docu-mental

One of the best qualities of TV news is its unbelievability. Maybe that's the secret to the widespread appeal and long-term popularity of network and cable news programming: its so easy to watch without taking seriously - to consume the packaged, predictable, perfunctory information-product of the McLuhanesque cool medium and let it slide right through, like shit through a goose, without much effect, and then watch whatever reality show is on next.

A well-made documentary film, on the other hand, is not as pasteurized, homogenized, bite-sized, overproduced, and packaged for fleeting mass consumption at 6:00 and 11:00, therefore it might take longer to digest, might actually require chewing, and consequently could stick to your ribs.

My friend Dr. Jack Thunder recently offered me the privilege of watching about 90 films on various social issues during the next several weeks, as part of a process by which some of them will win something. Besides the fact that I have no credentials whatsoever, it's nice to be asked to participate - put me in, coach, I wanna play! However, I'm beginning to notice some effects on my otherwise stable psyche.

I'm going docu-mental, Doc!

The piece about Ariel Dorfman's exile from Chile following the Pinochet military coup on 9/11/73 and the ensuing "disappearance" of Salvador Allende, his inner circle of democratically elected socialists, and many innocent sympathizers, for example, stayed with me for a while. I now have a couple of Dorfman's books on my To Read list, and I have a couple of friends I want to consult about his work.

A couple of days later I was transfixed for an hour by a Canadian film about a group of wholesome teenage girls in an outdoor education program and their 34-year-old male sexual predator teacher. Their first-person accounts of rendezvous to help this snake "clean his boat" left me a bit shaken.

Then a couple of days later, Zelda went camping with some friends at Zaleski State Wildlife Area, so naturally my paternal fears have been working overtime. She came home yesterday with nothing worse than sore muscles from hiking nine miles of hills and a coating of dirt from being outside for two days. So I'm relieved and reassured that she's a big girl and she knows what she's doing, and that I'm overreacting (moi?) just a bit.

As I haphazardly develop a set of standards - somehow 'I like it' or 'I don't like it' isn't enough - for discriminating between one film and another, maybe the level of my own reaction is as valid a measure as any. I take my temperature. If a film gets under my skin and shakes me up a bit, it must doing something right.

Tonight I'll watch one or two more movies, and if the stars align, one of them will grab me by the throat, gut, third eye, butt, brachial plexus, or gonads and rock my world for one hour and fifteen minutes. At least I hope so.

Everybody's Cryin' Mercy

And they don't know the meaning of the word.

Driving downtown to the art museum on Sunday (free admission!) I caught a few minutes of someone's very respectable cover of Mose Allison's song, which totally stuck in my head when I got to the museum and wandered contentedly in the second-floor galleries looking at quilts.

I can't believe the things I'm seeing
I wonder 'bout some things I've heard
Everybody's Crying Mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word

A bad enough situation
It's sure enough getting worse
Everybody's Crying Justice
Just as long as it's business first

Toe to toe
Touch and go
Give a cheer
Get your souvenir

People running 'round in circles
Don't know what they're headed for
Everybody's Crying Peace on Earth
Just as soon as we win this war

Straight ahead
Knock 'em dead
Pack your kit
Choose your hypocrite

Well you don't have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd
Everybody's Crying Mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word

What was the name of that club in Detroit where my friend Eddy and I saw Mose Allison? Eddy was a big blues and jazz freak who, luckily for me, turned me onto Mose and many other nonpop musicians, as well as places like the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor and the ______ in Detroit. Damn, memory, it was only 35 years ago.

It added a lot to the visual experience to have a soundtrack. A good museum is already a multisensory experience anyway, letting the placement of visual art in the gallery move you bodily through the space, letting your changing position in the room change the way the pieces on the wall meet the eye of the beholder, checking out the people checking out the art, humming a tune, seeing if a rhythm develops.

It wasn't a huge crowd, but the show was well attended. Quite a few younger people, a sizeable group trailing the docent who was leading a tour, and a middle-aged couple in continuous conversation with a tall younger man in a clerical collar and a really nice linen suit, eavesdropping on their conversation: (I'm paraphrasing) some people say the best reason for believing the Isaac story is that it's too outlandish to make up.

The quilt exhibit was great, by the way, with lots of variety in materials, design, color, and some stretching the definition of quilt. My favorite was a kind of collage of vegetable images forming a mandala. Gven and her sister and mother enjoyed it too - something for everyone.

In the back of my mind, I was probably still digesting Rev. Susan's sermon about reading the Bible without being intimidated, my favorite anecdote being the Presbyterian minister's account of shaking her Bible study class out of their fear of the text by asking them to imagine they were watching "Leviticus: The Movie."

By a happy accident, we found ourselves in another room adjacent to the quilt exhibit that contained a lot of images of text, including a book whose pages had been cut away into a long continuous paper strip that wound itself into a ball beside the book. I wish I'd thought of that, but I'm glad someone did.

Gimme Shelter

"We got the house!"

Zelda sounded pretty happy when I called her from the little theater in the student center, where Sanctified Brethren College was staging Proof. Her mother and I had just found our seats, along with Trainer Sue, and I was turning off my cell phone when I noticed I'd missed a call. There was just enough time before the curtain for that bit of exciting news from the daughter.

A little backstory might be in order here. Zelda and her friend Zannah have been looking for an apartment, and they found a double they liked in Hipville. She's been out of college for one year, seven months, and six days (but who's counting?) and still living at home (not that we mind!) and has wisely taken her time in making the next big move into Her Own Place.

She's a level-headed, fun-loving, logical-linear, visual-spatial, bookish, Norwegian-Scots-Bohemian-French, hyphenated-American young woman, but when it's time, it's time.

The play was excellent, by the way, four actors on a spare stage, great dialog a plot full of family tensions with equal parts push and pull - father-daughter, sister-sister, boy-girl - and not surprisingly, the mutual understanding of the brilliant father and even more brilliant daughter (it's a math thing, you [and I] wouldn't understand), tinged with toxic codependence, got my attention. Kudos to the SBC theater department. It took all of two minutes for me to suspend disbelief and buy into the characters, their peculiar states of mind, and their world. There is nothing like live theater.

The next night, it was warm and dry with a slight breeze, so Gven and I slept outside in the new tent, still standing after its initial setup. First we unstaked it and moved it to a different patch of grass, revealing a pale square of lawn that will soon recover, we hope. Each of us holding the middle of two flexible poles, we walked it over a few paces and put it down again, with the wind catching it momentarily like a big kite.

With a couple of yoga mats and a couple of quilts as padding, we slept just fine with the rain fly off and the stars visible through the netting. It was kind of a trial run for when we go to Michigan in September and kind of a flashback to days and nights in a homemade tent called Om Shanty in the woods of Strawberry Mountain Farm, Walker County, Georgia, once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away.

We slept inside the next couple of nights, then on a warm night I decided at the last minute to sleep outside again. Gven had already gone to bed, but it was cooler outside, and the moon and stars were out, so I lay down on the mats and quilts in the tent. A crash of lightning and thunder woke me up at about 3 o'clock, and I decided it was time to take down the tent.

It only took a few minutes to stow the bedding, and the long, collapsible poles folded right up and went in their little bag. In no time the tent was folded up and stashed in the workshop, just as it started to rain. The wind coming in through the bedroom window felt amazing, and as I came down from the adrenaline rush, it didn't take too long to go to sleep. And we needed the rain.

So the initial field-test is completed, I know how to put it up and take it down, and we're more or less ready to go to Michigan in a month or so. Not so sure about the handy air mattress with its own built-in pump (only $19.99 at Meijer).

Lars, girls, and reality

I saw this movie about a week ago, and it made an impression. Yet one wonders whether it is worthwhile, appropriate, or necessary to write about it. Would it be a tragic loss to not chronicle a remarkable thing such as this movie or my reaction to it? It isn't new, up for awards, or part of the zeitgeist. I should see it a second time, because sometimes, like with "Broken English," I am so affected by seeing a movie once that I think it's better than it really is. But "Lars and the Real Girl" is something special, I swear.

"Lars" is a bit like the inverted reality of "Truman's World" but smaller, quieter, and both inverted and turned inside-out. No, it's not, it's the complete opposite of "Truman's World," but it works on some of the same planes. It tells the story of a man/boy whose circumscribed world is about to burst open in unpredictable ways. It lets the audience see inside the psyche of the character and witness his struggle with identity, especially in relation to other people, including whom he can trust, touch, and confide in.

But never mind the comparisons, this is an altogether different (and better) movie. The aesthetic leap for me was not just suspending my own disbelief in order to enter the world of the film but seeing the characters suspend their disbelief, cultural blinders, prejudices, common sense, fear, and logic to treat a fabrication as reality. Beyond pretending, they bought into the game.

Sorry to intellectualize it unnecessarily, but that's what art does, and that's what play does, and that's what friendship does. Every homo ludens wants someone to play with, to enter a magic circle where imagination reigns and something becomes possible. Instead of treating people as objects - pretty or homely, smart or stupid, nice or nasty, good vs. evil - in a world of liking this and not liking that.

Mad dogs, Englishmen, and old jocks

What goes out in the midday sun? I'll take Old Sayings for 100, Alex.

It's a hot Saturday morning in central swingstate, and you have a meeting at the Old North Church in the morning and another meeting in Worthmore at noon, so you stop at home and, feeling your oats, decide to bicycle to the second one. Heck, it's not that far (6-7 miles), and in the shade of my decision-making brain, it's not that hot.

Kids, do not do this at home. This is not the Tour de France or the Tour de Lance or even the Tour de Grandview. But if you do, please factor into your decision: distance, temperature, wind, time of day, road surface, hills, and the continuous need for water, water, water. Anyone using common sense knows this, or should, hence the Old Saying about rabid canines and arrogant imperialist.

It started to sink in about halfway down Schlock Road, the convenient diagonal traffic artery with a designated bike lane leading directly from Methodistville to Worthmore. Since cycling creates its own breeze, it wasn't the heat itself that got to me, but after a couple of small hills the energy just drained out of my legs, and my whole body kind of shrank into a lower gear.

It's a strange somatic sensation, and I have learned the hard way that putting more effort into the movement does not make up for the oxygen debt when heart and lungs stop supplying enough ATP to the muscles. I've tried it, and it doesn't work. What does work somewhat is to relax the upper body by not leaning heavily on the handlebars, to breathe slowly and deeply, and to keep pedaling, just not so fast.

It's not rocket science, and my friend wasn't crushed that I got to Scottie McBean's at 12:10 instead of 12:00. In fact, we had a very productive conversation about a couple of small snags in the process of publishing his book. We talked about illustrations, permissions, digital files, and the medium being the message; I sweated through my T-shirt, cooled off, and rehydrated.

To add a bit of drama to an otherwise ordinary day, I got a call from my mate at McBean's about a minor emergency at the mall. So after my meeting, I took the side of the right triangle straight north toward Polaris, instead of the hypotenuse home to Methodistville. Note to self/others: Skankus Road is perhaps the worst place in central swingstate for a bicycle, a crumbling pot-holed two-lane thoroughfare in a busy residential/commercial corridor.

Next time I'll go a different way, but it was a straight shot to Macy's, and we unlocked the keys from the car so we could both be on our way. By this time I had also realized that my choice of headgear was totally wrong. Kids, on a 90-something degree day, wear something other than a heat-absorbing, polyester, nonbreathing, black Buckeye baseball cap, even though the block-O deters drivers from running you off the road.

What I didn't do on my summer vacation

1. Grow six kinds of peppers and two kinds of tomatoes in a well-prepared garden.
2. Go for long bike rides every weekend to exotic places like Mt. Gilead, Millersburg, New Philadelphia, Peninsula.
3. Put a new screen/storm door on the front door of Om Shanty.
4. Replace the ancient gutters on the northeast corner of the house.
5. Paint the garage.
6. Paint the back exterior (siding and trim) of the house.
7. Cut several low-hanging and damaged limbs off the three maples trees, thus letting more sunshine in and replenishing the woodpile.
8. Winterize the workshop with new stovepipe; organize the tools and miscellaneous materials into a usable space.
9. Go camping in northern Michigan, swim in Pencil Lake, check out my friend Chip's church in Traverse City, maybe even a side-trip to da UP, eh?
10. See Sam Shepard's play "Kicking a Dead Horse" at the Public Theater in the East Village; see the "Book/Shelf" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art; listen to a free jazz concert at Madison Square Park; see a Shakespeare play in Central Park; have a drink at Thor on Rivington Street.
11. Cruise the Baltic with stops in Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gdansk, Riga, Talinn, Vilnius, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg.
12. Buy a community pool membership and swim laps three times a week until I can swim half a mile, thus preparing for the triathlon I won't compete in this year. Or next.

NOT nostalgic

It was still light out after taiji class at the temporary Rec Center, and it was a Thursday night, when everybody is tired and it isn't the weekend yet, and it doesn't take much. It was a nice group of long-time students, some of whom are new to each other but each brings their own experience to the mix, and it was fun to practice together.

My venture south on High Street before going home was ostensibly to check out the Park of Roses for a place to meet outside for the rest of the summer. My class needs a place to practice between mid-July and the beginning of fall, when they reopen the renovated Rec Center, and I think the gazebo will do nicely. But it was the slice of Clintonville life on the way there that pulled at me.

You pass the library first, and it was bustling as usual. Then there's a long line of tennis courts, and every one was in use. Down the hill toward the meadow are ballfields, runners, walkers, dogs, bicycles, the occasional frisbee, and the entrance to the Park of Roses, where a throng of sari-wearing Indian girls were meeting at the shelter house and spilling out into the garden. It was a fine summer evening in a great urban park, and I miss it.

I had another errand to do, so I drove to the coop and bought flour, cheese, honey, and beer. On my way out the door, I saw Zelda's friend Max running down Calumet, said hello, he said hi back. It's a neighborhood, and I don't live here anymore, so I go home to the suburbs for supper.

Did I ever tell you about the time I met Joan Baez walking up High Street? Okay, if you insist. It was the week the U.S. invaded Iraq so that Bush II could be a wartime-like president-like, and there was an antiwar event downtown. It also happened to be the week of a Baez concert at the Palace, and as I was walking to the demonstration, there she was beside me, walking with two friends. I asked her if I could shake her hand, and before her companions could put me in a headlock, she said okay. She's pretty tall and has really long fingers. I said I loved her work, she said "Me too," and that was that.

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague

Turns out Zelda and two friends are looking at apartments in various parts of town, and at least one of them is a duplex in Clintonville right near the coop. Maybe they'll live there and maybe they'll opt for somewhere else. Her mother and I are gone for good.

Get over it. It was ten years, and it was no bed of roses, and it's been another five since then. Maybe in another five years I will feel that way about Methodistville.

People of the Library

Jesus loves me, yes I know,
Cuz the Bible tells me so,
Little ones to him belong,
They are weak but he is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
The Bible tells me so.

Before I offend everyone I know by saying things I'll later regret, let me just say that this is probably the first song I learned to sing. I clearly remember singing it in Sunday School at Middle Class Methodist Church in River City, Wisconsin, probably in kindergarten. It was foundational in our training as nice kids. Do kids still sing it? Does it still have the epistemological effect of teaching us that we know that x is true because it says so in a book?

I'm completely sure that this lesson was taught with the best intentions. I also remember that as the place where I learned to color inside the lines. And they say art isn't as basic as reading and math. The minister was the kindly Rev. Winslow Wilson, whom I've always associated with the scholarly Pres. Woodrow Wilson, go figure. I seriously doubt whether Rev. Wilson or any member of his flock was deliberately waging cultural imperialism, although there is no doubt they were on a mission.

These days, the culture wars are not between Asia and the West, the Haves against the Have-nots, fundamentalist Christianity against fundamentalist Islam, northern hemisphere capitalists vs. southern hemisphere colonials, or conservative Right vs. liberal Left. I think it's the People of the Book versus the Other People.

I'm not sure what to call the unorganized, uninstitutionalized, non-card-carrying rabble who do not base their beliefs, policies, and practices on a single inerrant, authoritative text. The POB have plenty of choice names, however, for the OP: primitive, anarchist, pagan, heathen, savage, you've heard them all. It seems every 'ism' spends most of its time proving itself superior to those lesser creatures, that is, when they're not killing them.

Notwithstanding the long and cherished rivalry between various peoples of various books, well known and thoroughly chronicled in their heated accounts of crusades, jihads, purges, reformations, inquisitions, purifications, revivals, awakenings, schisms, holocausts, hejiras, and diasporas, it's the noncombatants who have suffered most. The folks who haven't bought into either rival faction touting either rival text.

Despite their sectarian conflicts, these cultural warriors were all monotheists, imperialists, authoritarians, and People of the Book. They have so much in common! They were all on a holy quest to convert, subdue, civilize, educate, save, and enlighten the poor, confused, benighted, ignorant, deluded, uninformed Other People. Their major premise was: In the beginning was the word. The minor premise is: And the word was written in my book. Completing the syllogism is the conclusion: Buy my book and do what I say.

The irony for me, personally, is that I'm in the book business. I edit books, I read books, and I like books. I choose to spend most of my time with books. I was in school (and occasionally out for recess) the first 40 years of my life. I liked school, and the bulk of my schooling consisted of the traditional readin' and writin'. I've always encouraged that bookish model of formal education, and to some extent it has rubbed off. My kids work in bookstores. Books pay the bills. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Like making laws or sausages, however, if you get inside the process even a little bit, you lose the idealized notion of the book as a pure source of wisdom. Please. There are good books and bad books, like there is good and bad art, music, movies, and theater. There's only bad TV, sorry. All have their flaws, and all have a point of view, a bias, an agenda, a historical context, and a market. Most could use a good editing, and many are either lies or bullshit or a combination of the two.

The difference hit me in the face on a Friday evening at the end of a long and exhausting work week. I was sitting in the back yard enjoying a Rogue Amber Ale and slowly letting the sensations of being in the garden return me to myself from the workaday discursive drain. Birds flew in and out of the yard, light and shadow played on pine and redbud trees, hosta and daylilies danced their quiet riot in opposite corner beds. I wondered out loud what I would do without this space where words don't rule.

Of course I will return to work on Monday morning and complete the terms of my sentence. But this is not the name of the game, it's an epiphenomenon within the world-as-garden, and the Other People, who are not People of the Book, know this.

So to put this in a logical framework: there are two kinds of people in the world. Some actually believe that in the beginning was the Word, and then God created the heaven and the earth, rivers and seas, grasses and trees, birds and beasts, and two innocents in a garden. Others believe that earth and sky, wind and water, flora and fauna, naked apes pulling weeds came before language. The flesh made word.

Let me end this on a note of affirmation, even if it's too little too late. Just as humankind once turned the corner from neolithic to agrarian culture, then turned another corner in the Gutenberg revolution of printed text, we are in the throes of a digital revolution, yet books are still valuable treasures. Not just one book, but lots of them. Let a hundred flowers bloom. There's a library in the garden.

Impulse purchase

If you've been thinking about possibly buying something, let's say a new tent, just hypothetically, you know, after all these years of using the old Sears two-person (one person really) backpacking tent, if the opportunity presents itself and the price is right and the stars align, and it's not really a plan or even a strong desire, but you stop at Dick's on the way home from church on Sunday just to see what they have in stock, not even thinking of making a decision, and you even leave your wallet in the car, knowing that you won't need it because we're just here to gather information and see what's out there, and once you make it past the basketballs (only $15.00) and the full line of canoes and kayaks (who knew there were so many kinds, sizes, lengths, depths, girths, and how those dimensions relate to speed, maneuverability, and lateral stability?) you find quite a variety of tents, and some of them are drastically reduced in price, and all of them are less money than you thought you would have to spend, so you start comparing, just for the sake of argument, the Field and Stream brand to the Quest, narrowing it down to two or three designs in the same general size and price range (quite reasonable actually), and the salesman, a nice guy named Justin, offers some helpful information about the easy assembly of the Quest but the superior quality of the Field and Stream, yet there is a Coleman that is both larger and less money than both, with most of the same features and a killer warranty to boot, and why not get a little more tent for a little less money, so you carry it out of the store in the handy carrying bag and set it up in the backyard right away of course, and it really is easy to put up and spacious enough for a small revival meeting, and you're not really sure what the old lady will say when she gets home and sees it, but it sure seemed like a good idea at the time, and this will allow us to go up to northern Michigan any time without having to arrange to rent a cabin, so under the circumstances, is it still an impulse purchase?

It's only castles burning

Don't let it bring you down,
It's only castles burning,
Just find someone who's turning,
And you will come around.
(Neil Young, "After the Gold Rush")

On the fourth, the thirty-second anniversary of our meeting, Gven Golly and I went out for pizza. Half veggie and half spicy chicken and not bad. I think our first pizza was from the Mellow Mushroom that weekend in Atlanta, and it had sliced fresh tomatoes. We were both helping my sister Jo Jo move when the forces of the universe - and my conniving brother in law - brought us together.

Anni-versary (year-turning) 32 times around, and this one was fairly spontaneous. It was raining on and off, so I did some laundry, pulled some weeds, transplanted some vegetables that had planted themselves from compost. Other people celebrated the signing of an important historical document by lining State Street in their rain ponchos and umbrella watching other people parade through Methodistville on behalf of the Rotary or whatever club they want to promote by waving the colors.

While it rained, I played with the remote and stumbled across an old movie worth watching, quickly becoming hypnotized by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo - the architecture of posh San Francisco, the clothes, all blue suits in dark red rooms, and the strange interplay between a crazed James Stewart and a crazed Kim Novak in her big green car.

When it was time, I tore myself away and we went out for pizza, but no real restaurants were open; I guess all the right-thinking people were doing barbecue or blowing things up, so we ended up at Donato's, which, I'm sorry to say, does not have the vibe of the Mellow Mushroom. By the time we got home, the fireworks had started, so we walked across the street and joined several little groups of neighbors in the little park on Park Street with oak trees for all eight of Ohio's presidents (we stood by McKinley) and watched the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air.

It was barely past the twilight's last gleaming and nowhere near the dawn's early light, and there happened to be another decent movie on TV, so we watched 1776, the film version of a Broadway musical that I saw with my Mom many years ago at the Fisher Theater in Detroit. I remember it being very good on stage - unpretentious, insightful, and funny - and the movie actually did the play justice. The characters of Franklin, Adams, Dickinson, and Rutledge were especially revealing of their regional, intellectual, and class differences, all of which shaped the great compromises that followed.

On the fifth, Gven and I made it to a friendly gathering at Julie's house for drinks and dessert. I was so immersed in a project that I didn't know if I would go, but I was pleasantly surprised to complete enough of it to call it a day and energized enough (by the work or by the party, I don't know) to have a really good time.

What project? After about four years of contemplating, speculating, and ruminating, I finally got around to setting the first two posts of a pergola on the brick patio. Various design ideas have been pergolating all that time - sorry, that just had to be said - finally culminating in decisions about dimensions, materials, and placement.

On the sixth, the weather held, so I added a horizontal piece to the two posts and strung the electrical line from the house to the garage that has been disconnected for about a year, looping it through a screw-eye on top of one of the nine-foot posts. For me, this is a major engineering feat. The fun part was finding out that the circuit breaker I thought was for the garage was not, and I have a melted tip of a Swiss Army knife to show for it. So I threw the main breaker just to be on the safe side.

No, the really fun part was Zelda helping me connect the (cold) wires, the two of us standing nine feet up on stepladders, one pulling the wires together and the other twisting wires with needle-nose pliers and taping them tight. The moment of truth: Captain, we have power! Next weekend maybe I can get the garage door opener to work.

no good news, no bad news

This just in from Volunteersville:

The dahlias, gladioli, and daylilies are blooming. A pileated woodpecker was sighted in the front yard and a redheaded woodpecker and a hummingbird at the feeders in the back yard. Sister Jo Jo has been there this week to accompany Mom and Dad to their doctors' appointments, do some oral history interviews, and work on the ever-present jigsaw puzzle. She is as resourceful as she is good company.

Chas Golly saw Doc Justice this morning, and the CAT scan showed no significant change from the last scan two weeks ago or the one six weeks ago. So is the glass half-full or half-empty? Even fancy digital imaging technology doesn't show everything inside the man's skull, but it doesn't show any new bleeding or fluid, and that would be a problem. It also doesn't show a return to pre-injury shape and contour.

Since he is having no symptoms to speak of - at least he isn't speaking of having any symptoms, no dizziness, loss of balance, headaches, or disorientation - Dad has been declared fit to go back to his regular activities. He can play golf, work in the garden, drive the car, cut wood, carry water. And he is glad to be back in the game.

Actually he has been playing for the last two weeks with his Monday morning league, the Mulligans, although not at the level he would like. His energy is sufficient to make it around 18 holes, so endurance doesn't appear to be a problem. Yet he isn't getting much distance on his drives, and he isn't getting under the ball in general, so he's trying to correct the mechanics of his swing.

The Doc is waiting before putting Dad back on coumadin, the blood thinner that so many people use. He an atrial fibrillation, so the chambers of his heart don't completely fill and empty with each beat, and a little blood tends to pool up behind the valve that fibs. There is always a chance that stationary blood could form a clot that could then move somewhere, such as an artery in the brain, and do some damage, such as a stroke. Coumadin reduces the risk of a stroke, but it also increases the risk of the bleeding that was caused by his (unrelated) head injury. There is trouble if it's too thick and trouble if it's too thin, so the head has to heal some more before he resumes the heart medication.

Mom has her own issues, including a vitamin D deficiency and a number of foods she can't eat, and she has lost a few pounds. She has reduced her activity because she gets fatigued doing household tasks like cooking and cleaning, but there are things she would like to do if she had the energy, such as play a little golf and do more in the garden.

My parents are getting older. They have a lot of history, mostly healthy and active, but everything takes its toll eventually, and they are slowing down and wearing out. They have a lot of habits, mostly productive ones, but at some point any groove can become a rut, and it gets harder and harder, if not impossible, to unlearn one pattern and learn a new one. I doubt whether the little bit of taiji I showed Mom or the rehab program my nephew Max worked out with Dad can make a significant difference. Especially if they don't practice it. They do what they like to do, and it's been working pretty well for fourscore and seven years, so maybe they know what they need.