#116 - A Ginormous Problem

A Ginormous Problem

1/21/08 (#116)

Just as it is fascinating to live in a city on the cusp of exponential growth, the skyline growing more jagged by the week as each new junior-varsity skyscraper arises to hold another few hundred Portland couples and there .2 children, it is enjoyable to live in a language that perpetually expands and contracts with each passing fad. Sure, it's disconcerting to hear a fifty-something white man use the word "shiznit", but it's also disconcerting to see a fifty-something man in a bikini---and that's hardly the fault of the bikini. For the most part, I embrace such linguistic developments (even if don't adopt the new terminology into my daily vocabulary), but there is one word that I hear with growing regularity that causes me to lament that the English language has no bouncer at the door:

Ginormous.

This adjective is apparently a mash-up of gigantic and enormous, emerging to describe that specifically particular size that is slightly larger than gigantic but not quite enormous. Or perhaps enormous is the lesser adjective? Considering that they're nearly perfect synonyms, ranking them is like identifying the largest egg in a full carton of "large" eggs.

When I began contemplating the growing ubiquity of ginormous (both number of users and number of uses seem on the rise) I suspected the origin lay in each generation's desire to create a language of their own: The flappers of a century ago spawned an amazingly creative argot full of reinventions (Fire Extinguisher: The chaperone on a date; Smudger: A person who likes to dance closely) and creations (23 skidoo: To ask/order someone to leave), a manner of speech that surely sounded like a foreign language to the generation that preceded them. (Peruse the "Flapper" section of any slang dictionary and you'll see how extensive their reinventions were, and how influential their vernacular was to our modern English.) After that, the Beboppers arrived with another personalization of the available language, and the soldiers of World War II generated new phrases of their own. Then came Bobby Sockers, hippies, hip-hoppers, gen-Xers, skateboarders, ad infinitum---each generation modifying the language to suit its new tastes. Just as General Motors urged young drivers that "this is not your father's Oldsmobile", the latest generation doesn't want to be saddled with having to use their parent's vocabulary; just as Kerouac doesn't mirror the syntax of Shakespeare, modern generations want to redecorate the sentence to reflect their new personality.

While I thoroughly support the mashing of two unrelated words to create a new adjective (I've created many of my own, collected in my Ridictionary), the vocabulary mash-up requires the application of creative sensibilities: The new word should shine in a way that the old words no longer did. For instance, I coined the word "Spamphlet" (a mash of "spam" and "pamphlet") to refer to the unsolicited handouts one sometimes receives when accosted on the sidewalks downtown. I'm not bragging that the new word is brilliant, but it's a more modern and enjoyable way of describing those unwanted items versus "tract" or "handout".

But with ginormous, there is no creativity displayed at all: The mashed words have nearly identical meanings, and the word produced by their union is yet another synonym. That isn't expanding the language, but merely cluttering it, like a person who gets three copies of "Huck Finn" and then claims to have a collection of works by Mark Twain. Think of the $100 bill, which once garnered the nickname "the C-note" (based on the roman-numeral "C", meaning "100"), later re-dubbed the "Benjamin" (a reference to Mr. Franklin, whose visage adorns that denomination), and how both new descriptions bring more color and playfulness to the English language. But by the ginormous method of word manufacture, that currency would become a "hundobill"---sure, life is short, but not so short that we need to save the time of two syllables with that clunky term.

It's the lack of newness that makes the use ginormous inexplicable: Why would one use the wrong word---or in this case, a non-word---if it sounds similar to and means the same thing as an existing English word? But perhaps its value lies not in what it is, but in what it is not.

Many of us have an gnawing suspicion that some of the people with whom we talk are marking our conversations with a red pen as the words come out of our mouths. We are all subject to the fear of appearing uneducated, and if we use a word with a real meaning, we can also misuse it---for instance, "that enormous matchbook" or "the gigantic cotton swab." Both of these are likely inaccurate (unless you're at a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum), and may expose the speaker as dictionary-challenged. But by using a non-word, the speaker has tossed Strunk & White out the window at the start---there's no misusing the word because the word has no actual meaning.

Think of diction as table manners: Attend a formal dinner and with each course you'll have to decide whether to use the salad fork, or the dessert fork, or the dinner fork; as the flatware inventory increases, the diner is faced with the awful prospect of exposing themselves as incapable of dining with the queen. But add a curling iron along side the plate and even the most snobbish will refrain from saying, "Did you see the barbaric manner with which he used that curling iron?" The curling iron has no correct or incorrect use as the dinner table, and thus all use of it is correct. (Though plugging the curling iron in before eating is universally frowned upon.) Obviously, ginormous is the curling iron in that analogy.

My adviser in college once told me, "It takes a great deal of courage to use the English language properly", his assertion based on the reality that our language suffers from so much widely accepted and regularly perpetuated misuses that wielding it correctly may cause the speaker to look foolish, supported by the style manuals but mocked by a group of people who think that stating "I'm not averse to it" demonstrates a hilarious lack of knowledge of the word "adverse." I suspect ginormous is a manifestation of that fear, a linguistic Golgotham conjured by speakers who seek protection from those judgmental coworkers and dinner guests who mistakenly believe that vocabulary is the hallmark of intelligence. (While it does reflect the attention paid in secondary school and/or a voracious reading habit, vocabulary is unlikely to help you compute the interest on your mortgage, solve a leak in your bathroom sink, or help you escape unscathed if you accidentally fall into the tiger cage at the zoo, so its value should be kept in perspective.)

Whatever the origin of this unnecessary etymological redundancy, I hope its life span will be worthy of measure by the Macarena standard. I fully support the continuing evolution of the English language, to the point where I'm even willing to let "shiznit" sneak through the door. But ginormous? 23 skiddoo.

©2008 wpreagan

#115 - Santa's Secret Service

Santa's Secret Service

1/7/08 (#115)

Watch any movie that involves a fairy tale ending and you will surely see some straight-laced, overly-sober "realist" chastise the hopeful hero with a variation on, "you want everything to be like a fairy tale, but that's not how things work in the real world." (Usually delivered one implausible-plot-twist prior to the ensuing fairy tale ending.)

The problem with the fairy tale is not its incongruity with our so-called reality---after all, all the world's a stage, and for the duration of our show, we are the primary scriptwriters for our own stories: Penning a fairy tale isn't a lot harder than writing a drama about family conflict. (Though on the latter, you'd have the advantage of collaborators.) Unfortunately, the curtain rises on our play at the same time is rises on a thousand other plays, and they're all being acted out on the same stage---if can be hard to concentrate on the Princess' soliloquy if Blanche Dubois keeps interrupting the scene.

The key to staging a successful fairy tale is also the key to planning an elaborate surprise marriage proposal in a crowded restaurant: Getting the bit players to cooperate with your script. And just as the future groom must contend with some members of the impromptu cast caring more about their poached salmon than the ceremonial ruse concocted for his fiancée, there are more than a few bit players who will volunteer to improvise the role of the ogre in your fairy tale.

Santa Claus is a central character in the most perpetuated of our common fairy tales, and over this past Christmas season, I began to realize how difficult it is to protect Santa, to maintain the illusion that he is the real deal. Frankly, even the logistics of that fairy tale are a bit preposterous to maintain in the 21st century: One man with one sleigh delivers a billion toys in 24 hours? Heck, even our UPS driver had a helper with him for most of December, and they worked five days a week. And they could deliver to the front door.

My daughter is five, and while she started the Christmas season as a true believer, there were several incidents that led me to lament the previous year's tutelage in the value of analytical thinking, occasions when this production of the fairy tale seemed genuinely threatened:

Previous Scripts for the Same Story: We watched a lot of Christmas movies this year, and I was flummoxed to find so many tackling the question of "believing" in Santa Claus. From Charlie Brown to a pint-sized Natalie Wood, children are presented with an array of variations on faith and frustration. The trouble is, even though Natalie Wood eventually believes in Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, the damage was done with the initial expression of disbelief: Midway through, Sage turned to me and asked, "Why wouldn't she believe in Santa?", as if she had heard someone refuse to believe the ocean is blue. Any explanation I could offer was irrelevant, because the seed of doubt had been planted. (Hollywood is the most difficult bit-player to urge into cooperation.)

Casting Overlap: Santa came to Sage's school, a larger-than-life man in a flawless costume (complete with a bushy, real beard) who distributed presents (supplied by the parents) to the students and told trie little elf stories with perfunctory Kringlese. (Though after he asked the children, "Does anyone know who Jesus was?" I suspected he was going to refer to his reindeer as "Peter, Paul, John, Matthew...".) Afterward, Sage asked if that was the real Santa. "It sure looked like Santa", I assured her. "Yeah, but he looked different than the one at the mall downtown." (We had not "visited" that Santa, but he had come into view when we breached the border of the Pioneer North Pole when looking for something for Sage's mom.) It's tough to keep up a fairy tale in which the hero continually changes their physical appearance---it's like trying to believe "Darren" was actually Darren when he seemed to be a completely different person in random reruns of Bewitched. (Worse, imagine Bewitched with dozens of different Darrens.)

Prop Problems: Sage and I sat watching one of the holiday cartoon movies when she asked, "If Santa comes down the chimney and out the fireplace, where does he get out at our house?" Her curiosity was genuine: Our 1924 bungalow has no fire place, no wood stove, no possible portal between the rooftop and the living room. It was one of those moments that you see in an advertisement, the dad speechless to such a simple yet complicated question, except there was no voice-over narration to mask the awkward silence that followed. I goggled my brain for something...anything...plausible. "There's a little door in the base of the chimney", I explained, then immediately recalled that the little door I was picturing was actually located on my parent's chimney, in a house they sold 20 years ago. I don't like fibbing to Sage (though when necessary, I will obfuscate the truth verbal gymnastics that would leave even the Dad in Calvin and Hobbes dizzy), and this was a lie that she could fact-check during a commercial break. A man shouldn't be subjected to such dilemmas---parenting is expansive enough without an additional section of the test featuring logic puzzles.

Too Many Writers: In our family, Santa brings one gift; Mom and Dad supply the rest. (Santa already has a billion toys in his sled, he can't be bringing the whole Smurf village to every little girl who asks.) But in Sage's cousin's house, Santa brings most of the gifts. Thus, when the kids got together that night, Sage's cousin rattled off a long list of gifts delivered by jolly old St. Nick, while she stood by with her single Santa-supplied toy in her hand, a puzzled expression on her face: Why is Santa so disproportionate in his generosity? Was her letter to Santa too specific in its request? Or had she deceived herself into thinking she would be on the "nice" side of Santa's ledger, and in fact had a line reserved for her name under "naughty"? I watched from across the room as she wrestled with these puzzles, knowing that my involvement would only exacerbate the problem because it would give her a forum for articulating her uncertainties, each question (and its noncommittal answer) begetting another question. She shrugged it off as they got down to the serious business of playing with their new toys, but at that moment I felt Dickens' ghost of Christmas Future creep onto the stage.

He looked like an ogre in a fairy tale.

What surprised me this season is that I had not anticipated any of these spoilers, yet they were hammering me on a near-daily basis, making the holiday season feel less like reveling and more like spin control. I think we managed to keep the ruse in tact, and next year she will again be excited to believe that this particular fairy tale will come true again. I just have to remember: First, don't let Santa tell any Jesus stories; Second, keep a keen eye out for rogue Santas lurking behind department-store snow drifts; Third, investigate financing on the installation of a fireplace, and finally....well, sorry Sage, Santa's going to stick to the one-gift-only rule. More than one gift for each child and, well...then the story just wouldn't work in the real world.

©2008 wpreagan

#114 - Brindle (Eulogy for a band)

Brindle (Eulogy for a band)

12/4/07 (#114)

Every day in America, somebody's favorite band breaks up. On November 18th, it was my turn.

The dissolution of a band is a common tale, the rate of successful longevity so pathetically low that it makes even the most volatile marriage seem like a sure thing. As musicians often say, being in a band is like being married, except your married to two or three or four other people, and for "date night", you attend drunken bar scenes, display yourselves on a cramped stage and hope nobody boos your romantic bliss.

A band is susceptible to myriad intrusions upon its creativity: The quiet or clamorous clash of egos as members jockey for navigational control, the constant allure of new and potentially more satisfying projects that form on the periphery of one's circle of friends, and/or the tedium of playing songs you no longer wish to play, to name just a few. Even simple logistics outside of the musical realm can inflict a fatal blow: The bass player gets a job working nights, or the drummer gets an opportunity to move back to his home state and rediscover family, friends and familiarity.

It is the latter that brought down Brindle, a modest little duo that played sporadically in the Portland area over the last half decade, always to appreciative crowds that understood they were witness to something precious. Watching them play, you just knew Brindle wasn't going to "make it big", because "big" would have been cosmically (and comically) incongruous: They were intimate, and the rooms where they sounded best were ramshackle little places that scoffers would dismissively refer to as dives and regulars would proudly refer to as dives. When Brindle played, these rooms became a sonic geode: A gritty, unimpressive exterior disguising the gorgeous, colorful, multi-faceted beauty that existed within.

Their audience was heavy with friends and fellow musicians, most wearing a smile like they were getting away with something, privy to a secret spoken in a language that couldn't be understand beyond the walls of the room. When the band began its set, the crowd inevitably encroached Tim McMurrin (and his uniquely detuned guitar) and Josh Gambrell (and his uniquely arranged left-handed drum kit) because the music had irresistible gravity---all fleshy excess and muscular poses had been been boiled off, leaving a sonic skeleton that revealed the genuine grace and power of rock and roll. As my friend Paul Bryant noted on a web site upon hearing the news of their demise, "Brindle is some of the most satisfying live music I've ever heard. Their music is somehow secretly formulated in its simplicity to move me and choke me up while totally rocking me out."

Corralling their sound into a small collection of adjectives is a pointless procedure, as the contradictory modifiers "simple" and "complex" were immediately appropriate and simultaneously accurate. Their music bounced as if it was navigating a hopscotch game that stopped at 5 ½, often beginning with an irregular gait before revealing a strange yet lissome cadence. Such revelations had to be quick: Most Brindle songs clocked in around 120-seconds, with a rare few stretching toward the 3-minute mark and others stopping half-way to that point. Where most bands find a catchy riff and try to maximize the utility of the hook by repeatedly returning to it in the same song (verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus), Brindle allowed the hook to shine brightly then disappear, a formula written as "verse/chorus/next song". This could be heartbreaking, as it was disappointing if they never went back to a particular cool part, but that ache was soothed by the next song, which was always just as good as the one that preceded it. Two minutes later, fresh heartbreak ensued, a cycle that repeated throughout their set. The most accurate description of the band's sound involves no adjectives at all: "Rock smarter, not harder" was their unofficial motto (everything about Brindle seemed unofficial), and a more apt summation could not be written.

There are some bands that flash with stunning brilliance, but whose passing is accepted with little more than a shrug of regret. This is not a commentary on quality, but is instead essential to the natural order: Music is constantly evolving, and a particular bloom can be thoroughly enjoyed and then allowed to fall from the vine, to be replaced by a new bud. But there are some bands that urge us to break this order, that possess something inexplicable in their biology that makes us want to pluck the flower and press it, preserve it, prevent time from taking it from us.

Brindle was one of the latter bands. They will be dearly missed by many.

©2007 wpreagan

#113 - Aquatic Engineering

Aquatic Engineering

11/14/07 (#113)

There are several small lakes that form at this time of year in North Portland, waterways that rise and engulf vast tracts of land to form landmarks such as Lake Chautauqua (occupying the same general coordinates of N Chautauqua Blvd) and Halleck Pond (located where N Halleck St. was known to have existed in September.) These recreational areas abut the curbs of my neighborhood, formed by the confluence of rainy rivulets that flow along the gutter toward the city block's topographical low point, the storm drain, carrying on their waves the thousands of horse chestnut leaves that have spent an unhurried season papering the neighborhood in a veined, pale-yellow wrapper.

The chestnut leaf is enormous, shaped like a droplet of water if a droplet of water was the size of an adult's gym sneaker, and usually falls in the same cluster in which they grow, five leaves fanning out from a single point of connection with the branch, together large enough to form a plausible placemat for a formal dinner on Gilligan's Island. On a day with legitimate rain (not that ubiquitous Portland drizzle that is often referred to as rain), these enormous leaves are hurried to the sewer inlet where they are promptly splayed across the iron grate: In a matter of minutes, the drain is clogged and a pool begins to form. It's not uncommon for the pool to swallow the pavement completely, as the storm drain on the other side of the street is usually clogged with leaves as well.

Growing up in New England, I learned to regard standing water as the enemy: As one old-timer in my town told me years ago, "If it doesn't go where I want it to go, then it'll go where I don't want it to go." In Maine, water that backs up at a street drain will seek the next available low spot, which is most likely our or our neighbor's basement---it's a civic duty to make sure that the drains are flowing freely, as no one wants to hear the sound of their sump-pump turning on every four minutes throughout the night. (Plus, standing water breeds mosquitoes, and the battle against the mosquito never rests: I don't care if it's a puddle forming underneath a slowly melting icicle, sop that slosh up with a towel or it will soon look like the pool at a Las Vegas hotel, with bug larvae taking the place of uncouth brats on spring break.)

Armed with this history, I could mount a nurture-based defense for the behavior that, when seen through the plate-glass window of a cozy living room, must look like madness: A grown man teetering on the edge of the curb, stabbing at the water with a felled maple branch, too foolish to come in from the rain. I could argue that I deserve their thanks more than their ridicule, saving their basements from certain flooding by allowing the city's drainage network to perform as designed, but honestly, I don't do it for them. Benefit to others is simply an ancillary bonus: Mine is a primarily selfish act, aquatic engineering for fun and adventure.

If you're thinking that standing outside on a rainy day poking blindly at a puddle in order to find a storm drain doesn't sound like fun, then you have a stunted definition of fun. (And you can count my wife among your allies, as she invariably delivers her standard "So I'll see you at home?" whenever we approach one of these spontaneous lagoons.) The evacuation of these impromptu ponds provides a three-point fulfillment that is not readily available within the confines of our hectic and overfull days, especially not readily available on the average 35-minute dog walk through the city, including (but not limited to) these pleasures:

An opportunity to reconnect with the simple joys of childhood: The neighborhood where I grew up was bordered on one side by Chartley Brook, a stream that originated somewhere in a Norman Rockwell painting. In this stream I learned about pollywogs, frogs, turtles, crayfish, and a guidebook's worth of other small water life. During summer vacations, or even after school on sunny days, I loved to visit that stream and play for hours: Standing in the water with old sneakers on, I arranged rocks to make breakwaters and harbors, created tree bark boats that sought refuge in the harbors (or missed the harbor and fell victim to the "whitewater" that percolated under the dense copse of birches downstream), and assembled a world where my imagination could spend unfettered hours. Frankly, my adult life doesn't have enough of that type of recreation, so the clogged storm drain is like a portal---as the Chestnut leaf seal is broken, small whirlpools form and gain velocity, sucking nearby flotsam into their inverted cone, and I suddenly have the enthusiasm of a boy standing at the bank of Chartley Brook, unaware of anything except the manipulation of the flow. This is more than mere nostalgia; it's just short of time travel.

Negotiating peace between nature and man-made infrastructure: The clogged storm drain is a microcosm of the battle between earth and industry (don't fool yourself, industry and the environment rarely meet with a genuinely cooperative spirit, even when the best intentions are present), one of Mother Nature's myriad miniscule retaliations for the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, Love Canal, etc. (The earth can certainly justify a grudge.) Yes, I'm aggrandizing, but this small lubrication of the friction between nature and technology provides a palpable sense of harmonic restoration.

The satisfaction of a job well done: My life is cluttered with tasks in various states of completion: Some of these projects require me to conform to someone else's schedule (which can prevent them from getting done punctually), others allow me to work at my own pace (which also can prevent them from getting done punctually.) As such, my brain is constantly being tickled by the loose ends of these endeavors, each of which distracts from the other until I feel like a man populating six crossword puzzles simultaneously. ("Where was that 8-letters down for 'overstimulated'?") But when I chance upon a flooded street, I can enjoy the satisfaction of overseeing a project from start to finish: When I arrive, there is an impasse; through my efforts, there is resolution; when I depart, fishing season is over.

This season I have enjoyed having an apprentice, as my five-year-old daughter precociously recognizes the enjoyment of this seasonal pastime, exercising her body and brain with an improvised deployment of strength and strategy. (Either that, or she simply relishes the opportunity to splash about in an ankle-deep puddle with parental approval.) This companionship does more than provide a semi-plausible alibi for my playing in puddles---aquatic engineering offers a bundle of teaching opportunities: Choosing a suitable poking stick (we discuss the tensile strength of different woods, how to identify hardwoods versus softwoods, what happens to wood when it rots), identifying different leaves (we examine the various shapes of the leaves, searching out as many variations as we can find), and observing the water flow (what makes a whirlpool, why more holes makes for faster draining, how the city's drainage system works.) In fact, I could pitch the whole process as an unscripted biology and physics seminar, a chance to reinforce that the world is a giant science lab and that class is always in session.

That it also looks like two kids and a dog playing in a puddle is purely coincidental.

©2007 wpreagan

#112 - Missed

Missed

10/11/07 (#112)

"Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really." -- Agnes Sligh Turnbull

I don't understand people who don't have pets. I do understand people who enjoy animals but whose household is ill-suited for pets---small apartments, erratic and/or busy schedules, allergies, whatever---but folks who have the time/space/finances to have animals and don't, that mindset is a complete mystery to me.

I once discussed this concept with a friend whose house resembles a start-up zoo (two dogs, three cats, five birds, and a turtle---and that was just the welcoming committee) who had observed over the years that people who don't have pets tend to be selfish in most areas of their lives because they are the center of their own universe. I don't know how accurate that is as a blanket statement, but it struck a chord with me: Pets require our attention and our care, and indeed, some people seem to reserve their attention and their care for self-indulgent expenditure.

That type of attitude simply doesn't work if you're a pet owner, or at least a conscientious pet owner. Stephanie and I once had a cat with diabetes, a condition that required us to administer insulin shots twice a day, 12 hours apart, at the same time every day. The cat's medical condition had a profound impact on our lives: Someone had to be there for the medication, so if we went to dinner, we had to be back by 8:00; If we went out of town for a night, we had to have someone handle the shot in our absence; if Steph wanted to see the early evening movie, I would stay home to tend to the cat. (I always enjoyed attending events with a mix of friends and strangers and announcing at 7:30, "Sorry, we need to run---time to shoot the cat." The look of concern on the faces of those unaware of Djama's condition was thoroughly enjoyable.) These days, my friend Nick has the same restraints on his schedule as a result of his dog having diabetes; I know that if I want to make plans for us, they have to work around punctual injections. No problem---his wonderful dog is worthy of our accommodations, just as the value of our cat made our adjustments irrelevant.

Many pet-free people use stories like these as validation for their anthropocentric lifestyles, reveling in the fact that they don't have to vacuum up dog hair, don't have to yank the stove away from the wall every month to sweep up the errant kibble, don't have to plan their lives around some creature who offers slobbery kisses with a tongue that drinks from the toilet bowl.

And that is exactly what I don't understand about them, because these were always minor inconveniences when it came to Boo Radley, the Chow/Golden Retriever who, until recently, brought eight years of joy into our house. (Fortunately, we learned early on that Boo would drink from the toilet bowl if he had the chance, so we quickly converted to a strictly enforced close-the-cover ritual.) Sure, he had accumulated an invoice file at the vet that grew to the thickness of a 19th-century Russian novel; sure, he broke more than the average number of car windows with his territorial exuberance*; sure, his joy of digging left our front lawn looking like the aftermath of the famous climax of Caddyshack. But I would gladly endure all of the above many times over if I could have him back for one more long walk through the neighborhood.

We lost Boo to cancer, with an alarmingly short time between his exhibiting of symptoms and the obvious need to ease his grief. Since this happened, I have heard many stories from friends who had similar canine cancer experiences: The dogs resist and persevere for as long as they can (thus hiding their symptoms) until it overwhelms them and it's too late to help. Among the many disappointments that I felt was the frustration that he was only 10 years old. When the vet referred to him as "geriatric", I wondered if she had misread his chart: Boo didn't have a gray hair on his face; up to a week before he was still playing like a puppy. Geriatric?

My confusion was derived from Winnie, the Labrador/Weimaraner mix with whom I grew up**. Winnie came to my parent's home when I was an infant, and lived to be 16 years old. While I remain grateful that she lived such a long and happy life, the combination of her longevity and her being the only dog I had ever known from proverbial start-to-finish left me with a mistaken notion: Dogs live to be 16 years old. In the 24 years between Winnie's death and now, I had never received any information to contradict this non-scientific data, as I regularly saw dogs who were 12 and 14 years old tugging their owners through the park.

Turns out my understanding of lifespan was terribly wrong, and I should have been paying more attention to the one-human-year equals seven-dog-years equation: I never imagined that the point of that math was to make clear that a 10-year old dog was a senior citizen.

Boo was a fabulous dog, a poster child for successful adoption from the Humane Society, and a testament to enduring bonds that can develop between people and pets. While I tend to remember Boo as he was in his last years (mellow, loving, peaceful), reminiscing with friends has reminded me that when we got him, Boo was a wild-man, a 70-pound bundle of muscle, enthusiasm, and intermittent brain activity. (We referred to the latter as "the switch": He was an extremely bright dog when he wanted to be, but let him see a squirrel from 30 yards and he left logic and obedience behind. Fortunately for the squirrels, his hunting prowess resembled that of Elmer Fudd.) As a younger man, he snapped at least three retractable leashes in his efforts to tussle with other dogs (the bigger, the better), he refused to sleep on any soft surface (if we could coax him onto the couch, he humored us, then hopped right off), and once the switch turned off, our only concern was limiting the mayhem. (As an older man, he overcame his aversion to couches---in fact, he often positioned himself so that he could prop his head on a pillow. "You've gotten soft, Boo", we'd chide, and he wouldn't even raise his head to protest.)

One of my favorite Boo stories occurred at the pond in Laurelhurst Park, home to several dozen resident mallards. There was a brief stint in Boo's life when his behavior warranted a short experiment with off-leash walking. (You've seen those dogs who walk along with their owners, untethered and well behaved? That I thought Boo could be one of those dogs is a testament to my foolish optimism.) To set the stage, the duck pond is probably an acre in size, with an island in the middle that the ducks call home; the ducks spend most of the day investigating whether any of the humans on the shore are throwing bread into the pond. We were walking the path that circumscribes the pond when Boo saw the ducks: Off went the switch, and off went Boo, leaping from the concrete beach and splashing into the pond in hot pursuit.

Actually, "hot pursuit" is an overstatement. While Boo's bloodline included noble water-dog lineage, his swimming could be described with the same phrase used by my Pee-Wee hockey coach when describing my playing: "He's certainly not the most talented guy out there, but no one plays with more heart." Watching him swim after those ducks was like watching a UPS truck chase after a handful of high-performance motorcycles: It was obvious to spectators, and to the ducks, and to everyone except Boo, that he was not going to be having mallard for lunch. (I doubt he would have known what to do if he had caught one---as I said, his expertise as a hunter was such that catching the prey was a purely theoretical concept.)

As Stephanie and I futilely yelled his name from the bank, Boo swam like a fat man running for a bus that was already pulling away from the curb; his resolve shone in his eyes as he pursued his quarry, his head barely above water as he dog-paddled after a small subset of ducks. The ducks were fully aware of his presence (alerted by the enormous splash of his belly-flop) and casually retreated around the island. I cannot over emphasize their disregard for his threat: If ducks smoked cigarettes, several would have paused to light up before continuing their evasion.

As Boo's efforts led him further from his point of entry, I moved along the bank yelling, "Boo! Boo! Get over here right now!" but whether by insolence or obliviousness, he clearly had no intention of giving up. He chased a cluster of six ducks as they rounded the west end of the island, the sound of his huffing breath so audible across the water that Stephanie and I independently worried from opposing sides of the island that he would frantically dog-paddle himself into heart failure. (I'm sure he'd have deemed that a glorious way to go, like Keith Richards surely will when he eventually (inevitably?) succumbs to a heart attack onstage.)

When one of the ducks broke from the flock and veered toward the shore, Boo gave it a quick glance but kept his focus on the numeric advantage of the remaining five; ditto when another drifted off as he puffed his way around the south side of the island, still ignoring my bellows from shore; soon after another duck split away…and then there were three.

By this time they had almost circled the island, the ducks looking over their shoulders now and then to see if Boo had displayed a shred of intelligence and given up the pursuit: Nope. Boo struggled on, as if at any moment the ducks would simultaneously collapse from exhaustion. As if tired of mocking him, the three remaining ducks suddenly increased their speed and diverged in various directions, leaving the hilarious sight of a 70-pound dog bobbing alone in the middle of the pond while children and parents laughed and pointed from the edges. Admitting defeat, Boo swam back to the bank where Stephanie was waiting.

I know it's wrong to anthropomorphize our pets and assign them human emotions, but when Boo emerged from the water, he bore a smile that unmistakably said, "I know, bad, but did you see that?! I chased those ducks all the way around the island! That was awesome!" In cases like this, it was pointless to punish him because he didn't care about punishment---there was no scolding, no repercussion that could ever be bad enough to negate the joy he felt for what he had done, and it seemed disrespectful to chastise a dog for….well, for doing what dog's do. While Boo sometimes misbehaved, our motto had always been, "We wanted a dog, not a robot", and we knew that his heart was pure, even if his spirit---and his swimming---was weak.

As I write this story, I worry about justly representing Boo, as if he might read this from the great beyond and woofing to the German shepherd next to him, "No way! I was within inches on those ducks!" But I will fail, in the same way that any eulogy fails to capture the eulogized: It's as futile as trying to capture the Grand Canyon in a single photograph---the more we try to include, the more the detail is lost. And Boo's life was nothing if not a series of joyous details, 10,000 vignettes strung together to make a story. It was my privilege to share so many of them, 10,000 bits of happiness that I will remember long after forgetting about hairy floors and food under the stove and any other so-called inconveniences.

Boo, you will always be missed. I hope there is an afterlife for dogs, and in that world, the couches are cushy and the ducks are slow.

©2007 wpreagan

* Boo's window-breaking incident appeared in Torrential #70, A Day in a Dog's Life

** Winnie was featured in Torrential #18, Involuntary Time Travel

#111 - In Praise of the Dibble

In Praise of the Dibble

9/20/07 (#111)

My daughter's cousin* Owen was over one day and we all decided to mix up a round of Nesquik, the world's most fabulous chocolate milk. The powder, mind you, because my pint-size posse and I roll old school: I have tried a host of challengers to the "best chocolate milk" crown, from the so-called gourmet Scharffen Berger sludge that seems to defy the milk to at-least-it's-better-on-ice-cream Hershey's and most of the options between, but nothing hits the spot like Nesquik. (Though I still have trouble calling it that, as it went by the trade name Nestle Quik when I was a young chocolate-and-calcium-speedball fiend.)

When out of the scrutinizing watch (and frustratingly flawless memory) of adolescents, my powder-to-milk ratio tends toward the exorbitant, ensuring that many gulps feature that sweet, gritty texture I love; but with the impressionable eyes of two five-and-unders watching, I am invariably the responsible adult, heeding the directions on the package in hopes that they will grow up with a taste for moderation that I don't possess. The kids were going to mix their own, and before we started, I said, "Remember, two spoons, that's all."

Of course, one would expect them to try to maximize each scoop by balancing a ridiculously tall tower of powder on the end of their jittering spoons, to gingerly move the payload across the deceptively vast terrain between Nesquik container and milk glass without that disappointing twitch that causes a minor avalanche of chocolate to be lost upon the counter top. (At least I would expect that, because that remains my standard Nesquik modus operandi.) But the kids each took one reasonable scoop, then another. As I moved to put a cap on the mix, Owen quickly jabbed his spoon into the shrinking gap between yellow container and plastic top and protested, "We didn't do the dibble!"

The dibble? I didn't want to sound concerned, but I didn't like the sound of a young boy dibbling in my Nesquik. "How does one 'do the dibble', Owen?"

He pushed the lid aside, dipped the tip of his spoon into the cocoa and retrieved a tiny portion of the Quik, an amount so small it could be hidden behind a shelled peanut. "Two scoops, plus a little dibble," he chirped brightly.

Ahhh, that dibble. I didn't know it had a name, but I am quite familiar with the dibble; in fact, I am a great fan of the dibble; furthermore, I would venture that the dibble often possesses as much value as either of the immeasurably larger scoops.

The dibble is that little something extra that separates a satisfactory experience from a sensational one. Of course, the most essential element of the dibble is its visibility---the inconsequential bit of cocoa dust that Owen added into his glass of milk did nothing to increase the chocolaty flavor of his beverage, but he knew it was there, and he reveled in his victory over the two-scoop limit. He might have started with two larger scoops, and thus had more chocolate even without the dibble---but then, that method didn't include the dibble.

Young and old, we can all be swayed by a little dibble. When I worked as an auto station attendant (a.k.a. gas huffer) my station had a commitment to washing the windshield of every car that purchased gas. There was a time long ago when that service was the norm at a good filling station, but the bean counters discovered you could have less staff if you only washed the windows on request, not on principle, and these days you can usually expect some high school kid to stand at the rear quarter panel of your car staring into space until the pump automatically clicks off. Our station charged more per gallon than those no-service stations, yet we regularly dispensed 300,000 gallons a month---washing nearly every windshield as we did. People didn't mind paying our price, because they got the dibble: Pardon the pun, but when they left our station, they could easily see the difference.

Many businesses have exceeded expectations as a direct result of the dibble, and many others have failed for lack of the dibble. For example, I cite my last two experiences with the oft-maligned (and oft-deserved) airline industry.

My brother summed up the state of modern airlines this way: Customers have lost all loyalty to a brand, and brands have lost all loyalty to their customers. We might prefer one airline over another, but airline seats are a commodity and few will spend $700 for a favored carrier if they can reach the same destination for $500 with a competitor. Because of that, airlines scrape to keep their seats as cheap as possible. Corporate budgets have no room for dibbles.

I flew US Airways in July, my first time flying that carrier. It was a red-eye flight departing at 11:00pm, and while waiting to board, I heard a customer ask the ticket agent for a blanket and pillow. "You can get those on the plane," she cheerfully assured. Seated in Zone 2, I boarded early in the process, and after stowing my bag I looked for the promised blankets and pillows. There were none to be found. I asked a stewardess where they kept these items, and she explained that they didn't have any. None? "None." Well, we're still at the gate, let's solve that problem before we leave. "Portland isn't one of our hubs, we aren't provisioned for that here." A full-capacity, four-hour overnight flight and US Airways decided that the t-shirt-thin blanket was too much of an expense in exchange for the $600 airfare. (Bonus points: Upon arrival, as the exhausted coach peasants trudged wearily off the plane, we were treated to the sight of a wrinkled blanket and pillow on each of the first-class seats. Apparently, US Air now considers the t-shirt-thin blanket and no-cushion doll pillow to be first-class items.) Forget the dibble---this was 1 ½ scoops of chocolate being passed off as a two-scoop glass of Quik.

Compare that to my last experience with Delta. Same journey (though not a red-eye), and a typical airline experience: Standard free-for-all jostling to get everyone aboard**; 25 minutes on the tarmac waiting for takeoff; ample room to slide several sheets of paper between my knees and the seat in front of me. 3 hours and 30 minutes later, one of the stewardesses got onto the intercom and encouraged us to join her in some "post-flight yoga", a simple bit of stretching that would get us ready for the mile-long trek through the airport to our next connection.

"It's easy," she began, "let's start with our necks----let your head gently fall forward, then slowly rotate in a clockwise position. Since we traveled from the West coast, we've lost three hours, so to help you adjust, maybe start with your head dropped to the right." She continued on in this whimsical way, coaxing us to rotate our shoulders, chastising some passengers for not participating, demonstrating how to rotate the ankles…"Good job, everyone. I bet you're feeling better already. Now gently put your left foot behind your head". Many eyebrows shot up in disbelief before the cabin filled with laughter. Her routine lasted 10 minutes, and at the end, I felt a strange sensation: I felt good. Everyone seemed to feel good. Where most flights end with exhaustion and silent competition to escape the fuselage, that plane was full of smiles and cheerful conversation. And how was this miracle of air travel achieved? One exuberant woman provided one simple service that we didn't expect. There was no extra cost to Delta, but the extra value was immeasurable.

Such is the value of the dibble. Her dibble didn't even include a metaphorical mini-dip into chocolate powder; instead, she provided something intangible, a contagious enthusiasm that spread throughout the plane. (Admittedly, the airline-hostess-enthusiasm-bar has been set rather low by those hosts who continue to deliver the cartoonish string of perfunctory "buh-byes" to the bleary-eyed masses as they eject them into the terminal.) Her enthusiasm managed to defy the state of modern air travel and win my loyalty for Delta: That brief interlude of faux-yoga and a funny monologue convinced me that Delta has a much better understanding of how it feels be a traveler than the yes-we-have-no-blankets attitude of US Air, and I appreciate a company who understands what it feels like to be a customer.

Now if only they'd just include Nesquik among their complimentary beverages. But then, the yoga was Delta's dibble---Nesquik would be a double-dibble. I dare not be so greedy. (At least not while the kids are watching.)

©2007 wpreagan

* Why not say "nephew"? Because Sage and Owen aren't technically cousins; their moms are cousins, which probably makes them second-cousins, or first-cousins-once-removed, or some other impersonal and irrelevant modifier that I refuse to embrace or even tolerate. Family is family, and "cousin" is the furthest semantic extension I will abide. My wife's cousins are my cousins, not my cousins-in-law; my wife's cousin's spouses are my cousins, and not some hyphen-riddled sub-set of my life. Family is not an org chart, it's a tree, and no matter how far out a particular branch any of us might be, our roots are shared.

** Tangential mystery I would love to have explained: When they call passengers for boarding, they start at the front of the plan and work back. This means that the first group of people are filling up the first set of seats, standing in the aisles forcing their over-size carry-ons into the overhead bins and looking for non-existent blankets while everyone else waits in the unheated/uncooled tunnel that connects the airport to the plane. Then the next group of people start filling the next group of seats, followed by the next, and the next, etc. All the while, the back of the plane is empty, and the people who will sit in those seats are standing in the hallway. It seems that if they loaded the back of the plane first, then you could get everyone on board simultaneously. There must be a reason---perhaps with weight in the back and not the front, the plane might do an inadvertent wheelie---but I wish such things were explained during the pre-flight informational session. That, and how an 80-ton bus with wings can get airborne in the first place.

#110 - Firecrackers

Firecrackers

8/3/07 (#110)

I grew up in a house of sparklers. With four kids of varying ages, I think my parents had visions of three-fingered children and a future of tedious "no, he wasn't born blind" explanations and opted against any Independence Day explosives.

For us, fireworks weren't an item designed for backyard enjoyment---that product was called badminton. (Or later, Jarts, enormous weighted lawn darts for a game that fused the sharp-object danger of darts with the unrestrained hurling of horseshoes; while I don't recall any of us being injured by the Jarts (save the occasional accidental drop on one's own foot) I'm still astonished that my parents drew the line at firecrackers with the firepower of a shaken pop can yet allowed a set of one-pound sharpened metal projectiles into the toy box.) Fireworks were an event to be attended, not hosted; a spectacle presented by professionals for the entertainment of the entire community.

Yet I remember the mysterious longing I felt when the neighbors across the street would drag out their minor-league pyrotechnics on the afternoon of July 4, smuggled up from South of the Border, a southeastern institution whose interior looked like a grocery store's produce department except in place of apples and cantaloupe they had bottle rockets and M-80s. Fireworks were illegal in my state (at least that's what I was told), so when Mr. Comey ignited the rocket that launched a tiny plastic soldier into the sky to have him parachute gently back to earth (with obvious charring to his face and extremities) it seemed like an irrationally bold defiance of the local ordinances---not to mention insanely dangerous considering that the Comey kids were essentially the same age as my brothers and sisters. Was he unaware of the danger he faced? Mom never hesitated to give us unsought safety advice---had she thought to offer some to this madman across the avenue?

By today's standards their arsenal would likely seem juvenile at best, as the home fireworks market has changed massively in the last 10 years. Where once the neighborhood kids vibrated with excitement at the zzzzzzzzip-pap of a bottle rocket shot from an empty Coke bottle, there are now folks two streets over who launch massive charges that rival a respectably-sized small town's civic presentation: these displays easily reach an altitude of 150 feet, their multi-colored bursts 30 to 40 feet across, an astonishing form of recreation for a man who grew up writing his name in the dark night with an incendiary device that could be hidden behind a pencil. These neighbors even have what I call "cannon blasts", those incredibly loud non-visual fireworks that seem to reset your heartbeat upon demolition. Had the Comeys unleashed such so-called entertainment back in 1972, the cramped area behind the couch would have been crowded with both the family dog and me.

My frustration with 21st century home fireworks aficionados is not the size of the displays or the volume of the bangs. What annoys me is the disregard they have for neighbors, exhibited in three significant ways:

1. No adherence to any acceptable curfew: 10:00pm to midnight, that's fine, blow yourselves up for all I care. But if you purchased so many fireworks that it takes you until 4:00am to ignite them all, you are not celebrating independence, you're celebrating being an ass. No one wants to come to that party.
2. No adherence to the calendar: In our neighborhood, they start around June 27. I suppose we have Christmas light to blame for this, as those lights are enjoyed for weeks before the holiday, not just on Christmas day; but then, Spiderman and Jack Sparrow don't show up at my house on October 29 expecting me to feed them. They also last well past the July 4---in fact, we suffered though six or eight late-night cannon blasts on August 1 this year. (Unfortunately, folks who don't obey this second complaint seem to be the same folks who disregard the first.)
3. No concern for cleaning up: On the morning of July 5, our neighboring blocks are littered with the charred cardboard and melted plastic remains of seemingly hundreds of explosive devices. If I thought it was kids leaving the crap to blow away I would knock on doors and report it to their parents---but these days, parents are as bad as the kids. (But that's an issue that transcends this particular holiday.)

Living in Portland, we have a variety of options for great public fireworks displays, and most years we attend the big city-sponsored display downtown. Launched from a barge in the river that divides the city, there are plenty of places on both banks that offer a fabulous view, so we pack a knapsack with a blanket, beverages, and (of course) sparklers and head down to find a nice vantage point. This year, it was a grassy area near the south end of Waterfront Park where we had room stretch out and watch the crowd while we waited for the festivities to begin. As darkness slowly claimed the daylight, I was forced to confront two realizations.

First, the line between a public fireworks display and a home fireworks display has regrettably blurred: the very public and very busy walking path in front of us was constantly blocked by children---actual children, six to ten years old---igniting fountains of colored sparks from tubes with names like "Towering Inferno" and "Geyser of Fire" and tossing spastically gyrating sparking devices toward a vaguely defined no-cross zone with only the slightest regard for accuracy. (Meanwhile, their parents sat gabbing in closed clusters, apparently confident that if none of the children were screaming, "Argh! My hand!" then all was well.) We saw kids toting boxes they could barely heft, crates so large that had they been filled with dog food would have fed our dog for a month. (And ours is no small dog.) It was noisy, odorous, annoying, and frankly, quite unsettling.

The second realization was my daughter's reaction to it all.

Genetics never fails to astound me, and her body language screamed familiarities at me: I recognized myself in her obvious mix of fascination and fear of the spectacle, and felt anew the bittersweet enjoyment of the simple sparkler, at once innocently fun and embarrassingly inadequate. As her eyes soaked up the scene, I ached for her, wanting to snatch her up in my arms and run until it was July 5 and those confusing, contradictory emotions had faded like the resonant echoes of a cannon blast.

But of course, that would be trying to save her from life, and I don't want to save her from that. If not then, she would face that disquieting clash of emotions on the next day or the next, and if it didn't involve fireworks, it would be about bicycles or best friends or even badminton. In fact, it will probably be all of those, as that seems to be the human condition: It's not that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, but simply that there is another side of the fence, and things are different there, whether the grass is greener or it's blackened by the burn of department store fireworks.

As darkness settled further, I stood and snatched her up in my arms and said, "Let's write our names in the darkness," which we did with laughter and delight. The sparklers have long burned out, but I can still see her name scribbled in the dusk.

Try that with a firecracker.

©2007 wpreagan