The Gift

As a young man, I enjoyed a nearly perfect sense of direction. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I could tell within ten degrees on a compass which direction I was facing. Not everyone my age had this gift. Its display was even met with envy at times. I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was nice to be good at something.

The gods, however, award such gifts grudgingly. My internal compass began to fade in my 30s, and has long since shut down entirely. Built-in obsolescence, I suppose.

Without that factory-installed compass, I am lost. This is wholly unfair. Mature men need it more than young men, for the young are much more adept at faking it.

My wife has watched this erosion (and happily complained about it) for years. It used to be that I knew which way to turn and she didn’t. This was immensely satisfying. Men, you see, must be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times so as to pounce on any approaching threat.

Naturally, the angst of the missus grew inversely proportionate to my fading sense of direction. The worse it got, the more she dutifully pointed it out. Thanks, babe.

For awhile, I could blame cloudy skies or nighttime for obscuring the sun by which I navigated. That argument survived for about three days.

At length, one of my sons – acutely aware of the crisis – bought me one of those GPS things. Voila! I installed it at once, carefully licking the suction cup on the windshield mount and planting it, just so. It had a for-real compass built in! Screw the cloudy skies! Screw the dark of night! Problem solved!

The gods must have been amused by this. For sport, they inflicted near-record heat on Texas summers. The defenseless GPS began falling off the windshield, clanging right onto the steering column and scaring the crap out of me and the missus.

There are some things one absolutely should not attempt while driving, such as grabbing one’s crotch to protect the boys from incoming.

Only slightly less dangerous is driving while attempting to affix a GPS mount to the inside of a windshield. While steering with both knees to keep the hands free for the task. And at night. And (naturally), while trying to remember directions to an unfamiliar address which you expected to find easily because you had this GPS but which from this moment forward stands not for Global Position System but instead for ***-damned Piece of ****.

I wonder what we did with that old street map . . .

THE TEST

She stood outside the office building, trying to light her one cigarette of the day. She used to smoke a pack a day, but for the past three years she has been cutting down. "Almost there!" she said.

She was nervous, anxious and near tears. She said that she had just come out of her nursing exam and she wasn't sure that she passed. For three years she had read and studied hard and prepared for this day. The hours-long test was over, and in a few days she would know her fate. She would not be able to sleep until then.

So here she stood, trembling a bit but trying to hide it from the others trickling out the door and heading to their cars. She had been so nervous on this day that she asked a friend to drive her to the test site. Now, she waited for her ride to take her back the nearly one hundred miles to the small town where she lived and had studied and crammed for months and months.

She said that she's wanted to be a nurse for years. She couldn't recall when she decided that. She likes helping people, she said. It gives her great satisfaction to help ease another person's discomfort or pain. There's nothing like it, she smiled.

She worries most about the medications part of the rest. See, all candidates must answer at least 75 questions. The student can opt for more, up to two hundred and something, she said. The test-givers randomly assign a few in the class to submit to the whole test. She had opted for the whole battery, and she believes that she did okay except for the very last question. Now she worries. Maybe her whole future in medicine lies in that one, lousy test answer written on a piece of paper in a large room in a tall building in a big city.

She is among hundreds of thousands of nursing students attempting to enter a profession that is begging for qualified practitioners. This woman -- a single mother of three -- may someday tend to your mother or father, or maybe even to you, or your spouse.

If she passes today's exam.

Wish her well. Tell her will that it is an important calling that she has answered. Ask any doctor: a good RN is worth his or her weight in gold.

We need everyone to be really good at what he or she does, actually. We are Americans, after all.

We are family.

We are the American family.

Obama's Oil

That's the message being broadcast everywhere. It's the President's fault. Well, okay, he didn't actually cause the spill, but he hasn't done enough and quickly enough to fix it. Yeah, that's it.

"Why has the Bush Administration been so slow to intervene into what was from the first day obviously a major environmental crisis?"
--The Los Angeles Times
March 30, 1989
(six days after the Exxon Valdez disaster)

Back then, there was public debate about whether to allow oil and gas exploration in ANWR -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Bush administration -- barely two months into its first term -- was for it, but the Exxon Valdez disaster killed the idea. The Obama administration recently proposed allowing it 50 miles off the East Coast. The BP disaster has now killed that idea, too.

The fact is: we Americans demand fossil fuels and oil companies meet that demand. Government is supposed to protect us from shoddy practices but it cannot. Whistle-blowers go unheard until there's a disaster (think Countrywide, undertrained pilots, ignored intelligence).

That's SOP unless and until we change it.

THE GREEN ROOM

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. –The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It wasn’t a 30-yard fence, but a patio we had enclosed to create an additional room. Never mind that we never used the darned thing. For one thing, it’s ugly, with siding all ‘round, and emerald green indoor/outdoor carpeting laid by the previous owner. For another, we’re just not “outside” people: we don’t go camping, hiking, picnicking or any such thing. At most, once a year we drive to a remote spot to watch the 4th-of-July fireworks over downtown. We’re pasty-white indoor folk.

So there it was, an outdoor-indoor room that needed painting. I knew how to paint a wall, but it had been awhile. “Preparation,” a housepainter once told me, “is the thing. Get all your gear on-site, ready.” So I prepared exactly nothing. How hard can it be? I thought. Just paint the damned thing.

The wall that we created to enclose the room was made of fence wood, board-on-board. At the time, we thought it was a good choice. It was not. It soaked up the paint like a sponge. An hour into the task, I had completed one wall when the phone rang. A friend and I talked for half an hour. By then, the paint roller had stiffened a bit. *sigh*

And what’s that on the floor?? A big drop of paint that went unnoticed ‘til now. And another over there! Jeez.

Thus it went for the next three hours until I’d had enough. Clean-up took another 45 minutes because paint rollers hold a lot of paint.

Tonight I sit here, achy and hungry. My arms and shoulders are threatening legal action against my brain, and my jeans are sporting new designs that suspiciously resemble painted finger wipes.

Tomorrow, the remaining two walls.

Don’t say a word; two walls in one afternoon ain’t bad. But if you spot Huckleberry Finn, tell him I'd like a word with him.

BROKEN DOWN

I've been a Triple-A member for years, and until recently it has served me well. Mind you, I don't call upon them for anything but a tow or a boost. Twice a year at most, and the driver always gets a tip. Lately, though, the service has deteriorated. The drivers are universally courteous and professional. It's the folks in between the driver and me who have become the problem.

The process is simple enough. The call to the Roadside Assistance number gets you a customer service rep who takes your information, schedules the truck and gives you the driver's Estimated Time of Arrival. Once he's on the way, you get an automated call confirming (or slightly adjusting) that ETA. The driver arrives, does his job and -- in my case, at least -- always gets a tip. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Tonight, my car died right at the fast-food pick-up window. Three young men at the store hustled right out and pushed me to a safe area nearby. (Who says today's kids are going to hell in a hand basket?)

I called Triple-A's Houston headquarters and was promised a tow truck driver within 45 minutes. Houston always promises 45 minutes. Thirty minutes later comes the automated call, estimating the driver's ETA 20 minutes later than first promised. After a half-hour, I call. "Uh, I'll contact Dispatch, find out what the problem is and get back to you." Twenty minutes go by with no call-back, so I call again. "He's on his way and will be there in 30 minutes." Thirty-five minutes later I call again. "He's 8-10 minutes out," which proved true. The driver was courteous and professional, and he apologized: he's the only guy covering Plano, Allen, Frisco, Richardson and West Garland, and he's got 4 more calls after me. I've heard nearly-identical excuses the past two years. Tonight, this driver did his job well and got the tip. Houston is lucky that my car wasn't down a ditch in BFE tonight and that the weather was tolerable and that there happened to be a Starbucks within walking distance while I waited three hours for Triple-A's tow truck driver.

Footnote: The disabled car was our "nice car," which has about 100,000 miles on it. The car that my wife drove to the scene was our "everyday car," which has more than 150,000 miles on it and has been far less trouble.