Why I haven't been posting and a photograph of my late father

One of the things I do is take pictures. I take a lot of them, and sometimes I show them to other people, but mostly I don't. This isn't because they aren't good - many of them are very good, and it isn't because I'm modest, because I'm not - anyone who knows me will agree with this. Mostly it's because I'm too lazy to organize them into a slide show. If I'm going to show off any of them, it's because they sort of fell into a natural order because they were all shot at one event - for instance these at the Flea Theater's web site or because it's just one or two photos of some person or thing that works so well for me, or has so particular and strong a meaning for me, that I find myself compelled to show it off. That is what this is about.

It's been nearly two years since I last posted anything to this blog. Alone, this wouldn't rate an explanation. Plenty of people start to blog, expect to do it regularly, and find themselves rather soon not blogging at all. I am one of those who prefers not to have a public confessional, and if I'm going to put some piece of writing on the web, there ought to be a reason for it: a rant about something I find particularly annoying; something that moved me to words; an event that really got me thinking about the world in a way I could write about. That said, it was about a week after my last post that my father passed away at age 89 after a brief illness. I don't think it's coincidental that I didn't write anything here since then because I've written a great deal in other places. It's just what happened.

So to relaunch myself, here's a photo of my dad I took just a few weeks before he passed away. My brother is the only other person with a copy. He said it he liked it, but he wouldn't show it because it made him feel sad. It makes me feel sad, too, but it allows me to see that 89 years of a real life leaves marks. In this photo he seems calm and thoughtful.

A day after I took this photo, my father was in the emergency room of a hospital in West Palm Beach, FL. I spent hours sitting by his bedside. He was semi- conscious, the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong and I couldn't do anything. One of them told me that a lot was wrong and that there wasn't anything I could do. He sent me back to my hotel room with a promise that I'd be called if anything changed. It was after midnight.

Later that morning I went back to the hospital. Dad had been admitted but was waiting for a bed in intensive care. He was conscious and bitching that he was hungry and nobody had fed him. I was happier than I'd been in 24 hours. I called the nurse and she got a meal to him stat. I fed him and a little later he was moved to a bed on the ward. I spent that day with him and the next day my brother, who'd been on a short vacation, got back. What could we do? Keep him comfortable. He wasn't going to be there long, and in fact, he was discharged a couple of days later.

My father wanted to die at home. My brother arranged home hospice for him, and for the next few weeks Dad thought he was getting better. I won't say we knew better, but what my brother and I knew was that his heart was going, that there was a reason he could barely walk from bed to bathroom, and whether it was a week, a month or a year, we were lucky he was comfortable and could still have some small pleasures in life.

When he died, I was sad, but I didn't think it was a tragedy. I spoke with him briefly the night before, he was having trouble staying on the phone for more than a few minutes, unlike our more usual 45 minute discussions. That morning about 4AM he woke up and told the aide he was hungry. She said it was too early to go out, but that she'd give him some fruit and later they would go out to breakfast. He ate a banana and went back to sleep. About 6AM she went in to check on him and found that he had slipped away. Writing this, my eyes are misting, but that's okay, because I miss him. She called my brother and I guess whoever else had to be called in Florida. My brother called me and we each got busy with our sides of the job. Later he called me to tell me he looked peaceful and calm. I knew that even before I was told.

When I think of my dad, I remember a lot of things, and this photo helps me to remember that at the end I was close with him, and that he mattered to me right up until then.

So that's the story.

Ringtone madness

I am perversely proud of being a cell-phone (sell the phone) rejectionist - had one, hated it, didn't renew my contract. Free at last! Free at last! Free at last!

But being personally cell-phone free doesn't eliminate cell-phone's annoyances from my environment. But really, it's not the cell-phones, it is the people who use them. It is my opinion that people are impolite using them because we as a culture/society haven't gotten used to using them, and established what is polite and what is rude when it comes to cell-phone use in public.

Personally, I don't tolerate someone letting a ringing cell-phone interrupt a conversation. If someone stops talking to me to answer the phone, I walk away from the conversation.

But I don't want to go on about cell-phones in society. Instead, I want to mention an idea I had to make cell-phones even more annoying than they already are - really useful self-reflexive ringtones.

Imagine these:

1. Phone off the hook
2. Busy signal
3. "the number you have reached is no longer in service..."

You get the point.

But upon checking I discover that at least one of these is already available for purchase.

Just goes to show.

Sudanese Teddy Bear

I was going to rant about the insanity of a woman arrested, dragged from her home in shackles, because the seven year old students in her class named a teddy bear Muhammad. But I decided not too, because it's too absurd, and now that the judge found her guilty and sentenced her to 15 days in jail, hard-time, I presume, just like Paris Hilton had to serve, it's time to move on to other absurdities.

But still, the thing that got people in Sudan all lathered up about this was the alleged insult to the prophet of Islam. He's dead, isn't he? And how can a dead person be insulted? He has no feelings to be hurt, and no thin skin to be pierced. I could call a teddy bear Teddy Roosevelt, spit on it, poke its eyes out with a stick, dip it in honey and bury it up to its neck in an ant hill, and nobody would threaten me with jail.

If only we could live in a world where the insult is the insulter's problem, and not the insultee's. Where I grew up, kids, when insulted used to chant "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." In Sudan, this just isn't so.

Is Fertile full of fertilizer?

I was going to write this letter to a small-
town* weekly newspaper in northwestern Minnesota, but my wife, who is from the town, wouldn't let me send it because, well, she said "my sister still has to go to church every Sunday, and show her face at the recreational center during the week."

In the end, I directed the letter, in a form much edited and censored, to one of the newspaper's columnists:

I am writing to you because you are the only person from Fertile whose email address I could find, and who has a column in the town's newspaper.

All my wife will let me say is "congratulations to the Larsons on their new venture."

But that isn't what I really want to say. But since, according to my wife, it's a small town, and people's feelings and appearances must not be hurt, I won't say much more.

[at my wife's insistence, this was taken out of the letter I sent:]
I hope the people of Fertile have the sense to take a little bit of constructive criticism with humor, and understand that anything I say is said with affection. I am a native of New York City and I am married to a daughter of Fertile, MN. I have learned during the nearly 10 years I have been involved with this wonderful woman, that there is more difference between people from Fertile and NYC than there is between people from NYC and Tokyo, Japan. Be that as it may, Fertile seemed a nice enough place when I visited, except for the mosquitoes and the weak coffee.

Being married to a native of Fertile, I cannot help but stay in touch with the goings on there. And I have discovered something you need to know.

[this made it in:]
Do you know you got trouble, right there in Fertile city, and it's spelled with a capital T-R-O-U-B-L-E, and it's name is MODESTY. That's right, modesty. Because, if I understand my wife and my sister-in-law right, people that are proud of what they do, and let others know it, are not respected or respectable. There's something wrong with a frown at someone's accomplishment instead of a hearty congratulations and keep up the good work.

[Here's some of the good stuff she made me take out of the letter:]
Now mind you, what I'm about to say has my wife rather annoyed with me, because just as modesty can be a problem, shaking the bush is, too. But as she knows, I am one hell of a bush-shaker. I say let the berries fall where they may.

What brings this up was an article in the Fertile Journal trumpeting the opening of a bed and breakfast, The Willow Creek, right there, in Fertile. Now I saw this and I said to my wife, now isn't that nice, Fertile's got a B&B, and it looks like a nice place, too. The only thing I scratched my head about was why the proud new owners chose to decorate it in 1940s style, a period noted for not being notable in American home decorating for reasons I prefer to not discuss, as that would be a bit of a digression.

Reading on, my wife and I discovered that my wife's aunt, Ida Johnson, lived in that house, and my wife used to play in the attic. This brought back found memories, and we chuckled about it, and how nice it is that the house is going to be taken care of now. And as my wife reminisced, she remembered how her niece was friends Carole Bevolden, now Carole Larson, the new owner, and my wife was Carole's sister's friend, and they were they were always getting in teenage trouble, because that's what teenagers do.

"So," I said, "what's the problem, it's obvious that Carole Bevolden grew up nice, and became a nurse, a worthy profession."

And my wife said "nursing runs in that family, her sister's a nurse."

And I said, "there's nothing wrong with that."

My wife and her niece grew up nice, too.

"But," my wife said, "my sister isn't going to approve because she doesn't like it when people are self-promoting."

And there's the problem. Because it isn't just my sister-in-law that has a problem with self-promoting. According to what I've heard from reliable sources, people in Fertile, in general, have a problem with self-promotion, and, as I said, this is a problem.

When someone does something good, and that thing is a commercial venture, that person has a responsibility to him or herself and anyone else involved in that venture to go out there and blow a horn and bang a drum. There were surely hundreds or thousands of mousetrap inventors who starved waiting for the world to beat a path to their door, but the world never did because nobody ever heard about that mouse trap. And here's somebody opening a bed and breakfast in Fertile, MN, I mean, where is Fertile MN? Nobody I know except for people who know my wife know where it is, and they wouldn't know if I didn't take the trouble to show them on a map , and make sure they know that the tallest building in town's the grain elevator, and that even though Fargo's the nearest city, and Fargo isn't much of a city, the people are nicer and smarter than those people in the Coen brothers movie, and yes, not much happens there, and much of that not much is about the same as it is everywhere else, but the people there like it, and they get to eat Northern and Walleye, and we don't but so what? We have other pleasures.

So Carole Bevolden Larsen, should be this weeks toast of Fertile, for giving Fertile something nicer than a motel as a place to spend a night or the weekend or even longer, when coming into town and not wanting to put the in-laws out for a weeks stay - or perhaps, being the cranky kind of guy I am, preferring to not have to always be polite to my hosts.† I don't want to be condescending and say that the Larsen's have brought a bit of civilization to Fertile, when I was there, Fertile seemed as civil as any place I've ever been - but it isn't a commercial hub, and so let's forget about modesty and instead of disapproval for being proud and saying it out loud, all of the good of Fertile should get out there and let everyone know that something good is happening there.

By the way, when my sister-in-law asks me why I'm not out visiting over the Christmas/New Year Holiday, I always answer with a question: What's the temperature? Usually the answer is something below zero Farenheit, which allows me to say "there's the reason." I'm from a place where the temperature usually stays in two digits, and those two digits are always above zero.

But winter's coming, so I hope you dress warm, and enjoy it.
--
* Hyphen's used in an effort to preserve the horizontality of the text. See my previous post.
† I was going to mention the fact that the guest bed at my sister-in-law's home isn't good for my back, but I was asked to not say that.

Is the hyphen dying?

I am a little behind on the news, so you too may not have heard: The end of the hyphen is at hand. What's next? No more semi-colons? Of course, the colon is safe because academics and pundits need them for the titles of their books.

The decline of the hyphen was reported in September, when the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was published with approximately 16,000 compound nouns either concatenated or separated.

Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, said "People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for."

Ok, what are they for? Emphasis, for one, because if you put a hyphen in a word, it looks more important, right? And it's sort of like a word perineum, a nice place to rest your chin. I think they should be required for oxymorons, sort of like a double-headed arrow with the barbs removed, so that the brain-thickened, hyphen-challenged bloggers get the point.

Stevenson also said "Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

In this day-and-age of spell- and grammar-checkers, all it takes is a few lines of code to create an automatic de-hyphenator. Write your blog entry, have it spell-check your work, and voilá, no more messy, old-fashioned looking hyphens.

Hmmph.

Diurnal or Waiting for Standard Time

I've got a problem with the delayed end of Daylight Savings Time in the US.

I checked my account, and I can't find any daylight accrued. So what am I saving?

Worse: I get up early to work out and now it feels like I'm getting up in the middle of the night. I finish working out and it's still night. I get out of the shower, and finally, there's some gray in the sky. I feel like I'm not getting any sleep.

It's like being jet-lagged without ever going anywhere.