Lessons from the Littler Lives

Getting Ready for the Journey

My big, rangy, orange tomcat, Al, is preparing to leave me after 15 years of companionship and affection.

His diabetes has taken a turn for the worse, and he has been afflicted lately with seizures that wrack his whole body.  Worse yet, he’s stopped eating and drinking regularly … and I can tell he is lightening his load  in preparation for his long journey away.

I’m not sure he knows this.  I watch him stalk around the house, his collar bells still tinkling as he shakes his head.  Where once, his diabetes claimed all the strength in his hind legs, he has recovered much of his previous agility and strength.   If one didn’t know better, one might think Al was still planning on sticking around awhile longer.

Al is my friend and traveling companion.  When I was stationed elsewhere for a year, Kathy brought Al to me on one of her visits and he became my bachelor companion.  Every day I’d come home from work, he’d run up to me and sharpen his claws on my suede desert boots in greeting, while I brushed his fur.  At night, I’d sit on the couch and watch TV, and he’d sit on the back of the couch watching with me.  After awhile, he’d fall asleep up there, but not before reaching down and putting his paw on my shoulder.  I never wanted to move when he did that.  I never wanted to sever that connection between us.

Nowadays, when I come home and change out of my Best Buy work attire, I hear his tired meow coming from under the bedroom bench, and he slinks and stalks his way out onto the floor … demanding to be petted and brushed.

But the cat treats that used to send him into a tailspin now are left mostly untouched.  As I said, he’s preparing to leave.

                                                     *    *    *

At the same time, one of my two maniac ferrets, S’Mores, is winding his little life down after a two-year battle with cancer.    

These two little guys have brought much joy (and patches of floor poop, truth-be-told) into our lives.  They sleep 12-16 hours per day and wake up (ALWAYS in a great mood) and want to do nothing more than party with their people.  S’Mores used to delight friends and family with his thievery of stuffed animals – many much larger than he was – clamping them in his his tiny predator’s fangs and scampering away with them to his stash under the chair.  

Too, it seemed like he was also working as an experimental physicist, checking constantly to see if gravity was still in control.  (He would wriggle his way behind a row of books on a shelf, and push them out and off with his nose.  It seemed at first like we had a poltergeist, until we’d see his little face come poking out to find out where the book had gone.)

But his lymphoma now is getting ahead of his daily dose of chemo.  Despite daily hand-feedings and nightly doses of banana-flavored steroids, this little guy‘s once-glossy fur now is bare in patches, and his legs fail buckle under him while he eats.   

S’Mores, too, now is apparently nearing the end of his stay with us.

                                                   *    *    *

Cats, dogs, Guinea pigs, ferrets, hamsters, parakeets, goats, ponies and peacocks  … they've all come into the Breyfogle household over the years and have worked their way into our lives and hearts.  Each and every one gave unconditional love, affection and companionship, asking only that we feed and take care of them and spend a little time with them daily.

Each and every one has left a small hole when they inevitably passed away.

And that’s one of the first lessons from these little lives:  They go and you have to stay behind, grieving.

But if you've done it right, the memories of the joy they brought into your life more than make up for the brevity of their sojourn here.

So the companion animals in my life haven’t changed, really.  I've always known that cats and dogs and ferrets are relatively short-lived.

No, I fear that what may have changed is me.

Since I was diagnosed last year, I've felt the slow, gradual progress of the lung ailment that aims to claim me.  While I seldom think about it, watching my two little companions prepare for their final journey has made this Zen-like detachment of mine more difficult to maintain.

I've always told Kathy that I tend to live “…in the moment …” which has kept my disease far from my immediate attention.  The end is always an age away as the seemingly endless succession of “right now” and “this very moment” proceeds past. 

But as my disease advances – albeit slowly – I’m having a difficult time looking forward, especially since my two little friends are nearing their respective ends.  (sigh)

(Shaking it off ... sheepish grin)

OK … so that my friends and family won’t panic, I’m not succumbing to anything.  I've got a lot of fight and feistiness left in me. 

This sadness won’t get me for long, I promise.  I'm sure I can cajole Kathy and my family out of a toy or two.

And that’s another lesson from these little lives.  When there are caring humans around, there are always a few more treats to be had.

The Old Dog can still bark pretty loud

I truly love my expensive, high-tech toys.  (Kathy will bear patient witness to this phenomenon.)

As I gaze over my rifle rack, my eye lights delightedly upon the SciFi-like Steyr USR, which looks just like a Star Wars blaster ought to look … shiny, long, swept-back and sleek.  My other 2^nd Millennium toys are just as high-tech and post-Industrial-Revolution looking:  The FN P-90S is another of those weapons which have been featured on SciFi Channel shows (excuse me: SyFy Channel  … WTF?) … made of polymers and metal, and oddly shaped like a raygun probably will be in the not-too-distant future.  The DPMS Ar-15 looks just like the familiar, lethal workhorse it has become on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

They’re enough to make even the most ardent firearms antiquarian happy.

But, by God, there’s really something to be said for taking the Old Dogs out to the range and letting them bark.  And that’s just what I did on this glorious Fall day.

As I previously mentioned, the government-chartered Civilian Marksmanship Program (http://www.odcmp.com/) was founded in 1903 as part of the Defense Appropriations Act.  The stated intent was to better prepare American youth for military service in the event of callup, by training them early in the fine arts of marksmanship.  That organization has gone through a couple of RE-organizations since then, becoming a mostly-civilian run group.

But then, as today, one of the more popular parts of the program is allowing American citizens, who are not legally prohibited from doing so, to purchase military surplus rifles provided they belong to chartered clubs who oversee their members’ shooting activities.

I got my CMP M-1 Garand a couple of months ago, and it has been calling to me ever since … begging me to take it out to the range and let it play.  It was made in April, 1945, at the Springfield Armory, and stands as one of the best rifles I own … even if it’s so low-tech, it’s almost no-tech.

The Garand – called by Gen. George S. Patton “… the greatest battle implement ever devised …” – is no petite firearm.  In this age of lightweight polymer stocks and light metal actions, this rifle is a tank.   Where my AR-15 is a mere 6-7 lbs fully loaded, the M-1 – at 11.6 lbs – feels more like a sturdy artillery piece when shouldered. 

The wooden stock is polished and darkened from gunpowder and the sweat of multiple hands over the decades.  Some of the original bluing has worn off the gunmetal action.

But all these thoughts fade as the weapon snugs up against my shoulder and I reach inside myself in the familiar meditative ritual.  As I stare down the barrel at the target 100 yards distant, my eyes focus on the front sight.   As the hubbub of the range recedes,  the rifle’s rear sights, the target 100 yards away, and the rest of the world go blurry.  Where normally I’d feel the weight of the firearm in my hands, I instead feel  only the lazy beat of my own heart.  Instead of the loud kraaks from other shooters’ rifles, I hear my own muffled breathing as my inner noise quiets down.  It seemingly takes forever and no time at all, before the Garand’s loud report startles me out of my zone and the round is headed downrange.

Which is another thing to love about this old dog of a rifle.

I went shooting with my brother-in-law Drew Masters, while I was visiting on the East Coast recently.  Drew had recently obtained his own lever-action .30-30 rifle, and we headed out to a nearby range to pound some rounds downrange.  The .30-30 is such a light weapon, it has almost no mass at all to absorb what becomes a rather vicious kick.  Drew ended up the day with a large purple  “range hickey”  bruise on his right shoulder as a reward for his efforts.

While the Garand is a far more massive weapon, firing a bigger cartridge than the .30-30, its recoil is more of a powerful push than a kick.  With each round, your shoulder is physically moved rearwards for several inches.

I mean, with other of my older rifles, like my 1943 Mosin-Nagant, your shoulder moves so much that your new best friend after shooting is your chiropractor.  The Garand is nothing like that … you’re not hurting, even through you know you’ve been kissed.

Maybe it’s the feel of the gunpowder darkened wood stock under my hands, or the coppery tang of the cordite smell mixing with the gun oil.  Maybe it’s  the feel of a perfectly designed shoulder weapon… a weapon so perfectly designed it could only be improved by changing it completely into something else.  Maybe it’s  knowing that my father carried a rifle just like this one through the jungle hells of New Guinea.

Whatever. Could be any or all of these things

But on a sunny, warm Fall day, taking the Big Dog out and letting it play was perfect. 

Just perfect.

Memorandum for the Recond (continued): a Personal "Shopping List"

Committed to Memory (Part the Fourth) – Self assessment: It pays to advertise

I met Kathy, my loving wife, my adult supervision, and my very own “happily-ever-after,” through a singles ad ages ago.

Ever try and discuss yourself in one of those?

The responses I’ve seen run the entire spectrum from the teary-eyed woman who declared in her viral YouTube video that she wished she could hug all the kitty cats in the world; to a guy who sang his best Barry White impressions of what he would do to his would-be paramour into the video camera.

This wasn’t one of those ads.  This was an actual printed ad … in a real pre-Internet printed singles magazine.

So I knew I had basically once chance to impress the “… sweet, sexy, semi-artist …” whose ad caught my attention, and I had to get it right. (Query: Is a “Semi-artist” one who paints pictures solely of large, 18-wheeled vehicles?  Never have gotten a good answer to this question. But I digress.)

Lacking any Barry White ability (besides … this is a printed ad, remember?) and lacking any poetic abilities beyond things that rhyme with the word “Nantucket,” I elected to simply summarize myself in a rather long shopping list of attributes. (I know … typical “guy” response, right?)

But it worked.  Kathy tells me she wanted to meet that guy, even if our relationship never went anywhere afterwards. 

Aside from teaching me how to edit a list of bullet points (something that would stand me in good stead in the military, as I later prepared endless PowerPoint briefing slides,) writing that 7-page letter of “shopping lists” helped me to weigh and consider the person I had become.

And did I mention Kathy liked it, too?  We met for lunch at Beans and Barley, and started to talk.  We haven’t quit talking since then.  The rest, as they say, is history.

In the interests of full disclosure, I reprint that (edited) shopping list herewith.

Things I Like:

·        *  The “tick, tick, tick” sound my Trek Series 7200 mountain bike makes when I cycle down a country road, while the sun warms my back, and the miles whirl lazily by

·         * Stepping onto my elliptical machine, turning my IPod to 90’s music, turning the volume up to “stun’” and just stepping out hard and fast. Bliss!

·        *  Spicy food – I think that food (like Life) should be a little spicy and thus more memorable. I’ve always felt that life should be a little rough-edged and unfiltered … an attitude that has gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion.

·        *  An evening spent in the company of a small group of boon companions, with maybe a glass of bourbon or red wine to ease the conversation, while we talk of everything from politics to history to bullshit philosophies, to what we wanted to be when we grew up. (I always wanted to be an astronaut or a fire truck).

·        *  Telling and retelling sea stories (which strangely grow more epic in each recounting) to my grandchildren (after cleaning them up suitably for my wide-eyed, still-impressionable audience).

·        *  Reading. Reading anything … words in a row … cereal boxes if need be.

·        *  Sitting down at a computer terminal in a noisy newspaper newsroom, glancing at the clock to note that my deadline is just minutes away, taking a deep breath and reaching for the river of words that always flows through the back of my head.  As the minutes to deadline tick away, the adrenaline rush kicks in and the words just flow out of my fingertips into the computer keyboard and onto the monitor screen.  I grin to myself because I know I’m good at this and that the goddam’ story is gonna’ be brilliant  … and that tomorrow I’m going to have to do it all over again.  Of all the various and sundry jobs I’ve held over the years, from selling imported tropical fish and monkeys to operating a tollbooth, from  being a sailor to a dairy farm hired hand; being a newspaper reporter/photographer is right up there with being a Navy combat cameraman in my estimation.  Can’t remember ever having so much fun at work.

·        *  Becoming so involved in and transported by a novel that I actually come to care about the characters, and become impatient with the author (Are you listening, George R. R. Martin?) whose written output can’t keep up with my voracious reading

·        *  The intense bond between people in uniform that comes from shared hardship, danger and adversity...or sometimes just because we're all working for the same screaming T.I.U.  (Tool-In-Uniform), who gets away with it because he outranks us all.

·         * Sitting on the beach at night in Escanaba around a waning bonfire and “dreaming the coals,” as the evening winds down and the billions of stars and whirling satellites come out to dazzle us.

·         * Watching a pretty woman undress in the evening.

·         * Watching a pretty woman dress in the morning. (Not exactly raging hormones, but they’re there and fully functional, thank you.)

·         * A pot of freshly brewed coffee and a good cigar on a shady veranda

·        * Music – anything except “My Woman Done Left Me” hillbilly music … but especially the kind of music that batters you senseless with its power and majesty.  I can remember being in my High School orchestra when we played Handel’s Messiah.  The music swirled around us as we played … it was almost as though the air had turned to silver mist and you could almost see the arpeggios and scales as they whirled like silver dust devils through the thickened air around us.

·       *   The smiles that come with someone you’re connected to at the cellular level.  You need not finish each other’s sentences at that point, because you can hear the finish in your mind.  It’s as  though your DNA calls out to each other

·      *  Poetry, but the rather old-fashioned kind … the kind of poetry that stirs the blood and paints fiery pictures in your imagination.  Poets like Kipling and Masefield and Vachel Linday, whose works could almost be accompanied by stamping of feet or the beating of a regimental drum.

·       *  Time at the rifle range is almost like zen meditation to me.  You shoulder your rifle and gaze down the barrel at the front sight … letting the rest of the world go hazy.  You listen to your own breathing and slow it down to point where you can hear your breathing and hearbeat in your inner ear … and almost by itself, your hand begins a slow squ-e-e-e-e-e-ze of the trigger as you mentally reach out through the barrel to connect with the target a football field away.  When the rifle fires, it’s almost a surprise as the recoil pushes hard against your shoulder.  You let out the breath you forgot you were holding, and start all over again.  It’s as peaceful as naptime … punctuated by loud blasts from the rifle muzzle.

·      *    Animals – I’ve lived with and been owned by everything from peacocks to pygmy goats, guinea pigs to parakeets and ponies. I currently live with a rangy, orange tiger tomcat named “Al,” a clueless terrier named “Loki,” and two maniac little ferrets named “S’mores” and “Gadget.”  I find that animals give affection unreservedly, asking only that you take care of them in return.

   

      Things I don’t Like:

·       *  Politicians, who’ve never really served anything besides their own careers and bank accounts

·        *  Guys who treat their wives or girlfriends like they’re disposable or unimportant

·        *  Loud, boorish people who delight in throwing their weight around

·        *  Braggarts – how pathetic can you be?

·        *  Screamers

·       *  Those who’ve never served in uniform, but who feel compelled to lie and say they served with valor.

·        *  Peas, lima beans, liver

·        *  Non-alcoholic wine (what’s the point?)

·        * Parents who let their over-indulged, bratty children dominate their lives … and run around screaming in a public space (like Best Buy, for example)

·       *   Parents at the opposite end of the parenting spectrum who slap their children in public

·         * Having to go to the DMV.  Used to be, having to go to the dentist was attached to this same bullet point.  Lately, however, he’s started dosing me with really, REALLY happy pills before each visit.  Next, he lets me listen to really loud classical music on my Ipod while he’s at work.  I like my dentist now. DMV … are you paying attention?

Things I want to Remember:

·        *  Snorkeling near the Isla Taboga, off the coast of Panama.  The azure waters were warm and clear enough to put the best Swarovski crystals to shame.  Swimming through curtains of churning air bubbles, I emerge into a shaft of sunlight penetrating the waters like a spotlight.  In the middle of the dazzling brightness, a school of small squid were hovering in a long line like tiny, living, opalescent helicopters … the sunlight glinting off their parti-colored bodies, their fins moving sinuously as they kept station with each other in their underwater line.  I put out my hand to touch the nearest one, and like a sine wave on a screen, the line simply flowed around and away from my outstretched fingers.  Their huge eyes regarded me curiously as simply another denizen of the shallows.  Then, apparently reacting to a signal I was deaf to, the squid turned as one and sped off towards the deeper waters.  I looked around, seeing nothing to be alarmed at, but took my cue from them and turned back towards our boat.  A truly magic encounter.

·         * After 9/11, I was recalled to active duty and deployed to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in Cuba, where we were preparing Camp X-Ray for an expected influx of detainees captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan.  The first of what would be many Air Force flights touched down on the hot tarmac, and the massive rear doors of the aircraft opened.  Waiting military policemen walked on board, and walked off in pairs shortly thereafter, each pair with an orange jumpsuited detainee between them.  The prisoners, each many thousands of miles from their home base, looked around and spotted us watching.  The hate in their eyes was as palpable as the blast of heat from the tropical sun.  It occurred to me then that, these were the gentlemen who wished our country ill … and that I was glad to be there to see them safely taken off of the battlefield.

·      *  Sitting outside the Café Leopold Hawelka on a cobblestoned side street in Vienna.  I was sitting and reading the international edition of the Herald Tribune, and letting the empty Café Melange (Viennese coffee with thick cream and cinnamon) cups just pile up on the table.  I was in no hurry to get anywhere, and feeling especially worldly.

·        *  Sitting in a bar called the Green Parrot in the middle of a mangrove swamp on the island of Dominica.  The bar consisted of a few anchored platforms, with thatched roofs overhead, connected by a wobbly, floating wooden causeway.  (By the way, the parrot after whom the bar was named had long since passed away and the owner of the bar still grieved … and kept the empty cage hung over the array of rum bottles as a reminder.  Evidently, the parrot, whose name no one seemed to remember, got to pick the rum poured on any given day by pecking at the bottle.)  Bob Marley was blasting from the stereo, and a Rastafarian waiter named Keith was teaching us to play dominos.  A gentle rain – more of a misty spray actually – began falling and dripping through the thatched roof above us, and it was cooling and fine and simply wonderful.

·       *   Watching the ugly yellow-brown bar of a typhoon blow up over the horizon at sea, and start roaring towards my ship.  You know there’s nothing you can do about it, and that your day at sea is about to get “adventurous.”

·       *  Taking heavy seas aboard a small ship … you see dark, black water pile up and hammer down on your pitching decks … green water smash against the superstructure … and spray reach far up to soak the lookouts high above.  Just walking down a pitching, rolling passageway is a slow, torturous chore … and you grin to yourself because you know this is part of the adventure you signed up for.

·       *  Waking up on a ship at sea in the middle of the night, and feeling … feeling … the power of the ship vibrate right up through the deckplates, and feeling the rush of water along our hull as we plow through the heaving waves.

·         * Going to a family wedding at my relatives’ house in Mexico.  The father of the bride, my uncle Raoul, killed an ox and roasted it in a pit in the front yard of his house.  Only a few relatives were invited to the feast, but the entire village came anyway.  The bride and groom left after a few hours, but the party continued throughout the weekend.  I think someone stole my uncle’s knives and forks … but he couldn’t have cared less.  I think it was at this point that I began defining happiness less and less as owning fine things, and more and more as simply living life with gusto.

·        *  Making a difference in someone’s life.  By this point, I know I’ll never have a bridge or barracks named after me.  I know I’ll never be called the “…Father of Navy (insert random noun here…” or anything.  But I hope that the people I’ve come in regular contact with over the years will consider themselves helped along their path through my efforts.  It will have to do.

There were quite a few other items on the list as I recall ... but they were 'eyes-only for the "...sweet, sexy semi-artist ..." I was trying to meet.  I think I'll leave them that way.

Gee, I wish I'd said that ...

25 phrases you wish you could say at work more often..

1. Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again...

2. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.

3. How about never? Is never good for you?

4. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.

5. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.

6. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

7. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

8. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.

9. It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.

10. I can see your point, but I still think you're full of shit.

11. I like you. You remind me of me when I was young and stupid.

12. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.

13. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.

14. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.

15. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

16. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.

17. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

18. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

19. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?

20. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.

21. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.

22. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

23. No, my powers can only be used for good.

24. You sound reasonable... Time to up the medication.

25. Who me? I just wander from room to room.

Memorandum for the Record (continued): My first real sea story

Committed to Memory (Part the Third):  “Mama! See the funny man?” “Hush, son, and you mustn’t stare.  He can’t help it.  He’s a lieutenant”

As a new sailor, I wanted to be just like my “sea daddies,” elder sailors each of whom had a whole raft of epic sea stories to tell as part of the education of a fresh-caught youngster.  One such sailor, an elderly First Class Photographer’s Mate named Jon Pfingsten, spun fascinating tale of himself and a very young Bosun’s Mate who (like me) wanted to be considered a true Fleet Sailor.

Jon coached him through the various steps, carefully upping the ante each time the young Bosun came back to him to get this apocryphal – some might say “mythical” – list checked off.

But it was what the mathematicians would call an “asymptotic” approach – the more the youngster achieved; the more Jon kept raising the bar.  The youngster never quite got there.

It was pretty much the same with me during my first few years … I never seemed to have anything “epic” to contribute to the daily bull sessions.  Somehow, sea stories always seemed to include other people.  Nothing I did ever seemed to have the “larger than life” quality that a good sea story requires.

                                            ***Now jump ahead several decades ***

As a seasoned (translation: semi-elderly) Lieutenant, I was part of a special detachment to board the Ticonderoga-class cruiser U.S.S. Vela Gulf, for fleet operations with our NATO partners up in the Baltic Sea, just off the coast of Sweden and Denmark. 

Here it must be noted that, even though the rank of “lieutenant” is a fairly junior officer rank, I had spent the previous 17 years coming up through the ranks of enlisted sailors, before taking a commission as an officer.  Thus, junior I might have been as officers go, but I already had gray hair and a former Chief Photographer’s Mate’s cynical attitude … and a penchant for voicing my opinions where other juniors might have opted for silence.

Officers like me – junior in rank but loudmouthed and opinionated – made a strange set of people who never really fit into the rigid hierarchy of the Naval Service.  So already, I stood apart from the other junior officers of our detachment aboard the ship.  I was a fairly elderly odd duck.

Back to the story.

The Baltic, as you might know, is a relatively shallow sea, but one which can blow up a truly noteworthy storm without much notice.  Thus it was on the last day of our fleet operations.  It had stormed the night before, so the air had that freshly scrubbed look to it, and the lightning-sparked scent of ozone still lent a coppery tang to the clear salty air.

The sea itself was azure blue, due in part to the white sands on the bottom only a few tens of feet below our keels, and also due to the reflected pure glory of the turquoise sky above.  It was going on towards an early autumn, and the wind had a chill to it that portended the long Scandinavian Winter to come, but today simply added a bracing coolness to the warm sun. 

Above, the sun shone through the racing scud clouds leftover from the storm, and painted everything with clarity and the definition one might expect of a laser-enhanced photograph. 

God’s own Photoshop, if you will.

I was all the way aft on the cruiser, and our battlegroup’s commander, Rear Admiral William “Mad Dog” Copeland (a Navy aviator, who rarely got the chance to play with surface ships) was up on the bridge, actually conning the ship.  Like all Navy jet pilots, he wanted to go fast, so he was putting our turbine-powered cruiser through her paces.  Each time he shifted the ship’s throttle, it produced a huge roostertail of white water from our madly spinning props, and a wake that sent the ships behind us surfing across the man-made waves.

Directly in our wake, the German destroyer Molders bobbed in and out of our wake.

She was a former U.S. Navy Charles F. Adams-class destroyer, of Post WWII design.  As such, she was the direct inheritor of everything that made a ship beautiful; long, lean, swept lines, knife-edged bow, menacing gun emplacements everywhere in place of the more modern (but far less beautiful) missile mounts that covered our ships.

In every motion and movement, she showed her classic “Greyhound of the Seas” heritage, taking the jumps and leaps through the waves like the thoroughbred she was.

She was a classic beauty: long, lean, gorgeous, agile, lethal.

That’s when the image of the too-beautiful day at sea hit me:  The perfect sky, the azure waves, the warm sun, the cool breeze, the freshly scrubbed atmosphere, a gorgeous ship knifing through the waves … this was an episode straight out of the 50’s TV show “Victory at Sea” … or better yet, it was a classic sea story … and it was all mine.

You ever have one of those perfect moments when you couldn’t do anything other than just grin like a maniac and laugh out loud at the utter perfection of it all?  This was one of those.

Standing back on the fantail of a warship, marveling at the timeless beauty of the scene before me, I started chuckling to myself and planning how I would turn it all into a sea story.  I mentally rehearsed my lines, chuckling with inner mirth at how it would all sound.    

Or at least, I thought it was “inner mirth.”

Other sailors, to whom I was still a mysterious cypher since I belonged to that odd “Who-were-those-guys?” detachment in their midst, turned at the sound of laughter and stared at the strange lieutenant (me), staring out to sea and talking and laughing to himself.

Their reaction set me off even more.  Chuckles gave way to guffaws of laughter at the pure joy of the moment.

The sailors glanced at each other and began moving away from me.  

Guffaws now started to double me over in paroxysms of uncontrolled laughter and tears of joy rolling down my cheeks.  (To this day, I’m reasonably sure I am referred to as “…that odd Lieutenant, who was talking to himself and laughing out loud at the voices in his head… and just who were those guys he was with, anyway?”)

I didn’t care a bit.  It was a beautiful moment, straight out of a postcard.

… or straight out of a sea story.

And now I’ve told my sea story to you.

Memorandum for the Record (Continued)

Committed to Memory (Part the Second)—“My God … It’s full of stars!”

Keir Dullea’s character in the iconic movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” uttered those words as an alien artifact transported him through fiery, acid-etched dimensions far from ordinary Human ken. Despite the drug-induced “enhancement” of our senses in the 1960s when I first saw that movie, one need not engage in any kind of chemical vacation to experience a truly mind-altering experience.

It happened to me at night, on the decks of a ship, far out at sea.

As soon as you open the ship’s watertight doors and go out onto the darkened weather decks, a blast of humid air almost knocks you off your feet and your senses begin to scream at you. You are, they insist, standing on the edge of a precipice that drops a lifetime away in every direction.

You see, a warship always switches to red interior illumination and darkens its outer decks at night. The red interior battle lanterns cast a blood-red glow about everything and – theoretically, at least -- enable you to save some of your night vision when you step outside. Black rubber sealed light traps about all exterior doors trap that same red light, keeping enemies from seeing a sudden glow of light and thus giving away your ship’s position. (We are told that the sudden flare of lighting a cigarette on deck at night can be seen by a lookout five miles away.)
Net result: As soon as you step out onto the weather decks of a ship at sea, you can HEAR the water rushing along the ship’s hull … and it sounds as though it’s only a few inches away from your outstretched hands … but you are blind, despite the red lanterns’ attempts at granting you night vision.

All about you is warm, humid, black, black, black … and the rush of damp air from your ship’s passage makes it feel as though the night itself were breathing into your face. You continue reaching blindly for the ship’s railing, as your senses continue to insist there’s nothing in front of you and you’re about to fall overboard into water that’s miles deep.

Finally, step by cautious step, your hands feel their way to the taught steel lifelines stretched all the way around the weather decks, and you cling to them, sidling your body the rest of the way and leaning into their solidity.
Then the magic show begins, as your night vision returns.

The deeper parts of the oceans are inhabited by tiny, unicellular creatures whose primary purposes are to (a) provide food for the food chain, and (b) start to glow brightly when they’re disturbed. Thus, when our ship rushes past, these tiny creatures begin to glow furiously, until the whole of the ocean around our hull seems to be luminous with witchfire. Further away from our hull, the creatures sparkle on and off, winking in some sort of glowing semaphore language at each other.

But that’s only the Overture to this magnificent symphony.
Far out at sea, the nearest land is several miles straight down beneath your keel, and the only light is that which comes straight from the Almighty’s paint brush. No light pollution out here to spoil the view, and your wondering eyes begin to realize exactly how vast is Creation and how tiny are all Human endeavors.
Because that’s when the stars start to come out.
First one tentative point of light appears above, then another, and another, until the stars and galaxies cascade into view in a kind of cosmic rush. All at once the sky – empty to your night blinded senses only a few moments before -- is a vast streak of light as the Milky Way burns its way across the sky, brighter than you’ve ever seen anything before. Familiar constellations are obscured and fade into the fiery background as millions and millions of unfamiliar stars come out of hiding.

That’s when you first notice that the majesty of the star show above is mirrored in the black water all around you. Winking fiery points above are reflected in the endless sea all around you.
Then you notice that the glowing little sea creatures outlining your ship’s hull are adding their own glowing counterpoint to the glory above and all around you.

All at once, it’s as though you’ve been floated bodily off your ship and now are suspended in a vast, glowing bowl of jewels … like you’ve been whisked away without realizing it and are floating somewhere near the Face of God itself.

Timeless.

Memorandum for the Record

Committed to Memory

There are just some moments – usually intensely private, I find – that nevertheless need to be committed to the record. Such moments, for me, illustrate the person I’ve become and am still becoming, and I want to write them down and share them here:

My father, hereinafter spoken of in the Third Person – “The Colonel” – was career Army. He entered the enlisted ranks as a buck private prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and rose steadily through the ranks during World War II. Orphaned at an early age, he and his twin brother Stan kicked around Kansas, going from one relative’s home to another. Frankly, Stan found an easier time finding a home with relatives, being the more easy-going and (some would say) tractable of the two. My dad, eventually, was sent to military school.

It was there he found his true home.

Dad was always more comfortable in uniform than he was sitting at home with his own family. “I get up in the morning and take off running, glad to be alive,” he told me, “because I’m going to work.”

Thus, when he died suddenly before his birthday, it was only natural he’d be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Let me paint a picture for you.

Riding in the military-supplied limo, the funeral cortege stretched out behind us. Soldiers of the Old Guard marched in full panoply, while an Army band played the funeral dirge. Dad’s casket was carried on an artillery caisson, covered by the US flag he’d served for so many years.

At the graveside, Mom, my sisters and I sat while the ages old pageant unfolded about us.

But I was also in uniform you see – full dress Navy crackerjack whites. As everyone else sat in numbed silence, I had to stand at attention in full view of everyone else … the only Navy uniform in that Army crowd.

Thus, when the firing party shot three volleys of 7 rounds each, followed by the mournful notes of taps from a pair of buglers stationed up the hill, I damned near bit the inside of my cheek out of my mouth to keep from breaking down in tears. The pain of a gnawed cheek gave me something else to concentrate upon besides the sense of grief and loss that comes when a parent dies suddenly.

Not that I’m against tears, mind you, but the military is a club that both Dad and I willingly joined … and kept rejoining when our hitches were up. We knew the rules of that club, including the strictures against public displays of grief and accepted them as simple facts of life (and death.)

As the last, long, low notes of taps died away, echoing into the distance, I sighed inwardly through the numbness. I had done it. I had gotten through it without breaking down.

As the crowd began to melt away, I felt Dad looking over my shoulder nodding approvingly.

He understood.

A Modest Proposal for a new holiday: "National Take Your Granddaughter to the Range Day"

It's well known in my family that, if you're good and your parents agree, Opa will take you shooting with him someday.

In fact, it's become somewhat of a Rite of Passage among my kids and grandkids. I see them all measuring each other against some imaginary "You must be this tall for this ride" sign in my living room, until they're big enough that Opa will give them "the safety talk" and place a loaded firearm in their hands.

Opa? That's me, by the way. The "Opa-nator." "Commander Curmudgeon."

As my kids will readily attest, I was King Grump all through their childhoods. My favorite word, sometimes, seemed to be "no" or "maybe" or "we'll see." My grandkids see right through that facade, and know me for the soft touch that I really am.

But when it comes to firearms, I am the righteous Voice of Wisdom and Wrath, and I make a big deal out of instructing my grandkids in the lore of boom sticks.

I think that, when kids are raised in the presence of powerful machines -- be they automobiles or firearms -- the machines take on a kind of unearthly glamour and a hint of powerful promise. That hint, that allure, is the siren song that gets some young people killed unless someone takes them by the hand and instructs them in the respectful, safe operation of said machines.

I can remember when I was teaching Johanna to drive, she got a little giddy behind the wheel her first couple of times. When she made a silly mistake, she even started to giggle.

I squelched that right quickly. "You are behind the wheel of a machine that has killed more kids your age than all my firearms put together," I sternly told her. "This is not just a car ... it can be a killing machine! Now get your head back in the driver's seat and focus!"

I never wanted her to fear driving. I just wanted her to have a healthy respect for how quickly and irrevocably things can go wrong with automobiles. Same thing with firearms. My kids always knew they were in the house. They knew that they were forbidden territory UNLESS I put one in their hands. Then, when they gained sufficient age and maturity, I began teaching them to shoot.

Actually shooting a firearm, I find, was almost an anticlimax for them. When they realized that, under proper instruction, the lessons were going to be about patience, and muscle control and slow, almost zen-like breathing; range time then became more of a meditative practice than shoot-em-up.

Which leads me back to my modest proposal.

I will teach all my grandchildren about shooting and proper respect and care of a firearm. My three grandsons will probably love shooting and trigger time, as comes with the "Y" Chromosome.

But it's the girls, I think, that will benefit the most.

Nationally, studies still show that boys tend to dominate classroom discussions. Nationally, studies show it's the girls who still tend to hang back and defer to each other. Nationally, studies show that girls are plagued with more self-doubt than their male peers.

But when a semi-elderly grandparent takes them to the sanctum-sanctorum (rifle range), tells them they can do it, and places a loaded firearm in their hands, you can almost see the self-confidence ratchet up inside them several notches.

Then, once they get beyond their first shot jitters, and they realize the little .22 cal isn't going to hurt, they actually start to like it. Then, or so I hear, they go back to class the following day and get "I-went-shooting-with-my-grandfather" bragging rights. Even rambunctious middle school boys will back down a little to a report like that.

I've taken my three oldest granddaughters to the range now, and all three are superb markswomen-in-the-making. (The US Navy actually studied the eye/hand coordination of male and female jet pilots, and found that women out-do men in all categories, once they find their confidence.)

Hopefully, what I've done here is plant seeds of self-confidence that will see my grandkids through all the trials that life is going to throw at them in the years to come.

And, let's be frank ... our time on the planet is limited. My time with my grandkids is something like formatting a message to the Future. Hopefully the message I'm sending through my kids and grandkids equals, "I was here. I mattered in someone's life. I hope you love my family, because I did and they carry, in part, my DNA and my values."

Anyway, the look in Maddie's eyes recently as she looked at her targets, made it all worth it, message-or-no-message. "Opa, this is WAY better than school!" she said.

Amen to that.

Death sentence ... or not? (AKA, the "Good-news-bad-news-no-news-Post")

Your first realization that you're aging is when you count up the birthdays you've already had and you understand that there are fewer birthdays left in front of you than there are behind you.

Your second realization, as I've posted elsewhere on this blog, is when you retire and go on pensions plus Social Security.

Your next one (gulp) comes when -- first your spouse, and next YOU -- are handed a life-threatening (and potentially life-ending) diagnosis.

After Kathy's diagnosis last year of cancer, it began to hit me that my "happily-ever-after" life story might not last forever. But Kathy and I dug in deep and fought the cancer with everything we had ... not to mention chemotherapy and radiation. Kathy made it fine and her five year clock to be pronounced cancer-free is ticking away happily in the background of our lives.

Then I started coughing this year. And coughing. Every night, I hacked and coughed my lungs out. At the same time, I started doing that disgusting Old Person thing of hawking up gobs of something equally bad from deep in my chest.

I may be fairly bright and well-read as old guys go ... but it took me awhile to realize that this probably wasn't just a sign of Old Personhood.

And it wouldn't go away.

And my doctors all got that straight-faced "You'd better sit down and listen carefully" look when they talked to me about it.

After biopsies and CT-scans and many other assorted medical pokings-and-proddings, we got a kind of catch-all diagnosis. The good news (sort of) is the fact that it's not cancer. The bad news is that it's not going to go away.

The worse news is that it's potentially life-ending.

The "No News" part of this is ... can someone tell me what part of getting older ISN'T life-ending?

As I tried to explain to my family in a private post, "We're all going to die of something." In a way, knowing what's coming -- the actual mechanism that's aiming for me is almost kind of ... calming. It's as though I don't have to constantly look over my shoulder now ... watching for bad stuff or cars careening out of control. Now I know what I've got, now I know how it's going to go (more or less,) and now I can get back to living my life with Kathy.

For those who have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, it's called "Interstitial Lung Disease," and is basically a hardening and scarring of the lung tissue itself. It's progressive, and will gradually get worse.

The doctors tell me that I've got a rare-ish sub-form of this thing that MAY (and I repeat ... may) respond to some drugs that may or may not slow it down.

So one of the first questions my family asked was, "How much more time?"

A bogus question, if ever there was one. As Kathy likes to say, "None of us has an expiration date stamped on our butts."

Besides, if you do it right, living becomes and endless succession of "nows" so that each moment flows by endlessly, and tomorrow is another lifetime away. I'm not worried. It'll come when it comes.

And in the meantime, Kathy and I now have perfect excuses to go traipsing around the world and making memories.

That'll do nicely.