I’m not sure what you did the last time you moved into a new house but what we did was head for Costco. There was stuff we had to have…a couch in the living room, some office furniture, perhaps a bed….and we hoped they would have it, and in fact they did, and it all worked out well, except for the office furniture part. Did you know that you can buy stuff that’s labeled “easy to assemble” that actually has 54 major wood parts and over 300 pieces of hardware? All truth, and that stuff, no matter how good you are, is gonna take you a couple of days to assemble, and at the end you have furniture that’s too heavy to move, so if anybody besides us ever owns this house I bet they will own this same piece of furniture because I sure as heck know I’m not disassembling it, except perhaps with an ax.

Towards the end there was one step that I thought (even at the time) was especially amusing. Basically it was the installation of the “tower”, a piece consisting of a three-shelf mini-bookcase-looking thing about three feet tall and a foot-and-a-little wide. Since the overall construction is an odd combination of iron- or rubber-wood (very heavy) and ultra-dense fiberboard (even heavier) even this relatively small tower is, you guessed it, heavy. And for some unknown reason, where every other major piece is fitted together with metal dowels that snap into metal locking hubs, n this one piece sits on the desk with nothing more to secure it than six glue-strips, the backing of which you remove just before you put it into place. I thought this was odd….clearly glue wasn’t enough to hold a heavy piece in place….until Irene and I man-handled it onto the desk at which point it sucked onto the desk like a huge abalone on a rock, stuck like it would be there until the end of time, actually all good except that it was stuck in the wrong place by about half an inch, which to Irene and my perfectionists’ eyes was a miss as good as a mile. If you ever actually have been abalone diving you know how tough it is to pry one off its rock, right? It was twice that tough to get this thing to move, and the sound it made when it pried loose sent both Spryro the boy-dog and K.C. the girl-cat running at full speed for cover. I would have sworn it was taking the surface off the furniture at least, but it didn’t, and eventually all was well and it was properly re-secured, this time in its proper spot.

All is well  in truth, now, and I write to you from that very desk, and it doesn’t look awesome but pretty good, and I bet you, when you visit, can’t find where the “tower” initially went. Consider this your invitation.

Which is here in the RV, as we have been, now, for over two days. There are times in the RV life when you better friggin’ have everything you need within your own cave because you simply aren’t going anywhere and what you’ve got is what you live with. Sickness, yours or your dog’s, can get you there, but so can weather, and here in Alabama more often than not the strange subset of weather, the humidity, is the main villain, coupled with the regularly-attending rain and localized but still ferocious thunderstorms that to this uninitiated ex-Californian sound like someone banging on the gates of their personal hell. Which has been the case here, in the PeeWeeRV, over the last two days. It rains, it thunders, it keeps on raining. The rain lets up, we let the dogs out, the thunder portends more rain, the dogs want to go back in, I look up at the sky, Irene shouts out that the back of the RV stinks of sewer gas which, inexplicably, is beginning to settle there -she opined earlier that a dead opposum had crawled into the vent to the washer and drier and died there, it smelled that way to her, and, this being Alabama, I didn’t question her but went outside and looked at the exterior of the vent pipe to see if, in fact, I could see claw marks on the paint. That I couldn’t didn’t mean she was wrong, and that I would say something that patently is that silly speaks more to this being Alabama than to anything more serious, for instance that I have finally gone to the Dark Side and joined up with, as Charles Pierce would say in his book of the same title, Idiot America.

The sewer gas smell comes and goes and in between attending bouts of nausea I look around and realize that Dennis was right, one can have a little cave and have everything in it one needs, especially now that I have three flat-screen TVs, with working HD and three different DirecTV receivers to go with them. The three allow me to have Speed Racer on one, a 2008 World Series of Poker event on a second, Kite Runner on a third for Irene to cry at and some other martial arts experience being taped to disc, all at the same time. But, attractive as this reality is, the real value is in the metaphor…not only do we have everything in this perhaps 300 square feet that we could possibly need, including each other, the two mutts and the HIK (Highly Interactive Kitty), but past all that we have the luxury of enough to eat, a toilet that flushes and books beyond the immediate reads that give us the illusion of seperate lives we can experience as soon as we get a minute…and in this case a blog site and readers, or at least one, otherwise how would you know about all this? Ain’t logic grand?

I had intended, when I began, to use the elegant bridge earlier in this piece to morph over and talk about Charles Pierce a little more, and to rant awhile about the continued dumbing down of America in general and as near as I can tell, except for Tom and Ann and a few other folks, of the South in particular, no offense to anyone if there is anyone reading this who takes offense at my calling the South dumb, which, in context, there probably won’t be for reasons that may become clear if you bear with me a little longer.

But I don’t know about all that right now……from here I intend that we migrate over to Montpelier, home of President Madison, who with Jefferson formed one of the great duos of earlier constitutional thought, although they certainlydidn’t spend a lot of time agreeing with each other. I point out in the doing that not all people here in the South are, in fact, stupid….but as Forest Gump so famously said, “Stupid is as stupid does”…and I’ve seen things here that are, in fact, stupid, but I’ve probably seen as many things being done in other parts of the United States that are just as stupid, and I’m really afraid, afraid….afraid in this case that what I’m really saying isn’t that the South is stupid at all, at least no more so than any other place, but instead I’m saying that people everywhere simply don’t think, and suddenly I have six hundred examples of this lack of thought to share and no energy remaining to share it with, and, back to Dennis, I have everything here that at least EYE need, and therefore will retreat for a few moments, intellectual coward that I can be, to the refuge of a soft chair, to the hypnotic patter of rain, to the sympathetic murmer of air-conditioning and to the comfortable belly on my arm of a once-sick but hopefully recovering-somewhat dog, and take a nap. The stupidity, if that’s what it is, will be there, waiting for me, the next time I dare venture outside our cave.

I get that frog, and I suppose I get the limitations to the approach as well. When I feel good about myself I can describe me as a Renaissance Man, interested in almost everything. When I’m feeling judgmental I recognize the same reality differently; to be interested in so many things is to focus on nothing and (while limiting risk around putting oneself out there) certainly assures you will never be acclaimed as number one at anything, either, thus insuring that no waves of adulation will ever lap at my feet. Too bad, so sad…..

….and yet this character strength or flaw does allow me to experience other lives, sometimes one after another, if only in my still-fertile imagination and if only for a few moments. Take today, for example….

Irene and I started the morning exactly where we have been for awhile, on the outskirts of Auburn, AL., a small still-redneck not-quite-cosmopolitan University town about an hour out of Montgomery, if that helps you geographically. Jake, now recovering a bit more regularly from his cancer surgery of this past Tuesday, actually walked with us all the way to the trash receptical and almost all the way back, a distance of half a mile, easily the best he’s done by two times and prompting us to believe we could leave him alone for an hour and get a bike ride in before the humidity came to join the already-evident heat. Changing into our bicycle touring gear, putting on the orange breathable top, the dark gray pickleball short, the cool lighter-gray short-fingered gloves, the charcoal hard helmet, I became like Lance Armstrong, of course too old, too heavy, riding a hybrid bike that Lance wouldn’t laugh at, him being seemingly way too polite a guy, but surely would snicker at behind a metaphorical hand, but I was he for just a moment, and straining to cross the semi-busy rural highway and rocketing up and down over the train crossing just past it. Just for a moment, but I got it. The ride, no more than ten miles and maybe an hour, was done with no stops to celebrate my Lance-ness…the first longish ride we’ve taken non-stop, as it were. VERY cool, good to be him.

Fifteen minutes later Irene and I were bound for the Jule collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, a pretentious title for a fine modern building housing a few terrific permanent collections. One of them, Dale Kennington’s Shifting Mythologies exhibit, consisted in part of five richly painted multi-panel screens and brought me so far into the art that I thought I could never escape. All of her perspectives are uniquely arranged to draw her viewers in, take for instance the panels depicting a beautiful pre-pubescent girl, standing and struggling through some obvious anguish, glancing at us as if to recognize that we weren’t going to save her, but could, if we only wanted to. And in THAT moment, I wanted to, wanted to have the skills of Dale Kennington, knew I never would, but, oh, my….I got it, and her, right then, if just for that second.

Around the corner, same gallery…and there is a permanent exhibit of…would you believe it?…pop-art Icon Andy Warhol, arranged to show first the polaroid snaps he took of subjects and then the paintings themselves, so heavily stylized and yet so true to the photos, showing another exposure, another side of the same thing that didn’t exist until he put brush to canvas, and what genius, and, after we talked about it a bit, I think both Renee-girl and I got it, and him,  although I could feel myself losing it as I turned the corner and left him behind.

The rest of the day has gone like that. At lunch in the wonderful Amsterdam Cafe (“wonderful” and “cafe” are two words that only juxtapose in Auburn at that particular place, home of, among other things, a lump-crab-meat-and-avocado-on-croissant sandwich that ranks as “one of the hundred things you have to eat in Alabama” for very good reason.), I talked over with Irene this book I’ve been reading, a great little first-edition of Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player, by Anthony “English Tony” Holden, in which, ala George Plimpton, Tony takes on another life, a life EYE have often dreamed about, playing in, among other places, the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. VERY, VERY cool…a life that I still want, but believe that, now, I may never see it unless something changes. That something may be in me or just in my finances but I’m putting it out there now….just give me a year, and let me show just a small profit, and I’m a happy man. The book is written well enough for me to know that I don’t want to be Tony, not all the way through…I just want to do what he did, and still dream about it.

I wasn’t through yet, though. When we left, we stopped by, next door again, into a vintage clothing shop, and as I look to my left into the mirror here in our coach, I see a short-haired aging geezer-jock, not quite over the last hill yet, wearing a true vintage tie-died tee-shirt, orange and red mostly, with the most bitchin’ picture of Mickey Mouse falling down on the front. Who IS that cool dude, I ask out loud, just playing, knowing, of course, that it’s another version of me, a version that may continue to please, who knows? And, really, who cares? Consistency can be badly over-rated, don’t you think? Vrooom, vroom!

Those visits turned out to be the opening of a floodgate of sorts and, since then, Rocky was in the hospital three more times, all around her diagnosis as having metastasized organ cancer and her eventual euthanasia, Spyo did what he could by contracting a still-to-this-day-unexplained super-infection that came within an inch of killing the poor mutt and took three days of intravenous live-in care to overcome, and Jake contracted liver cancer and as we speak is just out of his third hospital in three weeks, with this last time having him returned to us tumor-free although very sore, grouchy and without much appetite yet.

We could write volumes on the differences between these hospitals, on the high quality of some doctors and the mediocrity of others, on the up-beat and positive vibes thrown off by some, on the rundown nature of their brothers. Animal hospitals, like animal clinics, people hospitals, and people clinics, are, by nature, profit-making enterprises or should be. I suspect the ones that seem the best and the brightest DO the best from a fiscal point of view but uniformly I can’t prove this.

The quality of time one spends in a veterinary hospital is similar to that spent in a regular hospital if you are waiting around. There is nothing to do. You bring your lunch, your drinks, your book, your cell phone. Sometimes you bring another animal, just to wait with you. You make small talk with the people in the waiting rooms, and if they have animals you “ooh and aah” over them, even if you really think they  are scruffy and ill-behaved (the dogs, not their owners, at least usually), which I suppose you’d expect in a hospital where no animal can be at its best. You look at your watch, go heads-down and read for awhile. put your head back, sunglasses down and try to nap. You think. You worry. You get up, walk around outside, get water you don’t want, check your cell. Maybe call somebody you don’t really want to talk to. You come back, sit down. Your partner looks at you expectantly like you are going to have some news to relate. You talk about literally nothing, repeating nothing over and over as if by repeating it, it can become new or it will somehow become more significant.

The doctor, when he or she comes out, tells you all you really need to know simply by the way they walk and the expression on their face. Our Aburn doctor, Ralph Henderson by name, has so far communicated good news to us, so we like to see him coming. He’s a kind, gentle, sometimes-funny and always- intelligent man anyway, with little of the apparently-Southern polite evasiveness about him…he’s very direct, although soft in his communication. He wears orange Crocks and an orange-and-brown headband with blushing doggies on it, and always sports a large stethascope over his very traditional white lab  coat and green uniform. I can’t imagine a guy who looks more like what he is…a very fine animal oncology surgeon…and he almost makes all the waiting worth-while as he takes all the time you want, talks about every aspect of the upcoming or just-past operation, talks about post-care endlessly, discusses dental hygine, pooping habits, the amount of exercise a dog should or shouldn’t get and makes cute little analogies up about relationships with spouses and what that means to our care of dogs. He says, for instance, that Jake will be an “all-new-dog” in a week or so and our principle problem at that time will be to keep the little guy a bit calm, still, so he doesn’t damage still-healing sutures.

But nothing Ralph or anybody can do changes the fact that waiting in any hospital and/or caring for any still-recovering out-patient, animal or human,  is stressful, and at the end of each day, now, Irene and I are exhausted and fall into bed knowing that, at best, tomorrow we will do it again, hoping to see some incremental progress. Nobody can make a hospital a fun place to visit, although they certainly can be good places to save a life. Jake’s already a good example of that, come what may. And, stress or no stress, we’re grateful…for the doctors in general, for Red Bay’s Dr. Odie who got out of bed in the middle of the night to see Jake, to Mississippi State’s Dr. Johnson for her diagnostic skills and friendship, of course for Auburn’s most-excellent Dr. Henderson, for God’s giving the little guy another chance, and, overall, for the hospitals that we find along the way.

We spent the rest of the day frustrating ourselves with things mechanical, or at least I did. My cell phone display is down. The wireless router is apparently burned out, although Nexaira’s technical support disputes this for reasons I can’t phantom. The new tire-pressure monitor system I bought day before yesterday doesn’t, when installed, want to recognize four of the six RV tires. The Garmin couldn’t find any addresses we needed to go to….but this last we worked around anyway, getting to the San Antonio Riverwalk and the Alamo around noon in spite of the obstacles, which, once we were there, included a large bird accurately targeting me from about 50 feet overhead. This was so consistent with how the day had been so far that Irene and I both laughed in spite of ourselves, telling you more than I could here about how we had been doing up until that point.

Change was coming, however. To begin with, the Alamo was amazing. We rented a couple of the audio headsets and listened to a well-acted narrative that really did help me understand where all the passion is around the place. It’s clearly one of the defining institutions in our country, expressing as it does our resistence to tyranny and setting in place the call for patriotism, bravery and idealism that has ultimately characterized us, even in our worse moments. The fact that these couple of hundred brave souls essentially knew they were dead men walking days before their final breaths almost takes my breath away. I wonder if I could do anything that brave if I needed to, and I guess I’m glad I can’t answer the question.

The Riverwalk isn’t half-bad either…two square miles of really well-done walks along the river (hence, Einstein, the name, right?) and amazingly architecturally interesting shops, sights, people. Eventually we had to stop to eat, having pretty much exhausted our way-too-early breakfast, and, with no real expectation of good food, stopped at a little restaurant along the river called Boudro’s. Boudro’s is cute but that added to our trepedation about the grub…and, really, we shouldn’t have worried. It was by far the high point of the day…the “Good” in the above title. We would wind up sharing with our waiter, one of the mangers, Kyle by name, that we were really LOOKING to criticize the food and couldn’t find anything at all to whine about. The mesquite-grilled salmon was fresh, tangy, delightful…the brisket sandwich rivaled anything I’ve ever had for truly succulent meat…the fries were thin-cut, toasted instead of overly deep-fatted, and were lightly seasoned with something actually interesting. Even the side of black beans I ordered in hopes of getting the protein count up were tasty, fresh and different. When I challenged Kyle as to why the place had such truly excellent food, he laughed and said they had won “best restaurant on the Riverwalk” every year for as long as he had been there, which I think was eleven years. He said it’s frequented as much by locals as tourists and the only reason WE got in at all (this was 3 PM….not what EYE would have thought was a busy period) was because there is a convention of dentists in town and apparently the mid-afternoon sees them all back at their respective hotels flossing. He said that, in an hour, we’d never have seen a table and (again, given the food) I believed him.

We scarcely were able to stagger upstairs from there to Mr. Edward’s Ice Cream Parlor to finish off the already-too-much food with more…this time a rocky road sundae. And I wonder why I don’t lose weight. No, I don’t.

Anyway, it was good to finish that part of the day on a high note. The doctor said, this evening, that Spryro may well be ready to go home tomorrow…so maybe we can get out of San Antonio without permanent damage and relatively on schedule. We’ll see, but in any event the day was a roller-coaster that did have highs after all.

Rocky, with porcupine bear, on her way to the vet

The picture of her driving the coach was taken soon after she had work done on an infected toe in Kentucky….she was, however, always ready to drive. The one by herself is her on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which fascinated her because she could see condors down about a block, just sitting there waiting to be chased. (I would have enjoyed seeing that one!).

Rocky, sitting on edge of Grand Canyon

And there was always her with her pack. She was the pack leader, but benevolent. She was usually into letting them have one direction to look in and she’d keep an eye on the other.This particular picture was taken the day we arrived at Martis Lake outside Truckee, CA. We spent most of a summer there, being camp hosts, and Rocky enjoyed everything about the place, especially getting off-lead in the dogs-are-ok-to-let-loose areas and chasing the geese.

Rocky and Friends, at Martis Lake outside Truckee, CA.

Rocky, on the hunt in heaven

Rocky was diagnosed today as having inoperable cancer of the kidney, lungs and other organs. Given that she already was unable to walk when we brought her in late this morning, the doctor put her chances as having any quality of life as zero, and by two o’clock she was in heaven, hopefully chasing her first airborne rabbit.

Rocky was a dog’s dog. She was occasionally infuriating, always intelligent, regularly playful, habitually charming, rarely disgusting, aggressive once or twice, loving daily, and in general just about the most enthusiastic traveling companion any couple could hope for. These are general attributes, of course, and I do have to share that Rocky could do a few things better than most, to wit:

-  Chase. Rocky could and did chase anything that moved. Not generally with an intent to cause harm, as proven by the fact that she liked to carry caught voles, lizards and occasional shrews around in her mouth, alive, and was perfectly willing to spit them out, traumatized but physically unharmed, once you acknowledged her prowess at catching them in the first place. This occasionally caused her some regret, as in the time she and her accomplice, Spyro, chased and caught the porcupine in Truckee, CA.

- Groom. Rocky was given to grooming herself from tip of her paws to the bottom of her tail each morning if she had the time, and if she was bored she repeated the entire process again in the evening. No question about it; she was the most fastidious dog I’ve ever met.

- Escape. Rocky was a magician when it came to escaping places she didn’t want to be. She could go through invisible fences, open doorknobs and handles with her mouth, leap over pasture fences, hurl herself out still-moving car windows and return the same way. The first day she stayed with us we had ostracized her outside to sleep with the other dogs (who were kenneled). She got lonely, opened the french doors to the patio, walked in and up the stairs and went to sleep next to Irene’s bed. When Irene opened her eyes the next morning they opened on a dog who had come home to stay.

- Speed Eat. We’ve had many dogs who ate fast but none of them ate like Rocky. We have no idea what gave her the idea she needed to finish all her food in underten seconds. Still, she felt she did, and did. We eventually had to teach her tricks…for instance, to sit back from the dog bowl half way through so that she could at least swallow her food before she raced to the finish. She was a winner in most ways but in this way she was pretty much unbeatable.

There are more things, but this gives you an idea. She was…is….my best girl. I miss her and will for a long, long time. I hope she gets that rabbit.

Rocky Comes Clean

I’ve written about Rocky the Girl-Dog (her full name, used so that people can understand she’s a girl although (a) she doesn’t look like one and (b) her name is Rocky) several times before. This time the good dog has gotten herself in bad trouble. She has been losing her balance lately, is barely able to navigate around, especially given her right back knee doesn’t have any ligaments connecting the lower leg to the upper. On several occasions she’s fallen over and we’ve wound up consulting several vets ranging from our buddy Tom in Georgia to her “regular” doc in California, we’ve hade had her back leg xrayed (which only told us what we knew already…she has a bad knee) and has been quite lethargic. Today seemed so difficult for her we finally tracked down the right vet here in Austin (Dr. Ron Streid, who advertises himself charmingly enough as “the high-tech redneck”) and arranged an afternoon appointment….all very stressful. Turns out she is badly anemic, so the doctor took a wheelbarrow-full of money and some blood and promises some results by tomorrow AM. This probably will result in us being “stuck” another day in Austin, and, while it isn’t the way I’d prefer to spend Cinquo de Mayo, this still ain’t a bad place to spend time.

In between doctor visits, taking her outside, picking her up, setting her down and letting her set her own “business” schedule, as it were, we ourselves had other business to conduct. Specifically we needed to visit several houses we own here in Austin and, while we were at it, visit the property management company who manages and rents them on our behalf. The visit with the company went well, we saw and took pictures of two of our three houses, and we came away feeling that our investments here in Austin are in prety good hands. In fact, as I write this, Irene is “next door” (across the kitchen table) searching out houses for sale in the area. She’s found one nice house that’s only twice as much as its comparables (because it is on Lake Travis). Currently she is looking in a probably-too-expensive area called Westlake Hills and every minute or two I get to “ooh” and “aahhh” over yet another overpriced place. I’m holding on to my pocketbook for the moment.