Irish New Year's

Living in San Diego is like living in several timeshares all at once. From our front door in La Mesa, a suburb 13 miles east of downtown, any kind of cultural, topographic and climatologic diversity is no more than two hours away.

It was warm and dry at our house last week, a few days before Christmas, and it didn’t seem very Christmas-y at all. We went for a drive, just for something to do. We could have gone in any number of directions, but we chose west. Winter Pacific storm systems were pounding the northwest, and sending big surf down to us.

We were in Karen’s convertible. It was about 75 and clear as we left, but we put jackets in the trunk. Passing the airport on Harbor Drive, we could see a bank of fog peeping above Point Loma. Up Talbot to Catalina, where the fog was all around us. We left the top down and got jackets out of the trunk. Coasting down Hill Street, we could see waves breaking toward the cliffs, but what really changed for us was the weather. At home we had ceiling fans on. In the car we turned the heater on and turned collars up against the cool, damp breath of the fog. It wasn’t Aspen, but at least it was cuddly. A touch of Christmas at the coast.

We cruised the cliffs, watched waves foaming white as snow over black rock promontories, and let ourselves get nice and chilled. The fog rolled home right behind us, and the temperature dropped. We turned off the ceiling fans, plugged in Christmas lights in the gathering gloom, and built our first fire of the season.

This week, for New Year’s Eve, the destination is Ireland, which is about a mile from our house. Nobody celebrates New Year’s like the Irish. At Hooley’s, an Irish pub nearby, there is a countdown clock above the bar that today is spinning down the seconds, minutes and hours, until Irish New Year’s: 4 p.m. on Saturday, which is midnight in Dublin. I discovered this three New Year’s Eves ago, when my son Tyler, now a picker in Nashville, was playing with a band at Hooley’s on New Year’s Eve as, on the countdown clock, 4 p.m. approached. The place was rocking, and at the stroke of 4, it was Irish New Year’s. We cheered and lifted glasses and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

It was the perfect hour to celebrate New Year’s. Two years ago, I asked a few friends to join me there, and by 4:30 we were back at my house for drinks and dinner, after which folks could hang around or have plenty of time to move on to other parties geared to midnight and San Diego New Year’s, while others of us turned in at our usual bedtimes. It worked out perfectly; everybody was happy. I lifted a Bushmill’s nightcap to Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, for his thoughtfulness in discovering this place eight time zones west of Dublin, and retired at 9:30 in such bliss that I didn’t even hear the fireworks at midnight.

Now it is a tradition. On Saturday, we will celebrate at 4, then home for cocktails and dinner: roasted chicken, cabbage and sausage, black-eyed peas, biscuits and whiskey bread pudding. The black-eyes, you know, are a southern American New Year’s tradition. Eating black-eyes on New Year’s will bring you good luck in the new year. Standard recipe is half a pound of bacon, diced; one large onion, chopped; and a pound or more of black-eyed peas, fresh preferred but dried will do. If they are dried, soak them overnight.

Cook the bacon in a bean pot until it starts to brown, then stir in the onion, season with salt and pepper, and stir until the onion is soft and a dark glaze is starting to form in the bottom of the pot. Stir in the black-eyes with water just to cover and simmer until done, about an hour. I am also going to add some pork bits pulled off of leftover smoked ribs. In the old days, after the New Year’s Eve party, if I wanted my friends to have black-eyes for luck, I had to send them home with some. No longer, now that New Year’s begins at 4 in the afternoon. Perfect.

Sandpaper in your ears

“Peace on Earth” this Christmas?

Don’t think so. So many Christmas cards I’ve mailed, promising “Peace on Earth.” Hasn’t happened in my lifetime. I have seen Christmas cards in family scrapbooks from the 1940s, including 1943, the year I was born. They promised “Peace on Earth,” in the middle of World War II, with the first tactical atomic explosion at Hiroshima still two years away. I haven’t and wouldn’t be able to document it, but I’ll bet Earth has not had a moment of peace since then.

Maybe if we narrowed it down. “Peace in the Christian World.” Nope. “Peace in America.” Daily murders, violence and crime, in streets, in movies and on TV. “Peace in California.” Road rage capital of the world. “Peace in San Diego.” Har de har har. “Peace in La Mesa.” We do have our quiet moments, but why would I offer that as your Christmas wish? “Peace at my house.” Now we’re getting close, as long as we don’t watch the news, but peace at my house doesn’t do you much good, and your good is my wish.

No, once again this Christmas, peace anywhere on Earth has to be portable, and that peace is achievable. Insurance follows the car, and peace follows the person. “Peace in your mind” is totally possible this Christmas Day, or if not this Christmas (it takes a little work), then by Christmas 2006. If peace follows all the people who come to sit down at your Christmas dinner, then you will have “Peace at the Christmas dinner table.”

At many Christmas dinner tables, though, including many in my past, you might as well ask for “Peace on Earth.”

So many people go through life wired with buttons to be pushed. Such buttons can be pushed from a range of a thousand miles. All it takes is the right word traveling through the air. Get a dozen button-wired people at a Christmas dinner table, and watch out.

The buttons can be unwired. All you have to do is take back the power you have given to some other person to push it. These can be very important and powerful people: mothers, fathers, etc. But it isn’t their power they use to push your buttons. It is yours. You gave it to them years ago, probably starting in childhood. With that power, they can push your buttons at any time and make you feel small, cheap, insignificant, selfish, ungrateful, undesirable, inferior, a lifelong waster of every opportunity you ever had at achieving the greatness that you were born for, if you had only listened to the person leaning with all his or her weight against the thumb pressing your button.

You gave that person that power and weight, and you can take it back. All it takes is forgiveness. Appropriate, at the Christmas season, and the figure it celebrates, that the route to peace involves forgiveness. But it works. I don’t know exactly how it works, and it takes some work and willingness to get there, but when you forgive, you take power back, and peace is there waiting. Forgiveness, power, peace and freedom are all different spellings of the same human condition: happiness.

When you are ready, and it very well could require some professional guidance, you come to a point where you simply say in your mind to a person: “I forgive you.” At that instant, the button becomes unwired. The person may say the same things as before, words that for years you felt as sandpaper in your ears or an arrow through your heart. But now the words pass right through you and out into space. Left behind is a feeling of liberation you have known only in your dreams.

You haven’t said a word to the person about forgiveness. The person knows something has happened, though, because the button doesn’t work anymore. So he or she quits pushing, and it is a relief. It was your power, but it required their energy to keep their thumbs on your buttons all those years, and at some point, inside themselves, they will feel relieved.

But this Christmas story about reachable peace is not about them; it is about you. It is a true story.

Winter solstice

Cloudy, beautiful morning here in east San Diego County, California, North America, and at 10:20 we positioned ourselves on the glider, facing south, to observe the solstice at 10:25.

At that moment, the Earth in its orbit around the Sun reached a place where the Sun’s perpendicular rays hit, just for an instant, the Earth at its southernmost presentation to the Sun.

It was instantaneous: the Earth orbits the sun at a speed of 66,780 miles per hour. I tried to visualize that, assuming a random position in black space where I could watch the Earth, and witness its speed, as it crossed that place where Sun rays bumped the Tropic of Capricorn, 23 ½ degrees south of the Equator. Seconds later, the rays were traveling back north across the Earth’s face toward the summer solstice, at the Tropic of Cancer, 23 ½ degrees north of the equator, where on the glider it will be June 21 or thereabouts.

At 10:25, the Earth was rotating West to East at a speed of about 1,000 miles per hour. It was orbiting the Sun at a speed of 66,780 miles per hour. The Sun and its entire solar system were orbiting in the Milky Way Galaxy at a speed of 487,353 miles per hour. Yet from the glider, it seemed so peaceful. How in the world is it, that people come to believe they are dominant?

Stress tests

The hip joint is still shot.

It was supposed to be replaced today, but yesterday a complication arose. The surgical nurse called and said an EKG, taken a week ago, didn’t look right.

“It doesn’t look like earlier EKGs of yours,” she said.

The result, she said, could have been the result of a number of things, including a minor heart attack, a mistake, or stress.

“I showed the results right away to the anesthesiologist, and until we know what is going on, we are canceling the surgery,” she said.

I assumed, for the EKG, there would have been stress present, of the sort associated with submitting an EKG before going in for surgery in which the top of your leg bone is sawed off and an arthritic pelvic socket reamed out and a prosthetic device hammered into place with four weeks of intensive recovery to follow, with long rehabilitation thereafter. So I think that’s what it was.

“What do we do now?” I asked, feeling a drop of failed-EKG stress sinking in.

The remedy is to go for another test, this one called a “stress echo,” which will take place tomorrow. If that test disproves the other one, she thinks I can get in for surgery next week, thus enabling me to recover sufficiently for the start of spring semester, a deadline with absolutely no stress embedded in it at all.

The good thing is that it is ready-made blog material. I always relax when I know I have something to write about. And I had gotten my Christmas shopping done, in time for the surgery date today.

The Mike Leach campaign

The San Diego-based Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee has two words for San Diego this Christmas: Mike Leach.

Leach is the football coach at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He is the only football coach I know of to become the subject of a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The story was two weeks ago and it detailed Leach’s innovations that are reshaping the geometry, both in space and time, of a football game. If you want a sample, Tech is in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 2.

I have taken steps in the local media to get a phone and email campaign going to contact the San Diego football leaders and tell them they need to figure out how to bring Leach to our city. A vacancy already exists, at San Diego State. A vacancy could be made to exist, with the San Diego Chargers.

Members of the College favor the second option, for two basic reasons. First, the Chargers’ coaching staff too often, in our opinion, chooses a strategy of playing not to lose, whether for part of a game or sometimes a whole game. This was evident in the Chargers’ 23-21 loss last Sunday to a measurably inferior Miami Dolphin team. The head coach, Marty Schottenheimer, a distinguished coach with long tenure in the NFL, after the loss stated flatly that his team came out to play, but just didn’t play as well as they had been playing. The College begs to suggest the team always reflects the coach. It came out to play the game it had been coached to play, which was not to lose, a recurring theme in Schottenheimer’s history which more than once this season has increased the odds against his team winning.

This is in contrast to Mike Leach, who coaches his team to score on every play it runs, even late in the game with his team ahead 56-14. His intention is not to embarrass the other team. His abiding interest, as The Times discovered, is systems efficiency (his first career was lawyer), and the system happens to be football. If you run a play, Leach believes, the play should score.

They are very interesting plays, with as much as three-to-six-foot splits between the offensive linemen, four receivers spread sideline-to-sideline, and a tailback whose primary job is to catch the ball. Leach told The Times that his idea of offensive balance is to have all five receivers finish the season with 1,000 yards of receptions.

Leach said he spreads out his offense because it is counterproductive to concentrate action into tight areas, which wastes most of the 53-yard-wide field. It works for the run as well as the pass. Why ask his linemen to “open a hole” in a tightly bunched defense, when they can open holes simply by lining up far apart? Spreading the game out means his players must run and run and run, which he conditions them to do, and which the opposing team is not conditioned to do. “Make their fat guys run,” is his credo. When, in the second quarter, you see them bending over with their hands on their hips, you know you’ve got them.

In essence, Leach coaches his team to do three things: score on every play it runs, run the defense into total exhaustion, and hit the other guys as hard as you can. What the College would give to see such a coach on a Chargers sideline.

If that is not possible, then the San Diego State Aztecs are looking for a new man after a season of losing seasons and crowds of 20,000 in a 60,000-seat stadium. Why would Leach leave Texas Tech, which plays in the big-time Big 12 Conference, for San Diego State and the Western Athletic Conference? Well, for one thing, the pleasure of beating WAC teams 70-21 with regularity, unbeaten seasons, and a ticket into a BCS bowl game, prizes much harder, if not impossible, to come by at Texas Tech, which must play Texas and Oklahoma every fall. Mike Leach could put San Diego State on the map the way the University of Miami got on the map in the 1980s and sell out San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium six times a season.

He’s a free thinker and a surfer type too, apparently, and it is a geographic fact that the nearest free thinking and surf to Lubbock, Texas, is San Diego. He is also an innovator first and a football coach second, and a welcome addition to our city’s intellectual base. The College would not hesitate to invite him to speak, and ask him where he thought the airport should go.

The hip joint is shot

I am a 1943 Grant, in reasonably good condition. After a long test drive, I was recently driven off the lot by Karen Marie Werve, who married me with an admonition: “I want 30 more years.”
I feel good about that warranty. All my parts are ‘43s, and I still would take them on a long desert drive at night without fear of breaking down.

But there is wear and tear, and an occasional malfunction. The prostate went three years ago, because of cancer, and so I can’t shift gears as smoothly as I used to.

Now it is a hip. The left one. The doctor said, “The hip is shot.” The shock absorber is gone. Xrays show a sheet of white where once was a gray half-moon of cartilage separating the white ball socket in the pelvis and the ball joint at the top of the leg. My steering has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years, and my ride is very rough, even on smooth highways. Every step is a pain.

So the original hip joint is coming out, this Thursday. Sixty-two years is not bad service for a part that gets as much daily pounding as a hip. Its replacement, made of titanium and composites, is estimated to last 20 years. How’s that for human durability?

I will miss the original. The procedure involves sawing off the old, worn out ball joint, at the top of the femur. I asked the surgeon, in our pre-op meeting, if I could bring it home. “No,” he said. “But in 1955, I got to bring my appendix home in a jar,” I protested. “No,” he said.

Affection develops for things that serve us well. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a farewell to a set of Michelins that served me for 100,000 miles. How many miles does the hip joint have on it? No way to know. Now it will disappear into some disposal process, the same way the Michelins went into a recycling machine. I want to pat it on its worn-out head for all the years and fun, the playgrounds, running, swimming, sports, hiking, etc., that it made possible.

I am hoping for a spinal block instead of the general anesthesia, and my orthopedist said I qualified for the “cementless” procedure, which I had hoped for also. Four days in the hospital, rounds of therapy, then either home or to a therapy facility for a few days, then home in time for Christmas. There will be a period of restricted activity and movement, which I intend to parlay into getting waited on hand and foot. A fine thing: a beautiful woman drives you off the lot one week, then two weeks later you drag her into the shop for hip surgery.

A friend from college days has had not one, but two, hip replacements. He said the first two weeks I will feel lousy, then uncomfortable for two weeks, then a shift into steady recovery. I am aiming to be ready for the stairs to my second-floor office when the spring semester begins in late January, and to move furniture, lug around potted plants, and go for long walks for the next 30 years, at any hour that Karen chooses.

Those Grinchy catalogues

Yesterday, shortly before noon, the mail arrived, and in it a Bloomingdale’s catalog of Christmas gifts.

I took it inside, leafed through it, and found two things I liked. I dialed the number, confirmed the account, etc., and placed my first order, for an attractive pair of earrings.

“That is back-ordered until Feb. 7, or sooner,” said the service agent.

“Well, shoot,” I said. “What about this other pair,” and gave her the order number.

“That is back-ordered until Feb. 14, or sooner,” she said.

“This is a Christmas catalog, is it not?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“What about these UGG slippers,” I said, flipping the pages and finding the number, which I read.

“They are back-ordered until Feb. 7,” she said.

“I don’t need them for February, I need them for Christmas,” I said. “I guess I will go somewhere else.”

“I am sorry about that,” said the agent, and we hung up.

It’s not just Bloomingdale’s. Christmas catalogues arrive from many reputable retailers, all with reputations for their concern for customer satisfaction, and by the time I can get to the phone and dial it, all the stuff is not available. Maybe it is a disadvantage of living on the West Coast. The East Coasters get their catalogues three hours earlier, race to the telephone, or bring cellphones to the mailbox with them, and claim all the good stuff while my mailman is still drinking coffee in the day room.

But wouldn’t Bloomie’s want to take this into account? A valued customer is a valued customer, and more important, a sale is a sale.

Karen, my wife, is a genius of organizational analysis, and I asked her what might be the cause. She said she couldn’t say, without talking to a lot of people in the Bloomie’s system, but one fact did catch her eye.

“Both of these items were back-ordered until Feb. 7,” she said. “That is a week before Valentine’s Day.”

Her suggestion was that the customer might realize that, go ahead and order the items as Valentine’s gifts, then thrash through the catalogue looking for something – say, a sterling silver charm (for a charm bracelet) of a chili dog – that might be shippable before Dec. 25. The double sale, she thought, would be a shrewd marketing strategy.

Bloomingdale’s wouldn’t do that, though I hate to give them, or any retailer these days, the idea to think about. Whatever the reason, they didn’t do much for my Christmas spirit, and that’s not the sort of thing all us Santa Claus deputies forget easily.

A song for a lifetime

We had drunk a champagne toast and were getting ready to cut the wedding cake when Karen arrived (I thought) at some kind of private moment of decision and said, “Wait,” and turned to face our 25 guests.

“I want to do something,” she said to them. Her eyes were lowered, nervously. “And I am going to do it. I want to sing Michael a song.”

Cheers went up, and I acted out embarrassment, reached for an afghan off the back of a chair and draped it over my head. There was a time I would not have been acting, but thank God for the stability of being 62 years old. Karen laughed with everyone else, and I told them, pulling off the afghan, “Hey, I’m not embarrassed. I love it,” and I turned to Karen and hugged her.

But this story is not about me. It’s about Karen. “I wanted to surprise you,” she said to me. I was already learning that life with Karen is a series of sparkly little surprises, but nothing like this. She turned me to face her, our living room became quiet, and she took my hands in hers. She sucked in a deep breath, a draught of determination, and let it out slowly. Then she turned her face up to me and began to sing.

There were bells on a hill
But I never heard them ringing
No, I never heard them at all
Til there was you.

I had not heard her sing, and the beauty of her voice surprised me. It was very clear, very steady, with all her heart in it. I looked at her and could not believe this was happening to me. I started to sing, too, so much did I love her, very low, underneath her, until she got to words I didn’t remember. Then there was only her voice in the room. If she had been nervous, it had gone away. Her voice was as luminous as her eyes and her smile.

Then she got to the chorus, with its odd little note twist, and it threw her out of key for the last verse, but nobody cared. It was better, sweetly genuine, that way. She didn’t care, either. She had decided, somewhere in the preparations for our marriage, that she wanted to sing a love song to me.

At the moment, I thought about the challenge she must have carried, from the day it occurred to her to sing a song to me at our wedding. If it had been me, it would have become pure anxiety, learning the song, hoping I would remember the words, and at the crucial moment, having the courage to sing. I would always know that when the time came, I actually wouldn’t have to do it, and no one, except me, would ever know.

That’s not the way it was with her. From the moment she had the idea, she knew she would do it, and she practiced and practiced. But in all the excitement, she almost forgot. She knew there would have to be a right moment for her song, and she didn’t know when or how that moment would arrive, or even if it would.

Then came the toast, and I responded to the toast, saying, “I’ll go first,” as if Karen would go second. As I was saying my response, it came to her. “I had forgotten all about it until then,” she told me later. But she said she realized the right moment had arrived, and as it did, she remembered her song. And when she did, there was no doubt she would sing it. No decision to be made. She may have been nervous, but there was no option of not singing. “That’s not who I am,” she said.

Admiration for this woman routinely pours out of me, and when she said that, I wanted to be just like her. For me, the option would have been there. I might not have sung, and I would have regretted it forever. Not Karen. She turned to me and sang, and took into possession a memory for a lifetime, for her, and maybe even more for me. God, I love who she is.

A new destination

Eight-thirty a.m., Saturday, Dec. 3. An extraordinary morning after overnight showers. The wedding party was in place, on the patio against a backdrop of sunlight, clouds, sky and ocean. I knew my lines and had my game face on, ready to be the strong one if I needed to be.

Inside the house, the processional music started: “Roses from Tyrol,” track 4 on the Andre Rieu “Live in Tuscany” CD. From within the house, a sense of motion. Then Karen appeared in the open French doors and paused, on the arm of her son Bill, at the top of the step.

I saw her, and she saw me, and her face was all beauty, happiness and love. My game face may have resisted for an instant – I couldn’t say – but then it was gone in a flash, and tears were rising. In the same motion my heart left my chest and crossed the 15 feet to her. I had believed that I understood how much I loved her, but no: here was something new. She felt the same; she said she saw the tears in my eyes and surrendered instantly to a physical pull toward me, and toward us, in our commitment. We were at our convergence point, brought there by no easy highways, and the last 15 feet waiting to be closed were completely visible now, and spectacular.

I was able to wait as Bill brought her to me. I shook his hand and said, “Thank you.” Then I took her in my arms and kissed her. Embraced, tears in our eyes, a flurry of little kisses. I said to her, “How are we going to make it through this?” She said, “I don’t know.”

And so the ceremony of marriage between Karen and Michael Grant dissolved into a sustained embrace and numerous little kisses, interrupted by official statements of love, a reading from Gibran, a commitment to vows we had written two days before, the exchange of rings, and the kiss – the ceremonial kiss – at the end. It was the first wedding I ever attended where the ceremony was worked into the experience, and not the other way around. There were only five people with us, but if it had been in a cathedral with thousands, the tears would have raised, the hearts leapt, and the embrace sustained, a universe of two people, with some number of witnesses looking on. I was not meant to be the strong one for Karen. Karen and I together were meant to be the strong ones, placing our loyalty to the lovely intimacy of love before our obligation to ceremony, for anyone wanting to see.

It was a stunning experience, and in the hours afterward, we asked ourselves: What happened? What happened to us when she appeared in the French doors and tore my heart out of my chest, and she saw my tears?

I had believed that I could not love her more completely, but I was wrong. There was another five percent. It made sense. A couple of weeks before the wedding, when the preparations were picking up speed, I started to feel drawn to her in a different way. From our first dates, beginning in September, 2004, we talked about an odd familiarity that we felt, as if we had met before. Maybe there was a tearing apart, and now a coming back together, and the closer we came, the stronger became our old experience of completion, until the actual moment arrived on Saturday morning.

But there is something else happening that is more measurable. We both have done the inner work people do when they want to understand who they are, and why they act and react the way they do. We both understand power and its relationship to freedom and happiness; the three words are essentially the same. With that power, anything is possible. We have agreed for a long time that there will always be more love between us. There is always another five percent waiting. In our lives we will reach new destinations, that are already out there, but we won’t know them until we reach them, and then we will know more about love than we did before.

One of those new destinations was reached Saturday morning. She appeared in the French doors, and bam, we were there. We didn’t realize it for a day or two. It is too powerful when it happens, air totally unbreathed. Only looking back did we understand what had happened, knew where we were. That is exactly how it happens. Exactly.

Wedding Day

No posts this past week because I was focused on getting married.

Yesterday, Dec. 3, Michael and Karen became Michael and Karen Grant. It didn’t feel like Dec. 3, it didn’t feel like Saturday. It was a day suspended beyond time, somewhere between earth and space.