Category: Biographical

Demise of the Flies

When I bite into Cheerios, depending upon how long they have been soaking in milk, I anticipate a certain crunch, a crisp crumbling of the exterior wall of the oat circle, giving way to the welcome tenderizing by the milk moat surrounding it.

When drinking a beverage while watching evening television, one does not anticipate such a crunch. Instead, there should be the silk-smooth sensation of a liquid draining down the esophagus after a vibrant, refreshing taste exchange with an appreciative tongue.

While it’s not exactly the esophagus, my larynx is a well-behaved esophageal neighbor. Some years ago in a doctor’s office, a skilled specialist remarked on the size of my larynx. I sought his help after suffering unfortunate damage to my throat cartilage from a blow to the throat. Looking down upon me in the examining room were signed photographs from the doctor’s former appreciative patients; Barbra Streisand lovingly encouraged me that I had an excellent doctor. “Wow!” exclaimed my doctor upon initial examination, “I’ll bet you can really sing loudly! I’ve never seen a larynx this big!” This statement, coming from Barbra Streisand’s former doctor, caused me to swell with pride. And, yes, darn it, I can sing loudly, and hold a tune at that; after all, I had made it into my college men’s glee club. Admitting a slight boast, I confess that I can swallow a dozen pills in one pharyngeally-enlarged gulp.

But back to my esophageal interaction with beverages. A few months ago, while sipping my favorite beverage of choice while watching late night television, my wife explained what transpired because I didn’t recall it in detail. She explained that upon a certain fateful beverage sip, I inexplicably launched myself out of my chair, straight up, arms flailing outward while discharging the offending beverage several feet into the room. It was the classic television spit take—eyes bulged, buttocks clenched, the spew of mouth content arcing across the room.

What I had spat out possessed fur, accompanied by dangly-leggy things, and a sizable center pouch. This is what I guessed it comprised of, considering I had munched it several times before realizing it had no welcome place in my mouth or digestive system. It was a housefly, pierced by my teeth, its anatomy rearranged. I had very likely decapitated it before my oral explosion.

I had never had that happen before or since. Until last night. It was a déjà vu experience. Last night, I picked up my glass. I sipped. My lips recorded that same grotesque texture, that furry interloper touching my lips, the same sensation I had experienced several months prior. Another housefly in my glass! But that previous episode had taught me a lesson; my lips quickly sealed tight against the fur and the dangly legs and the bulgy, multi-mirroring eyes of another housefly. This time I locked him out of my mouth, just barely, and into my glass he went. I held the glass to the light to examine the floating corpse. Yes, he was indeed immobile. Drowned. Dead. I tentatively fished the deceased housefly out of my glass and placed him carefully on my beverage’s fabric coaster.

He has lain there for two days now, time enough to check for any possible movements or twitches of life, for I do not think a fly possesses a pulse. Time to discard him, whether disassembled by a trip down the garbage disposal, consolidated with the other trash bin rubbish, or centrifuged down the toilet.

Although a solitary fly possesses both a mother and father, and probably thousands of sisters and brothers, it’s difficult to get worked up over the death of a fly. It’s just one fly. Gone, never realizing it was alive.

But imagine the simultaneous hatching of billions of them, all headed your direction. Pharaoh rightly owned that plague sent him with the message: Hey. Listen up. Obey. Straighten up and fly right. Fly right.

So I ask myself: this one, lone, dead fly—what message did he carry to me?

The Decades


Each new decade of our life signals new ends and new beginnings. Perhaps a new decade reminds us that maybe, just maybe, we are ushering in a smidgen of new wisdom into our lives. If we are fortunate, grateful endings and unspoiled new beginnings can be a part of this decade-aging process.

This year, I rounded that new decade corner by entering a new, “I’m Now-in-My-70s” decade. Make way! I’m already seventy-times-round-the-sun age! How could that happen? Just yesterday, it seems I was making a figure of my first grade reader’s mascot, Penny the Cat, cut out of construction paper and handsomely colored with crayons. Years became decades. Navigating college lunch lines and managing social circles pushed thoughts of Penny far to the side. Falling in love and finding a job and raising a family, all while trying to figure out who I was—and would become—were exhausting and all-consuming. More aging decades of ends and new beginnings emerged and disappeared into fog. And then came the Golden Years and retirement, that vast canvas scroll of uncertain length. So much already behind. Formal education, done. Children, grown up and on their own. Check. Career, or make that plural careers of unequal lengths and varying quality. Got ‘er done. In hindsight, was I actually designed to evolve into whom I have become or what I have done? Never mind. It’s all in the rear view mirror, all bound together, sometimes tidy, sometimes barely held with crude baling wire.

There remains one unlikeliest constant companion in all this sea of decade-swapping change—my primary care physician. He increasingly populates more appointments on my calendar with each passing year. He is now 87 years old, and I thought he was elderly when I first retained his services, 25 years ago. He’s a remarkable man, having reared two sets of twins and a several others as well. On his days off, my doctor is a flight instructor at the local airport, something he’s done for 40 years.

With each weigh-in at his medical office, I vainly empty my pockets of all extraneous possession. I deposit loose change, keys, pencils and pens, even dental floss on the table before stepping upon the weigh-in scale. Still, each succeeding annual checkup records yet another pound or two of additional girth. Then the inspection begins, first the easy stuff—ears, tongue, nose and throat, working up to the pokes and prodding in the belly and groin. The tour then explores those naked tender spots that I myself have never seen with my own naked eyes, those remote regions requiring my physician to navigate with finger probes, accompanied by comments, “Ah, I see!” But I cannot see any of it.

Last week, this primary care physician and I entered into a lively debate about arthritis pain medications and their accompanying side-effects. Prepared in advance for this discussion, I unabashedly displayed the sophomoric research I had gleaned from the Internet. He was not impressed. “So you want to suffer on a daily basis in the remote off-chance that this medication could shorten your life?”

“Well, yes, I don’t want to die unnecessarily,” I responded, rock-solid sure of my YouTube research footing.

“I have a different take on that,” he suggested. “We don’t have yesterday. We are not promised tomorrow. All we have is today. And I believe in living it, today, the best that we can. Make full use of today. Take the damned medicine.”

“Oh, and one other thing,” he continued. “You know, we’re all going to die sometime. Something or another will get all of us, right?”

Once I got home and the embarrassed flush had cleared my cheeks, my brain engaged enough to recall a passage from the book of Hebrews. Yes, that Hebrews. “By His death, He could break the power of him who holds the power of death…and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

Welcome to my 70-year decade. Should be a fun ride.

Virus Diaries: Uprooted

It began as a routine trek to retrieve the garbage cans from the street in front of our house. I could have left them there for a bit longer. But a good citizen am I, and mindful of the Good Neighbor reputation I am advancing.

Trudging down the drive, garbage can trailing behind, why not pick a few weeds on the way, weeds sprouted after recent rains, weeds whose miserable greedy roots suck my moisture from my nutrients from my soil in my garden. Pathetic chlorophyll freeloaders, posing among the properly planted and well-cultivated, invaders among my master-planned hybrid specimens.

I plucked one final garden-invading fiend. I thought I did. But it pulled back, hard. I yanked again, and again met unexpected resistance for so small a green growth. The final pull wrested loose its hold upon the soil, and its naked root danced in the air. I relished that this thing, like a hooked trout, would gasp and fade away.

But wait. The frail roots descended into an unexpected pod, split open like a bean exposed to moisture. This excavated thing was not a weed. Instead, I had uprooted a baby tree.

I felt a sudden guilt, the guilt that comes when a life is aborted. This thing was meant for a long and sturdy life, a life that I had destroyed.

Many years ago and quite by chance, I came across a high school friend at a bus station in Kalamazoo. Her youthful, carefree high school face had devolved into a lined, worn mask. She explained that she had had an abortion, and had never since fully recovered. Uprooting a life takes its toll.

And there lay my baby tree, uprooted. It was meant for grand things: nourishment for bugs and birds, shade for beasts and joy for two-legged guests. And seeds to birth new generations.

Limp and frail, I held its tiny trunk and naked roots in my hand. I met God’s creation, this tiny tree, in my front yard—now the vanquisher and the vanquished. I uprooted the tree, and, I suppose, it uprooted a bit of me.

Virus Diaries: Social Distancing—It’s Simple Math

Once it was all the rage: “Six Degrees of Separation.” We discovered that we’re each just six relationships away from everyone else. I know you; that’s one relationship away. And you know other people. You know Sylvester, and he knows people. Bingo, two relationships away. He knows Edna, and she knows people. That’s number three. Our relationships multiply exponentially. So if you do that at six levels, or “degrees,” you could know everyone on the planet. Friends of friends, and so on. So there! All people are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. Six degrees of separation.

It’s simple math.

But wait a minute. Nowadays, on my daily walk, I count to six not by relationships, but by distance. I don’t want to “reach out and touch somebody.” No way! I want people six feet—or more—away from me. Today, give me “Six Feet of Separation.” The coronavirus has me jumping, keeping a street-width away from other walkers. My glasses fog as I re-breathe my mask-recirculated air. Because who knows? That less-than-six-feet-away stroller may have been around another less-than-six-feet-away walker, who may have been around another long-distance violator! Hang the formerly vaunted “six degrees of separation” theory! Spare us from those relationships six deep. And wide. And far. Keep me away! I’m all about “six feet of separation.”

It’s simple math.

One day, Mr. Coronavirus will turn us loose, and we might recognize life as we once knew it. When our gloves come off—literally—we’ll likely return to forging new “six degree of separation” relationships, which are just out of reach at the moment. And, yes, perhaps we’ll talk without needing to shout across the street.

Until then, we can be grateful, summing up both what we now have, and what we will then have.

It’s simple math.

Virus Diaries: Finding Fingal

(front row, first on left—with all ten brothers and sisters and parents)

This week, I’ve enjoyed spending time with my 140-year old grandfather. He immigrated to this country in 1891, when he was 29. Swedish-accented Fingal quickly hopscotched to Alaska in his quest for gold. And find it he did—mining enough gold to become a very wealthy Swedish immigrant.

Aged 140, I paused to let my grandfather gather himself for his story’s next chapter.

Fingal invested his new-found riches in Washington’s blossoming Yakima Valley. He bought up every small business that was available: grocery, hardware, dry cleaners, all the essential businesses, and hundreds of acres of prime land, ready for soon-arriving irrigation. And so, Fingal’s wealth grew.⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀

Until, that is, his unscrupulous, cheating small business managers realized Fingal had no business acumen. They overwhelmed his unsophisticated Swedish education, reducing his burgeoning empire to a fiscal nightmare. He salvaged some farming acreage, his lone investment left standing. He planted apple orchards, retreating to the lone farm house where he raised his family, including my mother, Dagmar.

Actually, I never met my grandfather. He died on August 16, 1945, just three months after my parents married on the front porch of the farm house. He arose from his bed for the last time for their wedding vows, six years before my birth. So the time spent with my 140-year old Grandfather this week has been virtual, with the help of ancestry.com.

During days of seclusion, there are stories surrounding us, closer than ever. We may be housed or virtually connected with family and friends whose stories we have never heard. It could be the perfect time to refresh ourselves with their life stories.

Tomorrow, during these homebound virus-afflicted days, I will return to my family archival photo and slide-scanning project, a project which I have conducted for many months. There, through pictures, I will again virtually meet up with Grandfather Fingal, the grandfather I never met.

Virus Diaries: The Toilet

During these global virus days, we are captives within our abodes. I have never asked myself, “Given the plague, where would I prefer to hole up?” We have already answered this question. We are holed up where we are holed up.⠀⠀

I am fortunate, protecting myself in the 1,600 square foot home that I share with my wife. Now that my field of vision is suddenly reduced, all around me in this household are curiosities that, in a larger world, might go unnoticed.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Take our toilet—no, don’t take our toilet! Were our world larger, proportioned as it used to be, I would need to anticipate my toileting needs away from the house. At Lowes Hardware—ah, yes, down the corridor at the back, on the left. Three urinals and four stalls await me. Our grocery store has one modest toileting compartment per gender, semi-hidden near the back, as if preserving it for employees only, nonetheless it is adequate enough for the task, or tasks, at hand.⠀⠀

My homebound toileting needs are now conveniently served just down the hallway; I have no need for an outside substitute in this giant virus-infested world. I enter the chamber, and the 12-volt motion-activated light invites me to safely stand or sit, as my needs may require. Regardless, I am welcomed by a non-judgmental porcelain creation of exquisite industrial design, hanging, as if perched, mounted directly on the toilet wall, defying gravity, for no part of this appliance touches the polished tile floor beneath. It’s a thing of cleanable genius, a World’s Fair-worthy sculpted beauty that I admire several times each day. Enlarged to gigantic proportions, it would make a wondrous waterslide.

Its other toileting convenience places it above a modest “Ford-level” appliance: the dual-sized wall-mounted push buttons release either minor or high-volume torrents depending upon the demand. But make no mistake, my ceramic friend is no competition for a “Bugatti-level” bidet-enhanced instrument whose performance flushes away all contenders.

An Artist in Darkness

“So you are a widow, living at this retirement center—what happened to your husband?” My question spilled out with unexpected bluntness.

“Oh, he was a doctor—a pulmonologist. He died in a mine.”

“In a mine?” I puzzled. The irony of a pulmonologist dying in a mining accident was inescapable. Was he researching black lung disease?

Carol cackled. “No! He didn’t die in a MINE! He died in oh-nine! As in 2009!”

I scrambled for cover.

Fresh from a Netflix docudrama about Ann Boleyn, I decided to up the ante of our breakfast chitchat and impress upon her my fresh-from-TV insights. But she soon left me in the dust, rattling off 200 years of English monarchy melodrama.

Checkmate. Nothing to do but retreat to, “umm-hmm’s,” and “ah-ha’s.”

Eager for a change of subject, I inquired about her education. “Double major in history and art,” she replied.

No wonder. She wisely avoided pressing me about my own educational pedigree.

She had called Boise home, but after her son-in-law’s fatal heart attack, she moved to be closer to her daughter. “In warm weather when they visited me, he would literally run up the nearby ski slopes for exercise. His death—well, it was totally unexpected.”

I asked Carol about her current art interest. “Being an artist can be a very lonely life,” she explained. “It’s only you and your art. That’s not enough for me. I need other people.”

I have never seen Carol without a hat, or sunglasses, or both. This art major, in her element with pastels and a sketchpad, lives in a dimly-lit world. A medical condition has rendered her eyes so sensitive that light pains her. In her apartment, drapes are drawn, the light nearly non-existent. Artwork hangs on the walls about her, barely visible. These days, this aficionado of form and color craves near-total darkness.

Carol abruptly excused herself. “Gotta go! Today’s New York Times didn’t arrive before I left for breakfast. Time for my crossword puzzle!”

Of course. The New York Times crossword puzzle. She has worked them for decades.

Watch out, art and history categories—Carol’s on the loose.

The Stewardess

Jan’s inaugural stewardess commission was on the World War II “Gooney Bird,” the twin-engine DC-3. They began flying in 1935. They are still in service to this day.

So is ninety-something, Jan. Over breakfast, she recalled her favorite flight crew.

“In those days, the unpressurized planes flew low. On long flights, our two mischievous pilots would open their cockpit windows and deploy long strands of chicken bones, all tied together with string. They let out enough line so the bones would hit and clatter against the windows of the unsuspecting passengers, provoking shock and dismay, while traveling at several thousand feet altitude.”

“I suppose turkey bones would have been too big and heavy for the fragile windows!”

Jan eventually graduated to DC-4’s, and to DC-6’s. The latter contained sleeping berths for upscale passengers, reminiscent of the era’s train transportation.

Based in Los Angeles, she served Hollywood royalty: Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Hedda Hopper, Walt Disney, John Wayne, Barbara Hutton.

Jan lived in a stewardess dormitory, where a visiting pilot ran into Jan quite by accident when he lost his way, arriving at the wrong dormitory; Jan was smitten.

One day, after making repairs under the hood of her Model A Ford, which she had purchased from another pilot for $125, Jan drove across town to visit him. He invited her to Tucson, where he was based. So she spent the next several weeks “visiting her grandmother” in Tucson. Two months after they met, she married her sweetheart pilot.

“Did that turn out to be a good thing?” I was incredulous. She curled her index finger to meet her thumb, forming an “O,” as in “perfect.” “We had an amazing life together. We traveled to every part of the world. Greece! We loved Greece!”

Later that afternoon, accompanying my father down the hall, we once again ran into Jan. “Didn’t we meet you yesterday?” asked my Dad. Good try. I suggested to him that it had been just that morning.

Jan’s son, John, who happened to be visiting her, accompanied her down the hall. We introduced ourselves, yet I felt I already knew John.

After all, we could both recite Jan’s fondest stories.

The Patent Lawyer

Chuck stared blankly after he placed his breakfast order. “No, I’ll take the cold cereal instead.”

Sometimes, Chuck’s esophagus blocks his food. It gets stuck—“right here.” It remains there until he eats again, when it may journey up into his mouth again. “And there’s not much that’s coming out the other end, either,” he explained.

“Do you still drive?” I asked the 98-year old, trying to change the subject. I could still imagine the taste of the food, the second time around.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to meet another driver of my caliber on the road!”

Chuck had fallen prior to his move into the retirement home, landing on his head. 30 stitches patched him up. The fall had reduced his short-term memory, and he now required the use of a cane. So, in his mid-nineties, he reluctantly gave up golf and tennis. “Tennis doubles is a wonderful thing. Don’t need to cover nearly as much court!” I guessed so; I had given up on tennis three decades ago.

Chuck was a patent lawyer. The precise details of every patent were still packed in the back of that cranium. Long-term memory was definitely not a problem.

“You know how a ship being attacked from an aircraft has to take three readings on the location of the plane and its angle of attack before you can aim, load and fire a 2.9-inch shell from the ship’s deck?”

Of course. Everyone knows that.

“You have time to take two readings. By the time you try to take the third reading, you’re toast! Up in smoke! No one could figure out how to take that third reading in time.”

Chuck’s client had figured out a way to accomplish this, using a sort of scrabble board contraption.

Another client developed an invention that produced weird electrical waves. Whenever Chuck inadvertently left his lunch near the gizmo, his lunch got hot. “You’ve got the descendent of this in your kitchen. It’s called a microwave.”

Just then, two men dressed in black suits made their way down the corridor, a black gurney between them. All they lacked was a body.

Chuck smiled. “What do you expect?” he asked rhetorically. “Just take a look at where we live.”

With that, cane in hand, he headed down the hall, as if he were hunting down a new tennis partner.

The Diamond Sorter

At 85, Art is a youngster compared with my 101-year old father. For breakfast, he’d have the waffles, Dad wanted oatmeal and poached eggs, all easy to chew.

Saturday at the retirement home means a two-hour drive each way for me. The breakfasts are routine, except for who is assigned to sit with us. Today, it was Art, a two-week resident newbie.

At the end of his Korean War service, Art’s home became the hospital for a full year. When he was released, he was still a teenager with no job skills.

He took a vocational skills test and discovered he possessed a hidden, latent talent: sorting.

Art could sort anything. He could detect the minutest differences. Sizes. Colors. Shapes. Anything. Think it’s tough to tell one leaf from another? Art doesn’t; he’s a born sorter.

His unique skill landed him a job as a trainee in a jewelry company where he was given plenty of stuff to sort: all of them diamonds. Thousands of them, and they all needed sorting by color, cut, size, quality.

His proficiency eventually made a way for him in the jewelry wholesale market. His skills had brought him into the limelight, into the big time, and into one of the most exclusive communities of Los Angeles.

He lived there all by himself. His wife had left him fifty years ago, though they have still never divorced.

Halfway through Art’s waffle breakfast, Edna, stopped by the table to greet us. She stood directly next to Art. But Art couldn’t see her. He only turned his head when he heard her voice.

Macular degeneration has stolen most of Art’s once-legendary gift of visual discernment. He feels lost in his new environment and misses his former neighborhood. He could have become a bitter man.

After breakfast, I fixed his television for him. A baseball fan, Art was suffering withdrawal. When I got it to work, he pumped his fists in victory, and we hugged triumphantly.

“It’s been a good day,” he explained, “for two reasons. First, you fixed my TV so I can watch The World Series! Second, because your dad called me an Old Geezer. Because that’s what I call myself! I love that! We Old Geezers gotta stick together!”