Simple Gifts

Thanksgiving has come and gone. Thank goodness.

Not that I didn't enjoy it.

We had a quiet dinner, took a nap and went to see John in the hospital to spread the joy that we can. Being in the hospital on a major holiday bites, and I wanted John to at least have some good home-made food, even if it didn't have any animal products in it. Well, other than the butter (lots of it) and eggs. (Most vegetarians draw the line somewhere between principle and wanting and needing good food, like dairy.)

John's doing ok, all things considered. I don't know that he'll ever do great again, given the Parkinson's. It's a disease that doesn't lend itself to much progress. It seems to be more a matter of trying to hold onto whatever one has than ever believing in getting better.

That, in and of itself, is depressing. The knowledge that it's all down hill from here must be overwhelming. Fighting that is certainly honorable, and it reinforces my belief in the unusual strength of the human spirit. But some days, it's just got to be a pisser.

John liked the fruit salad most. It was one of my best. Substituting clove powder (which I couldn't get from anywhere I would buy it from) with allspice gave it much more subtlety. After many versions and incarnations, I think I have that one right.

I said earlier that I'm glad Thanksgiving has come and gone. Not because I don't like it--it's really my favorite holiday of the year. No expectations of gifts, and if you can get a good meal on the table in a reasonable amount of time, you're a hero.

That said, our world has been upside down of late. And feast days always bring to mind why we're not spending them with our families. The reasons boils down to distance and dysfunction.

It's an eleven hour drive to Mama's house. If the weather cooperates. Shannon has problems with long errands around the neighborhood, so an eleven hour drive is out of the question. And I refuse to leave him here alone on a holiday.

The dysfunction comes in with my sisters and Shannon's brother. It's there, but we're just not going to talk about it. Rehashing old grievances and pointedly pronouncing judgement of the present don't make for a good dinner.

So, we had a nice (very tasty, if I maybrag for a second) Thanksgiving dinner. Everything got done early, so we just ate early. Didn't have to worry about anyone showing or not showing up. Didn't have to entertain.

We just enjoyed each other's company and had a nice meal.

For that I give shameless, unabashed thanks.

God is good when he wants to be.

He was.

How to Make a Perfect Bird

Shannon called me at work last Friday to find out how big a turkey to get. He's pushing 60 and had never bought a turkey in his life. I told him to get the smallest one he could find.

He kept asking me "Well, how big is too small?"

I had to tell him over and over again that he couldn't possibly find a turkey that was too small. "It's just going to be the two of us. How much can we eat?"

He did good. Brought back an organically raised almost 11-pounder from Sun Harvest.

That's how you make a perfect bird: you start with a good product.

All I did was add sea salt, fresh ground pepper and some melted butter.

Oh, and fresh sage. Lots of it.

We now have the leftovers I predicted, and anyone who visits this weekend will have to take some back. Until this bird of paradise is fully consumed, all visits come with take out.

With visit, you get turkey, sage dressing and giblet gravy. We're running out of carrots and potatoes, but we also have a stockpile of holiday fruit salad.

You like?

Google: the New Walmart

A judge holds the fate of the Northcross Mall development in her delicate little hands. She heard several days of testimony, and I’m sure her head is hurting. She’ll issue a ruling in mid-December. Just enough time to get rid of the headache and be able to consider the facts of the case.

The whole thing gives me a headache and makes me wonder if some people don’t just have too much time on their hands. I’ve only had the time to send a letter to the editor of the Statesman and found it was published when someone left a very threatening message: “Watch you back, bitch. I know where you live.”

I haven’t had time to do much else. Life got in the way. That, and making it to work on time (or some semblance of “on time”—what’s 5 or 10 minutes one way or the other?).

All those shrill people who stand on the street corners with their big, red signs don’t live in my neighborhood. They’ve never slogged their way in the rain across that damned parking lot with water up to their ankles. They don’t worry every morning about how safe or unsafe it is to cross Northcross without getting run over.

The whole thing brings to mind the concerted effort to kill, or at least immobilize another corporate giant: Google.

Yes, Google collects information from your computer every time you do a search. And if you have their toolbar installed, it collects information about every site you visit. And, yes, Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick poses some anti-trust questions. It could possibly lead to an anti-competitive market dominance.

Yet the shrill detractors are framing their arguments to the FTC in the terms of privacy issues. Their argument seems to be that Google is already too big and shouldn’t be allowed to get any bigger. That it’s invading every aspect of our cyber life. That, because it collects information from its users, it should not be allowed to acquire an ad company.

If you don’t want Google putting cookies on your computer, it’s simple enough to turn them off. And if you really hate Google that much, just don’t use it.

I’m sure those two idealistic boys who started the company never imagined the firestorms they’d set off.

And Sam Walton (“Mr. Sam” as he was known to just about everyone) would be perplexed, too.

If a store’s not right for a community, no one will shop at it. That’s the law of supply and demand at its simplest, most pared-down version.

And even though this is an affluent neighborhood, there are pockets of poverty not too far away. The Albertson’s closed at 183 and Ohlen Road. The next closest grocery is the old HEB on Burnet Road, but it would require a bus trip and maybe a transfer, depending on where you’re coming from.

Having a thriving, revitalized shopping center across the street will almost certainly mean that getting across Northcross ain’t gonna get any easier. But they’re digging out an enormous (at least 12 feet deep) retention pond that will be hooked into Shoal Creek at the extreme western edge of the property.

That should put an end to slogging through ankle-deep water on my way to the office.

And that’s what living in a neighborhood means: if you ain’t slogged, you don’t live here.

Many Thanks

Thanksgiving snuck up on me this year. Last week, I asked my boss, “Is it really Thanksgiving next week.”

“Yep,” she replied.

Between death and travel and more death and apartment-repair nightmares and friends in the hospital, the last several months have run together into a blur. Not to mention cash flow problems caused by all of the aforementioned issues. We’ve managed to compress an entire year’s worth of problems into a few short months.

Still, I’m thankful. I’m still alive and human enough to be moved by other peoples’ pain, as well as recognize and embrace my own. We had the resources to pay for all the extra expenses we’ve had. My mother and I are closer than we ever have been.

Sometimes, I look back on the year and start to get depressed.

But then, if I’m honest, I’ve had the good with the bad.

Yes, I mourn Daddy’s death, but then I remember that I had the privilege of knowing him for 42 years. And, yes, the repairs on our apartment have been a nightmare. But many people would love to be able to complain about that, because all they have to repair is a cardboard box. And certainly not one in a nice neighborhood.

And I have a good job. It’ll be eight years November 30.

With all the chaos of this year, I have constants to sustain me: a committed partner, a job I like and a roof over my head. And then there’s faith.

It’s been a bad year in some ways, but in others it’s made me a stronger person who’s more committed to and secure in my priorities.

So now to my current priority--the menu:

Roast turkey
Giblet gravy
Mama’s cornbread dressing with sage (fresh, of course)
Honey-glazed carrots with tarragon
Green beans sautéed in olive oil and garlic
Mashed potatoes with garlic and dill
Fruit salad with holiday spices

Plus a special vegetarian version of the above (no turkey, of course—they aren’t veggies) for John, who’s still in the hospital.

Eat, drink and be merry, all ye (3 people) who read this.

We intend to do the same.

Gobble-gobble

Negative Space

Tomorrow is Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. I’ll have to call Mama. It’ll be the first one since Daddy died. She’s going to have dinner with her sister and taking the free turkey she got because the walk-in fridge at her church went out a week or two ago. She was around to take it, and Baptists that feed other people can’t stand to see anything going to waste.

Especially not food. God sends people to hell for wasting food I’ve been told.

I’m glad she’s going somewhere e
lse for the holiday. On Thursday, the house would only feel more empty than it already does.

I’ve often wondered what painters and sculptors meant when they talked about “negative space”. They’ve been talking about for years, but they do so in the argot of artists, who speak a language I don’t always understand.

Now I understand “negative space” in a palpable way.

It’s what’s obviously missing.

It’s the element, that by just not being there, becomes all the more real.

It’s the void that remains while life goes on around it.

This will be a bitter-sweet Thanksgiving. Sweet, because I have been shopping so much that Shannon and I will have our own private feast. Bitter because I miss Daddy.

Life could be worse. Then again, it could be better.

I keep telling Mama over and over and over again that we made the right decisions, that we did what Daddy wanted. She’s not always convinced, and one of us always ends up crying when we talk.

It’s usually me.

Still, I have a bitter-sweet thing to be thankful for: we did right by Daddy.

Most importantly, I did right by Daddy.

Consciously letting go of someone you love, making decisions to end his life in God's time (read: real quick) and then living with the aftermath is no easy chore.

After Rich, my first partner died, I questioned the decisions I made that led up to his death. His situation was hopeless. He had a massive septic infection in his lungs. One that had little to no possibility of treatment.

I had an obligation to honor his wishes, that he not be kept alive artificially, that out-weighed my own.

As I told Mama in the hospital, it'll be the easiest and the hardest thing you've ever done up until now. You'll know when the t ime's right, and you'll do the right thing. You won't be able to do otherwise.

It’s going to be a strange holiday season without him. To be honest, it’s just pure-strange to be without him.

I’ve decided in the aftermath, though, that I can never miss Mama’s birthday again and that I need to buy her something pretty and useless for Christmas. Daddy was always the one who gave her the one present she wanted most.

That one’s on me, now.

We’ve had our problems as a family, and I can’t be responsible for that. What I can do is move forward and try to help Mama do the same. My sisters can fend for themselves. Neither one seems to be open to the fact that Daddy’s gone.

Denial is futile, and it only leads to other problems that can escalate into full-blown craziness. I know because I have personal experience on that topic.

As I see it, my job is to fill that negative space with things that are meaningful. Whether it’s a phone call, flowers or a pretty little sterling pin with Austrian glass I found at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower center.

I’m flying in the face of modern art, but I think negative space is vastly over-rated, and something I definitely don’t want or need in my life.

I’m more concentrated on positive ones.

The Unsinkables

My mother and I had our very first real and honest conversation when Daddy was in the ICU at Methodist Hospital in Memphis. She refused to leave the hospital from the time he was admitted until he died, several days later. I spent my time there, too.

There’s something about stark mortality staring you in the face that makes everything else insignificant. It’s one of those highly-focused moments that obliterates everything else.

Focusing on the hallways and elevators between the waiting room and Daddy’s room. Remembering each turn, because getting lost might mean a few less minutes. Forcing myself and her to eat.

Not because we had an appetite, but because we knew that we wouldn’t be much good for him if we didn’t.

Since Daddy died, Mama and I have talked several times about how some things just don’t matter that much. About how life is too short for not loving the people around you.

Daddy’s death was a slap in the face to the both of us.

She’s opening up to me, and I’m opening up to her.

When she calls now, she usually spends a while talking to Shannon before she talks to me. He says he can tell a difference in her attitude toward him since before.

When me and her talk, one of us always ends up crying. Usually me.

But we talk about things that are important in and around the trivial (it rained one building over but not on us, and, by the way, every time I look at Daddy’s picture, I start to cry—that kind of stuff).

Such twisted conversations that only a mother could put up with.

She keeps comforting me as I comfort her. She says “It’ll take time.” 5 minutes later I tell her the same thing.

We’re messes, me and Mama. But finally, after 42 years, we’re in the same boat.

And neither of us intends to sink.

Patience

When I finally got an assistant, after several years of the position not being funded, I told her two things: “You won’t learn this job in 6 days, 6 weeks or 6 months;” and “There are at least a hundred mistakes to make. I know, because I’ve made them all.”

I wasn’t that good of a manager with my last assistant. Granted, he didn’t seem to like the concept of work or the impositions it posed to his social life. That probably made me more intolerant of his mistakes.

And it could be the case that my current assistant really likes having things to do, and I cut her some slack.

Still, things that might have pissed me off a few years ago don’t anymore. I’m amazed at my patience with her. I’m assuming that, if I had been kidnapped and replaced by aliens, I would know. They would be doing strange things to me instead of letting me go to work every day.

So it has to be me going to work every day.

Maybe my patience is just a by-product of me dealing with Shannon over the last few years. Maybe my priorities have changed after such a hard and painful year. Maybe I’m just giving people room to be human.

Since Daddy died, Mama and I have talked several times about why some things just ain’t that important. We were mostly talking about me being gay and my sister not speaking to me. Two topics that wouldn’t have come up with such honesty before he died.

Maybe some of that bled over into my workplace.

I know that dealing with Shannon’s mental health issues has helped teach me understanding. I still get impatient sometimes, because I tell him one thing and he hears another. But, by and large, I have learned the patience of Job.

It doesn’t come naturally. Most of us have to learn how to be patient. And I am chief among them.

I don’t know when that fundamental change occurred. Maybe it’s a product of aging, but I doubt it. I know too many people who are a good bit older than me who remind me of myself as an adolescent.

Most likely, it’s life-experience. Even though I haven’t consciously done it, I think that my experiences of the last year or so have made abundantly clear what is important and what is not.

Now, if someone could convince my older sister of that, I’d be most grateful.

If you try, good luck.

Intelligent Design?

I'm watching a show on PBS (Nova) about intelligent design and a lawsuite that revolved around it. And the only things I can take away from it is that, not only is it not intelligent, but that its proponents show a startling lack of faith. After all, it takes much more faith to believe that God works things out in his own way and time than it does to simply conscribe things you don't fully understand and can't explain to the junk heap.

It's certainly a simpler explanation that some higher being poofed the entire universe into being 4000 years ago than to argue that our universe is the product of billions of years of development. Most people have a hard time wrapping their minds around a concept like "billions of years." And I am among them.

The more complicated explanation, that life developed on Earth by way of an infinitely enormous number of mutations that favored one creature over the other, is more difficult to try to understand. Humans, by their very nature as temporal creatures with limited life spans, will never be able to fully comprehend the concept of infinity.

Faith is the belief in things not seen. Or fully understood. Faith requires us to accept things that we cannot grasp the totality of because all reasonable evidence points at them.

Faith and science have little to do with each other, except where accepting that the science one doesn't understand is an accurate explanation for a phenomena that we cannot comprehend fully.

Intelligent design is faith masquerading as science, and not particularly good faith, at that. It requires that you constrict God to a little box. It doesn't allow for the truly amazing and awe-inspiring: that we got here from where the whole process started.

Faith and science need not be enemies or even uneasy bed-fellows. They are not mutually exclusive and can coexist in peace.

In fact, science can reinforce faith, if you let it. If you think about how incredibly complicated our universe is, you should be awed. And many scientific laws and principles are so elegant that, if you understand them, reinforce the idea of some power we don't understand and will never fully comprehend.

That's faith, baby.

Vanity Fare

Unless you are an extreme masochist who enjoys having your entire world turned upside down while someone who does not speak English tries to fix your apartment the wrong way, don't ever, ever, under any circumstances try to have major work done on your domicile while you're still living in it. They were supposed to be done by no later than last Wednesday afternoon. Since they didn't get here until late Wednesday morning, that didn't happen.

Our apartment management has hired someone to replace the vanity in the master bath and mitigate some other water damage that previous managers have ignored to the point that the cumulative damage can no longer be ignored. They hired a contractor in good faith, and the guy that showed up to do the work thought he was there to replace a vanity bowl. Just the porcelain and not the cabinet, woodwork and drywall around it. Plus fixing the drywall in the dining room and painting the ceilings in the master bath.

It's gone from bad to worse to insane.

The cabinet he got to replace the water-damaged vanity we had is very pretty. It has six nice drawers, 4 more than we had before. The drawer pulls are lovely, as is the counter top.

The only problem is that, when they put the face frame back on the doors, those lovely drawers will only open a few inches.

On top of that, he didn't close off the wall behind the vanity, so I could see the framing timbers for the building and a nice, convenient route for mice, rats, squirrels and bugs into our cabinet. His answer was to try to use spackling compound with nothing behind it to seal up the very large hole.

On top of that, it's still leaking.

On top of that, my floors look like crap because he only made the most cursory effort at cleaning up after himself. I have spackling and drywall dust mixed with a little water and smeared around quite liberally in my dining room and master bath.

I took off early today to meet with the apartment manager and show her my concerns. She wasn't real happy, but assured me that the floors can be fixed. She also said that the people they hired were going to have to rip everything out and start over.

Good news and bad news, at the same time. Good, because things should get fixed. Bad because it's already been a week, and I'm not sure how much more of this we can take.

Living with these kind of projects going on around you is kind of like making a little voodoo doll of yourself and then sticking in full of pins in all the sensitive places. And when that doesn't hurt enough, sticking the pins in your living, breathing and frustrated body.

Unless you can go and live somewhere else while the work's being done, just don't do it. Take my word on this one: you don't want to live with it.

Enjoy what you have, imperfect though it may be. Fixing it could lead to divorce or murder.

It's only a vanity, and I'm not that damned vain, regardless of what you've heard.

The Other Side

Palliative Care from the Other Side

I’ve worked with nurses for eight years and heard clinical terms I don’t understand all too often. They tend to end in –itis or –osis or something else I don’t understand.

It often seems like they're using a foreing language I just don't quite comprehend.

I didn’t know what palliative care was until I started working there. It’s not a topic that comes up in many conversations. And when it does, most people just don’t want to talk about it.

Then, my dearest, closest friend in the world, Bucky, was diagnosed with cancer. The outlook was bleak from the beginning. The tumor was wrapped around his brain, stretching from his throat up and over, like a boa constrictor. Not the news I wanted to hear.

He went to MD Anderson and went through one round of radiation treatment.

He said “enough is enough.” Or something to that effect. He had to write things down because his tongue had swollen so badly that he couldn’t talk.

He died in hospice care.

Fast forward eight or so years, and I got a call from Shannon, my partner. He just said, “You need to call home.” I could tell he was on the verge of tears. Then he told me Daddy was in the hospital, and Mama didn’t sound real good.

Daddy had been diagnosed with liver failure a year or two before. He was waiting for a transplant and for him to be healthy enough to get one.

To this day, we don’t have any understanding of why his liver failed. It looks like a random event.

That said, I drove up to Tennessee with my older sister.

It took 15 hours, and by the time we got there, visiting hours had long come and gone.

We came back the next day.

He wasn’t doing well. He promised me that he would fight, if only for my sake.

Two days later, he died. surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren, a brother and a sister, as well as a couple of in-laws.

We watched the heart monitor slow down to a flat line and then settle into a distracting alarm.

The nurse turned it off.

The hospital (Methodist University in Memphis) had assigned a palliative care nurse to us. I didn’t realize up until then that there was such an ANCC designation.

She made everything easier. As Daddy was making his way into the next world, we sang “In the Sweet By and By” and “Amazing Grace.”

She had already told us what to expect and made sure that our requests for the removal of live-support were honored.

I don’t know how that little short APN with palliative care credentials deals with death every day. My guess is that she has enough experiences with people who appreciate her to make it worthwhile.

I can’t imagine any other reason for anyone to make witnessing death a career.

But Daddy died in peace.

It’s not what I wanted, but it’s what happened.

And I thank God that it happened the way it did.

With me there to tell him “I’ll see you on the other side.”

And in a good bit, thanks to her.

Payback

I spent the weekend working a co-worker's computer. I knew I was up for a challenge when I booted it up and it said "No." For whatever reason, it would not allow access to important parts of the hard drive. It even told checkdisk to go away.

After consulting with a friend who makes me look like an amature (that's because she's a network administrator and I'm an accountant and, therefore, an amateur), I decided to reinstall Windows. And of course, it didn't install a number of important drivers. I downloaded them from Dell's web site and installed them manually.

And then came the endless updates. Thank God for broadband.

As I was going down for a nap Sunday afternoon, my co-worker called. Her 11 year old son wanted to see if it was ready yet. He wanted it back, and now.

I told her it was more or less ready. There were some things like Flash and Java that I wasn't sure were up to date, but otherwise, ready to go.

She stopped by with her son. He's a real cutie. He'll be a heart-breaker one of these days. Blond hair, big old eyes that only kids and cats seem to have.

I started showing them a few things that might be different (like the anti-virus program) and he almost started jumping up and down. "Look, mom. It's better than it was before."

I carried it out to the car and put it in the back seat. He crawled in next to it and curled up around it, hugging it the way someone might hug a favorite pet.

His mother told me that he insisted on going home immediately. When they got there, he her to go away when she offered to help hook it up. So she went out and ran the rest of the errands she had planned. When she got back, he had everything hooked up and told her, "Mom, this is so much better than it used to be."

Silly, inconsequential story, perhaps. But seeing that little boy's face light up like it was Christmas morning was more than worth it all.

My co-worker kept on telling me she wanted to pay me, but I told her that I've had a lot of help from other people over the years. In fact, without their help, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did for her.

It's payback. The good kind.

The Accidental Accountant

I have no credentials to do most of what I do at work. My educational background is English literature. Medieval English literature, to be more precise, along with a fairly firm grounding in Southern Literature and a smattering of Jewish literature.

I can also carry on intelligent conversations about the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats), but that usually just degenerates into me insisting yet again that they all needed an editor.

Several editors, in fact.

Too, too many words. Meaning often gets lost in the verbal flatulence that the Romantics loved so well. I have no love for such florid writing.

Give me Emily Dickinson any day. Or Eudora Welty. John Donne. Thoreau. Anybody but those verbose, pompous Romantics.

Sometimes less is more. Actually, most of the time less is more.

But I digress. (At least I admit it.)

I work in finance and accounting for no reason I can see, except that it seems to fit me and the job was there.

I quite fell into the profession by accident and discovered I loved it.

I love the combination of ambiguity and preciseness that the job entails.

Contrary to what many people think, accounting demands many more judgment calls than those same people might be comfortable with. It’s more like an art than a science. And if they knew, they might be a little uncomfortable.

But it’s a mentally challenging job—sometimes more than I really want it to be. Especially on Mondays or the day after I've taken vacation time or the day after I just really had a bad day before.

I'm not complaining. I'm lucky to have a job that engages me on so many levels.

Of late, I’ve been stepping outside my credentials again, helping to put together a website with a bunch of people who don’t really understand how things like that work. Cleaning things up after the fact can be mess. But it can be done.

My world is small and big at the same time.

I’m not complaining. Life’s usually good if you let it be. Or at least tolerable.

So I’ll go on doing things that I have no credentials, but plenty of qualifications, to do. I’ll keep stepping out of the box and creating my professional life as I go along.

Learning on your own doesn’t come with credentials, other than personal integrity and a proven history.

And the day I stop learning new things will be the day I consider my life officially over.

It wouldn’t be much of a life, now would it?