No, we can't go around again

The airplane you see is on approach to San Diego's Lindbergh Field. Imagine the colors in the cabin.

Ring, ring! Tinnitus calling

In the summer of 1972, as I was working in downtown San Diego, I suddenly sneezed sharply. After the sneeze, I had a weird physical sensation, like a bucket of water had been dropped over my head but the water stayed in the bucket, around my head.

That feeling went away after a couple of minutes, thank God. I did not have to spend the next 40 years adjusting to life with a full bucket of water over my head. But when the bucket went away, it left something behind. There was a ringing in my left ear. As I sit here writing this, the ringing sounds the same as it did in the summer of 1972. Same volume, same tone, a high pitch like you could hear on the radio when you turned the dial a certain way, when radios had dials.

I don't know if I am hearing this sound, or transmitting it. Neither does medical science, which calls the sound "tinnitus," from the Latin tinnere, to ring. Webster's online defines it as "a sensation of noise (as a ringing or roaring) that is caused by a bodily condition (as a disturbance of the auditory nerve or wax in the ear) and typically is of the subjective form which can only be heard by the one affected." I am awfully happy, in terms of having found women who would marry me, that I am afflicted by the subjective form, and not the objective, which other people, horror of horrors, can hear. Can you imagine that, and snoring, too?

The Mayo Clinic offers more information than I ever thought or hoped I would find on the subject and none of it relates to my circumstance, which is sneeze-induced tinnitus. I had a ruptured eardrum, and was present at the birth of rock and roll, and was in the artillery, and had my share of ear wax, but this was all before 1972. My own suspicion is that the sneeze jiggled my stirrup off the anvil (you remember, the ear bones we learned, for some reason, in school) just enough to cause a high-pitched rattle, like a loose muffler on a car going near the speed of light. Are you listening, Einstein?

Does it bother me? I don't know. It has been almost 36 years since the sneeze, and I have forgotten what silence, auditory solitude, the breathing of angels, must sound like. I sleep fine, I use the left ear to listen to people on the telephone, I can hear a hotdog hit the grill from half a mile, so I guess I have gotten used to living with it. It comes up because I wrote a column about it years ago, and a reader, Pam, a fellow sufferer, remembered it and sent me an email wondering what I knew now. I am flattered she asked me, instead of the Mayo Clinic, but I can't give her much more information than they can.

She said hers had gotten worse, and she asked about my concentration for writing or reading. I have no problems there. My problem with reading concentration is the racket my imagination makes as I try to focus on sentences. Pam said she now has new "sounds" in her ears, two or more variations on the original high-pitched sound. She said she had trouble hearing conversations, on TV and in person. Pam, please understand the spirit in which I say this, but regarding TV, you aren't missing much.

"I was hoping to be selected for a tinnitus research project, but was denied for the current study," she said. "I did not meet their requirements since my 'ringing' changes in volume."

So tinnitus elitism rears its ugly head. Pam said she had joined a tinnitus support group. Anyone out there with real experience, for her and the group?

3Day January report

I was in Vons – our neighborhood supermarket – this morning and at the register Nancy, the cashier on duty, asked me if I had made any New Year's resolutions."I am going to walk in the Breast Cancer 3Day in November," I said. I explained that my late wife, Meredith, had died of breast cancer in 2000, and that my wife, Karen, did the event – 60 miles in three days – this past November and wore Meredith's name, among many others, on her tshirt. I told Nancy I made the mistake of going to the closing ceremony and was so inspired that I decided to make the walk in 2009.

Nancy, who I would judge is in her late 50s, kept scanning groceries. Then she said: "I did the 3Day six years ago. And I am a survivor."

The inspiration just keeps coming. And this one from Nancy felt like a reward. I had come into Von's sweaty from a one-hour walk. For me, however fit I happen to be, the first 15 minutes are always the worst. I always feel like, well, this time, I am so whipped after 14 minutes that the 15th minute without a doubt will be the last minute I ever breathe. Then the glide sets in. Not much of a glide. It just starts to feel like if I breathe hard and regularly, and don't cough or sneeze or do anything else to upset the equilibrium for the next 45 minutes, then I'll finish okay.

But this morning, I crossed a line. I recognized it because in my fitness history I have crossed it many times. I felt a tiny tailwind of reserve. So powerful was this tailwind that I wanted it recorded. And so I begin this report. I begin on Jan. 5 and will file a monthly report up until time for the 3Day, and no doubt I will write about the walk itself if someone will hold my arms up so my fingers can work the keyboard.

I start at 223 pounds (well, hey, it has been the holiday season) by the bedroom scale. I don't know what you weigh, or how you feel, but for New Year's resolutions, you can't beat the 3Day for bang for the buck. It works for weight loss, for fitness, for general health, for well-being, for accomplishment (big-time accomplishment), and for contributing to a cause whose mission is to take down an enemy that kills 44,000 American women a year and attacks 185,000 more. If breast cancer were a foreign nation, Congress would have declared war a long time ago.

Flight paths

On Jan. 25, 1998, the Super Bowl was played at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego (Broncos 31, Packers 24). I heard fireworks in the distance just before kickoff and ran out onto the patio and looked west in the direction of the stadium. Couldn't see the fireworks.

But then I turned around and glanced at the eastern horizon and saw a black slot in the sky, like a slot you would slide an ATM card into to get money. I was not drunk or anything. The slot was moving toward me, getting bigger. It was too late to run for the camera, or to run, period. In seconds, the slot turned into a black Stealth bomber. It flew directly overhead, not even a thousand feet off the ground, huge, blocking out sky like the ship in "Independence Day." It was aimed right for the stadium. I ran back inside and you should have heard the roar from the stadium as it approached and did its stadium flyby. God, I wish I had a picture of that thing going over.

Alta Mira is directly underneath the flight path for stadium flybys. Only once was it the Stealth. Other times it has been four jet fighters. We hear their engines first, then run out and see them in a wide loop to the east, trailing white smoke. Then they straighten out, jack up the thunder, and go over the house toward the stadium at 500 miles an hour.

Last week, it was a blimp, maneuvering before the Holiday Bowl at the stadium. I saw him far to the south, then he turned north, still considerably east of us. But close enough to hope. I ran for the camera and got him just as he was overflying a horizon feature that we call Dolly's Right One.

"Turn left," I whispered at him. I wanted him to take a path that would go right in front of the house. It would be a great picture, and I wanted to see what Gully would do. I do, from years ago, have an ancient print photo of the late, great, Barkeley vigorously warning a Sanyo blimp, that I could have hit with a BB gun, not to come an inch closer. The things puppies get to bark at, when they have the sky for a yard. But the blimp's captain, determined to aggravate puppies to the north of us, stayed on that course until he disappeared behind the bottlebrush tree.

But he did do me the favor of reminding me it was Holiday Bowl day, so 15 minutes before kickoff I was outside with the camera, watching. No jets this time, but there did appear a couple of other aviators. One of them headed for me as if he had it in mind to fly through the front door into our living room. That happens sometimes, with sparrows and finches and hummingbirds, who are relatively easy to corner and scoop up and return to the outdoors. This guy, though, I wasn't so sure.

On he came, magnificent in his control of the air. Then he gave a little left-turn twitch of his tailfeathers, and a slight change in pitch of the pinfeathers at the tips of his wings (maybe for stabilization, maybe just to show off, like jet pilots cutting in afterburners), and he sailed past close enough to rattle me into cutting off the tip of a wing. For a flyby, it wasn't bad.

The sky did give us one little supersonic shot before sundown, a ray finding a Christmas tree ornament and blasting color onto the kitchen ceiling. A promise of flybys to come, I figured.

A tardy Happy New Year

Happy New Year! I have been trying to post these images since early New Year's Day, but it must be that the folks at Blogger took several days off. I hope we are now back in contact.