But one 19th century institution missing from our world is a true loss: the health retreat. Back in the day they were called sanatoriums: resorts set up for the “improvement or maintenance of health, especially for convalescents.” Today the  idea of withdrawing from life to recover a bit health is so odd that most people, hearing the word “sanatorium” translate it as “nut house.”

My oh-so-slow recovery from my latest medical travail makes me long for this old tradition.

I ache to check out of my life for a time and into another, one where meals are prepared and laundry is done and my duties consist of napping, reading, and taking long walks through woods and meadows.

Thomas Mann wrote about life in a health sanatorium in the novel The Magic Mountain. A young man of no great intellect or ambition named Hans Castorp visits a friend recovering from tuberculosis in a mountain retreat. So taken is Hans with the sanitarium’s disconnect from the real world (the “flatlands” he calls it) he finds excuses to stay until, with a doctor’s eager encouragement, he imagines himself into tuberculosis and becomes a patient for seven years.

It might seem odd a book with such a subject was so influential on my young life. I found the lure of Hans’ introspective and purposeless life both horrifying and irresistible. Having spent a childhood in too much solitude caused by an introspective nature and aimless wandering around the country followed by a 1960s adolescence (no one should have been allowed to turn 16 in 1968) I wanted desperately to plant myself in some situation with defined and gentle borders. So I then thought anyway.

Mann’s deft novel talked me into the world, not out of it. The book laid bare the siren song of isolation and withdrawal; it showed me what is lost if you do not engage the world. The Magic Mountain was for me a necessary cautionary tale. For all the trials and tears I’ve had in this life, I don’t regret for a minute having engaged it.

Now though, after four years of medical ordeals that only an insane optimist or a fool would voluntarily endure, I long for a break. The miseries of the last year in particular leave me exhausted and in desperate need of renewal. I long for Mann’s mountain with its wooded paths and dining rooms, if only for a while.

In the 19th century there were health sanatoriums priced for nearly all but the poorest. Those with less means did not get the elegant treatment described in The Magic Mountain but they had places to go. Not any more.

Today a “health spa” is something you “do” for a weekend; a resort where you pay lots of money to have mud thrown onto your body and be served tiny little portions of gourmet greens with artisan bread and a Napa chardonnay. Activities are planned for the day, right down to the Swedish massage and the meditation hour. The spas of the 21st century are no place to go if you need to stitch your life back together after too much trauma.

I took break once before without succumbing Hans’ tubercular temptations. In 1996, after my first near-death experience (a “mere” bout of killer pneumonia) I went away to a little cottage – a studio really – on the beach. I slept and walked and slept more and rode my bike and wrote poems and was beholden to no one. When I arrived I could barely walk a block. By the time I left I was bicycling miles every day. So much changed – so much healed – in that one calendar month of March 1996. How I long to do it again.

How odd the idea is to us now: Go away and rest? For weeks? But what would you do? Restore? What’s “restore?” Dump everyone and everything you love for a month of solitude? Solitude? Do they have cellphone and WiFi there?

I for one don’t find it an odd idea at all. If I could only visit The Magic Mountain. Just for a month, I swear. One month.

–noun

1. Pathology. a quantitative deficiency of the hemoglobin, often accompanied by a reduced number of red blood cells and causing pallor, weakness, and breathlessness.

2. a lack of power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness: His writing suffers from anemia…

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrroad trip!!!

The car is tuned. It’s got new tires and is loaded down with jackets and maps and food for doggie and me and of course my camera and the tripod I always take and hardly ever use. The back seat’s converted into Otto’s Command Center so da pooch can survey the world from the comfort of his traveling bed. And we are driving down Highway 101 through the ridiculously green hills of an El Nino winter California listening to Roseanne Cash and Michelle Shocked on our way south to visit family and friends…

That’s what was supposed to happen.

Instead, Thursday I wound up in Moffitt Hospital a few pints of blood short of a six-pack, getting a transfusion while the docs scoped me out from both ends (yes: exactly that) trying to find the leak while I, delirious from lack of oxygen, a triple-whammy sedative of demerol, percocet and benadryl, and most of all too too too many medical procedures for any one lifetime, howled at the injustice of it all like a fourteen-year old grounded for a month.

Twenty-four hours later, my fluids topped up like a nursed engine with a cracked block, I walked out of the hospital with the hangover from hell and returned to my day life.

Huh?

If you cut a leg artery or your jugular or remove the tip of your finger you are immediately aware you have a problem. If you spring a leak internally however, not so much. Especially when you are in denial about any new medical problems because you’re feeling a wee bit put-upon after four years’ state-of-art medical S&M.

If you want to know how you know you have an inner leak look up melena, I’m not going to blog the details. I should’ve done something sooner: this isn’t my first internal bleed – not even my second or third. But I’m rationalizing maybe it’s the cherries I ate or maybe it’s the iron I’m taking or maybe it’s anything other than some damn disaster that will send me back to the hospital.

It was only a day or two before departure that I realized the trip was no-go. When you have no blood you have a hard time concentrating on a C.S.I. episode and you drive like a stoned alcoholic texting your next order to the bar you just left. 500 miles behind a wheel down California’s coast with no oxygen in your brain is not a good idea.

So instead of Rrrrrroad trip! I now sit at home while Otto goes on adventures with the dog walker, waiting for my hemoglobin to creep up to a functional level. Good news is, the top-up they gave me at Moffitt kicked in quick enough so I can actually read a book and do some stuff, if not exactly what I planned. Other good news is, the leak’s stopped. And it’s sunny for a change here in the Bay Area.

So: lemons, lemonade. Whatever.

–––

There has got to be an upper limit to how many procedures, transplants, runnings-out-of-blood, medically called-for cavity invasions, viruses and auto-immune diseases one body can handle. You think?

My deal is, I get to stay alive for some unspecified number of moments after the liver cancer and transplant. I get to be conscious, occasionally functional, and once in a while I even get to thrive. I also get to experience each and every sensation of a body running down its weave.

I’ve started and not finished a dozen posts on my health trials of the past year. One did refer to my struggle last summer just to learn that I’ve comedown two impossible–for-a-transplantee autoimmune diseases, but that’s it. I feel guilt for not having posted more.

Somehow I’ve made peace with the situation. A diagnosis and some medication to manage it – the AI’s, as I call them, will not go away until I do – helped. But somewhere along the way I lost the ability to write about it all.

If you really want to know more read up on dermatomyositis and Reynaud’s Syndrome. The acute phase of this mess, which lasted more or less from June to September, was the worst experience I’ve ever had medically. No, really: the liver transplant was a mere cut finger in comparison.

Until the Reynaud’s was under control I literally couldn’t write – rotting nerve-fired fingertips do not encourage typing. Now I’m just weary of of it all: repeating symptoms over and over to too many doctors; explaining to friends and family why I was having test A then test B and then test C then explaining to them what the docs found when they finally found something; wrapping my own head around the diagnosis because once again I achieved the impossible as someone with a transplant and a deliberately suppressed immune system can’t get an autoimmune disease except I got two… and blah and blah and blah and BLAH.

I just couldn’t whine anymore so I stopped. Better to write essays about California’s crazy seasons and anti-vaccine idiots hanging outside the H1N1 clinic and how the good old U.S. of A. is once again following California (coming soon).

So. Under the terms of my imagined deal with the Fates I live the frayed ends of a life and find the beauty and happiness where I can while trying to ignore the miseries. Denial, as I’ve pointed out, is a Good Thing.

Truth is, the Fates don’t deal. I have no idea when Atropos will snip my thread. It is chilling to know that even the gods feared the Fates. Even Zeus was subject to their whims.

Winter green?

Many other flickr photographers (from the Northern Hemisphere anyway) are posting pictures of ice storms, whiteouts, buried snow plows, and barren windswept fields. And here come the Californians showing snapshots of green.

California’s coastal winterscapes can drive the ice-bound crazy. Once again we’re seen as Violating All The Rules and Just Not Making Any Sense. But there is a logic to our seasons, even if it’s obscure. It helps to remember that the planet’s largest heat-sink (aka the Pacific Ocean) is just to our left.

So as a service for those who just don’t get all this green, here’s a short guide to our seasons.

Winter

Every hillside is green. A ridiculous, Irish/New Zealand green. So green your eyes hurt looking at it, especially when the sun shines. Green? In the land of perpetual drought?

The sky is blue unless its raining or the tail of one of the many storms pounding the Pacific Northwest lingers overhead. The fog vanished weeks ago and for a few months the coast is warmer and sunnier than inland.

Temperature: if the current air mass comes from Alaska, cold. If it comes from Hawaii, not-so-cold. Hawaiian air brings more rain than the Alaska variety; something about warmer air holding more moisture. But if the sun’s out, it doesn’t matter whose air we’re breathing. it’s glorious.

Rain: yeah, it rains. It’s rarely a bother, though our weather forecasters go apocalyptic when it happens and we all dutifully complain, even in drought years (most of them) when we shouldn’t. You do hear of the occasional flood when our rivers wake up or of houses rolling off cliffs but no one worries unless it’s our back yard.

To be fair, we do feel winter’s gloom. Short days and cold nights; some storms last for days (when that happens we say the “storm gates” are open), and we suffer mightily from the California variety of Seasonal Affective Disorder when we have to go to the gym rather than play outside. When that happens we take our antidepressants.

But then we turn on the TV or talk to a relative somewhere in the forsaken Back There and we chant our praises to the goddess for letting us live here.

Spring

The sky is a shocking cobalt blue except when it rains or the economy booms and everybody’s commuting.

Rainy days in Spring are technically called “Winter”. California seasons are guided by but not bound to the calendar; that would be limiting which of course is a no-no in the Golden State. One wet day causes little worry – we tell ourselves it’ll save us from drought. And Spring is guaranteed to be back the next day: we put it in our Constitution. During the rare times Spring rains do go on for days we are outraged and scream at Sacramento.

Plants sprout and grow frantically; they know what Summer means (see below) and they’re in a hurry. Massive clouds of pollen spew from everything. Antidepressant sales drop, antihistamine sales skyrocket.

Temperatures are all over the place. 50F highs one week, 70s the next. There are even days – usually in batches of three (that ocean influence; I’ll spare the details) – when temps hit the 90s. When this happens we are convinced we are dying.

Towards the end of Spring bits of Summer appear as the first banks of fog cascade over the hills. It is a beautiful spectacle, but it makes us forget what Summer is really like.

As the rains end, the green hills, thick with tall grasses, fade to brown – “golden” if you’ve been here longer than five years.

As foggy days become the norm, plants stop growing, cats and dogs with their Spring-thinned coats dive under blankets and we refill our antidepressant prescriptions.

Summer

Oh dreaded Summer. Unremitting fog. Gray days, icy nights. Week after week. From mid-June through August. Especially August. Always August.

Mark Twain may not have said “The coldest winter I’ve ever spent was a summer in San Francisco” but somebody did. Bone-chilling cold. Go five miles inland though and you can poach eggs on the sidewalk. Travel between the two too often and the shock to the body can be fatal.

Not a drop of rain falls within hundreds of miles.

The hills are parched. Even evergreen oaks and pines fade to gray in the long dry summer. If you water plants so they don’t die they stop growing anyway: it’s too cold and sunless. You won’t believe it till you see it, but plants can sulk.

Cats and dogs grow another winter coat. They sleep and grouch a lot, as do humans (grouch and sleep that is; not sure about our coats).

Every August I check the temperature in Nome, Alaska. It’s always warmer than San Francisco.

Sales of antidepressants are through the roof.

San Franciscans love our fog, but there’s no getting around it: August Summer here sucks.

Autumn

“Spectacular” doesn’t begin to describe this most beautiful of Coastal California seasons – if you don’t count the fires. (Though they can be pretty spectacular too.)

Again, shock-blue skies. The frostbitten tourists leave (too much time spent in T-shirts and shorts during August) and the really fine weather arrives.

Day temperatures are high 60s to 70s. Sunsets are great, the light breathtaking and the fog remains respectfully off shore.

Plants – if watered during the sulky months – burst with joy and go through a second frantic growing and flowering.

Dogs frolic in the parks, cats lounge in the sun and we humans flush our antidepressants down the toilet and resume the jogging and bicycling we started in Spring. We are happy.

Unless our house is on one of those brown, tinderbox hills, then we spend most of the season obsessing about fire.

Sometime in October it rains. Many moan, not wanting to give up the Awesome Season, but a few are relieved. They’re worn out from performing rain dances to stave off the water rationing our whiny weather people and apocalyptic politicians have been threatening all year.

These first rains make our roads slippery but they also wash grime and dust off buildings and plants which make everything look better. The fire season ends.

And in Autumn the most amazing thing happens, the very definition of seasons in Coastal California: within days of the very first rain the dead brown grasses on the hills morph into those impossible fluorescent greens. If the rain continues the grasses thicken and stay green well into April.

And the seasons cycle.

–––

Some say California has only two seasons: a green one called Winter and a brown (golden!) one called Summer. Those are the most easily recognized but they’re the least subtle – or satisfying.

If you just look at the world in binary you miss out on the amazing shades that come between 0 and 1. Here, those shades are brown-to-green and green-to-brown, also known as our really great seasons, Autumn and Spring.

Binary thinking also might cause you to accidentally visit in August, when you’d really be more comfortable in Northern Alaska.

2012 is exactly like every movie catastrophe you’ve ever seen: an estranged family fights for survival and the meaning of “family”; do-gooders shriek justice and compassion while everybody else panics and stabs each other in the back; heroic rescues give the audience – and the characters stuck in the mess – something to cheer. Bad guys get called-for comeuppance and sacred institutions (religious and secular) are reduced to richly deserved rubble.

Oh, and of course L.A. is destroyed. Again. Poor L.A.; no other city comes close to suffering as much cinematically as the womb of the entertainment industry. Kinda makes you wonder about the folks who run it…

There’s a lie in 2012’s marketing though, and I’m not talking about the bogus science. The movie isn’t really about the end of the world. It’s about the earth – more to the point us, humans – getting a chance at a makeover.

Sure, a good three-fourths of us are knocked off. “Civilization As We Know It” ends. Continents realign, the poles shift (to Wisconsin?), tsunamis scour half the land mass, and on. But by film’s end Things Stabilize and A New Dawn arrives – literally.

In other words, the earth – remaining humans included – gets an upgrade: a chance at a reboot to version 2.0.

And isn’t that exactly what all of us really want?

Our planet’s a mess. We’ve overpopulated it like rats on a sinking ship. We’re running out of resources, we’re only still eating because of hideous meat factories and genetic tricks made to our crops. To keep folks from thinking about all this education’s been turned into pop-culture quizzes and we’ve made a religion out of shopping.

But way down in our limbic brains we all know we’ve fucked up and hell’s to pay. Doesn’t matter who we blame – ourselves, our neighbors, those people over there, the rich, our gods or saints or sinners or politicians or just the roll of the dice – we know we all contributed and we’re all screwed.

Probably the biggest laugh in all the buzz around 2012 is the guilt some critics mention of rooting for John Cuzak et al while 6 billion other earthlings are being offed. Get real, critics! No one laments those people. Too bad about them, we tell ourselves, but when the apocalypse comes we know we’re with the elect. We will survive. This certainty isn’t just in our religions; it’s in our DNA.

What are movies like 2012 really about? What do we really want?

Another chance. And that’s what we want.

What we want is to toss away everything we’ve screwed up – in this case the whole damn world and everybody (else) in it – toss it all out like last year’s iPod and upgrade to the next version. Something newer, something trendier. More intelligent. Something like Earth, 2.0.

And we want more: we want something to force us to act, to do the right thing. Something like the realignment of the earth’s crust in 2012, say. Heaven knows we can’t do it on our own initiative: we can’t even agree whether Arctic ice is melting or if we should choose paper over plastic. Somebody – mommy? Are you there, mommy? – has to make us.

What a movie like 2012 offers is something to force us to act.

There’s another post-disaster movie out right now, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve read the book. Bleak, gray, filled with cannibals and hopelessness, strewn with wreckage, it offers no beginning to the catastrophe and no end. There are no shiny arks of salvation, no secret cooperation among nations. Just forage, disease and death.

The Road’s apocalypse is much more likely than 2012’s.

Which is why 2012 is packing the theatres and The Road will disappear in a week.

Who wants to fix problems when you can just upgrade and reboot?

I’ve been working on a few thoughts re: the healthcare “debate” we’re having in the U.S. from my perspective as a “professional consumer” of same. I didn’t plan to write this, though.

I have been seething at the treatment President Obama received addressing Congress about healthcare last Wednesday. The disrespect shown him – not just by Addison Graves Wilson of South Carolina, aka. “Joe the Heckler” but by the entire Republican caucus – was nauseating. Almost to a person, these “statesmen and women” of the opposition heckled the President waving sheafs of paper, petulantly pouted, booed and catcalled, and shot him endless hate-filled sneers worthy of a pissed-off 8 year old. One congressman even walked out for benefit of the cameras. It was disgusting.

Their venom has nothing to do with healthcare. It has everything to do with race.

Like the birth certificate flap that entertained us through the Summer, Spring’s anti-stimulus “tea parties” and pretty much every other pseudo-conflict stirred up since Obama’s election, the racial subtext of the health care “debate” is blatant.

Some people cannot abide having an intelligent, thoughtful black man in the Oval Office.

Finally someone with a pulpit has put the obvious out front and center. Maureen Dowd titled her column in yesterday’s New York Times Boy Oh, Boy, putting the missing word back into Wilson’s shout out, as in “You lie, boy!” Think about it for a nanosecond and you know she’s right. The old racist code word for black men was loud and clear.

Now, read carefully: no, not everyone who disagrees with Obama’s health care plans is a racist. Reasonable people have fiscal objections to government-run health care, philosophical objections, objections about his approach, and there are all sorts of worries about what change might do to our precarious status quo.

Are you hearing those people? No.

You’re hearing a U.S. senator boast how he’ll destroy Obama’s presidency by destroying his health care bill. You hear Master Wilson’s “liar liar” and how it’s netted him over 700 grand for re-election. You’re hearing Lindsey Graham – the so-called “reasonable” South Carolina senator – and a gaggle of other legislators calling the President a disaster.

And as always when politicians blow hard at the bottom of the barrel, they stir up muck.

Look at pictures from last week’s “tea parties”. Read the signs. You don’t need a psychic to see the real point of the protests. Obama is a “Fascist Muslim Communist!” (Will someone please tell me how anybody can be all those things at once?) Another shows Bin Laden passing the terrorist baton to Obama. Some of these fine patriots even put Obama’s picture in a pile of horse manure and took each other’s pictures standing in it. That’s a debate?

Death panels, granny-killers, black-on-white racism, a senator (Inhofe of Oklahoma this time) grandly proclaiming “I refuse to read the [healthcare] bill and I’m proud to vote against it!” Guns at town halls. Radio talk – serious – of killing the President. And anybody who has any kind of rational argument for, against, or middling on the actual issue of health care is a terrorist supporting a terrorist.

Don’t agree? Don’t think it’s racism, just strong opinions about a contentious issue? Take a look these photos from the first “tea parties” in April, set up to protest the stimulus package: “Obama’s plan: White slavery.” “The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s ovens.” You look at the rest. I don’t have the stomach. The racial subtext has been front and center for the opposition from the moment Obama was elected.

The Obama presidency has brought out the best and the worst in America. So many of us have a quiet pride in our nation taking such a significant step last November, including many who disagree with him and didn’t vote for him. But at the other bottom of that barrel are those so incensed by his election they welcome him as termites welcome an exterminator. They cannot abide – abide! This! New! World!

Racism is the venom in the veins of America. It’s time to get it out – to call it out – before it kills us.

This “debate” disgusts me. And it has nothing to do with health care.

Nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small. We haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. –Georgia O’keeffe

I saw a man on a street corner staring up with such intent he seemed to be studying for an important exam. I think he was.

In his hand was a camera, a Canon EOS, and the objects of his analysis were the powerlines overhead. Or he was noting the angles and shadows of the rooftops on the buildings nearby. Or perhaps it was the textures of the gray clouds left by our last small storm that fascinated. If his exam was an advanced one, he was considering all three.

The man was in the midst of what I’ve come to call the seeing – the act of poring over something, point by point, detail by detail, trying to figure out what is there. What is really there, not the small and disconnected bits we register in our day-to-day and then claim – foolishly – we’ve actually seen something.

Seeing – seeing – isn’t easy, and it isn’t common either. It’s a sense we probably made much use of in our hunter-gatherer phase only to lose it as we cluttered our lives with civilization. Some few of us are yet born with the ability to see – they are called visionaries or fools. Others learn it. Some never get the ability, perhaps because they find no use for it.

I remember when I first became aware there is a difference between looking and seeing. I was in high school, and like most lessons that stick from that time of life it didn’t come in a classroom but after hours, on a clandestine hitchhike with friends to the ‘hipper’ town up the coast. We were picked up by a VW van filled with hippies (yes, the 60s).

One friend and I sat in back among a huge pile of clothes covering most of a body, face down. A muffled moan told us that the body was not dead but nothing else. Long hair, tight jeans, the whole sixties uniform half-buried in a pile of dirty psychedelic laundry – gender I.D., so important to 16 year olds, was impossible.

I whispered to my friend: “Is that a guy or a girl?” My friend glanced over and responded instantly: “Guy.” He answered so fast I couldn’t believe him. “How do you know?” My friend rubbed his arm and gave me a look. I didn’t get it. Annoyed at my cluelessness, he pointed at an arm sticking out of the pile. “He’s got hairy arms.” I looked again – I saw this time – and my friend was right. When we got to our destination the guy woke up and there was no mistaking. How did I miss that arm? I felt a small bit of humiliation at my denseness that has never left me – and a determination not to miss the obvious again.

For a photographer, seeing is the difference between taking snapshots and making photographs. Ansel Adams called it visualization, others have different words for it. Georgia O’keeffe described it best, though. The above quote continues…

If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself – I’ll paint what I see – what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it – I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

The man on the corner with the camera was composing a photo in his mind. He was seeing the wires, the buildings, the sky, as a unity, as a totality that would say something to others, make others see what he sees – if only he presents his vision it well enough.

There are times I go out with my camera I am focused so tight on my surroundings I see shots everywhere. It is an astounding, dream-like experience. When I enter the seeing I don’t want to leave and I can’t be forced to (to the consternation of Otto and friends) until, suddenly, like someone who’s stayed too long at a bar finally realizes they have to break away from the stimulation and alcohol, I flee into quieter space, one with less sensory overload.

Other times I go out eagerly anticipating the experience and see… nothing. Just a jumble of objects, nothing special about them, nothing cohesive. It is like losing a sense, and there is small panic in thinking it might not come back. This I fear is our new modern default: hammered by responsibilities, complications, the more subtle sense of seeing gets buried, just as our awareness of rain fades in after a car wreck.

When you begin to grasp the enormity of seeing and understand that some are so much better at it than you are – and others lack it all together – it is easy to think of it as some special gift. No doubt there are some who do have a gift. But for most of us seeing is like running: we are equipped to run, but only a few run so well they are called “naturals.” The rest of us must huff around the track lap on lap to improve. For most of us, there is no “natural” to visualization, there is only a developing awareness.

The irony is, when you get to this thing seeing you want to share so much, when you really begin to understand it, you find out you haven’t a hope of making anybody see what you see at all. Again, O’keeffe:

…Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.

Does this matter, that you will never really see what I do, nor I, you? No, but it is a disappointment. O’Keeffe my not have imparted to those busy New Yorkers exactly what it was she saw but she got them – us – to stop and notice, really look at a flower. Study her paintings long enough and you’ll never see a flower the same way again. No small thing, that. It is a form of meditation, this seeing. And meditation, even if done in a group, is by definition solitary. Yet the value of meditation – of seeing - can be shared.

I photograph so I can see. Years ago, I thought a camera got in the way of experiencing something, but that was when I was taking snapshots, not photographs. Now for me photography is a magnificent excuse to explore this hidden sense, not a crutch. I know now I don’t need a camera, not really. Once you “get it” you get to keep it – if you pay your new found awareness respect.

But the real gift of seeing isn’t how it improves your perceptions for photography. It is how seeing enhances your perceptions of life, yours and others and the animals and plants and the world around you.

Ok, I’m getting sentimental here. But I’ve opened yet another door of the Medical Winchester Mystery House – an autoimmune condition this time – and I’m in need a bit of sentiment. I’ll write the gloomy stuff later, but right now…

I’ve posted (and posted and posted) about Otto, my dog. I’ve said less about my ex-cat (ex-mine that is, not ex-feline), Orion. Orion now lives with a dear friend, partially due to my medical adventures, but he’s still a frequent visitor.

More important, Orion and Otto are… well, it’s kind of hard to say what they are to each other: lets just call it a really really strong bond. Orion was here first, and when Otto arrived as a 7 week old puppy they fast became inseprable. Breaking them up was one of the sadder things I’ve ever had to do. It’s been sadder yet for the two critters.

During Orion’s last couple of stay-overs, I started taking notes on life with a cat and dog. Anyone who lives with both knows that the usual cat rules and dog rules – and your life – change erratically.

So here are the notes. And please: send along your own observations. No doubt we can come up with a book.

Life with a cat and a dog, in no particular order…

• It is difficult to do yoga or any other floor exercises if a dog is around. It is beyond impossible if a cat AND a dog are around.

• Cats are fast, but they’re not nearly fast enough to stop a dog from stealing from their food bowl.

• 1 cat + 1 dog = 4(x) mischief.

• A cat can wake up a sleeping dog – and a sleeping human – simply by walking silently through a room.

Corollary 1: A cat can suddenly appear right before your eyes – if it wants to.
Corollary 2: A cat can disappear right before your eyes. Same “if”.
Corollary 3: A cat can hide from a dog too, but it takes more effort than fooling the human (that canine nose).

• A cat will con a dog into doing things that the cat knows the dog isn’t supposed to do.

Corollary 1: The cat will walk away.
Corollary 2: The dog will play on the human’s sympathy and blame it on the cat.

• Cats don’t do rules.

Corollary 1: Dogs happily do rules, but not if a cat’s around.

• When the two of them decide that you’re to be “it”, you’re hosed. You might as well stop what you’re doing and join in the fun.

Corollary 1: Dogs and cats agree on one thing: they positively hate having their humans sit in front of a computer. When they decide to work together to remedy the situation, give up.

• If a cat likes (tolerates?) a dog, he’ll put up with a lot of canine roughhousing. Up to a point. Then the cat either a) runs off, or b) goes straight for the dog’s jugular. Orion did this to Otto to quiet him down one recent night. The night before, I saw a lion kill a donkey (on TV!) using the exact same technique.

Corollary 1: The dog instantly calms down when teeth are lodged in his throat.

Corollary 2: This technique is scarier to humans than to the dog.

• Life with a dog and a cat is very challenging because together they’re way smarter than we are. And a whole lot more fun.

And this is what I found on return:

Fortunately for  all who’ve followed this tiny saga, a neighbor was kind enough to tend the garden and keep me posted on the chicks via eMail. Just five days after I left, she sent the latest pictures of the twins. And I was astonished. The scraggly little pinballs had turned into actual birds!  Here are two of her pictures:

Photos by M.C., May 14, 2009

Five days to from pinballs with gaping mouths to recognizable birds – astonishing. No wonder Patience looked so thin the last time I saw her.

The very next day…  best to quote my neighbor’s eMail directly:

I took this [picture below] at about 7:45pm.  Then I stepped back towards the door and stood for a couple of minutes watching from a distance.  Suddenly there was a little buzz – I couldn’t see clearly but I THINK it was mom – then a whirr and a ripple and all three were gone, up to the right and over the wire above the fence.

I’ll keep watch in case they come back for a rest in the next day or two, but I suspect they’re on their way, fledged and capable of feeding themselves.  Certainly they were just as fast as mom!

I’m glad I went down this evening – at least now we know they FLEW away, and weren’t snatched by predators.  –M.C.

Here is M.C.’s last photo of the chicks.

Photo by M.C., 15 May 2009.

Today, a good handful of days back from the mountains, I watch the nest deteriorate – a feather comes undone from Patience’s careful weave, a small twig falls out of place, the once solid structure appears more and more fragile. A friend commented that one rainstorm now and it’ll be gone.

Hope of another tenancy by Patience or another hummingbird seems remote now that summer is here, which in San Francisco means icy cold fogs blowing off the Pacific intermixed with a few hours of cold sunshine and sharp winds. The growth of the cherry tree Patience built her nest in is robust enough that it whipsaws even more jarringly in the winds.

Still, the hummingbird saga isn’t over completely. I hear them in the back yard all the time and see them flitting among the trees during calmer moments. A couple of days ago during a sunny interlude, one came down to get water from the hose as I was spraying the plants. It wasn’t an Anna’s though, like Patience and her brood. This one was bigger and I could actually see the wings move. Maybe another species will take up nesting in the yard next year. I hope so.

What I got out of this small drama, even more than the wonder of experiencing it first hand, is how this minor scene of nature touched so many people as it unfolded. Are we really so removed from the world that the raising of two baby birds from eggs is seen as a small miracle? What does it say about the place we’ve made for ourselves in the world that we view such events not only with fascination but relief?

I’m not letting myself off the hook here; the trip to the mountains was essential for me precisely for the same reason. I spent most my time up there off-road, walking and hiking and driving dirt tracks, trying to get as close to the world – and as far away from what we humans have created – as I could.

What does this say about us? When do we face it?

Photo by M.C., 14 May 2009

More on the hummingbird saga unfolding in my back yard Regular posts will resume soon! (Written Sunday/Monday May 3/4.)

Over the last week Patience the hummingbird has worked dawn to dusk feeding her two chicks. They’re thriving, growing from pea-sized bits of gelatinous gray to wiggly lumps spiked with the beginnings of feathers and an orange beak, all of which still can’t quite fill a teaspoon. Back and forth she went hunting nectar and bugs, feeding the two several times an hour. Often, when I used the hose nearby, she repeated her “request” for water and I obliged by spraying the nearby plants. Her absences allowed me better views of the two little things though I always backed away when I heard her returning buzz. The weather at last cooperated too, with cool days and little wind.

As days went by she seemed less concerned about visitors to the yard, human or otherwise. She expressed no worry at all about Otto or me and ignored the robins, finches and doves. She still wasn’t too pleased with the European starlings bug-hunting below her tree however, and I can’t say I blame her. The starlings are the obnoxious tourists of the bird world, squawking and squabbling, hogging and fouling the bird dish and even bathing in Otto’s drinking bowl. Otto dispatches them whenever he sees them.

I noticed that the chicks don’t peep and squabble or do anything at all while mom’s gone, unlike most other young birds. The nest is not even 5 feet/1.5m off the ground yet you’d never know they were there if you didn’t know where to look. This seemed to me to be just too quiet for any little critter and I wondered if everything was going all right. I found the answer – and many other bits of useful information – from the amazing and exhaustive World of Hummingbirds website. The silence is a safety measure, to ensure that nothing gives their presence away while mom is off foraging. The chicks hunker down deep in their nest and wait until they feel/hear mom’s wings, then perk up for a feeding. Considering how often and long she was gone, this made sense.

By Saturday the 2nd, Patience was almost never around. I saw her feeding the chicks only once during the day. I didn’t think too much about it; I hadn’t been out back much and figured I’d just missed her. Besides, her absences allowed for lots of nest views for myself and others. The chicks had grown to the point that their beaks had lost the baby orange (already!) and were growing into a point. Their bodies were bigger too, taking up over half of the little nest’s depth.

Saturday night when I took Otto down for his pre-bedtime pee, I checked the nest. Still no Patience! I freaked. Yes, the chicks were bigger and it probably wasn’t that comfortable to be sitting on them, but still: they were only as big as a small strawberry. How could they stay warm? I looked around the cherry tree to see if she was sitting nearby, but it was dark and she’d never shown much interest in sitting in it before. I violated a rule I’d set when this back yard episode of  ”Nature” began and went upstairs for a flashlight. Careful not to shine the light directly on the nest, I could see both chicks were quite alive, their metabolisms racing like they’d just run a race. Was this right? Where is mom?

Back upstairs, this time to the computer and the hummingbird website where I found the following:

After one week, the baby hummingbirds will be covered in tiny little fuzzy feathers making them look like a miniature prickly balls. Baby hummingbirds will usually have enough feathers to regulate their own body heat by about nine (9) days after hatching. The mother hummingbird will no longer need to sit on the nest all the time, and the baby hummingbirds are too big for the mother hummingbird to fit.

I checked the calendar. I’d noted the day the eggs were laid and the day they hatched. Saturday was day 10 post-hatch. The next morning the little guys were fine, beaks pointed out of the nest, waiting for their next nectar-and-bug smoothie. And so it goes, even through a gentle rain that has been around for the last couple days. I’ve seen Patience only once more, but her kids are growing fast. Fast. According to the website, she may actually be building another nest nearby so she can do it all over again before the season ends. Amazing. Maybe Patience isn’t that patient after all.

One last bit: according to the website, “toilet training comes built in… baby hummingbirds will do everything they can to dispose of waste over the side of the nest.” I read that after seeing it happen in the flesh, so to speak. I was looking at the pair when one suddenly made a move and raised itself up to the top of the nest. This was more effort I’d seen either of them expend. Once in position – hard to tell what the position was as they still look like spiky lumps with a beak – a tiny squirt ensued then the little bird collapsed back into the nest.  If only we mammals were similarly pre-programmed!

Update: I wrote the above Sunday/Monday. Today, Tuesday, the chicks almost fill the nest and their beaks can’t even remotely fit inside. Like I said, they’re growing fast. Patience couldn’t sit on them any more even if she wanted to. All they do is wait, metabolisms racing, for the next feeding. Oh, and grow. This is the most recent picture. They barely fit in their nest anymore!