Soaking

Dear Kathe:

I love you.

I love you so much that over the last 27 years, it has soaked into every fiber and fluid in my body.

When I realized that being too emotionally dependent upon you was not good for either of us (my therapist once told me it seemed as though we had become potbound, our roots painfully intertwined), I thought that learning to stand on my own would mean that I would not love you quite so intensely and passionately. It was quite a surprise to find that actually I was able to love you far more.

Friction and frustration and defensiveness built up over years of difficult times have made both of us shy of saying what we are both thinking. This note is a small step towards reminding us both of a simple fact of life:

John loves Kathe.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Yes."\\

Now It's Dad's Turn...

...to be hospitalized*, with a new multi-species bladder infection and aspiration pneumonia.

He's at Riverbend, the same Springfield hospital where his mother-in-law stayed.

All of which means it is my turn in the barrel tonight.

Not that other people don't have it harder. Mom, for instance. Still, this gets old after awhile.

Not that other people aren't older.

Sometimes I feel nostalgic about working night shifts, and having been one of Night's Own Children is a cherished part of my identity, and to be sure if I am offered a night job I would take it so fast I'd be there the night before, but I don't think I want to actively court a night job.**

//The Magic Eight Ball says, "Stand watch through the night. Somebody's got to do it."\\

*Funny, I thought I had written at least something about Grandma's heart attack last week. Maybe later I will go back and make a post about it.

** Which means either that I am getting old, or that I no longer need to abuse myself in order to feel worthy of love and respect. Or both, I guess.

Happy Holidays*

*Whichever and however many you care to observe, and anyone who wants to be exclusive and hog all of December for themselves can go do it elsewhere.

We didn't buy a tree this year, but while we were looking for a convenient way to display our incoming cards (the mirror where we usually tape them up has been removed while we restore the living room wall -- note the nice fresh drywall in the background), we saw the ladder leaning against the wall and decided to set it up. And having once done that, it seemed like a good idea to drape a string of lights over it.

So there you have it. Our Yule Ladder for 2010.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "For goodness' sake, do please ring in the new."\\

A Narrow Escape?

A few minutes ago I was up in the lookout tower on top of the house (which these days is located in the former boys' bedroom at the top of the stairs*), working on a story I'm writing**. I had carried the laptop up there in its bag, mainly because it was still in it after I'd gotten home,*** but I picked up the computer as I usually do, tucking it under my arm and wadding up the extension cord, then picked up the carrying case and my coffee cup, and then picked up my glasses case and held it between two fingers....

And then I suddenly saw how precarious and unstable the whole arrangement was, and felt a chill at the possibility of falling on the stairs.

So I put the computer and its cord into the bag, and my glasses case into my pocket, and descended the stairs in a much more sensible and grown-up fashion.

In how many alternate timelines am I lying dead or crippled at the bottom of the stairs for Kathe to find me when she gets out of the bathtub? Possibly quite a few but hey, that's their problem, as is the loss of the laptop in the timelines where I dropped it.


//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "The one thing nobody ever gets to know is what would have happened."\\

* Kathe's grandson Dick may be moving in soon. We would both enjoy the extra company, as well as the rent money.

** I'll let you know how that works out later.

*** I spent the morning sitting up with my father while my mother attends to the closing of the house and their moving to a mobile home in Corvallis.

One, Anyway

Driving out to my parents' place this morning, the fog was very thick until I got up onto the elevation of Reese Creek Road, when it suddenly became clear. I grumbled about how I could have used to have clear driving on 99W, until I noticed how very frosty it was up there, also.

Some of these microclimates are pretty damned micro, I must say.

Also, I must say the Valley sure is flat, that the entire stretch from Corvallis to Monroe is in the same band of weather.

And one more thing about the weather this morning: as I got out of the car, I saw just one brilliant meteor. We'd have seen many more, if the sky had been clearer lately. But it almost never is, in the Valley in December.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "One can be enough, if you let it be."\\

The Last Christmas

My father's health is not improving, and my mother is not large enough or strong enough (or young enough) to take care of him without more help, especially not in a house that is not really suited to an aging couple in frail health.

So, they are moving to a more-accessible mobile home in Corvallis, to be nearer to their doctors and to emergency services.

They will be moving early in the new year, which means, among other things, that this will be The Last Christmas (cue portentous music) in the house at Bellfountain.

David and Tom and their families will be gathering at the house, and will help with some of the moving (and will take away some quantity of family heirlooms, as will Kathe and I).

It probably won't be too difficult or too tearful, but I reckon it's going to be interesting.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You can cue portentous music all you want, but it still is going to be The Last Christmas."\\

We Didn't Watch Videos Tonight

I suppose we are getting just a bit set in our ways: it really is news when we don't watch either an episode of a TV series or half of a feature film.

Tonight, we were planning to go to a potluck at the Oddfellows Hall, but as it turned out, we went first to a vigil at the mosque, to show the community's support for the congregation as they recovered from a terrorist fire attack.

So, that's what we did this evening, instead of watching Ratatouille.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Ratatouille still has a few days left before it has to go back to the Library."\\

Sphygmomanometer

I like sphygmomanometers. I like to look at them. I like to use them*. I like to say "sphygmomanometer".

*[I am gradually getting more confident in my desire to go back to nursing school again, in spite of multiple failures in the past.]

The other day, I was watching some kids playing with a toy medical kit, noticing that among other things, it included a plastic bracelet in the form of an adhesive bandage. Also noticing that they still put it all in a "little black bag", a feature almost as anachronistic as the way that toy gas pumps still go "ding-ding" as they pump imaginary gasoline.

I was intrigued by one little boy using a toy sphygmomanometer on another boy, squeezing the little bulb and pretending to read the dial: "Eighty, ninety, ten, eleven, twelve." Interesting combination of the correct and the almost-correct -- notice that he did keep the tens column straight.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Mind your blood pressure."\\

New Perceptions

Kathe:

Since I started therapy, I have been overcoming sensory inhibitions right and left: food tastes better -- and I pay more attention to its nutritional value as opposed to any emotional comfort it might give. I told you about the ground under my feet feeling more substantial. I don't know if that has led to any improvement in my posture, but I feel more balanced anyway.

But tonight while soaking I was overwhelmed by a rarer and more precious kind of improved perception: I suddenly had a powerful feeling of how much you really do value me, how much I mean to you.

I would have been unable to recognize such a feeling before, or if I started to get an outline of it, I would have recoiled from it with fear or horror or shame, feeling both unworthy and unfairly burdened.

The thing I craved like an addict was also something I couldn't bring myself to look at directly.

Oh, well, doesn't have to make sense.

But thank you for your love, admiration and desire.


-- Love, John

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Value all that you see, and see all that you value."\\

Sometimes Parking Is Difficult

[NOTE: Illustrations will be added to this post when Blogger quits acting weird.]

When there isn't a parking space available on "our" block (10th Street, between Jefferson and Adams, preferably on the east side, preferably at the north end near the house), we have to park the cars elsewhere in the neighborhood. Parking got more difficult when the medium-density apartments across the street were replaced by the high-density construction which we call the Great Wall, and more recently when a nearby area was made into a parking district, and our block was not included.

The other day, I wound up parked on 9th, between Jefferson and Adams, in between a carnation-pink Smart car with a license plate that read FLUFFF, and a vehicle with plates issued by the Grand Portage Band of the Chippewa nation.

Almost 30 years ago, while hitchhiking across the country, I got a ride through Chippewa country in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had an interesting conversation with a Chippewa, and had the pleasure of joining him in urinating into Lake Superior, at what he told me was Whitefish Bay, a location I instantly identified as the safe harbor that the Edmund Fitzgerald did not reach. He told me that people on the lakes appreciated that song very much, and took it as recognition for all the many ships which had been lost on the Inland Sea.

But I did not know that the Chippewa issued their own license plates, much less did I think that one day I would see one in my own Corvallis neighborhood.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "And what associations do you have with a pink car named FLUFFF?"\\

Halloween 2010

We went to the Boo Belly Bash at the Old World Center and saw a number of very accomplished dancers in inventive, eccentric outfits.

I especially liked the idea behind Tibella's mad scientist outfit (complete with lab coat and chemist's goggles), but have some advice for her, should she want to wear it again in future:
* A rubber apron to take off and toss to the audience
* Thick black rubber gloves (also to toss). The apron and the gloves really go with the goggles.
* Some sciencey devices to dangle from the jangling dancer's belt: a micrometer, a glass and steel syringe, a light meter, an Erlenmeyer flask, things like that.
* Maybe something smokey inside the coat, or in a pocket...?

We only got one group of three (adult) trick or treaters tonight, which was disappointing. But they went away with butterscotch candies and copies of Mad magazine, so I trust the spirits of the ancestors were satisfied.

We had a really nifty jack o'lantern designed by a friend (we'll post a picture when we get it uploaded). Pity he couldn't come by tonight, but that's life.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Remember the dead."\\

Did I Mention I Was In "The Boy Friend" In High School?

Probably not. Geez, I hope not -- I have never thought of myself as the kind of person who refers very often to my high school years. Bad enough how often I start a comment with, "When I was in the Navy".

But the other day, Debbie Ellingsworth posted a photo from The Boy Friend on her Facebook page, and tagged it as having me in it (playing Lord Brockhurst, the dirty old man). So, I thought I'd mention it.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "At least you outgrew being a dirty old man before you became one."\\

The Overton Wall

There's been a lot of talk lately about the Overton Window, the range of generally acceptable opinions and positions, the positions which will allow people, even if they disagree with your position, to at least take you seriously.

To say, "Welfare eligibility should be further restricted" is within the Overton Window. To say, "Welfare recipients should be given six months to find jobs or go to concentration camps" is outside it.

One of the great concerns people have is that the Overton Window keeps moving, and it moves according to the statements and actions of a relatively small number of people. When President Richard nixon announced that he would go to China to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Window moved to meet him. When it was revealed that Justice department lawyer John Yoo had written a secret memo providing a rationale for torture, the window moved.

But what happens to a pundit, candidate, blogger or water-cooler sachem, who misses the Overton Window?

Obviously, s/he hits the Overton Wall [my own coinage -- I Googled to make sure].

I hereby predict that Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and most of their TEA Party classmates in the 2010 election are aimed squarely to the right of the Overton Window, some of them by as much as 45 degrees, and they are going to hit the Overton Wall good and hard.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Normally, I'd wanr you against making bold predictions, but in this case, I'll just suggest that a wise man would make some popcorn."\\

Changing Habits

I have problems concerning material possessions. These manifest in various ways.

Over decades, I accumulated a large quantity of comic books. I always insisted that I was a reader, not a "collector", and that I kept the comics only so that I could read them again later.

And I did, sometimes in immense quantities. I still have fond memories of the months it took me to run through a complete (including reprints) set of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

But I kept the collection together for many years in a way that made it clear that I felt as though giving up any part of it would diminish me.

Then one day I realized that I simply didn't feel that way anymore. In fact, the existence of comics shops made me feel more comfortable about passing comics along to others who would appreciate them. It felt less like giving up a part of myself and more like releasing something back into the wild.

For years I carried money, checkbook, checks to be deposited and bills to be paid in a nice big zippered bank bag. I carried it around in my backpack for quite a long time, long enough that the bank that issued it no longer exists. Now, it's wearing out, and I need to replace it with...something.

Meanwhile, my back has been aging along with the rest of me, and I am being dragged toward carrying my stuff through other means than one big bag that I carry everywhere. So rather than look for another bank bag, I was shopping for a fanny pack like unto Kathe's, a good solid one that won't wear out in a single season.

As it happens, my mother had one she didn't use anymore, one she bought in Tunisia, made of leather. Couldn't ask for better, and I like the label [orange on black, with a little propellor plane and the brand name "XY", so I guess it's made for boys :{) ].

I still feel kind of bad about getting rid of the worn-out bag, though, but I discovered that I would feel better about it if I could keep a picture of it. Weird, I know, but I'm not too proud to use a crutch when I need one.

I couldn't find a picture of a purple bank bag online, though, nor of the Oregon State Bank logo. So I recolored a blue bag and recreated the logo from a sort-of-similar font by tweaking the letters, and here it is.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Use what works for you."\\

[I will add the photo of the bank bag as soon as Blogger gets over its spell of not having an "insert picture" button.]

Pastor Jones

Text of a message Kathe and I sent out this morning:

Pastor Jones is back in the news today (first he says he will, and then he won't), and we have decided to donate $20 to the local mosque for the express purpose of providing a copy of the Quran to someone who wants or needs it. We'll inform our local newspapers, also, in the hope that other non-Muslims will follow our example. Maybe we can out-weigh the "pastor's" destruction, for a net increase in the number of Qurans.

We are pretty damned short of money, but we will find $20 in our budget for this purpose, and we hope to persuade some of our friends to do the same.

Considering that "Pastor" Jones' church-and-used-furniture business only has about fifty members, our "action" may be bigger than his.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Comparisons are odious."\\

Things I saw This Morning

While on my way over to look after Uncle Wesley this morning, I saw a couple of things that made me smile.

One was a woman picking up plums from the northernmost tree, the one with the especially juicy plums. I invited her to use the plum picker standing on our porch.

As I do invite everyone to do -- we don't have the energy to use our plums for anything this year, so please do come get them. Likewise the apples, and the filberts if the squirrels had left any.

The other was a group of...was it cats? No, as I got closer I saw it was five half-grown raccoons, crossing Monroe near 14th, and scurrying under the porch of a frat house.

How nice to see thriving urban wildlife -- and how nice that they aren't thriving under our porch.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Never pass up an opportunity to smile."\\

A Core Sampling

Samaritan Health Services (or as we like to call it, The Very Big Medical Corporation of the Mid-Willamette Valley) is building a new physical therapy facility just north of the intersection of Kings Boulevard and Walnut Boulevard. They graded the soil, poured concrete for the walkways, and drilled holes in said concrete for the planting of handrail support posts, and that's where Kathe and I come in.

The drilling resulted in many small cylinders of concrete being drilled out and tossed aside, and the other day we stopped by and collected a couple of dozen of them.

We're not sure what we are going to do with them: Lay them down corduroy fashion in a walkway? Set them upright like teensy pillars? Bury them until only their circular tops show, and use them as pleasingly symmetrical accents to the irregular slabs we lay down on our walkways?

But we'll think of something, as Arthur C. Clarke said of David Bowman.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "To think is not enough -- one must act."\\

The Fien Experiment

I had this idea yesterday afternoon, just about the time Anne and Wes would have been having their automobile accident, I guess. I do hope that Anne will be in a position to take part.

I am going to try to recount off the top of my head what I know about my paternal grandfather, also named John Merritt Burt, and ask people who knew him (or who heard stories about him as they grew up) to expand and correct my recollections. I will also later on check available records, but as i said, part of this exercise is to see what I can come up with out of my own unassisted memory.

Have you ever tired to draw a map from memory? That is the sort of experiment I am trying here.

Merritt Burt and his brother Walden Burt were born in the 1880s, named after the two Methodist bishops in their parents' diocese. As a young man, Merritt decided he didn't like having a last name for a first name, and took to calling himself John Merritt Burt.

He joined the Navy in 1906 and left in 1912 with the rank of Boatswain's Mate 3rd Class. While in the Navy he learned to tie knots very well, and in later years was known to show off by tying knots with his toes. He also learned how to whistle the national anthems of all the world's naval powers, since when his ship was in port in Hong Kong he had to stand on deck at dusk while every ship in port lowered its flag in turn, its band playing, a process which could take as long as two hours depending on how many ships were in port.

He acquired a collection of handsome old-fashioned sailor's tattoos, of which there is alas no photographic record.

He was once put on bread and water for two days as punishment for punching out his immediate superior.

In 1917, he joined the Army and went to France as an infantry Lieutenant. He came back with various souvenirs, including his issued Enfield rifle and a plundered German Mauser rifle which remained in the family until they were stolen by a burglar in the 1970s.

After the war, he became a Treasury agent, and was kept busy during Prohibition busting up stills in the legendary fashion. He took a significant amount of copper home with him, and made it into various useful household objects such as the decorative work on a set of fireplace bellows which my parents used for many years. He never did make anything of the long-nosed copper alembic which became a favorite toy of my childhood. He also acquired, possibly also confiscated from a criminal, a long blackjack which he kept aeound the house, though the only use I know he ever made of it was in using its handle to give especially severe spankings .

Other highlights of his career as a "revenoor" included standing guard over the Golden Gate Bridge just after Pearl Harbor and finding a human brain washed up on a San Francisco beach (it proved to have been carelessly discarded after the shipboard autopsy of a sailor who had died of meningitis). He might have lost his job on account of a prank he and three male friends played, driving slowly around the San Francisco Mint as though casing the joint. They circled the building three times before a police car pulled them over and they were told to knock it off.

He worked in copper and in iron, and in wood. Once, while cutting a piece of wood with a table saw, he cut off half of his index finger. The stump of that finger was a memorable feature of his appearance when I was a small child, as was his clouded eye and his emphysemic wheeze.

He smoked for many years, rolling his own cigarettes with tobacco from a small cloth bag. He suffered from emphysema for some years, but it was lung cancer, presumably also from smoking, which finally killed him.

He married relatively late in life, and often regretted not being younger and more vigorous while his children were growing up. He fathered four children, two girls and two boys, one of whom was my father, George S. Burt. He often had a bad temper with his children, and frightened them with harsh criticism and physical punishments such as making them run home within the beams of his car headlights when they stayed out after dark. His favorite pejorative for his son George was "impertinent whelp", but you knew you were really in for it if he said, "I hope you're proud of yourself". His habit of flying into a towering rage with his children was, alas, passed on to his son and to his grandson -- I had to work very hard at unlearning it.

The children had a lively family culture, which manifested itself in various ways, including the invention of an imaginary language and culture. The kids gave themselves "Grorian" names, and may have given them to their parents also, but I do not know John Burt's Grorian name, if he had one. They also at some point gave themselves (or one another) "monster" names like "Thing" and "Creature". They named their father "Fiend With a Fearsome Face", usually shortened to "Fien", and they were still calling him that well after they were grown, and even after he had died.

Towards the end of a long day, he was fond of imitating a favorite expression of a neighbor, "Ahm tarred. Ahm tarred and ahm hongrey." His son did the same, and I have been known to say it myself. I have often wondered what other figures of speech and other habits I have acquired from him without knowing it.

He worked for the Treasury Department until he had accumulated just enough seniority, between his Treasury job and his military service, to qualify for a pension, and then retired. His wife was younger than himself, but she died of cancer more than a decade before he did.

After leaving San Francisco, he moved to rural Watsonville, and that is where he lived when I knew him, on a small acreage near what was proclaimed on its side to be "the world's biggest haybarn". I don't know if the land was an actual working farm, although that is how I thought of it as a child. The only thing I know for certain that he raised was bees.

He was a frail old man with a breathless laugh that was both comical and frightening to me as a child. I associated him with Boris Karloff, I think mainly on account of his squarish face, and perhaps also an air of mingled kindliness and menace.

He died when I was nine years old, but I hadn't seen him for some time by then. He was very sick, and I think my parents didn't want to expose me to his frailty, or perhaps to strain his health with my obstreperousness.

His last words were in response to a ringing telephone: "Uh-oh, that's Waldy." he was right: it was a call to let him know his brother had died.

Okay, that is as much as I can come up with right now. I will try to write more later, and I would appreciate any additions and corrections you folks might provide.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Don't delay."\\

Dolls on the Walls

Someone I know on Facebook posted a photo of assembled figures from her desk, including a Japanese figure called "Unicorn Girl", with an odd dark-blue thing on her forehead that looked more like a pin stuck there.

This inspired me to make this comment:

On our bedroom wall, we have Rosie the Riveter, Sigmund Freud, Harry Mudd (the lovable crook from OS Star Trek), J. Jonah Jameson (with desk-pounding action!), some guy called Fuzz, a knockoff of Batman called Battle Man, Halloween Witch Barbie, a Sailor Moon knockoff called Meteor Girl, a Barbie knockoff in overalls that we pretend is another Rosie, Tarzan, a Martian Plant Man, a Basilisk, Sally (from The Nightmare before Christmas) and Mandarin Medieval Spawn (which we bought because of its incredibly elaborate costume).

We also have a tiny Superman; even tinier figures of Isis, Thoth, Anubis, Bastet and some royal sarcophaguses (in an "Egypt Toob" from Safari Ltd.), still tinier figures of three Apollo astronauts (and possibly some figures so tiny they escape the naked eye, but those are probably just dust).

We'd love to have a Princess Unicorn, because of a very tasteless inside joke that I won't mention here, except to say that it involves a comedian's misunderstanding of the name UNICEF....

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Since you couldn't play billiards with me, I suppose I am a sort of action figure myself."\\

Going Back To School

I have been trying, in one way or another, most of my adult life to do this job, failing at this job, or recovering from failed attempts to do this job.

The reasons to stop trying to do this are obvious. But I continue to think that this is where I belong, so I won't quit.

And I am not the 21-year-old who couldn't be a Hospital Corpsman, or the 36-year-old who couldn't look after the residents of an assisted-living facility. Or the 45-year-old who couldn't get through nursing school. I am 49, not quite 50, and I am just going to find out whether I can be an acute-care CNA at Good Samaritan.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Be here now."\\