First Monday with Characters

Untitled work by Susan C. Price

Edited by Morris Dean

[Though the date above says Monday, it's Tuesday afternoon as I finish and publish this column. For an explanation, see the update on myself, the last "character" reported on below.]

Susan C. Price at the easle

why on earth would i want to update my character this frequently? i'm retired...the only BIG changes...can be icky

Sharon Stoner in "sunny" Florida

Nothing much going on except rain, flooding, lighting, one every second, downed trees and hail. 80° one day, next day down to 50°. That's sunny Florida!

Vic with his wife, Shirley

Vic Midyett in a very interesting place
    Vic first appeared on Moristotle & Co. anonymously. He wrote the lead item for the April 26 "Fish for Friday" column, about the Anzac commemoration in Queensland. He'll be back with bylines. Here's his first character update:

We visited a very interesting place this weekend; it was tucked away in the mountains of the Great Dividing Range that stretches along the entire East coast of Australia. If you are just a bit lower than you need to be, as we were, you don't get an interent signal. Or phone for that matter. Folks parked on top of the hill had both.
    Almost every little town in Australia has a "caravan park." A caravan to Americans is a travel trailer. There is a strong culture in Australia to "see" the country. Especially after you retire. We are in that group of what folks here called the "Gray Nomads." At any given time there are roughly 2 million of us roaming around the countryside. We've been at it now for 20 months and have met couples that have been doing this life style for 20 years!
    Some are younger with a trade to work and with young kids. The man finds a town he'd like to or needs to work in for a while. His wife home-schools the kids. Once he/they get tired of that location, they move on to the next one. But mostly we are the gray nomad army moving around as we wish. Several friends of mine also have boats and simply chase the fishing holes. Not to mention the 35,877 kilometers of coast line around the island.
    Every evening, no matter where you are, come about 4:30, it's "happy hour." We oldies get our folding chairs and tables in one place and sit down with nibbles, wine, or beer. Everyone shares short stories and "long" fish tales and a lot of laughs. At least once a week, if you stay in one place long enough, many get together for a pot luck or BBQ and hopefully music jamming time. Or a bonfire if there is a suitably safe place to do so. I play an African acoustic drum and the harmonica. Many are guitar players and that's the best! We love it.
    None of this has anything at all to do with the place we visited yesterday. Now THAT was different!

Ralph Earle in seasonal verse

So sorry to be such a stranger. Not enough time to do all the things I want to do. I may also be feeling a tad bit of envy for your status in the ranks of the Retired.
    But I do have a seasonal poem to report. I'm quite fond of it; hope you enjoy it too:

The Redbuds

all night
the redbuds wait
in their circle of dark
In the morning
the bees arrive
and the people
walk out and say
we knew it

we knew all along
how spring comes
the sun rises
a yellow-hammer
woodpecker
fills the air with
tap-tap-tap-tap-tap
for the bugs
in the poplar bark
and a red-tail
hawk glides
out of green
leaf tapestry
into the blue

The Neumanns on an "island"

We were hoping the new galley would be done by the end of April but unfortunately the counter had to be manufactured so installation is now scheduled for Monday, May 6. We hope to be able to report the project is complete in the next update!
    We had a great trip to an "island" called Grindstone Joes. I say "island" with quotes because it is connected to the mainland via a road so I'm not sure that really counts as an island? We were there as part of a cruise-out with the Ox Bow yacht club. This is a great group of folks and we had over twenty people playing a game of "survivor" that included one member of each team putting on a shower cap and letting the rest of the team cover it with shaving cream and then throw Cheetos into the shaving cream. The team that had the most Cheetos stick to the whip cream won that challenge.

Geoffrey Dean in memory of Janos Starker

For me April started with a trip to Belgium, where I spent a day sampling waffles and beer in Ghent and Brugge before attending the 12th International Congress on Music Signification in Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels. The month ended with "Sonata Counterpoint," the first of my Beethoven/Brahms cello recitals, with pianist Paul Ridgway and special guest composer Johann Sebastian Bach (J. S. Bach—not exactly a household name, but I think he'll catch on quickly). The same day (April 28) the distinguished cellist and pedagogue Janos Starker passed away, and I have since been visited by many memories of him and of my time (1989-1991) at Indiana University—Bloomington, where Starker had shaped a committed community of cellists since joining the faculty back in 1958. One of his signature pieces was the solo sonata by Zoltan Kodaly, a work thought unplayable before Starker mastered it at the tender age of 15. Here he is in a live performance of it fifty years later.


Starker was fond of quoting a fellow Hungarian IU faculty member, pianist Gyorgyi Sebok, who said, "Don't get excited. Create excitement." You may not SEE the excitement in Starker's interpretation, but you can HEAR it. What you CAN see is the ease with which he transcends the technical demands of this tremendously difficult work. If anyone could make playing the cello look easy, Starker could. But he was also convinced that there are no real secrets to cello playing—it could all be explained, and that's what he devoted himself to doing when he wasn't touring. I had grown up with his recordings and had heard him in recital, but it was attending one of Starker's famous Saturday noon masterclasses when I first went to IU to audition for the master's program that convinced me that Bloomington, IN was the very epicenter of the cello world, and Starker was the force that made it spin.

Chuck Smythe digging out

I'm still digging out after a blizzard of spring concerts and spring snowstorms. I'll be reporting on the concerts soon.

James Knudsen in learning

Things I have learned this spring:
    When turning on the evaporative cooler for the first time in months, DO NOT stand directly underneath it.
    Having spent some time with my sister's 1999 Volvo S80, I've learned that volvo translated into English means money-pit.
    Dan Baum, author of Gun Guys, is learning what Kristin Chenoweth learned: you can't make everyone happy, but you can piss everyone off.
    My ability to read fine-print unaided is gone. We had a good run, 20/20 vision, you will be missed.
    People who say they are experts are lying. And I should know, I am an expert on experts.
    Drivers licenses should be renewed every year; the shock of getting a new I.D. photo after eight years can be debilitating.

The Rogers on the northwest coast of Costa Rica
    Ed and Janie Rogers' daughter and son-in-law came to visit them recently, and they all enjoyed some grand times lounging around the Westin Hotel, feeding alligators, and doing other things fun. Ed wrote about it in detail, and it'll be tomorrow's column. [It's already "tomorrow" as I write this however, as I am still trying to get back online from my eye surgery....]

motomynd in re-launch, a-twitter, at the track, and detouring

After a first quarter of the year filled with funerals—and mercifully, some travel, the California Central Coast trip featured on Moristotle & Co., for example—April was a more low-key and normal month. Much of it was devoted to nit-picky business details—such as wrapping up tax filings—and revamping www.motomynd.com, which lay fallow for several months. The latter was necessitated by my decision to flip-flop my career for the third time in 35 years, again make writing my full-time gig, and curtail photography and video to part-time pursuits. I am making the motorcycle the vehicle of choice (pun intended) for the re-launch of my writing career, so the website needed a new vibe. Please do feel free to give it a look and email me with your suggestions.
    Since I am now writing in the 21st century, instead of in a time when I hacked out my first several hundred articles three or four fingers at a time on a typewriter—really—I even decided to join Twitter. Learning about that cost me two days of my life, but I now have a twitter handle—@motomynd—and a profile. You are hereby officially invited to follow me on Twitter, ask me to follow you, or ignore me, as you wish.
    The greatest moment of the month was having my 12-year-old stepdaughter come to me and say, "Okay, will you help me with running intervals? I'm tired of losing. Will interval training really make me faster?" This was a result of my talking her into running track for the first time ever, and her discovering over a period of weeks that while she might outrun the average classmate despite spending too much time sitting in front of a computer, she wasn't going to beat any real runners that way. So now she is training seriously, is building her strength and endurance—and I now have to train more seriously if I plan to maintain my title as the fastest runner in the family. She has a natural five-minute-mile pace; I now have a natural six-minute-mile pace: I do not see this ending well.
    If there was any real excitement this month other than—so far—still being able to outrun a 12-year-old girl as I all-too-rapidly scream toward age 60, it was a most unexpected detour I took through someone's side yard on one of my motorcycles. All is well that ends well, or at least without hitting a tree or a logging truck, I guess, and at least I know I certainly don't need to take a treadmill stress test to find out if my heart can still handle running at full rev for a bit....

André Duvall fully ABD tomorrow

My parents visited North Carolina during the last week of April. After attending my solo piano recital, which featured works by Beethoven, Debussy, Brahms, and early 20th century Chilean composer Humberto Allende, we spent the weekend on the Outer Banks, primarily at Ocracoke Island. Sometimes called "The Pearl of the Outer Banks," this beautiful island is home to the quaint village of Ocracoke, which once harbored the infamous pirate Blackbeard, a.k.a. Edward Teach. Mostly sunny weather in the mid 60's provided for a refreshing weekend.
    With my final degree recital performed and the news that I passed my oral comprehensive exams, I will officially be ABD (All But Dissertation) after presenting a final course project tomorrow. The next immediate academic goal is to submit an official proposal for my dissertation (an unofficial proposal has been approved), and begin work on it.
    On May 19, I hope to play in the Asheboro Open Chess Tournament, which occurs once every two months for chess players of all ages and skill levels in central North Carolina. I have enjoyed playing chess and participating in chess tournaments for many years. This last year, I have not had the time to play in many tournaments (which usually last several hours minimum, and sometimes more than a day), so I look forward to chess this summer.

Jonathan Price on the watch for April fools jokes
    With reference to Jon Swift's character update last month:

The Swift piece, as I now realize, was a fiction, an allusion to the famous Jonathan Swift and his Modest Proposal [for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public]. It took me a while to put this together, since I thought you really did have a friend named Jon Swift. The original was funnier and harder to see through, especially since it focused on the Irish poor.

James T. Carney in a new part-time job

I am happy to report that I have been demoted from my part-time job as a babysitter (one day a week) to a temporary, replacement babysitter (as needed). I am afraid that I am someone whose reaction to the statement that "no one is all bad—even Hitler loved children" is to comment, "What was good about that?" I regarded my own kids as like the government of South Vietnam—s.o.b.'s but our s.o.b.'s. Unfortunately, my wife has found a new occupation for me—I am an "engineer" on a dog rescue team that moves abandoned dogs who have been rescued from one location to another where the dog can be trained or placed. This operation is a little bit like the underground railroad in that I "engineer" one leg of the trip, picking up the dog(s) from one "engineer" and delivering them to another a hundred miles or so down the track. My first trip (last Sunday) involved transporting a pit bull. Next Sunday I have two Irish setters. I have changed my will to provide for disinheritance of my wife from my vast fortune in the event that I come to an unfortunate end on one of these trips.

Jack Cover in recovery

I’m still recovering from the Boston Marathon tragedy. I was first struck by the timing of the explosion. Four hours and twenty minutes is about the height of the number of runners, but the world-class runners finished in half that time. Then a horrible thought hit me. Four hours and twenty minutes is about the time for our oldest son when he ran marathons; was somebody out to get him? Gaines assured me that with his bum hip, he bicycles, but runs no more marathons.
    My status: Well. I’m a mess. It brings to mind the way I would greet guests to the Cover household when I was four years old: “I’ve got measles in my mouff, got the chicken pox, got a bruise, got a sprain, got a sty in my eye.” My folks tell me that after they got past conversation about required quarantine everyone would have a good evening, in spite of Typhoid Marius and his list of problems.
    Let’s start with my heart. It turns out I don’t even have the decency to have the more common atrial fibrillation (Afib), I’ve got atrial flutter (I’m coining “AFlut” for that). With “AFlut” I am adding to the dictionary of medical bafflegab. One more way to confuse the patient.
    Afib and AFlut are treated the same way. So apparently instead of my image of a hive of bees running around in my chest, I’ve got a pretty little hummingbird fluttering around. I only know that I had an issue when my pulse rate went sky high, I don’t even have the decency to feel anything in my chest when AFlut occurs, which most upstanding patients do. AFlut gives no particular harm to the heart, but there is an increased chance of stroke, for which there is a separate medicine. I live to add to the witches’ brew of medicines I take.
    Furthermore, the medicine given me to bring down the pulse rate to a proper level was causing severe hiccups, so I was taken off that medicine. A week after being off the medicine my heart slowed to its proper rate (it “converted”—No, my Presbyterian friends, it refers to my heart, not my church, although my heart is involved there, too). I don’t know if my cardiologist was tickled or annoyed with me that I converted after going off his medicine. Me, I’m delighted. I also think I need to thank many of you who are praying for me.
    Finally, two weeks after going off the AFlut medicine my hiccups pretty much went away. I am still fascinated how prolonged hiccups can affect me so greatly; just take the starch out of me. Thank goodness, I am no longer hiccupping (hicking up?) much. English is such an interesting language. My apologies to my wonderful friends for whom English is a second language. And to some for whom English is a first language.
    Next, it turns out that my Inlyta cancer medicine has lost its efficacy for me. My larger tumors are all under control, but my pencil point tumors near my lungs have grown. I’m to be put on a trial study. One half the group will be on the medicine that my oncologist would have prescribed anyway. The other half will be on a new medicine that has shown considerable promise. I’m big on promises. Besides, this sounds like a win-win situation at worst.
    With all my medicines and my cancer, I am still dealing with severe fatigue. My diarrhea and nausea pretty much went away when I stopped taking my cancer medicine. I like to tell people that I am dealing with “FAND” (another new Cover bit of bafflegab) that means: “FAtigue, Nausea, and Diarrhea.” You heard it here first, folks. Apparently FAND is a side effect of pretty much any treatment for renal cancer that does not involve surgery.
    I pray that all of you are well and enjoying life to its fullest. Please kiss someone you love in my name today. Please say a prayer for those involved with the Marathon tragedy.

Jim Rix in pursuit or procrastination?

Regarding my pursuit of an adaptation of Jingle Jangle to film, it was, coincidentally, a year ago that procrastination for the Snaggletooth screenplay outline set in. It coincided with the annual visit of my Arizona friends, after which a friend's brother lingered on after helping me do some home maintenance. The Arizona friends are again in town...I had been thinking about resuming the outline as well as about trying my hand on a full-blown screenplay and on Snaggletooth: A novel based upon a true story. However, considering other things in which I'm involved (remodeling one of my apartments into which I will move and spend the summer while my house is rented), I won't get "around tuit" until at least late June or July.

Nick Johnson in a new business

My business with Primerica is going great so far. I've learned quite a bit and have been able to give the presentation you saw about 10 times. I also wanted to follow up with you to see if there was anyone you could think of who would benefit from hearing the presentation and the services we provide. This would be very helpful for me in progressing my business and my training as well. Anyone who you can think of would be helpful.

Siegfried at the vet's

Photo by clinic staffer Marsi
following surgery

Morris Dean in re-attachment
    On Sunday my wife drove me to the ER in Chapel Hill for the medical emergency of a suspected retinal detachment in my left eye. Retinal detachment is a risk of aging, of having elongated (myopic) eyes, and of having had cataract surgery, all three of which apply to me. The vitreous hardens with age and contracts, which, if any of it has adhered to the retina, can tear the retina. In elongated eyes, the retina is stretched and thinned, making it more vulnerable to tearing. Not sure what it is about cataract surgery that increases the risk.
    Anyway, the on-call ophthalmologist and a colleague confirmed the detachment, and surgery was scheduled for the next day, Monday, which is today as far as the displayed date of this column is concerned (but yesterday in terms of when I'm writing this and actually posting it).
    When I followed up with the surgeon the next morning, he said I'm A+ in terms of what could be expected the day after. The surgery involved, first, the vitreous fluid being removed from my left eyeball; second, the retina being flattened back against the wall of the eyeball and tacked down wherever needed by way of a laser to make scars for adhesion; and third, gas being injected into the eyeball to apply pressure to keep the retina in place during healing. Healing should be pretty much accomplished in a few days, but the gas won't be entirely absorbed (and replaced naturally by fluids from the body) for I think two and a half weeks, during which time my vision in the left eye will continue to be blurry. After it has been completely absorbed, I'll know to what extent the vision in my left eye has been compromised, if at all.
    I'm of course encouraged that the retina could be re-attached and the prognosis is good for being able to continue to use my left eye for things like reading and writing, especially since I have always favored it for those activities. I'm using my right now, of course, to write this.
    I'm particularly excited to be re-attached to blogging so quickly!

The eye patch was removed during the follow-up
with the surgeon; I'll wear the patch
for five more nights only.

    Oh, by the way, I am now subject to a fourth risk for retinal detachment in my left eye: having had a previous one....
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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