The Accidental Voice

I wonder what the woman was thinking as she sat on her motorcycle at a stoplight in suburban Chicago a few weekends ago. She might have been thinking of her kids, where she was headed or maybe nothing at all. No one knows but I bet it wasn’t about the car coming up behind her, at speed, as it plowed in and took her life.

The woman who hit her was putting nail polish on.

The forty six passengers who were hurt on Boston’s green line when the trolleys they were riding in collided weren’t expecting to have to be attended to by medical personnel. They were just riding the trolley home on the evening commute. They were thinking, for the most part, what they think about every day on that ride.

The twenty-four year old driver of the trolley that caused the accident was texting.

I saw an accident a few weeks back. It was one of those strange ones. Traffic was typical of rush hour but otherwise it was a bright, normally dry Colorado morning. Yet, there they were, a pickup truck and a very expensive BMW pulled on to the left side of the northbound lanes of I-25 and it appeared the BMW had tried to eat the back bumper of the pickup. Expensive car, expensive bodywork. The truck was pretty much fine.

Was the driver of the BMW on an important conference call paying only partial attention to driving? When I see a $90,000 automobile, I can’t help but ponder the cliché (unfairly, probably) that the owner spends too much time at work. That kind of money had to come from somewhere. Was spending too much time thinking or doing work the case this time? Was he working while driving (or was it driving while working)?

Driving, by its very nature is a participation activity. It seems to me that if someone is driving a car and doing anything else, they might as well be driving drunk. Some informal studies (we’re talking Mythbusters informal) have shown a significant decrease in driving skill when talking on the phone. It seems to me this is merely common sense. I don’t care how smart someone thinks they are or how good of a driver they think they are. Neither a big ego nor a a big brain will protect them if they fail to maintain proper control. It doesn’t matter what kind of job they have or how much money they make, either. Jobs and money don’t drive safely. People do.

I am constantly amazed that there is not more vehicular carnage on the roads with all the distractions that now exist. Vehicles these days have TVs, video game consoles in the back, MP3 player displays and GPSs all serving to distract the occupants including the driver. If you go to an auto show, you will likely see a whole lot more features that aim to get drivers’ attention. Lexus has ads on TV at the moment that tout the new XS, complete with color screen and console mounted trackball. It also has all kinds of “safety” features that are supposed to predict for the driver if danger is imminent. Does it protect a driver or make them more complacent; distancing them from something to which they may be better off being intimately connected? For whatever reason, the priorities of driving a car seem to be getting all changed around. I am pretty certain a driver’s attention is not something from which we want to get market share.

It seems often the case where the act of driving a car is an afterthought to all the other stuff we do or could be doing. I imagine some people hear about these accidents and read about the increasing numbers of proponents of cell phone bans while driving and still think, “oh well, that doesn’t apply to me. ” Don’t bet on it. The law of averages says differently.

We’re humans and our brains, as different as they seem can only process so much stimuli at a time. Driving a ton and a half of highly energized metal does require full time attention and it’s worrisome that, increasingly, some don’t think it does. Because everything may be fine now, but what about down the road when someone slams on their brakes, there’s a patch of ice, a bicyclist swerves to avoid a gap in the road or a young boy runs between cars into the street. Do you want to be the person who wasn’t paying attention and has to say that you didn’t even see him only to realize that, yes, you were searching your bag for your cellphone?

The commercials talk about traction control, headlights that adjust to illuminate the corner into which the car is headed, heads-up displays that show infrared images of a deer or other obstruction up ahead and automatic breaking if the car gets too close to the one in front. There’s even a commercial where time freezes on an imminent collision between a semi and an expensive sedan. Guardian engineers come and adjust the driver and move the semi so the accident that would have occurred never does when time starts again. Guardian engineers don’t exist, of course, and this commercial is just to get you to buy the car. But the message is clear. Buy our car and you’ll be safer, but it doesn’t matter if you buy that car or some other. In the end, the driver is ultimately responsible for the safety of themselves and anyone else with them. And by extension the other people in cars around them. If they are doing something else, safety is compromised. That compromises my safety and now “we” have a problem.

Watch sometime. Watch someone who seems to be deep in conversation when they are driving in front of you. You may notice that they are driving as if they were drunk. Slowing down for no reason or driving slower than the posted limit, weaving in the lane, weaving out of the lane, speeding, hard braking in traffic, even locking up the tires in a particularly close call because they didn’t realize the traffic up ahead was completely stopped. They were too busy figuring out where everyone was going to meet for lunch and listening to how to get there, working on a really big deal or troubleshooting a particularly nasty problem with the distribution center in St. Louis.

I once was on a call while driving back from a client’s in Golden. When I’d gotten to my destination, I reflected briefly on the drive and realized I couldn’t really remember it. It was a little freaky. I don’t “talk and drive” anymore. I’m on the wagon. The phone is just not that important. My thinking is any call I get can wait the 15 or 20 or 50 minutes it takes to get to my destination. If not, I’ll pull over and focus on that. Not both.

Recently, legislation has been making its way through the Colorado House of Representatives that would have required hands free devices while driving and using a cell phone. I’m thinking someone needs to create an even more stringent law that prohibits cell phone use while driving entirely. Just requiring hands free misses the point and is really just a waste of taxpayer’s money (unless it’s a stepping stone for more hard-nosed legislation.) Requiring hands-free devices for talking on a cell while driving is like requiring hands free stick shifts. It’s silly. The concern is not having both hands on the wheel. It’s paying attention and using your brain.

In aviation there are the concepts of situational awareness and cockpit management. Being “ahead of the airplane” at all times ensuring that if something comes up, you can anticipate what’s next and act accordingly. In motorcycle training courses they use SIPDE which stands for Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide and Execute. It’s not a huge leap to think that either of these can also apply to driving.  If you can’t scan because you’re looking down at your muffin, or you can’t predict because you are engrossed in a call, suddenly, you’re behind the car and that’s a bad place to be. To be sure, there’s not that little matter of falling out of the sky and you have two additional wheels but drivers are still operating something in which there is a lot of energy. It’s moving at a relatively high speed most of the time and it is always a good idea to be mindful of that.

They say five links in a given chain of events can break before disaster is imminent. Life is a chain of events. If five things go wrong in close time proximity to each other, it might be a good idea to pay attention because chances are getting better that something unpleasant is about to happen. A person is talking on the cell phone and they’ve already used up one link. Balancing a sandwich on their thigh? A second link that could potentially break. Drinking a coffee or soda? Three. Reading a book? Four (yes, I have seen this.) They’ve got one more slot. Do they think they can control what uses that last one? Maybe, maybe not. They’ve had one hand on the wheel the whole time but they still only have half their brain in the car. That remaining “chance” could disappear fast.

Essays car distractions, driving drunk, driving like you mean it, driving on the phone, hands free cell phone, paying attention

I watch as the slippage peeks out here and there. I hear the questions repeated and know the previous asking has been forgotten. I see the slow, gray veil of confusion imperceptibly descending little by little.

I am powerless to stop it; powerless to stem the damage to the mind.

How do I tell them it’s time? What does it take to go to someone and tell them they are not the person they still believe they are? Does anyone have the will to be unshaken by the look of hurt or confusion that follows? Can I muster the fortitude to believe I am doing the right thing even though the sadness is telling me to take it all back and convince myself that it just isn’t that bad?

The person before me is not the same, but I still care for them as I always have. They deserve every bit of respect because of what they have been and the sacrifices they have always made for me. How could I deny them that same sacrifice in return? Our roles have changed and I, at times, am the caregiver, the person with the wisdom. But that wisdom is incomplete, so how will I know when I can tell them they can no longer live on their own? How can I do this when everything they believe and experience tells them everything is normal? How do I overcome the doubt that what I am seeing is not just a passing phase? Especially when there are those moments of clarity when even I feel that everything is still OK. Am I holding on to those moments in order to convince myself that it’s not as bad as I think? Maybe today they are a little tired or have a little more stress with all the activity that’s about. Yes that’s it, it will pass.

But it won’t. There is no cure. It does not go backward.

When is the right time? If I know in my heart there will never be a “right time,” why do I continue to look for one? How do I overcome the fear that this “right time” will be when there is an accident? If that fear can be quelled by telling them “it’s time,” how do we come to a meeting of the minds when one of those minds is slowly being chiseled away? The continuum of memory is necessary to have that discussion with reason but it no longer exists. Is it too late or could I be just in time? What do I pick, dignity or safety? Is it really safer or is it just an illusion and am I using the idea so I can unburden myself of the fear and worry? How do I remain strong? And when they start to look at me and not know who I am, where do I find that strength to keep the pain at bay?

The person before me is the same as they have always been. Just different. I know that for their own sake, I must tell them it’s time to start a new chapter (maybe the final chapter.) But that difference gets in the way. How do I move that veil aside so we can have a discussion with clarity. “Will you move from this big empty house?”, “Why?”, “Wouldn’t you feel safer over there or happier being around more people?”, “I’m fine.” But you’re not. I can see it and I am afraid.

Why have all these questions not been answered even though people have been asking them for decades? Why is it so easy to get angry but so hard to make a decision of caring intent? Why is it so hard to do the right thing for the person who cared for me without reservation for so long? They have had such a long time to practice, I am new to it. What, in fact, is the right thing for this person who has done so much in their lifetime and who has been such a pillar of strength for me? Is this what they mean by “tough love?” Why does it take so much out of me to be that rock of strength for them?

How can I take the freedom from this person who has given me their trust to help them do the right thing because, deep down, there is a part of them that knows things are not as they should be? Am I violating that trust by making a decision without them and then coming to them and telling them what they must do? Am I honoring that trust even if they think I am not? Do I commit an injustice when they insist that all is OK and are certain they will know when “it’s time?”

I don’t know. How can they?

The mystery of these questions pales in comparison to the sadness and conflict the answers bring as they come. Do I know the answers but still avoid them for my own comfort? Is there still time? Maybe, but time is passing so quickly.

We all have to say goodbye sometime. It is the way of it and most of us can accept that. But watching a life that has been lived as a bold continuous line slowly become a dashed, thin one is crushing. Watching the dashes get shorter and the spaces larger is the hardest way to say goodbye I can think of. The anger burns hot at the injustice and thievery this disease has wrought. What is fair about a person - who could carry the world on their shoulders whie running - having their whole existence slowly fade?

I am not the first, I am not alone and I am not the last to walk this path, of course. But at times, it feels like it. I know that, because we all have an incredible capacity for perseverance, I can and will find my strength. That is the only true way I can honor what has already been given me in a lifetime of commitment. My enduring hope, once I have finally walked through these fires of the unknown, is that I still have the voice to say the final goodbye and the fortitude to be both sad for the loss and glad of the release for us both.

www.alz.org

Essays Alzheimer's disease, caring for the elderly, indecision, independence, loss, loss of loved one, loss of memory

I am a numbers person. Having studied math in college, I have always found all different manner of numbers, equations and formulas fascinating. There have been a lot of big numbers bandied about lately — usually with dollar signs bolted on to the front — and I got to thinking about how big those numbers are.

During all the talk about the $700 billion dollar bailout package, I wrote about
how big the number one billion is, what a billion dollars could buy and a few ways you could use to visualize such a number. Half that money has been spent (on what, no one seems to be quite sure) and the rest, $350 billion, is now being distributed with anyone and everyone slithering in to try to get a piece of it. I’m not so sure Gordon Gecko was right in the movie Wall Street. So far, greed has not proven to be all that good. At least not for the U.S.

Now we have The Stimulus Package; the $780 billion that’s meant to pull our collective a$$es out of the fire in which we find ourselves since the complete implosion of the economy. Combine that with the $350 billion and you get a number just north of one trillion dollars. But, what is a trillion? Most know it’s “a lot” but the number is so big most people can’t really comprehend it. Here are some things I found that give some sense of just how big this number is. Hint: It’s a whole lot bigger than even the billion I wrote about earlier.

Consider the humble dollar bill. It’s 2 ½ inches wide and 6 inches long and roughly as thick as a piece of paper. I have ten of them in my wallet at the moment and if I laid them together so they made a rectangle, they’d be about the size of a decent non-stick cookie sheet from amazon.com. I could buy six muffins down at The Coffee Stop on South Wilcox, a little over five gallons of gas or three medium drinks at Crowfoot Valley Coffee on Perry Street. Not a bad deal.

Let’s make the gargantuan leap to a trillion. What would a trillion dollars look like?

Considering that a ream of paper contains 500 sheets, if we had a ream of our cookie sheet sized rectangles we’d have $5,000 — Sweet! I could use that. To cover an American football field we’d need 44,400 of our stacks (I’ll let you do the math on the European football pitch of you’re a “soccer” fan.) That makes $222,000,000 — Even better, “hey, boss, I quit!” But let’s say we’re looking down at that football field covered with all that money, the looters haven’t come yet and we really want to get to a trillion dollars. (Incidentally, it’s only a trillion in the U.S. Most other places call it 1000 billion. We just insist on being different with our billions, trillions and funky systems of measurement) Since a ream of paper is 2 inches thick, to get to our goal, we’d have to add another 4,504 layers. You’d be looking at a stack of money the size of the football field
and as tall as a 19 story building. You’d be looking up.

A trillion seconds ago, some cave dwellers were painting on the walls at Chauvet Pont-d’Arc in France. These are the oldest known cave paintings. All they had to worry about was eating and staying alive…ah, the simple life.

It’s the 23rd of February, 2009. If you spent $1,000,000 a day from day zero of the Gregorian calendar, you’d still have 731 years, 6 months and 25 days to go before you spent a trillion dollars. In other words, you’d actually have to spend almost $1.4 million a day to spend your last dollar of $1 trillion today.

My home town of Castle Rock, CO is around 31.6 square miles in size. If I wanted to haul in a trillion marshmallows and spread them around, I’d be able to cover
all of Castle Rock — all of it, not just Castle Rock proper, but Castle Pines, Castle Pines Village, Founders, The Meadows…everything — in almost 8 inches of marshmallows. A trillion marshmallows would cover Denver, CO in two inches of puffed sugary goodness. Break out the chocolate and graham crackers and start a really big fire.

Whether there’s a dollar sign in front or not, a one with twelve zeros after it is a huge number. A billion is a large number. But 1000 billion? It’s really hard to imagine. Regardless of political leanings, I’m thinking we all need to hope like hell that it works.

Essays big numbers, math, money, stimulus package, trillion

It was the early nineties and the first time I saw Cortni, I was blown away. She had eyes like a cat with a regal aire that commanded the attention of the young men in the office. Carla, a co-worker, and I were across the room one day watching this phenomenon. She leaned over to me and whispered, “look at those wolves.” I turned to her and said “I’ll get her.” And I did. Three weeks and three days after our first date, we rode to the Jefferson Memorial on my motorcycle and I proposed to her on the steps amidst the cherry blossoms and white stone majesty of my favorite monument.

Three and a half years later it ended.

Because that’s not a love story. It’s a fairy tale. It’s believing marketers selling an idea as reality, the movies portraying starry eyed fantasies and commercials for diamonds. It’s believing there actually are white knights who can ride in with their trusty steeds and carry the princess off into the sunset. It’s thinking that reality can be sustained on the vaporous dreams of storybooks. But a stone doesn’t have magical power to keep the bonds of commitment strong. It’s a stone no matter how much was spent on it. What creates a real love story are the little things. Not grand gestures or superficial displays of affection. It’s not quality time. It’s Time.

A real love story is something wholly different, infinite and more there.

Diane was stunning and brilliant. She was the opposite of the everyone who had come before. She even intimidated me a little with her outgoing, carefree attitude. Before our first date she was moving a hundred miles an hour in her jean shorts and ripped Motley Crue t-shirt while I waited for her to get ready. But there was something compelling about her. Something underneath. The independence, the eyes-wide-open intelligence and the supreme confidence in who she was. No one could tell her who to be or how to act. She was who she was and she would never apologize for it. I was a goner.

Within a year, it was clear we wanted to spend a life together. Not because of fascination or infatuation, but because it just kinda made sense. We belonged together and everything we believed and how we saw the world matched. Not the same, but like two clues that fit to make a whole picture. As cliché as it sounds, she truly did complete me.

But this love story is not what comes to mind when you think about Valentine’s Day. It’s not flowers, chocolate and jewels. It’s not showing appreciation just one day a year because “you’re supposed to.” It’s kind of plain. This story is about being there any and every time she needs me. It’s making toast and poached eggs every single morning and bringing it to her in bed because for nine months those mornings were hard and she deserved every ounce of energy I could devote. It’s about supporting her when she’s afraid and trusting her when I am. It is a love story in which I make her laugh every day– even if it’s at me– and laughing right along with her. It’s a story about celebrating her triumphs– even if it’s just when the new dish she wanted to try turns out perfectly. It’s a story of listening. My love story is peppered with conversations about nothing or everything and being able to say anything in either kind. In the pages of my book, we are having these conversations still, after fifteen years. My love story tells of believing with all my heart that this one person is the person I find comfort with today, tomorrow and onward. The theme is talking. The plot is small touches; like the tap on my nose to dissipate the static before kissing every time we leave each other’s side.

My love story is not unique, hopefully. And it’s not filled with poetic words. It’s simple. I love Diane with everything I am. Still, and forever. Not because someone tells me to or so I can put it on the bumper of my car. Not because I married her and that’s the way married people are supposed to be. It’s because she has been there for me in my darkest hour and during my greatest triumphs as I have been for her. We have participated in each other’s lives to the fullest; in the truest meaning of “for better or for worse.” We are constantly exploring and there is always so much to know and learn so we do it together.

Diane is my all, my everything. She is my journey and my destination. And after fifteen years, as this story is still being written, whenever she walks into the room or I hear her voice as she approaches, I am breathless.

Essays commitement, couples, love, love story, marriage, valentines day

It happens every year. As we descend into shorter days and longer nights. As the earth’s axis tilts the northern hemisphere away from the sun and the light and radiant heat strike the U.S. at a more oblique angle, things change. The air cools, water condenses and when the temperature gets cold enough, it freezes and floats to the ground robbing the air of moisture and humidity. Dryer means more static electricity. And more static electricity means more getting lit up any time you touch a remotely conductive surface.

Albert Einstein once posited that if we evolved properly we would eventually exist as pure energy. Imagine that, all of us just blobs of light or sparkling spheres floating around. The fashionistas would certainly figure out a way for us to change our colors and we wouldn’t need to drive any more, we’d just float to where we needed to go. Or better yet, we could probably use the theory of quantum mechanics and simple just appear there using super position and time travel. We wouldn’t need to eat (my guess is we could subsist on sunshine), we wouldn’t need our fancy cars or the gas to run them (if we did need cars, we could just jack in and run them ourselves) and we wouldn’t need anything else but energy. So as long as that big fat red giant was shining, we’d be good. No need to work or do anything else, really since the evolutionary process would take us beyond needing to understand the universe, since we’d now be a part of it. We would be everything and everything would be us. Kind of like we are now, but we’d actually be aware of it. We’d just float around, interacting with each other as energy. Some would simply pulse and flash in some kind of highly advance conversation and some would interact as Steve Gutenberg and Tahnee Welch did in Cocoon. That would be interesting.

However, as fascinating as that mental exercise is, that’s not the way it is now. We’re still bags of bones, our skin still gets dry and papery, we itch and turning on the lights becomes a new adventure coming up with all manner of turning on the lights. The back of the hand, a hip, an elbow, anything. Anything to prevent the static shock from striking at the point on where some of the most sensitive nerves exist. I hit the light with my knuckle and try to swipe quickly by, thinking I’ll beat the electricity before it gets out of the thing I’m touching. But that’s folly since my hand is not going to be traveling at the speed of light any time soon. Not until I am a ball of energy anyway. So, as Winter progresses, reaching toward anything remotely electrical is a tentative, apprehension laden affair.

Even though our skin seems as if it’s made of paper during this time of year, the inside is still about 80% water. The dryness in the air makes it harder for electrical build up to disperse and within that paper sack that’s 80% water are the same salts that are in sports drinks. Electrolytes. There’s a reason they’re called that. High school chemistry class taught us that when NaCl (erm, salt) is put in water, the Na and Cl separate leaving the Cl part with a negative charge and the Na part with a positive charge. We all happen to be electrically charged because there are a whole bunch of other salts that do the same thing and they are in there, too. This makes us all really excellent conductors of electricity. And because of that we’re pretty good at collecting that electricity up. The more charge we have, the more that charge wants to get out. What better way than to jump from us to something connected to the giant battery we call earth. Zap!

When I was a kid, I liked to mess with electronics. Mostly it was pulling things apart and looking at all the miniature cities rising out of the circuit boards. But I learned some things, too. I learned was that capacitors were components that store up certain amounts of electrical charge. They are often what make a light blink, releasing energy each time they becomes charged to some specific limit before charging up again. I watched a friend use a pair of pliers to cross the two leads on a capacitor that was the size of a soda can. They spot welded to it! Capacitors store energy. Lesson learned.

My friend and I also figured out that if we carried a capacitor around the house holding one lead, shuffled our feet and then touched the other lead to a lamp or other grounded metal, the static shock would go into the capacitor, not us. After a few times doing this, depending on the size of the capacitor (and never with one the size of a soda can), the capacitor would start crackling which we correctly assumed meant it was “full”. But that charge had nowhere to go since the two leads weren’t connected up to anything. At least not yet.

That’s where my sister came in. Or when we weren’t feeling ornery, we’d have a duel. Like a knife fight with the leads of a tiny electrical component as the knife. Once both leads made contact with skin all the electricity we’d stored in it would be released and all the tiny static shocks would become one big shock. SNAP! It would light a person up or just make a cool blue light. Electricity is fun, Mr. Wizard! Here, hold this.

So I am a giant capacitor. And in these cooler, darker days we ourselves become more efficient capacitors, storing up energy in our electrolyte ridden bodies. Storing it up for when we reach to turn on a lamp or switch on an overhead light.

Since I’m not leaving the beautiful, but dry, climes of Colorado any time soon, I have resigned myself to swinging my hand quickly by a light switch (like a fool), leaning my leg against the bead on the corner of two walls (the paint, texture and my pants leg seem to lessen the blow) or simply gutting it out and going for it, watching to see how big the blue light it this time. I have resigned myself to being an excellent conductor of electricity. I have resigned myself to being a human Tesla coil.

Essays colorado, human tesla coil, static electricity, static shock, winter