No, that’s not a typo in the headline. It’s the 17th of December, which means it’s my brother Chris’s birthday. He’s officially entering the last year of his first half-century of excellence. Make the most of it, bro.
Game of Knaves
Cribbage: The game of knaves, or at least of people who like to play cards. (Reported origin: The Wikipedia article on the game says it was invented by a British poet, Sir John Suckling. in the 17th century. Really.)
It’s an official Subject of Interest (SoI) because Thom, home from school for his Christmas break, wants to polish up his skills so that he can beat his roommate next quarter (the roommate has proven dominant in a more cutting-edge entertainment, Madden NFL 2006). So he hunted for our board out in the shed, and the last couple of nights we’ve played. For the uninitiated, it’s a pure numbers game, with a special emphasis on putting together combinations of cards that add up to 15; play too much and you’ll drift off to sleep thinking of great cribbage hands (my favorite: a 4-5-6, with any one of the cards doubled; I can hardly begin to tell you how exciting it is). There’s more to it than that — much more — but that’s a central feature.
Interesting that cribbage has come into the picture. Growing up, my family was given to games like — excluding those of a purely psychological nature — Scrabble,Yahtzee, Milles Bornes, and Monopoly. Chess and Risk sometimes, though the disadvantage of board games was the way they tended to fly into the air at particularly tense moments. Uno. Hearts. Spades. Trivial Pursuit, when it arrived. A made-up trivia game called “the alphabet game.” But no cribs.
Twenty
I had lots more to say about the occasion, in a reminiscing vein, a year ago. Now I can’t seem to put the right words around it. So all I’ll say is: Happy anniversary, my Kate. Twenty years? Living inside them, they have seemed like only days or hours, and hardly as many as twenty.
On the Road Again
Thom and I drove back to Eugene yesterday, stopped by his dorm, went to dinner (a hippie-style burger enterprise called McMenamin’s), and since it was still fairly early (8:30), I started back south. The weather forecast said a big storm would move in overnight, so I wanted to get over the higher passes along Interstate 5 — especially Siskiyou Mountain Summit, just north of the Oregon-California border — before I stopped. I made it down to Yreka, about 210 miles or so from Eugene and 300 miles from Berkeley, by midnight, then found a motel room. When I got my 8 a.m. wakeup call, I casually looked outside, expecting to see rain. No — snow. I checked online and saw that a winter storm warning was calling for 8 to 12 inches of snow along the route I was traveling. I packed in a hurry, had a cup of Best Western coffee, heard from the desk clerk that chains were required on the highway north but not south, and drove out of the parking lot at 8:26. This was the scene at Yreka’s traffic light (well, maybe there is more than one).
It snowed pretty heavily off and on for the first 30 miles or so. Then gradually, the snow turned to rain as I descended toward the Sacramento Valley. Drove out from under the storm and got back home just after 1. It finally started raining here in the last hour or so.
Windshield Photography
An hour and a half ago, I finished an up-and-back drive to Eugene to pick up Thom for Thanksgiving festivities. On the way to Oregon yesterday, the sun set just as I got to Redding, 200 miles north of here along Interstate 5. Winding through the mountains, Mount Shasta occasionally appears, always bigger than you expect. as you speed up the highway. The mountain, with new snow from the first storms of the season, held the last light long after everything around it was dark. I tried a through the windshield shot (hey — you have your cellphone, I have my camera) at a low shutter speed; it’s good enough for what it was.
L, for Lydell
If Lydell’s birthday were the Super Bowl, today’s edition would be the one played between numbers XLIX and LI. Not sure what the line is on the game, or what the over/under is, or even what I mean exactly by slinging that football-betting terminology, but: Happy 50th, Lydell. Back in Normal, who woulda thunk it?
Drug Post
We belong to Kaiser Permanente, the big California-based HMO that’s an outgrowth, I believe, of the private health-care system set up to take care of Kaiser shipyard workers during World War II. It’s got a wildly mixed reputation, though our experience has been better than OK. I called the advice line last night because of what I’ll term persistent gastrointestinal distress. Once they could tell I wasn’t hemorrhaging or making the call while balled up in the fetal position on the floor, they said they’d have my personal doctor call back today.
At 6:58 a.m., the doctor called. He’s a young guy and so confident and so seemingly happy to be doing what he’s doing that you can’t help but like him. Even at 6:58 a.m. He went over my symptoms and said just in case I had picked up an E. coli infection, he wanted me to take an antibiotic called Cipro for the next five days. I’ve heard of Cipro (ciprofloxacin); t’s strong stuff, and among other things is used to combat anthrax.
I went to the Kaiser pharmacy, picked up the stuff, and brought it home. Then I started to read the cautions. It can cause sun sensitivity, and you need to avoid prolonged exposure to direct sunlight. It can make you drowsy, especially if you have a beer while you’re on it. It can jack you up if you’re drinking caffeine or on theophylline (an ingredient in some asthma drugs and a component of some strains of green tea). Pretty average stuff, though more potential effects than I would have expected for an antiobiotic.
Then I read the Kaiser “Patient Information Leaflet” on Ciprofloxacin (sip-row-FLOX-ah-sin, the leaflet instructs). Under side effects, it lists the usual portmanteau of symptoms (including many of the things you might be taking Cipro for in the first place). It runs through “serious” but “unlikely” effects — just one, the sun sensitivity. Then it continues:
“Tell your doctor immediately if any of these highly unlikely but very serious side effects occur: seizures, mental/mood changes (including rare thoughts of suicide), numbness/tingling of the hands/feet, hearing loss, easy bruising or bleeding, persistent sore throat or fever, irregular heartbeat, chest pain, stomach pain, yellowing eyes and skin, dark urine, unusual change in the amount of urine, unusual fatigue.”
Also, Cipro can cause tendon damage. All of that was enough, honestly, to make me ask myself how bad I really felt. Did I want to have to deal with the effects of a very heavy-duty drug when I wasn’t incapacitated? I sort of dithered until Kate came home. I talked to her about it, and her take was, “Listen to what the doctor said.” So — I took the first of the 10 tablets prescribed.
No seizures or suicidal thoughts. Yet. I’ll keep you posted.
Pop: The Legend Continues
My sister Ann called from Chicago this morning, and just hearing her so early meant there was news, maybe bad news, about my dad.
In the middle of the night, he had chest pains. Not wanting to disturb anyone — neither Ann, who lives three blocks away and would have been at his place in a split second if he called; nor neighbors; nor paramedics — he climbed the stairs from his apartment, walked out to his car, and drove himself halfway across the city to the hospital where his doctor practices and presented himself at the emergency room. Ann was quick to say he was OK and reminded me that a few years ago he had chest pains and they turned out to be unrelated to any heart problem. So I was relieved and resigned myself to waiting to hear what the hospital tests showed.
Ann called back late in the afternoon. She and my brother Chris had spent the day at the hospital with Dad. The tests showed a 75 percent blockage in one heart artery, and the cardiac people did an immediate angioplasty (ran a little balloon through a blood vessel in his groin up to the heart to clear out the blockage). “Technically, they say he did have a minor heart attack,” Ann said. The procedure he had was not pain free, and he was pretty much immobilized afterwards and put on what sounded like a host of drugs — blood thinners and sedatives and godknowswhatall.
So let’s roll the tape back to this morning. Here’s my dad, six weeks after his 84th birthday. He sits up in the middle of the night with chest pains. And does what, again? Drives himself to the hospital. Halfway across the city. And not to be dismissive of fine Illinois metropoli like Rockford, Springfield and Rantoul, but this is not Rockford, Springfield or Rantoul he was driving halfway across, but Chicago, city of broad shoulders and big dimensions. What an adventure. I wish I’d been there to see the looks in the ER when he strolled in.
“He’s getting no end of grief from everyone who hears about the drive,” Ann said. He’s probably loving it, too. It just proves it’s never too late to add to the legend. If Mom was taking this in from some after-life bleacher seats — she’d prefer those to the boxes, though she’d like the boxes just fine — I’m sure she got a kick out out of my dad’s pluck.
Behold a Pale Hose
Even though I’ve been away from Chicago more than half my life — and when you get down to it, I grew up in the suburbs, not in the city — most of my family is still in and around the city and I follow what goes on there with more than passing interest. With the sports teams, too. And even though my brothers and I grew up with a Cubs allegiance I blame on my father, the Sox getting into the World Series is news.
Dad’s pulling for them, I think mostly because Mom and her brothers were all big Sox fans and, yeah, they’d love to see it happen. They’d love it especially because this kind of thing happens so seldom in Chicago. The Sox were the most recent visitors to the Series, having last played there (and lost) in 1959. The Cubs last trip was summarized by the late Steve Goodman:
“You know the law of averages says:
Anything will happen that can.
That’s what it says.
But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant
Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.”
So talking to Dad just now, he said: “It would be great to see them go all the way” — win the World Series. No debate there, though I’ll confess I’ve never had much love for the Sox under their current ownership and have never set foot inside the sadly misconceived stadium they built to replace Comiskey Park, the ballpark in which the Sox had played since 1910. The old place was decrepit by the exacting, fussy standards of our age; but it had history on its side and a certain trashed elegance that might have been revived.
But that’s a detour. Let’s turn back to my dad. Yes, it would be great to see a World Series winner in Chicago. In fact, it would be the first in his 84 years (he was born too late for the Golden Age of Chicago baseball, which seems to have coincided with the Roosevelt (Teddy, not FDR), Taft, and Wilson administrations.
OK — I’m on board. Go Sox.
The Lint Giver
Kate, upon inspecting some nice black slacks of hers that I had helpfully jammed into the washing machine with a bunch of other stuff, exclaimed, “What’s this?” She was referring to the profusion of white lint on the black slacks. It was clear that I had committed a laundry misdemeanor (laundry felonies almost always involve bleach or melting things in the dryer; or pens), and she set out to solve it. She sorted through the damp clothes until she came to her white fleece pullover.
“Here — this is what did it,” she said. “This is a lint giver. You can’t put lint givers and lint takers in the same load.”
Say again? This is someone I’ve known for more than 20 years. Thousands of baskets of dirty laundry have churned, spun, and tumbled through their cycles since we first commingled loads. We’ve used inscrutable top-loaders and mesmerizing front-loaders, both. Liquid and powder. Cold, warm and hot. Normal and delicate. A lot has come out in the wash. But this is the first I’ve heard of a guideline, rule, ordinance, statute or proposed physical law concerning “lint givers” and “lint takers.”
“Look it up online. I’m sure you’ll find something about it,” Kate said as she deployed a lint roller to defuzz the damp slacks. (She’s living right. It worked.)
Sure enough: A site called “How to Clean Stuff” features a graduate-level discourse on various lint topics, including lint givers and lint takers.
Updated July 2018.