Pleasures of Fly Fishing

It’s fortunate for me that the pleasures of fly fishing are not limited to the catching of fish. If you were to come upon me on a trout stream any time between April and November, you would most likely find me futilely attempting to untangle a Gordian wind knot in my line, or trying to retrieve the last of my hare’s ear nymph, wrapped around a willow branch eight feet above the bank. You’re less likely to find me actually with my fly in the water, floating in the drift, and even less likely to find me with a fish on. None of those pictures you see in outdoor magazines of anglers playing a strong fish, taut line spraying in backlit sunlight, or kneeling in the backwater, holding out an unseemly large brown trout, beaming in triumph – none of those pictures is of me. I’m the one around the bend trying to get my butt up the bank and through the brush without snapping off the tip of my rod.

Nickname

I ran into a former (après-retirement) colleague of mine at the library this afternoon. She was towing her eight-month old daughter who I had not met, a cute, healthy, happy, smiling infant. I asked what the child’s name is, and the reply was T-bone (the spelling might be Teabone or Teebone or something else, but I want to think it’s T-bone). Familiar with the premature eccentricity of my young colleague and her partner, this didn’t take me back at all. My initial response (internal) was, how perfect – the kid starts life with a nickname. I always wanted a nickname myself. During high school, I wanted to be called Skip (for whatever reason I don’t at all recall). In college, I harbored a desire to go by Sal (the nickname of the narrator in Kerouac’s On the Road (though J.L. McClure doesn’t move as easily to Sal as Salvatore Paradise does)). But one can’t assign one’s self a nickname. A nickname either comes – from a given name or a physical attribute or a behavior – or doesn’t. For me, it never did. But little T-bone begins with a built-in nickname, and a pretty good one at that (though it would be better if she were to move to Chicago or Kansas City later in life). No doubt there will be eyebrows raised when she enters the classroom and has her name read off the roster at the beginning of class. Then again, maybe she’ll get a nickname of her own – maybe Teresa or Tracy or Tammy.

Does the President Fart?

As I was watching President Obama’s State of the Union Address last night – that annual exercise in insignificance – I began to wonder if the president ever farts, if any president has ever farted while giving a speech, and if so, has it been picked up on microphone, and if so, what was the response of the audience and the analyses of the analysts who analyze presidential speeches. Presidents’ speeches have been broadcast and recorded for almost 100 years now (Calvin Coolidge gave the first State of the Union Address over radio), almost on a daily basis for the past 50 years or so. You’d think the odds would favor that at least once in all of the thousands of hours of speeches that some president (my money would be on Gerald Ford) would have let one rip, and that it would have been caught on tape. What was the response of the audience? Did they wince in embarrassment? Did they giggle like a group of fourth graders? Or did Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) shout out “You lie!”? Perhaps everyone empathetically kept their silence, including the media (though that seems highly unlikely). Maybe presidents are given gas reduction medication prior to any major speeches.

I googled “president fart” and got 3,460,000 results, the first being this on YouTube:

Unfortunately, this is a bogus clip, and I didn’t bother going through all the rest of the 3½ million hits. So the question hangs in the air, as it were. I realize this isn’t the most cogent analysis of Obama’s speech. But I doubt that you’re likely to find any more insightful appraisal in print, on cable, or online.

Gold Fish

It’s not easy to kill a gold fish. At least not on purpose. I’ve done it. I’ve flushed a couple down the toilet. I’ve allowed a number to become entombed in the ice of our pond, their corpses floating to the surface in the early spring. In an indirect way, I’ve provided easy access to our fish to the cat and raccoon that patrol the edge of our pond, the gnawed skeletons scattered on the ground in the morning. But when I’ve brought some of the pond fish in for the winter and put them in an aquarium, as I did again this year, I’ve not been able to knock them off. I came close this week, though. We had to buy a new filter and pump this year, and after a couple of months it had become gunked up. So I decided to clean it. With vinegar. (That’s what we clean the coffee pot with, after all.) And it seemed to work fine – most all of the algae and gunk melted away, I rinsed everything out well, and put it all back together. But the next morning the aquarium was cloudy and the fish were gasping for air at the top of the tank. Things did not look good. My wife suggested a ph imbalance, which sounded as good a diagnosis as any, but what did that mean and what could I do about it? Moreover, what did I care? If the fish died, the fish died. They’re lucky they aren’t like their more unfortunate brethren this winter, encased in the ice of the pond out by the garage. They get two daily feedings and seem quite content, if completely unaware, in their aqua cage. If I were to flush them tomorrow, they’d be none the wiser. But they survive, if not thrive. The water began to clear up the next day, and after a few more days had cleared up altogether. They’re happy (I can only suppose) to suck in gold fish flakes twice a day and mindlessly cruise the tank in the beams of sun that slice the water. In a way, I envy them their obliviousness to the climate change threats to their confined environment. But they remind me in uncomfortable ways of those in our own confined environment who remain oblivious to the not-all-that-different threats to our own.

Surgical Aftermath

I had surgery on my hand the other day. It was the second time for the same surgery on the same hand in the past five years. I’ve been told (twice now) that there’s no guarantee of success and that recurrence is not uncommon (I like the double negative assurance). Again this time, the surgery went without complication. I went through the procedure like a widget through a factory, a widget that’s gone through the same processing before, a mulligan as it were. I knew the routine and was appropriately stoic in the early morning prep, the interminable wait with nothing to do but watch CNN and check my email, and finally the march to the operating theater (they actually call it that, as if our performances will all be reviewed the next morning in the New York Times). I was of course out for the next two hours of the operation itself. I awoke vaguely over an hour or so in post-op, being asked about pain (“I’ll take some more drugs, thank you very much”) and generally what planet I thought I was on (“Uh . . . the round one?”) before being taken to final recovery where I was given a snack bar and water and pain pills (“thank you very much”). After a brief bout of nausea while trying to get dressed (with my wife’s necessary help), I finally was discharged into the snow and frigid temperatures of an Iowa January.

When confronted by others who can’t miss the prominent bloody bandage on my right hand, the first question is always, “What happened to you?” The first day or two I’d answer truthfully, “right little finger fasciectomy.” But after puzzled expressions, I changed my response to the more intrepid, “Bar fight.” The next question is inevitably, “Is it painful?” And the simple answer is, no, I haven’t had much pain at all since I left the hospital, I didn’t fill the prescription for pain meds the surgeon gave me because I don’t need them, I have an apparently high threshold of pain, and the real question you should be asking is, “Is it maddening to have limited use of your right hand?” Yes, it sure as fuck is. My right hand is my dominant hand and unless you’ve lost most use of your dominant hand you don’t realize that your life morphs into some bizarro universe where your right hand is useless and you have to rely on your left hand to do an amazing number of things that you’ve never thought twice about before – taking a shower (particularly shampooing), brushing your teeth, wiping your butt, making coffee, putting on your socks, tying your shoes, buttoning your shirt (or pulling it over the bandaged hand), getting dressed generally – it goes on, added to surprisingly as each day progresses, actions you have taken for granted that suddenly become frustrating, painful, strenuous, or comical. The presumption going in is pain. The reality is bother.

Evangelicals Support Santorum (and Break Law)

When I read the headline “Evangelical leaders back Santorum,” my first thought was, Can they do that? My second thought was, Of course they can, because religious groups can do whatever they like in the U. S. of A. (except for some religious groups such as, say, Muslims). But should they be able to do that? Isn’t there some sort of First Amendment to the Constitution that implies a separation between church and state, between religious belief and political activity? As it turns out, there is, though it exists in the tax code. Religious organizations which claim tax exempt status (and they all do), fall under the 501(c)(3) requirements for charitable organizations (religious, educational, literary, arts, amateur sports competition, prevention of cruelty to children or animals, and a bunch of other well-meaning groups I’m sure). What the tax code says about supporting (or opposing) political candidates is pretty clear (very clear as far as the typical tax code goes):

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.

You would think these “evangelical leaders” – who were acting explicitly as spokesmen (I’d say spokespersons except that they’re all men) for their respective churches – would be in violation of this “absolute prohibition” against campaign activity. But you would be wrong. Why? Because what government agency – the Justice Department? the IRS? – is going to go after such a politically powerful institution as religion? Now if it were, say, an education group (let’s say public school principals) that came out in favor (or opposition) to a particular political candidate, how long do you think its tax exemption would go unchallenged? Are there microseconds? All laws are made to be interpreted, and they’re interpreted and prosecuted by whoever is in power at any point in time. And who (including the Islamic Kenyan Obama administration) in this point in time is going to go after any conservative religious group? This is not a country of law or justice, but a country of interpretation, preference, and the current of cultural wind.

Actinic Keratosis

One of the several old man ailments I suffer is actinic keratosis, a small, scaly deformation of the skin, usually the face, arms, or hands that may develop into skin cancer over time. It is caused by having fair skin; long-term, daily sun exposure; multiple severe sunburns when young; and old age – all conditions I can lay claim to. For the past 20-plus years I’ve gone to my dermatologist, Dr. Tom, at least once a year, sometimes twice, to have him search my skin for lesions and burn off those he finds with liquid nitrogen. There’s no pain, a little discomfort, and Dr. Tom and I have a nice chat, he asking me about what I’m teaching (or now how I’m enjoying my retirement) and me asking him how his kids are doing (he has a son in med school who he hopes will take over his practice in a few years). He’s a scuba diver and an amateur underwater photographer, and we’ve talked about the barrier reef off Belize. It’s become a friendly professional relationship. About a dozen years ago Dr. Tom found something more troublesome on my upper right arm than an actinic keratosis – a basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. He was able to dig it out in his office – the thing I recall most vividly was the smell of my burning flesh as he cauterized the wound – and there wasn’t any spread of the cancer found in the biopsy. The only real problem with my actinic keratosis is cosmetic. For a week or so after treatment (burning off with liquid nitrogen), my face sports three or four red scars that resemble war wounds, and people who meet me stop cold and stare as if I have leprosy, asking what in the world has happened. I explain the horror easily enough. It’s just a history of being Irish and fair-skinned, playing baseball shirtless through the summer in the sun when I was young, and growing old.

Our Spies In Iran

“I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

(Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist)

“Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for or was sent to Iran by the CIA are simply untrue.”
(U.S. Spokesperson Victoria Nuland on the death sentence for American Amir Mirzaei Hekmati in Iran)

Excuse me for not believing for an instant either of these denials. Not that I don’t think that the Iranian government is corrupt, tyrannical, violent, terrorist, dangerous, and just bad guys all the way around. But can anyone really believe that the United States isn’t thick in Iran with spies and assassins and drones and lord knows what else? It’s what we should be doing. We don’t have spies in Iran? We don’t have assassins – or are at least helping Israel with their assassins? Or course we do. There’s a long history of U.S. denial of spying, going back at least to Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960 (we said at first it was a weather plane), and I’m sure it goes back much further, probably back through the Civil War and even Revolutionary War. Who admits to spying? No one, of course. (Remember last year when the U.S. claimed Iran had planned to kill the Saudi ambassador in a D.C. restaurant? Iran denied it.) But knowing that every country is doing it all the time makes the denials all the more absurd. And our government wonders why we don’t believe anything they say?

Another Surgery

I thought I was offering something of a joke when I suggested to my surgeon that it might be best to just cut off the pinky finger of my right hand, but I was surprised when he responded a bit too casually with, “Well, that’s a possibility, but I think we should try surgery again before amputation.” I suffer from Dupuytren’s Contracture (or disease or syndrome or fracture), a painless affliction, a hardening of the fibrous tissue beneath the skin of the palm that causes the fingers corresponding to the affected tissue to slowly flex or curl eventually into a permanent grip. Four years ago I underwent surgery (called fasciectomy) on my right hand to reverse the curling of the pinky finger, which had made it difficult to put my hand in my pocket or glove and impossible to use in typing. The surgery went fairly well, but I was told going in that it was not unusual for the condition to return. And it has. It’s more of an inconvenience, or at most a frustration, one more incessant reminder of age. I’m going in for another surgery. I don’t hold out much hope that it will alleviate the condition for more than a couple of years. But then that’s a couple of years before the next best option is amputation. And I can’t imagine a more defining marker of aging than when they start lopping off appendages.

A Mouse Up My Leg

Certain memories linger though we’d prefer they didn’t. One such for me is the time a mouse ran up my leg inside my pants. I was living in a student apartment in Wichita. It was a duplex, probably built in the 1920s or 1930s. There was a moldy, dusty basement that I was afraid to go into, and fortunately there was no reason to do so. Mice lived in the basement, apparently in abundance. I would be reading or writing late at night, and regularly a mouse would scuttle along the baseboard across the room from me, usually three or four of them an evening. Sometimes they would pause, look up to see what I was doing, and seeing I wasn’t doing anything that threatened them, go about their business. We had what was essentially an appeasement – they went about their business in quiet, and I went about mine. Then one morning I was in the bathroom, doing my business, my jeans down around my ankles. The heating in the apartment was forced air and for some reason there was an open grate on the floor just in front of the stool in the bathroom, placed just so that my downed pants leg covered much of the grate. Yes, as I sat there I felt something scurry up my leg. I slapped at it when it got somewhere around my knee, stood up, and saw the rodent fall dazed briefly to the floor, then disappear quickly back into the grate and back to the basement. I don’t know if that mouse survived. It probably did. And surely it had a tale to tell of survival in the jungle above the grate and in the dark night of the denim. And I have the memory that in 40 years won’t go away.

The Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa Republican caucuses are a weird political event. Actually, they’re not a political event so much as a media event. They’re little more than a non-binding straw poll of preferences among a minority of registered Republicans. The “votes” mean nothing politically. The caucus attendees, meeting in groups of several to dozens to maybe scores in homes and schools and churches, after hearing last-minute speeches on behalf of the candidates, write down their preferences on blank sheets of paper or raise their hands, the results counted on site, and then the results are phoned in to the Iowa Republican Committee who collate and release them to the media. There are delegates elected at the caucuses to attend county conventions, but they are uncommitted, not bound by any of the preference “votes.” At the county conventions, delegates, also uncommitted, are elected to the state convention where delegates are elected, uncommitted, to the national convention. So among the candidates in the caucuses, there are no winners or losers in terms of delegate count, as there are no pledged delegates to be won or loss. It’s the media’s (self-compelled) job to determine who won and loss, and that is based entirely on the expectation built up over the weeks leading to the caucuses by . . . the media.

So in this year’s caucuses, there could conceivably be four winners: Romney (if he finishes first), Paul (if he finishes at least second), Santorum (if he finishes at least third), and Gingrich (if he finishes fourth). Perry and Bachmann could also be winners if they finish fourth or better, but that would mean at least one of the other four would have to drop down, making them losers. Romney would be a loser if he comes in third or lower, Paul if he comes in third or lower, Santorum if he comes in fourth or lower, and Gingrich if he doesn’t make it to fourth. The defense of the caucuses is that they “winnow the field”: if you can’t mount a grass roots campaign that puts you in the top three or four in Iowa, you can’t make it anywhere, and you would do us all a favor by dropping out now. Which is why there are always three or four winners and two or three losers. It’s the ultimate in media-driven horse-race politics. And it’s no surprise that the importance of the Iowa caucuses emerged in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, as the 24/7 cable news megaphones were born. The caucuses are regularly touted (by the media) as pure grass-roots, knock-on-doors, campaign-over-coffee democracy. But they are nothing of the sort. They are a media created and media sustained (money making) circus. They don’t deserve to be “first in the nation” – they don’t deserve to continue as is at all.

Another (New) Year

New Year is one of our most curious holidays. Of course it’s a cliché that any new year (or new day or week or month or decade or whatever) is an arbitrary marker of time that designates nothing in relation to the continuum of change that happens above and beyond our perception of that which we can’t perceive. We – and our world – are constantly changing on micro and macro levels, mostly unseen. So we’ve invented time to help us mark our life’s changes. Yes, there is some astrological relation to our notion of time (our planet just completed another revolution around the sun). More to an understanding of our change might be the physical, observable markers – the turning of leaves in fall, the falling snow in winter, the greening grass in spring – our first broken bone, our first sexual encounter, marriage, a child’s birth, a grandchild’s birth, a knee replacement, the death of a parent, a move into a nursing home, the death of a spouse. But of course those would be (and are) personal markers. So we’ve constructed these cultural markers of time (days, weeks, months, years) to help us with a larger cultural, shared understanding of the movement from birth to death. And the year is a moderate, comprehensible unit to contemplate within the infinity from here to there within a life. Although whether “New” is the best adjective to describe it might be questionable. Perhaps “Another” would be more appropriate. As in, “Happy Another Year!”