This afternoon I made my weekly trip to the local Woodman’s, which is a colossal super market near where my wife and I live. Now that we are older and our kids are grown and it’s just the two of us, my wife maintains a list on a piece of paper on the breakfast bar in our kitchen, and whenever one of us thinks of something we are low on or out of, or something we haven’t had in a while that sounds good, we add it to the list.  Then, once a week, I take the list and go to Woodman’s and pick up whatever’s on the list, and a new list for next week’s session is started.

It’s a system that works well, and shopping is a chore I don’t mind doing.

Today, while I was pushing my shopping cart down the coffee aisle, I crossed paths with another man, who I’d never seen before, who I’d estimate was  in his mid-thirties, average height and build, and comfortably but neatly dressed, clean shaven with a neatly trimmed moustache.  I was pushing my cart one way and he was pushing his the other, and as we passed each other, I looked at him and he at me, when it happened.

He winked at me.

I’ve never had a strange man wink at me before, so I was taken aback, not knowing how to respond. I did the first thing that popped into my brain.

I nodded.

I nodded back at him and continued with my shopping.  Our paths did not cross again. But I’m left wondering, why the Hell did he wink at me?  What does it mean?  And was a nod the appropriate response? Or did I unwittingly insult him? Or even worse, lead him on?

The wink.  How should I take it? Should I be offended?  Flattered? None of the above?

I’m 57 years old and have been married for thirty four years.  I realize that I am blissfully unaware of the scene (“scene” – sounds groovy, doesn’t it?) that single people these days have to navigate.  The wink reminds me that it was always a complex minefield but that now, with more open and tolerant attitudes, it’s got to be so confusing and difficult to read signals and process information.  In my day (yep, sometime in your mid-fifties you are given your own “day” to reminisce about), if I was attracted to a girl – wait, is “girl” sexist? –or should I say “woman?” – you’d just ask her out.  And that by itself was incredibly difficult – how on earth you’d go about asking a (female) out these days is beyond me.

Not only am I at an age where I’ve been out of circulation for so long, but I’m also at that age where you don’t want to get caught leering at beautiful women. Because, frankly, it comes across as creepy. It’s too easy to be assigned the label “dirty old man.”

The winker today probably had no motive other than something perfectly innocent that I was too stupid to pick up on.

But then my long neglected sense of vanity speaks up, and I listen.

I’ve lost some weight, it reminds me, and I’m working out every day, so maybe that has something to do with why Mr. Moustache winked at me today.  Who knows? To be clear, I’d rather it was a gorgeous and young blond female of the opposite sex doing the winking, but when you’re my age, you’ll take whatever winks you can get.

After Friday’ terrorist attacks in Paris, my Facebook feeds have been inundated with liberal rants saying don’t blame Islam, and conservative rants about how we have to send in troops and wipe ISIS out, and how we would be crazy to accept more refugees into our country.

I’ve given it a lot of thought, and here’s what I come up with.  I have to disagree with my liberal friends. Islam is responsible for the attacks.  I understand that the terrorists equal less than one percent of the worldwide Islamic population, and that they are but a small cult with their own extremist interpretation of the religion.

The point is that all the attacks were executed by Muslims in the name of Mohammed or Islam or whatever name they give to their bearded guy in the clouds. Just like the people who bomb abortion clinics in the name of Jesus represent a small percentage of the people whose bearded man in the clouds is the son of another bearded man in the clouds.

Of course I don’t blame the billion or so Muslims who would never commit such atrocities, just like I don’t blame the billions of Christians who renounce violence in their savior’s name.  I blame the institutions.

The problem is religion, more specifically, organized religion. There isn’t one that is better than another.  They are all a collection of superstition and nonsense, and their usefulness has long been negated by the death and destruction carried out in their names. We are well into the 21^st century, and we should have advanced past the point of believing in the parting of seas or who has been chosen and who hasn’t. At some point, we need to step back and look at all of the chaos and destruction, all the madness and murder, and recognize the common denominator:  religion.

I have no idea how we rid ourselves of the cancer that religion has become. Even as it grows outdated and marginalized (the majority of young Americans do not attend church or count themselves as members of any specific religion), its power, its influence, expands. It’s easy, it’s accepted, it’s even encouraged to discriminate against different religions. This is why so many Americans cling to the ridiculous notion that President Obama is a Muslim. It’s socially unacceptable to discriminate on the basis of race.  However, it’s acceptable to discriminate against those who don’t “share the same values.”

The fanaticism of true believers is one of the most powerful forces on the face of the earth.  How does any society defend itself against people who are willing to strap explosives to their body and give their own lives in return for hundreds of innocent lives?  It’s the extreme madness that only religion can inspire.

Every day, somewhere in the world, people are murdered in the name of God.  And every day, families bury the victims and pray on their behalf to the same God they died for.

We need freedom from, not freedom of, religion. As long as religion exists, as long as nation-states legitimize religion, the insanity will continue unabated, and the numbers of innocent men, women and children killed in the name of God will rise.

(This is another short excerpt from the novel I’m working on.  This scene takes place in 1935.  Originally, these were going to be minor characters with a short backstory, but they keep talking to me, they won’t shut up, so I’m letting them go until they’re done.

Not much happens yet in this scene, it’s getting too long to excerpt, so I thought I’d share what I’ve got so far)

Randy and Corey were exploring, deeper into the forest than they’d ever been before.  They’d left the three mile out east-west fire road two hours earlier and headed south, toward the noon day sun that shone bright in the sky.  Andy was fourteen, Corey ten years old. At first, the forest was thick with scrub maple and birch, the terrain mostly flat, with occasional short and gradual knolls, the ground damp and black, the March trees grey and leafless. Then, as they continued south, the woods opened up and the trees, mostly oak and ash now, grew taller and older, as the ground rose and fell with undulating hills and draws, covered by a thick blanket of dead leaves and green moss. On the northern slopes of the knolls and rises un-melted snow banks stubbornly clung to the mossy ground.  The previous night’s frost had burned off and lifted in thin clouds of mist that the hungry morning quickly consumed, its satisfaction evident in the rays of warm sunlight that crossed Randy and Corey’s faces.

They were looking for more artifacts of the logging camps that at one time, forty to fifty years earlier, in the last twenty years or so of the nineteenth century, dominated the area. They’d seen the paintings and the old photographs on the wall of the feed and implement store of men with handlebar moustaches and wool coats and misery whips standing dwarfed by the massive trunks of the immense fallen white pines they stood next to.  The white pines were gone now, but the implements, the men’s tools, remained where abandoned, their usefulness passed to all but the slow and steady forces of rust and decay. Randy and Corey had already found, on previous expeditions, rusted out straw lines and springboards and peaveys and grapples, and a pair of abandoned calks, in surprisingly good condition, still wearable, with their soles still intact. Mr. Nelson had partitioned a corner in his old machine shed for the boys to stash their findings. He seemed to be the only one who expressed any interest in them, showing them to his father when he’d visit. Grandpa Nelson, as Anne and Laura called him, was at the time in his seventies, and remembered the times during his childhood that his father worked on a logging operation, as a chokerman and a faller. Randy and Corey would see Mr. Nelson and Grandpa approaching the machine shed and run over to show him what they’d found, and Grandpa Nelson would explain what each piece was and how the loggers used it and how rare or common it was, dismissing the spool of rusted cable they’d unearthed as nothing more than haywire, and getting animated at the site of the steel spiked pole, explaining that it was a peavey and was used to provide leverage when moving large logs.

At about one o’clock, about two hours after having left the fire road and heading deeper into the forest than they’d ever been before, Randy was relieved when they found a stream, choke full of snow melt and gurgling as it rushed south. He pulled out his jackknife and carved a deep gouge into the side of an oak tree.

“What are you doing?” Corey asked.

“Marking this tree, in case we get lost,” Randy replied.

“How would we get lost? We’ve got the sun to go by.”

“Well,” Randy said, “that’s all well and good if it stays out. But what if it gets cloudy?”

“Okay,” Corey said.  “Suppose it does get cloudy.  How are you gonna find one oak tree in all these woods?”

“Cause we ain’t gonna leave this stream now that we’ve found it. And by marking up this tree, we should be able to see it on our way back, and know this is where we found the stream, so this is where on the way back we leave the stream.  We know home is due north from here, and we’re about an hour away from the fire road.  So by reading the tree with the creek, we oughta be able to figure out which way north is.”

“Wish we still had a compass,” Corey said.

“We ain’t gonna need no goddamn compass, cause we ain’t gonna get lost,” Randy said.

“How much further we gonna go?”

“Not much,” Randy said.  “I’d like to follow this stream a little ways, see where it goes.  Unless you’re too scared.”

“I ain’t scared of nothing,” Corey protested.

Randy and Corey followed the stream as it wove its way through the high banks that over thousands of years it’d carved into the forest floor, bending, widening and narrowing as it slipped between the knolls, gathering momentum as it flowed under the cover of the trees, which were taller here.  There wasn’t any scrub brush in this part of the forest, just the trees, wide, wide and tall and far apart, and leaves, dead leaves, several inches deep covering the forest floor.  As they went the sky grew grayer as the sun disappeared behind a veil of darkening clouds.

Then, without warning, the woods opened up and dissolved into a huge, flat meadow, with long brown and gray grasses.  From where they stood, looking out at the meadow, they could see the stream, a thick blue line winding through the brown and gray, and they could see other pockets of blue open water scattered across the meadow.  The meadow was flat and wide, bordered by higher ground of the knolls and hills. A couple of hundred yards beyond where it began, where Randy and Corey were standing, the meadow narrowed, with knolls on both side encroaching in and pinching it, then it widened again, immense and open, the tree line on the other side looking small and distant against the suddenly immense afternoon sky, which was now a study in contrast between ever threatening shades of gray.

Randy and Corey stood looking at the landscape ahead of them, and they both took notice of the sky, devoid of any of the sunlight that had made the morning so warm and welcoming,. They both heard the wind begin to gather cold momentum through the dead trees, and they both felt its chill.

(This is a short excerpt from the new novel I’ve started writing – I’ve been having fun letting it take me where it goes and discovering its stories.)

It was 3:00 on a cold Saturday morning in January of 1947, just hours after seeing his own father for the first time in fifteen years, and locked out of his own bedroom by his wife, when my father, Corey Tyler, drunk and disoriented, realized that he was soon going to be a father himself. He stood in the living room of his small upstairs apartment, staring at his closed bedroom door, and tried to comprehend everything that had happened in the past several hours.

His mind was racing from one image to the next, from his father’s eyes as they looked into his own to his wife’s moist eyes as she told him she was pregnant, to the German SS soldier’s panicked and wide eyes in Dachau as he pleaded for his life seconds before Corey ended it with a single cartridge fired point blank from his M-1 and the sound of the subsequent shots as Corey emptied his clip into the soldier’s already dead body, and the clicking sound as Corey continued squeezing the trigger until he felt Sergeant Harris’ right hand on his shoulder.

He found himself staring into the ice box unsuccessfully trying to find another beer. Then he tried the kitchen cabinet where he kept the hard liquor.  All that was left was a couple of ounces at the bottom of a bottle of brandy; he took the bottle and undid the top and raised it to his lips and emptied it down his throat. It burned as it went down, the familiar warm burn of a wildfire hungry for more fuel. He put his army fatigue coat back on and walked out the back door of the apartment and stood in the little landing at the top of the stairs and buttoned it up. He walked down the stairs and stepped outside into the cold and clean night air, down the gravel driveway to the sidewalk. He started walking to the west, where it was only one short block to Main Street.

When he got to Main Street, he stood for a moment and adjusted his eyes to the glow of the streetlights.  He looked up and down and it was empty, no cars parked in front of the store fronts, no traffic on either the street or the sidewalks. He knew the bars and Fred’s Liquor Store were all closed, but he walked to them anyway, hoping that somehow he was wrong, and that he’d be able to satisfy the empty ache in his gut.  But one by one, as he passed The Bull Market, Smitty’s, and the Foxes Den, and finally Fred’s, there was no drunken miracle unfolding to provide him with that just one more drink.

He reached the end of Main Street, his search for a drink proving fruitless, and the still, cold quiet doing nothing to silence the noise in his head. He kept walking, turning south on Sixth Street and continuing on past  the darkened homes  and empty driveways.  He found himself at the corner of Sixth Street and Logger Avenue, two blocks from the shack with the dirt floor that he lived in with his mom and brothers and sisters in the winter of 1933, after his father had left them with no warning or explanation. He knew there was nothing left of it, that it’d been torn down years earlier, but still he was compelled to walk down the darkened street and observe the space the shack used to occupy.

The shack was in the backyard, facing the alley, of the owner and landlord, Mr. Peters, a skinny little weasel of a man who worked as an accountant at the paper mill. Randy told him stories about Mr, Peters, things that Corey was too young to have known about, how he’d hit on their mom and offer her discounts in rent in return for certain favors, and how he beat his young wife, Mrs. Peters, a pretty and young blonde who Randy had a crush on.

The shack and Mr. and Mrs. Peters were both long gone now, the Peters’ having sold the property and moving downstate some time ago. The very first thing the new owners did was tear down the shack, and at some point they erected the chain link fence that Corey leaned on as he looked out to the empty space that his memory still occupied.  He thought about Randy, and Mrs. Peters and how her blonde hair would bounce when she walked, and he thought about his mom, how tough it must have been for her to live there, keeping Mr. Peters’ at bay while trying to keep her family together while trying to understand why her husband had left.  And here he was, on the night that his wife told him she was pregnant, alone in the dark, while she slept alone behind a locked door, locked to keep him out. He inhaled and filled his lungs with cold, fresh air.

He thought about the moment he shared with his father earlier that night, when their eyes locked on each other, and he wondered what it was he saw there, what it was he recognized, and it came to him. It was the same thing that had driven his father to leave that drove Corey to be outside in the middle of the cold night.  It was the same thing that drove him to drink, to leave his wife alone night after night. It wasn’t the same specific thing that made them both leave, it was the thing inside of them, the thing that let whatever haunted his father haunt him, just like it was the German soldier at Dachau that haunted Corey. It’d always been with him, even before the war, it’d been handed down years ago from the small man in the plaid wool coat in the Lyons’ Den, it was in his blood. Now he knew it, and he was able to name it, to put his finger on it, while at the same time he wondered if he’d ever be able to defeat it. He knew now that his father was powerless against the restlessness that drove him away from his home and family, and he understood that now, just like he understood that he was destined to stand in the dark on the outside of chain link fences looking back at his own pasts.

He thought of Anne and their honeymoon and his heart broke, and he realized that every night he came home late to a dark apartment he was chipping another fragment off of her crumbling heart, and he wondered if he’d already damaged it beyond repair. He turned his collar up and started walking again, further into the darkened streets, and he thought of his unborn child, safe and warm inside Anne’s body, and the cold and dark world it will have to enter, alone, a world of death and mutilation, and for the first time since he’d been out on the streets he could hear the echo of his footsteps in the cold and still night air.

When I die, take my body to the river and drop me in. There is no death in the river, the river just goes on, and in its shallow depths I will go on, too, in the cold and dark water, the current moving, steady and swift, and it will lift my lifeless body and restart my silent and still heart and there on the river bottom amidst the rocks and weeds I will be reanimated, reborn, and I will live under the surface, undetected and unknown by the life on the banks, carried on the current with the rest of the random debris that has been  gathered up by her on her silent journey, until we, myself and the other dead debris, reach the ocean, the place where even the greatest rivers end up and end at, each of their heartbeats cast into the endless dark depths until they, the currents, the heartbeats, of all the rivers in the world join together into the great giant heartbeat of the ocean, and I like all of the other debris brought to life by the river will also be absorbed, small and insignificant against the immense and  unknown wilderness of the great sea, and then I will be no more, my destination reached,  my purpose, to become the tiniest fragment of the enormous and unending pulsating muscle that gives life to the vast and deep waters, to be a drop of water in the random tides turned by the pale white moon, finally fulfilled.

About ten to twelve years ago, a member of the team I used to manage, a great guy named John Donahue, tried to capture the essence of his manager by creating the following work of fine art.  You’ll notice I am pining away for the great state of Wisconsin, something I did with great regularity and with great effect.

Since my emergency heart bypass surgery in April, people have been asking me how I came to be 99% blocked in one artery and about 90% in two others.  The answer can be found in John’s artwork, in the package of Oreo cookies he placed in front of me. My lifelong love affair with Oreos was no secret, particularly the double stuffed variety, which I consumed by the fistful.

One consumes 140 calories and seven grams of fat for every two double stuffed Oreos eaten.  This doesn’t sound too bad.  The problem is, whenever I’d open a new package of Oreos, I’d pour myself a glass of milk and grab a handful of about six Oreos. That means I was dipping 420 calories and 21 grams of fat into the milk and slogging down the drowned sludge.  Them, if still hungry, I’d often grab a second handful of Oreos, meaning I’d consume easily 42 grams of fat within a few minutes.

Once the package of cookies was sitting in my kitchen, I’d try and go about my business, but I could hear them calling me, like the sirens tormenting Odysseus, and they’d pull me in until I found myself at eleven o’clock standing over the empty remains of the package before I went to bed.   I haven’t bothered counting how many Oreos there are in a package, let’s estimate about forty.  That means it wasn’t uncommon for me to consume 140 grams of fat in Oreo cookies alone in the period of a day.

The problem was it wasn’t just Oreos I was eating.  If it was the night of a Kenosha Writer’s Guild meeting, on my way home, I’d cap off the evening with a Reese’s McFlurry from McDonalds, or a selection from the dollar menu, or an order of hot wings from KFC. I knew these things were unhealthy, but I never did the math, I never added up the volume of fat I was consuming.

Now, I’ve changed my eating habits, and I’m exercising every day.  I’ve dropped about twenty pounds, and just found out that my current total cholesterol is at 119, or about half of what it used to be.

I know, I know, – it’s easy to change your habits after a trauma like what I went through.  The hard part is making the new habits permanent, and resisting the urge to fall back into old habits.  To that end I’m maintaining an Excel spreadsheet where I list the caloric and fat content of many of the foods I used to frequently consume.  Any time I’m tempted to fall back and have one of these old favorites, all I need do is read the spreadsheet to remind myself of how I nearly killed myself.  Below is a portion of the list:

At some point I heard someone describe my blockage and the attack I had as “The Widow Maker,” where the left main artery to the heart gets entirely blocked.  Once blocked, things move pretty quickly and you’re only moments away from starting a new career as fertilizer.

I’m lucky to have survived my own stupidity, and I intend to do whatever I can to remain vertical as long as possible.

I’ve had almost three months now to put my heart issues in perspective, to analyze how the experience has changed me, and to figure out what if anything I’ve learned about myself or anything else. So here’s a quick summary:

1. I am overwhelmed by feelings of embarrassment and shame for not having taken care of myself. I knew all about heart disease before this happened, heck, I saw my dad through two surgeries before he finally died from congestive heart disease in 2011. Yet I continued eating fast food, ignoring what I knew about its fat content, and I didn’t get enough exercise. As the great Stuart Smalley often said, “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.”
2. I’ve led a pretty damned good life. Okay, it’s a little short on adventure and heroism, the kind of things that make one stand out among a crowd, but I’ve been blessed with the love of friends and family, an abundance of laughter and joy, and a minimum of regret. I think, in general terms, I’m a good man, and I’ve tried to learn from the many mistakes I’ve made. I’ve been a good husband and father, and I’ve made more people laugh than I’ve made cry.
3. I’m not ready for death ….not just yet. There was about a fifteen minute period on a Monday morning in Intensive Care, before the surgery and after my stress test, when it felt like the elephant playing the grand piano on my chest was going to kill me. It was a surreal time, as from my bed I could see the understaffed ICU nurses responding to multiple emergencies, code blues and stats, literally running from one emergency to the next, and I laid there, my light on, waiting for more morphine to ease the pain that was unlike any I’ve known before. And I laid there, my heart about to rip through my chest, thinking, they don’t see me, I could die right in front of them. I began to panic, then, after a minute or two, I started to calm down, not because the pain had lessened at all, but because I’d asked myself, what if I die right now?  And the answer I came back with was as surprising as it is difficult to describe. It wasn’t acceptance, I never came close to that, it was more like resignation. I remember thinking, if I were to die right now, if this all came to an end, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it. I’d made my bed, it wasn’t anybody’s fault but my own that I found myself in this predicament.
4. Health care workers are my new heroes. Whenever we talk about heroes, we (rightfully) start with the veterans who have served so bravely and humbly to defend our nation. Well, right behind them are the nurses and doctors and therapists who work around the clock to care for us when we are sick. In addition to the glamorous life-saving surgeries and treatments, there is the dirty and disgusting and thankless work, such as changing my sheets twice within a thirty minute interval after two urinal malfunctions (in my defense, Parkinson’s often makes for slow and uncoordinated movement). They changed my bedding and my gowns and cleaned me up quickly, efficiently, and sensitively, all the while preserving more of my dignity than deserved to be preserved. They are under-paid and overworked, and under-appreciated … until you need them.
5. Loneliness is an epidemic. Nowhere is lonelier than a hospital at three A.M. One of my night shift nurses was a late twenties, dark haired and bright eyed woman, thin but “plain.” She obviously loved her work and was very good at it, telling me in great detail what to expect in the coming days and weeks (which was incredibly helpful). She was so excited because the next day, a Wednesday, was her birthday, and she had the day off. I asked her what plans she had and she said her father was coming down from Green Bay and taking her out to dinner (he was a big fan of the Golden Corral buffet).  I couldn’t help but fall a little bit in love with her.
6. Exercise really is the best medicine. I work out three mornings a week at the cardio rehab at the hospital, and I always feel better afterwards.  Even my Parkinson’s symptoms are more under control on the days I work out. Not a big surprise to most people, but for one who used to hate working out, it’s been a major revelation.
7. I’ve changed my eating habits, cutting way down on the amount of fat I consume. So far, thanks to the new diet plus the exercise, I’m down twenty pounds from what I weighed before the surgery. I weigh less than I have in years, and while I’d like to drop five more pounds, my real goal is permanent changes in diet and activity, not short term weight loss.
8. I am getting my strength and stamina back, but even better I can feel my energy levels rise.
9. I am so grateful for my life. The debt I owe Dr. Stone, my heart surgeon, and all the nurse and practitioners who cared for me can never be repaid. Same goes for the love of family and friends. I value you more than words can describe. Above all I am grateful for my wife. She’s made every day in the past thirty four years worth living, and I’m a fulfilled and better man for her love. It’s for her that I pledge however many days I have left.