Choice – Snail Trek Blog

Picture in a Frame

When my dad disappeared like a genie during a stroll, it was odd, a bit scary. Was it a seizure? Sudden Alzheimer’s onset? I fault doggie Schmutz for my own occasional erratic strolling habits, but this was different.

Dad’s uncommon behavior persisted. He appeared berserk, off the rails. Over time, I got used to Dad’s unprovoked rabbit trails, unanticipated pirouettes and time-out breaks. But it was still freaky.

During these impulses, Dad, a true artist, would place his hands directly in front of his face, then, with index fingers and thumbs extended and touching, he positioned them to create a little ad hoc “finger frame.” Eyes squinted and head cocked, the squared-off space between his fingers became his imaginary canvas. All distractions outside the frame simply fell away. Dad was framing beauty, creating his private miniature masterpiece.

Mona Lisa has displayed her inscrutable smile since 1503. We all admire Leonardo da Vinci’s extraordinary portrait. But no one mentions her frame, which has been replaced many times. One recent frame was discarded after insects were found living in it. Imagine vermin devouring Mona Lisa’s frame, her winsome smile transformed into a grimace.

Frames are often humble creations. They point toward something greater—the image itself. As they guide our attention toward the thing of value, frames seem to disappear.

We refer to the authors of the Declaration of Independence as its “framers.” They point to the “self-evident truths,” realities that preexisted the authors and endured beyond them. The authors were not the creators of the truths; they simply framed and enshrined them.

Editors work hard to frame an author’s work. They iron the text’s wrinkles and erase distracting rabbit trails. They tug at words and paragraphs until the work speaks, straight and clear.

In most homes, frames showcase pictures of beloved family and friends. Here, a cherished parent or grandparent. There, framed portraits of children and a dear companion. Faced with disaster, we would likely first grab these priceless mementoes.

Music also frames. It sails freely through time and dimensions. Music celebrates loved ones and consequential events. Like our lives, music has a beginning, a middle and an end, helping to frame significant episodes or emotions. One example is Rod Stewart’s rendition of “Picture in a Frame” (written by Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits):

The sun come up, it was blue and gold
Ever since I put your picture in a frame

Now I come calling in my Sunday best
Ever since I put your picture in a frame

I’m gonna love you till the wheels come off
Ever since I put your picture in a frame

I love you, baby, and I always will
Ever since I put your picture in a frame

Like a picture and a frame, melody and lyrics reach deeply into our hearts.

A frame honors what we cherish.

It might be a refreshed appreciation of nature or a rare composition within the bead of an artist’s eye. What we frame might be an eternal truth, a story worth telling, or a rare and cherished love.

Imagine our lives as a series of pictures, still life tableaus of the people and events that have molded us into who we are becoming. One beside the other, they depict our life story, the joys, challenges, loves, and disappointments, scenes on display.

There, that portrait of our beloved companion—it needs a wide, generous frame.

Next—ah, that disappointment that we felt so deeply, and what we learned from it! For that, an elegant, but simple frame will do.

For the deep grooves left us by the loved ones gone astray, and the joy upon their return—give that frame deeply engraved contours, like the ones etched into our heart.

With the proper framing of a canvas, all else falls away.

The content of those tableaus does not always fall within our choosing. Still, we own the framing rights to them. What shall we choose?

Little Slivers

An army of California freeway motorcyclists, the “lane splitters,” legally ride the no-man’s-land between lanes. When motorists encounter a Harley on the lane-that-is-no-lane, they may suffer violently erupting blood pressure and heartbeats outpacing those of a guinea pig.

A Harley can pump out 120 decibels, enough untamed quaking to redirect the veins in an eyeball. And the heart-stopping noise and sheer shock of an unexpected motorcyclist blasting on slivers of highway, mere inches away, can generate PTSD symptoms.

Tiny slivers can draw disproportionate attention. Take my left big toe. The toenail’s edge, a tiny sliver, grows crooked and inward. Only a sculptor could appreciate the nail’s insidious geometric angle. This minuscule anatomical anomaly, doubtless the vestige of an ancestor’s aberrant DNA, creates piercing pain. The throbbing torment rivals the earsplitting Harley gobbling up its sliver of freeway.

Other kinds of slivers carve consequential geopolitical landscapes. The city of Kaliningrad lies 412 miles westward from the rest of Russia, a vestige of World War II politics. It is an isolated political sliver encircled by other countries. The Suez Canal is another geographical sliver. That tiny navigable sliver eliminates long voyages around the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The canal reduces the journey by 5,500 nautical miles, or 220 fewer days at sea. The Panama Canal, another watery sliver, saves 8,000 nautical miles for ships sailing between the east and west coasts of the United States.

Our appreciation of, or annoyance at, slivers can play into our personal aspirations. We are hard-boiled in a pot of anti-sliver diatribe. To carve out a well-lived life, we are coached to create outsized achievements. Slivers be damned! We can become whatever we may dream, pole-vaulting over monstrous obstacles in our way. We measure our worth by powering our ambitions up the steepest inclines.

There must be a better way forward, a counterpunch to the gold-medal worthy mandates of a bigger, better, faster world. Have we overlooked the unnoticed, shadowed backwaters concealing Little Slivers of a different scale?

The July 19, 2024 issue of The New York Times carries an article about a tribe, the Maduro people, living deep in the vast expanse of the Amazon rain forest. This year, their tribal meetings would be held in a village 13 miles distant, beyond thick forest, logs, and streams. Attending the meeting would be a near-impossibility for the tribe’s oldest member. She had lost track of her age, but it’s somewhere between 106 and 120. Despite having never worn shoes, and refusing to do so, she vowed to make the trek.

We are brought low or grow tall depending on our navigation of the challenges in our path. Only the old woman’s son could create the way forward for her. Hoisting his mother up and onto his back, he fashioned a strip of fabric across his forehead for his mother to hang on to. Barefoot and dangling on his back like a baby opossum, the aged mother held on for the entire 13-mile trek. All the while, her son’s machete slashed and stabbed at the dense undergrowth, carving a Little Sliver, a way forward, a path of hope in the wilderness.

Little Slivers come in many wrappings. They may be a highway for audacious Harley motorcyclists. But when laid out upon the globe, Little Slivers can reshape a map. They can also create outsized consternation and suffering—the stabbing pain of a toenail or the anguish of a broken dream.

And there are the undervalued Little Slivers, the hopes like those within an aged woman. They remain unnoticed and little regarded except by another watchful, caring person. By lifting those precious slivers onto our backs and carrying them within our hearts, we may offer a hopeful way forward. When their sacrifice truly becomes ours—a lasting burden embedded within our own hearts—we may attain a new and hopeful Little Sliver for our own future.

Wandering

With the determination of a Muscle Beach body builder, the pale green lizard performed pushups on tiny arms, intending to draw admiration from an adoring female. Instead, with no comely female Reptilia in sight, it drew only my attention, as it pushed hard up and down against a warmed rock. The superheated West Texas summer attracted few visitors. As we hiked along a nearly indecipherable rocky path, the sun baked both the lizard and ourselves. Still, we bet against the midday scorch. The vast desert would provide the wandering adventure we sought.

Beginning our trek at midday just as the thermometer eclipsed one hundred degrees, we realized we were out of our element. Carrying no water with us, we firmly cemented our novice status. Never mind, it would be a quick hike. Upon returning to our car at its completion, freezing air conditioning would await us. So we tripped onward, energized that we were the lone brave souls wandering through this hostile world. Occasionally, a surprised rattlesnake hastily retreated across our trail. Jackrabbit scat baked along the stones marking the trail’s edge, though we noticed the trail markers growing increasingly rare and random. Once reassuring, the pathway eventually disappeared altogether. We searched for clues. Was this a stone arrangement pointing forward, or the burial marker of previous hikers, wanderings that would prove to be their final wilderness hike? Five miles into our hike, we were lost, so what to do next? Should we soldier onward hoping to discover the markers again, or would we attempt an uncertain recovery and retrace our steps? With no water, no trail, and 105 degrees of scorching heat, we were like wandering Jews—minus the water from the rock, the manna, and Moses or Joshua.

By definition, wanderings stretch boundaries and challenge limits. Good wanderings hold adventures and untold stories, yet they can be scary and hold danger. Songs are written in their honor:

“My father was a wanderer,

And it’s also in my blood,

So I happily wander as long as I can

And I wave with my hat

Valeri, valera,

Valeri, valera ha ha ha ha ha,

Valeri, valera,

And I wave with my hat.”

Frankly, it sings much better in the original German lyrics. Nonetheless, the song accurately describes my own father. When he passed away last year, aged 106, my Artist-Father proved to be a wanderer to the end. Left-brain required tasks were not his thing. Without the aid of a check-writing coach, he would stare uncomprehendingly at his checkbook. But even though aged, by changing his mental channel to his impassioned world of art, he would defy gravity, rise and hover over his wheelchair, balance against the walker that held his paint palette, and stab at his wall-hung oil paintings. Brush in hand, he would improve them yet again! Precarious, yes. Inhibited, no. Dad never learned to stay on the beaten track or, for that matter, off his little apartment’s walls.

Can we recall the last time we wandered off the beaten track? Perhaps to our loss, many of us learned early on to stay ruthlessly on track and to avoid coloring, painting, or wandering outside the lines.

I recently installed a 100-watt solar panel on the roof of our 17-foot camping trailer that inhabits the driveway. Thus equipped, she can charge her battery unaided. It was a sort of “put a ring on it” moment, lending our relationship full empowerment. Now she can hum and buzz with glorious self-generating power, our energized equal as we wander roads, whether paved or dirt. I felt I had breathed new wandering life into our little Pinocchio.

Of course, our tiny trailer offers no equivalency to the wanderings of bold explorers. Instead, she provides us with our-scale wanderings, helping us to dial in randomized mixes of people, places and events. Sometimes, we are led on a leisurely stroll through the woods beneath ancient oaks with deeply scarred bark, moss-covered stones cradling a brook’s clear and crisp waters. At other times, our trailer delivers us into a different kind of wandering—an unpredictable Vitamix concoction of unexplored places and previously unknown faces. They are random wanderings, though afterwards we wonder if they were indeed very random. Long after these events occur, the retelling begins with, “Do you remember when…” and the warm joy of familiarity tickles our brains once again. We embrace these wanderings as being somehow sacred, each retelling resurrecting a precious, sweet nectar.

Our hiking path having disappeared in the vast West Texas desert, we rambled blindly on, sunbaked and lost, our wandering adventure grown not so sweet! By now, with sun blazing and deep concern setting in (yes, we might call it “panic”), I happened to recall one steady feature during our hours-long wandering mishap: for miles behind us, a lone utility line had bisected the cloudless sky. I now recalled observing it even from the now-distant plot where we had parked our car. I surmised that we could now follow that power line, straight as a prickly pear thorn, leading us back to our trail’s beginning and the safety of our car. And so it did. Found again! Joy and relief at being alive!

There is a counterpart to wandering: restoration. Restoration, that essential element that salves and strengthens us upon a return from wandering, can be easily underestimated. Yet restoration is the most critical component for wanderers. Returning from wandering in a desert, whether actual, relational or emotional, demands commemoration. Restoration after wandering through an illness, from captivity, and return from grieving, all deserve uncommon celebration, the sort held for soldiers returning from war.

And for those friends who have helped us both to wander and to return from wandering, we also owe uncommon celebration.

Like the utility line, they help to guide us onward toward wandering, and afterward, homeward, toward restoration.

Investment Accounting

Youth imagines time to run on forever. Typical of our young station in life, there is neither enough time nor money to supply our interests. Investable resources are drawn down to support the thing at hand, with less thought of those many decades ahead.

Perhaps, for awhile, that is as it should be. Youth feeds upon the hope of opportunities at hand to grow the vision and passion of our yet-to-be discovered futures. How many times, as young people, have we re-imagined what our lives would become? Somehow, ageless bodies, good fortune and our emerging skillset would provide whatever that future held.

During my early twenties, it first occurred to me that I was falling behind. The automated success ladder I had envisioned for my life became less automatic, and I slowly veered off course, a small degree at first, which widened with my advancing age. How had I been relegated, at my first job, to cleaning toilets in a restaurant? How did I find myself, shirtless, hot, and profusely sweaty, baling hay in Mississippi? And, ignorant of the profoundly itchy characteristics of okra upon the skin, how was I now ignorantly harvesting it bare-handed and bare-chested?

I continued onward with vague goals, and without the means to achieve them. Little did I recognize that I tottered already on the precipice of an ungoverned financial future.

The earnings of $1.25 per hour at my first job were put toward my first car ownership, a 1962 MGA Mark II Roadster with rusted door panels, which I purchased for $300 when I was 17. I considered this purchase a mighty good investment both toward transportation and developing social opportunities with the fairer sex.

I failed to realize that the $300 required for the purchase of the MGA, along with all my other earnings, did not belong to me. Rather, it was all on loan to me, as were all the other accounts of my life, monetary or otherwise. Success in every enterprise, reputation, health, relationships with family and friends were all ceded to me from God. They were on loan to me. My interest should be to prosper them and generate what good I could of them, before the eventual completion of the terms of the loan.

My thinking started to change. I began asking myself — when time itself is folded up and retired, what value of our lives is there remaining?

The Gospel of Luke, chapter 19, reminds us of the investments loaned by a nobleman to three servants. Upon his return, the nobleman would ask for an accounting of the three loans. One servant took wise risks, investing his loan aggressively, which paid off. Over time, his financial investment soared, as did, we might assume, the other similarly managed affairs of his life. Due to his devotion to excellence, his professional advancements arrived with remarkable speed. Before long, he himself purchased the very company that had initially hired him. He may have become a man of great influence, whether obvious or subtle in nature. He stirred vision and passion in others by his virtuous behavior. Once, upon taking a corner too fast, an old Volkswagen overturned; he ran over to help, rolled the car over with the driver still strapped in the seat, then pulled out the crumpled fenders with his bare hands. He was a gregarious sort. When his neighbors complained about the ruckus from the parties he would throw for his friends, he remedied the issue by inviting them to his parties as well. Upon his ultimate return, the master was pleased with him, very well pleased, and the servant was appropriately rewarded.

The second servant was equally virtuous, a prudent lifelong conservative investor. His were ever an equal mix of stock and bond ETF financial investment products. They were safe, and he needn’t fret over economic downturns. His finances were established to weather adversity, as were his other affairs. A man of lesser passion than the first servant, he carefully governed his relationships. His friendships with others, cookie-cutter versions of himself, were reliable and pleasantly in tune with his own persuasions. He was a faithful and good worker, advancing up the predictable ranks to the admiring “Atta boy!”accolades of his coworkers. Upon passing by a person in need, he might consider how he might meet the need, pause for the briefest moment, then press on. “Ah! A little too late, already passed by—never mind.” To prove his compassion, he would be the first to phone in a 911 emergency—from a safe distance across the street. He noted his tarnished world and its misdirected values, and he exerted his passionless, middling efforts, budging toward doing good when convenient, and performing righteous acts without staining his trousers.

A lone koi fish circled the grimy pond within the courtyard of the third servant. Deflated by life, he awaited funds for its restoration. A browbeaten and fearful man, he expected the worst and accomplished little. He supposed his boss to be an abrupt and unpredictable taskmaster, who himself would take credit for the servant’s work. A boss, he mistakenly perceived, with unreal expectations and no room for lax performance. Office parties were a thing of horror for the servant, who with feigned devotion would heap self-ingratiating praise upon his supervisor. He danced, like a marionette, to earn his boss’s approval. In the end, the character flaws within the third servant produced no growth whatsoever, no improvement of character, performance, relationships, grace, or virtue. The servant succumbed to such self-manufactured fear that he squandered the generous nobleman’s loan, securing it safely within his mattress, its real value slowly but surely depreciating over time; he ended with less than what he had been entrusted with.

At the appointed time, the nobleman, now crowned king, would return and require an accounting of his investments long in the making. But before then, we may make two observations. The first is that a reward clearly awaited those who had invested wisely. And perhaps even more prescient—while the nobleman was yet away, there was still time enough for the servants to mend their ways.

Emerging Stones

Once a rock, now a stone — Transformation by Wes Dahlberg
— © 2024 Craig Dahlberg

Well past his 80th year, my father hopped along the rocks on the beach just out of reach of sloshing waves, searching for the next face peering from along the shore. Each rock he selected became his canvas. But his art would not hold the mundane image of a stylized tree or a vivid green frog painted to adorn a doorstop. Instead, he peered deeply into the contours and subtle colorations to unlock what, or who, was already there, waiting to be discovered.

“There! Can you see him? And look, over his shoulder, there’s his daughter embracing her puppy,” he would describe. And of course, we all said we did, even if we had no clue what image and story the blank rock actually contained.

To the last day I pushed my father’s wheelchair through the parking lot, he required me to stop to review the subtleties of granite stones in the outside walls of his assisted living residence to identify imaginary faces and scenes locked within the patterns of the stones, staring back at us. What were they saying to us? Can you hear them? Can you see them? Then, “Forward!” my father would have declared, his eye ever searching onward, outward, and inward to set free the next stone captive.

Just when does a rock become a stone? A rock lies unused in a quarry or unnoticed beside a road or pathway; a rock serves no particular intention or use. However, a rock becomes a stone when it is put to a purpose. The rock gives birth to a stone. We christen a stone when we ennoble it to possess a specific use. A rock, for example, converts into a stone when it becomes part of a stone wall to keep out intruders, or when a rock is re-purposed as cobblestone, transformed into a pathway for our use.

By the time of his passing at 106 years old on November 1 of 2023, my father had transformed hundreds of rocks into stones, releasing the faces of the captives held within them. The subtle detail that he added with his horsehair paintbrush—no cutting instruments allowed—defined and refined them, drawing the images out and giving them their first breath.

When he finally departed, Dad’s death removed my last bit of scaffolding to the former generation. He was the last survivor of my parents’ generation. Gone were his wife, her parents, his parents, his brother, his nephew, his in-law parents and brothers and sisters. All that was left is the next generation: my brother and myself. Like Dad’s stones, we now stood on the top shelf, placeholders for now, for our generation and the ones to come. That top tier is a windier place, unprotected now that Dad is gone. We feel less protected from the forces of nature that now seem colder and damper, with our face against the wind. It is for us, now, to repeat “Forward!”

*****************

On a boring, routine night of tedious sheep-tending chores, a young shepherd played hacky sack with his sheep’s droppings. He checked for consistency and coloration as he bounced the dung off one foot to the other and back again. Discoloration or soft poop would indicate problems. Achingly monotonous, tending sheep provided plenty of opportunity to amuse himself and to contemplate his place in the world. His notions drifted in the air, along with the musty, fetid odors of his sheep. As the youngest and therefore the least in the family, he did not have the first pick of the chores. Hence, sheepherding was his lot. Could he, alone on this forlorn hilltop, be mindful? Would he tend this moment with no urgency, no purpose, or with both urgency and purpose? Where was his own “Forward” call within his menial service?

Caring for the sheep consumed his life. He considered his only significant moments were in transporting food supplies to the nearby battle lines. In stealth, he would deliver hardy supplies—grain, bread and cheese—to the unit on the front lines, then again return to the menial tasks, herding his bleating, smelly beasts. Today, at dawn’s break, he again loaded up the supplies, arriving to the sound of the clamor of battle. As usual, a vulgar dispute broke out among the front line ranks over today’s strategy. How to defend against the renewed threats of the enemy?

With opportunity arise both fear and courage. Fear announces an impending disastrous consequence—a wrong choice or a step too far. Courage responds—how? With the possible regret of having not tried, grappled, and succeeded.

“Forward!” came the sudden, unexpected voice of courage in the shepherd’s brain. It traveled to his hands, into his fingers, and toward his feet. Its sudden sound drove him to his knees, into the waters of a stream, where he quickly groped for the heavy, smoothed objects at the water’s edge. In a moment, he gathered the prizes from the bank and dropped them into his travel pouch. And in the same moment he lifted the pieces of granite from the stream, his brain fog cleared to reveal the purpose of the morning and of his life.

When does a rock become a stone?

A rock becomes a stone when that rock is put to a purpose. It becomes a stone the moment a young shepherd inserts the rock into his sling and lets it soar, fast and sure, splitting both the morning sky and, meeting its intended mark, a skull opened and split wide.

One Before Me, One Behind Me

“Ahead and behind wound the line of the hungry…”
—Morro Bay, California © 2023 Craig Dahlberg

My exterminator paraded the last fallen warrior of The Rat Wars through our bedroom, its limp body dangling from its long naked tail, head thoroughly flattened by the steel spring of the rat trap—a real ratastrophy. The pelt was surprisingly clean, a brown body with a white fur mask across the face. I wondered how large a garment a skilled taxidermist might have fashioned from all the deceased rats retrieved from my attic. Rat hides collected, preserved with salt and expertly sewn together—why not rat fur gloves or a rat fur scarf? A handsome pair of rat fur socks, perhaps?

When cornered or trapped, neither humans nor rats do very well. We all look for a way out. Like my unsuspecting rats, I had gradually backed into a trap of my own making. Reared in a conservative, rule-following family, I had learned well how to color between the lines. Armed with correct manners and a conformed instinct to please, by high school I was reliably prepared to enter a boys’ boarding school, far from home. Along with my eleven other classmates, we learned the standard high school subjects, but at an accelerated rate. During winter, we had but to step out of our dormitory and ski down the mountain, then take the funicular back up the mountain. We were boys then, turning into men, far away from the girls who were turning into women.

Returning stateside after attending the boarding school abroad, I enrolled in an affluent high school with a challenging and emotionally disruptive social scene. The ratio of automobile-owning teenagers to the high school teen population was nearly one-to-one. Girls draped themselves into the cockpits of Corvette convertibles piloted by their pimply-faced, steady boyfriends. Heavily modified Ford Mustangs snarled out of the student parking lot. I was an outsider. I crawled into the nearly-empty yellow school bus, staring out the window in consternation, ready to be transported to my silent home, punctuated perhaps by a family-centric TV show—Mitch Miller and his band, or Lawrence Welk’s drone to his orchestra, “And a one, and a two!” How conservative. How comfortable. How stifling.

It was a confusing, baffling time, made more so after plotting for six months to ask a girl out on my very first date. I was shot down with the most pedestrian of explanations: “I’m busy that night.” I backed so far into my rat hole that a Rat Hole Safety Inspector would have required the installation of a breathing ventilation tube.

And then—Lord have mercy—came college. With it would come the specter of more teenage wraiths mutating into young adults, with me looking on, locked away by fear, silence and envy.

Three times each day, at precise intervals, the college dormitories belched out their inhabitants, who joined the winding, rapidly-lengthening cafeteria line. I would wriggle myself uncomfortably into the line, managing my discomfort by staring at the blank tile-covered, creme-colored wall, silently calculating the total quantity of shiny ceramic tiles, as if on a divine mission.

Ahead and behind wound the line of hungry students, a serpentine row along the stairway running through me, then past me, up toward the top of the stairway. Young women with side-swept hair bobs wore pink, orange and citrus green mini-skirts. For the college-age men, it was mop-top hair, extended sideburns and wispy mustaches, paisley shirts and bell-bottom trousers. Teetering on the steps, I hugged the hand rail. Gradually, we came within sniffing range of the standard-fare shepherd’s pie as we rounded the corner to the cafeteria.

I was acrophobic, balancing on one step, fearful to look at the next person in line behind me. Nonetheless, I shot a glance toward her downward-facing head. Unexpectedly, she glanced up at me. I was galled. Good grief. What to do? It was too late to look away. “Hi,” I muttered, confounded that was all I could come up with. What was wrong with me?

That night, my churning stomach made little progress against the shepherd’s pie. I desperately needed a way out of my painful introversion and self-imposed social exile.

I concocted a Grand Scheme.

What do you do when folks within the smell of your breath smile at you, ask your name, and express genuine interest in your story? The answer is simple—probably you smile back at them, ask their name, and ask about their own story. In so doing, I would weaponize my Grand Scheme.

The next day, I again stood in the cafeteria line, one person before me, one person behind me. The same conflict burned—what to say? What to do? But this day, I had promised myself, things would be different. I again half-turned my head to the one student before me and the one student behind me. And this time, I heard myself exchanging names, and listening to their stories as we wound up the dining hall stairway.

And so the Grand Scheme began. I learned the names and stories of two students in each meal line, the one ahead and the one behind me in line, three meals each day. Like a fledgling the first time out of its nest, I discovered a bigger world, and my life gradually transformed from inward isolation to outward-focused engagement.

As with all great discoveries, I was ruined for the past; I could not go back. To this day, the Grand Scheme lives on. These many decades later, I still happily enjoy the effects of this single decision—to attend to the One Before Me, and to attend to the One Behind Me.

Getting Rid of Pets

I have always loved my pets, whether dogs, guinea pigs, my boa constrictor named Boaz, two lizards named Liz and Ard, or the zebra finches who suffered their simultaneous dramatic demise, feet pointing skyward in the bottom of their cage after choking on sunflower seeds. Yes, though cleaning cages can grow wearisome, I never thought of “doing in my pets” because of it. No way.

That is, until today—because today I received this notice from my extermination contractor: “Getting rid of pets just got easier.”

Imagine that! My exterminator, who rids our premises of cockroaches, rats, ants, and gophers, now has a side hustle: eliminating unwanted pets! No doubt he’s using the agony-inflicting chemicals already pre-loaded onto his truck! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the notice. What a brilliant, demented scheme! A one-stop shop to eliminate all annoying vermin and all pets!

I was infuriated and determined to whistleblow these clowns. I hastily typed in a Google search for the phone numbers of ASPCA, PETA and Petco. I was seething with a holy, self-righteous sort of seething.

As my computer hunted for the numbers, I fumed (not, “fumigated”) as I read the exterminator company’s promotional blurb one more time: “Getting red of pests just got easier.”

Oh—PESTS, not PETS! Whoop-sie. My mis-read. My bad.

As my blood pressure gradually receded, it gave me time to think. I was relieved. Good! I still get to annihilate cockroaches, yet keep my precious pets!

And I wondered about my pets.

As it turns out, I have a lot of “pets” beyond the furry and scaly variety. In fact, I possess a virtual menagerie in my garage. There are the soft-back and hardback books undisturbed for decades, their yellow rat-pee stained pages buried beneath compound layers of gathered dust. Beside them lie the carcasses of ancient iPhones, rest in peace. Lurking in the shadows, buried in random plastic containers, lie thousands of orphaned screws, bolts, nails, and washers. All my pets.

This Pet Became a Pest. A Scary One.

I had other pets that did not inhabit my garage. It started out as a pet, small and cute and respectable, but it eventually outgrew its own sort of cage, which was a record player case. In 1936, Sergei Prokofiev composed “Peter and the Wolf” for kids just like me. When I was in first grade, I had access to my parents’ record player and that record. I loved that record and that player. At first.

When I placed the armature of that record player onto the black spinning plastic, magic happened. Out jumped every character in the story, each portrayed by a different instrument—a bassoon for the grandfather, kettle drums for the hunters, nasty french horns for the nasty wolf, a flute for the freaked-out-frightened bird, and an oboe for the duck who was eaten alive by the wolf. Alas, heroic Peter, represented by a calming stringed section, arrived on the scene too late to allay my panic-mottled pink cheeks.

When the climactic, freak-me-out scary music let forth, I knew that the characters were alive beneath my dark and dusty bed. The wolf! The hunter! The mangled duck! The frightened bird! Mercy! Quick—I must get on top of the bed until the massacre was over!

My pets—the record and record player—obviously went very wrong. The story had grown too real, and the record player became a huge pest of frightening proportion. Eventually, I didn’t even want to play the thing. A pest, perhaps, and even more than that. My pet became a pest and a terror.

This Pest Became a Pet. A Lovely One.

Two of my grandchildren own a Rattus, the fancy genus name for a rat. I have unwittingly owned several of these creatures myself. They lived in our attic. After several seasons enduring scratching and gnawing sounds above my bed, and two episodes of profound stench from decaying corpses of deceased rodents, I brought in the professional with the big guns—er, rat traps.

“No need for cheese,” explained the exterminator. “These curious critters explore anything new, including a rat trap, and then, smack! The bar from the trap snaps shut and crushes any body part in its way.” He was right. In short order, I could have displayed a respectable Rattus pelt exhibit.

My granddaughter, June, owned a pet rat, Reepicheep, who was different. Reepicheep had crossed beyond the boundary of “pest-hood,” elevated to the honor of “pet-hood.” June knew just the right places to scratch him. He rested trustingly around her neck, a reciprocal bond of true friendship whenever June liberated him from his cage.

Pets Become Pets; Pests Become Pets

Perhaps I have this “pet” label and “pest” label hopelessly backward. Maybe I’ve been calling my “pets” my “pests.” And maybe I’ve been calling my “pests” my “pets.”

My pests are like this: For a long time, I’ve called life’s troubles, my “pests.” But later, looking back, I think, “I grew a lot. I learned a lot. I changed a lot. Huh!” Sort of like a friend helps you grow, in weird ways. The dictionary definition of “Trouble” is: “Trouble,” which is something that is just no good, and it hurts. But sometimes, in a weird way, trouble is good for me. And therefore my pests, my former troubles, have become my pets, the things I have come to value.

And my pets are like this: For a long time, I’ve called the warm and fuzzy and cuddly things in life, my “pets.” You know, the sorts of things that make me feel comfortable. And time-wasting. And draining. And shallow. And aimless.

You know, those kinds of pets.

You know, those kinds of pests.

Love Poetry

The saxophonist lifted the instrument to his lips, testing the valves and mouthpiece. A ragged chirp signaled that his breath had indeed found its way through. The musician took two abrupt steps to his right and poked his finger onto a keypad. An audio track came alive, pushing his humble audio speaker to its full, if meager, capacity. He rotated two steps leftward, and he was off, saxophoning the melody line along with his pre-recorded ensemble bandmates.

Considering the setting, a pre-Thanksgiving Day banquet at an assisted living facility where my father lives, his performance was an adequate, perhaps admirable rendition, even when he switched over to his clarinet. It evoked memories of my father-in-law, Jack, who had played clarinet in a jazz band; I imagined his full head of dark hair, boyish grin and vigorous tap-tapping of shoe upon the dance floor.

Perhaps our friend, the current saxophonist, should have stuck with his micro-woodwind band and accompanying recorded track instead of attempting to croon. His vocalization gift was modest indeed; his singing voice wandered far afield. He plastered notes randomly, mercilessly splattering them all over the musical scale. Up, down, sideways, front-ways, back-ways in fits, the notes fell. Meanwhile, the accompanying pre-recorded track galloped happily away on its own, untethered from his vocalizations.

Little did his captive audience care. A frail woman in a wheelchair clapped and cheered along with the others in the modest audience, reliving each half-century old song the musician could muster. Another woman’s plaid red dress proclaimed “Snuggle” in bold white script, topped with a gold necklace. Below her chestnut-brown dyed hair, her deeply-lined face drew into a grin. After all, these were their songs, the songs they danced to before arthritis, before dementia, and before taking up residence in this assisted-living home. Their days of dancing may have been behind them, but the music liberated the melodies deep within. Their souls were set loose.

Besides the music, not everything else progressed smoothly at the retirement home Thanksgiving party. While my wife and I sat at our assigned table with my father in his wheelchair, the elderly gentlemen seated at the four-top next to us struggled to hear one another. Outbursts of exasperated attempts at dialogue succumbed to long rounds of silence. When the man nearest me attempted to pull his wheelchair up to the table, an unfortunate imbalance of plate and food ensued. There was a moist ku-thump as his full plate of turkey, brownish dressing, pale tan gravy, contrasting ruby-red cranberry sauce, and a dollop of pale-white mashed potatoes catapulted off the table and onto his lap. No one else even noticed before he pushed the contents from his thighs and onto the floor.

Nope. No one noticed, and no one cared. It’s the behavioral norm here, a beautiful norm. The wayward musical renditions could have shut down a cheap bar. But not here. Food spills onto trousers and carpet—who cared? No one cared. Survivorship builds callouses against the irritants that take down weaker folks.

None of that stuff really mattered. None of it.

Ah, there! Can you see them, the couple sitting at the next table, just beyond the heads of my father and my wife? That’s what really matters.

It was there I watched a drama unfold. One of the guests at this special Thanksgiving table was a tall, handsome, slender man with a shock of glowing white hair so thick it would choke a comb. I had noticed him earlier in the evening. He was the sort of man who, in the days before such promotions were banned, might have posed as the Marlboro man in a cigarette commercial. He carried himself casually, easily chatting with residents around the dining room, putting them at ease.

Beside him at the table, unable to speak and immoveable except for her head, sat his wife. A crimson blouse, tucked neatly into her wheelchair cushion, peeked from beneath a chic black sweater. Spoonful after spoonful, forkful after forkful, her visiting husband patiently raised her Thanksgiving dinner to her lips, pausing from this priority to stroke her hand and occasionally chat with the other table guests. Then he would turn again to his wife to feed her, and each time he did, a grin from a much-younger version of himself took over his face, reviving the same smile that possessed him the first time they met, decades ago.

It was poetry. Each serving he offered her was a new line of a love poem.

Eventually, the meal concluded, and the white-haired man disappeared, pushing his wife’s wheelchair to her room. When he re-emerged to descend the steps to his car in the parking lot, I quickly followed him outside into the brisk night air. I touched his arm, and surprised, he turned toward me.

“Sir,” I haltingly began, uncertain how to express my admiration for the love poetry he had displayed for his wife, “I’ve been watching you during the entire Thanksgiving meal. I watched every bite of food you served your wife. I watched you stroke her hand and talk gently to her, even when she could not respond back to you. I wanted to tell you I saw all that, and it deeply affected me. Thank you for showing me…” What I said immediately felt put on, too weirdly magnanimous, clumsy, and I wanted a second chance to say it better.

“We’ve been together for 53 years,” he responded. “She’s taken care of me during all those years. And now it’s my time, my opportunity, to take care of her.”

It was dark outside. He couldn’t see my eyes moisten as he reached to shake my hand. I wandered back into the dining room, knees weaker, but a stronger person.

To the Dump

Each week, a wagonload of garbage arrived at our house situated on the bank of the Rhine River. The wagon, replete with accompanying noxious odors, drew flies like a Disney theme park woos visitors. It was gross stuff, in this wagon. Just imagine your community’s weekly trash and rotting garbage all piled into one nasty, stinking, portable pile on parade—broken furniture, discarded clothing, drained motor oil, bits of string and nails and mangled wood, and a generous anointing of rotting food scraps, the passion of the buzzing flies.

An elderly woman in a tattered 1950’s-era patterned, heavily stained dress perched squarely inside the wagon, straddling the discarded garbage and trash. She wore leather boots and a threadbare baggy wool coat over a shabby sweater. A ragged scarf protected her head from the flies.

Her elderly husband’s mouth and cheeks animated his walrus mustache as he huffed deep breaths, stretching down to hug the next mound of trash to his chest. He heaved it up into the arms of his wife, awaiting the load from within the wagon. She searched for salvageable discards as he reached for the next armload of trash.

Meanwhile, their obedient horse, covered with burlap to guard it against the trash and the flies, awaited their command to move the wagon forward to the next house.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

During Christmas in Germany in the late 1950’s, we gifted our garbage man and his wife a small monetary offering, which they eagerly accepted, along with the other modest gifts of cookies, beer and schnapps from other neighbors. But that was small payback for the service they rendered us, unthanked, week upon week, offloading our stinking refuse into their garbage trailer.

At bedtime after I am asleep, their horse-drawn wagon still enters my dreams. I see that rickety-rickety garbage wagon. I hear the clomp-clomp of the hooves, and the gentle voice of the garbage man reining his horse to a stop at our driveway. He bends low to pick up and deposit my discards into the arms of his wife, atop the wagon. I see him glance at me as if to ask, “Is there any more?”

There’s always more. Scientists tell us that during our sleep state, our brains go through a cleaning cycle, during which the worn-out, damaged tissues in our brain are removed, like so much trash and garbage. The glymphatic system eliminates potentially toxic waste products from our brain, protecting us from disorders, including, very probably, Alzheimer’s Disease.

In my dream-state, this is the stuff being gathered for the garbage man. The exhausted brain cells that have done their job need to be replaced and refreshed. That’s not all. Along with those cells should go the day’s unredeemed endeavors—the worn and weary misguided thoughts, the ill-advised priorities and self-protecting reserve—they also deserve the dump.

Unfortunately, something in me wants to steel against that brain-cleansing process. Instead of yielding my wayward ways and misguided thoughts to the garbage dump, I want to hang on to the refuse of the day. Go ahead, garbage man, move on to the next house, to the next brain! That’s silly, of course. It’s even stupid. Why would I choose to hang onto trash? To hang on to distress? To anger? To being overlooked and ignored? To pride and self-importance?

And so lingers my ancient German garbage-master, peering into my brain, into my dream-state. “Do you vant to keep zat?” he inquires in his Prussian accent, suggesting he has more room on his wagon for anything I want to offload. “Do you vant to keep your broken hopes? Your aches? Your trouble? I can take zem!”

Oh, good grief. Don’t make me choose. I know what I want to do. But can I really let him take all that to the dump to be just—gone? That familiar trash is what I know the best; it has become part of me.

My patient trash man makes one final appeal; he awaits my decision. “Any more?” the mustache twitches. He reaches out to me one more time. I ponder whether there might indeed be more.

And then…I decide. It’s done.

He stoops down to gather my garbage one final time. He makes the day’s perfect pitch. His wife makes the catch.

Score!

One Baby, One Butt

Babies are warm, cuddly, and delightful. And they can be terrorizing, especially for new parents, for whom every moment of a twenty-four hour day presents a new learning frontier: “What do I? When do I? How do I? Where do I? Why do I?”

The counsel I gave myself then, and have since given others, is to simply do the one necessary thing immediately before you. Check the butt, change the diaper. Because every baby’s body works sort of the same. They eat, they sleep, they pee, they poop.

But, of course, babies are not automobiles. They need more than oil changes or diaper changes. Humans are a complex amalgamation of genetics, environment, opportunities and many other components, including Choice.

The woman I photographed transported one, two, three, four, five babies. I don’t know why or where she was taking them. But certainly each child was unique, and partially formed from infancy onward through their own Choice and consequence—to rebel, to obey, to comply, to tantrum.

Beyond infancy, the power of Choice plays an ever-growing part of our lives—our friends, attitudes, our values. By the time of adulthood, the power and the outcome of our choices can be gratifying or overwhelming—our faith, our career, our spouse. Many choices prove to be exceptional; others, disastrous. Some choices we want to mulligan, golfing slang for a “do-over.”

But the way to our future is far from re-living the past. We are given only one way out—one way to move forward. And that is by making even more choices—mature, forward-thinking and consequence-embracing choices, even in the light of some spectacularly poor ones in the past.

We all share the same human condition. To be human is to have one butt, but many choices.