The Accidental Voice

“It’s ‘The Decade of Discontent’,” I said a few years ago during a conversation about being in your forties.  And it occurred to me this very well could be.   Professionally, people of this vintage are often on the cusp of deciding to chase the money, continue to chase it, stop chasing it or do something completely different in an effort to find that which fulfills them most.  The children are grown, but not all the way so there is still that dependence but independence has crept in so parents aren’t “needed” as much.  The body starts talking back too, asking “what exactly are you doing working me like this and why is coffee not involved?”  And then there’s the big stuff.  Shocking and unexpected news, friends divorcing, cancer and people who have life smoke a curveball they just weren’t expecting or didn’t really deserve.

I had a former friend tell me their marriage was breaking up.  They said, “this has happened before.”  The implication being that their partner had caused the breakup.  Later, it came out that they had actually had the affair.  It revealed a lot about the character of a person I thought I knew.

A friend lost someone to cancer, and another friend underwent surgery for a brain tumor; now living with the possibility that sometime in the future it could come back.

Three other couples we knew split and I winced knowing the pain that would consume them and their children for a time.

I ran up against the stark reality that parents get old and infirm and there’s no stopping that train once it’s begun to pull away from the station.  No conductor to tell or emergency rope to pull as the wheels slip a few times and the forward momentum begins its gradual build to full steam ahead.

Was it my age group?  Was it just me?  Was it this “Decade of Discontent” revealing a side that was darker than anyone knew?  I couldn’t tell, but it seemed so odd that so much was going on.

The pattern seemed obvious but there were no particular reasons.  And there were people focusing on the negative and finding the danger, fault and unhappiness in everything.  Again I asked myself was it just me?  My own outlook?  The political climate?  All the intolerance in the world?  People looking over their shoulders because someone told them they needed to be afraid.   It’s a habit that’s easy to start and once there, like anything, it’s a hard one to break.  Where were those who smile at the simple fact that the sun came up and everything is right with the world?

I read recently that 35 percent of human communication is facial expression.  So a third of what your trying to say comes not from your mouth, but from your whole face (words are only 7 percent, body language the rest).  I wasn’t really surprised because for whatever reason, I have always sought to make people smile or laugh whenever I spend more than just a moment or two with them.  The face always looks much better that way.  It’s not something I actively seek, just a … well … hobby of sorts.   It seemed a decent thing to do.  Collecting happiness.  Watching for the smile, making a subtle joke or comment that elicits the crinkle of the nose, the sparkle of the eyes, the drawing of the corners of the mouth.  It’s a trophy from a brief exchange of words while waiting in line, a small token I can take from a business meeting, a triumph that, for a brief moment, I had a little part in bringing a small amount of joy to someone.

I have known positive people and I have known people about whom others say “boy, they find the negative in everything.”  Everyone has that choice to make  and, thankfully, some have made the choice to be happy people.   Just by their very nature they are happy and what a pleasure it is to run up against them.

***

Diane and I headed up to the Smoky Hill Library the other day for a meeting about high school options for  the boys.   It was a bright, sunny day and as we walked in to the library, we noticed a small coffee bar tucked off a hallway where the meeting rooms were.   The name escapes me, but it was typical of what you might expect; little alcove, books to read, a counter for service and a closet of a back room for supplies.  We had a few minutes so decided to grab something.

That would have been the end of it had the young woman behind the bar been a regular cashier just doing her job.   But she wasn’t.  As soon as she opened her mouth, the inflection and expression she put forth was like the wash from a passing semi.  The kind that rocks you back on your heals and if you’re not ready for it, you immediate think “whoa, laying it on a little thick.”  It made Diane and I smile but I was a little uncomfortable because I didn’t quite know how to take this person.

Ordering our drinks, we made small talk and in that minute or two I suddenly realized she wasn’t laying it on at all.  This was how she lived.   She was simply filled with joy.  It almost seemed as if every moment was a gift to her and she wasn’t apologizing to anybody for appreciating each one.   So much so that the words she used were full of happiness and appreciation.  Words like fantastic and wonderful, greeeat and excellent.  And she meant them.  We talked about nothing of particular importance but it was as if we were the ones she’d been waiting to talk to all day.  Suddenly, we were basking in her joy, letting it cascade over us like a warm late-summer rain; turning our faces into it, almost holding our arms out to catch what we could.  We walked away from that little coffee bar feeling pretty sweet.  It may have been one of the best drinks I’ve ever had … and it wasn’t the coffee.

***

My family and the boys’ grandparents went to Elephant Bar to celebrate father’s day this year.  We’d been there before, liking the service and the menu with its abundance of choices.  When our server walked up we were met with a bright, beautiful smile, pleasant air and friendly voice.  She didn’t sit down in the booth with us and pretend to be our friend.   She didn’t slap her book onto the table and squat down so she could look us all in the eye, elbows splayed out on the table while she took our drink order.  Nope, she just spoke to us directly, looked us in the eye and immediately (I’m not exactly sure how she did it) made us feel that she was happy to be there for us and maybe just happy to be there, period.  The conversation somehow strayed from the business at hand and we found out that she had ridden her bike to work.   She rode to work every day, in fact.   From Denver to Centennial.  We were duly impressed.

The weather was pretty stormy outside that evening so we expressed our concern about her return ride, but she brushed it off.  “I sometimes hop on the lightrail if I need to,” she said, even thought the lightrail was still a few miles up the road and riding in the rain was a real possibility.  She told us she was closing that night so it would also be late when she left.  With the weather, the late hour of her departure, the prospect of possibly having to stand dripping in the back of the train with her bike (those are the rules: you have to stand, in the back, if you have a bike) you’d think she would be put out.  Nah, life was an adventure and she just seemed to say “bring it!”  She was there to help people have a pleasant evening together, riding home in the rain was inconsequential.  We were convinced that anything challenging that came along for her would be met with relaxed determination and aplomb.

She was, I would venture to say, the best server I have ever had in the fifteen or so years I have lived in Colorado.  Not because she was there to fill our water every time we took a sip and not because the timing was especially perfect.  That didn’t matter.  It was because she looked at us with a clear gaze, spoke with a calm voice and projected a true desire to make our evening better.  Diane and I both felt the tip was nowhere near adequate to pay her back for that but we found her manager and made sure he understood there was someone in his midst that brightened the world around her.  That mattered.

***

How great to be around people such as these who are so warm and giving of their kindness and joy.  How great it would be if there were more of them.  You kind of wonder what font of life they’ve found from which to drink.  If I find it, I’m giving it away to anyone I can and I won’t tell the marketers.  They’ll just exploit it, soiling the purity of the simple luck of coming across someone and suddenly having your day become completely different.  And that’s kind of the point isn’t it.   Making the world brighter around you; laughing, sharing a joke with the person across the counter,  changing up the way someone might expect the conversation to go so they slip out of the groove a little.  And the smile always comes.   Another bit of happiness to collect.

Thank you sir, may I have another.

As you step out into the bright sunlight, or even the teeming rain, in days to come, think of the gift of a smile or kind word you’ve been given and use them both willingly and with reckless abandon.   If everyone endeavored to create laughter around them whenever they were, I am convinced their lives would be better for it.  And, who knows, perhaps they would unknowingly help that one person who needed it the most that day.   The neighbor who’d just told her husband she was leaving and knew the pain it caused, the one who’d just found out it wasn’t benign, the one who just spent the weekend discovering their parent didn’t really know who they were any more.  In that, they themselves might find a brief moment of peace, grace and joy without knowing where it came from.

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.

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

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.

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.