Misadventures on the Day After: Confessions of a Brat

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

9:30 am
    "It's a national day of mourning," Dr. L. tells me, by way of explaining my 15 minutes wait in his exam room.

    "You're asking what brought me in today," I guess.

    He shakes his head, leans in close, says, "we'll get to that," and then repeats what he said about the big news.

    He's an African-American about half my 66 years, and on a rogue impulse I put a hand on his shoulder and say "I'm sorry."  And then almost compound the weirdness by trying to explain myself, by saying something like Trump will be more of a disaster for some Northern Californians than for the white guys.

    He shakes his head again.  "He didn't need a get-out-the-vote campaign," he says, "all his small-town voters were self-motivated."

    Down to business.  What brings me in is sudden hearing loss, on top of the moderate/severe loss that became my new normal a decade ago.  For a couple of weeks now, it's been a struggle to talk to just one person in a quiet room.  Case in point, our conversation now.  I'm a teacher, and worry about keeping my job if my students need to ask questions by writing them down. 

    Dr. L. looks inside, says the problem is only fluid buildup behind the right eardrum.  He wants to schedule a hearing test before draining it, to measure the effect.  I ask him to do it now, so this very afternoon I can hear my students.  He agrees to rearrange his schedule to fit me in.

10:00 am
    Dr. L. stands behind me, numbs my right ear, and inserts a hypodermic needle.  I hear muted slurping sounds, and when they stop, other sounds in the room not noticed before.  Thank you doctor!

10:30 am
    Hillary makes her final campaign appearance while I drive to Rockridge BART. To fill air time before she starts, NPR pundits savor the memories of concession speeches of yore.  Al Gore in 2000, now there was an example of accepting defeat after winning the popular vote!  Kerry 2004, a good one too. The right words now, from the gracious loser, and America would return to its comfort zone; just as if we had not witnessed our complacencies crumbling beneath us all year.

    To me, the most memorable part of Hillary's speech is the very end, where she says her campaign will live on to inspire future generations of girls, who know now that there are no limits to their aspirations.  Embracing a cause larger than herself, or seeing herself as the great cause in which others can find themselves?  Can't decide.  She doesn't grieve for the girls who will suffer if Trump cancels their parents' health insurance; if the thought occurred, during the long night, that her campaign may live on as an example of smug ambition opening the door for disaster, it doesn't leak through to her public persona.

    But the pundits do seem soothed.  They praise Hillary for pledging to support the President-elect, as well as for conditioning that support on respect for the principles of equal protection under the law, and freedom of religion.  Not to worry — if Trump's white nationalists start bothering the likes of Dr. L., they'd cross Hillary's fearsome line in the sand.

11:00 am
    I park, get out of the car, but suddenly my legs feel rubbery, I'm dizzy and nauseous.  Someone's leaf-covered yard looks inviting, and I kneel down by the sidewalk, arms on the ground in front of me, head in hands. Don't remember ever feeling so sick.  Just want to rest, feel the cool ground under me.  But there are two phone calls to make.

    The Computer Science chair at CCSF doesn't pick up; my voice mail says my 3 pm class looks dubious.  The receptionist at Dr. L.'s office says she'll get him while I wait.  On-hold music is streaming through my hearing aids when two motorcyclists stop and walk toward me, wearing concerned expressions.  Want them to stay, don't want to impose, not thirsty, but ask for water anyway.  They give me a bottle of Evian. Say thanks, wave them away.

    Dr. L. comes on the line and says that I'm experiencing an ear drainage side-effect.  He offers to call in an anti-nausea prescription to a nearby pharmacy. But where would that be, and how would I get there when I don't want to move?  He says that in any case, the symptoms only last 2-4 hours.  That's great news anyway, thank you doctor, bye for now.

    A woman walking a big dog asks if I need anything, keeping a wary distance. I ask to use her bathroom, though it's not urgent.  She says something I can't get, but guess it's that she never opens her door to strangers.  Tell her I understand.  Someone crouches low on the sidewalk next to me.  It's an effort, but I turn my head and see a woman even younger than Dr. L., with shortish hair.  She tells me her name is C.  She asks what happened.

    Tell her about the ear stuff. Where I was heading now?  Tell her about CCSF.  C. says she's a college instructor too, at a community college and a state university, like me.  But she teaches criminal law, she's an attorney who knows the criminal justice system from the "inside."  Arrested protesting at Livermore?  "Good guess," she says.  They picked her up when the police decided to arrest the attorney witnesses at a prisoner rights protest.

    Where was she last night when she heard the news?  At a party, where people pay to destroy things — the priciest item on the menu was the chance to whack a car with a sledge hammer.  Where was I?  At the gym, doing 20 miles on an exercycle, watching the tallies mount on CNN, hoping, hoping.

    Was there someone she could call for me?  The truth comes out — I live alone.  Strictly speaking that's not true, but Clark couldn't drive over, or even take the bus, on account of he's a cat.  Did I want her to summon an ambulance?  Say OK, and she makes the call. Someone else joins us while we're waiting. Turn my head again, and it's another young woman, with a South Asian complexion and a slender gold nose band.  She introduces herself as N.

11:30 am
    When the ambulance comes I refuse to let them take me.  Too much work, by the time they admitted me, I'd be ready to be discharged.  The head EMT says it's against their regulation to leave someone lying on the street.  I say "Screw the regulations."  He consults with C. and N., then tells me to sign a release.  I make it to my knees and make an X on a touch pad.  The ambulance leaves without me.

    Remarkably, C. and N. don't leave as well.  Wouldn't you be tempted to say "screw you too," if you went out of your way to provide someone the help he asked for, and then he spurned it?  Instead, C. offers to get the anti-nausea prescription for me.  Say OK again, and she calls Dr. L.  Her voice is soothing although I can't make out her words, and when she's done I give her my health insurance card and a working credit card, and she heads off.  N. stays.

    Self-pity attack.  Tell N. "I'm an old man, sick on the street, and Trump is President!"

    "There is that," she says wistfully, referring to the last item on my list of woes.  I start crying, really I do.  N. asks if she can bring me anything, and I say no, just her offering is enough.

12:00 pm
    C. returns carrying a little white paper bag, and N. leaves.  C.  says we'll need to go to her house, only half a block from here.  She helps me to my feet, I put my arm around her shoulder, and off we go.  Just 5 more house, 3, 1, now up these few steps.  She helps me through the front door, and tells me this is where she lives with N. I understand them as a couple.  She hands me the little white bag and points me toward their bathroom.

    I sit on the toilet for a spell, then take a brief nap, poised on the edge of the tub, head resting on the sink.  When I emerge, N. points me toward an easy chair, covered with a sheet, and provisioned with a large metal bowl. I flop down and open the bag.  Of course the medication is a rectal suppository, what else could you give someone who can't hold anything down?  I say "Oh,"  close the bag again, close my eyes.  If C. was miffed that once again I'd spurned the help I'd asked for, she doesn't say so.  Zzzzz.

2:30 pm
   C. wakes me up and says she'll need to leave in half an hour.  I plead for a little more time, and she agrees to 15 more minutes.

2:45 pm
    C. wakes me up again, and I gather my things and stand without help, stomach quiet.  I get her address for a thank-you card.  She sees me to the door.  "Check this out" I say, and descend the steps, arms raised in triumph high above the handrails.

Two Rivers

    Most people have their quaint little rituals when they go to cemeteries and remember.  Mine is to bring Jean roses, and speak the news as if she could still hear.  She would have been pleased with most of it, but irked by the story of her headstone.  Oakmont installed one in the winter of 2014, one year after, and I immediately started trying to get it replaced.  Imagining her impatience, I would appeal to tradition.  Jean was a procrastinator too, and most often in her case the wait was worth it.

    The wait for the new headstone ended just before this Labor Day, thanks to the valiant efforts of the sculptor and artist John Gregorin.  John turned my vague concepts into a design, which he then adapted to meet the requirements of the engravers.  The ink well in the middle with two quills was John's idea, as were the dancing roses on my side: writing stuff together was one of our favorite parts of being married; and we met folk dancing.  Two Rivers, the song whose first bars are on the bronze, was the first waltz at our wedding, and John and his sweetie Sue Torngren played it at Jean's memorial.  Both have been invaluable, loyal friends.

    Jean might actually have approved of the first headstone for its simplicity, only our names and the three dates we know, had it not given her name as "Jean M. Lewis."  She was never that except on the letterheads of business correspondence.  She's "Jean Mary Lewis" on the new one, as she was on her diplomas, or in marital moments of high ceremony.  One night, early in our marriage, I lay awake thinking about those three words, and discovered they were an anagram for "My real sin, a Jew."  She laughed in the morning when I told her, saying I just didn't rate in the major transgression dept.

    How did the wrong name got there in the first place?  The short, best answer is that's the sort of thing that happens when unopened correspondence piles up one's desk. Oakmont did tell me there was still time to make changes, when I finally did get around to opening their letters.  But then they installed the headstone anyway, and I only found out about it when visiting Jean.  At a tense meeting afterwards, they exhibited a contract I'd signed agreeing to a default design — they'd told me at the time of wild grief that they just wanted to have something on the record.  Some heated exchanges followed, but in the end they agreed to waive most of the fees on a marble extension and changes to the bronze.  Thanks Oakmont.

    John, Sue, the blessings of conflict abatement, my news had a theme on my first visit to Oakmont after Labor Day.  One reason for insisting on the new headstone was to find another way to say thanks for the marriage. And I told her how grateful I was for the change in my younger son Sam, who just earned his one-year clean and sober badge — a huge difference from the addict she knew when she was sick.

    There was some sad news too: Laurie, an old friend from their student days at U. of. M., had succumbed to leukemia.  Laurie was in remission in November 2012 when she took a week off from being a prof at the University of New Mexico to come to California to help care for Jean.  She was one of a long list of friends and family who were wonderful to us during that terrible time: John and Sue of course, but also Yao, Amy and Ellen, other friends from college days who came out to help; Karen, who visited almost every night at the hospice; Craig, who sent us the world's best creative cheer-up cards; Derek & Tara — Derek was the who used the line "Life thrived at her touch" at Jean's memorial, and Tara's memories are a separate blog post.  Bob and Terry, Anne and John, Chuck and Kathy, Ray, Shadie, … too many to even try to list.  If you're in the right frame of mind, even the death of friends leads make to feelings of gratitude.  Life is sweet.

The neighborhood at Oakmont

A Knight to Remember

Mickey Pico memorial inset

    It took a while, and a few tense negotiating sessions, but this summer Oakmont augmented their generic bronze headstone with a marble extension that provides a fitting memorial for Mickey Pico.  As you can see from the photo, the memorial now uses "Mickey," the name we all knew him by, mentions three of his sterling qualities, and features an inset picturing Mickey Bagel Bistro, the pride and joy of his career.

    The family offered many suggestions about verbiage, including "Crazy Generous'" and "Sold the Best Bagels in Juneau."  But there's little room on a headstone to develop a theme.  Even a haiku would be wordy, and a bit absurd, as if you're trying to argue with death.  To me, the ostentatious tombs are some of the saddest places in Oakmont.

Mickey Pico memorial, with inset on upper right.
The headstone is easy to read when you're
actually there, despite the oak tree shadows.

    It was a hard decision.  "Warmly Generous Caregiver" made the cut, to acknowledge his care for our mom, Esther G. Pico, during the last difficult years of her life.  And the way he could not pass by pandhandlers without giving them something, always something that rustled, never something that clinked.

    "Merchant" is on there, because "Entrepreneur" and "Street Merchant" didn't quite do it — in this case, less really is more.

    And last but not least, "Loved the Open Road," because he did, all his life.  From the he was a boy traveling with our dad, Charlie Pico, across the U.S. and Canada in his annual circuit of rodeos and fairs; to his adult life, traveling around like a knight errant, committed to living his ideals the way some people are devoted to paying off their mortgage.

   Mickey Pico, big-hearted paladin, lover of the physical world, R.I.P.
   

Saturday Morning at the Movies: Political Reality and its Discontents

Inforgraphic from
Fix-It: Healthcare at the Tipping Point

 

   There is an eminently practical solution to a terrible problem that is not an issue in this election campaign, simply because it's considered to be political impossible.  Saturday morning, about fifty dreamers who want to make it an issue, gathered at the Rialto Theater in El Cerrito to watch the movie Fix It: Health Care at the Tipping Point.

The Rialto Theater in El Cerrito,
supported by the generosity of many donors

    Our health care sysem is a slow-motion train wreck.  The U.S. spends 17% of it's GNP on health care, and even with the ACA, that figure has been on the rise — and 1/3 of all health care premiums are eaten up in administrative costs.  Most bankruptcies in the U.S. are due to medical expenses; many of those bankrupt had insurance, but it didn't cover enough.  Health care costs are only around 10% of GNP for the EU, where health care insurance is not tied to employment. They also have a higher life expectancy,

    Single-payer is a practical solution to the health care mess because when a single entity buys insurance for everybody, costs are lower and health outcomes improve.

    And alas, single payer is politically impossible when we're only hanging on to the Affordable Care Act by the skin of our teeth.  The Republican congress voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but last February the House failed to override President Obama's veto.  Hillary says she wants to extend the ACA by offering a "public option," which would compete with private insurance plans.  But unless there's a dramatic change of fortunes in congress, she would need to play defense too.  Donald J. Trump says he would ask congress to repeal the ACA on the very first day of his administration.

    Fix It emphasizes that single-payer saves both lives and money.  The movie was funded by Richard Master, owner of MCS Industries, which makes picture frames and decorative mirrors. The company was struggling to meet annual increases in health care insurance, and Richard decided to try and find out why. He discovered the system was broken, and that in the words of the movie's title, there's a fix.  The movie also features a Republican legislator from Pennsylvania, explaining that single-payer would be good for the economy because it would lower the cost of doing business.  Well, duh.  There's also an interview with a Canadian conservative, amazed that his fellow conservatives in the U.S. cannot grasp this logic.

    As for saving lives, many of us already know sad stories about people who could not afford treatment. One I'll never forget came courtesy of Jean's sister Anne, a retired radiation oncologist and a brain tumor survivor herself.

    Anne was invited to give a second opinion on a man who had been treated by another radiation oncologist for a nasopharyngeal tumor that had invaded his skull. Following that treatment, that doctor found necrosis spots in the man's brain and decided that the tumor had progressed even further. The man was told he had not long to live.

    However, when Anne examined the scans from the first treatment, she saw that his tumor was actually stable. The spots in his brain, all within the radiation fields of his treatment, were not evidence that the tumor had spread. Instead, they were areas of damage caused by the treatment itself, and the way it was given.

    Anne expected the man to be overjoyed when she called to tell him he would live. But she found that from the patient's point of view, her news had a serious drawback. Expected to die, his hospice care was paid for. Expected to live, he had to resume paying for his medications out of pocket. And how in the world could he afford to do that?

A smartphone commercial you would never see on TV

Gale Myra Pico with her new smartphone
August 9, 2016

    Walking on the sidewalk, sitting on a train, waiting for a table at a restaurant, most people so absorbed by their smartphones they don't look around and notice all the others doing the same thing they are, pecking away at small screens.  Does it make you feel disgruntled, like grousing that you've wandered into a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, strange alien beings  inhabiting familiar forms?  Here's another side to the story.

    My sister Gale is a schizophrenic, and for the last 25 years she's been living

Gale, Sam, and Gabe, absorbed in their
phones, August 14 Patterson CA

in a group home in San Francisco, while coming to see me in the East Bay every month.  For the first 24 of those years, I'd arranged for her to come over by calling on her house phone.  Often nobody would answer and the voice mailbox would be full.  If someone did answer, and repeated shouts of "Gale, phone for you," elicited no response, there was no reliable way to leave her a message.  She'd conceived a firm dislike of cell phones, and had never browsed web.  In short, she lived with the technology that existed at the time she was first hospitalized, in the 1960s.

    Gale likes to read books in French, and her current favorite authors are Guy De Maupassant the Victor Hugo.  I would order books for, but my French is poor and once I made a mistake and ordered a Classics Illustrated version by mistake.  And the books would take a long time to arrive, were expensive, and Gale needed to keep a dictionary handy to look up new words.  Then last year, she suddenly agreed to accept an iPad so she could use an e-book reader.  Afterwards, the world of French literature was just a convenient click away, as were the definitions of words she didn't know.

    And then she learned how to use the Maps app to get around better on public transportation.  And then Pandora, to listen to Little Richard.  And then to use email — when one of hers showed up on my inbox, I'd think of how hard it had been to phone her before, and picture a small, isolated word expanding dramatically.

Gabe, Gale, ETa, and Sam, August 14 in Patterson

    But after a year, she started to feel a bit cramped in this brave new world.  It was still just as hard as ever to talk on the phone, and there were repeated problems with wi-fi at the group home, interfering with her music.  This summer she changed her mind about cellphones, and last week she got her first, an iPhone 6S+.

    She's already learned how to reply to texts using Messages, and to send new texts from Contacts, and to dial and answer the phone.  And she really appreciates being able to listen to her music on cellular data, when wi-fi isn't available.

    This Sunday Gale took her new phone with her to Patterson, near Modesto, when we visited

Eta and Gale, August 14 in Patterson

my younger son Sam. Sam has just earned his 11 month clean and sober badge — another world that's been expanding just recently.  The driver was my niece Eta, Gale's biological daughter, and my older son Gabe came with us too.  This was the first time Gabe and Sam had ever met Eta, who grew up in Israel — more expansions.

  The 3 youngsters had a good time, appreciating each other's coolness, while of course spending much time talking on the phone and texting.  But Gale was just as absorbed in her phone as they were in theirs, and everyone took time to help her.  It was all good to see, and I didn't grouse about alien beings once.

The Sweet Uses of Political Irrelevance: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

    Up, Simba originally appeared in Rolling Stone, and the expanded version is included in this anthology.  It describes a week in the McCain 2000 campaign, in between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, and for the obvious reason it's the book's most topical essay now.  The essay Consider the Lobster, which originally appeared in Gourmet, is also useful if you doubted a lobster might really object to being boiled alive; and after reading The View from Mrs. Thompson's, you'll know for sure what 9/11/01 felt like in Bloomington, Illinois living rooms.  If you saw The End of the Tour, are drawn to literary cult figures, but are intimidated by DFW's 1,000 page post-modern masterpiece Infinite Jest — this anthology is an accessible DFW starting point.  There are some 200+ word sentences, replete with parenthetical clarifications, but I could always make my way to the ending period without getting lost.

    There are two threads running through Up, Simba.  Thread one is DFW's meditations on America's unrequited passion for a real leader, someone with personal authenticity, someone who somehow can "get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own." DFW wants to believe, but wonders if such leaders are still possible, when everything sounds like a sales pitch.  You might read and decide the dream is good, its time will surely come.  Or pace DFW, you may decide that from the perspective of this ominous 2016 electoral season, there's something to be said for cynical politics as usual.  Or maybe both, as first authenticity, and then cynicism, came to be embodied for DFW in the McCain 2000 campaign.

    Thread two is a week of life on the Trail (= the McCain campaign).  After McCain upset Bush₂ (DFW's also calls him the Shrub) in the New Hampshire primary, Rolling Stone greenlighted its project of having "serious" writers cover the election.  The campaign entourage included the McCain High Command; the savvy, heroic techs (wielders of burdensome mikes and cameras); and the "pencils" (=print journalists), including the 12M (=The 12 Monkeys, the elite pencils who write for prestige publications, and whom DFW despises).  DFW rode to "THMs" (=Town Hall Meetings) in "BS1" (as the entourage dubbed the bus, short of course for Bullshit 1), and the 12M rode in relative comfort in BS2. The week's political drama, such as it was, was occasioned by McCain's mistake in countering Bush₂'s attacks by going negative himself.  But McCain's campaign didn't recover after he went positive again, and he ended up folding his cards after a disappointing performance on Super Tuesday.

    Superficially, a study in political irrelevance, a dull week in the campaign of a loser.  But it's a treat to read because DFW makes the people and places come alive, making us understand that "…the network techs … are exponentially better to hang out with and listen to than anybody else on the Trail".  This description of the techs in action at a scrum (= ring of techs around McCain as the goes to and from THMs) explains the essay title:

…the single best part of every pre-scrum technical gear-up: watching the cameramen haul their heavy $40,000 rigs to their shoulders like rocket launchers and pull the safety strap tight under their opposite arm and ram the clips home with practiced ease, their postures canted under the camera’s weight. It is Jim C.’s custom always to say “Up, Simba” in a fake-deep bwana voice as he hefts the camera to his right shoulder, and he and Frank C. like to do a little pantomime of the way football players will bang their helmets together to get pumped for a big game, although obviously the techs do it carefully and make sure their equipment doesn’t touch or tangle cords.

    DFW lauds the techs for their incisive, nuanced appreciation of campaign tactics, far surpassing that of the 12M.  Why did Bush₂ go negative?  Couldn't have anything to do with raw emotion, he's too much a creature of his pricey advisors; most likely he was trying to get McCain angry, to throw him off his game.  Why should McCain's game be the high road?  Because negative campaigning drives voters from the polls in droves, and McCain is asking the bored, the disillusioned, the young, to get involved.  He's the candidate who spent four years of torment as a P.O.W., so he's credible when he talks to new voters about commitment to ideals.  When he ends his THMs with “But I will always. Tell you. The truth.", he is always rewarded with wild applause.

    But not even the techs will say that parts of McCain's Chris Duren moment seem staged.  Briefly stated, here's the story. McCain released a response ad saying Bush₂ "twists the truth like Clinton," and his poll numbers did drop like a stone, as the techs anticipated they would. McCain needed to get back on the high road without looking like a wimp, i.e., a Democrat.  He found, and/or manufactured, a usable route at a THM when Chris Duren's mom said that her son, who had found an outlet for his tender idealism in the McCain campaign, had been traumatized by a phone call, presumably from the Bush₂ campaign, that disparaged his candidate.  His mom wanted to know how to restore her son's faith in America.  McCain said he'd call the young man and do his best, which he subsequently did, in a clever way that maximized media exposure.  In deference to Chris Duren, and trusting young Americans everywhere, McCain announced that he'd unilaterally pull his response ads.  No wimp he, just a statesman taking the long view.  Campaign misstep corrected.

    And so McCain: indisputably authentic as a P.O.W., but as a candidate dubious, just like all the rest?  DFW's inclined to treat the problem as a logical conundrum: if a candidate says that he will tell the truth regardless of the polls, and that makes him wildly popular, wouldn't he quite naturally want to look at the polls and see if he's in any danger of actually being elected?  An insoluble problem it would seem, leaving us stuck with a political class DFW describes succinctly, from the standpoint of the Rolling Stone demographic: "Bush₂'s " … patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest."

    DFW does mention, in passing, that McCain's scary right wing positions make him wonder, stuff like government censorship of entertainment, and invading Mexico to snuff out drug exporters.  But he doesn't go as far saying that an essential attribute of a good leader is that she (or he) wants to lead us to a good place.  Had DFW decided to live, would he now be inclined to foreground policy?

    In 2016, a real leader has emerged victorious from the Republican primary wars, after throwing away the cursed playbook, and always speaking his uncalculated personal truths.  Someone who inspires the disillusioned with the fresh enthusiasm that swept McCain to victory in New Hampshire 2000, but has never soiled himself with Chris Duren moments.  Someone who would make the 12M turn up their patrician nose, as at a foul smell.  On the downside, he wants to build a wall on the border with Mexico, says California's drought is a myth, and endorses torture.  Nobody's perfect.

    His opponent entered the national stage in 1969, when she gave a commencement address to her own graduating class at Wellesley College.  She talked about translating the ideals of the '60s into action, about making the impossible possible.  Her legions of detractors say her ambition shrank as her career flourished: the impossible became the ridiculous, and the possible became the status quo. But everyone agrees she's as good at the playbook as any guy.  That playbook says the same thing it did for Bush₂ in 2000: negative campaigning works against the insurgent candidate.  So expect Hillary to hammer Don for being a failed businessman.  And Don, clueless, will insinuate that Hillary is in league with terrorists, or somehow involved with the Kennedy assassination, any nonsense that comes to mind.  Think that's not a healthy democracy?  Then you must be a sexist, or a traitor who doen't want America to be great again.

    DFW would doubtless pass on the real leader this time, and invite us to pray for Hillary, in the same manner that he invited us to pray for Bush₂ in Mrs. Thompson's living room on 9/11/01: 

" … silently and fervently, that you’re wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he’s actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity … "

    Amen.  On November 9, let's hope the results show that there's life in the playbook yet, and that the President-elect remembers how the world looked when she gave her Wellesley commencement address.  If she doesn't, she will remain widely despised across the political spectrum, motivating millions more to flock to Trump.  Then what would happen to us in 2020?

Garrison Keillor's last Chicago Show

§

The Show Must Go On

    Garrison Keillor has tried retiring before, but it's different this time.  He's picked out his successor, Chris Thile, a MacArthur genius award-winning mandolin player, who will steer Prairie Home Companion (PHC) in the direction of less talk/more music.  There's nothing wrong with that mix now, but Garrison's talk is irreplaceable. When Chris was asked if he might rescind his retirement decision again, Chris laughed and said "unlikely."

    For good reason.  On June 3rd, Garrison had a brain seizure after doing two back-to-back concerts in Virginia.  After an an MRI at the Mayo clinic, he issued a press release saying the brain scan showed a dark area near, but not in, the language area of his brain.  And that he intended to finish his last tour anyway.

    What do you take from that, you with experience decrypting medical bulletins from family and friends?  Reassurance? A note of defiance?  No and Yes for me.

Chuck and Kathy, 2016

    Early February, when my friends Chuck and Kathy had invited me to visit them and go to Garrison's last live Chicago performance, was a high point of this electoral season.  The three of us are ardent Sanders supporters, and expected him to do well in New Hampshire. And the previous week, when Sarah Palin endorsed Donald Trump, the NY Daily News had published its famed "I'm with Stupid" front page, with the photo of Palin and Trump pointing to each other approvingly.  But by June, Don had vanquished his Republican rivals, and the Hillary machine had amassed enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.  As Yeats said, and Garrison read, when he selected The Second Coming as the poem on on his Writer's Almanac podcast: The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.  In my febrile imagination, Garrison's saw his last tour as a chance to rally the blue state tribe.

§

The Lewis Family Home Companion

    My first impulse was to tell Chuck and Kathy no thanks.  I'm teaching a summer session Computer Science class at SFSU, and needed to spend that weekend writing lesson plans.  In other words, I'm a grind.  But I ended up saying yes, thinking that Jean would have liked the idea of closing the circle.

    In August 2007, Jean accompanied her mom Sylvia on a PHC cruise to Norway.  Sylvia, then 86, purchased two tickets well in advance, hoping to persuade her boyfriend Ben, a trombonist whom she'd met at a jam, to use the other. But after Ben died suddenly of a heart attack that April, Sylvia started losing her bearings.  She did remember her tickets however, and asked Jean to go in Ben's place.  Jean wanted her mom to have one more adventure, and she'd been a PHC fan herself since her college days U. of M. Fortunately, on their very first day on the ship, they met Chuck and Kathy.

    By that time, Sylvia was incontinent.  Chuck and Kathy saw the situation, and stepped in to help without being asked.  Sylvia also needed constant attention to prevent her from wandering off, and her new friends would keep an eye on her so Jean could dash off on lightening tours at Norwegian ports of call.

    At this point in the story, Garrison might step in and dead-pan something like "it was a struggle, but they kept Sylvia clean and dry."  And they did.  And mother and daughter also performed an accordion/flute duet in the cruise talent show, exchanging a few words with Garrison himself during the festivities.  Sylvia confused was still a commanding presence, and on the flight back to Detroit she decided they were disaster victims, and demanded that Jean lodge a complaint with the Red Cross about their cramped facilities.  Jean calmed her down, and got her home safely to Ann Arbor.

    Our own favorite PHC show gave us a shorthand for saying we're deeply married, "burying the pigs."  It was 2001, summer was ending, and Jean and I were walking on the beach at Alameda at sunset, holding hands, listening over headphones.  That April Jean had a miscarriage, convincing us to end three years of escalating fertility treatments that started with hormone injections and culminated in fetal implants.  The very next week, my manager handed me a cardboard box and said to clear out my cubicle. In May 2000, I'd left BofA, where I'd been a software engineer for fifteen years, looking forward to a job doing more actual computer programming.  By August 2001 I'd been unemployed 4 months, no interviews scheduled, and my child support payments were higher than my unemployment benefits.  Instead of bearing our own child, Jean was supporting two we never saw, and me.

    The Lake Woebegone monologue was about a rural couple who plough their savings into a pig farm.  Things go well, until an infection sweeps through the drove, killing all the pigs.  What would they do?  Plenty, in the fullness of time, but something was required immediately.  They didn't blame each other for the stupid mess they were in, they just worked together digging a burial trench.

§

The Show

    The show was actually in Highland Park, a verdant suburb 25 miles north of Chicago, at the Ravinia Pavilion, June 11.  At the entrance, gulping the hot coffee not allowed inside, I noticed a t-shirt promoting the Ricky Byrdsong Race against Hate. Asked, and learned that Ricky had been an African-American basketball coach at Northwestern, gunned down in 1999 by a neo-Nazi on a killing spree that also netted him an Asian-American and an orthodox Jew.  The shirt seemed to resonate with the political moment, although my memory could be clouded by the Orlando massacre, which happened about 10 hours later.

    Garrison wore an off-white suit and a red tie.  His tall frame is a little bowed,

Before the Broadcast

hair graying, face aged, and when he sits down between the segments when he must stand to speak and sing into the mike, he does so slowly and carefully.  The backdrop of the stage was decorated with signs for "sponsors" familiar to PHC listeners: Powdermilk Biscuits, the American Duct Tape Council, Café Boeuf. Before the broadcast began, he and guest star Heather Masse (she of the Wailin' Jennys) strolled from the stage down the center aisle and out into the surrounding park, where people listened to the show over loudspeakers.  They sang a medley of patriotic songs, including America the Beautiful and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  When they came back in we all stood for The Star Spangled Banner.

    The show proper began with his tribute song/monologue to the Windy City, cued by notes on sheets of 8 1/2 × 11 paper that he let fall to the floor as he finished them.  The tribute is a series of swift images and maxims that portray a "blue collar city."  Don't wear a tie or ask for artisan beer.  Architecture is the

Heather and Garrison

natives' favorite art form.  "Sign saying 'get a new life through bankruptcy'." "Women in pink hair and pink slippers."  Sign for St. Helen's: "'What's missing in CH _ _ CH?  UR!'"  Corner grocery store selling pickled eggs and fresh baked rye bread, the cashier so busy arguing in a "foreign tongue" with another woman, who could be her mom, that she waves aside Garrison's attempt to pay for a small item.

    It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone … where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.  Unlike the tribute song, Garrison does his famous monologue entirely without notes, pacing back and forth across the stage, head down, often turning his back to the audience.  Like a boy squirming to justify his misadventures to a skeptical but convincible authority figure, coming to the point cautiously.

    Being June, the theme was graduation.  Back in the day, graduates were not congratulated, they were interrogated about summer jobs, and picking potatoes and laying asphalt were two correct answers. At the 2008 Lake W. High graduation, a teacher gave a speech in a storm, holding an umbrella over his head, "knowing he should stop but not being able to."  "They remember that graduation, but not a single word he said … an important lesson there for intellectuals."  At a recent ceremony, Lake W. High featured a speaker from Garrison's class, who lives in Florida, plays golf, and runs half marathons.  He looked old and fragile, which Garrison attributed to excessive physical activity — all the exercise you really need you can get just by sitting at a desk and writing.  But even the contemplative life wears you out eventually, and he read a limerick about the inevitable end game:

    Old age is a treacherous bridge.
    It comes to the poor and the rich.
    You get up in the night
    and then on comes the light
    and you find that you pissed in the fridge.
  
    Heather sang In a Sentimental Mood, which we were, and Chris performed a song called Da Da Da, celebrating emerging life in the guise of his one-year-old son Calvin, and Calvin's expressive single-word vocabulary.  Garrison announced the intermission, "time to see a man about a dog," and Heather, Chris, and Richard Dworksy sang Stars and Stripes Forever while the audience stirred to take care of business.

    There was more graduation irony in the second hour.  Garrison read a poem written from the perspective of unabashedly relieved parents: … No more church youth groups, amen/ and we'll never watch field hockey every again … .  Heather sang a parody of Dark as a Dungeon, the famous Merle Travis number about life in the coal mines.  Instead of Come all you young fellers so young and so fine/and seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine, the second line in the PHC version is Get you a job doing something online. Picking potatoes and laying asphalt are not necessarily virtuous acts nowadays.
    
    At the end, Garrison noted that he had performed at Ravinia every year since 2004, and was happy to be here one last time.  The audience brought him back for an encore, and Garrison, just 73, joined in singing the Beatles' She was just Seventeen, and then took a final bow with Goodnight, Irene.

Chuck, Kathy, Marilyn, Matt
Marilyn was on the Norway cruise when
Jean met Chuck and Kathy

     We walked back to our cars, stopping briefly for group photos.  Chuck noted there had been no Guy Noir, Private Eye routine; no Dusty and Lefty, cowboys on the open range range. And the Lake Woebegone monologue had not been saved for the second hour.  Obviously all part of a gentle exit strategy.  Garrison's sign-off on his Writer's Almanac podcasts is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."  Garrison the same in his next phase.

§

Epilogue

    Stuart Dybek is from Chicago, but his poem The Windy City is not explicitly about his hometown. Is it?  I read it as an eulogy to the passing of youth, which ties in with Garrison's graduation them.  Which ties in with retirement.  Anyway, as Garrison might say, it's a really good poem.

Bay Area Brain Tumor Walk Journal

Jenifer Prentiss, Walk Coordinator,
looking characteristically cheerful,
busy, organized

6:20 am Jenifer had asked the planning committee to report for duty by 6:30.  This blogger steps out of character to arrive 10 minutes early. Of course Jenifer and others are already there, busy unloading a small U-Haul truck, carrying heavy boxes to open canvas structures called "tents".  There are only two dollies, and it's actually hard physical labor.  A florist donated a generous supply of cut flowers for the Honor and Celebrate ceremony (new this year).  Absurdly proud of myself for carrying a heavy box of said flowers from curb to tent, counting steps.

8:00 am No more boxes to carry.  We set up Honor and Celebrate, arranging flowers in buckets and vases, displaying wristbands and NBTS flyers on tables, setting out Sharpies so people can write remembrance messages on a canvas sheet.

8:30 am The Honor and Celebrate Tent looks respectable, and walk participants have started to arrive.  Somehow it all came together — or did it?  A coffee donor had still not been found as late as a week before the walk, and this blogger is tired and uncaffeinated.  He casts a longing eye at the refreshment tent, and notices large hot liquid dispensers on one of the tables.  Saved!

Epitath by Merrit Malloy

Suze Restuch with
this blogger at Honor and
Celebrate.  Suze lost
her brother Jonathan to
a GBM in 2012.

9:10 am The Honor and Remembrance ceremony is a change of pace for the Walk, which has been centered on stories of survivors, and of research breakthroughs. Yet the actual mean survival time from diagnosis for glioblastoma multiform (GBM), the most common type of malignant brain tumor, has increased slowly in recent decades, and is currently about 14 months.  How would a widening focus be received?  Well, it would seem.  About fifty of us gather to hear Margaret Davis play the harp, and then hear Susan Conrad, UCSF chaplain, lead a responsive reading of Epitaph by Merrit Malloy.  Many people write messages on the canvas.  Tell Jean again that I love her.

Pamela Hamrick with Avery
in Honor and Celebrate,
seated in front of the canvas sheet
with the messages.

9:30 Talks from the podium, Pamela Hamrick MC.  She hold her infant daughter Avery as she explains how she became involved with brain tumors after her brother was diagnosed with a 

We hear from Sara Rey, a remarkable survivor who has lived with a GBM for over a decade.  Sara explains that she has issues to overcome, such as with speech — her husband Toby is with her on the podium, for support.  When she's feeling discouraged, she tells herself "I will be well, I will survive," and that helps.

Josie Hayes, Ph.D., tells the story of how she came to UCSF.  She became interested in brain tumor research when she was a graduate student in the UK, and found a local charity willing to fund her doctorate.  After the received her Ph.D., she looked around for the "best brain tumor research lab in the world" — and feels she found it UCSF's Costello lab.  She described the lab's current work in immunotherapy (training the patient's immune system to attack tumor cells), and targeting tumor cell "immortalization" (that is, the mechanism allowing tumor cells to acquire the ability to resist aging processes that destroy normal cells().

After her talk, this blogger asks Dr. Hayes if she has any promising clinical trials to recommend to patients who get the dreaded news that their tumor has recurred, and that they have no more FDA-approved treatment options.  She replies that depends on the patient but … immunotherapy is a promising new approach, and that UCSF's clinic directed by Hideho Okada is the "best immunology clinic" in the world. Dr. Hayes considers the promising new  treatment out of Duke, based on the polio virus and featured on 60 minutes, to be in the general category of immunotherapy.  This blogger popped the question: if Dr. Hayes considered her work in a mood of realistic optimism, what would she expect, a few years hence, to be the mean survival time from diagnosis for GBMs? "28 months."  A 100% increase from the current state of the art.

10:00 am The walkers start the course.  This is our first year at Crissy Field, after years of having the walk at Speedway Meadows in GG Park. This blogger hears only favorable comments about the change: the setting is spectacular, and affords a panoramic view of the walkers en route; parking is easier. We need some encouragement, because fund raising is down from to about 300k from about 400k at the same point last year.  Our explanation is bad luck and timing: two of the top fund-raising teams decided to take 2016 off, and another stayed on the sidelines after one of its key member was diagnosed with cancer. But the 2016 books aren't closed yet, and we're hoping for a great 2017 on Crissy fields.

Starting the walk

Reading Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell

    Book lover is a staple part of my self-description, but in 2015 I didn't love them enough to actually read one.  Right, all year long, not one book start to finish.  No time to read, too busy "reinventing" myself as a Computer Science instructor.  A half-hour turning pages could be a half-hour grading programs, preparing lesson plans.

    My pen pal is a stark contrast.  She describes herself a library devotee, and her late night email sign-offs say she's reading her book, then going to sleep.  She just finished The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, a dystopian fantasy set in the far Earth future. She started Infinite Jest, by DFW of course, a dystopian literary landmark set in a recognizable version of our North America.  Seems like a life of exquisite luxury, and accessible to anyone with a library card who is ready let go of exhaustion as their primary status symbol.

    I am ready, but need the right sort of book: serious enough to be interesting, but without so much time required in any one sitting that I push the survival mode panic button.  In 2014, Tom Parker, writer and creative writing teacher, recommended a novel called Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell.  It's composed of short vignettes — imagine a picture emerging from disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle — so it qualifies in the short-sitting department.  Then this Spring's edition of the Threepenny Review (lit mag out of Berkeley) contained a few paragraphs contrasting Evan Connell with Allen Ginsberg, claiming Evan had the more persuasive critique of what the great Beat poet scorned as bourgeois complacency; so certainly serious enough to be interesting.  And importantly, only an iBooks download away.

    For  a week, in the 15 minutes between bed time and sleep, I've been swiping through a vignette or two.  Proud to say I'm up to chapter 27, "Sentimental Moment," page 94 out of 341 — Mrs. Bridge wants their dreams back, while Mr. Bridge wants the car lubricated.

    Mrs. Bridge does cast a discerning eye on race and gender, among other vast topics.  But when it was published in 1959, segregation was the law in the south, and women with careers and education were novelties.  One reason to read it is for perspective on what has and hasn't changed.

     Here's Connell on race.  Mrs. Bridge's young daughter Carolyn is good friends with Alice Jones, the daughter of her black gardener.  Alice is the more dynamic of the two, always coming up with fun ideas, like taking apart phonographs cabinets so they can talk to the little people inside.  Mrs. Bridge decides she needs to intervene, so Carolyn will understand that their friendship can't last past grade school.  Alice is bright, and the next time she comes over to hang with Carolyn, Mrs. Bridge delivers her message indirectly:

    About ten o’clock both of them came into the kitchen for a bottle of soda pop and wanted to know what there would be for lunch.

    “Corky is having creamed tuna on toast and spinach,” said Mrs. Bridge pleasantly.

    Alice observed that she herself didn’t care for spinach because it was made of old tea bags.

    “I believe you’re supposed to have lunch with your Daddy, aren’t you?”

    Alice heard a note in her voice which Carolyn did not; she glanced up at Mrs. Bridge with another of those queer, bright looks and after a moment of thought she said, “Yes’m.”

   And here's a fun paragraph on women's sexuality:
  
    For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep. Presently, however, he began sleeping all night, and it was then she awoke more frequently, and looked into the darkness, wondering about the nature of men, doubtful of the future, until at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire. Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep.  This was the night Mrs. Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.

    Reading  also gives insight on a half-century of changes to the American novel.  Another creative writing instructor claimed that the manifest destiny of American letters is the close-3rd-person-single-character perspective — the author immerses the reader in a hot bath of a single personality, undiluted by emotional distance, or the thoughts of other characters.  And certainly there are fine novels written in that vein — Blue Angel by Francine Prose comes to mind.  But Connell keeps his characters at arms length, observing them cooly, asking his readers to scrutinize them carefully before taking them into their hearts.  That passage on race doesn't demand indignation, but it earns it.

13 Hours in the Life of a Retirement-Age Community College Computer Science Lecturer

    10 pm, class 9 am tomorrow.  Told them to expect a test.  Haven't written it yet.  Another class yesterday, a different test.  Promised the grader I'd send her the template today.  Haven't done it yet.  A student said he'd sent me email about his medical condition, told him I'd read it and get back to him.  Haven't looked at it yet.

    Find the student's email.  He's in physical and mental pain.  He wants to graduate after this semester, but needs to pass this class.  Says he'll do whatever it takes.  Do I have any tips of him?

    On the radio, pundits dismiss Bernie's victory in Wisconsin, as in 7 of the last 8 primaries: Hillary will clinch the nomination soon, they say, though she hasn't done it quite yet.  Write back, tell the student terribly sorry to hear about his aliments, but have no tips specific to his condition.  Recommend focusing on homework and example problems.

   New email from my pen pal.  She's feeling glacial.  Hmmmm.  Feel glacial too, thinking of the slow slide from desk to bed I'll make later on tonight.

    11 pm, start on the grader's template.  Thought the biggest problem would be using the drawing software to create diagrams with circles and arrows.  Turns out it's staying awake while double-checking answers to the True/False questions -- 5 hours of sleep last night due to plumbing mishap.  Head snaps back, lose balance, startle myself awake.  Someday I'll fall off the chair in that state.  Hasn't happened yet.

    Trump talk on the radio.  Is the metaphor Hitler? If the Great American Mean Streak found an adroit, charismatic champion, it would sweep out in full cry, leveling all before it. Hasn't happened yet, Trump trounced in Wisconsin.

    Midnight.  Template done, but now too tired to work on test.  Too tired to think.  Will try again tomorrow morning when caffeine regains its effect.  No tap water to make tea due to the plumbing, but had the foresight to fill large containers.  Set alarm for 4:20.  Strategy is shallow sleep, lights on, fully dressed.

    Out of bed by 4:30, arguably refreshed.  At desk by 5, drinking a cup of tea steeped with 4 bags.  Is desperate is the wrong message to take from these circumstances? Offtimes may drown in dreams and not be dead,/Such weight is mother leaning on your bed.  Every week I'm afraid I'll come to class without the promised test.  Hasn't happened yet.   On a roll, more congenial message.

    Test ready by 6:30, actually leaving a little time to prepare for the lecture.  How little?  Enough in engage the students in a short adventure in software development?  Or not enough to prevent the prof from looking like a dazed, exhausted old man who can barely remember his own name?  One or the other I decide, these are mutually exclusive logical propositions covering all possibilities.

    8:30 am.  The walk from the Balboa Park BART Station to Batmale Hall took under 10 minutes, leaving another half hour to prepare for class.  It's a .55 mile hike, mostly uphill, part of it a steep climb on a path that ascends a hill alongside the 4 story library.  My previous best time was over 15 minutes. There's life in the old boy yet.

   9 am. Turns out that neither proposition is entirely true.  Of course.  Do some extemporaneous software development in front of the class, make dumb mistakes, but also get across important points.  This particular class is usually dead, most students resolutely silent even when I plead for questions.  Get a few this time, and some smiles.

   10:30 am.  Pass out tests and Scantron cards.

   11 am.  Test over. My short term career goal: SLEEP, in glorious profusion.  Beautiful word, sleep; how obtuse of me not to have appreciated that before!  Shimmering doorway to vibrant other reality.  Think of Blake, Tyger, Tyger burning bright/in the forests of the night …  Burning then burnt out, night creature I.  Make any sense?  My pen pal could tell me, if she writes back.  She hasn't disappeared yet.  Start new email.