AS ONE STILL NEW TO the Serious Blogging Experience, I don’t know whether or not it’s tacky for one to link to nice things said about one by others on their blogs. If it is, skip to the previous post. If not, then you may enjoy Gina Cuclis‘ account of the last Sonoma City Council meeting I attended. Gina’s known me since the halcyon days of 1995 at (at KSRO in Santa Rosa), and we were amazed to re-meet when she served on the Sonoma Planning Commission (which I used to write about for the Sonoma Index-Tribune). She cares a good deal about Sonoma, and acts on that care; I’m glad she’s still part of the scene.
Category: Life
Each moment is different. Here are some of mine.
It Started With Fingerprinting
Actually, it started two weeks ago, when I was interviewed by two Sonoma County Law Enforcement Chaplains who asked me why I wanted to become one of them.
"To tell you the truth," I said, "the whole idea terrifies me. But it's the sort of terror which compels further exploration."
They laughed. "You couldn't do this if you didn't feel that way," one replied.
Or maybe it started in 2000, when I interviewed a Sonoma Valley man who had just graduated from the 85-hour program in order to be able to sit with victims of crimes and accidents and help them cope when they'd otherwise be alone; or in 2001, when first responders in New York walked into two burning buildings, perhaps knowing they weren't coming out. I'd been writing about police and firefighters then for long enough to think I knew why they did that — and right then, I wanted to help those who help. But it wasn't until earlier this month that the opportunity arrived in the form of a newspaper blurb looking for chaplaincy candidates and urging the interested to fill out the form on http://www.sonomalawchaplains.org.
Anyway, whenever it started, this grey cool morning found me in Santa Rosa, at the county sheriff's headquarters, being fingerprinted with three other chaplain candidates.
The woman who runs the fingerprinting machine said she didn't like it at first. She was of the ink-and-roller school, and said she only adjusted to the new technology when they took her roller away. Now, she said, she couldn't imagine taking fingerprints any other way. The LiveScan fingerprinting machine is a digital camera, which takes a group shot apiece of the four fingers on each hand, and then one of each finger and thumb which the technician rolled gently across the cleanest glass plate I've ever seen.
"Just relax," she said.
There's a lesson in that, and one which I'll be thinking about next Tuesday evening the training begins in earnest with a weekly three-hour class until April. More about that subsequently, God willing.
Too Mellow to Die
It worries me somewhat that my friends and colleagues are more concerned than I am that I experienced my fourth cardioversion Sunday.
“Experienced” is the wrong word. I experienced, and have a clear memory of, the 150 beats-per-minute irregular jangle in my chest, alternately exhilirating and tiring; the two ER trips, one for pink pills and one for (and this is why I love the emergency-responder sense of humor) “Edison Medicine;” the quiet peopling of “my” ER bay with what now seems in retrospect an awful lot of medical personnel; the partial deforestation of my chest so the defibrillator contact won’t arc; the smell of IV-administered sedatives in my nasal capillaries; the slow drop into warm unconsciousness from a ring of too-casual faces. I’ve seen it before, twice in succession five years ago and once three years after.
But of the cardioversion itself, the targeted electrocution which Ann tells me is always difficult to watch, I have absolutely no memory. And therefore, the seriousness of the situation — the potential for blood to clot in and shoot out of my atria toward my personal brain — somehow has never sunk in. Except for those around me.
All I seem to carry away with me (apart from the deep stretchy scorch in my chest, and a somewhat longer life) is a sense of the Universe’s fragile tensity — mine, yours and everyone else’s, all sideways in space and forward and backwards in Time; a sense that paints with echoing joy and terror everything it touches. (Synesthetics intentional.)
So maybe I shouldn’t be bothered by not being more bothered. Kissing the face of your sweetie can be intoxicating enough — how much more so to kiss the face of Reality, or of God?
Poetry of News
There is a certain poetry to newswriting that’s not readily apparent to its readers — and perhaps not even to its practitioners.
This derives in large part, I think, from the absurdity inherent in exchanging six to eight hours a day for six to eight hundred words a story which will be forgotten by next week.
It’s the game of Reality Creation, newsriting is. My job is to tell you what happened in a place you didn’t see. Though I labor to get it right (literally, with sweat and grunting and everything), my account is necessarily incomplete and should be taken with a grain of salt. (As should everyone else’s, of course: including yours.)
First Week In
Three things:
– My beats: fire, cops, breaking news, and meetings as needed.
– I work with some freakishly smart, amazingly creative people; two of whom I have now dueled with a lightsaber.
– The Game hasn’t changed much — get it fast, get it right, and get it (or a different part of it) first. Many of the players have also changed, but the ones who haven’t seem as happy to seem me as I am to see them.
Last week also found me chasing a fire, investigating a vehicle crash (no injuries, thank Gd), touring a local farm, and chatting with a now-retiring fire chief friend. It’s great to “be” a small-town newspaperman.
Again.
And so, to work.
It was four-and-a-half months since I was laid off from the sasonal office-manager position at a local nursery, and longer still since I worked in my official profession, when I picked up the phone to call Sonoma Valley’s newest newspaper. The conversation went something like this:
“Hi, I’ve been out of work for five years but I think I can help. Do you need any reporters?”
“Sure!”
Well, not exactly like that. But pretty close. Anyway, I started yesterday at the Sonoma Valley Sun, and will be covering fires, cops/courts, and breaking news. (In addition to whatever else is needful, like features and (I hope!) columns.) Also, I’ve reclaimed the byline “Neal Ross” (which I adopted for radio back in 1995 since nobody can seem to spell or pronounce “Attinson,” and kept for newspapering since that’s how all my contacts knew me. They still do).
There’s a saying that the One rewards men only for the merit of their wives. I don’t generally hold with Deuteronomic reward/punishment theology, but seeing the relief on Ann‘s face makes me agree with at least a small part of it … Blessed is the One who makes our wives happy.
As for me, I feel as though I’m walking in a dream. But I’d better wake up before the deadline. 😉
Thump, Flutter, Gak
I looked up from the computer, wondering about the “thump.” Then I saw the robin on the patio — fluttering wings outspread, struggling to get up.
Outside, through the gate, into the side-yard. “Are you okay?” I asked reflexively.
She wasn’t, at least at first. Her beak and eyes were wide open, and she was panting — or do robins always breathe that way? She seemed dazed but unhurt (no broken legs or anything), so I sat down next to her and babbled softly: “You poor thing. We’ll get you fixed up, give you some nice worm broth and pyracantha cobbler,” etc.
Continue reading “Thump, Flutter, Gak”
Exploring Mind
WHAT DIFFERENTIATES THE EXPLORER FROM other humans is his answer to the following question:
“If you could experience something that no one else ever had, but the cost was your own life, would it be worth it?” Continue reading “Exploring Mind”
“I Seen It Too!”
WAITING FOR THE GRATEFUL DEAD with Sputnik at the Shoreline, c. 1989ish, one of us began the following conversation:
“For example, that guy over there with the ‘I Climbed Lassen’ T-shirt.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he obviously wants everyone to think that he climbed Lassen. But ‘those who know do not speak,’ so…”
“So you’re saying he didn’t really climb Lassen?”
“I’m saying that whether he did or he didn’t, he wants everyone to think he did.” Continue reading ““I Seen It Too!””
Pithyism #0
The future is an open hand; the past is a closed hand.
What’s in between?
In the spirit…
… of its content, this might have been posted 12/28/6, the day I wrote and sent it to my coworkers. But it wasn’t:
Friends,
If you can imagine a universe-sized sponge made of galaxies surrounding bubble-like voids, congratulations: you’re hip to the current scientific model of the Big Picture.
We humans don’t always do too well with the Big Picture, though. Our tiny brains like to slice reality into assimilable, us-sized bites. Instead of Limitless Space, we distinguish between Here and There; instead of Eternity, we think about Then and Now. Sometimes, we even think about Later.
Every time our planet completely circles its star, many of us commit to doing (often changing) something as we travel the orbit to come. (That orbit doesn’t actually start on January 1st — that’s a date as arbitrary as the alphabet I’m using to type this email — but as the man draining the swamp said, “You have to start somewhere.”) If it’s your custom to do that, may you have the strength to live up to your commitments. If it’s also your custom to become frustrated with yourself a week later, take heart — it’s a big universe, with enough room to start over and enough time for patience.
Happy New Year, whenever it finds you.
Home Away
For me, there are five distinct stages involved in the building of our backyard sukkah:
Denial: “Is it Sukkot again already?”
Rage: “Where did I put the $#@! zip-screws?”
Bargaining: “Please don’t make me go to the hardware store again…”
Sadness: “I don’t think this is going to last the week…”
Acceptance: “It’s beautiful!”
I am a humble Jew (as a blogged statement, this may be self-contradictory), so our backyard sukkah is likewise humble:
- One 4×6-foot Persian rug
- Eight cinder blocks
- Four 2×2-inch posts, six feet in length, with two small L-brackets on one side (six inches from on end and 18 inches from the other)
- Three 6-1/2′ 1×2″ slats
- Four 4-1/2′ 1×2″ slats
- One 7′ aluminum javelin
- One 12×24′ camo (“mossy bark”) tarpaulin
- Two dozen 6′ slats (1x.25″)
- One maroon king-sized bedsheet, pole-stitched on one long side
- Power drill, zipscrews, cable ties
First, I stretch out the rug (making sure it’s under only bare sky) and stack pairs of cinderblocks in each corner. Then I zipscrew two of the 6-1/2′ slats to two of the 2×2″ posts atop the L-brackets, inserting the latter into the cinder blocks (for the back wall frame); the remaining 6-1/2′ slat joins the other two posts, which go into the remaining cinderblock pairs (for the front wall/door frame). Two 4-1/2′ slats are then zipscrewed into place for each sidewall frames. I carefully slide the bedsheet onto the javelin, cable-tying the latter to the front-wall slat; the sheet’s bottom-right corner is then cable-tied to the frame.
Next, I unroll the tarp (which lives under our bed the rest of the year) and fold it sandwich-wise over the frames, securing the tarp’s grommets to each other along the bottom and sides) with cable-ties. Two dozen slats criss-cross the top, supporting whatever garden greenery I can scrounge (usually ivy, but this year some sort of weird ferny plant which sprouted over the summer). Two patio chairs go inside along with a TV-table (for meals and studying), et voila!
And this was how I spent yesterday afternoon. In many ways, Sukkot is my favorite holiday — I like its emphasis on life’s fragility; that it gets me outside to pray; the way the stars look through the sukkah roof; and the way the sukkah looks with my roommate inside it. There is nothing quite like building your own sukkah — just like there’s no one else like the one who builds it.