A year ago today, the big guy came to us strung out on tranquilizers and convinced that ceiling fans were evil and dangerous.
He’s turned into a great and happy dog.
And a bit of a fat greyhound, if truth be told.
[saveagrey]
by James Brush
Coyote Mercury Posts
I’ve been swimming laps at the pool down the street now that it’s finally sunny and hot everyday.I went three times this week and found myself observing the habits of the other pool people.
One day, the only others there were a mother and very young child. When I walked in, the mother pointed to me and whispered, “That man is going to swim.” I guess the lack of anything other than goggles and a towel was the giveaway.
Next came a running commentary on all of my actions:
“Look, he’s setting his things down.”
“He’s putting on his goggles.”
“He’s swimming laps.”
“He’s taking a break.”
“He’s stretching.”
“He seems to be drowning.”
I know little kids need that and they have questions about everything, so I consider my ability to serve a teaching tool a public service.
The next day two pairs of teens shared the pool. Two girls talking and laughing just loud enough for the two boys on the opposite side to hear just how much fun they were having. The boys, of course, were wrestling and throwing a ball at each other with just enough vigor to impress the girls. Since the two pairs were on opposite sides, I had to swim my laps up and down the middle. That was me, the human fence.
The next time I went, three women sat around one of the tables under the canopy of the pool house. There were many empty beer cans, and from the bits of conversation, I knew that these were all teachers about to go back to school the next day, gathered to toast the end of the season.
One turned and yelled at her kid, “I heard that!”
The kid yelled back from somewhere in the middle of the pool, “How?”
“Because I’m a teacher. I can hear everything you say.”
The kid paused and looked back at his mom, looked at his siblings and friends and then yelled back nervously, “Can you hear what we’re thinking?”
As a teacher myself, I already knew the answer to that one.
Yes. Yes, she could.
Dark Waters by Lee Vybrony & Don Davis tells the story of the design, construction and first few years of service of the NR-1, the US Navy’s smallest and most classified nuclear submarine. I think what really hooked me was that it has wheels for driving along the bottom of the sea.
Vybrony was a member of the NR-1’s commissioning crew, an elite group pulled from the Navy’s top submariners in 1966, and he recounts his experiences throughout the construction, shakedown cruises, and first missions in the late sixties.
The crew of the NR-1 faced difficulties throughout those first years including reactor failure during a hurricane, getting caught in a fishing net on the bottom of Narragansett Bay, driving off an undersea cliff, and accidentally driving into an old WWII-era undersea minefield.
Much of what the NR-1 did (and still does) is highly classified so there isn’t as much detail about some of its missions, but Vybrony does a good job bringing the reader on board for a glimpse of life onboard the tiny ship with wheels.
“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” by Honore Daumier (1850) via Wikipedia
I’ve always loved the story of Don Quixote, the tall knight and the paunchy squire traveling the dusty roads of Spain following their delusions from misadventure to misadventure. Funny, though, I had actually never read the book until this summer.
Perhaps it’s a testament to the power of these characters that this most wonderful of road novels had permeated my conciousness long before I ever actually read it. Like most people, I was familiar with the windmill story, and I knew the characters as well from a pair of statues my dad keeps in his study, the tall, emaciated Knight with shield and lance standing next to a gloriously fat Sancho with his fingers tucked into his belt.
Finally reading Don Quixote (Edith Grossman’s translation), then, brought those statues to life (for that is how I pictured the characters) and took me on Don Quixote’s mad quest to right all wrongs and win glory for the beautiful (and imaginary) Dulcinea. For the past month, I wandered the roads with Don Quixote and Sancho, laughing at some of the most hysterical scenes and brilliant conversations I’ve ever read.
The conversations between knight and squire were my favorite parts. Don Quixote is learned, intelligent, thoughtful and completely nuts. Sancho is simple, illiterate, oftentimes foolish, yet quite witty and most often rational, though his dialog is peppered with endless series and half-remembered and incorrectly used proverbs. Despite it all, their friendship grows and draws the reader in to the point that when it finally all ends, I found myself wishing for another 1000 pages.
Don Quixote is more than a road novel, though. It’s as much about the power of literature and books as anything else. Don Quixote, having been driven mad reading bad chivalric romance novels, allows Cervantes ample opportunity to celebrate and question the power of the written word and through his crazed and gallant knight ask that age old question about the pen and the sword.
Cervantes’s style is playful, and in fact he is almost a character in the novel. I can see him sitting at his writing desk cackling with glee as he wrote the two books that comprise Don Quixote. Part I, written in 1605, is more fun than Part II (1615), but the second part is more interesting in many ways, especially since the characters are aware of the publication of the first part and take plenty of opportunities to discuss both the first part as well as the “false Quixote”, an unauthorized sequel that was published several years before the second part. This self-referential game that Cervantes engages in makes Don Quixote as much a novel about writing as reading.
Long before I reached the end of the book, I knew that Don Quixote had made my short list of favorite books of all time.
Last week I enjoyed my 18th year at Camp Periwinkle, a camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings.
Here are links to two very good news stories about camp:
Camp Periwinkle Changes the Lives of Kids Battling Cancer 0n Bryan/College Station’s KBTX.com
Camp Helps Young Cancer Patients Forget Worries on MyFOX Houston
Sometimes the ‘pod spits out a track that makes me turn it off and get out a CD to listen to the whole album. Today it was Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” What’s Going On? is one of the great albums of all time. Elegant and searching as it chronicles a litany of social ills, it somehow manages to be hopeful.
It’s also depressingly relevant and timely today. I guess not much has changed since 1971 when Gaye looked at the state of the world and asked the album’s titular question.
Mercy Mercy Me.
Thinking about albums makes me think about the language that we use to describe recordings – words like track, album and record. I wonder what will happen to that language as digital replaces the tangible. I imagine a future music junkie conversation running like this:
“Yeah, What’s Going On? is a great folder.”
“Totally. What’s your favorite file in that folder?”
“‘Mercy Mercy Me’, dude.”
“Yeah. That’s an incredible file.”
“Totally, but what does he mean by ‘fish full of mercury?’ What are fish?”
Or something like that.
Oh, and here’s the ten…
- “Chasin Another Trane” – John Coltrane – Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings
- “Glamour Girl” – T-Bone Walker – Complete Imperial Recordings
- “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) – Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On?
- “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” – Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention – We’re Only in It for the Money
- “His N.D. World” – Mary Lou Lord – KGSR Broadcasts Vol. 6
- “Antigua” – Antônio Carlos Jobim – Wave
- “Plowed” – Sponge – Rotting Pinata
- “Culver City Park” – Dave Douglas – Freak In
- “Can’t Find a Way” – Endochine* – Day Two
- “Careering” – Public Image, Ltd. – The Greatest Hits So Far
- “Mexican Blackbird” – ZZ Top – Fandango!
Okay, so that’s 11, but there is a star by the one I saw live.
Every summer evening should end with sunset on a trail.
On the tail end of a bike ride yesterday, I wanted to make it an even 23 miles so I turned on a street near our house and found a trail leading to another neighborhood. I took the trail, which led to a cul-de-sac with a small nature preserve only .25 miles from home.
The preserve is mainly a small karst formation with a cave underneath. The sign said that the cave is 85 feet by 45 feet, but only 2 feet high at its highest. The cave entrances have been gated off in such a way that bats and other wildlife can get in and out, but snooping kids are prevented from entering.
Later in the evening I walked back up with my camera to see if I could get a few pictures.
This is one of the caves that had naturally collapsed so there was no need to block it off. It’s now just a two foot deep hole.
In addition to this dragonfly, I saw mockingbirds, white-winged doves and a number of deer that seemed to be running all around me, allowing only glimpses as they raced through the cedar. One of these days, I’m going to bring the long lens and some patience and try to shoot a deer.
I liked the look of this fallen tree, rotted and teeming with life.
These flowers ignited if only for a brief moment in the sun’s fading light.
Tomorrow we head out to Burton, TX for Camp Periwinkle. This will be my 18th year at camp, and as always, I’m looking forward to another great week.
Since I have a lot of packing to do, and not just because I’m still stuck in the throws of the Coyote Mercury Summer of Not Blogging So Much, I’ll just repost what I wrote last year when I got back:
We got back from Camp Periwinkle (a camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings) on Saturday afternoon and have spent most of the time since recovering. I’ve been going to Camp every summer since 1990, which is possible since it’s only a week long.
The underlying philosophy of camp is selflessness. All the counselors and staff are volunteers, the kids go for free, everything there is donated. For one week, and sometimes for the last time, the kids at camp get to feel normal, and they get to have fun, and they have the time of their lives.
The smiles and the laughter at Camp Periwinkle are things that keep those of us who’ve been doing it for so long coming back year after year.
It’s typically one of the high points of any given year. It’s a chance to spend a week living in a perfect world, a world of patience, selflessness, love, compassion, understanding. It’s a chance to see kids and adults truly be their best selves. Where else can you see kids in a relay race cheering on the kid in a wheelchair who will cost them the race, yet no one cares about who wins or loses? Where else can you see adults put aside every aspect of their own comfort and convenience so that kids will feel special?
I’ve never been anywhere or done anything else that focuses what life should be about and how we should interact with one another more clearly than Camp Periwinkle. It’s a place where no expense is spared, no opportunity missed, to make kids whose lives are a daily struggle feel special, feel normal. It teaches kids that they can do what no one thinks they can. It helps them survive.
In the past seventeen years, I’ve seen kids laugh, smile, dance, and play who might never otherwise have found a place to do those things. I’ve watched kids crawl out of wheelchairs to climb a wall on the ropes course. I’ve seen kids fresh from brain surgery lean on their crutches and dance.
It’s a powerful place and it changes a person’s way of thinking. It reminds me of how special life is, how lucky I am, how important it is to work everyday to make the world a better place for everyone.
It’s a chance to see what life could be like in a world ruled by love, where nobody ever wanted for anything.
Did I say it is a perfect world?
* * *
Note: This post was republished as a guest editorial in the Nov/Dec 2006 Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing.
You can read more about Camp Periwinkle on Burst Blog: BlogBurst Bloggers Help Send Children to Camp