluid can't accumulate. I never quite got it straight where the fluid goes. Her beloved doc said something like "if you remove the tear ducts, you won't cry even though there is something still stuck in your eye." Good news. Really! Well, sort of. The oncologist was supposed to release her with medication in hand. He never showed up despite calls from the hospital staff, a friend-doctor employed at the same hospital, the residents, the social worker, and yes, her pulmonologist. The oncologist never showed up. Hours after we were supposed to be able to leave. Later he said he had come in 15 minutes after we gave up and went home.

So you may have noticed that there isn't much in this account about the oncologist. Yup. Mom met with him alright. With my brother. With friends in tow. He prescribed a new age cancer drug that costs something on the order of $3000 plus a month. If you can get it. If you can get insurance coverage. Did you know that the supplies of cancer drugs are in short supply? (you can click on this link as well) They are. Bad news.  He gave her the first month's supply.  Good news. We tried to reach him about the second month's supply and got it with one day's supply left on month 1. Did I say that that required multiple phone calls? It did. Not once did I get through to the secretary when I called, though I did leave messages with the answering service, who left messages  for the secretary...We got the  Fed Exed meds from Florida with rubber gloves to take it with. And with a bill for "only" $2000 which dropped to $240 the next month, when she went on the "catastrophic" level of insurance coverage. Forget about the osteoporosis pill that cost over $100 for one month - that's right, one pill. Ah well, that's not about the cancer, and she got the meds she needed. Let's have a party. And then we tried to reach the oncologist about the prognosis. How many calls? How many emails? He didn't answer any of them, but at the next appointment, he told us "one of my patients has lived for TWO years on this drug and is still alive." Good news. "And probably 100% of men over the age of 80 have prostate cancer. And that's not what kills them." SO since she is 92, and 92 is even older than 80-something, she could well live forever with lung cancer. Goodie. There were phone calls about alternative drugs that had just been approved. Emails about prognosis and test results and appointments and ...yes... fear... and itching.... and diarrhea.... Not one call or email was ever returned. Not one.....

SCENE TWO.....
Mom went for a second opinion today. Here's the shameless plug for Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.  We had to get "20 unstained slides" and "1 diagnostic slide" and a CD of her PET and CT scans. OK, that was a PIA. We essentially had to apply to get into see the doc and we were rejected by one who couldn't see her soon enough. We were accepted by another colleague. Oh Happy Day.

Mom went for a second opinion today. The cabbie actually got out to help her into the cab. What are the odds?

Mom went for a second opinion today. The doc spent close to an hour with us. His staff was clear and respectful. He was clear and respectful. There is good news and bad news. But when I called to say that the pharmacy was saying that they couldn't fill the prescription as written, his staff answered the phone on the second ring, asked what pharmacy we were going to use, and said, "don't worry, we'll take care of it." And they resolved it and called back in 20 minutes.

Anthony Perkins was last seen in the rear view mirror.

All in a Day's Work

It's a late night, and I arrived just over an hour ago, in NYC. It is 30 degrees in New York and 80 degrees in Mom's apartment. So much for sustainability. I teach a class in sustainable design and use more than a tank of gas to drive to and from VT, and the landlord of the building pumps out heat with no monitors on the radiator unless someone opts to turn off the valve. He uses the worst quality, most ozone-damaging fuel oil and clearly is unconcerned about his role in planetary health. So the radiator is pumping and the window is open.

Yesterday, H and I went Christmas shopping in Manchester and Bennington. We went to the outlets and I got new orthotics from a podiatrist who owns the local hiking store. He explained metatarsal arches and looked at my feet analyzing bumps I never noticed and the curve of my instep, and my gait...and I only went in to buy some gifts. I left with gifts in hand,, and a new stride which he says will cause me pain before it gets better. He encouraged me to work into the insoles and  come back in two to three weeks and he will analyze my feet again. He didn't charge me for the metatarsal support or the podiatric consult. Yet another example of the Vermont ethic... giving people more than they knew they wanted. (Oh yes, and both employees asked me how I felt and cautioned me not to overdo it, after a test drive across the street to the Northshire Bookstore. One had consulted on my gift purchase earlier, and the other was a mere bystander.)

We stopped in a craft store that we like in Manchester, chatted with two of the artists and then drove on to Bennington, to a craft store that H likes, on our way to one that I like, but as in earlier posts, everything was locked up tight at 6 p.m. on a Saturday, 2 weeks before Christmas. It is enough to make you believe that a lot of Cinderellas with pumpkin coaches live in Vermont. We had planned to have dinner at the well known Blue Benn Diner which has a remarkable menu - most of it posted on 8 x 11 sheets of paper all over the inside walls-quesadillas to cream of mushroom soup, and cider doughnuts to brisket, but alas they were also closed. We wound up at a Brew pup on the main street where we snagged two bar stools rather than wait 20 minutes for a table. There were two Christmas parties in the rooms upstairs with a band playing sing-along favorites that are part of bar culture. We watched while the bartender mixed 8 or more pints of various beers, Long Island Iced Tea, White Russians and a broad range of other mixed drinks and arranged them on  trays for the waiters and waitresses to carry upstairs. A lime meant the drink was alcoholic, an orange wedge signified something that was alcohol-free, and each glass was identified as the tray was picked up. We watched tray after tray disappear up the stairs on the arms of Mel the owner's son who "incorporated" in 1994 fulfilling his post-college dream, and Deb, who has been working for more than 20 years. "Dad" filled his glass three times in an hour, but the main event was Desiree the bartender who was a whirl, mixing drinks, filling glasses, restocking her garnishes and bottles, replenishing glassware, busing tables, taking payment, and keeping up the banter with her customers at the bar. Each trip was useful for some task, and there was absolutely no down time, though in the two hours that we were there, we did see her take a sip from her own water bottle once.

There's probably a joke somewhere in "two ethnographers walk into a bar," but H and I watched dumbstruck at her finesse. We got her talking about her husband who works as a cook at the hospital and her 18  month old son. We got her talking about the time she was laid off from another job at the same time that her husband was laid off, and the EIGHT jobs they took to make ends meet. And we got her talking about her marriage and her child and the difficulties of being a new parent. And we watched someone who loved the work she is doing. "No stress" she said, as she filled yet another tray. "She's awesome" the waitress and waiter said, admiring yet another one-leg-two-armed-kick-stretch-and-reach across the kid who was replacing glasses as fast as she could fill them. "I never get my drink orders filled as fast as when she's here," Mel said.

What does any of this matter on a hot-cold late New York night after another long drive? I am thinking about what it is to do the work you love. I am thinking about what it is to have the chance to be good at what you do because it is what you do all day.  I am thinking about what it is to try to do that work when you have a husband and a child who need your attention. The writer Arlie Hochschild wrote an article called "No Place Like Work" in which she described people who find work less stressful than their lives at home; described people who would rather stay at work than come home to demands that aren't so clearly defined. And I am thinking about the many people we know who never get the chance to do the jobs that reward them for the work they can do.

Oh yes, and one more thing... I am thinking about people who do what they do because it makes the people around them feel good, and it makes the people around them, able to do what they do better...OK so that's an awkward phrase, but Desiree not only was happy doing her job, but she made us happy, and she made the waiters and waitresses better at their jobs, and they made their customers happy. Not bad for a day's work.

A Dog on Thin Ice

Nora has come to the decision that my totem dog is a border collie.  That's a complimentary image, and she's described my professional life in terms that make the border collie seem like a reasonable choice.

But I'm expected to do the same now and choose a dog to represent her, and I suddenly feel as though my happiness for the next few days is on the line.  You know the old joke about the wife who asks the husband, "Does this haircut make me look too much like my mother?"  There's no good answer to something like that, right?  And that's just a yes/no question.  I now have a question ("What kind of a dog am I?") for which Wikipedia says that there are 492 possible answers, ranging from Affenpinscher to Yorkshire Terrier.  How does a guy get THAT one right?

And because she's had many dogs over the years, walking them through New York City where there are more dog breeds than people's nationalities, she's come to know something about all 492 of them.  So if I were to try to be safe and say "I think you remind me of a Cão Fila de São Miguel," she'd be, like, "Oh, that's just terrible!  How could you say such a thing?!?" And then I'd get twenty minutes of discourse on the traits of the Cao Fila and why it's nothing like her and why she was surprised and disappointed at my judgment and...

There's probably like eighteen of these dogs on the whole planet, and she'll have met five of them.

Me, on the other hand, I grew up in the working-class suburbs.  We didn't have dog parks.  We didn't even have dogs, come to think of it.  Another mouth to feed...  I remember that Chuck, two doors down, had some kind of a spaniel whose fur was always matted.  That's about it.  I think my family had the only dogs around.

My first dog, which we got when I was about eight or nine, was Dolly, a black-and-tan smooth-haired Dachshund who we got as an adult dog from somebody.  When Dolly died when I was about twelve or so, we went out and got a puppy around my birthday, a black-and-tan wire-haired Dachshund who I named Schultz, after Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes.

Sweet dogs, both, but I think if I were to tell Nora that she reminded me of a wire-haired Dachshund, there'd be hell to pay.

The other thing (and this is a terrible thing to say about the love of one's life, but the truth cannot be denied) is that Nora is a dog stereotyper.  Someone will mention a dog breed, and she'll say "Oh, those dogs are all crazy.  You can't train them."  She wouldn't say such a thing about Italians or bowlers or people from Poultney – well, she might say something like that about people from Poultney – but with dogs, she's more than willing to attribute standard characteristics to the many from the knowledge of the few.

So here we are.  I know next to nothing about dogs except for two Dachshunds and a chocolate Labrador Retriever.  I like dogs, in general, but I don't take it much farther than that.  And I have to develop an analogue dog for Nora, who knows every breed in existence and has firm opinions about each of them.

Nothing good can come from this.

The sonnet writers didn't often go for dogs as their source of comparison.

My love is like a red, red setter...

ehhh...

Let me not to the marriage of two breeds 
Admit impediments, love is not love 
Which neuters when its owner needs,
Or withholds treats, or from bed shoves.

It's the simplest, most harmless questions that hold the greatest peril.

A dog's life....

SO I don't quite remember what started it, but I know it had something to do with my last post when I said I wanted to find a Great Dane under the metaphorical tree for Christmas.  H and I started talking about what kind of dogs we were and he said I was a Jack Russell Terrier. 

 
OK so I don't get that one at all, though he says I am always doing something, and that's probably true, though too often it involves the keyboard of the computer. Anyway, it is far more flattering than what I thought he might say about Bassett Hounds and Clumber Spaniels. 

Or the other pet we have talked about acquiring when we can fnd a place with a year round pool

But then I started thinking about what he was. He called himself a Corgi cause of the short legs... Not.

And then we got off the phone and I nailed it. He's a Border Collie! They are the smartest of all dogs and they spend their days herding sheep into tight little packets by lying in a crouch and staring at them until they figure they are better off in a clump than on their own. And then if they didn't get the message, the sheepdog nips at the hocks until they move where they are supposed to. 

And sometimes the dog has to separate one from the others by running at them til they decide that they the dog's ideas are really smart, and they go hover in a corner of the pasture.

So what does H have to do with sheep? Well some of you know some of his colleagues... I am not naming any names, ok? But some of them are sort of in need of being corralled into one place, with one idea. Some of them have been known to go off on their own, thinking they can find a different path, and he has to spend his days, convincing them that the consensual path is the best for all concerned.

So I was really happy with that analysis until H said he'd gotten a message from one of the people at the professional organization he works with. Not everyone is falling so easily into line on a conference he is going to be running. And sometimes a sheepdog's work can be a bit more than he expected...

Pandering

OK so H is the numbers guy in our relationship, and I am responsible for the garden. That isn't to say that he has never dug a shovel-full of ... fertilizer... or that I can't count, but there are areas in which we leave the other one to be responsible for making decisions. His is the kingdom of numbers hands-down. But I can't help looking at the stats on our blog.

It is always interesting to see where people come from and as you can see in the right hand column, we have had some really interesting visitors - well, their countries are pretty interesting even if we don't know that they / you are interesting. But there is something humbling in the other field that is available to us, which is to see what the search terms are.  For this month, 2 people have come to the site by looking for Maine coon cats, 2 people have been looking for mokume gane rings like our wedding rings, 4 people have searched on 53 (Herbie the love bug's number in the movie by that name), and fully 70 people have found us by searching for some variety of big dog, great dane, mastiff or other dog-related combo. Now it isn't that I am jealous exactly, though all the comments seem to come in response to Herb's posts (ok, so I AM jealous), or that I feel that my gardening is taking a back seat to his posts on Herbie the love bug (ok so as I already said...!) , or that I think there is something interesting in the chronicle of married life (at least Kathleen and Susan and my mother agree), but to have a full 89% of our visitors come to us  by looking for dogs?  And there have been 244 page views on that post alone, when all we get on the others are between 2 and 10. Harrumph! Even the cats are a little miffed. SO this post is in an effort to get some real attention... Here goes:

Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, Rebecca Black
Herman Cain sexual harrasment
Apocalypse, the end of the world as a movie, video game, rapture or other likely search term
Scientology
Sex
The Meaning of Life
Tea Party
Occupy
Maserati, Koenigsegg, Ferrari, McLaren 
Khalil Gibran

Ok... there... I am done pandering to the masses. I'll post something else in a day or two...once I start breathing a little more slowly.

Then again, I take it back. I am not sure I want to be that public! Strike that!

Welcome to those of you who have found us... We are glad you are here... Now I just need to get a Great Dane for Christmas....Maybe I will go back to sleep and see what I dream of THIS time.

One Book at a Time, Please

I know many friends who have four or five books open at a time.  The book on the nightstand, the book in the office, the book on the coffee table, the audiobook in the car.  They dip into and out of these worlds, able to pick up comfortably where they left off, never confusing the characters. The Victorian detective doesn't wander onto the bridge of the starship, the beautiful Cambodian farm daughter doesn't fall in love with the Russian mathematician.  (Though any one of those would make an interesting story...)

Nora does that.  She has a couple of books or more going at once, each of them always dense with quilted, patterned language; she reads the way Annie Hall dresses.  I cannot.  I spent the weekend reading Chad Harbach's 500-page novel The Art of Fielding in two enormous gulps, 200 pages the first day and 300 more the second.  I did that last summer, too, reading Joe Coomer's A Pocketful of Names in a single run from nine in the morning until dinner.

So, given that habit, explain this.  In the course of the last two days, I've started writing a second book.  This new second book fits inside the first one, acts as a sort of reference volume to be used by the characters in the main book.  For the readers in the real world, I'm hoping that this second, internal book acts as an emotional guide to the larger husk surrounding it, is the secret encryption device that allows you to see through the code in the ways that the characters themselves cannot fully know.

It's an odd sort of confidence that rarely comes, when you can't begin to imagine where a project will go next, where you give up control and yet feel fully sure that the end will be joyful.  My life with Nora has been like that.  We rarely know what the next couple of days will bring, and yet I know that joy is assured.

"No way tired"

Why is it that I always seem to post from the center of silence? There is some music in the background - of course it is music H has chosen. He is sitting on the couch and I am on one of the twinned black chairs in the living room. I am grateful for this time together. We have had far too little of what I imagine constitutes a "normal" marriage.

I came back to MA after returning mom to NYC after the Thanksgiving festivities. I had plans to see a friend or two here, and head to a conference on Sustainable and Smart Growth held by a Cambridge think tank, Lincoln Institute. I managed to sneak some Christmas shopping in, and a trip to a few exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts- the Degas nudes, the jewelry room, and an oddly fascinating exhibit of wood sculpture by New York artist Ellsworth Kelly. I walked far too much, and was in considerable pain at the end of the day, but H and I met for dinner at the museum - something we do far too infrequently, and we wandered through the musical instruments exhibit after that. All in all, a nice day.

The conference was held  behind  substantial security at the Federal Reserve Bank Building in Boston, in rooms with glass panels and windows that faced in. There were internal courtyards and gardens with sculpted trees and shrubs, and clerestories facing the sky. Across the street, in the real cold of a winter day, was the encampment of  Occupy protesters in tents arrayed along the street facing the one doorway I could find in the mamoth structure, except that is, for the one where the Brinks truck was parked at a loading bay.

Inside, there were sessions that ranged from the self-congratulatory to the inspiring. Tim Beatley reported on European cities that are racing to be the first declared as officially carbon neutral, by providing high-speed rail and walkable streets and communities built at what architects like to call "human scale." Others reported on partnerships across state lines  building "place-based" solutions to the problems of urban sprawl. Communities in northern Maine and in New Hampshire and cities from New York to Seattle were models of what could be done to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel and improve the quality of life in communities across the globe.

In the meantime, the Tea Partyers have defunded  Obama's Sustainable Communities initiative which triangulated Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) in a too rare linkage of common concerns. Paul McMorrow's article in the Boston Globe is a powerful indictment yet again of politics that gets in the way of rational discourse and self-preservation.

I returned to the apartment and promptly got sick, crawled into bed with a cold and sniffles that had me asleep for the next 12 hours. I suppose it was the virus that is around. It could have been a result of spending a day in a space that did nothing but look in, while everything healthy happened outside.

One thing sticks with me.

The plenary speaker was Ron Sims, the ex-county executive of Kings County, Washington and an ex- Deputy Secretary of HUD. He rambled for an hour with neither a lectern nor a note, and like many schooled in a Baptist tradition, he blended exhortatory rhetoric with personal anecdotes. He talked about growing up in a poor neighborhood where Quincy Jones and his brother grew up. He talked about their successes. He talked about his  "perfect" granddaughter, and he talked about watching as the son whose umbilical cord he had cut, cut the cord of his perfect  granddaughter. He talked about his twin brother whose "work was done." And he talked about two women who were part of the church community where he grew up, and their pies.  And he talked about their singing of a Baptist hymn."I don't feel no ways tired," he said, declining to sing. "I've come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy." 

"Your work is not done," he said.

There was lukewarm applause after all the other sessions. There was  a standing ovation after he spoke. I went up to thank him, and he gave me what the Regional Administrator of HUD described as a trademark bear hug.

We have a lot to be grateful for in this country. He talked about his wife's observation that in her native Philipines, development would come right to the lakeside, but in his beloved Washington landscape, the lakeshore was still natural habitat. Here in urban Massachusetts, there is a sinuous park along the Mystic River a half block from where I write this. As I lumbered along to the Whole Foods for chicken soup this morning, there were couples walking dogs and carrying frisbees, children in and out of strollers on their way to play, and joggers running along the ersatz path that follows the river's course--a most "walkable landscape".  I wish the train ran between Massachusetts and Vermont without a needed detour in New York. I wish that there were more places that had some understanding of the need for people to encounter strangers on common ground and that there were more places that understood that there were appropriate human scale proportions between architectural height and the width of the street. But if the Tea Party has its way, the benefits that accrue to all of us in having communities that concentrate on smart growth and sustainability will be felt in other countries, and we will be left with empty shopping malls in suburban communities, the  foreclosures of  houses and their neighborhoods, and tent cities on public land in places from Washington State to Boston.

There are some days when I am in many ways tired, but I am not yet ready to give up.