Happy New Year!

Well, it's 1/1/10 today. This has me wondering: how the heck did that happen? Back in Ms. Grouchy's fifth grade class at Eugene Field School (my home town's public schools were often named after poets) we had to write an essay on what we'd be doing in the year 2000. I realized I'd turn 41 that year and wondered if I'd ever be that old- that was 30 years in the future and seemed impossibly far off. I went down to the Chicago area to see my Mom for Christmas and on my way out of town to come back to Minnesota I stopped for gas at a place I worked in high school. It's now owned by Chuck, with whom I went to grade school. I've known him for 45 years and hadn't seen him in probably 20 years and surprised the heck out of him when I introduce myself (he'd never seen me with a beard, for one thing). We had about a half an hour's chat, which only lets you gloss over the highlights, and was struck by the obviously honest man he has become- a guy who inspires trust and with whom you'd be glad to do business. That got me thinking about the past turning into the present which will again become the past, turning into the present.

Now it's 2010 and I am discovering the some of the truth of Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game" (I'll let you find those lyrics yourself if you don't already know the song). I've been married 15 years, have known my most of friends for over 30 years and have some friends I have known for almost 40 years. The children of my friends and relatives are growing up, graduating college, getting married and my circle of friends has its first grandchild. I've been in my career for nearly 30 years and in my current job for almost 20. My beard is grey, my hair is thinning, little health problems are starting to pop up. In 15 years I'll be 65 and looking at retirement as a "soon" rather than "far off" thing (well, hopefully, anyway. Or maybe retirement will still be "far off" then).

New Year's Day is traditionally a time to think about the future rather than the past, even though the future is always built upon the foundations provided by the past. Turning over the calendar to a new year is an opportunity to decide to try something different in hopes of have better outcomes. This can be done any time, of course, but there's something symbolic about a fresh new year. My main functional resolution is to go to bed earlier and get up earlier so I can be more productive with less stress. The personal, life-enhancing resolutions are to be nicer to my wife and to balance work and life better than I have the past two years. I've made a lot more money but the cost has been a lot more stress, an ongoing sense of exhaustion and increased crabbiness. I want to ride my bike more and waste less time on the Internet (I waste a lot of time on the Internet). And finally to do more things with friends this year. We're not getting any younger.

It's the Snowstorm of the Century!

Hmmm. Does anyone else think it's premature to call this the "snowstorm of the century" given that (1) we had one just like it in 1991 and (2) there are 91 years left in the century? I've seen at least a half dozen storms very much like this one in the 50 years I've been alive, the first being 23" of snow that fell on the Chicago are when I was a little kid (1967, I think). And for someone who lives in the UP of Michigan or Buffalo NY, this is just a regular old snowfall.

Anyway, a happy holiday of your choice to anyone who happens to stumble across these foolish scrivenings!

Old Friends Reredux and The Joys of Oral Surgery

A while back I wrote about get-togethers with old friends (at 50-55, we are starting to be old friends). We did it again, Neil's pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner which has been going on every year since the late 1970s. He hasn't missed one. 28 of us sat down to a meal and- not overtly but still- to give thanks for the friendships that have illuminated and blessed our lives for over 30 years. I am certainly thankful that anyone has been willing to put up with me for that long!

Along with this was an interesting side note about how things change. One of my friends's daughters has enrolled in the same college where we went. Despite being a Catholic college, when I enrolled in 1977 until 1981 there was a lot of liberalism there among both the student body and the professors. Even the brothers and nuns were fairly liberal, by Catholic standards. We developed many close friendships that have endured for decades and have let us see each other's children grow up into adulthood and our parents become elders.

My friend's daughter is having a very different experience. Many of her classmates go home on the weekends (almost no one did this when I was in school). They maintain their friendships with high school friends very actively, talking on cell phones daily (there were no cell phones when I was in college and most people kept in touch by letter). They are not developing close friendships with other people in the dorm or in college. They hardly do things together. And the political climate is conservative to neoconservative.

How times change. While I won't say college was the best four years of my life- I have much preferred being an actual non-impoverished adult over being a broke student- college set the stage for the adulthood I have enjoyed. I hope that works out eventually for my friend's daughter.

And now to the joys of oral surgery. Warning: much too much information ahead. The story goes back to getting my adult front teeth. My right front upper incisor came in like a Winnebago motor home- extra wide in a tight situation. When I needed braces, the tooth was root canaled, pared down and crowned. All was fine until May 2003 when I was attacked while riding my bike on the Cedar Lake Trail in Minneapolis. One of the consequences was that this tooth was broken off. My dentist put a titanium post into the root and attached a crown. A couple of months ago I developed an abscess of that tooth and was informed it had to be removed. An implant was recommended and I had a course of antibiotics in the meantime. Today I had the extraction of the tooth and placement of the base of the implant done by Dr. Richard Ballin in Minneapolis.

The procedure itself was amazingly fast, mostly painless (other than the injections for the local anesthetic). My face was numb in about 2 minutes and the procedure started about 5 minutes after the injections. My blood pressure, hear rate and oxygen saturations were tested (136/83, 100 bpm, 96%- more anxious than I thought). The tooth was out in less than five minutes and then I waited with a gauze pack for the bleeding to stop. About that time I realized my heart was pounding irregularly and I felt kind of funky. My BP and pulse were rechecked and a 3 lead EKG was started finding a normal sinus rhythm with an occasional PVC. This was due to the epinephrine in the "Novocaine"- actually lidocaine, I think- which is used to minimize bleeding, but it was a bit freaky (and the sensation of heart palpitations lasted for about two hours before stopping, even though my heart rate was pretty regular). After we established that I was OK cardiac wise, we continued.

A wedge was placed between my teeth to position my jaw. Dr. Ballin inserted a guide into the socket (I think, since my vision was a bit restricted). He packed the socket with bone graft material (the root was very large, necessitating this) and used a series of drill bits to make a hole in the jaw. Then, with a cute little ratchet wrench, he screwed the implant into place. It actually made me laugh. Then a small cap screw was placed into the implant to protect the inner threads, a membrane was placed over the socket and the whole thing was stitched down. With aftercare instructions and a follow up next week, I was good to go. As I type this my face is still a little numb but the anesthetic is slowly wearing off (they said it could last up to 6 hours; looking up lidocaine with epinephrine it seems the average is about 3.5 hours). I have an ice bag to apply to reduce swelling, a bottle of ibuprofen and a prescription for Percocet if that doesn't do the job. So far so good.

The implant will now heal for four months, at which time the cap screw will be removed so that the permanent abutment can be installed and the crown attached. In the interim, I will be wearing a "flipper," basically a 1 tooth partial denture. Or I could leave it out and apply for a job as a carny. I'd need soem tats first.

A nation's debt to Joe Wilson

The flap over Joe Wilson- a white Southerner- calling President Barack Obama- an African-American Northerner- a liar on national television in one of the very centers of American democracy has threatened to derail the national conversation on health care reform once again. But the nation actually owes Joe Wilson a debt, because he has ripped open the scabs covering the wounds of racism that continue to make our country bleed.

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency allowed many Americans to pretend that the wounds of racism are healing or, indeed, even healed. But watching the news and even the daily interactions between people of different races show that those wounds remain very deep and are freshly cut every day.

I've never met Joe Wilson. Maybe he isn't a racist himself. Maybe he's just another disgruntled Republican bitter and angry that the promised permanent conservative majority promised by Karl Rove turned out to be a lie because Rove misoverestimated the American tolerance for incompetent and ineffective government. In any event, Wilson's words revealed the lie underpinning the Republican Party's pretense to moral superiority and exclusive claim to patriotism which they have been selling particularly since 1980. Ronald Reagan, if he could come back and have a look at these latter days of the GOP, would probably not even recognize this current collection of misanthropes as Republicans.

Wilson's few words and subsequent unwise intransigence showed the depth of the disrespect which has been accorded the first African-American President. Other Presidents have been met with grumbling when addressing Congress, but none have had "you lie!" shouted at them (even when it turned out thatthey had lied). Protesters bringing guns to places where the President was speaking "to exercise their Constitutional right to bear arms" is nothing more than an effort at intimidation in order to keep the uppity in their places. It worked in Mississippi and Alabama and throughout the South for a long, long weary time. Why not again? Protesters shouting for Obama's death are little different than the exultant accessories to murder clustered about the bodies of tortured and hanged black men slung from trees, grinning at the cameras recording their sins.

It is possible and even necessary for the Republicans to bring to the discussion strong criticism of Obama's and the Democrats' health care reform ideas. This is how laws are improved and strengthened in the crucible of debate. Racism- however veneered- disrespect and bitterness undermine the ideals of our republic like the worm in the bud. They are a cancer in the guts of the nation and, if not exposed and rooted out, these things will destroy us.

"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings," sang Bob Dylan. Joe Wilson has exposed the bitterness, disrespect, false patriotism that dogs the Republican Party and the broader racism that still plagues our nation. These are more insidious threats to freedom than was ever seen from the handful of Communists of the Red Scare of the 50s. For bringing this into sharp focus, we owe Joe wilson a debt of gratitude.

Happy Birthday Dad!

I realized this morning that today would have been my Dad's 80th birthday. He passed away in August 1996 a month after bypass surgery. He had polio at age 6 (in 1935) and after recovering from the polio was found to have developed diabetes. He took insulin twice a day for the rest of his life- it had only been discovered in 1921 and became available as a treatment in 1923 and protamide zince insulin in 1936 (I remember him taking that form of insulin as one of the two he used; the other was Lente. Later he switched to Humalog). I remember him carrying a little case with his insulin bottles and his syringes on every vacation or overnight trip. I remember my Mom's amazing skill at estimating his blood sugar levels with a single glance.

I also remember going to auto races with him- especially USAC midgets and sprints and occasionally stock car races. We went to a lot of races when I was a kid; in those days the USAC midgets came to the local race track (Santa Fe Speedway) three times a summer. By the time I was in high school it was once a year. There's no better racing than midgets on a 1/4 mile dirt track. My Dad used to race stock cars but that was before I was born, so I never saw him race. I've seen photos of the cars and of him racing (including one of him crawling out of his upside-down car). In the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s he acquired a 1930s Crosley powered TQ midget that he restored and took to vintage car races around the Midwest, along with his collection of thousands of racing photos. We used to sometimes go and look up old-time racers to get his photos autographed. I remember spending an afternoon with Fritz Tegmeier when I was about ten, and several visits to see Slim Williams and his wife Gladys (Slim was the subject of the book Alaska Sourdough by Richard Morenus- Alaska was another fascination of my Dad's).

When he died, many of the people he knew from racing came to pay their respects and told me many wonderful stories about my Dad that he had never thought important enough to mention. But that was my Dad- so interested in other people that he hardly ever talked about himself.

So I wish I could call my Dad today and say "happy birthday!" But I can't and it hurts even 13 years later. If your Dads are still around, give 'em a call. I'm going to call my Mom today... and her 80th birthday is just three weeks away.

Old Friends Redux

I went to my friend Pat's 50th birthday party. When I was in high school there were- like high schools everywhere- a lot of cliques. It's the nature of youth and many humans in general. I went to a small high school (graduating class = 147) so people often had to be in several cliques in order for all the cliques to be represented. My clique was the anti-clique clique. Me, Pat, Dan, Mariann, Jim, Don and Rick hung out together most of the time plus a few more folks here and there. Since graduating from high school, I mainly just kept in touch with Pat. Life goes on and that's the way it goes- people's lives progress and you lose touch. And mortality strikes- Don died from leukemia a few years after graduating from high school, plus several classmates have passed away too. It seems much too early for people who are only hitting the Big 5-0 this year. So, while extolling the virtues of Old Friends in an earlier post, I must acknowledge that the truth is that Old Friends include people who don't get to be old.

So at Pat's party, Jim and Mariann and I showed up from the old gang. It was interesting to find that in many ways these folks are the same as they were and at the same time utterly different. In high school, we had lots in common. As adults in the middle of middle age, life has gone on, things like marriages and divorces and children and careers and professional development have come in. Our lives are much more separate than they were, and yet the relationships in many ways feel the same. Something else- their intelligence and wisdom was much more obvious. Intelligence and wisdom is still under development when you are 17 years old. That's still true at 50, but it's also true that wisdom and intelligence are more developed. My friends are experts at what they do now. They are respected in their fields, they know what they are doing... they are "solid" in a way that just can't be in high school. A funny thing was that we talked very little about high school. We talked about the years since, the things that have happened and have shaped us to be who we are.

There also another difference: perspective. In one's teenage years, every problem and trauma seems big. In middle age, we can put those problems in context. We've gotten through other problems and we'll get through these too. We've had other successes and we know that these are temporary- and that tomorrow someone will ask "what have you done for us lately?"

I was delighted to see my friends at Pat's party. It was just cool to see them, to see who they had become. And, even better, we're only about halfway through (give or take a decade). Who knows how things will go from here.

Old Friends

I'm old enough now that I have old friends- that is, friends who are old. My best friend from high school, Pat, is having a surprise 50th birthday party. It's not a total surprise, since he knows about it in the abstract but doesn't know the date. I won't mention that here for obvious reasons, even though he- like 99.998623719% of the planet- does not know about my blog.

I've known Pat since 1973, freshman year in high school, when we bonded over being Packer fans in the suburbs of Chicago. Jeez, that's almost 36 years ago. There is something about old friends, people who knew what an idiot you were and thus are able to put in context the idiot that you are now. People with whom you can talk about stuff in a sort of shorthand or code, who can pick up your meaning in just a few words. Sometimes the conversation sounds like:

"Well, I..."

"Yup. Me too."

"So then we..."

"Sure, let's."

It's the sense of connection. Even if you see somebody once a year, the connection is still there and the conversation just starts up where it left off. Old friends.