Isabelle

This one won't be easy.

That was the start of a blog entry dated almost three weeks ago, then sat unfinished and barely begun. The sweetest cat in the known universe died at the foot of our bed some time during the night. It was painful to watch, though we knew it was coming, and it is painful to recall now. So I will not dwell unnecessarily on her long, slow decline or the strange sight of her blank open eyes near the end as she labored to breathe.

Izzy and her brother Gus joined our family on my daughter Zelda's seventh birthday in 1991. We lived in Grandview, and our previous cat, Big Louie, had been hit by a car while crossing Northwest Boulevard. We buried Louie in the tiny back yard of our double and started looking for another cat. My running partner MacKenzie's tabby had kittens soon after, and he and his family were generous enough to let us have not one but two longhaired picks of the litter, the orange male and the black and orange tortoise-shell female.

Gus and Isabelle moved with us to south Alabama that summer and helped make our little house on Brook Lane a home. A year later they moved back to Columbus with us. Zoe bonded with Gus, sometimes wearing him draped across the back of her neck like a fur collar. My favorite thing was to lie on the floor after a run and cool down while Isabelle took a nap on my chest. Good times those.

The prime years were the ones we lived in a big brick house set back from High Street surrounded by an acre of pine, spruce, poplar, and maple trees with lots of wildlife. It was cat heaven and not too bad for humans. We acquired a dog during that time, and it took awhile for Gus and Izzy to accept Dali into the club, but eventually they came to terms.

Our move to Methodistville was relatively smooth for the animals, and each of them claimed their favorite places in the smaller house and yard. Now all three are buried in the back corner, just inside the fence on high ground under the cedar trees. Gus went first, and Isabelle was a wreck for maybe a year, crying day and night for her brother. Already losing weight and strength, she became much more needy and feeble but lasted another couple of years on sheer pride and stubbornness.

The question of another cat or dog has come up naturally. I think we will take our time with that and just let the house be empty of animals for awhile.

Turn the page

New job, new cast of co-worker characters, new set of acronyms and idioms to go with the new subculture of production. New kinds of problems to try to solve, new chaotic situations out of which to bring order. I've been an editor for so long, it had become burned into my identity, and officially at least, I'm not an editor anymore. We shall see how readily I shed that skin.

It seems like a lot of changes are happening all at once, because they are. The star wheel is turning from summer to fall, and just today the pine trees were shedding their golden needles like crazy. It's a downer in a sense, gravity and the receding sun's rays doing their thing, but I love the look of fresh pine straw on the ground.

The cooler temperatures are not harsh just yet, so the cold is not a problem either. Wear long pants, put on a sweater. It gets dark pretty early, so there will be no more eight o'clock bike rides deep into Delaware County with plenty of time to loop back home while the cars can still see the green flash of light that is me on le Trek.

I'm starting a new job in a different department of the same company, although the "same" company is morphing into a whole new starship publishing enterprise, so the department I was in for almost ten years will not be the same old department much longer. Even if I wasn't the new/old kid on the second floor, it would not be business as usual. Good news or bad news, you tell me.

I chose to disappear from the fourth floor quickly rather than make it a long, drawn-out leave-taking. It's not like I'm leaving the company or the big small town that is Central Swingstate. I just need to be here now rather than dwell on where I am not.

The plus side of not making many close connections with people at work is that when it's time to move on and call it a day, there are fewer attachments to break. I know that sounds harsh, or a lame rationalization, or fair-weather friendly, but it's not intended that way. I'm not the jilted boyfriend who says, after the fact, that he never really like her anyway. I'm more like the survivor of a shipwreck who washed up on a desert island and lived a good, long time on the nearest beach, in no small part because of help from the other inhabitants of that island. Now another tempest has washed me out to sea, and I'm learning to live on the fruits and nuts that grow on the next island.

Since I did not choose to make this particular move at this particular time, I have less at stake in its being the absolutely best thing ever to happen. Even an intentional change of situation has only an even chance of success: either it will or it won't work out to my advantage, however that is measured. As it says in the middle school math book, just relax and do the best you can. When the next challenge, opportunity, or long strange trip comes about unexpectedly, it's not all that different: I don't know where this story is going, but I will do what I can to make it go somewhere good.

That's just the thing. Being ejected from my comfortable seat in Editorial Land after all these years might just be the best thing that ever happened to me. Yeah, like it "happened to me" and I had nothing to do with it. I probably sowed the seeds of this departure/exile/deportation/ostracism many times over. Paraphrasing that most revered and respected of elder statesmen, Trickie Dick Nixon, they won't have Sven Golly to kick around anymore.

If anything, I'm anticipating a whole new professional adventure, and in the Joseph Campbell sense, you don't pick your adventures, they pick you. So I'm game. Let's see what kinds of trials and tests, temptations and traps, hidden helpers and hoodwinking hindrances lie in wait.

Peregrination

Let's say you're out for a nice bike ride on a gorgeous Sunday evening in Methodistville, and the wind is a mild sou'wester. MacKenzie's First Law says that you would start out going southwest, against the wind, to get the tailwind on your way back. It's an ideal late-summer time to unwind, in the immortal words of Chuck Berry, with no particular place to go.

If you go west on Walnut and hang a left at the cemetery, then head down Knox and cut through the service department past the skateboard park, you get to Alum Creek bike trail and go south, under Schrock Road and I-270, past a row of condos to a little unofficial eroded pedestrian trail up the bank to Cooper Road.

Here it gets tricky for a minute, as you ride uphill a short distance north, looking out for traffic on the curving two-lane road, before turning left on Corporate Exchange, a wide connector through an sort of office park campus that wends its way up to Cleveland Ave. and comes out, lo and behold, at the Home Depot. This was my objective: to find a route to that corner. Success!

There's no bike rack at O'Charley's, which is not a surprise, only a mild disappointment, since I was secretly hoping to bicycle there to meet my posse later this week. However, at the back of the parking lot I notice an inconspicuous, heretofore unnotice driveway, like a call to adventure leading around a bend and over a small rise to the Xenos campus, which looks busy, well-organized, and wholesomely friendly, like a cross between the Hallmark Channel and the Sci-Fi Channel. Just past the well-marked Cafe in the rear of the the back building I spot a gap in the fence, squeeze through a narrow gate at the back corner, an almost hidden portal onto an out-of-the-way dead-end street that leads to the mainstream normalcy of Sharon Woods Blvd.

I love to discover these obscure connections between the public geography that's printed on the map and the places that the locals know only because they happen to live there. Sharon Woods winds south from Schrock about a mile through a suburban residential neighborhood not unlike my own, past Underfunded Public High School, and comes out on state highway 161, one of the ubiquitous commercial strips from hell so common in central Swingstate.

Crossing 161, the neighborhood changes, as they say, and for an old white guy it doesn't feel so familiar anymore. Since I'm macho in my backward Buckeye cap and cruising along in high gear on le Trek, I have no fear, but through the roundabout of Tamarack Circle I know I'm not in Kansas anymore. I get as far south as Morse Road and things get really strange.

I haven't been to what's left of Northland lately, and apparently no one else has either, because it's deserted save for the surrealistic movie fascade of a building labeled State of Ohio Department of Taxation. This is either some extreme irony or people actually work here, but it's Sunday so I can't really tell, and the sun is going down, and I don't want to turn into a pumpkin, so I definitely need to head back from whence I came.

With no buildings blocking the view it's easy to find my way through the uninhabited expanse of pavement to Karl Road and head north past familiar landmarks like Woodward Park Rec Center, Epworth Methodist Church, the Northside YMCA, and the Karl Road branch of Columbus Public Library, all of which are, in my insular world, bastions of civilization.

Karl turns residential again north of highway 161 revisited, and it would be a stretch to say that I'm on my own with no connection home like a complete unknown, though I was enjoying the indirect route I was riding not quite like a rolling stone. After turning right on Schrock, I happened to notice a gate left open at the very back corner of Sharon Woods Metropark where it ends at I-270, so I doubled back and snuck through the gate into the park and found the unexpected treat of a perfect curving path through protected woods and picnic tables back toward Methodistville.

Directly across from the park entrance is St. Ann's Hospital, which reveals itself as a kind of campus, too, as I coast downhill through a succession of parking lots leading back to Cooper Road, which takes me back to Alum Creek trail and up the hill to Otterbein, which really is a campus, back to Walnut Street and Om Shanty, where there is a cold Great Lakes Eliot Ness Amber Lager waiting for me. Pointless but satisfying nonetheless.

Yo Ho Ho

You can feel the change of seasons in the air. The maple tree outside the office window already shows a distinct splash of orange. We pull up the down comforter sometime during the night. Football season is underway across this great pigskin nation. That must mean it's time to switch from gin to rum.

Gin and tonic is a summer drink, and on a warm summer evening, there's nothing quite like it, wedge of lime, thank you. Spring is for tequila, por supuesto. In a margarita, or with grenadine and OJ in a tequila sunrise, or all by itself, what the je. Viva agave! In winter it's vodka. Russian, Polish, Swedish, whatever. And from around Labor Day to New Year's Day, here roughly defined as 'fall', rum is the liquor of choice in my house. It's versatile, as refreshing in OJ as in tonic or, as a Christmas treat, egg nog.

Let's be clear. I am not advocating that anyone overindulge. Have one drink to take the edge off. If it's a seasonal libation, it becomes a little more celebratory, a little more connected to the four directions, the solstice and the equinox, the turning of the big wheel, with the cultural observance of winter, spring, summer, and fall. When I figure out the eight trigrams, the five elements, and the five flavors, you'll be the first to know.

Nine, nine, oh nine

My son Jessi was born 27 years ago today. Over the years, the numbers 9/9/82 have been kind of special for me, as well as an easy-to-remember PIN or lock combination.

The online Merriam Webster dictionary gave me this additional factoid this morning.

Did you know?

Since ancient times, various groups of people have considered nine to be a very special and sacred number. Legends and literature have long characterized groups of nine as having a special, in some cases magical, significance. Ancient Egyptians organized their gods into groups of nine; even today, their principal group of gods (headed by sun god Re-Atum) is called the "Great Ennead of Heliopolis." The "Ennead" English speakers use in that name traces to "ennea," the Greek word for "nine." "Ennead" is also used generally to refer to other groups of ancient gods. Furthermore, it is the name given to six sets of nine treatises by Greek philosopher Plotinus that were collected and organized by his 3rd-century disciple, Porphyry.

So there you go. Nine not just another number. Nine is out there. Dressed to the nines. The whole nine yards.

Everyone knows that 9 is super cool numerologically. If you add 9 to any digit (let's say 2 + 9 = 11), and then add the digits of the sum (1 + 1), you get the original digit (1 + 1 = 2). Oh wow!

Nine is very heavy in the Book of Changes (I Ching) too, indicating a strong yang element in any changing situation. Nine is all about creativity, mobility, and dragon-like power. Three in a row has to be auspicious.

So by the quirks of the base-10 numbering system and the Western calendar that has September (literally "seventh month") falling on the ninth month, September ninth in the ninth years of the current century kind of stands out. Three nines in a row, 9/9/09, makes 27.

Happy birthday, Jessi. You are a nine nine oh nine!

It's a Bean!

If you've been following the continuing story of our search for a car, the search is finally over. Thank goodness. It's been almost six weeks since the deer leaped into the path of Gven's Honda somewhere in western Pennsylvania, totalling both the car and the deer. The car made it home safely; the deer didn't.

In the meantime, we've been getting by on one vehicle, plus the Lincoln Town Car on loan from Gven's friend Kate. As Commander Cody said, "My pappy said son, you're gonna drive me to drinkin' if you don't stop drivin' that hot rod Lincoln." Now Kate can have her Town Car back, because Gven has bought a Toyota Echo named Bean. It's a cute little, dark red, kidney-shaped car, hence the name.

We test-drove Accords, CRVs, and Civics; Volvo S40s and XCs; a Subaru, a Land Rover, and a Sportage. Some came close, but none filled the bill. It's a good way to meet interesting people from the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, Ukraine, and Grove City. Long story short, car culture is vast and varied. Our research was less exhaustive than exhausting, and it seems to have worked out fine.

The Bean doesn't have power windows, a sunroof, all-wheel drive, or turbo. It isn't an SUV, station wagon, hybrid, or amphibious armored urban assault vehicle. It does have four wheels, an engine, air, and a CD player. It runs. It handles well, and it's great on gas. I think it will do, even without bells and whistles.

We'll have to see how Gven bonds with her car. It's doing well bopping around town, and soon we will take it on a road trip to see the parents. It's just good to have the car issue resolved for now.