Starting up again

I haven't posted in a long time. I will try to remedy that in two ways: I am going to start rolling up my multiple blogs into this one. The only exception will be the Jerry Lettvin Memorial blog which will be converted into a series of static web pages.

There are a couple of things that I need to make clear.

First, although I call this a memoir, you can expect to see many different types of content: poems, stories, recipes, and rants. I will do my best to label things appropriately so that they can be found.

Second, I write lengthy pieces. I'm old school that way. I'm not writing for your benefit, but for my own. As a result, you may get to your tl;dr limit faster than I get to my point. If you're bored then go away. I probably won't even notice.

Later today I will start to post some of the backlog.

The Time Traveler

In September of 1970, I started working at an herb shop called The Herb Shop, on Chapel Street in New Haven CT. It was an offshoot of an organic food store on Whalley Ave. called ... that's right, The Food Store. I worked with John Thompkins who was a co-owner of both.

We had several enterprises working in the shop. We sold books on herbalism, spices and herbs for cooking, herbs for healing, custom blended perfumes (my particular specialty), and some kick-ass legal herbal smoking mixtures.

We didn't do a lot of business. Often the morning's profits were blown on a bagful of eggrolls from the Chinese restaurant two doors down. But there was a steady clientèle for our curry and chili powders, Mexican and Middle Eastern saffrons, and other culinary spices. The customers for medicinal herbs were more sporadic. We'd have a run on elderflower and mint during cold season, and once when there was an outbreak of VD we did a huge amount of sales of uva ursi and similar herbs.

I was usually the only person in the shop. I became fairly expert in the use of old Materia Medicas, Culpepper's Herbal, and Jethro Kloss' Back To Eden.

The sideline I started in natural fragrances became something of a style. I'd send the prospective customer to have their horoscope done and palm read, then I would do a tarot reading and blend the perfume accordingly. It wasn't entirely bullshit. I had a bit of a nose, had experimented with different skin chemistries, and seemed to have an instinct for the right combinations. I probably could have done it without all the new age folderol but people liked it.

My favorite customer was Tom. Tom was always dressed nicely with a spotless white shirt and striped tie under a grey suit. He also wore a battered old Panama hat that emphasized the mahogany of his skin. He carried himself with dignity and grace and was both charming and courtly.

When he first came into the shop, he asked if I would let him browse the labeled jars behind the counter. I assured him that he was welcome to. After about 30 minutes of study, he came back to the counter and wrote out a list. He was asking for so many ounces of hyssop, and about half that of thyme and on and on. There were about 15 different herbs on his list.

I pulled out a number of plastic bags, but he stopped me. "If you don't mind, please just put them all in the same bag. Paper if you have it."

The mixture didn't sound edible to me, nor particularly potpourri sweet (although it did include dried rosebuds), but he was the customer so I created the mix for him. He laid a few well-worn dollar bills on the counter in payment, thanked me and walked out. About a week later he was back with a different list of herbs. This became a regular event.

After a while my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him what he did with these seemingly illogical blends. He was polite but didn't answer. It took several more visits before he sighed and shook his head.

"Well son," he said, "I've lived through a lot of lives. I was a carpenter in China, a farmer in France, a soldier in Russia, an olive picker in Italy, and a stonecutter in Egypt."

I looked at him in amazement. He was certainly old enough to have done all those things but somehow it didn't seem likely. "When were you in Italy?" I asked. "I lived in Naples for a couple of years."

He chuckled, "It was long before you were born, son. As I recollect, it was back in the time of the Borgias."

Well of course I knew he was either crazy or deluded, but he was a good customer and I still wanted to know how he used the herbs that I sold him. So I asked him to tell me more.

Tom told me that he had an unusual memory. He could remember fragments of each of his previous lives. The earliest fragment was from Egypt. I may have sounded as if I was scoffing when I asked if he had worked on the pyramids, but he shooks his head and said, "Oh no, nothing so grand as that, I did some house foundations and sometimes some roadwork."

I asked how it was that he could remember all those lives. "I can't even remember the name of my third grade teacher," i said.

"About 20 years ago," he told me, "I started remembering bits and pieces. It turned out that the memories came when I smelled certain things. I started developing formulas or recipes that would make it easier to remember. After a while I could make the memories of a specific life happen."

"How do you do it?" I asked.

"The herbs in that bag you just made up for me is the recipe that will take me back to ancient Egypt. I divide it into four portions and tie it into a linen bag, then I steep it in a covered pot of boiling water for an hour. I run myself a steaming hot tub of water and pour the herb liquid in. Then I climb in and close my eyes. It takes about five minutes until I'm walking down the streets of Memphis."

I was startled for a moment, as if there was some kind of a disconnect. Then I remembered that Memphis, TN was named for the ancient Egyptian city.

Over the next few months, he told me more about his past lives. I saved the recipes and the target time and geography of each, but I was never able to get them to work for me.

Eventually we couldn't keep the store going and had to close. When Tom came in for the last time, I had packaged up as much of the remaining stock as I could into his formulas, labeled them and sent him off with a year's supply of free time travel.

One of my better moments

In 1979 I was in the Navy and based on an aircraft carrier with a homeport in Norfolk, Virginia. One night, some friends and I decided to go off base to catch a movie that had just opened. I was looking forward to it. I love Brit comedy and The Life of Brian sounded perfect.

The problem was that Norfolk was a hotbed of televangelism so when we got to the theater, it was surrounded by picketers who were apparently horrified at the sacrilege of it. My companions turned-tail and headed back to the base. I decided to press forward.

As I moved through the crowd, it became obvious that none of the protesters had seen the movie. They were taking a pastor or other third party's opinion and in many cases they didn't know if the third party had viewed the film.

I had a secret weapon for dealing with such people, a clipping that I kept in my wallet for such occasions. When I was approached belligerently by a group, I waited until I was asked the proper question. Finally it came ... "Don't you believe in the bible?"

Of course I do," I replied. "In fact I have documentary proof of its truth."

They were a bit taken aback. "What do you mean?"

"The old testament predicts the presidency of Lyndon Johnson," I said, "and the mess he made of the Vietnam war."

In spite of themselves, they were impressed. They weren't expecting biblical knowledge from someone as irreligious as they assumed me to be.

I pulled out my wallet and said, "Yep." I nodded at one of the bible toters, "Look it up right now." I pulled out my wallet and took out the clipping. "Proverbs 26:17." I held out the clipping.

"He that passeth by and meddleth with strife belonging not to him is like one who picks up a dog by the ears."

They backed slowly away and let me pass.

My short career as a film-maker

The course I took in film-making was a basic introductory one. Always needing to be different, while the other students used small, modern, hand-held, battery-powered cameras with zoom lenses and shot color super 8mm film, I chose to use a monster of a Bolex with a three-lens turret. The Bolex had to be wound up every 20 seconds, needed a shoulder rest or a tripod, and shot black and white 16mm film that needed special processing.

I cobbled together an animation stand and had film splicing and editing equipment. An old army-surplus shoulder bag held film spools and extra lenses. (Deni had kindly drawn a very Dan O'Neill style Mickey Mouse on the bag flap.

I tried. I shot long traveling shots down deserted alleys, empty stairwells, and deserted rooftops, presumably trying to translate my angst into images. Long boring minutes of minutely filmed brickwork were so tedious that I couldn't even watch it to edit it. I finally edited it into a seizure inducing short piece that I almost immediately dumped in the trash.

Realizing that Andy Warhol had naught to fear from my work, I turned briefly to journalism. This lasted a few days in May 1970 and culminated with being tear-gassed on New Haven Green as I unsuccessfully tried to get close enough to Jean Genet, Benjamin Spock, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, or William Sloane Coffin to get a recognizable shot. (Those were the demonstrations at the Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins trial.)

My last foray was into animation. I still have the reel. It was the only color film I shot. Denise did the artwork and I worked out an infantile shooting script. It was a psychedelic countryside with a flowing river and glittering sun. A black egg rolls into the frame, breaks into three parts to become a bird shape, and flies away. The entire film was about 45 seconds long and took us an entire long weekend to shoot.

Thus ended my illustrious film career.

Wayback Machine

Sometime in 1970, Deni and I were living in New Haven. We were poor, but happy, quasi-hippies. We were both working for Yale libraries and I was taking a course in film-making at Quinnipiac College. (Just to help in time placement, my movie camera was a Bolex that held a spool of 100 feet of film, would run for about 20 seconds per winding, and weighed about 8 pounds.)

Sometime during that period we must have found a photo booth and sat for our portraits. As you can see, I was anticipating the "grunge" movement, and Deni was just drop-dead gorgeous.

So who am I anyway?

Assuming that people other than my family might be reading these fragments, I should probably give a brief overview of my chaotic life. This will give many a chance to opt-out of reading any future meanderings and maunderings.

I was a technical writer for most of my life, but I have worked in more discrete occupations than most other people (albeit less out of desire than out of the need to keep my family fed). Many of these jobs will be subjects of posts so I won't detail them now. I write poetry (I am an occasional contributor to The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form), collect books, study colonial American history, write essays about nature, and much more. I used to be a consistent contributor to Salon Magazine's Table Talk.

I am still a fat man, although I have been a strict vegetarian for more than three years. I have had a beard of some type since I was 18 years old, and currently wear it both grey and bushy. I wear a fedora and carry a cane.

I wear bifocals. I prefer work pants or bluejeans to flannels, but usually wear Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and sandals for most of the summer months. I prefer long-sleeved shirts in colder weather but invariably roll up the sleeves.

I try to have a notebook and pen with me at all times but, because I am easily distracted, I currently have about 30 notebooks awaiting transcription into one ... oh look! a squirrel!

I am married and have four children and three grandchildren. I am wonderfully proud of every single one of them.

I drink red wine and occasionally whiskey. I used to smoke a pipe and still have a large collection tucked away in my closet. I haven't smoked tobacco in nearly five years. I go to the gym several times a week.

I am currently trying to finish writing three books.

There is a picture of Tom Baker as Dr. Who hanging over my desk.

Navy Coffee

On the carrier, the media needs of the crew were handled by the ship's PAO (Public Affairs Office). As I mentioned before, we published and broadcast in several different forms.

Some of the operations were automated. There was an easy listening radio station that played huge reels of tape that we changed every few days. A news rebroadcast station played AFRTS broadcasts or the BBC World Service. The third station used live DJs and news readers. We had volunteers to fill some of those slots and me and my crew handled the gaps in the schedule. Other than the volunteers, there were only five or so of us to staff the media complex.

I, for example, had a late night jazz show, a classic rock show, and assembled and read radio newscasts. My subordinates were all excellent guys, each with his own talent set who had similar duties and schedules.

We also ran two television stations, one for entertainment and one for training. We swapped-off as director, engineer, camera man, and newscaster to produce a nightly news show. We collaborated to write the scripts and try to find some kind of graphics to use. We all loved to direct since it meant we got to sit at the video mixer which looked like the Death Star controls in Star Wars (because that's what they used to make it seem like future tech).

You have to remember that this was before the ubiquity of the internet made everything easy to grab. We seldom, if ever, had any video of world or national events, so we maintained files of potentially useful photos and graphics, royalty free clip art, and Navy source materials to try to flesh out the newscast and incidentally to act as art for the ship's daily newspaper.

Before and after the nightly TV news, two men handled the running of the television programs and movies that were broadcast throughout the ship. The others helped edit, write, rewrite, layout, and paste-up the eight page daily newspaper. When that was done we interviewed, wrote, and edited Public Relation Release news and feature stories about members of the ship's crew and sent them to their hometown newspapers. Wrote articles and laid-out the monthly support magazine that was mailed to the sailors' families.

We also scheduled the training television channel, developed scripts, graphics, and talent for demonstrations and instruction. We set up the lighting, audio, and props, then rehearsed, produced, directed and videotaped the shows.

Did I mention that we also ran publicity tours, arranged and staffed special events, and dealt with visiting VIPs when we were in port.

So we had five men in the department and a handful of volunteers to help out with some of the radio and television duties. Our days were long and hectic. it wasn't unusual to see some of us pounding the typewriters in during a TV show or movie. Drills, formations, maintenance, and cleaning would have been like vacations if they hadn't invariably put us behind schedule.

I, as leading petty officer, also had administrative duties. Working up evaluations and keeping personnel records, recommending promotions, ordering supplies, training, working with other departments etc., etc. In my copious free time I was also the Jewish lay-leader for the ship, conducting sabbath services.

The schedule was ridiculous. We'd work twenty hour days for four days straight and then take a half day off to sleep and recuperate.

We were fueled primarily by coffee. There was a 50-cup percolator in the office I shared with the Lieutenant who acted as Public Affairs Officer. It was refilled three or four times a day so you might be able to imagine the volume consumed and our slight obsession about finding the fastest routes to available heads (toilets). This wasn't normal coffee either, our preference (when we could get it) was for the 5 pound olive green cans of "watchstander" coffee which boasted about 50% more caffeine than normal brews.

I'll post a story here some other time about how I poisoned my father by mistake with watchstander.

I became so accustomed to working with the constant buzz, that it took me a decade or so after I left the Navy to bring my consumption down to just 10 cups a day.

Friendly Fire

The following account is intentionally vague, even though the only person in it who might be offended is past caring.

In 1976, I re-enlisted in the USN for a second four year period. I was sent back to DINFOS (the Defense Information School) at Fort Benjamin Harrison for an advanced course in broadcast journalism prior to be assigned to an AFRTS station on an aircraft carrier.

Over the course of the next four years, I managed to get myself onto several enemies lists including, and especially the Captain's. The ship's first captain was fine, but his replacement and I did not see eye-to-eye on many issues. Foremost among the disagreements were those on censorship of the ship's newspaper. He insisted and I resisted.

The first thing that you need to understand is that, in addition to a monthly magazine, 3 24-hour radio stations, 2 television stations and the newscasts for all of them, we produced a daily 8-page newspaper. The newspaper was odd in that it wasn't really necessary. Every department on the ship got AP and UPI newsfeeds and posted them outside their admin offices for people to read.

We would take the same feeds and choose the most important stories, trim them, add photos, etc. Most people picked up a copy of the paper only for the local (shipboard) news and the feature articles. We did try to keep our integrity though, and publish a balanced selection of stories. We won Navy-wide awards for our work.

Which is why it came as something of a shock to get a memo censuring me for printing the story of Elvis Presley's death. The captain wanted me and my four men to go out and collect all the papers then republish the paper removing the story. As I remember, we eventually solved this by blacking out all references to the fact that the death was drug-related rather than republishing. It was foolishness since the same story was hanging on bulletin boards throughout the ship, including the bridge.

For the next two years we had minor skirmishes about what was and was not appropriate for the ship's newspaper. At the end of March 1979 the Three Mile Island incident occurred. The captain explained to me, in a storm of fury and froth, that it was NOT a good idea to have a story about a nuclear power plant accident on a ship that was powered by nuclear reactors.

Again, I tried to point out that the news was already out there, and suggested that the best way to handle it was by using the story and adding to it to explain why the ship's safety procedures and discipline made it unlikely, if not impossible, for something like that to happen on board. This was unacceptable to him and I ended up endearing myself to him further by going over his head and getting the okay from an admiral.

By this time, as you might guess, no one was going to mistake us for BFFs. Then came the crowning moment.

One of the things I did to try to keep our readership up was to write a column for the paper under the pen name of Charlie Noble. The subject matter was usually cool facts about maritime history or terminology. Occasionally I would have some kind of a brain-teaser or puzzle. It was one of those puzzles that put me at the top of the captain's list of people to get rid of.

The question I posed was simple. The ship anchors in the Bay of Naples and at high tide a sailor climbs down a rope ladder to a boat to get shuttled to the shore. As he climbs into the boat he notices that five rungs of the ladder are under water. He comes back to the ship at low tide. How many rungs are under water now?

About three hours after the issue was distributed, I got an envelope, addressed to Charlie Noble, containing several pages of carefully written calculations that explained why only three rungs would be under water with a cover memo saying that this solution had to appear in the next issue along with the solver's name. That solver was the captain.

I have to admit that I toyed with the idea of simply following orders but, copies of the ship's paper were distributed to other ships, in Norfolk and at the Pentagon. If I published his proof, it would have major repercussions for both the Captain and me.

This wasn't going to be pretty. I climbed the 10 flights to his office and asked for a private conversation. First he wanted to know why I was opening other people's mail. I explained the concept of "pen name". Then I told him that I wasn't going to publish his solution because it would leave him open to ridicule. He asked why.

I explained that ships float.

He hemmed and hawed then started to talk about the weight differential when people got off and on. I realized that he was trying to salvage something, but it wasn't going to work. I said that with the mass of the ship, its waterline would barely change if the entire crew left the ship.

The captain told me that I was full of it. He called for the First Lieutenant while telling me that if wrong I would be sent to the brig for disrespect. The First Lieutenant walked in the door, saw the calculations and the newspaper open to my column and winced. He knew instantly what was going on because I had run it past him and he had told me he used a similar story when he did training.

You might wonder why a ship's officer wouldn't understand basic principles, but carrier captains are usually brown shoes (aviators) rather than black shoes (ship drivers).

The problem, of course, was the embarrassment involved. The captain seemed to think that my puzzle was intended to shame him and he never seemed to get that I was just trying to keep him from losing face. To him I seemed contumacious, and disrespectful. To me he became a powerful and dangerous lackwit.

Crunching Software, Hidden Writer

Unlike many other members of my family, I am a bit of an enigma. Easy identification comes with fame or recognition, and I have little of either. Most of my writing has been unattributed (software manuals and journalism) or under various pen names.

In the software industry, technical writers are not encouraged to sign their work. This bothers me. I am proud of the manuals and other materials that I produced and I wanted to be able to prove that they were my work, especially since I had interviewed several people who were obviously incapable of producing the examples that they claimed were their work. So I signed all the books I produced by hiding my name in them somewhere.

The first one I did was an excellent bit of subterfuge back in the early 1990s. I was working for Russell Frye of Frye Computer Systems. Russell was way ahead of the curve when it came to designing outrageously fine diagnostics and controls for networks, but when it came to me putting my name on the manuals I wrote, he stuck with the industry-standard. I never told him what I did so, if he's reading this and never figured it out, sorry Russell.

One of the illustrations in the manual was a list of network user names, The original was a screen shot of the list of users on our own system. We needed to replace those names with fakes.

It was easy to do. I used a graphics editor to write a new list and pasted it over the original. This was my chance to do some tweaking. I couldn't use the initial letters of the names to make an acrostic since they needed to look as if they had been sorted alphanumerically. So I had the bright idea of using the final letters instead. Since the user names were different lengths, making for a ragged right margin, and often appeared truncated, it was easy for others to miss my little personalization.

Reading downward the last letters spelled out "dlettvinmadethis."

Nobody knew it was there except me, and it would provide embedded proof that I was the author if I ever needed it.

I'm not the only one who has played around with manuals. One of my favorites was an old Mac manual the title of which I can no longer remember. I was reading it back in about 1990 when I was editing a tech support magazine for North Edge (later Timeslips) Software.

There was this one paragraph that kept bothering me. There was something about it that had my J. Jonah Jameson senses tingling. I read it a couple of times before it suddenly fell into place.

I re-typed the text block, breaking lines at the rhyme words, to reveal a hidden but perfectly written Shakespearean sonnet. It was in modern English, and the information was clear, but it was obvious that some poor schmuck had reached a limit and decided to have some fun.

I wish I could remember the name and version of the software. I would dearly like to try to track down the author to tell him or her how much I appreciated their little Easter egg.

The Worst Stew Ever

1969

I was feeling in the mood for some sherry tonight. It must have been because I had been watching a lot of Stephen Fry shows. So I went out to buy some. As I browsed through the liquor store, I saw a familiar label. I had my hand on the bottle, but then decided against it since I'm the only person I know who has a taste for it.

When I got home, my wife was making a beef stew and I started to laugh. When I explained, she joined in the laughter. It wasn't that funny at the time.

Dee and I were living in a small attic apartment on Whalley Avenue in New Haven in 1969. I had dropped out of the CIA (chef not spy) school, had worked for a time at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and was now a sort of vaguely part-owner of a kind of half-assed co-op venture that consisted of an organic food shop called "The Food Shop" and an herb shop with the far more creative name "The Herb Shop." When we could afford to pay ourselves we did, but more often than not we'd make do with leftovers from the food shop to keep ourselves fed.

Dee worked at the Yale library and her salary went for rent with very little left over. So the food from the co-op was critical to us. There were many skipped meals and those we had were pretty skimpy.

One night, what we had left were some random aging carrots and potatoes and some scraps of meat. Dee was at work, so I was cooking. I cobbled together a stew; adding in some flour for thickener and a bouillon cube for more flavor. Some parsley and sage from The Herb Shop punched it up a little but it was still a bit bland, so I pulled a bottle from the cupboard, sloshed what was left into the stew and tossed the bottle into the trash. The stew bubbled away on the stove top for a couple of hours. It smelled fantastic.

When she got home, Dee's face lit up at the smell. I dished out a bowl apiece, and put some croutons made from the ends of some stale bread on top. I was basking in her approval as she raised the first spoonful of stew ...

"Oh dear God," she said, "what is this?" She spat it out.

I was shocked. I lifted my spoon, tasted then followed her example and spat it out. It was bitter; incredibly, inedibly bitter.

What the hell had I done? I thought back. The herbs were fine. The meat scraps smelled fresh. The veggies were a bit soft but should have been fine ... the flour? ... the boullon? Oh my God! The wine.

I went to the trash can and pulled out the wine bottle. The label spelled out my idiocy in large letters: "CAMPARI". I had spiced up the stew with one of Italy's bitter aperitif wines.

Attempting to salvage something from this debacle, I put our bowls of stew on the floor. The cats sniffed at the bowls warily and departed without even attempting a taste.

We went hungry that night, but we were young and resilient and it wasn't long before we could laugh about it. After all, we still had each other.

Tipping at a Wedding

My brother once got married in Toronto. His bride was Chinese and her family was a big part of the community up there.

He invited me to be the 'best man' (who could be better) and bring my family. Unfortunately, Avi, still an infant, and my wife were sick. I took the two older kids, Moishe (about 11) and Hosanna (about 9), packed them into our beaten-up blue Ford Escort, and drove from Boston to Toronto.

I vaguely remember taking the kids to the top of the CN tower, and also remember marveling at the cleanliness of the city. I don't remember all that much about the ceremony, or my contributions to it (if any). I do, however, vividly remember the reception, both for its size and for a kindness done for me.

The reception was held in a huge banquet hall in Chinatown. I was part of the greeting line to welcome the guests near the table where the red envelopes were being collected (red for luck, envelopes to enclose the gifts of cash). As people arrived it was obvious that the only people at the reception who were not Chinese were my brother, our parents, me, and my kids. Most conversations were being held in Chinese, of which I understood nothing.

We were eventually seated at the head table along with the bride's immediate family. My brother was busy with groom stuff. My father was pretending that his broad gestures and occasional Yiddish curses would pass for a sincere attempt at communication and my mother was occupied by alternately fussing over the bride and being embarrassed by my father's antics. So there was no-one for me to talk to other than my kids. We talked about how big the room was and the number of big round tables ( about 25) and how they were all full.

At one point during this affair, I was ambushed by a tradition that my brother had forgotten to mention. (I hasten to add that I'm pretty sure that he didn't know about it either.) Suddenly a waiter put two bottles of whiskey and a glass in front of me. I must have looked confused. The waiter explained that I was supposed to take the whiskey bottle from table to table and drink a toast to the bride and groom at each. I asked if the bottle was to fill everyone's glasses. No, the waiter assured me. These bottles are just for you. When you run low on the first one, I'll bring you the other.

I'm sure my expression must have changed from confused to horrified. There were a number of problems with the scenario: I had my kids with me and no-one else that I trusted with the responsibility, I had driven to the reception from a hotel across town, and I had seldom, if ever, had anything more potent than wine or beer. I logically assumed that downing two bottles of Four Roses in about eight minutes would render me three sheets to the wind with zero driving ability and almost certainly freak out my kids.

The waiter interpreted my expression correctly and quietly asked me if I didn't drink. I said no. He smiled and said he'd take care of it. He took the bottles away and came back with two identical ones. Now my expression must have been puzzled.

I hope that I made an impression on the other guests there that night, as a dignified, bearded, fat man who could hold his liquor as well as anyone alive. I finished my rounds making all the toasts and even multiple toasts and never stumbled, or slurred my words.

When I got back to the head table, I asked the waiter if he got to keep what wasn't used. He gave me a little smile and nodded. So I tipped him more than I've ever tipped anyone, asked him to tip a glass and raise a toast to me tonight, then I tipped the last of the cold tea out of the Four Roses bottle into my glass.

My Father Eats a Pepper

My father's sense of humor varied between incredibly complex wordplay, multi-lingual puns, an appreciation for Victor Borge, the Marx Brothers, and P.D.Q. Bach on one hand, and the most heavy-handed insults and practical jokes on the other. This was extraordinarily confusing to me as a child, since it was hard to tell the difference between being instructed and being set-up for a fall.

I still don't really understand what satisfaction he got from scoring points on his credulous and naive children, but whatever thrill it was it must have enough for him to continue it for far too long. Very seldom could we turn the tables on him and when we did it was almost invariably accidental.

My parents went to Mexico one year. I think I must have been 8 or 9 years old. They brought back presents for us. I can't remember what my sister got, but my brother got a red basketwork dragon that I was intensely jealous of. I got a wooden sculpture which has been with me ever since. I named him Atrocious. It was explained to me that this was a sculpture of an African lion done by a woodcarver who had never seen one. We all got heavy Mexican serapes that had the neck slit sewn shut so we could use them as blankets. My father gleefully told me that the figure on my blanket was Chac-Mool, and Aztec god who demanded freshly extracted and still throbbing, human hearts as a sacrifice.

Stuff like that didn't bother me at all. The blanket went on my bed. I toyed with the idea of sacrificing one of my siblings to the god, but it seemed overly messy and uncomfortable to explain and clean-up afterwards. The lion was placed in a position of honor on one of my bedroom bookshelves (yes, even then my bedroom was lined with books).

A few days later, I walked into our apartment kitchen to find my father busily searching the drawers. Since he had a can in one of his hands, I assumed he was looking for the can opener. I found it for him. He was excited and announced with great pomp and circumstance that I was just the person he was looking for. This was enough to instantly make me wary. He had smuggled a can of chili peppers back from Mexico and he wanted me to be the first to try them.

Without actually running out of the room in fear, I explained that there was no possibility of my acting as taster for his royal highness. He insisted that these peppers weren't THAT hot. I insisted that I didn't trust him. "Then just dip your finger in the juice," he said, " and put a drop on your tongue. I continued to refuse. I had been caught too many times before.

He finally tried to suggest that my refusal was due to my wimpiness and lack of character. I remained steadfast. He smirked at me and popped a whole pepper into his mouth and bit down.

There's an expression that comes over a persons face when they've done something without sufficient thought. I have seen it on the face of a woman who liked the look of the pretty green stuff on the side of her first plate of sushi and popped a walnut-sized lump of wasabi into her mouth. I have seen it on the face of a friend who ordered a brew pub's hottest chili con carne and their special beer of the day, not realizing that their chili was intensely spicy and that the beer of the day was jalapeno. I have imagined my own face after having told a waiter at an Indian restaurant that I liked the heat of chilis and that they should amp it up for me. The first time I saw it, however, was on my father's face that morning.

There was a very slight widening of the eyes, damped down quickly by pride and not wanting to seem surprised. Then came a flush starting at the base of the neck as the heat hit for real and started to spread. It was clear that had I not been there he would have spit it out, so I stayed. The flush reached his forehead and he started to sweat while still trying to maintain a poker-face. He didn't want to swallow it, but I wasn't about to let him of the hook that easily.

Then came the bonus, he reached up to wipe the sweat off his brow ... with the hand he'd used to take the pepper from the can. I stood there quietly as if waiting for his verdict on the deliciousness of the peppers and my loss at refusing to go first. More sweat started to trickle down, this time washing the minute traces of pepper juice down through his eyebrows and into his eyes. He waved, as if to dismiss me and raced to the bathroom where I heard him spit out the pepper and wash his hands and face over and over again.

His eyes were red for the rest of the day. I never saw that can of peppers again.

The kicker to this story is that I am a great aficionado of chilis now. I grow my own jalapenos, and habaneros, I have jars of hot chili and curry powders, and containers of Jolokia (ghost peppers) and Trinidad Scorpion peppers in the cupboard and use them regularly. I am sure that the peppers that destroyed my father's composure all those years ago, would be mild to me now.

Brains but no backbone

1963

The Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy also includes a public aquarium. (One of the features was an electric ray in a petting tank. You couldn't get away with that in the US.) We had a large octopus in one of the display tanks who disappeared one night. The catwalks we used to feed the display animals were simply a set of boards laid over the tops of the tanks.

When we went searching, we found sucker marks drying on the boards and followed them. The octopus had gone past the dogfish tank (dogfish love to eat octopus) past the moray eel tank (morays also find octopus tasty), past the sea anemone tank (pretty but inedible) and dropped into the crab display where he reposed on a pile of empty crab shells radiating pleasure and satisfaction.

Many people don't realize that an octopus can clearly show its emotion. It is relatively easy to tell when an octopus is happy, sick, scared, curious or even horny by the texture and color of its skin, which it can control almost instantaneously.

After a few similar incidents, we moved this guy to a large tank in the common area of the research facility where he became a pet.

For those of you who may still doubt the intelligence of an octopus, let me continue. Our new pet loved being fed by hand. He also liked to grab my arm to get lifted out of the water and taken for a walk. They can survive cheerfully in the open air for longer than you might think.

His favorite game was to watch the door to see who came into his area. Octopods have extraordinarily good vision. If a stranger entered, he would quietly ease himself up and slightly over the edge of the tank (it was open at the top) and wait for his opportunity. Then he would use his siphon to jet a stream of cold seawater 15 - 20 feet to douse the unwary intruder. Then he dropped back into his tank an display the strong colors and hornlike skin protruberances that were his equivalent of giggling.

Food From Hell

I worked in one restaurant for about six months. I was not very happy with the owner's methods. He had a black market deal going on with a food supplier salesman who would bribe the rest of us to keep our mouth's shut by bringing us specialty food items.

The owner's favorite purchase was frozen processed turkey breast. He liked it because it was cheap, he could buy it in bulk and its flavor was easily disguised. If you ordered a tuna salad sandwich what you got was 50% tuna and 50% turkey.

The biggest travesty was the "lobster roll" according to the menu "succulent chunks of Maine lobster in homemade mayo." In actuality it was a product called "Sea Legs" which was essentially processed fish and texturized soy flavored with lobster juice and dyed red along one edge to give the appearance of lobster, mixed with chunks of turkey dosed with paprika to match the visual effect, mixed with old chopped celery and industrial mayo.

I needed the job. My kids were hungry.

Then came the middle of summer. During a parade a float went out of control knocking down a power line and blacking out downtown for two days.

When we reopened, the inside of the refrigerators were like ovens. I started to dump the tuna, chicken, egg and lobster salads into the trash. The owner stopped me and told me that we could just mix fresh stuff with the warm and no one would be able to tell the difference. Put it back he said, or you're fired. I took off my apron.

Three weeks later he was cited for a dozen or so cases of food poisoning.

A Hard Roll

December 1993

The guilt had gotten to me. The guy in the wheelchair at North Station, the insistent quasimodos in Salvation Army uniforms tintinabulating at every street corner, the stocky old man in tattered jeans who sang to me, "I need some money, I need some money bad," had set me up.

Stoically, with my bland commuter face firmly unfocussed, I had passed by them all.  My hand in my pocket clutched my change to keep it from jingling.  I felt awful. I was a liar and a cheat and an ungenerous son-of-a-bitch, but I had made it through the gauntlet with enough money for a cup of coffee and a hard roll.

The coffee shop was steamy and friendly. They knew me and usually I joke around a bit with the ladies there.  This time I just smiled and grabbed my paper bag and left. I could see another panhandler on the corner so I cut through the alley to the next street and my office.

The building was still locked, but, as I got out my keys I suddenly remembered that I had a doctor's appointment this morning. I turned and headed for the subway. As I passed a doorway further down the street, Someone stepped out.  "Spare some change for a cup of coffee mister?"

Her timing was perfect. I handed her the paper bag and said, "I'll do better than that, you can have this coffee." She shrank back and wouldn't touch the bag. For a moment I thought she was frightened.  Then she said, "It's probably not black."

I laughed. "Yes it is," I said and handed her the bag again.  This time she took it and stepped backward into the doorway again as I headed down the steps to the Red Line. Suddenly I heard her voice again.

"Hey mister, didn't you get any butter for this hard roll."

Halloween Night 1975

Halloween Night 1975
It was the fourth year of my first tour of duty as a Navy journalist. I had been assigned to handle public relations for a Navy Office in Milwaukee WI. This was a terrible decision by whoever it was who sent me there because my pay grade was so low that I couldn't afford to live there. I'll talk about that more in another post. But the critical part is that, by my third year there, I was living alone, my family having (temporarily) disintegrated.

I moved to a studio apartment near Lake Michigan. It was the first, and so far only, place I lived that had a Murphy bed. My money was short so I had to ration my socializing. Part of that rationing was to take advantage of the USO club. I could always get some coffee, conversation, and sometimes a free meal there.

The young ladies who staffed this USO Club were all young, attractive, and charming. They all liked me because unlike most of there clientele I had made it clear that I was not on the prowl. When I was there I became a kind of protector when other servicemen got too rambunctious and irritating.

I was sitting at a table there brooding into my coffe mug one afternoon when Rose came and sat down across from me. Rose was what my father would call a "pocket Venus". (Actually, that's not true, he would have said that she would be a good centerfold for Reader's Digest.) she was small with a lovely figure and masses of curly dark hair surrounding a sweetly pretty face with sparkling mischievous eyes.

I always liked talking to Rose, she was smart, witty, and charming. I smiled at her and she asked me if I was going to come to the USO Halloween Party. I shook my head, I didn't particularly enjoy the big parties.

"I wish you would," she said, "I need a date."

What could I say other than yes.

The problem was that the party was the following weekend and we had no costumes. The costume store in Milwaukee had been stripped to the walls by people with more forethought than us. Among the few things left were a brown, hooded monk's robe, sort of a Friiar Tuck thing, well-used and a bit ratty, and an emerald satin 18th century-looking ball gown. Rose tried on the dress and it fit beautifully, so I bought the robe and rented the dress and in a fit of ingenuity bought an odd selection of make-up.

On Halloween afternoon, we met at her house and concocted our plans as we got ready. We were going to do a little scenario at the party. Rose had a pair of plastic fangs, and I had bought some make-up for her that glowed green under black light. (I knew that they were planning to have black lights scattered around the club.) Her fangs glowed too. I'll save the details of my make-up for the reveal.

So when we arrived at the club, she was a fetching and sexy vampire girl and I was a monk with his hood pulled down to shadow and conceal the face completely. A large wooden cross hung from a cord around my neck. In one hand I had a huge mallet I'd borrowed from a carpenter friend and in the other was a wooden spike.

As we'd planned, we spent some time playing hide and seek with me chasing her about the club trying to spike her (not a euphemism). Eventually I started acting exhausted and leaned on something. Everyone started watching as Rose crept up behind me and suddenly pounced. She stuck her head under my hood and bit (actually kissed) my neck before rushing off.

I did a transformational type of shudder and doubled over as if cramped, then stood and pulled my hood back.

I had used liquid latex and, stretching my skin, painted it on and let it dry, when I stopped pulling the skin tight the latex bunched up to look like a mass of wrinkles. I'd used black wax to make all but my canine teeth invisible, and applied two realistic puncture wounds to my throat.

There was quite a substantial and enjoyable gasp from our audience and Rose and I got a nice round of applause.

Halloween 2009

It was a beautiful night last night. Very mild but with a high wind which sent the leaves skittering across the road. It was a perfect night for Halloween, even in its denatured, passive yet sugar-buzzed shadow of its former self.

We live in a well-favored area, a cul-de-sac sandwiched between a church and an elementary school in the lower scale area of a very well-to-do town. A safe neighborhood. One of the town's police officers lives five houses down.

This morning my third grandchild (the first grandson) was born. This afternoon my wife left for Seattle to provide support for our daughter whose first child has just graduated to toddlerhood. I could not go with her for various reasons, so I was left as the sole distributor of the sealed, pre-packaged, glucose bombs.

Halloween in our town is tyrannically restricted to the period between 6pm and 8pm. I lit the candles in the five Jack O' Lanterns on our front steps, and as, dusk fell, settled down on the top step with an old basket filled with recognizably branded candy, a copy of Terry Pratchett's "Unseen Academicals", and a combination LED flashlight and laser pointer (removed from the possession of my oldest granddaughter who upon being told not to shine the laser into people's eyes, interpreted that as targeting instructions).

I have a full white-beard. I am also an overweight, genial gent, so it seemed somehow appropriate to confuse the little beggars by wearing a red shirt. Call it my version of "Let's Do the Time Warp Again".

The first arrivals were right at 6pm. The three kids from across the street. The two boys with light sabers, the little girl with an attempt at the cinnamon bun hairdo of Princess Leia. They politely dipped into the basket, giggled, thanked me and scampered away to where their mom and dad lurked in the shadows. I called after the kids to them to warn them about the red Halloween bug that nibbles on toes and deployed the laser pointer to make squiggly motions around their feet. They laughed and bashed it with their plastic weapons.

It was ten minutes before my next visitors. The woman next door escorting her daughter-in-law holding a baby in a lamb costume and a sweetly shy and silent three or four-year-old shepherdess. She didn't say anything no matter how much her escorts prompted her. I offered her the basket and she looked into its depths without moving. Then very carefully reached in and extracted a single small tube of malted milk balls and placed (not dropped) it in her bag.

"You are a very pretty shepherdess," I told her. She looked at me solemnly and nodded infinitessimally, confirming that I was capable of making reasonable judgments. Her escorts blathered apologies, still trying to get her to say something. I smiled at her and looked down, tacitly inviting her to look with me. I had the laser pointer's dot making circles in front of her. Then I made it climb up to her knee. She almost smiled, then turned imperiously and left, trailing her noisy escort behind.

It took about twenty minutes for my next visitors. A ragtag assemblage of middle-school boys in last-minute, low-concept costumes, stopped by and politely asked how much they could take. Grabbed their alotment and rushed of to the next house, leaving me bemused at how much their attempts at make-up resembled the Permanent Marker Bandits who achieved a sad fame last week.

A few minutes passed, then a colorful panoply of six middle-school girls resplendent in brilliant satins and velvets as princesses, ballerinas, tavern wenches, etc. came so that I could tithe for their beauty. Which I properly did. I politely called them ladies, which evinced a communal giggle.

Then, nearly and hour passed. I had almost decided to close up shop, When a young, tired-looking father appeared with his son in tow. The son was wearing a curiously undefinable costume. It seemed to be intended as some kind of animal, but the headpiece had been pulled back and it was impossible to identify.

I looked up the street and realized that most of the other porches were dark. This was going to be my last visitor so I helped the boy to a good selection. The father thanked me and they wandered off into the darkness. I blew out the candles in the pumpkins, turned out the light, and went inside.

We used to get so many kids here on Halloween, and so many ingenious and delightful costumes. Now they go to pre-programmed daytime events, or brightly lit malls, which use the smokescreen of community service to get in a marketing effort.

I've been left with a ton of candy. I dumped it in a bag so that my wife can have it when she comes home.

When I sat down in front of my computer to try to get a few hours of writing done, there was a message containing some pictures; the new baby looking ready to take on the world and his big sister dressed as a penguin. I looked at them for a while.

So, instead of working, I search Hulu for a scary movie, pour myself a Jameson's put my feet up on a document storage box and celebrate a quiet and now solitary Halloween.

A Penny is Passed

Apr 11, 2008



Springtime is the wrong season for a dog to die.
I know this. I said it about a week ago to Penny.

I was lying on the floor next to her for most of the day, holding her, masaging her legs, hoping that her inability to get to her feet was a cramp and not paralysis, comforting her through her obvious embarrassment at having to void bladder and bowels on the bed that she used in our bedroom closet.

I woke up that morning ready to plunge into a day of writing. My wife, Deni, was still asleep as I made myself some coffee. Penny usually gets up with me and barks to be let out into the backyard, so when I didn\'t hear her, I left the coffee perking and went back into the bedroom. She was awake, lying on her side as usual but her eyes were alert. I knew something was wrong immediately. When I thought back later, I realized that when she saw me, there was no motion at all from her tail.

She lifted her head and neck attempting to twist her legs under her and get to her feet, but she had no control of her body.

Let me back up a minute.

Penny was my youngest daughter\'s dog, but for the last 6 years or so, she has been my companion. She is a small white English setter with large round spots that were the source of her name. She came to us as a puppy. a tiny thing that wanted so much to be with us that she would bark and whine until we helped her up onto the sofa.

She was a runner. She\'d dash across the backyard like a streak of doggie lightning in pursuit of squirrels, neighbor cats, birds, and any other invaders real or imaginary. Her favorite game was to chase a basketball as it was kicked across the backyard. I called her "The Hound of the Basketballs". With smaller balls the game played was not so much \'fetch\' as \'just try to get it away from me slowpoke\'.

She was a runner. She was an investigator. She was hard to take for walks since she would always be straining at the end of the leash trying to follow a scent trail, or seeing just one more movement deep in the shrubbery that she had to identify. I\'m sure that some would say that we didn\'t train her properly, but I have always valued curiousity above obedience. Penny may have half-strangled herself trying to pass her limits, but at least she tried.

She featured in many of my essays about nature. She was my companion on walks, on the porch, in the yard, and as I worked at my desk. She\'d curl up at my feet as I pounded away at the keys, every so often barking or whining me away from the desk for a romp.

She got yelled at a lot too: when she barked incessantly in the middle of the night, when she whined at the dinner table until Deni (the soft touch) would sneak her a tidbit from her plate, when, bored with her own food she shouldered the cat aside and feasted on Tuna Delite.

She got cuddled. She was afraid of thunder, of sticks, of water sprays, of other dogs, and of snaky things like ropes or belts. We could always tell when a storm was rolling in ... Penny would try to dig her way through the bathtub or cram herself into the smallest space whether it was a kitchen cupboard or under a bed.

She loved car rides. I\'d tease her by saying "Want to go for a ride in the car?" and she would be panting and whining at the door before I even finished the sentence. She rode in the back seat with her head out the window. If I was running errands, as I walked into the store or library, she\'d start barking foe me to come back. Sometimes she\'d continue for so long that I'd have to cut the errands short.

She loved bones, much prefering them to dog biscuits. She was fastidious about her food. There was only one type of dogfood she liked, and she would actually sort out pieces that she didn\'t want from the bowl and pile them to one side, but she wasn\'t as picky about other things she ate. She liked peanut butter sandwiches, butter, anything that had been on a plate on the table (I once watched her steal asparagus, another time found that she\'d raided the trashcan for artichoke leaves), she also liked eating the occasional flower from the garden.

Her reckless eating habits may have hastened the end. Last summer she ate a large bee and, later that day, went into a series of full-bore grand mal seizures. She frothed and drooled, her legs spasming and her eyes bewildered at her body\'s betrayal. Deni and I bundled her into a blanket and drove to the only place open, a distant animal hospital. She had come out of it by then, but was in the post-epileptic stage of constant walking and fear. They warned us at the hospital of likely permanent neurological damage and that the seizures might recur.

She had trouble with her back legs from then on. She could still run, but it was an effor for her to climb stairs and once again we had to help her up onto the couch so that she could be near us. She went from sleeping on the couch to sleeping on an old feather bed on the floor of our bedroom closet. Then came the day last week.

Throughout the course of the day, I lived in hope, I gave her some chunks of beef from some beef stew and some of the liquid. I had to use a shallow bowl and tilt it sharply to let her get at it since she could not raise herself up enough otherwise. I lay next to her, massaging her legs and hoping it would pass.

It was when she tried, desperately to get to her feet, and first whined and then moaned ... a sound I had never heard her make ... a sound of such distress, that it forced me to think. Here was a friend of mine, someone whose entire life is about movement. What could I do for her? It wasn\'t as if she were partially mobile. Except for spasms and quivers she was immobile below the neck. There was no option for scooter wheels orother partial mobility solutions. As humans we have other resources, we can internalize, creating a mental alternative to the freedom of movement.

It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I am still tearing up as I write about it. Deni and I took the corners of the featherbed and lifted her up to the bed, where, once again, I wrapped Penny in a blanket and carried her to the car. I drove as my wife held Penny. The vet was waiting for us.

Springtime is the wrong season for a dog to die. Winter is finally over and the grass is coming up. The snow is gone, the peepers are back. Wildlife intrusions into the backyard will be more frequent.

It is a week later and I am still putting food in her bowl, watching where I step, reacting to the barks of other dogs in the neighborhood. It is a week later and I\'ve decided to leave the faded, half-deflated basketballs where they are under the tree and up against the weathered fence.



It is a week later and I just realized that I have my feet tucked under my chair so as to give Penny more space under the desk.

Penny Recovers a Bit

5 September 2007

So there's a combination of bad news and good news. Which I suppose is not a surprise since nearly everything is.

The best news is that the seizures have stopped and that Penny seems to be returning to her old self. The ambivalent news is that the vets have no idea what caused them. There seem to be no easy answers. There is no treatable condition to be found. It is unlikely to be epilepsy and more likely to be either "good news" some kind of an anomaly perhaps brought on by ingesting something poisonous (she does seem to have a taste for bumblebees) or "bad news" some kind of brain lesion or tumor which is likely "in a dog her age, to be untreatable or perhaps a stroke.

It is now just a question of waiting and hoping that it does not recur.

There was a wonderful moment yesterday though. Penny had been unsteady on her hind legs all morning. She spent much of her time sleeping under my desk. I was happy about that since it meant that I could write and, at the same time, keep an eye on her to make sure she was doing well.

About 1:30 I had a visit from a friend of mine, a fellow storyteller named Tony Toledo. Tony is the only person I know for whom coffee is entirely superfluous. He is a superannuated poster child for ADD. Okay ... I'm kidding a bit, but he is dynamic, unfailingly cheerful, and has an infectiously bubbling personality. I find it difficult to be in the same room with him and remain melancholic.

Apparently, so does Penny. She literally bounced out from under the desk standing straight and firm on her legs, her tail wagging like an overclocked metronome.

It made his visit a double joy.

That seemed to be a turning point for her. She's still a little unsteady but manages the steps to the backyard and cheerfully barks at the squirrels and jays.

I'm going to have to get Tony to visit more often. Maybe I'll get him to sign one of his publicity photos and hang it on the wall in the rogues gallery of my heroes.

But I'll hang it lower so that Penny can see it.

Penny Eats a Bee

Today I spent a long time playing with Cleo, my oldest son's dog. She is a tall caramel colored standard poodle with incredible patience and love for her owners, including my granddaughter who occasionally insists in dressing the dog up in dancing tights and tutu.

Chasing Cleo around the yard and playing tug o' war with each of us on an end of a frayed rope, reminded me of how much I miss our dog, Penny.

The next three posts are sequential and were written as things happened.

24 September 2007

It has been a long night.

Penny is the white with brown spots English setter, that is my fairly constant companion. When I sit on the back porch, she sits with me. When I write she lies under the desk by my feet. She only deserts me when my wife, Deni, is knitting. Then she curls up on the sofa next to the balls of yarn. Yesterday, while we sat on the back porch she ate a bee. She looked irritated for a moment but seemed fine.

About 8 pm I was working on some essays when my son, Avi, rushed in and said, "Something's wrong with Penny."

I jumped up and hurried out to the living room where Avi and my wife were desperately trying to soothe Penny. She was in the midst of a massive grand-mal seizure. Her tongue was lolling out, thick froth drooling from her mouth, and her legs spasmodically kicking as if she were running. Her bladder had let go, her eyes blank. I jumped in to cradle and comfort her, but it was obvious that she was not registering anything but the terror of being trapped in a body that was betraying her.

It lasted a long time ... at least 10 minutes. When the seizure finally passed, I was soaked with drool and urine, but so grateful that her body had calmed. Deni, in the meantime, had been on the phone with the vet. It was after pm on a Sunday, and she had been told that the nearest emergency facility open was more than 20 miles away.

Penny wanted to get to her feet, but they wouldn't stay under her. She seemed desperate to move. I figured that the spasms had affected her motor control and had probably cramped her muscles as well. I picked her up and carried her to the car. We left Avi at the house and Deni sat in the back soothing our dogher as we zipped along the dark winding country roads.

Penny loves to ride in the car and she calmed down a bit and even fell asleep.

At the vet's I carried her in, but she seemed to want to be on her feet. I set her down and snapped a leash on her collar. There were other animals there so I kept the leash short as they took the intake information.

Penny kept walking into things and straining at the leash.

Finally we were put in an examination room. We waited for ten minutes. Penny seemed desperate to leave, which was unusual for her. she usually likes trips to the vet. She was constantly straining at the leash and getting it tangled around the furniture.

We figured that she was upset about the other animals so my wife went to stand in the hallway to wait for the vet while I let Penny roam at will in the small room. She kept circling the room obsessively keeping close to the walls and getting her head jammed into the corners. I realized that she was, at least temporarily, blind.

The vet finally came about twenty minutes later. She confirmed my assumption of grand mal, told us what the probable causes were in a dog her age, which included diabetes, thyroid problems and brain lesions. She said that the walking and blindness were Post Ictal behaviors. She suggested that we leave her overnight. They would put her on a valium drip and monitor her.

Worried about the delays we had already seen, we decided against that. She said she'd give us some valium suppositories in case there was another seizure and left.

Deni stayed to wait for the medication and to pay the bill. I took Penny out to the parking lot to let her walk and get her out of an environment that was clearly disturbing to her.

We waited outside for at least another half hour before the vet finally got back to my wife with the medication, reinforcing the correctness of our decision to bring Penny home. We drove home. Penny quietly dozing.

When we got back to the house at 10:30, we settled her back on the couch in a nest of blankets. Deni sat next to her and listened to the television while I went into my office to do a little more work. Or at least that's what I though I would do. Instead I popped Google open and started searching about dog seizures. I found that there was a lot that the vet had not told us about.

The length of the seizure made it a "Status Epilecticus" and is potentially life-threatening, and there are so many potential causes that they fill an entire page. Eating a bee was listed.

Deni turned off the TV after a while and went in to get ready for bed. Suddenly we heard Penny's claws tip-tapping along. She had gotten off the sofa and walked down the hallway to the bedroom where the dog bed she sleeps on normally is. This cheered us up. She seemed to be getting back to normal.

Penny curled up on her bed, Deni curled up on ours with a book, and I went back to write a little more.

About midnight I called it quits. I went in and got ready for bed, checking Penny who was sleeping soundly. I read for a short time until exhausted I turned out the lights.

I woke instantly at about 2:30 am, as did Deni. Even in the dark we could tell that Penny was having another seizure. I dropped to the floor next to her and cradled her while Deni got the suppositories.

Let me tell you about these "suppositories" ... These were not glycerine insert them and let 'em melt types. They consisted of a small glass bottle with a sealed cap filled with liquid a syringe, and a tube for insertion. The first one slipped out of Deni's hands as she tried to get the cap off and spilled its contents on the bed. The second one went better ... she got the syringe filled and stuck the insertion tube on the end, greased it with K-Y and lifted Penny's tail.

I did my best to hold her still, but a sudden spasm yanked the tube of the syringe and half the contents spurted over her fur and the dog bed. I hoped it would be enough, we only had one dose left. We took her back out to the couch where it was easier to hold her.

The seizure wouldn't stop. Finally Deni filled the last syringe and we managed to get it all in. Suddenly I remembered something I had read earlier that night and sent her out to the kitchen for an ice pack. I put it on Penny's back near the base of her rib cage. Slowly, the spasms started to decrease in intensity.

Deni and I have been switching off since then, sitting next to Penny and holding her. She has tried to walk, but cannot. her forelegs seem fine but her back legs can't seem to function properly.

I just went out to check on them. They are lying on the couch, one on each end, sound asleep. It is 7 am.

In an hour the office of Penny's regular vet will open. I hope for the best but dread what they will say.