So many John Callahan cartoons make me laugh out loud. This morning I’ve been leafing through our five paperbacks of his work. I’ll randomly cite a few, to give the uninitiated among you a taste of his brilliant tastelessness. There are so, so many more where these came from.
A male patient is bending over an examination table, his butt exposed. The male doctor says, “My technique for rectal examination is somewhat different in that I’m gay and have no arms.”
Nursing home residents shuffle their walkers past a sign on the wall that says,“Thank You for Not Dying.”
An Old West posse on horseback pauses in the desert to gaze down at an overturned wheelchair. The caption reads: “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot.”
A quadriplegic aerobics instructor tells his class—all of them, like him, lying prone in wheelchairs—“Okay, let’s get those eyeballs moving!”
You get the idea. Callahan, who died on July 24 at age 59 of complications from his various physical ailments, had been a quadriplegic himself since a drunk driving accident when he was 21. (He wasn’t driving, but he, also, was drunk.) He kept drinking even after the accident, but finally stopped when he mangled his teeth trying to open a bottle of hooch with his mouth and collapsed in tears at the pathetic spectacle. With therapy, he got to the point where he could draw rudimentary cartoons by guiding his right hand across the page with his left. His mind—brimming with anger, grim pathos and pitch-black humor—supplied the concepts and captions.
According to his obituary in the New York Times, Callahan’s syndicated work appeared in more than 200 newspapers around the world at the peak of his success about a decade ago. The obit added, probably unnecessarily, “Many of those newspapers got used to receiving letters of objection.”
One cartoon that was particularly controversial focused not on people with disabilities but on one of the most sacred icons of American history. Titled “Martin Luther King at 13,” it showed an embarrassed youth standing next to his bed, which was stained by a huge puddle. He’s explaining to his upset mother, “I had a dream.”
In an interview for The New York Times Magazine in 1992, Callahan said, “My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands. Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.”
I grew up wearing a hook for a hand, so maybe I was predisposed to like Callahan’s work. But I was more struck by this line from the Times’ obit: “Mr Callahan often defended his work with a shrug, saying simply that he thought it was funny.”
Same here. It’s true that I’ve felt patronized and even pitied at times in my life, even though by Callahan’s standards being short one hand scarcely constitutes a disability. And of course I’m happy that Callahan was able to Find a Reason to Go On, and to make something of his life, and all that crap. But the bottom line is that I’ll always appreciate him simply because he made me laugh out loud.
He wasn’t always belligerently in your face, either. One of my all-time favorite Callahans, in fact—it brings a big smile to my face whenever I think of it—is downright sweet. It’s atypically two-paneled, and the first panel shows a guy with his dog. The dog is standing on its hind legs, with its front legs against the man’s trousers. “Get down!” the annoyed dog owner shouts.
In the next panel, the dog is deliriously jamming on an electric guitar.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Protester
Anyone who regularly drives up and down the Embassy Row stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in the District has seen John Wojnowski and his provocative banners that scream things like “Vatican Hides Pedophiles!” He’s a gaunt older man with close-cropped hair and glasses who stands at the street corner across from the US Naval Observatory (official home of the vice president of the United States), scanning passing cars with an intent gaze and his mouth stuck between a smile and a grimace. He’s out there at rush hours, and often on weekends. He occasionally points at his banner, as if you might otherwise miss his huge, blaring indictment of the Catholic Church.
I’d been passing him in my car for years before I had any idea of his identity or backstory. Why did he seem to want to vice president, specifically, to know how he felt about priests diddling young boys with impunity and apparent immunity? That particular entrance to the Naval Observatory is the location of the Atomic Clock, which gives the super-exact time in huge digital numbers. Perhaps the lone protester also was making some statement about “time running out” on Rome’s misdeeds? Sometimes I’d beep my horn in support and give him a thumb’s up—as I, too, am appalled by the well-documented blind eye with which the Catholic Church long has regarded priests’ sexual abuse of boys and young men (and sometimes girls and young women, as well).
But then, a few years ago, the Washington Post ran a story on him, and discovering his name led me to the inevitable “John Wojnowski” Wikipedia page, which brought additional details. The condensed profile is this: He was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1943. He says he was sexually molested by a village priest in Italy when he was 15 and, although he tried to suppress the memory for much of his life, the incident left him angry, reclusive and insecure. It greatly affected his relationships and employment history in Europe, Canada and the United States, he says. (According to Wikipedia, he is divorced from his Polish wife and has two children.) He took early retirement from his job as an ironworker in April 1998 and began his one-man protest. It turns out that the nondescript building behind him is the “Apostolic Nunciature,” or US embassy of the Vatican. Apparently the vice president’s ringside seat is strictly coincidental.
In a follow-up story this May, published by the Post but written by the Religion News Service, a spokeswoman from the Archdiocese of Washington was quoted as saying it had investigated Wojnowski’s charges, discovered that the Italian priest who allegedly molested him had died, but repeatedly offered to pay for Wojnowski’s therapy. Wojnowski had declined, saying he’d tried therapy but finds protesting more therapeutic.
Watching him out there in all kinds of weather—broadcasting his fury, sometimes jeered by passing motorists, occasionally engaged in heated debate with pedestrians—it’s hard for me to see what’s therapeutic about his one-man stand. And recent banners make me wonder if he’s made the mental journey from consumed to unhinged. One I saw a few weeks ago read, “Ratzinger the Sodomizer.” Now, it’s one thing to condemn a church that by nearly all accounts could have done and should be doing more to stop sexual abuse by priests. But it’s quite another thing, it seems to me, to “out” as a buggerer the current pope, who to my knowledge has never been publicly or legally linked to anything of the kind. (I also wonder if that isn’t a libelous statement for which Wojnowski could be prosecuted. It seems to me that if he instead were accusing his across-the-street neighbor Joe Biden of violating the tender rumps of Senate pages, the Secret Service would have old John in custody before the Atomic Clock could tick off five minutes.)
All of that written, however, I can’t claim to know what did or didn’t really happen to John Wojnowski, what personal demons are calmed or fed by his protest, how he’d feel or what he’d become if he didn’t have this campaign to occupy and fuel him. I feel sorry for him, and I’ll continue to beep my support when his banners bear messages I find supportable. Because what I find sadder even than John Wojnowski’s life is the fact that sooner or later he’ll go the way of his alleged abuser, the banners will disappear, but the actions he’s been protesting all these years will likely continue, with little more than lip service being paid toward meaningful reform.
I’d been passing him in my car for years before I had any idea of his identity or backstory. Why did he seem to want to vice president, specifically, to know how he felt about priests diddling young boys with impunity and apparent immunity? That particular entrance to the Naval Observatory is the location of the Atomic Clock, which gives the super-exact time in huge digital numbers. Perhaps the lone protester also was making some statement about “time running out” on Rome’s misdeeds? Sometimes I’d beep my horn in support and give him a thumb’s up—as I, too, am appalled by the well-documented blind eye with which the Catholic Church long has regarded priests’ sexual abuse of boys and young men (and sometimes girls and young women, as well).
But then, a few years ago, the Washington Post ran a story on him, and discovering his name led me to the inevitable “John Wojnowski” Wikipedia page, which brought additional details. The condensed profile is this: He was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1943. He says he was sexually molested by a village priest in Italy when he was 15 and, although he tried to suppress the memory for much of his life, the incident left him angry, reclusive and insecure. It greatly affected his relationships and employment history in Europe, Canada and the United States, he says. (According to Wikipedia, he is divorced from his Polish wife and has two children.) He took early retirement from his job as an ironworker in April 1998 and began his one-man protest. It turns out that the nondescript building behind him is the “Apostolic Nunciature,” or US embassy of the Vatican. Apparently the vice president’s ringside seat is strictly coincidental.
In a follow-up story this May, published by the Post but written by the Religion News Service, a spokeswoman from the Archdiocese of Washington was quoted as saying it had investigated Wojnowski’s charges, discovered that the Italian priest who allegedly molested him had died, but repeatedly offered to pay for Wojnowski’s therapy. Wojnowski had declined, saying he’d tried therapy but finds protesting more therapeutic.
Watching him out there in all kinds of weather—broadcasting his fury, sometimes jeered by passing motorists, occasionally engaged in heated debate with pedestrians—it’s hard for me to see what’s therapeutic about his one-man stand. And recent banners make me wonder if he’s made the mental journey from consumed to unhinged. One I saw a few weeks ago read, “Ratzinger the Sodomizer.” Now, it’s one thing to condemn a church that by nearly all accounts could have done and should be doing more to stop sexual abuse by priests. But it’s quite another thing, it seems to me, to “out” as a buggerer the current pope, who to my knowledge has never been publicly or legally linked to anything of the kind. (I also wonder if that isn’t a libelous statement for which Wojnowski could be prosecuted. It seems to me that if he instead were accusing his across-the-street neighbor Joe Biden of violating the tender rumps of Senate pages, the Secret Service would have old John in custody before the Atomic Clock could tick off five minutes.)
All of that written, however, I can’t claim to know what did or didn’t really happen to John Wojnowski, what personal demons are calmed or fed by his protest, how he’d feel or what he’d become if he didn’t have this campaign to occupy and fuel him. I feel sorry for him, and I’ll continue to beep my support when his banners bear messages I find supportable. Because what I find sadder even than John Wojnowski’s life is the fact that sooner or later he’ll go the way of his alleged abuser, the banners will disappear, but the actions he’s been protesting all these years will likely continue, with little more than lip service being paid toward meaningful reform.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Mon Dieu!
For whatever reason—and I fear to psychoanalyze it—I’m attracted to macabre news stories. Such as, for example, when a number of severed feet, some of them still in sneakers, weirdly started washing up on the shores of Washington state and British Columbia a couple of years ago—as if a boatload of Ogre Raw Diet or Cannibal Kibble had overturned during a violent storm at sea. I was all over that phenomenon, checking various American and Canadian newspaper Web sites daily for weeks, until the tides stopped sending orphaned extremities shoreward, and the theories as to what the hell was happening dried up.
So, of course, I had to click today on this link to an AP story: “Couple Arrested in France After Police Recover Bodies of 8 Newborns.”
New homeowners in the northern city of Villers-au-Tertre, near Lille, had found bags of bones in the garden and basement of their new digs (no pun intended), which, the AP reported, prompted a criminal investigation that brought the arrest of the former homeowners, a couple in their 40s who, it turned out, had parented the unlucky octet.
OK, first, an aside: The entire five years we had our beloved greyhound Ellie—who recently died of cancer, but that’s a little too painful to write about just yet—Lynn and I BEGGED the dog to sniff up a body for us, or at least the remains of one. Ellie’s long snout was brilliant at locating chicken bones. Why not human bones? Wouldn’t that have been cool, in a grim kind of way? I always think about how a guy who’d been out looking for turtles, supposedly, years ago found Chandra Levy’s remains in Rock Creek Park in DC—less than 10 miles from my house, in a patch of woods that’s VERY near paths on which I’d run many times. Why couldn’t yours truly have found the slain intern and been the one to give the cops the goods? Anyway, did Ellie ever sniff up so much as a single human digit in all her years with us? No, she did not! But I digress.
The story about the French couple had no details about motive (a parental form of “buyer’s remorse,” perhaps?), logistics, time frame, etc. The investigation was termed “ongoing.” But here was the even more bizarre detail: According to the AP, “France has seen a string of cases in recent years of mothers killing their newborns and saving and hiding the corpses.”
A “string” of cases? They’re “saving and hiding” the corpses—as if infant cadavers are now a featured item on French scavenger hunts?
Finally, there was this: “Germany has seen a string of similar cases. In one, a woman was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison for killing eight of her newborn babies and burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents’ home near the German-Polish border.”
Damn! One really must wonder what’s in the water over there. Do we need the European Union to place prohibitive tariffs on this sort of thing to discourage its spread throughout the Euro zone?
Not to mention, what exactly is the fish tank about? I’m picturing a Goth German girl wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I Asked for a Guppy and All I Got was Pregnant.”
Yikes!
Now, allow me to make crystal-clear that I’m appalled by the slaying of newborns and the severing of feet. I’d like to emphasize, too, that I am not a jingoist who hates the French. To the contrary, I never once called my pommes frites “freedom fries” after 9/11. I dig the existentialism of Albert Camus. I like wordy movies that feature lots of cafes, smoking and subtitles. I find amusing the Gallic concept of frequent yet joyless sex. Why, I can’t with any certainty say that I, too, wouldn’t have raised an immediate white flag in the face of the Blitzkrieg. But now I shudder to think what will happen if the American religious right catches wind of this nixed newborns story.
I can see the bumper stickers now: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart—And So Do Those Liberty-hating French.”
So, of course, I had to click today on this link to an AP story: “Couple Arrested in France After Police Recover Bodies of 8 Newborns.”
New homeowners in the northern city of Villers-au-Tertre, near Lille, had found bags of bones in the garden and basement of their new digs (no pun intended), which, the AP reported, prompted a criminal investigation that brought the arrest of the former homeowners, a couple in their 40s who, it turned out, had parented the unlucky octet.
OK, first, an aside: The entire five years we had our beloved greyhound Ellie—who recently died of cancer, but that’s a little too painful to write about just yet—Lynn and I BEGGED the dog to sniff up a body for us, or at least the remains of one. Ellie’s long snout was brilliant at locating chicken bones. Why not human bones? Wouldn’t that have been cool, in a grim kind of way? I always think about how a guy who’d been out looking for turtles, supposedly, years ago found Chandra Levy’s remains in Rock Creek Park in DC—less than 10 miles from my house, in a patch of woods that’s VERY near paths on which I’d run many times. Why couldn’t yours truly have found the slain intern and been the one to give the cops the goods? Anyway, did Ellie ever sniff up so much as a single human digit in all her years with us? No, she did not! But I digress.
The story about the French couple had no details about motive (a parental form of “buyer’s remorse,” perhaps?), logistics, time frame, etc. The investigation was termed “ongoing.” But here was the even more bizarre detail: According to the AP, “France has seen a string of cases in recent years of mothers killing their newborns and saving and hiding the corpses.”
A “string” of cases? They’re “saving and hiding” the corpses—as if infant cadavers are now a featured item on French scavenger hunts?
Finally, there was this: “Germany has seen a string of similar cases. In one, a woman was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison for killing eight of her newborn babies and burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents’ home near the German-Polish border.”
Damn! One really must wonder what’s in the water over there. Do we need the European Union to place prohibitive tariffs on this sort of thing to discourage its spread throughout the Euro zone?
Not to mention, what exactly is the fish tank about? I’m picturing a Goth German girl wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I Asked for a Guppy and All I Got was Pregnant.”
Yikes!
Now, allow me to make crystal-clear that I’m appalled by the slaying of newborns and the severing of feet. I’d like to emphasize, too, that I am not a jingoist who hates the French. To the contrary, I never once called my pommes frites “freedom fries” after 9/11. I dig the existentialism of Albert Camus. I like wordy movies that feature lots of cafes, smoking and subtitles. I find amusing the Gallic concept of frequent yet joyless sex. Why, I can’t with any certainty say that I, too, wouldn’t have raised an immediate white flag in the face of the Blitzkrieg. But now I shudder to think what will happen if the American religious right catches wind of this nixed newborns story.
I can see the bumper stickers now: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart—And So Do Those Liberty-hating French.”
Friday, July 23, 2010
Suck of the Draw
Maryland’s new official license plate, which will be issued through June 2015, pays tribute to the Free State’s role in the War of 1812. Which seems just perfect to me.
Maryland isn’t exactly a high-profile state. California excites the public imagination because it’s big and contradictory and unwieldy. New York is brassy. Massachusetts symbolizes liberalism. People make fun of my birth state of New Jersey, but it’s on everyone’s radar. Mississippi is ranked 50th in everything. Texas dares people to mess with it. Even out-of-the way states like Montana and Idaho have the anti-government crazies and, in the latter’s case, the Aryan Nations racists to raise a national hubbub. Virginia is for lovers. Maine’s got moose.
But, Maryland? Americans don’t give it a second thought. Like the gray Dakotas, the tiny Delaware and Rhode Island, and the bland, hot Southwestern states, it’s somehow indistinct. (OK, Arizona’s currently in the news because of its immigration law, but this, too, shall pass.) And the truth be known, Maryland’s anonymity suits me. To those who know it, it’s a lot of things—centrally located, historically corrupt, relatively progressive for its border-state, slaveholder roots—but it’s not pretentious. It doesn’t preen for the attention that eludes it.
And now this. Not only the license plate, but this recent headline from the Baltimore Sun: “Maryland Prepares Grand Salute to War of 1812.” What truly captured the essence of what I’m trying to get across was the subhead of that article: “Key Battle Sites Recognized in the ‘Forgotten War’ That Ended on Maryland Shores.”
There it is: “Forgotten War.” Forgotten why? Because, much like another second-tier conflict in American history, the Korean War, all the War of 1812 did was maintain the status quo. The United States was a recently independent nation before that two-year conflict, and so it remained afterward. The British pushed us around, then we pushed them around. Things ended up where they began, and a treaty put the stalemate in writing. Just like American-led troops in the three-year Korean “police action” almost lost that conflict, then almost won it, but ended up with a treaty that kept the peninsula divided at the 38th parallel.
Now, I’m not saying these weren’t wars worth fighting, that the brave soldiers who gave their lives shouldn’t be honored, and so on. (And the Korean War later yielded M*A*S*H, a fine film and TV show.) What I’m saying is that saluting a war about which nobody in this day and age gives a stray hoot is So Maryland, So the state few Americans could find on a map.
The perfection of this fledgling bicentennial extravaganza, which presumably is starting in 2010 to give the giddiness time to build, is crystallized in the license plate, which could not be blander or less impressive. Its minimalist, oddly modernist design purports to show Fort McHenry on the left side, with a big American flag popping up from its roof. The words “War of 1812” appear just below the state’s name at top center of the plate, and a Web address at the bottom center (starspangled.org) nudges non-residents to make connections most won’t—that our national anthem was written by Marylander Francis Scott Key about a battle waged in Baltimore Harbor in 1814 that was won by we Yanks, ensuring we’d all grow up with our stupid regional accents rather than infinitely cooler British ones.
I say that the plate “purports” to show Fort McHenry—which in fact is a wonderfully evocative battlement whose hills I’ve climbed many a time—because the artist’s rendering is boxy and (there’s that word again) indistinct. It could just as easily depict a big-box retail store as an early 19th-century protector of our national shoreline. And what, I ask, is blander, what less excites the imagination, than the evocation of a Wal-Mart or Best Buy—forgettable in design and identical from coast to coast?
This is what I mean when I pronounce Maryland’s choice of license plate the perfect marriage of state and object.
Maryland isn’t exactly a high-profile state. California excites the public imagination because it’s big and contradictory and unwieldy. New York is brassy. Massachusetts symbolizes liberalism. People make fun of my birth state of New Jersey, but it’s on everyone’s radar. Mississippi is ranked 50th in everything. Texas dares people to mess with it. Even out-of-the way states like Montana and Idaho have the anti-government crazies and, in the latter’s case, the Aryan Nations racists to raise a national hubbub. Virginia is for lovers. Maine’s got moose.
But, Maryland? Americans don’t give it a second thought. Like the gray Dakotas, the tiny Delaware and Rhode Island, and the bland, hot Southwestern states, it’s somehow indistinct. (OK, Arizona’s currently in the news because of its immigration law, but this, too, shall pass.) And the truth be known, Maryland’s anonymity suits me. To those who know it, it’s a lot of things—centrally located, historically corrupt, relatively progressive for its border-state, slaveholder roots—but it’s not pretentious. It doesn’t preen for the attention that eludes it.
And now this. Not only the license plate, but this recent headline from the Baltimore Sun: “Maryland Prepares Grand Salute to War of 1812.” What truly captured the essence of what I’m trying to get across was the subhead of that article: “Key Battle Sites Recognized in the ‘Forgotten War’ That Ended on Maryland Shores.”
There it is: “Forgotten War.” Forgotten why? Because, much like another second-tier conflict in American history, the Korean War, all the War of 1812 did was maintain the status quo. The United States was a recently independent nation before that two-year conflict, and so it remained afterward. The British pushed us around, then we pushed them around. Things ended up where they began, and a treaty put the stalemate in writing. Just like American-led troops in the three-year Korean “police action” almost lost that conflict, then almost won it, but ended up with a treaty that kept the peninsula divided at the 38th parallel.
Now, I’m not saying these weren’t wars worth fighting, that the brave soldiers who gave their lives shouldn’t be honored, and so on. (And the Korean War later yielded M*A*S*H, a fine film and TV show.) What I’m saying is that saluting a war about which nobody in this day and age gives a stray hoot is So Maryland, So the state few Americans could find on a map.
The perfection of this fledgling bicentennial extravaganza, which presumably is starting in 2010 to give the giddiness time to build, is crystallized in the license plate, which could not be blander or less impressive. Its minimalist, oddly modernist design purports to show Fort McHenry on the left side, with a big American flag popping up from its roof. The words “War of 1812” appear just below the state’s name at top center of the plate, and a Web address at the bottom center (starspangled.org) nudges non-residents to make connections most won’t—that our national anthem was written by Marylander Francis Scott Key about a battle waged in Baltimore Harbor in 1814 that was won by we Yanks, ensuring we’d all grow up with our stupid regional accents rather than infinitely cooler British ones.
I say that the plate “purports” to show Fort McHenry—which in fact is a wonderfully evocative battlement whose hills I’ve climbed many a time—because the artist’s rendering is boxy and (there’s that word again) indistinct. It could just as easily depict a big-box retail store as an early 19th-century protector of our national shoreline. And what, I ask, is blander, what less excites the imagination, than the evocation of a Wal-Mart or Best Buy—forgettable in design and identical from coast to coast?
This is what I mean when I pronounce Maryland’s choice of license plate the perfect marriage of state and object.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Friendship, Unplugged
Recently a friend of mine asked me if I’d agree to pull the plug on her. I responded that I’d consider it an honor. It got me to thinking about the stage I’ve reached in my life.
My friend isn’t dying, at least any more than are any of us from the day we’re born. There’s no medically imposed timeline on her death, is what I mean to say. It’s a legal matter. What she asked of me, essentially, was to give her “do not resuscitate” assurance should she find herself on death’s door with no hope of a meaningful quality of life. Anticipating my “Why me?” questions, she said that in her state (state of the union, not state of mind) the individual assigned this power cannot be a relative. And frankly, she added, she could not trust blood relatives to honor her wishes in this regard. As to why me and not another friend, she said she knew she could trust me not to say to her face now that I’d allow her to die, yet later tell doctors to continue life support, swayed by my own self-doubts and/or pressure from said relatives.
That was why I told her I was honored. It’s a humbling thing to know that someone trusts you with his or her life, or more precisely its end. Actually, her request had arrived via e-mail, which is less weird than it sounds if you consider that I hate the phone and generally instruct friends to write to me instead if at all possible. (A face-to-face conversation wasn’t immediately possible in this case for logistic reasons.) So I actually e-mailed her my unequivocal acceptance. I’d opened the reply with the enthusiastic affirmative that I’d “be happy” to pull the plug on her, knowing she’d appreciate the dark humor.
Speaking of that, it occurs to me that when you’re a teenager, you get asked to baby-sit the neighbor kids. When you’re in your 20s or 30s, you may get asked to be a godparent. When you’re in your 40s, you might be approached to adopt the children of a couple you know, should they both die in a car crash. Well, I’m 52—firmly entrenched, I now recognize, in a decade during which it isn’t so much about the lives of children, but more about the pending (if not yet imminent) deaths of peers.
In fact, Lynn, who’ll be 50 in November, recently fielded and accepted the same “please kill me” request from a friend of hers who’s roughly in our age group. It’s a funny thing. I look at it not so much that people see us as executioner types or even necessarily coolly dispassionate, but more as being trustworthy. And maybe, too, as being reliably secular. I don’t know that in either case our friends consciously tapped us because we haven’t any religious concepts or hang-ups about what truly constitutes “life,” or doubts as to whether humans should have the power to end what God has granted. But perhaps on some level it made us better candidates for the job, in their minds.
I mean, anybody who’s known me long enough to have heard my rants has heard me praise the state of Oregon and The Netherlands for their stances on assisted suicide, and remembers my fury a few years back over the protracted, heartbreaking Terri Schiavo ordeal in Florida. Not that there aren’t religious people who share my views, but secularists like Lynn and me are even less likely, probably, to be swayed by the certitude of people whose emotions are guided less by the wishes of the afflicted than by hope for the divine.
I won’t pretend I’m crazy about being in my 50s. But age can offer certain bonuses—comfort in one’s own skin, financial security, increased down time, etc. It also can confer special privileges. Such as, in my case, being handed a key to life and death I may never use, but to which I’ve nevertheless been entrusted.
My friend isn’t dying, at least any more than are any of us from the day we’re born. There’s no medically imposed timeline on her death, is what I mean to say. It’s a legal matter. What she asked of me, essentially, was to give her “do not resuscitate” assurance should she find herself on death’s door with no hope of a meaningful quality of life. Anticipating my “Why me?” questions, she said that in her state (state of the union, not state of mind) the individual assigned this power cannot be a relative. And frankly, she added, she could not trust blood relatives to honor her wishes in this regard. As to why me and not another friend, she said she knew she could trust me not to say to her face now that I’d allow her to die, yet later tell doctors to continue life support, swayed by my own self-doubts and/or pressure from said relatives.
That was why I told her I was honored. It’s a humbling thing to know that someone trusts you with his or her life, or more precisely its end. Actually, her request had arrived via e-mail, which is less weird than it sounds if you consider that I hate the phone and generally instruct friends to write to me instead if at all possible. (A face-to-face conversation wasn’t immediately possible in this case for logistic reasons.) So I actually e-mailed her my unequivocal acceptance. I’d opened the reply with the enthusiastic affirmative that I’d “be happy” to pull the plug on her, knowing she’d appreciate the dark humor.
Speaking of that, it occurs to me that when you’re a teenager, you get asked to baby-sit the neighbor kids. When you’re in your 20s or 30s, you may get asked to be a godparent. When you’re in your 40s, you might be approached to adopt the children of a couple you know, should they both die in a car crash. Well, I’m 52—firmly entrenched, I now recognize, in a decade during which it isn’t so much about the lives of children, but more about the pending (if not yet imminent) deaths of peers.
In fact, Lynn, who’ll be 50 in November, recently fielded and accepted the same “please kill me” request from a friend of hers who’s roughly in our age group. It’s a funny thing. I look at it not so much that people see us as executioner types or even necessarily coolly dispassionate, but more as being trustworthy. And maybe, too, as being reliably secular. I don’t know that in either case our friends consciously tapped us because we haven’t any religious concepts or hang-ups about what truly constitutes “life,” or doubts as to whether humans should have the power to end what God has granted. But perhaps on some level it made us better candidates for the job, in their minds.
I mean, anybody who’s known me long enough to have heard my rants has heard me praise the state of Oregon and The Netherlands for their stances on assisted suicide, and remembers my fury a few years back over the protracted, heartbreaking Terri Schiavo ordeal in Florida. Not that there aren’t religious people who share my views, but secularists like Lynn and me are even less likely, probably, to be swayed by the certitude of people whose emotions are guided less by the wishes of the afflicted than by hope for the divine.
I won’t pretend I’m crazy about being in my 50s. But age can offer certain bonuses—comfort in one’s own skin, financial security, increased down time, etc. It also can confer special privileges. Such as, in my case, being handed a key to life and death I may never use, but to which I’ve nevertheless been entrusted.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Shake Appeal
Today at about 5:04 am, Lynn and I were awakened from sleep by a deep rumbling that sounded to me like our house suddenly abutted train tracks, and to Lynn like the weather jokers had again blown a forecast and failed to predict thunder. A few minutes later our cancer-stricken greyhound, Ellie, limpingly padded into our bedroom, as if to ask, what now?
When the radio alarm came on at 6, we had our answer, and it was a thought that had run across Lynn’s and my mind at the time, before we fell back asleep. (Maybe Ellie had speculated similarly, but she never reveals much.) The rumbling had been a 3.6-magnitude earthquake, centered in the Germantown area of Montgomery County maybe 20 miles northwest of us.
A mild geologic occurrence as such things go, obviously, but of course it was the talk of morning radio in a region dying for conversational fodder besides the heat, the Gulf oil spill and the latest congressional nonsense. All-news WTOP quoted seismologists and reported calls from startled listeners. There was the expected quote from a Californian to the effect that a 3.6 quake barely qualifies as background noise. As I donned my running clothes (I had the day off from work), the DJs on the classic rock station mocked our seismic apocalypse with all manner of morning-zoo sound effects, from air-raid sirens to cars screeching to a halt. One of the guys reported that a listener had phoned in and said a decorative plate had tumbled from a shelf in his house during the seconds-long event, conking him on the head. The first known casualty of our natural disaster, the DJ quipped.
While I was out running, my own DJ patter ran through my mind. I could hear myself on air, asking, “Can you imagine if you and your partner were getting busy at around 5 am today? She’s moaning, ‘Omigod, did you just feel the earth move?!’” Which led me to hear in my head that old Carole King song. Hours later, with no one to annoy by my dreadful singing voice other than the beleaguered Ellie and our sacked-out cats, Winnie and Tess, I was belting out, “I feel the earth move under my feet/I feel the sky come tumblin’ down/I feel my heart start tremblin’/Whenever you’re around.” I leaned in to give yawning Winnie an “Ooh baby” for good measure.
Our pre-dawn temblor (love that word) was kind of cool, actually. There’s something to be said for a literal jolt from the ordinary—a wake-up call that doesn’t beep or blare, but, rather, thunders without exactly thundering, threatens without quite unnerving. Unlike most alarms, it proved a welcome way to start the day. It gave people something to talk but not argue about. It was quirky, in retrospect even fun.
And all the more so because, as it happened, nothing came tumblin’ down—except the stray decorative plate, and Carole King’s legacy, courtesy of my off-key “tribute.”
When the radio alarm came on at 6, we had our answer, and it was a thought that had run across Lynn’s and my mind at the time, before we fell back asleep. (Maybe Ellie had speculated similarly, but she never reveals much.) The rumbling had been a 3.6-magnitude earthquake, centered in the Germantown area of Montgomery County maybe 20 miles northwest of us.
A mild geologic occurrence as such things go, obviously, but of course it was the talk of morning radio in a region dying for conversational fodder besides the heat, the Gulf oil spill and the latest congressional nonsense. All-news WTOP quoted seismologists and reported calls from startled listeners. There was the expected quote from a Californian to the effect that a 3.6 quake barely qualifies as background noise. As I donned my running clothes (I had the day off from work), the DJs on the classic rock station mocked our seismic apocalypse with all manner of morning-zoo sound effects, from air-raid sirens to cars screeching to a halt. One of the guys reported that a listener had phoned in and said a decorative plate had tumbled from a shelf in his house during the seconds-long event, conking him on the head. The first known casualty of our natural disaster, the DJ quipped.
While I was out running, my own DJ patter ran through my mind. I could hear myself on air, asking, “Can you imagine if you and your partner were getting busy at around 5 am today? She’s moaning, ‘Omigod, did you just feel the earth move?!’” Which led me to hear in my head that old Carole King song. Hours later, with no one to annoy by my dreadful singing voice other than the beleaguered Ellie and our sacked-out cats, Winnie and Tess, I was belting out, “I feel the earth move under my feet/I feel the sky come tumblin’ down/I feel my heart start tremblin’/Whenever you’re around.” I leaned in to give yawning Winnie an “Ooh baby” for good measure.
Our pre-dawn temblor (love that word) was kind of cool, actually. There’s something to be said for a literal jolt from the ordinary—a wake-up call that doesn’t beep or blare, but, rather, thunders without exactly thundering, threatens without quite unnerving. Unlike most alarms, it proved a welcome way to start the day. It gave people something to talk but not argue about. It was quirky, in retrospect even fun.
And all the more so because, as it happened, nothing came tumblin’ down—except the stray decorative plate, and Carole King’s legacy, courtesy of my off-key “tribute.”
Thursday, July 15, 2010
So It Begins
A number of people over the years urged me to create a blog. (I won’t call you out here, in case you start reading this one and quickly regret the enthusiasm.) I long resisted the idea.
Writing a blog struck me as self-indulgent. I wasn’t sure I really had anything to say, or worth reading about. Perhaps worst of all, everybody and his brother (or sister) blogs these days. I had to take a hard look at myself. I mean, am I on Facebook? No. Do I text? No. Do I even have an electronic gizmo on which to text? No. So, why start a blog?
Well, I do like to write, for one thing. For another, I do have opinions—observations, joys and rants—that I enjoy sharing with friends. I’ve been told I “give good e-mail.” I hope so. I’m a journalist by background, so I like telling a story in an economy of words. I love language and wordplay, so I try to pique and entertain. I’m a wiseass by nature, so I try to be funny—ideally, but not always, where appropriate. Sometimes, though—and I’m a little embarrassed to concede my ego—I want a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail can afford.
Some people have urged me to write a novel or book of short stories. I appreciate the show of confidence, but I can’t see that ever happening. I lack the breadth of imagination, and I’m insufficiently disciplined. What is fiction writing if not the intersection of vision, talent and industry? Having only (maybe) one of the three isn’t enough.
Which is why blogging has come to look attractive to me, despite its confounding popularity. Blog posts needn’t be long. I’ll never have to make things up from whole cloth. I can riff on what I know, what I just read or saw, what strikes me as amusing, what I find maddening. I can treat posts casually, kind of like long e-mail messages—and, in so doing, hopefully avoid inertia.
So, I’ve decided to give this a shot. My goal is to write about things I find interesting, and to present those musings in an engaging way. Sometimes posts will touch on my own life and circumstances, but more often, I hope, they won’t. Because the last thing I want to do is bore anybody, and in my mind whenever anyone starts closely chronicling his or her daily life, the potential for tedium is gigantic.
One last note: The name of this blog is my joke on myself, given that it’s taken me 52 years to challenge myself in this way, and given my fear at the start that I’m too lazy to keep this thing going. The Webster’s definition of lassitude is “a condition of weariness, listlessness, or debility: fatigue.” I hope not to make readers weary or fatigued. I guess we’ll see. Here goes nuthin’.
Writing a blog struck me as self-indulgent. I wasn’t sure I really had anything to say, or worth reading about. Perhaps worst of all, everybody and his brother (or sister) blogs these days. I had to take a hard look at myself. I mean, am I on Facebook? No. Do I text? No. Do I even have an electronic gizmo on which to text? No. So, why start a blog?
Well, I do like to write, for one thing. For another, I do have opinions—observations, joys and rants—that I enjoy sharing with friends. I’ve been told I “give good e-mail.” I hope so. I’m a journalist by background, so I like telling a story in an economy of words. I love language and wordplay, so I try to pique and entertain. I’m a wiseass by nature, so I try to be funny—ideally, but not always, where appropriate. Sometimes, though—and I’m a little embarrassed to concede my ego—I want a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail can afford.
Some people have urged me to write a novel or book of short stories. I appreciate the show of confidence, but I can’t see that ever happening. I lack the breadth of imagination, and I’m insufficiently disciplined. What is fiction writing if not the intersection of vision, talent and industry? Having only (maybe) one of the three isn’t enough.
Which is why blogging has come to look attractive to me, despite its confounding popularity. Blog posts needn’t be long. I’ll never have to make things up from whole cloth. I can riff on what I know, what I just read or saw, what strikes me as amusing, what I find maddening. I can treat posts casually, kind of like long e-mail messages—and, in so doing, hopefully avoid inertia.
So, I’ve decided to give this a shot. My goal is to write about things I find interesting, and to present those musings in an engaging way. Sometimes posts will touch on my own life and circumstances, but more often, I hope, they won’t. Because the last thing I want to do is bore anybody, and in my mind whenever anyone starts closely chronicling his or her daily life, the potential for tedium is gigantic.
One last note: The name of this blog is my joke on myself, given that it’s taken me 52 years to challenge myself in this way, and given my fear at the start that I’m too lazy to keep this thing going. The Webster’s definition of lassitude is “a condition of weariness, listlessness, or debility: fatigue.” I hope not to make readers weary or fatigued. I guess we’ll see. Here goes nuthin’.
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