Notes From A Bear's Journey

Heart of Mind     Here's the thing, heart disease doesn't run in our family (knock wood).  And to be fair, I've heard the terms in songs and in books, that meeting someone special can make one's heart "go a-flutter" or "my heart skips a beat."  We've all had that feeling, that odd sensation for a few seconds, or that heavy thumping of the pulse when doing a heavy bit of exercise.  But this was different.  In the middle of the night, a little after midnight, I was awake and feeling my heartbeat as I lay on the pillow.  It seemed odd, and perhaps it was only happening because indeed, I had just woken up and this in the middle of the night.  But then it continued.  And something was amiss...light, very light beats, all over the place, and then one large one, shockingly so.  It was puzzling, not worrisome, for I didn't feel anything else that was different, no dizziness or clamminess.  But my wife noticed me awake and asked what was wrong...&q

Another Fall     Prescient or ironic? Or both, or neither?  I couldn't tell, but here's what happened.  Within an hour of uploading the last post, I had walked the dogs, my wife had initiated a long search for me in the car, 9-11 had been called, and my mother now rested in the emergency room.  She had fallen again, this time on the tile in her bathroom, possibly due to a reaction to some new blood pressure pills she was taking.  Turns out that Carvedilol (as with naporoxen, or Aleve as the popular brand is known) has a tendency to pull sodium out of your body, and in some cases dangerously so, said the doc in the ER.  My mother's sodium levels had dropped substantially, something that may have contributed to her dizziness and resultant fall...at least, that was their suspicion.  Also, my mother was allergic to Bystolic (used to treat blood pressure) and Carvedilol (her newly prescribed blood pressure pill) was somewhat related to Bystolic.  Perhaps her primary doctor mis

The Drive Back     Something about being on the road early, as in starting out at 4:30 in the morning before the commuters; at that time the road is lit only by the headlights of a few cars, the silence and darkness almost one, the dashboard lights inside your car an eerie yet somehow comforting presence.  But we had packed and loaded the car the night before and now we were off, my brother heading back to his home and me to mine.  I was a bit ready to make the journey, long as it might be, for the weather was once again predicted to be quite nasty, rain and snow accumulating in the Sierras beginning the night before.  But as we left that morning, the rain hadn't arrived.  The skies did look threatening, but not enough to cause me to rush while filling my car with gas.  Better to have a full tank should I hit the traffic or the snow, or have to return to town to purchase chains (even with a four-wheel drive).  Darkness was my friend now, but within a few hours, its accompanying c

Last Night     It was a bit of an eerie feeling, my brother in the other bedroom, as exhausted as I was.  It was now past 10 at night and we both continued talking despite our alarms set to wake us in just over 5 hours.  He faced a long 6-hour flight home, while I faced about a 12-hour drive (in my behemoth rental car).  Still, our bodies would not sleep and our voices carried across the hallway.  At first, I thought it was simply being overtired, a point where your body tells you that you need to get some rest but your mind's chatter just won't shut off.  But as my brother and I kept talking, we both realized that it was something more, that this was to be our last night in this house.     The house had been a good one, my parents keeping the lawn spectacularly green and trimmed.  We (my brother and I) both remembered being impressed, their lawn often appearing as something out of a fertilizer ad, the garden lush with tomatoes and melons and grapes, their plums and such of

Pennies from Heaven     Everytime it rains, it rains, pennies from heaven.  It was a hit song way back when; and way back when is what my brother and I discovered as we began to wrap things up at my mother's home.  The place was beginning to empty, even as we felt that munchkins or menehunes were sneaking in at night and slowly refilling drawers and adding small trinkets as we slept.  The cleaning out process seemed endless, and the trash dumpster that once seemed way too large was suddenly growing a bit too full (7 yards, a measurement new to me but often used in the construction and landscape industry, is really quite the volume...basically a "yard" is a cubic yard which is 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet, in other words, a lot).  We had ordered the bin through a company called Recology, one of the main waste and recycling companies throughout much of the western half of the U.S.  And we had already planned to sort and then recycle much (and there was a lot) of my dad'

Changing Faiths, Part II     These days, talking about the Koran in the U.S. is a bit like talking about gun control.  Often, you just never know if you're offending someone's deeply held beliefs.  It is much the same when visiting other countries, for until you become aware of the customs and expectations, it is best to just play the part of the naive tourist...observe and learn, but don't offend.  With faiths and beliefs, however, the equation sometimes goes deeper and can hit harder.  Jokes one made find funny might truly grate against another person's emotions.  And this is somewhat how Garry Wills (a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who specializes in religion) began his piece in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books .  Not long after President Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was asked by a friend if I had ever read the Koran.  I was embarrassed to answer her, “No.” I have spent most of my life studying in one way or another both Jewish and Christian

Changing Faiths      Having shared the honor and pleasure of helping to clean my mother's home, my brother and I have been somewhat surprised at the amount of help that seems to have appeared from afar.  Backing up a bit, the process of clearing out and then selling a home, especially a home that isn't yours, has not been an easy one, and that begins at the supposedly simple step of just finding a realtor.   But where to begin, for the field is both lucrative and attractive; here in the U.S., the commission for using a realtor is usually 6% of the sale price; so as an example, if you were selling a home for $200,000, you as the seller would pay the realtor $12,000 (often that fee is split between the seller's realtor/broker and the buyer's realtor/broker).  The job of the realtor/broker is to show, appraise and advertise the house, as well as guide the seller through the process by attracting and screening potential buyers as well as guide the seller through the hoops

Oh Pioneers     Having made the crossing over Donner Pass, the site where early pioneers faced such a dificult time that they alledgedly were forced to eat some of their fallen travelers in order to survive, I was struck by the seemiung endless forest now all covered with heavy snow.  Large driver-operated snow removers size of farm combines, their corkscrew-like feeders putting my own 12-horsepower snowblower to shame, shot old congealed snow over the barriers and into the forest like the spray from a firehose (and for those of you who haven't shoveled snow in awhile, the more snow sits and melts and rehardens, the heavier it is to remove; even snow that one's own blower has thrown off to the side you'll find much more compact and thus heavier to manually shovel).  Whatever the machinery, this area was apparently ready for it (near this area is the ski and casino resort area of Lake Tahoe, site of the one of the deeper lakes in the world).  Perhaps other snow areas had s

Back on the Highway     Once again I will be driving, this time through snow country where the weather is unsettled at best.  Chains are required on all trucks, the big trucks, that is.  And in my rented 4-wheel drive, I'll feel a bit safer although none of that does any good on ice.  Did I mention that the lighted highway signs are all advertising "snow and ice" for about 200 miles?  In my area, the wind is gusting with enormity; semis are being blown over and who knows what else.  At any rate, the point is that I have to drop off for a bit; perhaps even getting through these highway stretches will mean more than having another cup of coffee but perhaps a strong shot or two to calm the nerves as I pull off for the night to let the storm pass.  So, the pause begins in earnest, returning when all is back to peaceful observation...wishing all of you much more peaceful times and reflections in the meantime.

Risky(er) Driving     Land in an airplane and you hear that, the most dangerous part of your journey is about to begin, that of driving on the highway (touting the airline's record of safety).  And let's face it, what could be riskier or more deadly than driving a car or truck, especially when it comes to debilitating accidents and fatalities.  Well, it turns out that something has indeed emerged that is riskier, something that even brought the U.S. Senate together in a near unanimous vote (unfortunately, the bill is expected to die in the more partisan House of Representatives)...opiate addiction.  Yes, I wrote earlier about the over 220 million addictive and legal drug prescriptions for opiates written in 2011 (the next year, that number climbed to 259 million and continues to rise).  And now, death from opioid overdose has surpassed that of highway fatalities.      Table from Center for Lawful Access and Abuse Deterrence     Actually, you can see that death by d

Food, Glorious Food     One of the nice things of being on the road is simply sampling the variety of foods and beers and whatever else might hit your fancy.  Often the items are too limited in scope or production to make it out of their local area, or perhaps have grown but are now restricted by other states' laws from being introduced elsewhere.  No matter, one is always please to hear one of the locals (if you can gain their trust) tell you of a special small diner or a dish known only in this town.  Why this could be famous, you're almost heard to utter, and indeed some things have gone on to fame and fortune.  And much of this is due to a vast history of cultural and immigrant tastes arriving from distant shores at different times.  Banh mi from Vietnam, Barberton chicken from Serbia, runzas or bierocks from Volga (river) Germany, and of course, boiled peanuts which are found throughout Hawaii but are credited to have come from the Deep South (my brother and I used to lo

Photographs and Memories     A classic some would say, that title song by Jim Croce, a portion of his lyrics reading: Photographs and memories, All the love you gave to me, Somehow it just can't be true, That's all I've left of you.  Of course, working back at my mother's house, I've been finding piles of photographs, some of me as  a child, some of other relatives, and many of people I don't know.  This had all happened earlier as well when I found a trove of my step-father's photos in a chest, each carefully placed in a professional photographers paper frame (each beautifully done and framed, even if taken back in the early 1900s).  There were usually no inscriptions, no words or dates or names, only the photo.  And there were dozens and dozens, each person in the photo standing rigidly as if at attention and told not to smile.  Perhaps that is just how it was done back then, this new form of capturing an image on paper and then patiently waiting to use