The Village(r)...

     Sometimes I feel as if I want to be trapped (in a good way) in an old English village, singing 'it's a fine life"  from the musical, Oliver.  Having finished the 4th season of the PBS remake of All Creatures Great and Small, the veterinary adventures of a 1930a farming community in old England, all captured so well in the books of James Herriott and now put twice onto film, I couldn't help but be pleased at the visual break from the hectic pace and world we now reside in.  With beautiful countryside and politeness everywhere (even from the hardened farmers for heaven's sake), one left each season with a Picardian wish to "make it so."  But alas, those times are gone for most of us as we encounter long lines and traffic jams (and impatience) almost daily.  And realistically, how long could any of us live in a place where almost nothing changes, where everybody knows everybody else plus what's going on in their lives, little though it may be.  Pure bliss, some might say, while others might be searching for that last little bit of hair to pull out.  Life in that small village of long ago rewlly wasn't me, I thought, for it seemed too pleasant.  So much easier to escaoe to it for a bit, turn off the TV, and think how refreshing that was but time to get back to reality.  But as it's turns out, that small village life may be me after all. 

     In the mail came a letter from my doc saying that he was retiring after 35 years.  Thirty- five years!  Why the nerve.  I've been going to him since, well, since he was basically starting his first year (not really, but close).  And my dentist (well, the father of my dentist at least) had the nerve to pass away; and although I like his son well enough (who now IS my dentist), I miss the fatherly handshake I always got from his dad (whose gold crowns are still in my mouth after 20 years).  Need I go on?  I'm as bad as an old English villager tending to his flock of sheep, you might say.  A stick in the mud.  A pint please, ta!  Not that I am against the thought of moving away into that sort of life but admittedly, finding the time to move is growing shorter and shorter.  Just look at the dumpsters!  Wait, what?

      So I need to back up.  Picture your idyllic neighborhood where people down the street wave as they drive by, even if I can't really see them clearly through their darkly tinted windows.  But if they're standing outside while I'm walking my dog, it's not unusual for us to stop and chat a bit.  I see them all the time, just as they see me; they're neighbors.  In fact, the only newcomers to our stodgy neighborhood have been the five or so younger parents moving in as us old timers decide to up and move, somewhat willingly, one hopes.  So dumpster one: there it sits about 4 houses away on the adjoining street.  They must be remodeling, I think, except it is filled willy-nilly to the brim, as if the folks inside had been given 24 hours to get out.  Then I noticed the walkers, and the canes, and the collection of old envelopes and baskets and dishes and small furniture.  Almost all of it was usable for a thrift shop, especially where walkers and such are in high demand.  But this was more of a get-it-outta-here filled dumpster.  Not a piece of drywall or old cabinets in sight.  Then a week later, another dumpster appeared some four houses away in the opposite direction.  Then another one a few blocks further from that one, and then yes, a fourth one.  Now I'm not a dumpster diver and my wife will tell you that the last thing I need to do is to bring home is more "stuff."  But just before throwing out my dog's poop in one of those conveniently-placed dumpsters, I leaned in to peek and sure enough: more walkers,  unused ACE bandages, dish drying racks, even a usable set if Dewalt drill attachments.  Well, you get the picture.  Most everything there was usable for someone but especially for someone who perhaps couldn't afford such things at the moment.  Towels, folding tables, sets of sheets and blankets.  I had to wonder why they wouldnt just stack a bunch of those items on the curb or near the side of the dumpster with a sign that said "free?"  Or call a charity or rehab center to pick everything up?  It wasn't my place to judge but with all four dumpsters I could only think of one thing, that the remaining spouse in the house, the one I probably never saw in 20+ years, must have passed away (and perhaps relatives sent to "clean" the place were from out of state with little time to spare away from work).  Then the estate sale signs began popping up, and before long, it seemed that flippers would be arriving to gut and get the place ready to sell.  Like it or not, I was firmly IN that village and getting a preview of where all of my "valuables" would likely be headed...the next dumpster.

     It is in moments such as this that you sort of shake you head and say, oh no, another reminder that my life battery may be running low.  Which is when I began reading about goiters (stick with me here).  Turns out that one of our cats has gone way past his 9th life and is probably closer to his 22nd.  Rescued as a stray and limping, he had quite a growth on his nose; the rescuers took this rather large cat to a vet who diagnosed it as cancer and said he would do what he could.  After the operation, the surgeon gave him an optimistic 3 months to live; it’s an aggressive form of cancer, he said.  My wife, soft-hearted as she is, said that if the cat only had 3 months to live then we would house him in our home with our other cats vs. having him being stuck in a rehab cage.  Some 9 months later (and perhaps because he was the only male among our 6 female, but also rescued cats) this scabby-nosed cat had us wondering what was going on.  We'll have to do a CAT scan (no pun intended) and take another biopsy the specialty vet told us.  It costs $1700 but it's the only way to truly know what's going on. Now we love our animals but we could sense that our other cats looked at us with a face of disbelief, which is probably exactly how we really looked.  Okay, we said, go ahead.  Off went the results to Germany (likely $100 for the scan and $1600 for the vet's 1st class ticket) and guess what?  The cancer was gone!  Three years later, and still with a scab on his nose, our Bugsy is still happily the only male cat among 7 females (yes, another "feral" arrived).  We named him Bugsy because each time my wife went to bait the trap where he was, she came back filled with straw mite bites.  Those pesky invisible "bugs" were like nothing she had encountered, penetrating multiple layers of clothing and leaving welt-like bites which not only itched but did so for days.  But once in our home, Bugsy became our love bug, constantly purring and demanding affection.  The final straw (minus mites) was the capture of a true feral, Starr.  In a field for 5 years, my wife trapped and brought her back to our house, if only to spare her further cold winters.  She took to Bugsy like a long-lost boyfriend (in 2 years, we are still unable to touch or pet Starr, although she is no longer is scared of us).  But Bugsy wasn't done.  His teeth were bad (he now has only 4 left).  Gulp, how much?  He's limping pretty bad.  Gulp, how much?  He needs blood work.  Gulp, how much?  He needs daily thyroid meds.  Gulp, how much.  Bugsy has been spending down our imaginary college fund...

     So here's where all that ends up.  The thyroid.  This caught my eye in the London Review: Touch​ your neck, just above the base.  Beneath the skin, too thin to be felt, is your thyroid, a gland shaped like a butterfly, with wings spread either side of your throat.  It produces two hormones that act on almost every cell in your body, influencing nearly all physiological processes: from metabolism to brain function, body temperature to growth.  These hormones contain the element iodine.  Your body cannot create iodine, so to produce the hormones, you must draw iodine from the world around you: mainly from food, but also from drink and the air you breathe.  You only need a tiny amount --an adult requires 150 micrograms a day (fifteen hundredths of a milligram)-- but without it, the consequences are dramatic.  Your thyroid, desperate for iodine, begins to expand, to filter iodine more effectively from your blood.  Over time, this growth becomes a goiter, but even this adaptation may not be enough.  Deprived of thyroid hormones, your heart rate slows.  You begin to feel cold and exhausted.  Your muscles ache and become weak.  Soon, your joints begin to swell, your skin dries out, your hair thins.  Your voice becomes a rasp.  You gain weight, and an all-consuming brain fog settles over you, making it hard to think, to remember things, to feel joy.  Wrote the American Thyroid Association: The term “goiter” simply refers to the abnormal enlargement of the thyroid gland.  It is important to know that the presence of a goiter does not necessarily mean that the thyroid gland is malfunctioning.  A goiter can occur in a gland that is producing too much hormone (hyperthyroidism), too little hormone (hypothyroidism), or the correct amount of hormone (euthyroidism).  A goiter indicates there is a condition present which is causing the thyroid to grow abnormally.  We now check Bugsy's thyroid levels twice yearly (he requires twice-daily meds...but all is in check since that was life #18 for him).

     And then there's the prostate, something that affected my brother and more recently, another friend.  And then I read this is Bloomberg's Prognosis: Every type of cancer is challenging, but the threat to the prostate is particularly fraught.  It doesn’t help that about one in every eight American men are expected to develop it during their lifetime:  That actually makes it harder.  The most common risk factor for this type of tumor is age.  It explains the old adage:  More men die with prostate cancer than from it.  A 2021 study found prostate cancer could be detected during autopsies in about one-third of men over age 70 who died from other causes.  That climbs to more than 50% of men over age 90.  But more than half of men in their 70s underwent screening in the previous two years, a 2023 study found... It’s the second-leading cause of cancer death behind lung cancer.  Once you know you have it, the watchful waiting approach, which is exactly what it sounds like, can be excruciating to endure.  And while I'm not quite there yet, several of my friends have hit that 3/4-century mark and now hitting 75 sounds a bit like walking down a semi-lit, but "safe" alley.  The chance of a mugging or worse may be remote, but you never know...certain words begin to pop up at that age: liver/skin/breast cancer, brain tumor, Parkinson's, early-stage dementia, cataracts, and yes, prostate cancer.  My brother was my age when his PSA levels (prostate specific antigen levels) began to spike, jumping from below 1 to over 3, then 6, then above 10, all within a month.  And here was another weird change that happened in the past year: In 1972, 79% of autopsies were performed for deaths due to diseases and 19% for external causes such as assault.  By 2020, 37% of autopsies were performed for diseases and 60% for external causes.  Added author Marilyn Johnson in her book The Dead Beat: In the more recent period, rates were highest for people age 15 to 24 and for causes such as homicide (98.7%).  Age 15??  Homicide?  Where was my old, quaint village?

     Perhaps I was reading a bit too much into all of this.  Maybe I should just have another pint and tend to old Nellie, except that I knew nothing about cows, other than their "moo" is often called a "low."*  Or the pope,  for that matter.**  Heck, I knew nothing about Roman Catholics.  Or Catholics in general.  So of course, I had to dive into both.  As she wrote in LRB, here's how Patricia Lockwood met the pope (and even has a picture with him) albeit unexpectedly: The invitation​ said ‘black dress for Ladies’.  ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs.  ‘He has to be the whitest.  And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’ ...Uneasily, I pack a suitcase.  My black dress for Ladies might be a swimsuit cover-up; it doesn’t matter.  It looks like what a nun who is also a widow would wear to the Y; who cares.  Everything has gone wrong, is going wrong...Here’s the word I cannot remember: ciao.  Here’s the thing I should not go around humming: ‘Mambo Italiano’.  The website I look up halfway through to see everything I’ve been doing wrong defensively informs me that the one thing Italian men DON’T do is go around singing all the time.  I had never heard this stereotype before in my life but it is ALL that I’m experiencing.  Sometimes they come up and sing a word directly in your ear...When the pope is rolled in in his wheelchair, everyone takes the same picture.  This doesn’t seem right – shouldn’t your first encounter with the pope be primary?...His speech, since I am looking at him instead of following along on paper, seems to consist of three words, repeated over and over: Bambini.  Morta.  Che bella.  ‘Che bella’ comes out with his old strength of voice, so beautiful.  

     This would not be me, of course...or would it?   But even with knowing next to nothing about the pope, I would never have expected him to praise the Mongols (Pope Francis is the first pope to visit Mongolia) with the words: ...the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development.  Added the article in The New Yorker (subtitled, "Nomadic warriors like the Mongol hordes, scholars argue, built our world"): He [the pope] also celebrated "the Pax Mongolica," the period of Mongol-enforced stability across Eurasia citing its "absence of conflicts" and respect "of international laws."  Wait, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were good guys?  The article continues: The Eurasian steppe is a vast curtain of grassland that stretches from Hungary to Manchuria.  Its size is almost impossible to fathom: a vista of green and tan whose termini are farther from each other than Anchorage is from Miami or Cairo is from Johannesburg...The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali.  (Today, more than three billion people speak an Indo-European language.)  Roughly seventy per cent of us have some Yamnaya ancestry in our DNA.  More than the Greeks, the Romans, or the Chinese, it’s the nomadic Yamnaya whose legacy survives in our words and our bodies...A modest, resourceful, and sometimes ruthless hunter-nomad named Temujin, having been abandoned by his clan as a nine-year-old, united the tribes of the eastern steppes for the first time in four centuries.  In 1206, at a gathering of steppe leaders, he was bequeathed the title Chinggis Khan, which means something like “fierce” or “oceanic” ruler.  (The English “Genghis” comes from translations of Persian sources.)  In the next two decades, he and his followers became the first to bring under one dominion the lands between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific Ocean, an area nearly as wide as the steppe itself.

     How did he/they do it?  Along those same lines, how do you cross the Sahara desert at night?  During WWII, Mike Sadler did just that.  Wrote a piece in The Washington Post: Earlier that year, a British team dropped by parachute suffered heavy casualties against German Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps.  This time, the special forces were attempting a surprise ground attack from the desert...In mid-December 1941, a group of British commandos gathered in the Libyan desert outside an enemy airfield west of Sirte.  They had crossed 400 miles during more than two days, driving stripped-down vehicles through wadis and wind-packed sand from an oasis deep in the Sahara.  Their guide, navigator Mike Sadler, was on his first mission, learning to use the sun, stars and surveyor-type instruments to traverse expanses with no roads and few landmarks.  “A lot rested on it,” he recalled.  Mr. Sadler had arrived in North Africa as an antitank gunner.  At a Cairo bar on leave, he met some of the early recruits to the Long Range Desert Group.  He was first considered for the unit because of his weapons experience.  On the way to the base, Mr. Sadler became fascinated by celestial navigation.  He was offered the role as navigator.  He had just weeks to learn how to use a theodolite, a device used by surveyors, and how to read celestial charts...“Desert navigation, like its equivalent at sea, is largely a matter of mathematics and observation, but the good navigator also relies on art, hunch and instinct,” author Ben Macintyre wrote in “Rogue Heroes” (2016), a nonfiction account of the SAS operations.  “Sadler had uncanny, almost unerring ability to know where he was, where he was going, and when he would get there.” ...“You have to be confident because it was awfully easy, especially at night, to start feeling you’re going wrong and you should be further to left or right,” he [Sadler] once told a military historian.  “It was rather easy to give way to that feeling if you weren’t confident.”  Sadler, believed to the last of the elite SAS founding members, recently passed away at 103.

     In the end it doesn't seem to matter if you're an adventurer who crosses vast deserts by starlight, or one who stays in one place long enough to watch his doctor retire (me), or fit into a dozen places in between.  Picture the teenage life of Jon Lee Anderson who wrote in The New Yorker: My father had always been a wanderer, the kind of person who’d happily get from one place to another by taking a freighter.  My mother—a children’s author who’d published her first book at twenty-eight—had put her work aside to follow him.  On Foreign Service assignments, the two had lived in Trinidad, Haiti, El Salvador, South Korea, and Colombia before landing in Taiwan and Indonesia.  Along the way, they’d assembled a family.  My sister Michelle was born in Haiti, where she got inoculations from the Embassy’s recommended physician—François Duvalier, the future Papa Doc.  Tina was adopted during the El Salvador years and Mei Shan in Taiwan.  My younger brother, Scott, and I were born in California, between overseas postings.  His story goes on but one can see that life is so full of possibilities that there is no right or wrong.  Life's variety makes the world go 'round, and perhaps that even includes that saying, "it (does) takes a village." 

     To conclude I end with something else I know nothing about, even while it surrounded me: the Vietnam War and what veterans (and civilians) in general go through, even 50 years later.  A story in Smithsonian told of US Air Force Colonel Robert Certain returning to the French-built Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, more popularly known during the war as the Hanoi Hilton.  Said the article: In a top-secret memo to a White House colleague on December 5, 1972, Alexander Haig, a top Nixon administration official, insisted that the bombings must “create the most massive shock effect in a psychological context” and be “brutal in character.”  And in a taped phone call with Nixon on the eve of the attack, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger compared what they had planned—attacking with advanced heavy bombers each capable of carrying dozens of 500- and 750-pound bombs—to a “4,000-plane raid in World War II.”...During the campaign, the North Vietnamese people were suffering hundreds of casualties, according to their government’s reports.  Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi was hit when a North Vietnamese SAM struck a B-52 as it dropped its bombs...The Vietnamese American writer Mai Elliott wrote vividly about that destruction in The Sacred Willow, a sweeping memoir about the history of Vietnam as told through generations of her own family.  Lang, a late cousin of hers who operated a fabric stall in the Kham Thien neighborhood, told Elliott she spotted a corpse still holding a sandwich in the wake of the bombings.  Relatives of those who had been killed, Elliott wrote, came to buy cloth from Lang so they could “wrap the corpses for burial.  She sold so much fabric that her arms began to ache from cutting it.”  One of Elliott’s young nephews was found dead under a stairwell in another part of Hanoi, killed by the shock waves from a bombing: “His family found him still standing, holding on to the handlebars of his bicycle.  He had taken it—his most precious possession—with him into hiding to protect it from harm.”  Elliott told me she’d made a point of writing graphically about the bombings so her readers would understand the toll of the campaign.  “People didn’t know whether they were going to survive from one day to the next,” she said.  “I really want the readers to know what it was like to be there on the ground, hearing the rain of bombs for 11 days.”  Wrote the author of the Smithsonian story, his own father a veteran who fought in the Philippines: Throughout the trip, I wished my father had been alive to take part in it.  I also wished he’d told me more about his experiences in combat.  Perhaps those memories were just too painful for him to discuss.  I wondered whether he also felt he had no right to talk about his own pain, given all the horrors experienced by the American POWs and the Vietnamese people.  Spending time with Certain underscored for me how much power there is in vulnerability, and how much courage it can take to ask for help.  Otherwise, people can remain figuratively chained in lonely prison cells for the rest of their lives.  

    Whether it is Genghis Khan or Gaza, wars of the past (and present) or all of the upcoming elections that may determine which direction our world will turn this year (and ironically, wrote The New Yorker, the US election is just one of many on that list, with many occurring in countries with populations far larger than us), I thought of me sitting in that idyllic village in a pub with my crickety old body and my rickety old mind, hearing the words of veteran N. Vietnamese pilot Nguyen Hong My telling Certain and his fellow POWs at a reunion banquet, "After my experience in those events, I do not have the word 'enemy' in my dictionary."  Colonel Robert Certain would later tell that same crowd that they had managed to: ...live long enough that we are too old to die young.  Nice words and exactly how I felt.  Tired of families and countries and political parties fighting, tired of wars that somehow damaged more civilians than soldiers, tired that it seems to take 50 years to realize how fortunate we are to simply BE where we are and that despite all of that, this peaceful period may still be just the cyclical eye of the hurricane with more turbulent times ahead.  When will we learn, or more importantly, will we learn.  Maybe this time we will let bygones be gone, and try our best to let the past go; maybe this is the time we'll actually take to heart the words of Colonel Certain's, that no matter our ages we should all consider ourselves too old to die young. 

The Love Bug(sy) and Starr (top)

*Where the heck did the term "low" come from (my wife and I happened to see it regularly on subtitled British films)...well, basically from the old english term "lowen," which loosely means "happy" in Cornish (but "lion" in German).  But that got me thinking about cows and lo and behold, I knew even less than I thought.  From Wikipedia: Vision is the dominant sense; cattle obtain almost half of their information visually.  Being prey animals, cattle evolved to look out for predators almost all round, with eyes that are on the sides of their head rather than the front.  This gives them a field of view of 330°, but limits binocular vision (and therefore stereopsis) to some 30° to 50°, compared to 140° in humans.  They are dichromatic, like most mammals...They prefer to view novel stimuli with the left eye (using the right brain hemisphere), but use the right eye for familiar stimuli...Cattle avoid bitter-tasting foods, selecting sweet foods for energy.  Their sensitivity to sour-tasting foods helps them to maintain optimal ruminal pH.  They seek out salty foods by taste and smell to maintain their electrolyte balance.  Their hearing is better than that of horses but less good at localizing sounds than goats, and much less good than dogs or humans.  Olfaction probably plays a large role in their social life, indicating social and reproductive status.  Cattle can tell when other animals are stressed by smelling the alarm chemicals in their urine.  The odor of dog feces induces behavioral changes prior to cattle feeding.  Cattle can be trained to recognize conspecific individuals using olfaction only.

**Far from being sacrilegious, I did discover that you capitalize the "p" in pope only when referring to a specific pope, i.e. Pope Francis, the pope.