Pre-Cancer Man

(Spoiler Alert! I wrote this after I had my first colonoscopy two and half weeks ago. At the time, I knew the doctor was able to partially remove a polyp and it was likely pre-cancerous. I now have the results back confirming its pre-cancerous nature but did not contain any malignancy. The remainder of the polyp will be removed some time around my birthday – oh joy! So I am fine, but tinged by this to be more careful in terms of my health and quite thankful to Jean-Marie who insisted I get the colonoscopy in the first place)

Cancer has become a dark shadow that crosses all our paths in one way or another. I have lost my dear friend Dennis to lung cancer, there is my friend Ian who struggled indomitably and successfully through rectal cancer, my friend Jim who lived longer than the odds allowed with melanoma, my father who had prostate cancer that could not save him from the degradations of Alzheimer’s, my beloved brother-in-law Matt who survived Burkitt’s lymphoma, my mother-in-law who had several different types of cancer that wasted this dominant woman, and their are others. We all have our lists. It is a disease that holds no regard for anyone and respects no boundaries. Now is the time for my personal scare.

Just a few days ago, I underwent my door prize for turning fifty – a colonoscopy. I had no expectations going into the procedure; my digestive acumen and cast iron stomach were (at least to me) things of legend. The new anesthesia is miraculous, I was out one moment and alert the next, no time for groggy, no place for incoherence. In recovery my wife and I sat and were greeted by the a nurse who said words we all make fun of but are never thrilled to actually hear, “I have good news and bad news.” She said that the preliminary results were that the polyp (four times larger than the average) which was found and biopsied was likely pre-cancerous. Because it was a flat multi-lobed polyp they were only able to take half of it at this time without risk of compromising the bowel. The rest will be removed later.

Still while the phrase “pre” was absorbed readily, the term “cancer” hung like the big elephant piñata in the room, ungainly swaying back and forth, the sudden ugly and unwanted center of attention. Questions were asked and answered, the gist of which is that the biopsy results will be back in seven to ten business days, and the results will determine when I go back for another scope to remove the remainder of the polyp which is taking up too much room in my life right now. There is the slimmest possibility that surgery would be required but the chance is so remote and not worth my attention until the report is in.

The benefit of the prefix ‘pre’ is that there is far greater breathing room than afforded with it than without it. But the damage is done and the baggage has been placed at my feet. There will not be a doctor’s visit no matter the reason without the echo of that word in the primal recesses of my brain. I cannot remove it from my sweet, sweet wife’s thoughts and vocabulary.

In one instant of time I have become the pre-cancer man. An internal label given by me to a mental image of Dr. Jekyll hoping there will never be a Mr. Hyde, or a rising hominid hoping not to devolve into some destructive ancestor, but I have never done well at worrying about myself, I am much more wired to worry and care for others. It is difficult for me to see beyond the practical implications of the results I have been handed and will be handed. I will adjust my diet; I will drink less whiskey (and this is said with a truly heavy heart) and enjoy more water, I will take care of myself with this too close brush with fate, and that will be that. I cannot, however, not worry about the effect that word has or may have on my wife, family, and loved ones.

Cancer (even the insinuation of cancer) is a pebble that makes large unending waves once it is carelessly tossed into life’s pool. The concentric waves reflect and return to me from my wife and children, from my friends and siblings, setting up a silent and persistent echo in my head. So I present the warning and wake-up call I have received to all I know. I encourage you (as Katie Couric did a dozen years back – only without the video tape) to stay vigil, listen to doctors, and undergo whatever preventative screenings they recommend. It keeps the waves as small as possible.

Day Follows Night Redux

The sunrise comes as no surprise. “As day follows night” the saying goes and proves its truism each morning. From the eastern horizon the sun threatens, rays lighting it and spreading west. The light in these brief moments of dawn is transfigured crossing the prairie to cast a coral glow on the rise of Rockies. Such a contrast, landlocked mountains painted the color of sea life, bringing together ocean and mountain, ephemeral moments, blink and it is gone. Gaze upon it and drink it into your soul before the sun at the start of its brazen passage whitewashes all with its naked stare, claim this daily miracle for your own while it last.

Mile markers and mountains race by as I head south on the interstate. I long for there to be silhouetted Saguaro about me, frozen arms outstretched in acceptance or submission, but not here, there are only walking stick cacti to see in Colorado. Sad stand-ins for the quintessential quilled plants that inhabit our image-ridden imaginations. Still walking sticks are something, as cacti are succulents of myth and lore in my native South.

As I look over the hood of my car, the blacktop goes by and beneath me. Years on this circuit have imprinted upon me, and I can gaze about freely in the knowledge that my car knows where it is going. Amid the stark, arid beauty of these barren plains that abut the Rockies, people I pass and that pass me seem oblivious with eyes on nowhere and cell phones nestled against their cheeks. How can they not see, how can they not think of God instead of the microcosms of their lives?

At seven thirty in the morning (or the A.M. as might be said in the masterpiece of a movie, Raising Arizona), they are talking on their cell phones. Who is on the other end? Are they talking to other commuters, reaching out for kindred spirits with whom to hide from the braking dawn and its majesty, or someone at home who tugs at their hearts in a life that seems more commute than anything else? I don’t know, but I wonder. I have no one to talk to that early, and wish no one to talk with. They need their sleep or start to their day, and I need to commune with the visions about me to assure myself that I am part of the coming day. I see exits familiar in number and name, and locations marking my progress, a self-congratulatory pat on the back that one meager morning milestone after another is passed, each milestone taking me further along from bed to work.

My mind is a transition as well. I process dreams, think of home, and then accept work and its list of things that cry for my attention. These last thoughts nurse me along the final miles to the office so that the beginning of my work day builds upon the foundation of my thoughts.

Returning home reverses the imagery of going to work. I take the drive to unwind and drink in the surroundings, to numb the thoughts that are best left to my desk and tomorrow. The mountains take on a different quality as I work my way north. The sun having dipped behind them is still lighting the world, and leaves the mountains in relief to such an extent that they appear cut out of cardboard. Layers of mountain shapes shown in two dimensions to the thirsting eye.

I leave the work behind and settle into the home ahead. I plan what to fix for dinner, I scan the mountains and the prairies. I see different faces in adjacent cars doing the same thing as their morning counterparts – talking into phones, ignoring the world, absorbed and self-absorbed.

Home is the boon I unconsciously await all day. It is the gift afforded to me by trial of a fifty mile each way commute. I relinquish home in the morning, knowing I will reclaim it at night. Returning to my wife and our dog, to cook dinner, to relax together and taste each others waters of the day.

It is at the end of this routine that bed waits, that sleep dreams for my return as the price of a new dawn. I know not where the dreams will take me, though I try to be the boatman of it across my private river Styx. I have some say at times how I enter, where I tread, but never the whole of the whole. The true boatman is my subconscious and goes by the name angst. My dreams are the very definition of worlds colliding. They are linear feed and juxtaposition of past and present and mist enshrouded future. I embrace them as such; I groom through them for insight, and take them at face value.

When morning comes, I walk free of the dreams and must rise from the bed trailing a longing glance back to my sleeping wife. I partake in my morning ablutions and return to my car and my commute, the cycle repeating as cycles must. My day is under way and the sunrise comes as no surprise.

Our Resin Lord

Roadside monument to someone passed
Crucified replica lord hanging amid weeds
Driven into cracked and arid hardpan
Mourned by wilted silk flowers at his feet

Plastic savior, eternally upturned face
To uncaring sky, and unresponsive heaven
Riveted through stigmata to metal frame
Silently suffering the elements, unheard by saints

Mocked by dust devils
Ghosts that come and go in time with gusts
Turning in fleeting dance
Chaotically about weeping silks and foot of the cross

Frozen agony searching, mutely asking
God, why have you forsaken this traveler
Whose life was robbed too soon
On asphalted road between Sodom and Gomorrah

Our Resin Lord
Caught between life and death
Upon the cross on foreign Golgotha
Not even thieves to keep him company

The Evil That Men Do

Long ago in the mists of mythology, Zeus commanded Hephaestus the god of craftsman to fashion the world's first woman out of earth and water. Athena clothed her modesty, Hermes gifted her tongue with speech, and Aphrodite graced her with beauty. Zeus bequeathed to Pandora a beautiful jar along with the task of keeping it safe. Zeus also warned Pandora to never open the jar. Try as she might, Pandora could not deny that other bequest of the gods, curiosity. She opened the jar the merest crack and all the evils of the world were released. Pandora closed the jar as fast as she could but only succeeded in keeping Elpis the Spirit of Hope locked up as all else escaped. Zeus, unlike God with Eve, bore no malice towards Pandora for he expected this.

The evils of the world whether spread by Pandora or brought about by the sins of Adam and Eve, manifest themselves most forcefully in man's penchant to bring about death and destruction casually, and bring about peace only as a compromise to satisfy self-interest. As the year ends, national headlines reported the wounding of three New Jersey police officers in their own precinct house, the five hundredth taking of a life in Chicago this year, and the death of a New Delhi gang rape victim.

2012 has been a year marred by violence around the globe and for Americans dominated by the home grown massacres of innocents. The seven mass shootings in the United States this year account for a quarter of the attacks, wounded, and dead by mass gun slayings in the past twenty-two years. More than the lingering conflicts in the Middle East, the assaults in 2012 have left the nation mourning and vulnerable and asking what can be done.

The senseless slaying of twenty children five and six years of age, and six adults at a school in the now sorrow draped Connecticut town of Newtown seemed the horrifically nameless punctuation of the harm that people can so quickly and seemingly easily be capable of. The authorities continue to probe, and everyone seeks answers to why twenty small coffins now lay beneath the earth, sealed boxes on lives barely begun. We ask if the killer was deranged, we ask if the availability of assault weapons is to blame. The outcry reaches to the top of our nation, and no reasonable reply from any corner is heard.

Elements of the government are responding to calls for tighter gun control, while the NRA raises its craggy visage and calls for better armed schools. The NRA seems to have forgotten the fact that Columbine had armed guards yet Klebold and Harris were not impeded or repelled from their path of destruction. The government focuses on assault rifle access when statistics since 1990 do not support them as the primary merchant of death in these random slaughters.

The NRA pointed out after the Aurora movie theatre shootings that a better armed populace could have stemmed or prevented what transpired, but at no time since 1990 or before have any of the gun owning citizenry jumped into these situations as saviors. Neither gun control advocates nor gun supporters seem to spend much time noting that it is not the career criminal that bring us to our knees, but well armed private gun owners that are making us fear for our children in schools, and malls, and movie theatres.

Career criminals are far more cautious with guns. Guns are part of their stock and trade and are a link back to them every time they use those guns in commission of a crime. Guns also up the ante on any law induced end to their careers. These criminals are interested more in prospering than going on a rampage ending in suicide. Their guns are a tool and not a means to an end.

The ones we least suspect, the quiet ones are the ones that create the greatest grief and fear of the unknown. The wolves that creep among us in their sheep-like skins keep us glancing about furtively. How do we defend against ourselves?

The answer doesn't lie in knee jerk governmental control of a single type of weapon that bears little relation to the problem at hand save to appeal to some element of the voters. The answer doesn't lie with the NRA that makes the ludicrous defense of its position that killers will always find something to kill with. The NRA is mainly concerned with preventing losses to a thirty billion dollar a year industry and appeasing the dwindling majority represented by white male gun owners. I don't know where the answer lies, I just know that time honed myopic entrenchment of dueling false ideals is not the way to go about solving the problem or even stemming the tide.

The causation of these attacks are multiple and complex. The picture is composed of social triggers, and psychological predispositions, as-well-as the ready availability of guns. We live in a society not only grown used to, but one that expects immediate gratification through constant contact with the world through the internet, cell phones, and cable/satellite services. The entertainment industry and news agencies constantly try to outdo one another to such an extent that we have become desensitized to the point that only the most violent stimulation can break through our veneer. These things together with the proper personality type and readily available guns has proven to be a lethal combination.

Instead of pandering, the government should take a multi-pronged attacked such as:

• Finding sociological commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings
  
• Determining psychological commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings
  
• Develop laws that will limit access to guns through third party individuals such as someone buying guns for someone else
  
• Track guns better, perhaps through annual ownership taxes similar to automobiles, the taxes can be used to fund gun violence programs
  
• Better education of people of what may be tell tale signs of contributing factors such as overly morbid behavior and suicidal tendencies

As a native of the South, I and many people I grew up with were raised around guns. We were taught to respect them, how to use them properly. Not to say that we didn’t sometimes have fun with them as well. I can still remember using a shotgun on my first derelict toilet in a ramshackle barn. I realize that guns themselves don’t kill people, there has to be a person holding the gun with a willing finger on the trigger. Finding what makes a person decide to take as many innocents as possible with them when they decide to end their lives, is at least as important as reasonably implemented controls on firearms.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

I am not looking to hear reindeer pawing at my rooftop tomorrow; I am not going to have visions of sugar plums dancing about my cluttered jagged thoughts when I go to bed Christmas Eve. I will be listening to the sound of my wife’s breathing and trying to dream of the tiny miracles of Christmases passed to settle my spirit from a year that has been difficult and at times painful.

I wish my childhood memories were more clear, that I could pick out defining Christmas moments from each year that passed beneath my young feet, but they no longer are, they are blended together. One of the memories unattached to time or age is of a nocturnal exploration of presents beneath the tree. I do not recall if I was joined by any of my siblings (and would not implicate them even if I did) only that on this secret venture I peeked at every present I was receiving that year and it ruined the surprise on Christmas. When I told my mom of this just today on the phone, she told me two things: 1) She didn’t know that I had done that, and 2) She had done the same thing when she was a child. I was surprised and pleased by her admission as it established a new link to have with my mother. I love Mom.

Childhood memories also bless me with mental snapshots of what made Christmases in my youth wonderful. Closing my eyes I can see images of my father in varying degrees of Santa garb, of trees overflowing with gifts for five children who were just lucky to have the parents we did, of fires in the hearth, and of incredible food prepared by my mom for her small army.

Memories are better defined thinking back to my college years. When I was a sophomore, I moved off campus to an apartment that would become known as the “Sex Palace”,the same way a large man is given the nickname “Tiny”. It was there that I erected the first Christmas tree that I would call my own. It was a scrawny pine tree sapling adorned with handmade ornaments, topped with a picture of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberry Beast. It was that same Christmas that I returned to Orangeburg for the holidays and got the idea to do a photo series on the season. I made a corrugated cardboard sign bearing a large arrow and the word tree. I then drove to all my friend’s houses and asked them if I could take a picture of them with their families holding my sign pointing it in the direction of the Handal family tree. I wish I had kept those pictures, but somewhere back the line I wrongly decided that the mature thing was to toss those memories in favor of an image of who I should be and what I should carry with me. But nothing can take away from me the memory of the smiling faces on photo stock of the Wilsons, Lovejoys, Barkers, Campbells, Whitakers, Fogles, and others.

Many Christmases have come and gone since then. Not all of them happy, but they produced far more smiles than tears. This upcoming one will be significantly lessened by the recent loss of Dennis (more family than friend) and the sorrow that the love of his life, Marc, will be going through as part of himself is forever gone. This creates a void in the soul of our Christmas that cannot be filled and that we will always carry around.

This is where out of self-preservation I selfishly invoke Christmas magic, and yes I believe in it. I believe in the myriad small miracles that happen at Christmas that bring smiles to our faces and ingrain memories to keep those smiles in reserve for whenever they are most needed.

This has been a year for which only the biggest smile can help, so I look within to my favorite Christmas. It was the Christmas of 1998, and our daughter Haley was pregnant and living at home with us. She was round and seven+ months along. She had been miserable with a winter cold that she could not shake because of the limited medicine that her pregnancy would allow. The house was filled with relatives in for the holidays, and things were buzzing with activity by all of us on the day of our annual Christmas open house.

There was something else going on as well. Since fall, we had been working on turning our sagging detached two car garage into a cottage for Haley and the bundle of joy that would be our grandson in fewer than two months. We did this to provide her with her own life, privacy, and a safety net. By the day of our party, it was structurally complete but as yet undecorated.

My amazing wife who is a force of nature, had her heart set on the house being finished for Haley by the night of the party. This added to the work and stress to the day, but if Jean-Marie thought it could be done, I knew it could be. As Jean-Marie dedicated herself body and soul to the cottage, I was tasked with supporting her and directing the party preparations. At one point, my brother-in-law Matt (one of Jean-Marie’s brothers) took me aside and asked me with an air of frustration if Jean-Marie was aware that in a few hours eighty people would be descending on the house and there was a lot left to do. I simply told him that Jean-Marie would not be doing this and leaving the final party prep to us if she didn’t think it was doable.

A great deal of work in a little bit of time ensued attended by my running interference and supplying manual labor for my spouse. Shortly before the party, things were all in place, and we were showered, dressed, and ready. Before the guests arrived, Jean-Marie and I lit the luminarias leading behind our house to the cottage, and led Haley (with her eyes shut) to her new home. Once inside, we told her to open her eyes. As she did, Christmas for my wife and I collapsed in that one moment to our daughter, her unbelieving look on her face, and the tears of joy streaming from her eyes. Moments like that remind me that almost anything is possible, and the happiness of those I love is the greatest gift I can ever receive.

Tribe of the Cathartic Wasteland

In my short bio on my blog site, in my entreaties to people to read what I post, in my essays, I both allude to and actively skirt the question “Why do I write?” It is easy for me to say that it is something that I have always wanted to do and it is something that I have played around with in various small ways for much of my life, but that is a neat little package wrapped in a truth, but not the truth. Not that you are likely to find the whole truth of it here, though I will try to provide just that. A flitter of nerves in my stomach tells me that on some level just below my conscious thoughts I am afraid of the truth. In my head I hear the condescending rant of Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!” Perhaps I can’t. Perhaps I am afraid because I feel writing is a religion with any bound writing a bible, and religion requires faith to exist, that finding the truth of it will dispel the act and the gift as surely as the finding irrefutable proof of God will send the Almighty dissipating to the winds in a cloud of logic. I feel I do need to divine it though, and if it has any chance of sticking to me, I must be honest not only to myself but to the reader as well.

There are countless books that describe the process of writing, that help one to write fiction, memoirs, poetry, non-fiction, whatever you wish. I own several of these, but they address the mechanics, the technical, the form and function. The underlying metaphysics of writing are individual and therefore deeply personal, so that no one writer can ever say why all writers write.

My writing life begins with and hinges upon reading. I was born into a family taken by reading. My mother read books that entertained her, probably because her five children were not always as entertaining as she would have liked. My father read primarily for his edification, reading on such diverse topics as history, biology, and philosophy (although science fiction was his guilty pleasure in all that). Between and betwixt the chaos that five active children can raise, all of us were able to find reading that suited us and spoke to us. For most of my formative years, I embraced science fiction which gave me a glimpse of realities just tantalizingly out of reach. My heroes were Asimov, Sturgeon, Niven, and Clark. Family trips to the bookstore or library were mandatory pilgrimages prior to any vacation, the books we were to read as anticipated as the place we would read them.

I found that reading had the affect of allowing me to truly enjoy my classes in spelling, literature, and English. And though I had a perspective spiraling toward the scientific and mathematical (a solitary pursuit when compared to my siblings), I loved learning new words, tasting new phrases, and understanding the structures which comprise good sentences. I was as happy with a writing assignment as I was with a mathematical proof. In retrospect, this is where I wandered far afield from more literate endeavors. Though I loved words, I was attracted by the more stable constructs of science. It was a safer and easier landscape for a boy to explore than the landmine laden frontier of the visceral.

In high school, I blossomed in math, contemplating the concept of infinity with glee, taking in the subtle beauty of Euclidian geometry. Never realizing that amongst the hardened pathways and seemingly solid ground that math and science were built upon, my eye was engaged with their abstracts – a literary-like approach. I also stepped occasionally outside my shell to dip into the warming waters of writing. Two such efforts will always come to mind. The first was a paper we had to write for a DAR contest on the concept of One Nation Under God. I wrote on Satanism and witchcraft in the United States and earned a trip to the office and call to my parents because I was offended that it would not be submitted to the DAR (oh what a rebel I was). The second was a science fiction short story re-telling Genesis for a creative writing class. I still remember cringingly the words I laboriously typed on my father’s old manual Royal typewrite (I am also still proud of it and the grade I received).

Even though I left high school to attend Engineering school at Clemson, and left Clemson to do applied research for the railroads, there were cracks in my self imposed armor that allowed the need and urge to write to slowly seep from me. It predominantly expressed itself through cartooning. In high school, I wrote comic strips for the school telling the ongoing adventures of Super Manager and his able sidekick, Ball Boy. Unknowingly this allowed me a creative release in a life otherwise dominated by athletic endeavors, homework, and fear of girls. In college, I continued to cartoon (and for much of the time to still be scared of girls). I fell in with an incredible cast of friends in a running group we formed calling ourselves the Out-of-Control Track Club or the OCTC. We ran twice a day seven days a week together, and for our weekly beer-based meetings at the bar called “The Study Hall,” I would provide a comic strip of the OCTC in all its eccentric glory. The chinks in my armor only widened once I moved into a professional life as not only would I post the occasional comic outside my office, but would write humorous “articles” (once even an entire “newspaper”) poking fun at myself and co-workers to the delight of all (except those in charge of my professional future, but that is a tale for another time).

All this is to say that eventually amidst the turmoil of adulthood, I found that I wanted to do more than to be funny. I discovered my fingers wanted more than to just draw humorous scenarios in pictures and words. I found that I had been trying to contain that which ultimately I could not contain – the need to express myself in words, black on white. Contrasting shades that miraculously contain meaning, feeling, and texture whose sum went beyond the twenty-six letter alphabet that compose them. I look back and recognize that I have always wanted to write, that there was a hunger that I tried to feed with bare scraps and leavings insufficient to the appetite.

Now as I write more and express myself more, I find myself needing to write more and explore myself more. I find that there is a nature to my desire that is espoused in catharsis and self-definition.

The cathartic aspect of writing for me is self-evident. As I write, I express my opinions, dreams, hopes, and ideas. It is through the written word that I am drawn to put these things forward in an explosive release of scribbling pen and the staccato tapping of fingers on plastic keys. Each time I face the blank page, I yearn to give birth to another feeling or image – not to free myself of it, but to shake it loose of its dusty cage and expose its beauty, horror, or banality, to see if it has the legs to stand on its own.

As I write, I am seeking who I am, what tribe I have been born into. We have all had dreams or fantasies that we are descendants of kings and queens, and few that speculate on their lives before reincarnation claim to have lived as a street sweeper or jester. Writing however is different; lineage is claimed through the authors that most resonate from our reading into our writing. It is not an act of pretension; rather it is a reverent recognition of those that awakened the muse in us. My voice invariably links me to a clan, and this clan is to be found in the pantheon of writers who speak to me the loudest through their works. The ranking gods of my personal Mount Olympus are James Dickey, John Nichols, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Wolfe, and the lordly and damaged Pat Conroy. I do not in the least consider myself to be on a par with these shaman of my tribe. It is because their prose speaks to me and caresses my soul like no other works that I have immersed myself in. Here at fifty I find myself a toddler learning to talk by listening to their words and the dictates of my spirit, as any child learns to speak. And as a child, I refine my accent, my voice through experimentation and mimicry hoping something unique (yet traceable) will result. I do this in hope of growth and in homage of those that have inspired me to writing.

After letting my fingers move of their own accord across the keys and my spirit wander where it will , I do not know if I have shed any light or answered any questions. I only feel that this exploration has run its course for now. That there are no more fossils I wish to exhume from the eroded and exposed walls of the canyon that runs through my soul. I know only what I knew before I began typing, that I write when I can, that I don’t write near enough, and that I will never stop writing now.

The Razor’s Edge

Thirty-seven years ago, I was thirteen and watching the first show of what would become an iconic television series – Saturday Night Live. I have no recollection of that show save for one skit, the mock television commercial for the “Triple Trac Razor.” Schick or someone had just that year come out with the revolutionary Twin Trac Razor, the first major advancement in razors since the disposable was invented. In their relentlessly humorous way, SNL described the advantage of the “Triple Trac” by describing how the first blade pulled the hair away from the skin, the second blade catching the hair before it could snap back painfully against face, and the final blade delivering the coups de grace by shearing the hair unbelievably close to the skin. I had not begun shaving by that time, but I was an avid watcher of my father shaving (he had to twice a day, king of the five o’clock shadow was my dad) and I couldn’t imagine a three bladed razor. The thought was ludicrous and hilarious to me. However, in the nearly four decades that have followed which has seen the boom of personal computers, the coming and going of pagers, the rise of the internet, a cell phone in every pocket, addiction to texting, and advent of tablets; science has far outstripped my admittedly meager imagination and razors can now be purchased with up to SIX blades.

I used to use the twin blade razors but when triple blades actually showed up on the market I retreated. I didn’t feel that I could ever keep up with the blade race. I was daunted by myth become fact, and fell back to embrace a legend. I was in an antique store and saw an old safety razor in perfect condition, and bought it before someone else snatched up the treasure. In twenty years, I have never looked back.  I in fact now own four safety razors, treasuring each.

What is a safety razor? It was the next generation of razor to come after the bare bladed straight razor. I would never own a straight razor, they scare me, and nostalgia will only carry me so far. I first saw the safety razor when I would intrude upon my father in his boxers at the bathroom sink, he staring at his face in the mirror preparing to shave. When I first started watching, dad had a shaving mug with soap, a brush for application, and a safety razor to do the actual deed. I loved to see dad lather his bristled face with that brush.  Mesmerized I watched the stainless steel head of dad’s razor drawing through the thick suds, leaving a trail both clean and smooth in its wake. I would stand in fearful awe while watching dad remove a dull blade and shove it into a mysterious slot in the back wall of his medicine cabinet. Where did it go? Would that space ever fill with blades? How could he do that and not cut his fingers?

I was enraptured. In shaving there was mystery (blade disposal), danger (blood beading on throat or cheek, a styptic pencil to stem the flow), and machismo (if I had known the term at that young age). I loved to watch my father shave, a play in three acts – lather, shave, aftershave. I close my eyes see it, and the smell of Old Spice will flow back to me. I cannot help but think of my father each time I look into the mirror and lather my face from my mug filled with bay rum scented soap.

I think there is something almost primal in the act of a man shaving. It is as if we are saying that (opposable thumbs not withstanding) that the willing removal of facial hair is what civilizes us and keeps us several rungs above our more hirsute cave-dwelling ancestors. The deep interior nature of shaving can also be seen by the fascination a young boy first drawn to the act of watching father, or grandfather, or brother shave, yearning for the day when he might have his own razor to shave his own face – a rite of passage.

A father myself, I will never forget the day sixteen years ago when I bought my son Michael his first razor. I was so filled with pride, I went to the mall and bought him an expensive set with mug, brush and razor, bringing it home and demonstrating its use.  I am in part helping to pass on shaving to my grandson as well. I think he was three or four when shaving came across his radar. He would watch me shave, and once even asked if he could shave me. I said yes. On his first stroke he nicked my throat and wanted to stop because he believed he had hurt me. I just smiled and calmed him and let him finish the job. It wouldn’t do for him to fear something so basic to manhood that in not too many years it will be a daily part of his life.

Even with the beard I have worn since I turned twenty, I shave almost every day, cleaning up my throat and my cheeks.  Making myself less scruffy, more civilized.  One might think that it would become drudgery, but it has not and it never will.  I am a romantic when it comes to shaving.  I am a believer that it keeps me grounded to my manhood, linked back in time to my father, and tied to the future through my son and grandson.

To Dennis with Love

The horrible part of needing to write is in the ache to express in words those pivotal moments that changes one’s life when at such a time words cannot hope to suffice. Our friend (and this term falls infinitely short of what he truly is) Dennis lies in a bed tended by hospice, our son Michael, their neighbor Trish, friends on demand, and his heart and soul for the past twenty-eight years; Marc. Dennis is in and out of awareness of what is going on. He eats little or nothing now, and is being made as comfortable as possible. How I hate that last phrase, because it never leads anyplace good for those of us who watch and wait and pray.

I cannot talk about Dennis without talking about Marc. They have been a couple and inseparable for twenty-eight years and married for twenty-five. They are Marc and Den, inseparable, one. If couples can be said to have soul mates, they are ours, and we are the richer and better for it. Over the twenty years we have known each other they have become part of our family, and we part of theirs. Our hearts are breaking, and I wonder if they will ever heal because I am not sure they will ever stop breaking from this.

Since the devastating diagnoses of cancer for Dennis, Marc has been brave, doting, caring, and protective. He has been all we hope we can be when placed in such a situation. Even in tragedy, Marc sets a high bar. I think if the dictionary had a picture by the word “stoic,” you would find his handsome, bearded, and smiling face.

Dennis in health was a lanky handsome man of the earth, loving to tend the gardens both at his work (the College of Charleston) and at his home. Sometimes I think his goal was to make things as fertile and lovely as his soul. To see Dennis at labor was to know a truly intimate part of him.

Dennis in decline is a pallid, frail saint. Shuffling when he could still walk, but the movements of his hands though impeded by his health are oddly somehow beautiful and graceful punctuations to his raspy, ruined speech. He clings to his dignity, and tries to ask as little of the people around him as he can. Even when he needs nurturing, Dennis attempts to be the nurturer.

Our favorite nickname for Dennis is Mother Theresa, because he embraced all things so readily. Wanting to help or improve or simply lighten a load. I still laugh at the look Marc gave Dennis, when Dennis brought home a baby fox nestled in a box with a towel. Dennis had found the fox at work (then the El Pomar Foundation in Colorado Springs) abandoned outside its den. I believe the pup went to the zoo for rescue, but Dennis’s first idea was to raise him as one of his own (only Marc in his wisdom stayed Dennis’s hand in this). In the battle between nature taking its course and Dennis having his way, odds were always in Dennis’s favor.

It is not easy to say goodbye to such a heart and spirit. Selfishly I do not want to. Selfishly I want him bound to this earth and in our lives for much longer than we have had. My faith assures me that he is going to a place better than this, a place without prejudice, a place of pure love, a place that will only be enriched by Dennis’s soul. I take comfort in this. I know that ultimately death is harder on the survivors, and that the pain is now squarely moving to our shoulders.

Dennis, Jean-Marie and I love you truly and with all our hearts. We will miss you more than we can say. Thank you for all you have meant to us and done for us. Thank you for your comfort, friendship, and love through the too short years that seem like no time at all. Thank you for leaving your mark on this earth as the Godfather of our grandson. Thank you for being Uncle Den to our Children. The world is better with you in it, but now you are needed to tend other gardens and set another place to bloom. We will take care of Marc. Goodbye.

When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth

Mitt Romney is being criticized for his comment about obtaining binders full of women’s names to choose from for political appointments when he was governor of Massachusetts. Even though I am not a Romney fan I do not see the harm in what he said or did. There is a male culture in politics, and where it may not be “politically correct” to say the consideration of women for staff roles is thinking outside the box, it doesn’t mean that thinking outside the box isn’t exactly what needs to be done to alter the paradigm.

When I was born, we were a nation on the cusp. We were on the cusp of women’s liberation, and women as a force in the workplace. With this rise of women and all the effort given to prepare them and position them for equality, why were men left out of the transition plan? Perhaps it is because in a male dominated society, men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed. Therefore it is better to conquer us than be responsible for transforming us.

I am not and have never been a male chauvinist, but reconciling how to be a man and gentleman as my mother and father reared me, with how women expect to be treated today is a challenge that at times makes me feel lost at sea. My parents’ generation had much better defined gender roles that they adjusted with partial success to accommodate the coming era. Women’s liberation was a revolution and not a revelation, and so women were the first and only priority within the movement. To this end, my parents had to teach their daughters to be independent and self-sufficient in the hopes that they would prosper amid this revolution, meanwhile rearing their sons in a more traditional since.

For the most part, women of today seem focused on and comfortable in the role of bread winners, workers, and leaders. Meanwhile men have become a jumbled mass comprised of those that are part of gender equality, those that are chauvinists, and those that are social dinosaurs. I am not sure that the relatively small portion represented by the chauvinist will ever be eliminated, but they and their effect will be minimized. We social dinosaurs will take care of ourselves as we are committed to self-extinction, begging for a metaphorical meteor to collide with our world and release us from our evolutionary dead end. We dinosaurs are the men helping to rear and encourage a unified gender view for a better world, while balance how things are with the siren call of ancient genetic memories that whisper into the primitive regions of our brains, “Provide, protect, procreate…”

We dinosaurs find it both fair and necessary for the world’s survival for it to change in this way, but it is difficult for us to deny the ancient concepts of hunter-gatherers and nesters. We still open doors for women even though those who recognize the gesture often think of it as patronizing, and those who are unfamiliar with the act sprint for the open door as if it were simply a limited time offer. We still stand when a lady leaves the table or enters the room, an action met with confusion for all but a few. We still use ma’am as a term of respect, usually to be rebuffed, and accused of making the woman on the receiving end feel “old.”

Democrats (who I have primarily voted for) have been conditioned to their platform of equality of the sexes (derived from the need for a political advantage), while Republicans have been slower to come around. They want to embrace women into their ranks, but many just do not know how. Older established Republicans, I consider to be among my ranks of dinosaurs moving things along ploddingly and inevitably even though there is no place for us in the resulting landscape. So it is a mystery to me with all the other issues of substance out there, why Mitt Romney should be mocked because he made an honest effort to be inclusive. It was an old fashioned approach, not as contemporary in thought as many would want, but I believe he was doing the best he could under the context of how he was reared and the world he grew up in. For Romney, it was probably even a “liberal” thing to do.

Today women occupy high levels of government and business not out of the need to meet quotas, but because they deserve it and are the ones most worthy of those positions. The pace has been too slow on equal pay, and women need to be more readily lumped into the general hiring population rather than looked at as a special segment. These things are being addressed, sometimes with reluctance, sometimes with passion, but they are being addressed. Mitt in his plodding dinosaur way was trying to demonstrate this, and deserves credit for it. Since my birth, a great deal of progress has been made and I feel the greatest strides taken. What remains are loose ends and detail work that will only be accomplished in the passage of time. We will recognize the completion of this societal metamorphosis, the spreading of the butterfly’s wings when we stop counting heads, when our candidate binders are filled with the resumes of people and not men and women, when the red necks have been subdued, and when we dinosaurs die off leaving a better planet in our well worn tracks.

FALLOUT

I worry about the amount fear mongering in this election season. Rhetoric has been less about platform and strategy and more about how much the other candidate will impact your life and ruin the United States and the now ill-defined American dream. It is not so much for the voters that I worry but for the children who are inadvertently exposed to negative campaigning through television, news, and the internet. If voters cave to the pressures of fear mongering, then to an extent we get what we deserve, but children do not have the filters that come with age and experience to keep away the effects of potentially harmful words.
I have not investigated nor interviewed anyone to know if this worry is real or imagined. It is simply a feeling that has arisen from my own innocent youth and the irrational (but real enough to me) fears I had as a boy.
In the late sixties, I was on the downhill side of my formative single digit years. This country’s feelings toward the Vietnam War were just beginning to simmer and boil. For this conflict, the draft was still in force in the nation. The draft that mandatory instrument by which the armed services replenished itself. At the time, the draft was held by lottery. Birthdates were drawn at random, the sooner your birthday was picked, then the greater the chance of your receiving a draft notice.

The draft was a fearful thing, not just because there was a war, but because it was the first war to be covered on television. This was the first war the press could report what was happening to US troops as it occurred. This was the first war where the public could make up its mind based on information that was not purely government spun.
The fear generated by the horror of the Vietnam War for a child my age was more nebulous, more a sense in the gut. Adults can more easily attach concrete ideas to their worries, and therefore know better what they are afraid of. Still the idea of the war and what potentially fighting in it could mean scared me, particularly when adults or talking heads discussed it within earshot.
One night the family was watching television (on one of the only three networks which were available in that fog enshrouded era) the draft lottery was being broadcast. I new nothing about draft eligible age, I knew only that the sooner your birth date was picked, the sooner you would go off to war. I was also aware that war as seen on the news was not heroic and bloodless as war as on shown a television show like "The Rat Patrol."
The feeling in the den was somber, there was nothing jovial in watching the call to the service of one's nation. Silently we watched as the lottery drawing was made. The first date picked, then the second, then mine, then the fourth, and on down the line. I am sure my birthday being drawn third elicited some smart-aleck comment from one of my siblings followed by laughter, but I was struck ice cold.
At the time no one knew it, but I was afraid, and because my parents never made mention of what I felt to be my upcoming draft notice, I didn't feel I could talk to them. I had to appear as brave as I thought they obviously thought I was. For months (far beyond my normal child's attention span should have been good for), I was afraid that the mail was carrying a letter for me from a grateful president. I was afraid I would be going far from everything I knew to a violent world pictured in black and white on the other side of the television screen.
Of course I was never drafted, and the knot in my belly eventually left me, but the memory endures. It lives on in me as an example of how something that is uttered can scar the formative mind. Children are not always self-aware enough to question what adults say. We don't keep this in mind enough and this doubly true for politicians. They are far more interested in obtaining or maintaining power by scaring the electorate and degrading their rival, than making a case based solely on their strengths and positions.