Memoirs

Big Yellow Nuke Plant

/ djgourdoux / 5 Comments

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone
                                      Joni Mitchell
 

In July of1984, I started working as a Systems Analyst at the Zion Nuclear Power Station.   After being there for about a year, one of my responsibilities was system administrator for the Process Computers.  The Process Computers were these old, 1960s technology computers from Westinghouse that took inputs from throughout the plant and converted them to values for monitoring the plant’s performance.   An entire room was dedicated for each of these computers (there was one for each reactor, two in total), with the majority of the room being used for termination points for the cables that ran from sensors throughout the plant.  The actual computer consisted of four small CPUs (the primary CPU, a backup CPU, a Process I/O CPU, and a Data CPU if memory serves me correctly) that each had three panels which displayed the flashing hexadecimal code for which instruction it was executing and what memory address it was accessing at the time.    There were three black and white workstations hooked up to it, one in the computer room, one in the control room, and one in the Technical Support Center, which was where management would huddle if there was ever a significant event or nuclear accident.    There were also printers in the control room that printed key events in the sequence they occurred and time and date stamped alarms when pre-defined limits were reached on the data points.

The data points that fed the process computer were split between digital (on or off) values (for example, breaker switches on a pump) , and analog values (which typically sent a signal of one to five volts), which would use a pre-defined and calibrated polynomial equation to convert the voltages to a value that could be monitored.  The Westinghouse process computers were so old that they didn’t have any mass storage capabilities; for that, corporate Comed IT engineers had designed an interface with the Prime mini-computers that, every minute, sent snapshots of all the Process Computer data points.  I wrote FORTRAN 77 programs against the Prime Computer databases that retrieved this data, and eventually assumed system administration responsibilities for the Prime Computers as well.

The plant was designed in such a fashion that it could operate safely and fully without either the Process or the Prime computers.  However, the nature of technology is once it is available, new uses are found for it, and it becomes relied upon in ways that the designers didn’t foresee.  So it was with the Process and Prime computers.  The operations and engineering staffs became more and more reliant on the data that the systems served up.  This meant that the system administrator had to be available on call should the systems ever fail.

Note that the Process Computers, being 1960s technology, were already, in the mid 80s, approximately 20 years old.   This meant that they failed quite frequently.   I quickly learned that about 90% of the failures occurred with one of the several same hexadecimal values displayed on the CPUs; I learned what the related cause was and more often than not was able to get the system back up and running pretty quickly.  Sometimes I had to call one of the hardware guys, either Dan Z. or Pat M – they had been there a long time and more often than not were able to quickly resolve the problem.  When things got sticky, they had diagnostic programs (on Hollerith punch cards!) that they’d run to help pin point the problem.  I learned a lot from Dan and Pat, and also from my I.T. cohorts, Denis and Terry.

 Note also that Nuclear Power Plants are 24 X 7 operations.   This meant that these failures occurred, more often than not, in the night, usually not long after I had fallen into a deep sleep, and my name was at the top of the call-in list.   Here’s a little secret:  no matter how much I complained about getting roused from a sound sleep, I actually loved it.  It was my favorite part of the job. 

The reason I liked being called in says something to the nature of my ego.  I enjoyed being the guy everybody was counting on, I enjoyed the challenge.  I also enjoyed driving the seven miles in through the sleepy town and the empty streets, and the sight and the feeling of the plant at night.   I’d get in the almost empty parking lot and the containment buildings would be all lit up with yellow lights.  I’d go thru security and enter the service building and take the elevator to the third floor, and walk across the turbine deck to our office in the Prime computer room.  The turbines would be loudly humming as they turned, and I’d enter the computer room where our desks were, and it’d be empty and quiet.  Then I’d exit into the Unit One Process Computer room, and from there go into the control room, and talk to the operator who called me in.   Then I’d get to work on the problem, which 9 times out of 10 was a very easy and quick fix, and I’d talk a bit to the operator, telling him it is fixed and engaging in a moment or two of idle chit chat.  I loved the sights and sounds of the plant at night, I loved the warmth of the lights and the humming of the turbine, and I loved the fact that it was just a skeleton crew on duty.  Most of all, I loved being needed, being the guy that was counted on, and more than anything, solving the problem.

I was 25 years old when I started working at Zion.  About five months later, my wife and I bought the house we still live in to this day.   A little more than a year later, in September of 1985, our first child, Jon, was born.  In May of 1989, our second son, Nick was born, and in 1994, our daughter Hannah arrived.

I left Zion in January of 1996, after working there for 11 ½ years, to pursue other opportunities. About a year and a half later, they announced plans to shut the plant down, and now, 16 years later, I think the handful of employees left are involved in moving what remains of the spent fuel off of the plant.

There were plenty of times that I hated my job at Zion.  There were plenty of times when we wondered just what the Hell management was thinking, and there were plenty of times where it was a grind, and time seemed to crawl.  But there were also just as many times where we laughed and fought and triumphed and failed, and looking back on it now, those 11 ½ years, when I was young and starting a family, flew by, and I didn’t realize, I didn’t appreciate, just how good the good times were, and how good it felt to be young and healthy.  I think the Joni Mitchell song “Big Yellow Taxi” pretty much sums up how we all experience our youth  – we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.

These days I sleep pretty good – five or six hours uninterrupted on good nights.  It’s been years since my phone has rung in the middle of the night.  But if it were to wake me tonight, it’d be a thrill to go in and walk across the turbine deck and hear the hum of the generator and the rumble of the turbines one last time.

The Magic Football Helmet

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

(To mark the occasion of the Super Bowl and to celebrate Aarron Rodgers being named NFL MVP,  I’m posting a piece I wrote couple of years ago during one of my sleep deprived nights)

In September, 2008, my fellow Wisconsinites and I were nervously facing the end of an era and the beginning of a great unknown:  after 16 seasons, Brett Favre would not be quarterbacking our beloved Green Bay Packers. The amount of angst and consternation caused by this simple fact cannot be overestimated – for example, my son Nick, the college journalist who was three years old the last time someone else took the field as starting quarterback for the Packers, wrote a column about how a close friend of his, upon hearing the news of Favre’s “final” “retirement” earlier that spring, had actually collapsed involuntarily to the ground.  This is utterly believable.  The connection between our state and the Packers is so strong it has an aura of religiosity around it.   People from other states, especially from more urban areas, see the cheese headed fanatics and their tail gates and beer and just don’t understand.  To Wisconsinites, the Packers are Wisconsin, or rather, what they wish Wisconsin is, or was – small town, simple, unsophisticated working class, genuine and true, somehow surviving and even prospering in the harsh reality of the modern urban world.   The Packers of Green Bay are the only small town franchise in all of major sports to still exist, and this exception in the day of modern superstar athletes and unimaginable salaries and media outlets is truly remarkable. 

Forty years earlier, in September of 1968, Packer fans were facing uncertainty with the departure of another icon.  Their great coach, Vince Lombardi, who had just  lead the team to their third consecutive league championship and fifth in seven years, as well as victory in the first two Super Bowls, had retired from coaching.  Although there was great concern in Packer country, no one at the time could know that this event would mark the beginning of a 29 year championship drought, filled with mediocrity and incompetence that would challenge the loyalties of even the most devoted Packer fans. 

In September of 1968, I was two months shy of my 10th birthday, but as young as I was, nobody who knew me would deny that I was already among the most devoted of the most devoted Packer fans.  I had caught the fever a year earlier, in that magical 1967 season that would be Lombardi’s last as coach in Green Bay and would culminate in my hero, Bart Starr, crossing the goal line with 13 seconds left in the greatest game ever played, the Ice Bowl, giving the Packers their still unmatched 3rd consecutive NFL championship. 

I’ve had a tendency over the years, once developing an interest in something, to throw myself completely and obsessively into it until I have established an indisputable level of expertise in it.  Prior to the Packers and football, when I was about seven, my first obsession was animals.  I loved going to the zoo and at some point determined I would know as much about as many animals as humanly possible.  I remember getting a book entitled “The Mammals”, put together by Desmond Morris (more famously the author of the book The Naked Ape).  It was a very thick book, and quite scholastic – it was in fact merely a catalog listing of every mammal known to man, with a black and white picture of the animal (usually some drab photo taken in a zoo somewhere) and a couple paragraphs describing where it was found, diet, habitat, etc.  I committed to memory virtually every animal in the book, from all the different apes and monkeys to the various Yaks of Asia. I could tell you the difference between even and odd toed ungulates, and that rabbits and hares were not rodents but rather lagomorphs.  Precocious? You bet I was.   What can be more obnoxious than a seven year old who is an expert at anything?  I remember one time we were at the Milwaukee Zoo, and as we approached a savannah display, a nearby Mother sweetly said to her toddler, “Oh, look at the deer!”   Mr.  Expert here laughed derisively out loud. 

“What’s so funny?” my Mom asked me. 

“That’s not a deer”, I said, barely able to contain myself, “that’s a kudu.”

“Oh, a kudu”, my Mom replied, as we turned the corner to the sign that said “Greater Upland Kudu.”  My Mom had never heard of a kudu before.

So it was in the same manner in 1967 that I threw myself into football, learning and watching and reading everything I could about the subject matter (baseball would follow the next summer).  I was a little kid, younger than all but one in my grade in school and thus smaller than most, so I wasn’t much at playing football.  But as a fan, I went from at the beginning of the season not even knowing what was going on on a punt (I thought they were trying to kick the ball thru the goalpost) to by the end of the season knowing the different pass defense schemes run by most of the NFL teams (Don Shula’s Baltimore Colts, for example, played primarily a zone defense, where the St.Louis Cardinals blitzed more than almost any other team, especially safety blitzes from their  great safety, Larry Wilson, while the Packers, with what I still think is the greatest secondary in the history of the game, played mostly simple man to man and rarely blitzed).  I watched every Packer game and any other NFL game that was televised (I despised the American Football League as a weak imposter and refused to watch its games).  My brother Mike had an APBA professional football game that he never let me play, but it did inspire me to ask for and receive on my ninth birthday the great board game, “Fran Tarkenton’s Pro Football”, which I played and played for hours at a time.  And best of all, for Christmas that year, I got a Green Bay Packers helmet.

If you’ve never believed in the mystical powers of magic, you never put that helmet on.  That helmet was imbued with Arabian genie-like powers.  You’ve heard the myth that when you put a sea shell to your ear, you can hear the roar of the ocean?  The first time and every time afterwards I put that loose fitting helmet on my small head, inside I would hear the roar of 50,000 fans  in Lambeau field.  I would wear that helmet all the time, and for a while, even take it to bed with me, to put back on first thing in the morning (although I never was able to figure out how to eat breakfast thru the face guard).

My roommate was my brother Don, almost five years older than me.  Don recognized early on the power of my imagination, and, as he is one of the most gifted story tellers I have ever known, was able to turn that imagination against me and plant mind numbingly horrifying visions in my head, visions of the dead woman in our closet, Madeline from “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Don had read Poe’s story and retold it to me, adding additional plot twists  and turns and a level of detail that would have made even good old Edgar Allan himself sleep with the lights on), sasquatches, dead Indians, escaped black panthers and rabid German shepherds on the prowl.  But when he wasn’t scaring the snot out of me, he was a pretty good older brother, and would let me follow him around everywhere, which I did just about every day.   He always included me when his friends were over, although being a little guy, there were usually special rules for me.  For example, our big thing would be playing war (Combat was our favorite television show at the time) with our toy rifles and grenades, and if you got the drop on someone and shot them (by making a shooting sound, like rat-a-tat-tat!), they’d have to feign getting hit and die a dramatic death right there in the yard, and stay down until one side or the other was completely vanquished –unless, of course, they were shot by me.  I was too little, and thus “didn’t count.”  I don’t know how many times when we were lining up to play I’d hear those dreaded words, “Dave’s on our team – but he doesn’t count.”  There was always a depressingly existential ring to those words that I’m only now beginning to understand.

My following Don around more often than not lead to great adventure and fun, but there were times I paid a cost.  One time a large group of us was playing army in Krause’s woods.  There was a part of the woods that was populated by a thick stand of young maple trees that provided a low ceiling of green leaves, allowing only splotches of sunlight to hit the mossy ground underneath.  I crept thru the brush and came upon Don in the middle of this patch.  Suddenly he let out a scream, his body writhing, his toy rifle extended in his arms up above his head.  “Good lord!” I thought, “My brother’s been hit!”   I did what any heroic little brother would do – I ran in, my toy rifle blazing, while at the same time Don ran out of the woods.  What I didn’t know but soon discovered was that it wasn’t an imaginary enemy machine gun nest Don had chanced upon – rather it was an all-too real hornet’s nest he had stepped in.  Don quickly ran out and away from the nest, leaving its entire aroused and angry population swarming in clouds that the heroic younger brother ran into just as their angry frenzy reached its fevered peak.  I think Don ended up with about nine stings; I on the other hand had in excess of thirty, my Mother putting lotion and gauze on each one.

In September of 1968, Don was just beginning high school, and I was entering fifth grade.  Don was now a big kid, and there would be no more war games, and soon he’d be meeting new friends, going to high school football games, spending more time away from the house.  But when he was home, he still let me follow him around, and he still made time for me – still scaring the crap out of me with his horror stories (which I of course secretly loved), but also taking the time to engage in my interests and obsessions. 

As the 1968 football season approached, I had brought the annual version of Street and Smith’s Pro Football yearbook, reading all of the predictions and memorizing all the starting lineups and statistics.  Then there was one magical page that had the entire 1968 NFL schedule printed on it.  I would read it and re-read it, charting out who I thought would win each game and keeping track of what the standings would be, often times while wearing my treasured Packers helmet.  And I remember one bright Saturday morning in early September Don and I heading out to our backyard, me with my helmet on my head and my Street and Smith’s 1968 yearbook in my hand, with the purpose of playing the entire 1968 NFL schedule.  How exactly do two kids play an entire NFL schedule?   Well, I’d call a play, Don would pitch me the ball, and I’d run with it, and he’d tackle me and announce how many yards I gained, and what the down and yardage was.  He’d adjust the quality of the tackling based upon which runner I was portraying – for example, if I was the big fullback Bill Brown of the Minnesota Vikings running up the middle, he’d let me run over him for a few extra yards, and if I was Gayle Sayers of the Bears, he might let me get around him on the outside for a big gainer.  On pass plays, Don was the quarterback, and I was the receiver.  We’d work patterns and developed pretty good timing – Don had a strong and accurate arm, and we spent enough hours together in the back yard that I perfected sharp cuts and fakes on my patterns, and as soon as I made my cut and looked back, a perfect spiral would be in the air for me to haul in.  I dare say I also developed pretty good hands, too.

We simulated entire games (though we never got through the entire schedule, of course), and they were as real as anything on CBS or NBC on Sundays.  I’d tell him the strengths and weaknesses of each player, and Don would make dramatic tackles and relay descriptive accounts of what happened on each play.  There under the warm blue September sky, falling to the soft grass with a football in my hands in the tackling arms of my brother and with the roar of the stadium echoing inside that Packer helmet, nothing else existed, nothing else mattered, but the sheer bliss and joy of a living, waking dream, a dream that was realized thanks to the heart and mind of who at times like this was the greatest older brother any goofy, undersized, helmet wearing little brother could ever possibly hope for.

That was more than 40 years ago.  In the past ten years or so, for reasons too complex I think for either of us to fully understand, our relationship has disintegrated.  But however great the space is between us now, and however unlikely it seems that it will ever be bridged, nothing can or ever will happen to change the fact that once upon a time, when I was small, my brother’s generosity and imagination provided fuel to my dreams, fuel I continue to draw upon to this day.  For that, I owe him my sincere thanks and best wishes.

Time and distance are incredibly corrosive forces, dimming and distorting the half light we view memories in.   Each of us twists and manipulates events until they are consistent with and support our current view of the world.  We all do it – it is part of how we make sense of things, how we rationalize the universe to fit who we have become, or more accurately, who we want to believe we have become.   But in the process we lose track of who we were, and we can never really understand who we have become without the knowledge of who we used to be. Whatever I am or to be, I know that when I was small, I was the little kid with the football helmet who followed his brother around all the time.

 

Snow Day

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It had started snowing late the night before, and it continued through the Saturday morning, ending just about noon.   All told we got about three inches of the stuff.   I was 23 years old, and we were living in the upstairs apartment on 18th Avenue at the time, and we had nothing to do and nowhere to go for the rest of the weekend.

Shortly after noon, after it stopped snowing, I put on the old army fatigue jacket that Jack Anderson had given me about three years earlier, a stocking cap, a pair of gloves and my rubber boots.  On the back landing, just outside of the entrance to our apartment, I grabbed the little metal snow shovel and began clearing off the steps of the stairway.   It was cold but not too cold, probably in the low twenties.  It felt warmer when the clouds moved out and were replaced by the bright January sun.  The snow was light and powdery, and I felt good as I moved to the bottom of the steps.

Next, I cleared the little gravel driveway we shared with the woman who rented the downstairs apartment.  Once I had finished that, I started on the sidewalk in front of the house.  Compared to the rutted gravel of the driveway, the sidewalk was a breeze, and I was able to quickly get to the end of the property line.  The house the apartment was in bordered a vacant lot that was the corner of 18th Avenue and 45th street.   I had been outside only a few minutes and had cleared the back steps, the driveway and the sidewalk in front of our house.  I felt good and had nothing else to do, so I figured, what the Hell, I may as well keep going.

I cleared the sidewalk to 45th street, then, heading east, I cleared the 45th  street side of the corner lot.  When that was done, I found myself in front of another old, two story house, with sidewalks and a driveway hadn’t been cleared yet.  I felt good, and I didn’t want to stop, so I kept going, and started on the sidewalk in front of the house.  About halfway thru, the front door opened.  An old, frail man I had never seen before  stood in the doorway.

“Thank you”, he said.

“Don’t mention it”, I replied.

“Would you mind doing my driveway, too?”

“Sure, no problem”, I said, quickly surveying the short, cement two care driveway.  With the snow this powdery and light, I figured I could knock it off in a few minutes.

“Thank you so much”, he said, and went back inside.

I quickly finished the sidewalk in front of his house, and it didn’t take me long to do his driveway.  Every now and then I’d glance to the window, and each time he was standing there, stooped over, watching me

I finished the driveway and turned my attention to the short cement walkway that ran from the sidewalk to his front porch.  I made quick work of it and just as I was finishing up, the front door opened again. My guess was that he was going to offer me a few bucks for my work.

“Thank you again,” he said.  “When you finish up, why don’t you come inside for a few minutes”

I nodded my head and he closed the door.  It was only a couple of more minutes when I finished.  Standing on the steps to the front door, I was just about to knock when it opened.

“Come on in, come on in.”  I stepped in, and he took my coat and I took off my boots.  He motioned for me to sit in a chair in his living room. Then he went to the kitchen.  He came back with two glasses filled with a golden brown liquid. 

“Cold out there, huh?”, he said, handing me a glass.

“Not too bad”, I said.

“Well, drink some of this, this’ll warm you up.”  He sat in a chair across from me.  It was warm and very good.  I was able to recognize it as brandy. 

We sat there in the warmth of his living room, surrounded by framed photos of what I assumed to be children and grand children and great grand children.  The room looked like it belonged to a bygone era.  We talked about the cold, we talked about his health – there was something wrong with his lungs that made breathing cold air difficult – but mostly he talked about brandy and how whatever kind it was that we were drinking was top of the line stuff.  When the first glass was finished, he bought me a second glass, this one of a different, more famous make of brandy, and he explained to me why the second one was inferior to the first.  I didn’t know anything about any of that; I just knew they were both warm and good. 

We sat and drank brandy and talked for about a half an hour.  After I had finished the second glass, he offered me a third, which I politely declined, saying if I drank any more I might not be able to find my way around the corner to home.  I got up and put my boots and coat on, and as he thanked me again, I took one last look at his living room.  It was so warm and comfortable.  There has always been something sacred, something even holy, about people’s living rooms, especially the ones belonging to strangers who invite you in.

It was about 3:00 when I left and started back for home, feeling a little bit of a buzz from the brandy and a contented ache in my bones from the work and the cold air.  The sun was still out but lowering in the west.  I grabbed my shovel and walked back home.  I was 23 years old, and the future lay out before me like an undisturbed coat of fresh snow on an endless city sidewalk, waiting to be uncovered.

Happy Deep Brain Day

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Getting nothing but static/Getting nothing but static/Static in my attic                                                                       – The B-52s                                          

This past Saturday marked the two year anniversary of the most surreal event I have ever experienced – the implementation of electrodes in my brain in part one of the procedure known as Deep Brain Stimulation, to treat many of the symptoms of my instance of Parkinson’s Disease.

Two years later, I have a better understanding of what DBS has and hasn’t done for me.  First and foremost, it has been a wonderful blessing, smoothing out many of the peaks and valleys that were, prior to the surgery, becoming more and more debilitating.   I sleep better and longer at night.

There have been some side effects from the procedure, and some symptoms of the disease that it is apparently unable to address.  The side effects include impacts to my speech and my handwriting.  Frequent and severe and sudden episodes of daytime fatigue still hit me, and I have to be careful if I am driving. Stress exacerbates other symptoms, including tremors that make working a computer keyboard or mouse temporarily impossible.  Because of these symptoms, primarily the fatigue (and repeated episodes of falling asleep in my office and behind the wheel on the drive home), I no longer work.

But make no mistake about it – the DBS has been a success, and I would recommend it to anyone in a similar state.  If it wasn’t for the improvements DBS gave me, I would have stopped working well over a year before I did, and I’d be unable to do the things that give me great joy now, especially writing.

So to mark the occasion, I went back and looked through journal entries and notes I have written over the past two years about my DBS experience.   Here are some excerpts:

Thursday, January 14, 2010:  I wake up and I am half sitting up in my hospital bed in a large room.  The heavy metallic frame that was screwed into my head earlier in the morning has been attached and locked into some larger metal base that I can’t see.    I can hear the usual blips and beeps of hospital equipment, plus a low hum of static.  It’s chilly in here, and there are people in scrubs milling about.  One of them notices I am awake, and the next thing I know my neurosurgeon, Dr. R., is in front of me, and he tells me the static I hear is in fact my brain talking, the impulses it creates converted to audio, and that they’ll be listening to it and talking to me as they prepare to install the first set of electrodes..  The fact that my brain waves sound like static is somehow not surprising to me.

 …   I wonder, as they are poking around in my brain, if they see anything that surprises them.  I have had dreams where they open my brain to find, undetected by the MRI and CAT scans, discolored sections that are rotting and stinking with gangrene, or that large populations of maggots or insect larvae are happily thriving up there, having eaten away a good chunk of my grey matter.   The thought of scientists poking around in my brain and finding the secrets locked inside is intimidating enough – what if, behind that curtain, they have a television screen that is hooked up to my sub conscious to display what is stored there?  What if they could see all the women I had secretly lusted for over the years, or those dark secrets I had hidden from the world, like the time when I was a kid and ate the last of the package of Oreo cookies, only to blame it on my little sister?   What if they poked around up there and realized that this brain, substandard and inadequate, isn’t worth the effort?

 …  Every Parkinson’s patient is familiar with the concept of “on” and “off” periods.   “On” periods are the times when the medications are working and symptoms are minimized, “off” periods are the times when the medications have either worn off or haven’t kicked in yet, periods of time when the symptoms are most exacerbated.  The primary medication for PD patients is some form of Sinemet, or a combination of carbidopa and levodopa.  For me, at the time of the DBS surgery, I was taking a 200 milligram dosage of Stalevo (a dosage of 50 milligrams of carbidopa  and 200 milligrams of levodopa  and 200 milligrams of entacapone) every three hours, with the “off period” beginning about 45 minutes before I’d  take it and lasting until about 45 minutes after, meaning that for every three hours, close to an hour and a half, or 50% of the day, was spent in varying degrees of being “off”.  These periods would usually announce their beginning with a very slight tingling in my toes, followed by the rigidity that would slowly spread until it inhabited every inch of my body.  By the time of the surgery, at the peak of these off periods, on the worst days, the resulting discomfort would become unbearable.   Even at its peak, my rigidity isn’t the sharp and agonizing pain that people with Rheumatoid Arthritis, for example, feel; rather it’s an all encompassing discomfort from which there is no escape.  It feels like what I imagine rigor mortis would feel like, like you are turning to stone, like you are being converted to a living statue of yourself.  The natural reaction to this discomfort is to seek a position that will ease it, by either sitting or lying down or shifting your weight one way or another but you soon realize these attempts are futile, and all you can do is take your pills and wait for them to kick in.  For me, it got to a point at work where, at the time of the surgery, I’d wander from my downstairs office upstairs to the nurse’s station and lay down on her bed in the back, not because it made me more comfortable but because I was out of view of the public there and could shuffle and squirm in privacy until the pills started to kick in.  At the time of the surgery, I was hitting the nurse’s station two or three times a week.

…   During these rigid off periods, when walking, my gait would become a slow and unbalanced shuffle.   During my on periods, I walked pretty normally.  I wondered with some amusement what those workers in other departments, who didn’t know me or my condition, would wonder when I would shuffle past and then, an hour or two later, walk by normally.  “He must be hitting the bottle again”, I imagined them saying to each other. 

 …   November was spent making sure everything healed from the salivary gland surgery, and in December I started testing so the DBS could proceed in January.   I had consults with my neurosurgeon, the extremely likable Dr. R.  He has a great sense of humor and comes across as a regular guy, someone I’d enjoy having a beer with at some neighborhood tavern.  Of course, the guys I usually have a beer with are the last guys I would want operating on my brain.  He is a transplanted New Yorker and an avid sports fan.   The morning of my surgery, he came in my room and visited me, and Sports Center was on the television.  With the impending procedure just a couple of hours away, we briefly talked football and baseball, about the (football) Giants and the Yankees, just like we did the night before when he stopped in my room and checked on me.  I remember thinking, this guy is just like me; we have a lot in common, and on some level found this to be disturbing.  My preconception of a brain surgeon was some genius scientist whose own brain was filled with too much brilliance and eccentricity to have time for such trivial pursuits as sports.  I know the limited capacity of my brain is overflowing with stats and figures and opinions related to batting averages, earned run averages and completion percentages to the degree that I can’t remember to take the garbage out, let alone differentiate between the basal ganglia and the substantia nigra.  The night before the surgery, as he left my room, I suggested that he spend the night in a Holiday Inn Express.  He laughed, which I found disappointing, meaning he was familiar with the television commercials I was referencing.  Truth be told, he’s a good guy, and I felt comfortable and at ease with the idea of him poking around my brain.

 … The night before, after Dr R left, I took the last of my allowed dosage of meds at 9:00 and quickly fell asleep.  As usual, my meds wore off after about three hours and I woke up around midnight.  This was the time I’d normally take my nighttime Sinemet tablets, dissolvable and quick acting, and eventually fall back asleep.  However, for the surgery, it was required for my system to be clean of meds, so there would be no nighttime tablets.  I was unable to fall back to sleep and spent a very rough night awake and uncomfortable with nothing to do but watch television and twist and turn in my hospital bed for six and a half hours, and wonder and worry about the next day’s proceedings.   Prior to the salivary gland operation, the only operation I had ever had was minor surgery for a torn meniscus on my right knee.  I remembered that before they put me out, someone took a black sharpie and marked a big “X” on my right knee, so they didn’t operate on the wrong one.  I wondered if, in preparation for to the DBS surgery, they would put a big “X” on the top of my skull, as over the years the precise location of my brain has been an object of frequent speculation, with some convinced it was located somewhere on my backside, and others certain that I did most of my thinking with another, more private part of my anatomy.

 The big day began promptly and on schedule at 6:30 A.M. this morning.  The first step was to have Dr R.’s team of residents admit me and shave the parts of my head that were not already bald in preparation for the surgery (suffice to say at this point in time they were ahead of schedule).   Next was the installation of the metal frame, which I had understood to be like mounting a large vice grip to my head.   They brought the device out and it looked exactly like I expected it to look, and they plopped it on my head, with one of the residents leveling it, and another marking spots in my forehead and in the back of my head to clamp it on.  It is at this point we must pause to reflect on how far modern medicine has advanced, and the many miracles that have been achieved by technological and scientific advances, making most procedures as painless and sensitive to the patient’s experience as possible.   This procedure unfortunately is not to be included in that category, as the device and the technique to install the frame apparently remains unchanged from when first introduced by the either the Marquis de Sade or the grand inquisitor.  It begins with them prepping the areas with a shot of Novocain – and, just like when you go to the dentist, you are left wondering if the shots of Novocain are actually more painful than the resulting procedure would be, as it involved a resident sticking a needle into four points in my skull and shooting the Novocain in.  Then they put the frame back on (which was heavier than I had anticipated) and it was time to clamp the device to the head.  Just like a vice grip, as one resident held the frame in place, another began screwing the clamps in until they were to meet the points where the Novocain had been injected.  It didn’t take me long to realize that these weren’t the type of clamps I used in my workshop when doing wood working projects, what the resident was screwing in were actually spikes that would penetrate skin and skull – I know this because not only could I feel them penetrating my cranium, I could also hear the sound of skin tearing and skull breaking – and as the first one was installed, I hunkered down thinking, only three more to go, by the time they get to the other spots, the Novocain will surely have kicked in more – take comfort in the fact that the brain is capable of these rationalizations, just don’t expect them to be true – each of the four spikes was in fact more painful than the others. 

Then they wheeled me down the hall for one last CAT scan, where they lifted me off of my bed onto another bed that had more metal attached to it.  They positioned my head so that the metal frame latched in with the frame on the other bed (it loudly clicked and locked into place), then wheeled me back to a waiting room, where, with the frame now firmly attached, I was allowed to visit with my wife and the anesthesiologist, who explained to me how they would be putting me out and bringing me back during the day’s events, which would likely last until 3:30 or 4:30 PM  (it was just after 7:00 now).   While I was having these conversations, Dr. R. and his team were looking at results of the CAT scan and a brain MRI that had been taken five days earlier and planning out the procedure, figuring out where to open my head up and install the electrodes that would act as receptors for the neurotransmitters that would be installed later.  Then they were ready and began rolling me to the operating room, asking me to count backwards from 100 or say the alphabet backwards or recite the Gettysburg Address backwards or whatever they asked, I don’t recall, as I was already out. 

Next thing I know I’m awake in the operating room, listening to the static my brain is broadcasting as Dr R. and his guest star neurosurgeon complete the task of installing and testing the electrode and associated leads in the right side of my brain.  This goes on for a couple of hours, and as I sit there awake and the anesthesia gradually wears off, I become aware of the pain in my head, which is becoming more and more unbearable.   At some point I actually start moaning.  “Almost done, bear with us”, Dr. R. promises several times, and when he finally tells me that he is done with the first side and they start putting me under again, I am happier than ever before.  

Then I am awake again.  They are ready to do the other side.  Now I know what I’m in for, and the novelty of being awake while someone is poking around in my brain has worn off.  I’m thinking there is no way I can go through this again.   The pain is there almost from the start.  Fortunately, and to the pleasant surprise of even Dr. R., they are able to very quickly isolate and find the second spot and implement the electrode, and when they put me out for the last time, it’s 1:30 in the afternoon.   I’m about two hours ahead of schedule.

I wake up a couple of hours later in ICU, where my wife is waiting for me.   I proceed to spend a long night in ICU drifting in and out, but by Friday morning I have most of my wits about me.  Aside from the incredible pain in my head, I feel pretty good.  My head is bandaged up so that I look like, as Dr. R. describes, a “human q-tip”.  By Friday afternoon the pain in my head quickly subsides to the point that I stop taking pain medication.  Late Friday I’m moved out of ICU back to my regular room.        

Saturday morning they remove my bandages.  I’m startled by the size of the scars and the number of staples in my head.  By 1:00 I’m free to go, resting comfortably in the front seat of my Prius as my wife navigates the hour and a half trip to our home in Pleasant Praire, Wisconsin.

DBS Part one is complete, and I now have two electrodes implanted in my head.  Two weeks from now, in DBS II, the sequel (“just when you thought it was safe enough to go back in your brain”), they will run the wires under the skin down to a point in my chest, where they will install the neurotransmitter that will eventually send the signals to my brain that will drown out the noise created by Parkinson’s Disease and minimize if not eliminate my symptoms for some period to come.  I am sore, but I am optimistic and eager to reap the benefits of this surrealistic experience.

Lonely are the Free *

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

(* – Note:  The title is taken from a great Steve Earle song I just discovered – somehow it seems to fit)

Six years is a big difference when you’re only seven years old.  It’s an eternity, it’s a lifetime, it’s the world lived and experienced and known.

I remember the time my second grade teacher, Miss B., at the end of her rope, was disciplining me, had me out in the hallway, holding me firmly by my shoulders and pushing me up against the lockers, yelling something at me, when I saw, at the end of the hallway, you and your eighth grade class heading out to somewhere.  I couldn’t conceal my glee at seeing you, my big brother, which only added to Miss B.’s frustration.

Then it’s four years later, a warm spring night.  The front door opens and you walk in, dressed in a suit and tie, with a pretty girl in a pretty dress.  You introduce her to us, she is the preacher’s daughter, and she laughs, and you laugh at some stupid thing I say, but your laugh and your smile are so warm and real, and I know you are responding not just to what I said but rather the accumulation and the entirety of our time as big brother and little brother.  You are still six years older than me, and with girls and proms and suits and ties you are running interference for me, leading the way down life’s long and winding trail.

Nights later that summer you and your friends are in the basement.  From the living room upstairs I can hear the thumping bass of the music, usually the Doors, and I can hear pool balls crashing into each other and the deep laughter of you and your friends in voices that no longer belong to boys.  And I long to be down there, to be welcomed in the company of men, and I creep down the stairs, and you in your anger that was always so imposing bluntly make it clear I am not welcome, that I am not ready for this part of the journey yet.

Then a couple of years later you are in the army, home on leave after basic training, your hair razor short.  We pick you up at the airport, where you flew in from Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, which to me feels like it is on the other side of the world.  Then a couple of weeks later, Mom and Dad take you back to the airport, where you’ll head out first to Fort Dix, New Jersey, then on to Germany, which really is on the other side of the world.  By the time you get out, I am almost 16, but you are still six years older than me.  Still the big brother, you still lead the way, the trail now taking you across oceans.

Then you are home again, and we share a room.  At first it is great, I tease you and we joke around constantly, we wrestle, and you make me laugh like I haven’t laughed before, and I make you laugh.   You teach me about music and books and movies.  But eventually things change, and we start to fight.  I am 17, 18 years old now, and you are still six years older than me, but I don’t understand you anymore, and I no longer recognize the path you are taking as one that I want to follow.

I remember one night in our shared room, when we weren’t getting along very well.  I came to bed late, and you were already lying in your bed, and the light came through the window, and I saw that you were still awake.  It was only for a moment, but in your eyes I saw something I had never seen before.  I saw vulnerability and maybe a trace of despair.  For a few minutes before I fell asleep, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe you didn’t know any more about getting along in this big and frightening world than I did, and that we shared not just the same blood but maybe the same doubts.  But that spark of recognition was quickly put out by my own cold and damp inaction.

Flash forward about twenty years and you are living in the small house on the dirt road in Northern Wisconsin.  It’s a warm and overcast summer day.  You and I are sitting at the picnic table outside your house, and we are talking about the Packers and baseball and philosophy.  You are explaining string theory or chaos theory to me, and I am trying hard to keep up.  I ask questions and you answer very patiently, and you let me know when I’ve asked a good question, when I’m getting it, and I feel so proud that I am almost keeping up with you.   After a while, I have to leave, return to my wife and children, who are waiting for me to take them swimming.

It’d be a few years later, on a Friday afternoon, when I’d get the news that you are gone.  There was and is so much I felt and so much I didn’t and never will understand.   But tonight it occurs to me that you are still out there and still my big brother, and it occurs to me that I’m still following the trail that you were always blazing for me.  The only thing is that now I realize how lonely it had to be for you at the front of that trail, and I cannot comprehend the emptiness you found at its end.  For all those years, for all the light you shone on my path, I remained blind to your darkness and pain.

I continue my journey, the trail marked by dark stains from tears of regret.   I can only hope that someday, when I catch up to you, I can thank you for all you gave me, and shine enough light to make you see what a beautiful soul you have always been.

 

Forgotten and Waiting

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

(This is based upon my memory of real events and places and people from my childhood.   I’ve changed some of the details (mainly the fact that the school and the playground have already been torn down), the chronology may be off, and his name has been changed – but Ethan and our moment were very real)

The old elementary school is abandoned now, dark and empty and silent, still formidable in its red brick.  The three stories that comprise the original building still dominate the neighboring landscape, and the one story wings that over the years were added to its east and west sides center and buffer it, making it resemble a fortress.   Behind its  front, between the wings, the large playground, with its fading black pavement cracking from neglect and the monkey bars and jungle jims and swing sets and slides having all been removed years ago, is also empty and silent, waiting for the bell to ring and for children to emerge from behind the locked doors.

For more than 80 years, since it was erected in 1925, the old school has sat in the center of the small town, on the corner of 14th Avenue and State Street.  It was where all the town’s kids prepared for high school until 1967, when, in response to growth caused by the post war baby boom, the middle school was built on the south side for sixth through eighth grades.  In 2002, construction of the new elementary school, near the middle school, was completed, just in time for the old school, obsolete and in need of extensive repair, to be condemned.   There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen to the property – various private investors have expressed interest in various development projects, such as an apartment complex, or a senior center – but it’s a given that whatever becomes of the property, the buildings will have to be torn down.

But the old school doesn’t know anything about any of this.  It just stands there, silent and proud, patiently waiting.   It waits for plastic crates filled with little chilled cardboard cartons of “white” and chocolate milk, the smell of freshly mimeographed work sheets, film strips and record players, workbooks, three ring binders and pocket folders.  It waits for crayon and water color drawings to be hung on its walls, and for spring jackets and winter coats to be hung on hooks in its classrooms.  It waits for someone to unfold and open up the tables that transform the gymnasium into the cafeteria.  It waits for teachers and administrators and janitors.   Most of all it waits for its purpose, the children, for their laughter and footsteps and voices to once again echo down its halls.

For only six of the nearly 80 years the school was open, from 1963 to 1969, I was one of the thousands of kids to pass through its halls.  As I passed today on 14th Avenue, it occurred to me that any trace of me, any mark I may have made there, has long been worn away.   Then I turned north on State street and I saw the fenced in little white house that stands next to the school, and for the first time in years, I remembered the tragic and mysterious Ethan Carter.  It was the first time in years I had thought about him, but it wasn’t the first time I had forgotten him.

Each year, Ethan would be present during the first few days of school, long enough to make us remember him, and then he’d be gone.   Born with a defective and weak heart, everyone knew that he was dying.   He was thin and frail; his skin was a pale shade of gray, almost translucent.  His face was gaunt and hollow and small.  His nose looked out of place compared to his eyes and mouth – it was a normal nose, but it stood out, the only part of his body that wasn’t underdeveloped.   He moved slowly.  I don’t remember ever seeing him run.   Still alive, he already looked like a ghost.

The only time I ever really interacted with him was on the playground, during recess, on a warm September day in the beginning of the fourth grade school year.   I found myself with a baseball glove on my left hand, playing catch with him.  He was standing with his back against the tall woven wire fence, not far from the slides.  It was warm out, but he was wearing his jacket.   We were standing closer together than two fourth graders normally stand to play catch.  He couldn’t throw the ball very hard, or very far, and I’d softly lob it back to him, almost underhanded.  He’d open his glove when the ball arrived and try and cover it up with his right hand.  He missed about as many as he caught, and I’d wait patiently as he’d shuffle to the fence to retrieve the ball.  I was afraid that if I threw it too hard I’d destroy him.

“I live here”, he said, pointing to the other side of the six foot tall woven wire fence that towered above him and marked the east-west boundary between his yard and the playground.  The south side of his yard butted against the northern edge of the west wing of the school and was marked by a shorter woven wire fence, about three foot tall, as was the northern border of the yard.   Inside the fence there was a small white house and garage, and a small back yard, with a sandbox that sat in the shade of a large maple tree. Unaccustomed to fences, the property reminded me of a prison.  I remember replying something to the effect that I’d sure hate to live next door to school.

That was on a Friday.  The following Monday, he wasn’t there.  His desk was empty.   I remember him being in school a couple of days in the two or three weeks that followed, and then he wasn’t there at all, as the fall turned into winter and winter turned into spring.

For a while, during recesses, when I’d walk by the slides, I’d think of him, and I’d glance through the woven wire fence to the empty back yard on the other side.  Sometimes I’d wonder if he was inside, laying awake in his room, weak and lonely and sad, listening to the sounds of the children on the playground, and I’d feel sorry for him.  Sometimes I’d think about him and that he was going to die, really die, and I’d get scared, and I’d make myself think about something else.  Eventually, as time passed and the memory of our couple of minutes playing catch faded, he was forgotten.

Then one warm spring morning, a week or two before the end of the school year, he was back.  He was sitting at his desk, as if he hadn’t been gone, unaware that he had been forgotten by his classmates.   He looked about the same as the day early in the year when we played catch.  No one made a big deal about it, he was just back.  He frightened me.

He frightened me because I knew he was dying.  He frightened me because he had missed the whole year, and couldn’t possibly have been caught up with us, but he sat there anyway, not having done his assignments for all that time, and it didn’t matter.  It didn’t matter because he was dying, and even though we were small children and there was so much we didn’t understand, we understood that death was bigger than anything, bigger even than school and our teachers and bigger than our moms and dads.

He was there for a day or two before the end of the school year, and he was there for only a couple of warm days early the next fall, our fifth grade year.  Early in our sixth grade year, in my classroom in the middle school on the other side of town, word came that he had finally died.  It wasn’t a surprise, and it wasn’t even big enough news for anyone to talk about much.  No one had seen him in over a year, and the sum of our total experience with him was no more than a scattering of school days over the years.   Soon after, in death, as in life, he was forgotten again.

This time he’d remain forgotten, until on a whim today I decided to take a detour and drive through the town I grew up in.  The site of the empty and abandoned school was powerful enough to release a flood of memories and emotions, but it took the small, fenced in white house on State Street to make me remember him again, and think about the boy I barely knew, and the brief moment we shared together in the handful of brief moments that made up his life.  It occurs to me that although that moment was buried in my memory, forgotten until today, it has come into view more vibrant and real than any other memories of the school.

Today, more than 40 years later, the school still stands, proud and defiant, waiting for the children, unaware of its pending and inevitable demolition.  In the quiet autumn midday, Ethan Carter emerges from the walls of the small white house next to the school.  He is, as he will forever remain, still a child.  Unencumbered now by illness or physical boundaries, he silently passes through the woven wire fence to the empty playground, his baseball glove ready, waiting for the children whose laughter he used to hear through his window, the children who in life he was too weak and frail to be a part of.   He waits for them, and he waits for me, if only to play catch with for a couple of minutes.

My Part in the Downfall Revisited

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

(Saw this article on-line this morning, related to the Generation-Y workforce I discussed in this post last July.)

http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-2838-Leadership-Management-Gen-Ys-impact-in-the-workplace/?SiteId=cbmsnhp42838&sc_extcmp=JS_2838_home1

For a few years now, I have been hearing and reading about generation Y, people born after 1980, and the complaints from my generation, the baby boomers, that this new generation isn’t willing to work hard, and expects to be pampered and treated as “special”.  Much of the blame for this is placed on people like me, people who coached this generation in youth and recreation league sports, where everybody got to play and winning wasn’t emphasized.   Apparently, people like me drove the competitive will out of these young minds and replaced it with the namby-pamby “oh, well, at least I tried hard.  I’m still special!”

I coached co-ed recreation league softball and boys basketball for most of the years my sons were growing up.  I have always loved sports, and played little league baseball as a child.  I was too small (I was basically a year younger than most of my classmates) to go out for football and not good enough to make the middle and high school basketball teams, but I played back yard and pick up games with other neighborhood kids every chance I got.    I became a rabid sports fan and developed a life time love for all three games.

Early on in my sons’ lives, I noticed that, at least in my little corner of suburbia, the landscape of childhood had significantly changed.   In the post urban sprawl spread of real estate development of 1990s suburbia, neighborhoods as defined in my childhood were a thing of the past.  Kids no longer found other kids in nearby backyards and began playing together.   Instead, with neighbors further away, with technology like gaming and the internet driving kids inside more often, with parents working more hours and obsessively worrying about sexual predators, playtime had to be carefully scheduled and coordinated.  Kids had to be driven to and picked up from their friends houses.  As a result, spontaneity was largely removed, and kids had fewer opportunities to explore places and discover new friends than when I was a kid.

The largest casualty of this was the backyard or driveway pickup game.   With so many logistical factors to coordinate, getting enough kids for a game together on short notice became impossible.  Organized sports became the only way kids could play baseball or softball or basketball.

There were two types of organized sports kids could choose from – competitive and non-competitive.   The competitive options included traveling teams, which have grown to become a unique phenomenon, and little league.  Little league wasn’t as demanding as the travelling teams, but you had to try out to make a team.

The non-competitive leagues were run by the village or the local Y.  Everybody who signed up was guaranteed a roster spot, and there were minimum playing rules to ensure that everybody played.  It wasn’t as namby-pamby as many of the critics like to exaggerate.  Score was kept, each game had a winner and a loser, and standings and season ending championship tournaments were usually tracked.   As someone who loved sports, and wasn’t good enough to make most of the teams I tried out for as a child, the non-competitive leagues were an attractive option for my boys.  We signed them up and I quickly became involved in coaching, first as an assistant  on my oldest son’s softball team, then as the head coach of my second son’s softball and basketball teams.

Going into coaching, I knew all of the different strategies and philosophies that I thought would make a great coach, and what my teams may have lacked in talent or skill would be made up for by my brilliant tactical approach to the game.  This dream lasted about as long as it took the ink to dry on my coaching sign-up form.  I soon realized that not only were these little kids with short attention spans, but that many of them had never played the game before.

In basketball, for example, instead of implementing post or perimeter offenses or zone defenses, my time was spent trying to figure out which player could dribble the ball past the half court line, and trying to explain that unlike volleyball, you don’t have to slap and swat at the ball, you can actually catch it, or trying to convince a kid that he can’t catch a pass or get a rebound or play defense with his hands inside his shirt (this last example was made more frustrating by the fact that the kid with his hands in his shirt was my own son, Nick.)

So our weekly practices were exercises in riot control.  First and second grade boys who had been cooped up in their homes in the cold winter months were suddenly let loose in a gymnasium with about 10 other boys and a bouncing ball – their energies were as broad as their attention spans were narrow.  The chaos would be paused at the end of the session, only to be picked up where it left off on the Saturday morning games, where despite all my shouting they would still dribble into the corner and the other nine players on the court would follow, as if magnetized to the ball.

But every now and then something amazing would happen – the ball would actually travel airborne in the general direction of the basket.  Even more amazingly, three or four times a game, it would actually go in!  The kids would jump up and down and scream, which they pretty much did all the time anyway, while in the stands, the proud Mother and Father would beam, the Mother thinking how cute my little Billy looks, while the Father began silent deliberations on Duke or North Carolina.

Co-ed softball was even more of a challenge.   There was the second grade girl who practiced her ballet during games in the outfield.  There were the missed throws that resulted in extra bases that resulted in more missed throws.  There were fly balls that bonked outfielders on the head.   There was one of my all-time favorite players who, for reasons that will forever remain unexplained, always travelled with a portable DVD player and a copy of the film “Ghostbusters”, which he’d watch over and over while sitting on the bench between innings or waiting his turn to bat.

In both sports, in both practices and games, there was an abundance of short attention spans, confusion, frustration, and general mayhem.    And I grew to love every minute of it.   They were not only as fun as a barrel of monkeys; they actually were a barrel of monkeys.  Once I realized they were never going to comprehend a pick and roll or a suicide squeeze, I had to determine what if any value any of us, players and coaches, could get out the experience.   In time, I realized that they were just kids, and like the girls in the Cyndi Lauper song, they just wanted to have fun.

This then became my mission – I wanted every kid on my teams to have fun.  On the surface, nothing seems easier, because kids are built for having fun.  Fun is the only reason for existence that a child has.  But after spending some time with my teams, I quickly realized and remembered that it’s not that simple.   Some kids weren’t as good as others, some weren’t as smart, some were small, some were overweight, some lacked social skills, and some came from difficult family situations.   It became apparent that for some of these kids, fun was a rare experience if not an alien concept.

My strength was a sense of humor that isn’t as well developed as I’d like to think it is – in other words, it remains at about a fifth grade level.  This may make me come across as juvenile and sophomoric in the adult world, but it served me very well with children.   I found that the one thing that would at least momentarily hold their attention was my potential for goofiness.  They may not have listened when I tried to explain which base to throw to from the outfield, but if they thought they might hear me say something stupid, they were a rapt and attentive audience.  I think that all kids, for a myriad of reasons, love hearing adults say really stupid things.  Once I realized this, it became my secret weapon.  I’d say enough stupid things to get their attention, and then, every once in a while, I’d slip in some coaching.   They’d remember verbatim every stupid thing I’d say, while maybe 25% of the coaching seeped through – but hey, that was progress.

Knowing now how to get at least a minimum of their attention, and knowing how much they enjoyed the stupid things that I said (and did), I realized an amazing thing.   The kids would all listen to me and laugh at me together.  A really good player might be sitting on the bench next to a really bad player, and they’d both be laughing at me.   They may have had nothing else in common, but they shared the common experience of being sentenced to listen to my corny silliness.  The year would always begin with separate cliques of kids from the same schools or the same neighborhoods, groups of familiar faces unfamiliar to the other groups of familiar faces.  There would always be a kid or two alone on the outside.  My job became to break down these groups and meld them all together into a team, a team that may or may not have won many games, but a team, and all that means.   Above all else, I loved watching those early season cliques dissolve, and I loved it when the good players would cheer on or try to buck up the bad players, and even more, when the cool kids found something interesting in one of the un-cool kids.

I coached for I think eleven years, until Nick was out of high school.  Over the years, I actually had some teams that were good enough to win championships.  I also had teams that failed to win a game.   The one consistent thing was, I believe, despite the fact that no statistics were kept, and regardless of our won-loss record, every year my teams lead the league in laughter.

Every year, I’d watch these collections of kids become a team, and that is what these leagues were all about.  I don’t mean to imply that I was a brilliant motivator or supremely skilled in developing young people.   Most of the other coaches were just as effective, using their own methods and skill.  It was the structure of the leagues and their mission that everybody gets a chance to play and learn the game that allowed teams to develop.  More than that, it was the kids themselves.  Adults have a tendency to take credit for too much; that these kids were able to overcome their own differences and preconceptions is ultimately a tribute to the open-mindedness that young children still possess.  It’s adults who close these minds with fear and suspicion and distrust.

Now these kids, whose minds I helped fill with unreasonable feelings of self-worth, are young adults starting their careers.  We keep hearing how demanding they are and how they expect to be treated as if they are something special.  They apparently believe the “everybody is a winner, everybody is special” philosophy learned in our sports leagues.  Baby boomers have difficulty understanding this, thinking, I’m not special, I’m lucky to have a job, and if I have to work 60 hours a week to keep it, then that’s what I’ll do.  What makes these kids think they are so special?

Maybe the generation Y kids will continue to insist they are special.  Maybe they won’t stand for their jobs being outsourced.   Maybe they’ll feel the job is lucky to have them.  Maybe they won’t put up with all the crap the baby boomers assumed was owed to their bosses.

One topical book refers to this generational difference as “Hard America” vs “Soft America”;  that the baby boomers of “Hard America” are driven by competition and accountability, while the “Soft America” of generation Y, having been coddled all these years, is inherently weaker, and needs the protection of government regulation.  I’d argue that this is ridiculous and short sighted.  “Hard America” may be driven by competition and accountability, but anyone who has ever had to suffer the obnoxiousness of an overly competitive family member who sulks and pumps his chest through games of Trivial Pursuit or Pictionary knows that weakness and insecurity lie not far below their surface.  It is this weakness, this fear of failure that has allowed this generation to take the world’s strongest economy and slowly destroy it.  Where families were once headed by a single wage earner, now two or more family members work two or more jobs and still struggle to make ends meet.  The competitive win at all costs mentality has been exploited, and as a result, we work harder for lower relative wages with fewer benefits.   The people who run the corporations love this, while everybody else suffers.

The values taught to “Soft America” place value on the individual and his contribution to the team.  Ask anyone who has ever been a manager who they want on their team, the overly competitive and aggressive ladder climber, or the good team player.   If members of generation Y truly believe that they are special, then there may be hope that they will demand the simple respect that the baby boomers have given away.  They may be the only hope to fix what we, their parents (who instilled these values in the first place), have destroyed.

(P.S. – my time as a coach was all volunteer, so, unlike those pesky teachers, my contribution to poisoning young minds was at least tax-free)

Food For Thought

/ djgourdoux / Leave a comment

(This is an excerpt from a chapter I wrote for my memoirs project a couple of years ago about some of the more memorable meals I’ve experienced – doesn’t look like it is going to make the cut, but it seems to be in the spirit of the season)

Probably the best Thanksgiving dinner I ever had was the Thanksgiving of 1978.  I was already living up north, and Dad wasn’t going to be up until the Friday after Thanksgiving, so Don came up on Wednesday night.  I met him at the trailer that Thanksgiving morning, and we hunted all day, and then in the evening, Don, in a testament to his skills as a cook, with only a wood burning stove and cheap electric hot plates to work with, prepared the greatest meal I’ve ever experienced.  I don’t even remember everything we had, I just know he had apparently gone to the store with a plan in mind and executed it brilliantly.  There were several main courses, I remember there being spaghetti, I think ham, there were green beans, and a whole package of dinner rolls, heated and browned to perfection on the wood stove.  As we ate, on my little black and white portable rabbit-eared television, on channel 13 from Eau Claire, the only channel we could get in, Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers was destroying the Dallas Cowboys in one of the all-time great Thanksgiving games.   The whole episode was one of those moments when all is perfect in the world, the heat from the wood stove warming up the damp chill in our bones from a hard day of hunting, the warm food replacing the dull ache in our stomachs with a contented fullness, and in the background, football.

Then there was the meal, maybe the following year, I don’t recall exactly when, that my Dad, Don and I all slept through.  It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, a sunny and cold day, not a cloud in the sky.  After finishing lunch, Don dropped my Dad and I off  at the east end of the 80 acres of Schultz’s woods where we used to do the majority of our deer hunting, and then took the truck to the swampy Mudbrook country that bordered the west end of the same property.  None of us saw any deer that afternoon, and my Dad and I met up at about 4:30, shortly before legal shooting hours for the day ended and about  a half hour before the sun went down and the winter darkness would overcome the still clear bright sky.  There were a couple of inches of snow on the ground as we walked out of the northern edge of the woods and through the farm fields that lay between us and the trailer.  As we crossed the fields, the wind kicked up out of the north, slapping us in the face, and the temperature, which had been in the mid twenties all day, almost instantly dropped to zero.  To this day it is the fastest and most extreme drop in temperature I’ve ever experienced, and the walk from the woods to the trailer, across three different fields, never felt so far or cold

My Dad and I finally made our way back to the trailer, and we started a fire in the wood burning stove.  It was about this time Don came back with the truck.  We were all jolted by the cold, and stood in our hunting clothes close to the stove, waiting for heat, when my Dad remembered that he had a small bottle of Yukon Jack whiskey with him.  It’s the only time I remember hard liquor ever being a part of our hunting season (normally, there was lots of beer).  It was bad, rotgut stuff, but it was warm, it warmed our insides as it went down.  As the fire warmed up, we found what remained of the ham we had for dinner the previous night and a loaf of bread.  We’d slice off chunks of the ham and throw them on the stove.  The three of us remained huddled around the stove, eating ham sandwiches and passing the Yukon Jack around, shedding off layers of hunting clothes as the fire gained heat, until both the ham and the whiskey were completely consumed.   It was at this point, dark and bitterly cold outside, that we remembered we were due at my maternal grandmother’s house in Ladysmith for dinner that night.  One of us went out and started the truck, and, after waiting long enough for it to get warm, we climbed in.

When we got to my Grandmother’s house, we were greeted by a table full of food and waves of heat as my Grandmother, and her 2nd husband Gordon, maintained the thermostat in their house at somewhere close to 85 degrees year- round.  We sat down, my Dad in a comfortable chair, and my brother and I on a soft and comfortable couch, across from my Grandmother and Gordon, who as usual could barely conceal their glee in seeing us.  Minutes later, after sitting down in the warm comfort of my Grandmother’s living room, and after a day of being in the cold and harsh elements, and after consuming a bottle of Yukon Jack and countless hot ham sandwiches, all three of us were asleep – as in sound asleep.  You could hear my Dad snoring.  About an hour later, we all woke up enough to realize it was getting late, that we’d better get back to the trailer.   In the still foggy cloud of heat and ham and alcohol, we managed to say goodbye to my Grandmother and Gordon, somehow excusing our not eating, and climbed back in the truck, turned on the defrosters, and headed south down Highway 27.  Don was driving, it was starting to snow out, but all three of us remained groggy.  I, in the middle, and my Dad, to the right, quickly fell asleep, and so did Don, the driver, although he managed to wake himself several times just as we were veering off the highway into the dark oblivion.  We somehow managed to make it back to the trailer, where we slept soundly; not realizing until the next day how much our sleeping visit must have disappointed my Grandmother. 

My Grandmother, Ethel Scrivner, was the classic Grandmother; sweet and immense, she was at this time in her late seventies.  She had had a difficult life, with her first husband, my Grandfather, walking out on her and their four small children in the early 1930s, leaving her alone and broke during the height of the great depression.  She somehow managed, though, cleaning office buildings and whatever other work she could find, eking out a living and providing a home (or rather homes, as they lived in a variety of houses in Ladysmith that were sometimes barely above shack classification) for my Mother and her three brothers.  In the mid 1960s when she was also in her mid 60s, she met a widower from near Green Bay named Gordon Booth, a sweet and lively old man who was constant motion – it was in adults describing him that I learned the adjective “spry” – for some reason, a word you never hear associated with young people.  He was a kind old man who looked out for her and, after a hard lifetime of work and poverty and being overweight had left her aching and arthritic, Gordon and his doting ways were just what she needed and deserved.  More than 30 years after abandoning her and his family, my Grandfather, living in Iowa at the time, mailed the papers granting Ethel her divorce, allowing her and Gordon to be married.

Gordon was a simple man who, prior to meeting my Grandmother had spent many years taking care of his fatally ill first wife until her death.   They had no children of their own, so when he married my Grandma, he inherited four adult children and by my count 12 grandchildren.  He was simple and unsophisticated in his views of the world, but his capacity for kindness and caring remains unsurpassed in my experience.  He lived, to put it simply, to care for others, his first wife for all those years, and then, in the last twenty five years of their lives, he lived to care for my Grandmother.  My Grandmother was the first to die, in 1989, and the image I’ll never forget from her funeral is at the cemetery, the sight of Gordon sitting and watching from the front seat of the hearse, his lungs not healthy enough to withstand the cold spring air.  He watched as me and my brothers and my cousins carried my Grandmother’s casket to her grave, his gray face through the car window sad and small and burdened with the weight of heartbreak and loneliness.  It would be only a mercifully short few months later that Gordon, with no one left to take care of, would also die.

For a time, in the late 70s, in the lonely bachelor days when I lived in Ladysmith, I’d drive across the railroad tracks to their small house on Corbett Avenue and enjoy Sunday dinner with them.  I’d get there in the late afternoon and as my Grandma would be putting the finishing touches on the multi-course meal, I’d take Gordon, who had already given up on driving, to the IGA so he could get their weekly grocery shopping done.  He loved getting out of the house, and he was proud to be seen with me, and the feeling was infectious, as I was proud to take him.   No sooner that I’d  park the car than Gordon, like a bullet shot out of a gun, would be on his way through the parking lot, walking that frenetic leaning forward walk of his, as if his feet were having trouble keeping up with his torso.  Once inside he’d get a cart and, his hands extended face level on the handle, frantically push it down the aisle like a man possessed, grinning from ear to ear, thrilled to be out of the house and on a mission. 

When he was done, we’d load up the bags and return to their house.  I’d reach in and take out the items one by one and hand them to Gordon, who knew exactly where in the cupboards everything belonged.  The stove would be hot with the few remaining pans simmering, and the table would be set and waiting for us, with my Grandma’s wonderful main courses steaming in the early evening sunlight.   Finally we’d sit and eat, and for me, it was heaven, a weekly home-cooked masterpiece that never disappointed.  As we ate, my Grandma would tell me stories about my Mother, how she loved mashed potatoes when she was a child, or about the first time she brought my Father home to meet her.   “Oh, he was so gorgeous”, she’d marvel.  “I told her, don’t you let this one get away – oh, was he gorgeous.”

I’d stuff myself with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, dinner rolls.  “You want any more, Davey?” Gordon would ask, and I’d answer no, I have to save some room for dessert, at which point Grandma would beam, proud as she was of the pies and cakes and cookies she always had waiting for me.   After thoroughly stuffing myself, Grandma and I would retire to the living room and watch television, Gordon joining us after clearing the table.  Grandma and Gordon each had their own chairs, and I’d sit on the couch in the tiny living room of their tiny house.  We’d sit and quietly watch T.V, whatever show came on; they weren’t the most discerning of viewers.  There wasn’t a lot of talking, there was instead a satisfied comfort, for me the satisfaction that comes from a wonderful home-cooked meal, for them, the satisfaction of opening up their home to family, a chance for them to play roles that in their distant memory they played every evening, when family was real and close and immediate, when they mattered, when they were needed.

Finally, after the evening sky grew dark, I’d get up and leave, thanking them profusely for the evening, and saying, yes, I’d be happy to come back next Sunday in answer to their inevitable questioning.   Then, after saying the final goodbyes, I’d get in my car as Grandma stood in the front door. I’d return her solitary wave of the hand, and pull out into the darkness as she shut the door.  I remember how cold the night always felt, mainly because my Grandma and Gordon ran the furnace in their house year round.  As I’d return to my darkened apartment, the satisfying fullness from the meal would slowly fade and be replaced by a melancholy ache.  I missed my family.

Vulture

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

We were just north of Kansas City.  It was mid afternoon, and we hadn’t eaten yet.  I spotted a Steak and Shake to the left, so we pulled off of the freeway.  Traffic was heavy, and the stoplight turned red at the top of the hill, just before we were to turn left.   As cars backed up behind us, we noticed the man in the green army fatigue jacket holding the cardboard sign that said “U.S. Veteran with Family Needs Help”.   I put him to be in his mid fifties; he was thin and had fading reddish hair.  He was clean shaven, and he kneeled near the stop light.   He did not approach us or any of the other cars.

Knowing I had a fresh five dollar bill in my wallet, my Sister and I had the usual discussion about whether he was legit or just one of the many rip-off artists you hear so much about.  Meanwhile, in my mind, the would-be writer in me immediately tried to construct stories about how this man ended up in this place.   Tragic stories of real loss and anguish were balanced by devious and cynical con jobs.   It struck me that either angle I took would be a good vehicle for exploring the theme that life is, among other things, an on-going assault on individual dignity.

If he was in fact a con, if he was merely too lazy to get a job, then he certainly wasn’t worthy of any of my money, and anything I gave him would just be perpetuating a lie.  Besides, there are shelters and mechanisms provided by our government and private faith based initiatives that are in place for people with exactly these issues.

If he really was the victim of tragic circumstance and fate, if he and his family really were hurting and hungry, if he had exhausted all other means and standing at that corner with his hand out was his only option, then it would be my obligation to help him.  Maybe my five dollars would somehow be enough to prevent his family from going hungry for the night, or enable them to sleep with a roof over their heads.

The light wasn’t going to stay red forever.   There was no time to do a background check, or to interview him to conclude if he was worthy or not.  I’d have to determine quickly what to do, whether this man was worthy of my five dollars or not.

Either way, at least I’d have some fresh material to write about.

Intersection

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A couple of months ago, on a warm August afternoon, I watched a hummingbird from my window.  It was smaller than my thumb, and it hovered and levitated, the motor of its tiny wings a blue blur, as it looked for nectar in the wild flowers just outside of my cabin. 

Around here, you don’t see hummingbirds in the winter.  They migrate south, to Mexico and Panama, as far as 2500 miles. Hormonal changes brought about by decreasing amounts of daylight tell them when it is time to go.  For some, the migration path takes them over the Gulf of Mexico, or about 500 miles of non-stop flying.  Predators are numerous, from the many birds of prey to bats and cats to even spiders and insects.  Hummingbirds typically migrate alone.  

I put this down so I don’t forget about that hummingbird and the blue blur of its wings and the long and perilous and solitary journey that brought it, on that late summer afternoon, to the wild flowers by my cabin at the precise time I happened to look out my window.