My first winter solstice on the Florida coast

This solstice I awoke to lawnmowers, just one, the riding mower Brian pilots as he mows my yard and the ones adjacent and across the street. It’s winter solstice and in Wyoming I didn’t wake up to lawnmowers. Snowblowers sound similar but the pitch is different, closer to a screech than a roar. And the mowers move quickly as they crisscross the salt-air-resistant St. Augustine grass that is like a weaving rather than the upright bluegrass or fine fescue of Wyoming. Yes, bluegrass, a lawn type suited more for the green of Kentucky racehorse pastures than the brown of the high prairie. When bluegrass matures, it feels fine on bare feet. Not so the Florida varietal; its runners poke feet. It keeps growing after summer and Brian is here every other week in December instead of every week in June. The Florida rains arrive and you can almost watch the grass grow.

Winter solstice announces the rough part of winter and the beginning of longer bouts of sun although we barely notice it day by day. Summer solstice announces the glorious days of summer and the slow passage of the sun across the sky or so it seems when you live in the Sunshine State and you work mowing lawns or pounding nails or laying down roofing shingles. Brian finishes the big front law and moves to the back. He makes three passes in my tiny yard and then he’s on to Number  70 or Number 66 or motors across the street to Number 67. I hear him most of the morning and it’s odd is what it is, this summer sound at Christmastime. Soon the leafblower erupts and it’s more akin to snowblowers and I wish I found comfort in it but don’t.

In Florida and Wyoming, the sounds of December 21 mean one thing: summer is coming. In Wyoming, it takes its own sweet time. In Florida, well, it’s already here.

Watching surfers the day before my 74th birthday

They are tiny figures on the outside sandbar, straddling their surfboards, heads bobbing up with each oncoming wave, and then obscured again behind the froth.

I know how it feels, this waiting. It’s not like other kinds of waiting, waiting for a traffic light to turn, waiting in the grocery store line, waiting for school day’s final bell.

It’s waiting for the future, waiting to see the heft of the wave, the promise of the day’s best ride as the sea moves beneath your board and lifts you up and it’s up to you to see where you go and what you do

And sometimes it’s a bubbling brute of whitewater that pushes you off the board and into the drink and depending on the wave size, how much time you spend cartwheeling until you emerge to find your board.

These young surfers out there today, they wear leashes and their boards spin with them and sometimes into them.

In the 1960s, the boards were bigger and unleashed, could whack you good if close enough, the skeg or fin a sharp knife that can leave a mark.

My surf life was short, a high school thing that I left behind in my twenties and I don’t know why.

Some of today’s surfers will be out on the waves in twenty years – remember how young you were at 37, half my age now? At 17, 37 is forever years away, 74 is so far down the line that it doesn’t exist except among those old people who clog the roads as you speed to the beach before the waves get blown out.

Age beached me. I can’t walk. I can swim with a floatation device. I can get to the beach by car and use my walker to get to the water, let it lick my toes, take me back to 1967 when a December day with waves was good enough but not as glorious as a July day with surf and 80-degree water and my fellow surfers surround me and I spy my girlfriend pull up and park and she waves and I return the wave and feel as if I will live forever this way, a young man in the ocean, just waiting for the next wave.

The sea calls my name

Wind from the ancient sea

A hurricane-force wind blew down the pine onto my roof on a February day. The house shook and I looked out the front window to see the pine cantilevered from the ground to the roof. Damn it’s Super Bowl Sunday and I have a game to watch but that’s how it is in Wyoming where there are plenty of mighty winds but no hurricanes. Like in “Oklahoma” where “the wind comes sweepin’ ‘cross the plains,” in Wyoming, the wind comes sweeping across the Gangplank of the Laramie Range right through Cheyenne and on to Nebraska. Wind from an ancient sea, nothing to stop it but my tree and my roof and a limited imagination.

We slept with bedroom windows wide in the middle of winter. Furnace so efficient we cranked it down but were still warm as toast in our beds. I came to bed late, Chris already sleeping, and the wind would ruffle the dainty curtains etched with palm trees. The wind lulled me to sleep. Trees might come crashing down or maybe just big branches but this was Wyoming and trees were scarce and far between. As I fell asleep, I imagined the wind with a salt tinge, fresh from the ocean, traveling the thousand yards from the beach to our little house and through the wide-open jalousie windows and the beat-up screens and into my memory where it remains.

And last night, I heard the ocean while reading in my house a short walk away from the Atlantic. It’s wide, the ocean, wider than Wyoming and the entire West with its gangplanks and sweeping plains and rock-ribbed cliffs. I threw open the window and realized the ocean was kicking, stirred up by some force beyond the horizon. It was loud, as if waves were breaking at my tympani. I rushed to bed, tucked myself in, memories of the surf kicking up and into my teen-age room, promise of big waves tomorrow, surfing with my brother, gone these ten years, the sea calling us as if it knew our names.

A swim in the Y pool may not be a walk in the park

I am training myself to walk again. It's no walk in the park.

I looked up "walk meaning" and found some leisurely reading.

It's a verb (I walked to school) and a noun (It was a leisurely walk). It's a word you hear on almost of every episode of "Law & Order:" "We can't just let this perp walk!" If he does, I'm certain he will walk quickly from the building most likely in the company of his attorney.

Walk is quite popular. A chart on Google Ngram Viewer shows that the popularity of walk is at an all-time high in the 2020s. It may not remain there judging by our unfit population, all in need of a good walk or even a not-so-good one.

This brings this post to me. I cannot walk. My body revolted and, judging by a photo taken in a hospital ICU, I was revolting afterward. "That's not me" I said when my wife showed me the photo of the old man on the gurney. He was obviously out of it. IV tubes snaked from his arm. He had been intubated and fitted with a feeding tube. You couldn't see the Foley catheter or the heart monitor but they were there amongst the jumble of sheets and blankets.

That was Sept. 9. I can walk now, sort of. I get around with a standard walker complete with tennis-ball feet and I also have a rollator walker with four wheels. I sometimes scoot around on an electric scooter labeled Buzz Around XL. When Chris and I go for a walk on the bike path, she walks and I scoot. Still, we call it a walk. I do. 

But I can't walk, not yet anyway. Over the past five years, I hurt myself in ways that blunted my walking mechanism. That's a silly way to put it. I sometimes tell people I am partially disabled. I did that the other day. Jeff escorted Chris and me on an introductory tour of the Ormond Beach YMCA. We joined and wanted to see what we were getting into. A lifeguard about my age but looking 20 years younger, showed me the chair they use for hefting people like me into the pool's shallow end. I explained that I was partially disabled and that I could walk down the five steps into the pool to join each morning's water-ex class.. I plan to walk unaided or maybe with a cane in the near future. I aim to be a walker again. It will not be a walk in the park and it hasn't been. Still...

Did I really need that ambulance on the September night in question?

Most Americans, it seems, have been following the hunt for the murderer of United Healthcare exec Brian Thompson. But it’s not the manhunt that has received most of the attention. Instead, it’s the deeply flawed American healthcare system which, to most people, represents the American Healthcare Denial System beholden to Wall Street. Valid medical claims are turned down because they hurt Healthcare United’s bottom line. I shall throw my insurer in there, too, as my family has been denied payment by CIGNA for medical claims. Much of that is related to mental healthcare for my children. I could write a book on our experiences with various insurers as we worked to save our children. I will not write a book -- what’s the point? Inequalities of our system have been going on for decades and will continue.

My experiences with my healthcare claims and those of my wife have been great. Heart attacks, it seems, ring a bell with insurers. Near-death experiences with septicemia also resonate in the corridors of both CIGNA and Medicare. Those were claims made by me, the Widowmaker in 2014 and the septicemia in 2024. Seems as if I have a major malfunction every ten years.

The latest issue took me by surprise. I got a bill from Volusia County Emergency Medical Services for an ambulance transport to Advent Health Hospital in Daytona. They write that Medicare has turned me down for the $894.80 ride and said it was a “ ‘non-covered service’ because it does not meet Medicare’s medical necessity requirements.”

This seems quite odd to me as Medicare has partially covered at least one ambulance ride. In January in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I caught Covid and one cold January night I couldn’t breathe from the congestion and an ambulance took me to the local hospital where they got me breathing again and sent me home five hours later. That met Medicare’s medical necessity requirements.

At the ER on the night of Sept. 9, the Code Blue team was called out as my heart stopped twice  after I had two seizures. Chris said it was quite a sight to see as medical personnel rushed into the room and saved me. My vitals were wacko (medical term) and staff guessed I had a massive infection of some kind and they placed me in a coma for four days.

Pause here to let readers know that my dear wife took a photo of the comatose me and I will share it if you ask nicely and agree to publish my next novel. 

When I came to in ICU, I didn’t know where I was and what had happened. To read the full experience, go to my previous posts here and here. Turns out I had septicemia from an unknown source and it blasted my bodily functions such as walking and talking, eating and defecating. I was moved from ICU to a medical floor and then the twelfth floor which Advent devotes to physical therapy for stroke victims, the partially paralyzed, and mystery cases like me. I made enough progress by Oct. 4 that Advent released me back into the Florida Wilds and that’s where I’ve been ever since.

I am a lucky man. I am blessed more than I should be blessed. There is one thing I will not be and that is almost $900 poorer because I didn’t meet Medicare’s requirements for sick people. Twenty-five days in the hospital? A quick survey of my hospital history: I spent five days after my heart attack, three days after knee-replacement surgery, and two days following a spinal fusion. I am so glad I wasn’t sick enough in September and decided to take an Advent Health cruise.

Volusia County Emergency Medical Services sent me a list of items I must file for an appeal. They include all of my medical records from the hospital (“you may be required to pay a fee") and “a letter from any physicians you may have followed up with in regards to your ambulance transport.” I can see how daunting this might be for someone, possibly a retired someone recovering at home from a near-death experience.

There is some irony here. It wasn’t the bad guys at CIGNA that turned me down. That mega-insurer is my secondary and they haven’t had a crack at me yet. I pay too much of my pension for that coverage. I also paid for Medicare which is a government program. I should be railing against the stinkin’ gubment, right. Old Joe Biden let me down.

But during my recovery, I’ve noticed that Medicare is concerned about higher costs and wants all of us to use its new reporting system. This addresses higher costs and the millions, maybe billions, of fraud claims by people who should be strung up on the highest yardarm (archaic Navy term). One of the highest costs for patients and Medicare is the abuse/overuse of ambulance services.

Trump’s Project 2025 may be behind Medicare’s new cost-saving initiative. But wait – Trump is busy enlisting nincompoops to head government agencies and getting his ass kissed at Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and hasn’t yet assumed the mantles of power.

The only thing left to blame is the USA’s antiquated and rapacious healthcare system. The death of a healthcare executive is a tragedy. And it is tragic that some find humor in it.

Delighting in the suffering of others is a MAGA trait, is it not? What in the hell are we doing?

Winter is coming and it's time to stockpile soup for a nasty 2025

I blame Max Brooks.

Yes, the guy who wrote “World War Z” and the excellent graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters” (artwork by Caanan White).

In his 2020 book, “Devolution,” Brooks combines a gigantic eruption of Mount Rainier and a Sasquatch invasion and civil war and the bumbling of clueless techies. All hell breaks loose.

Most people are woefully unprepared because we are Americans and live for the moment and ourselves. We do not stockpile food and supplies like the LDSers and Preppers. Why bother? Nothing’s gonna happen.

In “Devolution,” residents of the wired Greenloop community high in the scenic Washington state mountains must find ways to do without grocery deliveries by drone, solar power, and cell connections as they struggle to survive. The elderly artist in the co-op knows how to grow spuds from potato eyes and how to trap and dissect rabbits for a yummy stew.

I was thinking about that while staring at the canned soups at Publix. Look at all of those cans. They don’t need refrigeration. They don’t really need to be cooked as they are MREs. So, acting on instinct and paranoia, I grabbed a bunch of Progresso soups. You don’t even need a manual can opener as you can open the can yourself even if you have difficulties with aging hands as I do. I imagine that all of the refrigerated food is eaten or spoiled. We have long since eaten all the packaged crackers and cookies and snacks.

Soup will save us. I grabbed a dozen cans. Piled them high in the cart. When Chris caught up with me, she surveyed my shopping cart and asked, “Why all the soup?”

“Winter is coming.”

“This isn’t ‘Games of Thrones’ “

“Winter, it’s still coming.”

“I know. But not this week. And we have a fridge and freezer filled with food.”

“People are talking about a civil war. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”

“You watched ‘Ghostbusters’ again?”

“But what if…”

“What if what?”

A crowd gathered by the soups. People stared at us, and then at the beautiful red-and-white cans of original Campbell’s, tiny tributes to Andy Warhol. Some wanted to get their own soup to stockpile for a looming disaster such as one the USA will face on Jan. 20, 2025.

Chris, alas, had her way. I put back most of the soups. We kept Campbell’s chicken noodle and Progresso creamy tomato and basil.

The rest of the shopping trip was uneventful. I managed to slip in a box of saltines and boxes of Band-Aids, the large kind, the kind you would use for post-apocalyptic wounds. I checked out and went home to continue reading “Devolution,” large-print edition.

And I had to ask myself: What if?

When we were friends

Some have died. Too many. A High School Friend, knocked back by alcohol, claimed by Covid, I hadn’t seen in decades. No funeral due to the pandemic. We knew each other in high school but I ran with a different crowd, I thought I was all that, you know, how at 17 you can think you’re all that without knowing what that is and what you may become. A few years later, we partied together, were roommates at the beat-up house at the end of the street on the way to Newnan’s Lake in Gainesville. He had a car, shuttled the lot of us to Daytona to be with family and other old friends. On one summer trip the afternoon skies opened up as it does in Florida. We rounded a corner, the sheets of rain easing up, and came upon a rollover. Pickup lost control on rain-slick country road. Little metal cylinders rolled around the soggy pavement and two guys too young to drink legally scrambled to pick them up. One guy motioned for us to come over and said “take as many beers as you want” and we realized that dozen of cans of PBR were on the tarmac. “Take them – cops are coming!” He shoved an armful at me. I stared, and then heard the sirens. “Hurry!!” My Housemate and I shuttled back and forth to his car and we had quite a stash by the time the Sheriff arrived. We were asked if we were witnesses and we said no sir no sir we just happened by afterwards and wanted to help but we’ll be on our way now sir. And we were. Partied all weekend at the beach. My Roomie more than most but thought that was just the way he was so the days and weeks and years went on and I realized that My Friend would never let go of those PBRs and Jack and shrooms and whatever other mind-altering substance came his way. I went West with the woman who became my wife and there was a 25-year reunion at a beach hotel and I was with wife and two kids and My Old Roomie was sober, with a woman friend he had met at AA. Later, he was homeless, or so I heard. I didn’t check to see if that was true. I had my own problems – that’s what I told myself. His sister texted me to say My Classmate had died of Covid, had been sick at home for too long and it was too late by the time he was carted off to the hospital and died. No funeral due to Covid and now it’s been several years and his face swims into view when we talk about school chums, where are they now and so on. My wife and I have now returned to that beach town where we met and memories swirl around like skeeters on a July night. I can tell you one thing that is true: There was a time during my brief span on Earth when this man and I were friends. On this lonely planet, for a brief time, we were friends. That will have to do.