Real Joe

An early morning reflection from my hospital bed via audblog. (3 PM update: I’m now back home, doing fine, thankful for powerful drugs.)

I’m having ACL surgery early this afternoon, part of my civic duty to check out our town’s new hospital, as well as my patriotic duty to help stimulate the medical economy. As my son Graham wrote in his birthday card to me recently, “You’re not getting older, Dad, just more interesting to the medical profession.”

I stay overnight tonight, then on crutches for a while. I hope to be able to work at my PC via my recliner, though I’m not sure I’ll be up for that tomorrow. My wife laughs at how optimistic I am about how soon I’ll be mobile. Might have to post via Audblog only for a day or two or…

I’ve been too busy since I got back from Blogger Con yesterday to do much reflecting about this. And I have a presentation in the Cities this morning on weblogs for non-profit organizations so I don’t have time to walk in the Arb or write in my journal, either. Which bugs me. Not having enough time for a little solitude is almost like not brushing my teeth or taking a shower. It’s no biggie but it’s unsettling in a small way.

Back from Blogger Con in Cambridge. The session content was mainly pertinent to my day job with the exception of a Sunday session titled Weblogs and their Spiritual Context by AKM Adam, a professor at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and well-known in the blogosphere for his AKMA’s Random Thoughts blog. Heath Row has a transcript of the session up on his site, including my questions/comments about the degree to which he reveals his own struggles as a priest in his blog.

I can see why Joey deVilla, Accordion Guy (also an attendee) called AKMA the Ferris Bueller of the Blogosphere. The guy’s a hoot.

AKMA brought his son, Si, with him to haul his luggage since he just had surgery. (Si has a blog, too, SiBlog.) I got to chat with them on several occasions, including at Logan airport where we had a great little discussion about false prayer (epitomized by Red Sox slugger Trot Nixon who gave credit to God for his game-winning homerun on Saturday.)

I’ve added a blogroll to the right-hand column, with just three weblogs right now: Kent Nerburn, Real Live Preacher, and The World According to Chuck. More often than not, these guys are reflective in their blogs as they struggle to make sense of their daily lives. And they write good. heh. If you know of other blogs of the same ilk, let me know.

I’ve removed the Google AdSense box. They were right… it works better on a page with content that doesn’t change.

I’m heading to Boston tomorrow (Cambridge, actually) for a weblog conference at Harvard Law School called Blogger Con. It’s been a while since I’ve gone to a conference of any kind just as a participant… nothing to sell, no presentations to make. Just collegial connections to make and stuff to learn. I probably won’t blog much from there.

I spent an hour this morning walking through parts of Carleton College’s Arb taking photos and reveling in the beauty of a frosty fall morning. It actually wasn’t the first frost — that was a couple of days ago — but this was a hard frost, around 20-25 degrees F.

Last year I took a few photos of the first frost (they sucked, mostly) and I’ve been looking forward to this year’s ever since. It’s a peak SOS (Shot of Solitude) hour in which I’m more focused than usual on my surroundings, my brain chatter relatively quiet.
I’ll narrate a few of the photos but you can also just scroll through the entire gallery.

* I’d never notice these dead weeds if they didn’t have white hats on.

* This walnut tree was not only shedding green leaves at a rapid rate. It was also dropping a walnut every 30 seconds or so. At first I thought someone was hitting golfballs in the pond. Note the splash rings radiating out in the water.

* I don’t usually have much luck shooting into the sun because I have no clue what I’m doing; but I got lucky with this one, whisps of fog forming on the ponds midst the frost-covered islands.

* I’ve never taken a picture of a sundog before.

* I think this is the only house within the city limits that’s adjacent to the Arb.

* I normally don’t see a red fox but once every couple years, usually scooting across a county road. Today, I met one on the trail and had my camera ready. Too bad I didn’t have a monster zoom lens.

* “Where does the frost go, Dad?” “Well, son, as the sun rises, the the tree shadows get tired of protecting the frost so they abandon it. The frost dies because it can’t keep up. Moral of the story: You can’t be spoon-fed all your life.”

* With such a hard frost so early in the season, the green leaves, mainly from the walnut and ash trees, were piling up everywhere, a somewhat unsual occurrence. These made an interesting pattern on the black path. These covered a truck downtown. And these piled up in front of our house.

So I now have a photo gallery section to the website, which I’ll keep adding to.

After a few months off, my high school-aged daughter and I are back to our weekly dinner dates, something we started a while ago. We’re trying to do it on nights when my wife is working so it varies. Though she never objects, I’ve never been quite sure how much she likes it. But this week she initiated, so there’s my answer, at least for now.

My wife asked one of my sons last week if he remembered his “angry year” ten years ago or so in his mid-teens and how, after we spent two weeks camping and using a talking stick around the campfire several times, he came home markedly changed for the better.

I learned about a talking stick back then when I was working at Utne Reader and they published the a cover story on “Salons: How to Revive the Endangered Art of Conversation and Start a Revolution in Your Living Room.” (One of my job titles there: Salonkeeper. Utne now publishes a book titled, Salons: The Joy of Conversation. And The Salon-Keeper’s Companion: An Utne Reader Guide to Conducting Salons, Council and Study Circles is still posted online.)

We used our talking stick a few more times as a family after that summer’s camping trip but I’ve not thought much about it since. Last week I happened to be reading Ekhart Tolle’s new book, Stillness Speaks. His central thesis about stillness seems to gel with physicist David Bohm and his theory of dialogue, which I also first heard about in that issue of Utne. Likewise, dialogue is one Peter’s Senge’s five disciplines for a Learning Organization.

Monday night, I built my first fire in the woodburning fire cage that I got from my wife and kids for my birthday.

It was a perfect night for a fire… crisp, clear, no wind, leaves falling. It occurred to me to invite my daughter out to sit with me in front of the fire and pass the talking stick back and forth. She’d been in minor hot water with us several times during the day and so it seemed liked a good time to tap into whatever help we could get from dialogue and stillness.

I explained to her my crude understanding of what can happen with a talking stick and dialogue. I told her that since the person holding the stick knows that they won’t be interrupted either with criticism or praise, they’re less defensive and are more likely to speak more honestly and more openly… from the heart. Other people there are more likely to really listen and try to understand the person with the stick, since they’re not preparing to reply. And since nobody needs to worry about being interrupted or even having anything to say if they don’t want, there tends to be many periods of silence, way more than usual. This decrease in verbal and mental chatter makes it more likely that everyone’s subconscious can more readily tap into something larger or deeper.

Christians might call this God’s Grace; physicists might call it the field of potentiality in the quantum void of the atom; George Lucas might call it the Force; new agers might call it the wisdom of the universe. Lately, I’m more drawn to the phrase “field of intelligence” in part because of all the attention to the human genome project and the decoding of large sequences of human DNA . It’s hard to deny that’s there’s no small amount of intelligence packed into the cells of every living thing.

So I let down my own hair a bit and talked about my struggles that were and are very similar to the ones she’s having. She talked a bit and then we took turns ticking off a few things we were feeling grateful for, and that was it. Nothing earthshattering, and she even had one more run-in with her mother after that. So who knows what benefit might come from it, if any. But I’m confident that it was good for both of us. And it’s got me thinking.

Another gem of a column from Stuart Greene in the October issue of The Rake: Sex & The Married Man: More Than a Mouthful.

I like it that he’s unbabashedly a fan of his wife’s front and back porch — great line: “Personally, I don’t want what I haven’t got. Maybe that’s because I’m a butt guy, and my precious has the finest caboose on the tracks” — but there’s one thing he’s missing, summed up in the ancient adage that I don’t hear much anymore in these days of boob jobs and penis enlargements:

It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have.

This ain’t trivial for two reasons:

1) gravity and age take their toll on both sexes and especially on women after childbirth; sagging can be delayed but it’s inevitable as most long-marrieds can attest; and

2) no matter how perfectly proportioned your sweetie might be in your mind, a male’s propensity for variety lurks in any marriage, as Greene himself acknowledged in his last column defending married men going to strip clubs. (That column kicked up a storm of interesting letters, both pro and con. See the Letters to the Editor.

So while I agree with Greene that boob jobs too often miss the mark by focusing on size instead of shape, it’s somewhat of a moot point for anyone interested in long-term marital sex satisfaction — like me. What’s needed is more attention on how us marrieds can keep the sparks flying with the assets we each have without resorting to short-term anatomical fixes or siphoning off the energy via strip clubs or — to be balanced — romance novels, trashy, high-class or otherwise.

I’ve got ideas and some experience but I can’t go into details without stirring things up in a bad way on the home front.

Stuart, I’m guessing you’ve got the cloak of anonymnity, so let’s hear more!

After getting my brace refitted two weeks ago, I thought I’d give racquetball one more try last week. I did, and my knee objected by popping out again, this time, in a manner that left no room for any further indecision. So I was on crutches much of last week while negotiating a time slot for ACL surgery in the next week or two.

While laying awake that first night, trying to find a position for my knee that would allow me to sleep, I flashed back to a couple of things that helped me get through till morning.

A few field hospital scenes from Ken Burns’ Civil War PBS series came to mind, particularly those showing piles of limbs ten feet high outside the amputation houses. I tried to imagine what it would be like to recover from an amputation back then, in those conditions. It helped me make a mental shift, so that I began treating my dumb-ass knee pain like a hangnail in comparison. I’d yelp in pain when I shifted my knee and then I’d laugh and swear goodnaturedly. [I wisely chose the living room couch for these antics so as not to inflict damage on my marriage.]

Secondly, I remembered this blurb from Timothy Miller’s book, How to Want What You Have. “Pain cannot be avoided… Suffering, on the other hand, is optional and unnecessary… Whether something hurts, and how much it hurts, depends on what you are paying attention to and what you feel you have gained or lost as a result of the injury… Pain may be borne with resentment, fear, and anguish, in which case it becomes identical with suffering, or it may be borne with good cheer and a light heart.”

The examples he uses in the book to illustrate this are right up my alley: a guy who wrecks his knee while making a great play to help his team win a company softball game vs. a guy who wrecks his knee on his only day off while helping his ungrateful jerk of a brother-in-law fix his house. They’re both in equal amounts of pain, but only the latter suffers. I wrecked my knee doing something I love, and I plan to return to it when I heal. So I decided I had nothing to complain or get bummed about, and thus far, I’ve been able to maintain that attitude. We’ll see how it holds up.