To Prodigal Sons and Daughters

We still love you. We love you with your unlimited data plans, your $183 shirts, your Coach bags and matching shoes. We love you with your white table cloth dinners that you invite all your friends to and pay for them and tip not only your waiter, but the matrie d’, the bus boy, the coat check attedant, and the hansom cab driver. We love that you enjoyed a ride around the park. You bought everyone roses.

You’re so generous.

We loved the postcard from Paris; we aren’t sure how you enjoyed an opera in French since you took German in school, but we love that you tried. We love the perfume and the linens. We would have been happy with brie, but we understand that’s hard to ship. And the 1974 Bordeaux? We don’t blame you for drinking that on the plane ride home. The airline only has Sutter Home; we understand.

We love your San Francisco flat, made all the more charming because you rent it out on AirBnB when you’re out of town. You leave Ghirardelli chocolate on the pillows and sourdough bread on the counter next to your espresso machine. You have a basket of maps: wine country, Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Bridge. You allow small pets, but not children. Good call.

By Infrogmation of New Orleans (Photo by Infrogmation) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html),
CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), CC BY 2.5
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We really love your choice of cars. You could have gone flashy, Ferrari or Porsche.  You had enough cash for a Bentley. Instead, you chose a VW Karmann Ghia, which looks like a lot of fun, but not expensive. Of course, if you’ve ever had a VW, you know how expensive they are, what with all the repairs and renting of cars while the other is in the shops. Insiders understand truly what an expense it is.

We love these things not because they are wonderful. They aren’t. It’s a cheese, a wine, a car, an apartment, a shirt, a bag to put shit in. We love them because we know they are nonsense. And we know, because we are old, that the more you spend on these things, the closer you will get to realizing how much nonsense they are.

We have the table set. The guests are on alert. The basement is full of Two Buck Chuck, Triscuits and Velveeta. We have a 93 Corolla that runs and a bed in the spare room. We still have your high school yearbooks and the VHS tape of you giving a speech at the local Rotary Club.

Spend away. Do what you need to do. We love you. And we won’t say a word.

To The Buddha Sitting on the Porch of the Bad Luck House

The house they bought has been empty for three years. Someone moved out in a rush and left some unfortunate decorating schemes. A tough sell for any realtor. And the house doesn’t really fit with the rest of the neighborhood--wood cedar shingles that look like they belong on a cottage in Northern California. The rest of the houses on the block are brick, built in the 1920’s for tire executives and managers.

 

The house has a history: whoever moves in has always had a reason to move out quickly, staying just a year or two. The other neighbors never get to know them. It seems to attract the recluse, the different, the mysterious at best.

Years ago, the owner at the time bought a buddha placed him on the front porch near the door. He is a slender buddha. He is smiling with every part of his face but his mouth, one hand raised in blessing.

Two years ago, a family moved in. A man, a woman, two daughters. When I stop to chat and welcome them, he tells me he has four girls at the Catholic school down the road. The older two live close by, he says. With their mother.

Days later, walking the dog, I stop by again and talk with the woman. They have moved up from Columbus, to be closer to the older daughters. She seems uncertain when she says it, as if she’s trying to remember exactly what the reason is and it seems like it must be that. What else would it be? She ushers the girls past me, into the house.

I never speak to them again. I see them less and less. The car is rarely in the driveway. Today I think they must have moved; the house seems vacant. The grass is mowed but the hedges aren’t trimmed. No flowers like last year. All the drapes are shut.

Something is wrong in the house. Buddha is blessing. Peace to this house. Peace. Peace in this house.

To The Mayo Clinic Family Health Book

SymptomChecker.com is nice, plug in all the Things That Are Wrong, and hit "submit." Then it spits back some possible ailments: infection, lupus, arthritis. 

 

I'm not worried, just curious. Mainly, I just think I'm getting older and the assorted malfunctioning bits and pieces are to be expected.

Some days, though, I just want to wander through the medical literature, system by system, and get a look at the big picture. I study "Your Brain and Nervous System," the spine, each vertebrae, the way it should look if hand drawn and perfect. An x-ray of the damage. I assume mine is somewhere in between the two. I read, "Your brain is composed of approximately 100 billion neurons...." I can't imagine 100 billion of anything and I don't know what neurons look like, but I'm using several of them to think about the fact that I can't really know them.

"Your Ears, Nose and Throat" shows all the empty spaces in my head, the tiny bones in my ears, my vocal cords. It has instructions for "Proper Use of Your Voice" that suggests I avoid "excessively loud or raucous talking," which is easy to do most days, but I do enjoy raucous talking when allowed.

I study the lists of diseases and syndromes, mainly for their words: cystinuria, Dupuytren's contracture, vasculitis, agnogenic myeloid metaplasia. Impossible to tell which is dangerous and which is merely an annoyance, which is easily correctable and which has a low survival rate.

When we met with Rainer's doctors in the NICU before we knew it was fatal, one of them commented that when he goes home at night and his kids are in bed, he still goes into check on them. They are 10 and 13, but he still has to make sure they are breathing. He sits on the edge of their bed in the dark and just needs to make sure. Sometimes they are so quiet, he wants to wake them up. He knows all the possibilities. All of them.

We calculate the odds. We study the symptoms. Just to be ready. Just in case.