Even cyborgs need periodic battery replacements

I’ve been recovering from heart surgery since Feb. 16. It was Valentine’s Day Week and it seemed like a good time for it. Heart surgery has an ominous sound. Thoughts go to quadruple bypasses and aortic valve replacement. I just needed a replacement generator in my chest to stop any signs of ventricular fibrillation which can lead to death. The gadget is filled with microchips and wires that connect to leads that snake down into my heart. I got my first one ten years ago after a widowmaker heart attack that almost did me in. Because it took too long to get help for my stopped-up heart, it sustained some muscle damage which in turn made my heart less effective. Up until January 2013, my heart had been very good to me. In high school, it pumped like a champ as I ran down the basketball court or when a girl looked at me in a certain way. Got me through my adult years until I hit 62 then BAM! Damn…

So the first one wore out and I needed a new one. I am on Medicare and have secondary insurance that pay for the $23,000 gizmo and attendant expenses such as doctor’s fees, OR fees, nursing services, etc. I am lucky to have health care insurance that keeps me ticking. Health insurance is a right and should not be optional. I see that our esteemed GOP state legislators have once again torpedoed Medicaid expansion that would insure thousands of Wyomingites. A widowmaker strikes and you need help? Tough luck, buddy. For the GOP it’s all about the cruelty. They didn’t used to announce their cruelties for all the world to see and hear. Now they shout it from the rooftops.

Back to my trip to the operating room. It’s called the CRMC Cath Lab and it’s where the electrophysiologists work their magic. I was under conscious sedation, like the kind you get for your colonoscopy. In this case, the surgeon applied a topical anesthesia and then pumped me with Fentanyl but not too much. He then cut into my chest, removed the old battery and in with the new. Then he sealed me back up. Before you know what’s going on, I'm being whisked off to recovery.

So how does my electrophysiologist keep track of the signals beamed from my Abbott Laboratories ICD? I used to have a Merlin Home Transmitter the size of the big black phones you used to see in 1940s movies. It sat by the side of my bed and beamed my readings to the CRMC Device Clinic. My new monitor is a Samsung device, smaller than a smart phone, that I can take anywhere. Pretty slick.

My new machine should last 5-7 years, according to the pamphlet that accompanied it. I plan on lasting at least that long. Seven days post-op and I’m doing fine.

Thank you, modern technology and surgical expertise. 

Two years ago I reviewed a nonfiction book about ICDs on WyoFile. It's "Lightning Flowers" and written by Wyoming author Katherine E. Standefer. She needed a device while still in her 20s and then set out to find the its origins. A great tale, whether you're a cyborg or not. 

Night of the Widowmaker, ten years on

Ten years ago on these pages, I regaled my readers with stories of my heart attack. It was an exciting misadventure. Nobody in my family had heart issues and neither did I. I was struck down in the middle of a working day. The scientific name for my affliction is anterior ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction or STEMI. It’s commonly known as “The Widowmaker.”

I didn’t hear the term from a cardiologist until I was recovering in my hospital room. Such finality. It seemed so 19th century. "Night of the Widowmaker" could easily be the title of a thriller novel. Its shock value was too tempting for a storyteller to ignore. I used it hundreds of times in place of heart attack. When I took the time to describe it in detail, tossing in an encyclopedia of medical terms, I could see my listener’s attention begin to wane. Simply described, the left anterior descending (LAD) artery gets blocked by a clot or plaque and the heart reacts.

The signs are there should you pay attention. Chest pain, shortness of breath, excessive sweating, jaw pain. Mine was a belly ache. Since it happened during norovirus season, I figured I was getting ready to blow chunks and/or get the runs. I got neither. It was Dec, 17, 2012, and the eve of my birthday number 62. I might have to lay off the cake and ice cream. I was off work for two weeks so I could lie around and see what happened. After a week, I went to my GP and he thought I might have pneumonia so sent me for an X-ray. He had a perfectly good EKG machine out in the hall but that never entered into the conversation. The X-ray showed congestion and the doc prescribed an antibiotic and bed rest.

On Jan. 2, I headed to work but only made it as far as my front door. I couldn’t open it. I called my wife. She decided to come home and take me to the ER. When she arrived, she saw I was in pain so called 911. The EMTs got there quick, took my vitals, and said I was having heart failure. They bundled me onto a gurney and sped, sirens blaring, to the hospital. Tests and X-rays showed the heart attack and also congestive heart failure. Dr. Khan wanted to get me to surgery right away but held off because I couldn’t breathe. So he stashed me on the telemetry floor and prescribed Lasik to rid my body of fluids. The next day, I had an oblation which opened the LAD and I began to recover.

Then I started telling my story. My heart, left to its own devices for two weeks, lost some of its pumping power. They filled me full of drugs, sent me home with orders for several rounds of cardiotherapy. Six months later, I got the bad news that my heart had only partially recovered and that I was a prime candidate for Catastrophic heart failure. To avoid further drama, I needed an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator or ICD. So I got one. Its battery eventually ran down, so this last Thursday, I got a new one.

The ICD lasts from 7-10 years. I pushed mine to the end so Medicare and my insurance company would agree to foot the bill. Medicare reimbursement for an ICD is 23 thousand and change. That doesn’t include hospital and physician and other associated fees. That will quickly eat up my deductible so my out-of-pocket costs will be manageable.

Someone with a heart condition shouldn’t have to worry about affordability. Someone with breast cancer – my wife – shouldn’t have to worry about treatment costs. My son and daughter, both with mental health and medical needs, shouldn’t have to up their angst to find affordable treatments. Alas, that’s where we are in 2023 in the United States of America.

Next time, I'll explore the status of my heart ten years on.

For some of my ruminations on the widowmaker, put "heart" in the blog's search bar.

Kristin Hannah's historical novel features the brave women of the French Resistance

I’m reading “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. It’s the story of two sisters in a small French village occupied by the Nazis. The elder sister, Vianne, has a child and a husband captured during the Nazi blitzkrieg. The younger one, Isabelle, is the rebel of the family, kicked out of a number of boarding schools and now working for the French Resistance. The sisters live very different lives. They share a hatred of the Nazis and possess strong wills to survive the war. The more compelling story is of the Resistance. The author has said that the novel is a tribute to these brave women. They faced dying during guerrilla raids or arrest which also meant death or a trip to a Nazi extermination camp. I just finished a chapter where Isabelle with her Basque guide takes four downed RAF pilots from Paris over the Pyrenees to the British embassy in neutral Spain.

Imagine traveling undercover to Jackson in a train jammed with Nazis and then hiking over the Tetons to Driggs in late October, struggling up talus slopes and crossing waterways, all the while dodging Nazis on one side of the border or Franco’s fascists on the other side. Or maybe it’s a postapocalyptic jaunt where the bad guys are some of the right-wing goons who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Well-armed and stupid. Rain and snow will fall as you travel. It will be cold and you’re wearing running shoes and a light jacket.

You get the picture. These people were braver than brave. Their country had been overrun. Friends and family members had been killed by the Nazis. They must pay.

I don’t know what I would do. I’ve hiked Wyoming and Colorado mountains in all kinds of weather but I am always prepared. I am in my 20s (used to be), dressed for the climate and wearing good boots. I have five days of food in my pack and one of those tiny stoves. Good topo maps. Pretend I have a loaded Glock at my side, prepared for attacks by Bloaters (“The Last of Us,” episode 5).

Just think about it. The French Resistance had so much less and did so much more.

I’m looking forward to the film version of “The Nightingale.” Dakota and Elle fanning play the sisters. I hope the creators do it justice. You can see a teaser here.

Booth and the Our American Cousin we want to forget

BOOTH

That family name is infamous. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the most dastardly deeds in U.S. history. We still live with the consequences.

Booth didn't just rise from the Ford Theater stage and murder a president. He came from somewhere. He had parents, brothers and sisters. As a kid in Maryland, he was a scamp who liked dogs, rode horses, and played tricks on his siblings. He is not a monster, at least he's not in Karen Joy Fowler's amazing historical novel, "Booth." He's the third-youngest of the children of noted actor Junius Booth and his beleaguered wife. A Marylander, he turns into a Southern sympathizer and buys into the kind of political mind-rot our Uncle Jimbo in South Carolina now gets on Fox and social media. 

We know how the story ends. In tragedy, maybe the worst one in American history. An almost-famous actor kills the president and changes history.

One can almost hear the reporters of 1865 interviewing the neighbors. "He seemed like such a nice man. Last winter I saw him playing in the snow with the kids (a scene from "Booth"). A fine actor too. You just gotta wonder what went wrong."

Presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. He seemed like such a nice man. Until he wasn't.

"Booth," an historical novel by Karen Joy Fowler, explores the Booth family history leading up to April 14, 1865, at a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer and conspiracy nut, bursts into Lincoln's box and shoots him in the head. The country, part of it anyway, goes into mourning. Unreconstructed Confederates cheer. 

A divided country -- so what else is new? 

Don't get around much anymore, but plan to change that

My daughter Annie invited me to go on the Friday ArtWalk. I used to go every month when I worked at the Wyoming Arts Council. Then I retired and went less often. Then I hurt my spine and needed a walker to get around. Then came Covid and there was no ArtWalk. Then Covid was over and my wife Chris was diagnosed with breast cancer.

ArtWalk was taken over by Arts Cheyenne in 2022 after a ten-year run in the hands of local artist Georgia Rowswell. It's gone from the second Thursday of the month to a First Friday arts event. It includes visits to local galleries, such as Clay Paper Scissors and new arts venues such as the Cheyenne Creativity Center downtown. There's new art to see, lots to eat and drink, and music by local musicians.

I hadn’t been to a First Friday before Annie invited me. She’s an artist too, you see, and just getting involved in the local art scene. Since most of my professional life was spent as an arts administrator where I did a lot of arts stuff, Annie depends on me for insight into that world. I laugh inwardly, not wanting to think about all of the things I don’t know about the art world. I know just enough.

Last night I realized that my social skills are not as fine-tuned as when I regularly had to schmooze with artists, writers, gallery owners, politicians, just plain folks. I was quite adept at small talk and most of the time I was on hand as a professional from the state arts agency and people expected me to say something enlightening. I tried. More than once I had to say I didn’t have an answer and I would get back to them on it. And I did. That’s how I learned. OJT. There are people born as arts administrators, there are those who go to college for it, and there are those who learn through trial and error. I am in this latter category. While in grad school at Colorado State, I helped arrange readings by writers. I had attended quite a few as a fan and someone busily writing fiction while I tried to make a living in other ways. I had no real sense of what it took to put on a reading. I found out at CSU.

I also did my first try at administering the arts. One of my faculty mentors, Mary Crow, asked if I wanted to serve on the Fine Arts Series. I was trying to get to class, teach a couple sections of composition, workshop my own writing, and find way to spend time with my wife and young son. Naturally, I volunteered. The Fine Arts Series meetings were busy and congenial. Its members included undergraduates and graduate students. Also CSU staff including the director, Mims Harris. I stepped into a semester that featured music and dance performances, an annual poster art show, and literary events. I volunteered for the latter. Thus began my journey.

Last night, I felt detached from that world. Early in retirement, I made a choice to spend time with my own writing and not volunteer for arts events. And then all of those other things happened and I found myself out of the loop. There was a lot I really liked about the loop. Educating myself and meeting new people. I liked that. Paperwork? Not so much. Annie has had a few arts-related jobs and is learning. My son volunteers for the local theatre and he also is discovering the joys and sorrows of THE LIFE.

I plan on attending more ArtWalks, readings, book signings, and the annual Governor’s Arts Awards gala. I miss it. I continue writing – that’s a priority. But all work and no play make Mike a dull boy. My advice: stay in touch with your schmoozing self. It keeps you engaged and the mind working, a concern for anyone over 70 which is where I find myself. I could play Wordle or assemble 1,000-piece puzzles. That would sharpen my synapses. I could do any number of things in retirement. An Atlantic Magazine Online piece this week asked "Why so many people are unhappy in retirement." The subhead: "Too often, we imagine life to be like the hero's journey and leave out the crucial last step: letting go." I could only read the first graf before the paywell clicked in. But I got the gist. Nobody wants to let go. Our entire life is based on beingness. We are not equipped to grasp nothingness. So we rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Or we sulk. Or lurk on social media. Or watch Fox News all day and experience the sweet rush of having our brains sucked from our heads.

I will choose engagement. I feel alive then and can delay thoughts of letting go for just one more day.

I discover Donald Westlake's novels and reminisce about John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee

I found Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books and they are fantastic. Always a caper going on. Always sharp dialogue and lots of humor. Westlake passed away in 2008 but I can see he's in the same school as Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Janet Evanovich and Jerome Charyn. Maybe a dash of Don DeLillo too. So far I've read two of the volumes, "The Road to Ruin" and the first Dortmunder novel, "The Hot Rock." It was published in 1970. I didn't look that up until I finished but there were clues placed throughout. The cars they drive, the characters' language, ubiquitous phone booths, no personal computers. Its throwback quality didn't bother me. He had a skillful way of incorporating all of that into the narrative.  

What other crime-adjacent novels of that era would show such wit? I thought of John D. MacDonald, for instance, and his Travis McGee character. McGee probably had too much machismo for these times. He could be funny and ironic. He called himself a "salvage consultant" and lived on his "Busted Flush" houseboat docked at the Bahia Mar Marina. McGee's erstwhile sidekick is Meyer, an economist always ready for a McGee caper. He dwells on a neighboring boat named for his hero, John Maynard Keynes.

I worked at a Florida bookstore in the '70s and I brought MacDonald's novels to my mother Anna Shay (R.I.P Mom) and she devoured them. Me too. Travis and his Busted Flush houseboat. I could always see McGee's houseboat through MacDonald's imagination. Back in the '80s, my brother Dan and I visited Bahia Mar and stopped at Slip F-18. We thought about the McGee we knew from the books. Slip F-18 was declared a literary landmark in 1987, a year after the author's death. 

I did my usual Google search for Travis McGee and came up with an article by Kris Hundley on the Visit Florida site (couldn't find a pub date). The second paragraph about the Bahia Mar Marina set the tone for the story:

There's little room left for a boat bum like Travis McGee. 

She described present-day Bahia Mar in gritty detail.

Bahia Mar touts its ability to accommodate yachts up to 300 feet, even squeezing in a 312-footer recently for a month-long stay. The marina's 3,000-foot dock along the Intracoastal sports one mega-yacht after another. flawlessly polished hulls gleaming, white communications domes looming 50-feet overhead, docked so closely together that the uber-rich could step from one vessel to another without ever touching the ground. Not an inch of precious real estate is wasted.

Bahia Mar must have considered the literary landmark plaque dedicated to MacDonald as "wasted space." It now sits in the marina's office. Hundley wraps up the piece this way: 

A boat bum might seem forgotten among such glitz. But inside the marina office, the woman behind the desk said that not a week goes by that someone doesn't wander in, looking for the slip once occupied by Travis McGee. She is not sure what the fuss is about: she's never read the books. 

Made me want to bang my head against the desk. MacDonald and McGee would have had a few things to say about the wretched excess of 21st century Florida. As a self-described "salvage consultant," McGee usually was coming to the aid of a trusting soul who had been ripped by someone who would own a 312-foot mega-yacht. His price was always half of the recovered loot. When the client objected, his usual response was "half of something is better that nothing." MacDonald also wrote the best-selling "Condominium" which tore into the thoughtless development going on in coastal Florida which has not abated in the 46 years since the novel's original publication. 

During his lifetime, MacDonald got great reviews from the likes of Hiaasen and Kurt Vonnegut. Here's what Vonnegut said about MacDonald's work:

“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen."

I feel a need to reread Travis McGee, see how he holds up in these fast-moving and confusing times.

Mike Miller posted an updated article on Travis McGee on Jan. 28. It was on the Florida Back Roads Travel site. In it, he writes about how he first came upon MacDonald's character when his father visited him in Florida in 1964 and gave him a copy of "The Deep Blue Good-by." His father was reading the latest novel, "Nightmare in Pink." Miller read "Deep Blue" and was hooked. He's read the entire series, some of them twice, and is a devoted fan. Read Miller's essay to understand what makes McGee tick, and why his books are still in print. 

My mother died too young in 1986, a McGee fan to the end. Mike Miller's father died in a St. Cloud, Fla., nursing home in 1986, the same year MacDonald died. Miller Senior's dying message to his son was "Nightmare in Pink." 

Now that's a fan.

Saying goodbye to a friend, Dick Lechman

A eulogy for a friend from a friend: 

Books, books, books.

Dick Lechman had thousands of books at one time at his Old Grandfather Books in downtown Arvada. He had books in the store, books in a garage, and a few in his apartment and his car. I loved going into the Arvada store because I could always find something I didn’t know I was looking for. A history of World War I, a coffee table book of Colorado maps, an unread early novel by one of my favorite writers. If I couldn’t find anything, Dick would always suggest something. His interests centered on spirituality and religion as befits a one-time practicing priest. But his imagination wandered far and wide. My daughter Annie, Dick’s goddaughter, liked the bookstore too. She was little and liked to get lost in the stacks to discover intriguing books about dinosaurs and unicorns, sometimes in the same book. I never met with Dick that he didn’t have a book for me. I might be interested in it or maybe not. But someone who will gift you a book is someone to spend time with.

After Dick and his wife Mary bought a house in Arvada, I sometimes journeyed down from Cheyenne to play ping pong in his garage/office. Books lined the shelves there too. Dick usually won the games and then we retired to the garage’s book section. Dick also built and installed a Little Free Library in his front yard. I like those and usually stop to peruse the library when I see one. It’s like hidden treasure – there could be anything in there. And often was.

Dick was a writer too, a poet with philosophy in mind. He always emailed or mailed me his poetry. I usually commented on it because I know, as a writer and writing teacher, that every written thing deserves attention. In his poetry, Jesus played baseball and so did his disciples. Amazing flights of imagination. I liked the way he always worked friends and family into his poems – that made it very personal. I didn’t understand all of it but appreciated that he spent time and energy writing it down.

Dick was a conscientious godfather. He always brought Annie books and wrote her poems. He went out of his way to help her when she was in a variety of mental health treatment centers, in Colorado, Wyoming and a few neighboring states. It’s sometimes hard to know what to say to a loved one with mental health challenges. Just being there in a big deal. Yourself, listening. Chris and I always appreciated Dick’s attention to our little bird trying to fly.

Dick was one of the first people Chris and I met when we decided to abandon traditional Catholic churches for something different at 10:30 Catholic Community. Some of us gathered together in a men’s group and it turned out we had a lot to share with one another. We went on jaunts to the mountains. I moved away from Denver, first to Fort Collins and then to Cheyenne, and some of the guys went down to Arizona for Rockies’ spring training. Dick liked his Rockies and so did Mary. We all were committed fans and one of my great memories was attending a Rockies-Dodgers game with Dick and Mary and Dick’s brother and sister-in-law. Summer night at Coors Field. Sure, you might get heartburn from the hot dogs and the Rockies relief pitching. But always the best place to be in summer.

It's sad to say goodbye to Dick. The memories remain. He was a good guy with a big heart. And a fine friend.

Dick was always learning. This is some of his commentary on an Easter poem he sent me in April 2022: Remember that is just Dick's two cents/And each of you have your two cents/So it seems this Easter is better than last Easter./Cuz I didn't understand the resurrection of the spirit till/I was 83 years old.

He was 85 when he passed from this life last week. 

2022 was Dick’s final Easter on this planet. He also commented on the afterlife, saying that he hoped there was no paperwork there. By that, I'm guessing he meant PAPERWORK, you know, the kind we all hate to fill out. He didn't mean the paper of books because that meant so much to him. I do believe there is poetry and books, lots of books, in the afterlife. What would heaven be without them?

Dick loved sports and especially the Colorado Rockies. If there's room for books in heaven, there must be be a snowball's chance in Hades that the Rockies can find consistent pitching and go on to win a World Series. We can all keep praying for that. 

In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

Poem for two doomed poets

On Philip Levine's birthday, a sad poem about two doomed poets from the Poetry Foundation web site. It's beautiful, really. I'll let Levine say the rest. Go to "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, captures the city between the wars

I’ve always been fascinated with Paris in the 1920s and 30s. The inter-war period. The tensions of those years add pizzaz to any book. So many writers lived and worked there. A sojourn to Paris was almost mandatory. Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce. Artists, too, notably Picasso. Discovered some others as I read “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,” a 2014 novel by Francine Prose. The author tells her story of the 1930s and wartime occupation through the pages of imagined letters, memoirs, and journals by the book’s principals. The two main characters were inspired by real people. Gabor Tsenyi is a Hungary-born photographer who hones the craft of low-light nighttime photography as he prowls Paris streets, brothels, and bars. Lou Villars is a French woman athlete who ends up torturing prisoners for the Gestapo. Gabor is based on the famous photographer Bressai. He is best known for his pics of the demimonde who hung out at Le Monocle, the “Cabaret”–like club that attracted the city’s artists and LGBTQ crowd that dared to be cross-dressing club regulars in the thirties but risked danger when the war came. Villars is based on Violette Morris, a lesbian athlete who came under Hitler’s spell at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

The era is an attractive one for writers. Many of those who fled to Paris were survivors of the Great War and facing Great War Part 2 in 1939-45. Some 70 million residents of Planet Earth died in the Great War. It was, as historian Barbara Tuchman and others have written, the war that changed everything. Four-plus years of horror were embedded into the conscience of a generation that was tagged with the term “lost generation.” Survivors may have been lost but not as lost as the millions of ghosts who roam Ypres and Verdun and forever inhabit Europe’s psyche. An entire generation of young people was almost wiped off the planet. Small villages in England, France, and Germany lost every one of its young men. The world never got over it, nor should it.

This showed up in the work of the era’s creatives. Bressai’s famous photo, “Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle 1932,” shows a hefty woman in a man’s suit sitting next to a thin woman in a sparkly dress. The look on their faces can be interpreted many ways. To me, they look to the future with a mixture of dread and hope. It attracted the book’s author, was even the catalyst for years of research and writing. Did they stay together? Were they rounded up like other “undesirables” by the Nazis? Prose wondered too, as a similar photo by her fictional photographer is crucial to the arc of the novel. As I read the novel, I decided to look up this photographer and found his work all over the web. He captured a Paris that was both romantic and squalid.

It took awhile for me to get into the novel’s rhythm. It seemed a bit contrived at first. And then I got into the flow of the intermittent narratives. I was both a reader and a writer studying the technique as I went along. Most of the samples picked up where the other left off. But not always. The reader has to do some work to tie together the narrative threads. After a hundred pages, that became part of the book’s charm. Who is speaking, and when, and can this narrator be trusted? Don’t we always wonder if the teller of a tale is trustworthy or not?

Hair stylist at the Cancer Infusion Station

Lorna of the luxurious brown hair. The first time I saw her. Not a streak of grey in it. I knew it wouldn't last because she's right here in the Cancer Infusion Center waiting room. This is where hair goes to die so the patient can live even if it's a little bit longer. Lorna hasn't yet stopped at my station to talk about styling options or maybe a wig; we have orange and blue ones. Stylin' scarves too, and caps with funny sayings, funny to all of us anyway, women of the lost hair -- yeah me too, and mine grew back curly and seal brown with silver tips. "Kissed by the sun, I said. "Touch of grey" said my husband, a Jerry Garcia fan. "I will get by," the song goes. "I will survive." As the weeks went on I missed seeing Lorna and wondered if she'd given up. She finally came by, hair strands sticking up in a topknot and tied in a bow. Reminded me of Zippy the Pinhead from those days when hair meant everything. Lorna walked by alone, as always. "Like my hair?" She tended it with her right hand, twirled around so I could get a good look. We both laughed. I saw her weeks later, head shiny as a baby's bottom. "Just a comb-through," she said. I held up a bare hand. "Got my comb right here." For the first time, she cast her burden aside and sat in my chair. I massaged her scalp with some feel-good ointment that smells of lavender and vanilla. I feel the ridges of her skull beneath the hairless skin. Cancer started in her breasts -- they've been banished the damn troublemakers. Lorna and I reminisced about the touching that went with them. When done right, it lit us up. My touch on her bald head is one small thing, a tiny pleasure. Small things are what's left when the big things go.

You will forget things, micro-essay

You will forget things. As you age, that’s the mantra you hear from people who think they know better. Nobody tells you this: you forget how to forget. The past rolls in like the Florida East Coast waves I once surfed. That’s me on my long board walking the nose on a wave spawned by a tropical storm. I am 16 and my shoulders already are scorched by the sun. I will be riding this wave as a 71-year-old living in Wyoming’s high prairie as my dermatologist burns off a rough patch birthed that day at the beach. I am 28 making love with my girlfriend in a Colorado mountain stream. The water so cold, our skin warms from the friction of our bodies. Do you remember… starts my wife, 66, the one from the stream, and I say I cannot forget and it seems like the right thing to say but what I really mean is there is no way that I can forget, that even if we had split up during the awful times that we want to forget I could not forget how, in the shade of quaking aspens, the sunlight vibrated across your skin, your blue eyes on me. My last thoughts will be of waves and water, you and me. I will not and cannot forget. That’s old age, the truth of it.

Grandma and Grandpa were in France on November 11, 1918, when the guns grew silent

World War 1’s Meuse-Argonne offensive began on Sept. 26, 1918, and halted with the announcement of the Armistice on Nov. 11. It was the largest in U.S. military operation in history with 1.2 million American soldiers. Deadliest, too, with more than 350,000 casualties on all sides and 26,277 U.S. deaths. Many of the troops were inexperienced which probably added to the casualties. The so-called Spanish Flu was raging at the time which swelled the ranks of the soldiers being treated at American Expeditionary Force hospitals.

My grandfather, Lt. Raymond Shay of Iowa City was there serving with the Headquarters Troop, 88^th Division, U.S. Army.

Late in the day on Nov. 11, 1918, my grandmother, Florence Green of Baltimore, was a U.S. Army nurse serving at Evacuation Hospital 8 in France. She and other medical staffers still were treating casualties of the Meuse-Argonne campaign and would be for some time. Armistice Day (later Veterans Day) didn't yet have a name but here’s the entry in her diary:

November 11: Am so happy tonight to think the war is really over. I cannot believe it. Haven’t heard a gun since 11am. Great celebrating everywhere. Can almost hear the city hall in Baltimore ringing, and what a wonderful time for Paris.

The next day was Nov. 12 and she was still in France. She finally arrived back in the States March 10, 1919. She met my grandfather at Army General Hospital 21 (later Fitzsimons Army Medical Center) in Aurora, Colo. Raymond and Florence were married in 1922 and their first grandson, me, arrived on the planet on Dec. 18, 1950. Their son, my father Thomas, served overseas in the follow-up war to end The War to End All Wars from 1942-46. My mother, Anna Hett, was trained as a U.S. Navy nurse at Denver’s Mercy Hospital but the war ended before she could be shipped overseas.

More wars followed.

"All Quiet on the Western Front" not the remake we expected

Some negative reviews have come in for Netflix's remake of  "All Quiet on the Western Front." They all say the same thing, that the movie is not loyal to the book. That's true -- it leaves out some crucial scenes and adds scenes between the German and French armistice-seekers on the war's closing days. Also, the ending. The famous butterfly ending of the 1930 movie vs. this version which takes its time settling Paul Baumer's life and the armistice. He dies and the camera lingers on his young face, so young and so dead. 

I read Erich Marie Remarque's novel in the sixth grade. It wasn't a class assignment. My father had a massive library and I had a library card as soon as I could walk. Dad's World War II collection was a doozy. "Guadalcanal Diary," Ernie Pyle's "Brave Men," Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe cartoons, "They Were Expendable," "PT109." He was a WWII veteran, an infantry radioman in France, Belgium, and Germany. He also had World War 1 books, probably because his mother and father both served in that war. I was entranced by the pilots of those rickety old airplanes. I was obsessed with the Lafayette Escadrille and the "The Red Baron" Richthofen's aerial battles. I read all Nordhoff and Hall books, as  both had been pilots in The Great War. I also read their Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. Even now, I equate their "The Falcons of France" with "Mutiny on the Bounty." Adventure books. Boys' books. They made me yearn to be a fighter pilot and Fletcher Christian. Only in my imagination.

I was a kid and really had no idea what I was reading about any war. As bodies piled up in books, I viewed that as part of the adventure. My viewpoint has changed over the decades. I never went to war, the one of my generation in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos. I was 18 when I graduated high school in 1969. I never served in the military although I was in the Navy ROTC program for 18 months. I felt guilty about my lack of service for a long time, especially in the 1980s when Reagan told us we had licked the Vietnam Syndrome. I had Viet Vet friends. I had peacenik friends. I read a lot of books about Vietnam. There always some nagging sense that I had missed out on something. How odd that seems now. 

I reread "All Quiet" prior to watching the Netflix movie. I also rewatched the 1930 movie, released just a year after talkies appeared. The book and the movie both cover Paul's recruitment and his leave when he confronts those who were so eager to send him to war. They are at the heart of the book. Paul was subject to "the old lie" in Wilfred Owens' poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est." After recounting the deadly effects of a gas attack, Owen ends his poem with this:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.

That sentiment appears in the new "All Quiet on the Western Front." It just doesn't get the starring role I expected.  

Saturday morning round-up

Election day is Tuesday. I will vote and keep my eyes open for those who would try to prevent it. As an election judge and poll watcher, I never actually feared the other side on election day. I hear tales of mid-term election judges being called in by the county clerk for briefings on what to expect on election day and what to do about it. I worked next to Republicans and we all were charged with staffing the first electronic voting machines used in the county. In the 2000s, there was a feeling by some Democrats that the e-voting machines were hooked up with the corporations who made them and they were beholding to the GOP. Both Dem and GOP election judges agreed that the system was secure. Now Republicans question the integrity of the process because their guy did not win in 2020 and their guy -- and FOX -- keep bitchin' about it. The most proactive thing we can do is vote and not let anyone keep us from our appointed task. 

Chris just went through her third round of chemo and is looking forward to the fourth and last infusion the day after Thanksgiving. We plan to give thanks on that day as our kids will both be there for the first time in a decade. The next day, Chris goes to the CRMC Cancer Center for the four-hour task. Then we can give thanks again that the chemo part of the treatment is gone and so is Chris's hair. She has a nifty new wig courtesy of the Center's gift shop. It's brown with red highlights which is kind of what my hair looked like before it turned white. She looks great in it and plans to show it off the next time she goes out in public. Yes, cancer sucks but it can also help you appreciate what you have instead of what you might eventually miss. 

I'm reading "Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age" by Annalee Newitz. Fascinating study of four lost cities: Catalhoyuk in Turkey, Pompeii in Italy, the Angkor civilization in Southeast Asia, and Cahokia of the Mississippian culture in the U.S. All advanced and crowded cities that disappeared. Not that exactly, but each of these advanced urban centers that were abandoned in different ways. We all know about Angkor Wat but that actually was a small and not very important monument in a much larger city. For five centuries, rulers built monuments to themselves but also nourished the working class that built them. Floods, drought, and mismanagement doomed the place although Cambodians still live in and around this tourist site but also spread out to inhabit all areas of the country and founded the bustling city of Phnom Penh. Early Western World explorers marveled at the site and wondered what the poor Khmer did to screw it up. Newitz explains that it was much more complicated than that and much more interesting. Cahokia is intriguing because it existed for so long and the site of an advanced culture is now East St. Louis which has a reputation of poverty and civic strife. So much of what Cahokia (1050-1350 CE) developed was geared not for the elite but for the populace of 30,000, which made in larger than most European cities of the time. This is why we read history books, right, to fill in the blanks of the things we do not know or thought we knew. Hats off to Newitz for her fine research and entertaining writing style.

On Tuesday, don't vote us back to the Dark Ages

 

Something to think about as we face this important midterm election on Nov. 8. A Republican takeover of Congress dooms our democratic republic. VOTE!

Resistance is futile. Read The Three-Body Problem trilogy before it enters the Netflix universe

Have you ever heard the term “Dark Forest” in reference to one of the universe’s big mysteries?

I had not until I read Richard Powers’ wonderful novel about an astrophysicist’s dilemma that crosses space and time in “Bewilderment.” Then I came across a novel on Kindle called “The Dark Forest” by Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu, Liu Cixin in Chinese as the last name is listed first.

This concept posits that the universe is the Dark Forest. Intelligent lifeforms are making their way through the forest and are afraid. There are other lifeforms out there but what are they like? Are they powerful but helpful giant octopus-like creatures in “Arrival.” Or are they savage multi-limbed killers as in “Independence Day,” the creeps who just want humans to “die.”

As lifeforms make their way through the Dark Forest, they don’t know what they’re going to find. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to shoot first and ask questions later rather than being ambushed themselves? Forget “Star Trek” and its non-interference directive. Those strange-looking bastards on the other side of the trees are dangerous and can’t be trusted. Our very existence is threatened. Fire!

This helps explain why Earth, after sending our radio and TV signals and Voyager space probes for the last 100 years, has been met with silence. Maybe others have picked up the signals, have investigated us further, and decided that we are killers, which we are, invaders that have wiped out entire civilizations all over the globe.

In Liu’s novel, second part of “The Three-Body Problem” trilogy, scientists have made first contact with extraterrestrials. Residents of Trisolaris answer the call. Trisolarans are telepaths so everyone on their planet knows what others are thinking. When told that Earthlings speak from their mouths and tend to hide their inner feelings, the aliens assume that we are keepers of dark secrets and are dangerous. They plan to eliminate us as soon as they can get their space fleet to our solar system in some 400 years. Humans begin to plan for the encounter. Wallfacers are selected to come up with ways to staunch the upcoming alien invasion. Some Earthlings secretly ally with the aliens as they believe the aliens just might be more sensible than their earthly neighbors. They also suspect that resistance is futile, as the Borg like to say.

I read it with a dose of dark humor as it is true that humankind is dangerous and can’t be trusted. If I was a Trisolaran, I would get to earth ASAP, before we perfect interstellar travel and keen new weapons and pursue them in the Dark Forest.

Interesting to see that Netflix is turning Liu’s trilogy into a series due out in 2023. The Netflix web site says the series will debut next year. Director is “True Blood’s” Alexander Woo with “Games of Thrones” writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. In 2020, Netflix farmed out the English-language rights for the books which was only available in the original Chinese. So, if you choose, you can read the trilogy or get it on Kindle and start with the second book as I did. It can be a hard slog at times and wonderful in its moments.

I have read only two other trilogies in the sci-fi/fantasy category: “Lord of the Rings” and “Foundation.” Also, John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy. Dos Passos incorporates different points of view and newspaper snippets as he recounts his view of the U.S. in the post-World War I era. A neat blend of fiction and fact, a series ahead of its time. Eduardo Galeano and “Memory of Fire,” 500 years of Latin American history. Again, a wonderful mix of fact and fiction. Magical-realism is involved.

Do you have other trilogies to suggest?

If I may make a modest suggestion: start with book one when tackling a series. I’m pretty sure I missed out by starting in the middle. 

Me and MyAmigo

We cruise through the Cheyenne grocery store like angels on the wing. We ride MyAmigo scooters, tidy charged-up EVs that transports you through the valley of soft drinks and into the foothills of baking supplies and to the mountaintop of the candies you crave but say you’re buying for the grandkids who never visit. We greet other grayhairs as we pass, josh about drag racing down the aisle at 3.521 mph. I round a corner and encounter Floyd Lopez in his own MyAmigo and we adjourn to Starbuck’s for coffee and talk about Spanish declensions. I insist it’s MiAmigo and he agrees but argues that my idea will make no sense to the majority of Anglo geezers like me. He says that “MyAmigo” is the perfect Spanglish term. “Pancho used it all the time on The Cisco Kid.”

Caffeinated and informed, we return to our respective routes. We try to avoid returning to the other end of the store for items left off the list somehow. That drops the MyAmigo charge to dangerous levels, causes us to seek out a staffer to transfer us and the groceries to a fully-charged EV if one is available and not in the hands of another retiree who breezes around the store as if there was no tomorrow as there may not be. Most shoppers avoid eye contact. What we need is on top shelves. Elders who walk upright ask if they can help. Young couples too, guys in middle age who just got off work and we remind them of their parents tooling around a store in Case Grande or Fort Myers.

Check-out is odd. Cashiers are nice but young ones especially try not to look at you, as if grayness is catching. They hope you will not pay in bills and small change, or labor over a check, or redeem too many coupons clipped out of the Wednesday print ads. They move you right along as they don’t want any repeats of the old lady who yelled about how the leaking deli chicken got all over the muffins. The baggers ask to help you out but you lack any small bills and the kids won’t usually take tips but you never know. You cheat a bit by scooting outside into the lot even though the cart’s label reads “indoor use only.” Some people stop to help as you load groceries into the trunk. Some days you need it. The snow comes down, bitter winds blow. Once I forgot my gloves and it took too long to unload; spent 15 minutes in front of the car’s heater to defrost the claws of my fingers.

I drive home through the blowing snow. My son unloads my haul at home. It's done.

Miami Herald drops a word bomb on Florida governor

From today's article in the Business Insider piece about a Miami Herald op-ed about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his "Christian Nationalist shtick:”

"The governor's Christian nationalist shtick only separates us," the paper says, adding that Democrats should "counter it more boldly and bring back into their tent voters who feel that, on the issues of religion and faith, the party has nothing to say to them." Read entire article at Business Insider.

I would send you to the full Miami Herald but it has a very sturdy paywall. I already subscribe to several notable newspapers and the Herald is one but not now. Also, it sometimes drops the paywall in emergencies such as killer hurricanes. So stay tuned...

So shtick is the word of the day. You've probably heard it thousands of times. It’s from the Yiddish: Shtik, schtick, shtick, schtick. It means a “bit” or “bits of business” and usually pertains to a performance such as the one delivered to his Trumpian base every day by DeSantis.

Here are precise definitions:

Cambridge Dictionary: a particular ability or behaviour that someone has and that they are well known for (note the U.K. spelling)

Free Dictionary: An entertainment routine or gimmick.

Definitions.net: A contrived and often used bit of business that a performer uses to steal attention

All apply. I suppose you can catch the Governor’s shtick on his official web site. I just couldn’t bear to look.

A change in the Wyoming weather

It happens fast. One afternoon in September you sit in the easy chair, fan blows the sweat off your body. Next morning, you reach for a blanket against the chill that you haven’t felt since May. The heat had been getting to me. Our portable AC broke just when the August-September heat wave settled on us. Those long days, 85, 90, 95. Our house built without AC in 1960 because that was what you did, post-war building boom still roiling the prairie. It changes quickly. I turn on the furnace, open all the registers which is a funny name when you think of it. Spiders crawled through the open vents. Nothing poisonous, as far as I could tell. A Daddy Long Legs. A small brown spider (not a Recluse). Chris was concerned. “The spiders are coming! The spiders are coming!” We gave them little time to rejoice. The first burst of heated air carries with it Halloween and Christmas and those long nights of January and February. The gas jets click on and then the fan blows. I lay awake at night listening. Many nights, the heat challenging 45 and rainy. Summer is over. I am glad.