Driving Lessons

My sister Mindy taught me to drive.

My brother Chuck used to send me out to warm up the old truck while he was getting ready for school and he would even let me shift gears -- left handed from the passenger seat -- in his Mercury Bobcat while his hands were full with a milk shake and burger.

Yet it was Mindy that actually taught me to drive.  She taught me the trick to driving is to keep your eyes far down the road.

Then she took me car shopping and helped me buy my first car.

It happened like this. Mindy had just bought a Ford EXP -- which was Ford's attempt in the 1980s to build a sporty two-seater out of the Ford Escort econobox.

 It is a car justifiably forgotten today. Beige on brown with a tan mouse-fur interior. At the time, however, it my sister's pride and joy.  A new off-the-lot car that was all hers.

It says a lot about Mindy that she would allow her 15 year old brother to drive it at all, let alone teach him how to drive on it. Mindy was like that, she was an instigator -- but in the best way. She was a "C'mon, it will be fun." She was "lets race the horses up from the hidden fields." She was a creator of experiences.

Her experience teaching me to drive was fraught, at first,  since her car was a stick shift, and we lived on back roads full of hill starts and two lane curves. She was as patient and calm with me as with the horses she trained -- even when I almost let her car roll into the guardrail while trying to work the clutch from a stop on a hill.

Maybe she was having second thoughts about using her new car for such duty, because one day she said "let's go car shopping."

Mindy. Always with the smile and the "C'mon, let's go."

AMC Matador: Mine was Maroon 

I had some money saved up working the hay and in my mom's restaurant. So we set off for town one afternoon, visiting the various used car lots, looking at old pickup trucks and thrashed Pintos. Finally we happened upon a 1971 AMC Matador. It was bone-stock with some melted plastic trim inside from sitting in the hot Eastern Oregon sun. It was big, slow and comfortable. She helped me negotiate the deal and arrange to get it home -- since I was still more than a year away from getting my license.

It was not cool. This was the 1980s and irony had yet to be discovered, but it was a good fit for me.

That car was a freedom machine for me during my teenage years. Before I got my license we practiced on the back roads, piloting the big boat around the curves and along the old highway to horse arena, or to my friend Danny's house.

After I got my license, the Matador was the favorite in school for hauling way too many kids down to the store during lunch our, or over to The Dalles on a Friday night. I got in trouble in that car -- it had a habit of backing into things -- parked cars, a restaurant on my first date -- but I had many more good memories.

It was in that car that I discovered a love of driving. Something I thought about often these past few weeks driving up and down the gorge to be at her bedside. Driving is where I did my thinking, my crying and my grieving. Driving through the beautiful hills and stark vistas, through white capped river and broiling clouds, through shafts of light and heart-stopping sunsets.

My sister Mindy taught me to drive, and so much more.

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Good Fences

My last wood screw went into the last board as the rain began to fall.

There had been a steady drizzle, but now the dark ceiling opened up to a torrential downpour. 

I scrambled to put my tools away, slipping in the mud.  It took me a few moments to realize that it was the very last screw in my pouch - the last 3.25 inch construction screw I had.   It took still longer for me to get inside  the warm house and out of my wet clothes, to stand at the window looking at the green gray fields and admire what I had accomplished.

The fence was finished.

It still needed a coat of white stain on the last section, but that would come on a sunny day. My daughters love painting the white stain.

 I love good fences.

I never thought much about fences until we moved out West in 1978. I was Grace's age then and the forest hills and hidden fields seemed vast open wonderlands to me compared to the crowded suburbs of New Jersey. To be sure, we rambled through the wooded swamplands that backed up to our home there, but it nothing like 82 acres of field and forest. 

There was a great hill overlooking the whole property that we would climb in the last hours of a summer day with the night hawks already diving for prey. It was a grand thing to me then, to stand in an open field on the crest of a high hill, counting the white capped mountains as the pink fire of sunset painted the sky. 

The fences were barbed wire, which tears your shirt if you slide under it, and is too unsteady to climb over. Best to have a friend hold the wire for you,  if you want to climb through. Still they seemed few and far between.  We could ride our horses for miles without touching a road by simply finding the gates between properties, and making sure that we closed each gate we opened behind us. 

I never liked barbed wire. It rips the flesh of spooked horses and his hard to see in the trees. 

The fences I loved were at Crosby Stables. White painted rails around the whole property including the arena where Jim Crosby trained his Tennessee Walkers. I remember the mint green barns and the ink-black Schipperke dogs that Jim and Eunice used to keep. Little Tasmania devil dogs that would run and hop up to land on the rump a moving horse that never lost its stride. Jim was an Iowa man who landed out West with the railroad. We would ride over the hill to his place for 4H sometimes and he gave our family invaluable advice on horses when we were just starting out. Crosby Stables was like a microcosm of a Kentucky estate, four rail white fences cutting serenely through rolling hills. 

It is the fences of his idyll that I have tried to recreate here on my little patch of land. 

When we moved in, 22 years ago. The house was in need of attention more than the property so it became our priority. 

 The borders of the land were blackberry bushes with barbed wire buried somewhere underneath. 

When we had time and energy from our busy low-paying just out of college jobs, I hacked at the blackberries with a machete. Year by year cutting away at the invasive plant's empire of thorns. It was cathartic, but my desk job left me too weak to counter it's ever encroaching vines. It took years -- and eventually Hank's excavator -- to clear the last of it. It opened our property up so we could see the open fields beyond. We put in posts -- some dug with auger on the back of the tractor, other's dug by hand -- until finally the bright white-stained rails emerged. 

Just in time for little girls to clamber over them for walks out in the field. 

You see a good fence does more than just keep livestock in. It keeps animals -- and children -- safe. Lindsay and Grace love climbing the fences, or sitting on them and waving to grandpa as he goes by on the tractor. The white brings bright beauty in the dark gray of winter. 

I ripped out the last of the barbed wire a few weeks ago. 

Dug the post holes by hand. A good post hole digger will beat a week at the gym for building upper body muscles. There was a layer of gravel to go through too and some concrete from the old dairy barn that used to be nearby. At times, I was hands and knees pulling up rocks from the holes. 

Of course I never count right when it comes to how many boards I need, and that means another trip into town. No matter. There was a time when we could only afford to do a few sections of the fence at a time.  

Now I can even afford to buy a store-bought gate and latch. Much better than the home made gates that now want for replacing. 

The girls are helping me paint now that the weather has turned. Lindsay is dreaming of horses that will one day lean their heads over the top rail trying to see if there is a treat in her pocket.

As Lindsay and I paint, I tell her to take a step back every now and then and look at her work.

"Why?" she asks.

"So you can look at how far you've come," I tell her.

 "So you can see how much better you've made it by your hard work."

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Life is Not Fair

Life is not fair.

If you haven't noticed that by now, either you haven't been paying attention or you don't have enough birthdays under your belt.

Life was never fair, and never meant to be.

While whole religions have erupted from the minds of men to address this one issue, the fact remains, there is no divine justice wrought here upon the Earth.

I learned this lesson while I was very young, but had it reinforced by a decade as a newspaper reporter.  I saw cold-blooded killers set free, saw liars triumph and the honest punished for their honesty. Mendacity rules at all levels of power. Inhumanity and incompetence are promoted. Debased actions and bullying are rewarded. Being a reporter is to strive for truth in the face of lies. Journalists comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

In journalism, fairness is a watchword and justice is what every young wide-eyed new reporter seeks. Yet, the pay is barely minimum wage and you are disposable to your employer and community. After seven years at one paper -- winning awards and working 60 hour weeks, I was told to move on because the corporation didn't want to start paying reporters more than $18,000 a year.

"You've had too many raises," the executive told me from the hollow of his tailored suit. "You've reached the pay ceiling."

Everyone hates you when you tell them the truth anyway.

I had few illusions when I went into nursing.

Sure, there are golden moments when all is right. When your patients are healed by your actions and grateful for your kindness. Those moments must carry your for six months to a year before you might encounter them again. In the interim, the kind nurses will be cursed at and shat upon, denigrated and abused. They will work long hours and then be mandatoried over to work more -- punished for showing up to work.

They will cast themselves upon the rocks of the suffering and pestilent, the addicted and debauched, to be broken, yet to stand again.

At least the pay is better.

Moreover, as emergency room nurses we see the inequality of life's whims on full display. Children suffer, criminals get out of jail by malingering. The drunk driver murders children, then staggers away without a scratch. The kind die in pain and suffering while the cruel survive again and again. Sickness is not tied to sin.  The good die and suffer for no good reason. The gift of survival falls heedless of whether the recipient deserves another breath.

It is a hard lesson for a nurse to learn. The zen of nursing is learning to heal without judging, without a care about justice. Your job is to make the sick better, not to make the world fair.

No, there is no fairness in this business nor in life.

Yet in our larger lives, we must still strive for justice -- for justice is a thing wholly created by humanity. It is our humane reaction to the unfairness of life. Justice is the perfection we seek but may never attain. Striving for justice, fairness and equality are the only tools we have to battle back against the empire of fates that seek to pound us into submission.

The world is not fair.

It never will be.

Unless by our hands we make it so.

-30-

When Should I Start My Midlife Crisis?

I'm not dead yet.

In fact, I'm half 90 this week -- better known as 45 years old.

I think I'm doing pretty good, all things considered.

I have a home, a wife, great kids, a job and motorcycle.

Yet, I'm starting to worry that I'm getting a late start on my mid-life crisis.

Not that I'm planning a whole lot. I already have a motorcycle. I don't drink, smoke or fool around. I got my big career change out of the way a decade ago and I am pretty happy with it.

Maybe I already had it, and just didn't notice.

This birthday has got me wondering what we should consider mid-life these days.

While overall US life expectancy is 78 in this country I am in a position to know that how we live is a major variable. Previous generations have embraced smoking, drugs and alcohol in such a way as to skew the curve such that I often see 90 year olds healthier and stronger than 65 year olds.

That said, according to this calculator from the University of Penn- I'm predicted to live 85 years -- 95 if I'm really, really good and 76 if I take up the habit of driving drunk while not wearing a condom.

However, there is more to life expectancy than risk factors. The Death Clock, which uses a lot fewer factors figures I'll live to 95, but Amy will live to 103! That's the gender penalty. On the other hand, the Social Security Administration is only planning on me living to 81. While another calculator says I'll live to 95.

Or we could all be hit by a bus tomorrow (not all of us by the same bus, of course), making these actuary tables moot - at least on an individual level.

Moreover, we are always underestimating human ingenuity. We are on the verge of some major medical breakthroughs in terms of life expectancy. As aging baby boomers and Google founders pour their riches into ways of living and functioning longer, my guess is that we are going to see a continued increase in the lives of people with few risk factors who take care to lead active, growing lives.

Which brings up the question of the crisis itself. What is a midlife crisis? More than anything it seems to me to be a crisis of expectations - where we come to terms with the fact that we are unlikely to become pro football players or rock stars now that we've reached our 40s.

It is similar to the bad birth experience some mothers find themselves facing after they create elaborate birth plans for the delivery of their baby -- only to discover that baby had different plans about where and how he or she was going to enter the world.

In mid-life, as in birth, it seems we are overwhelmed by what could have, or should have been rather than what we have.

Many of us create ambitious fantasies about our dream life or dream career tangentially tethered -- if at all -- to our real abilities. That "what do you want to be when you grow up" game sticks with us.

Sometimes it becomes the "what do you want to do when you retire" game after a while.

My guess is retirement is likely to be a thing of the past in another 20 years -- so I don't even play that game much anymore.

As Moltke the elder once almost said, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." If you want to make God laugh, make long range plans. Life intervenes.

Rarely does life go according to our childhood aspirations. Yet these aspirations get integrated into our identity, our dreams - however unrealized - are woven into the fabric of how we think of ourselves. It is that dissonance that causes the crisis in our identity.

I have, at various times had serious plans on being:

• an astronaut
• a music producer
• an engineer/inventor
• an airline pilot
• a novelist 
• a professional football player
• an Olympic athlete 

Obviously, a couple of those dreams have fallen off the list.

On the other hand, I never had any aspiration to become a journalist - yet I did that for more than a dozen years with mild success. It is a career that I fell into, and it would not let me go.  Nursing was more of a calling than a career choice and the first 10 years dedicated to helping others heal has flown by.

Of course, looking at what we have accomplished and what we have seems to be the psychological salve to sooth this crisis of expectations. We are what we do. When bad things happen, looking at what we learned, or how we grew changes our perception of those events. 

The fact that we have reached the midway point of our existence -- without being hit by a bus -- should be an opportunity to take stock of what we have done, as well as what we have the gumption, ambition and means to still achieve with whatever time is left. 

Unlike our 12 year old selves, we understand now that hard work, dedication, money, talent and dumb luck are all ingredients to achieving anything we set our minds to.

Mostly, dumb luck.

That life hasn't turned out like we planned is often due to the absence of one or multiple ingredients -- or that you were planning on silly things in the first place.

Looking back at my list, I would have missed out on many of the most wonderful things of my life if I had pursued some other course. In his book 59 Seconds, Richard Wiseman talks about creating an attitude of gratitude for what we have -- but ignore -- in our everyday lives. (see the video above)

This exercise is a great for when you are mourning the death of your rock and roll dreams.

Or, whenever you have a birthday.

National Institute on Aging
Calico, Google's Anti-Aging Initiative
Wharton School at University of Penn
59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute by Richard Wiseman