That could have been better thought out.

It is possible that the marketing concept of putting a fireworks stand next to a gas station had not been thought through sufficiently.....

As I shall do annually on this most kinetic of holidays, I hereby admonish you to have a cautiously fun 4th of July.  I really do not want to see you in any professional capacity.

Paging Acme Orthopedics....

Periodically in the ER I encounter what I call "Wile E. Coyote" injuries.  They take various forms but the basic definition is a man, and its always a man, tries something that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  But really is not.

For instance.  I saw a good sized fellow who needed to get something out of the rafters of a pole barn.  That's a ways up, so a ladder was needed.  Ok, up the ladder he goes.  But the object is still just a little out of reach.  So, he leans just a little further out.  And the ladder slips out from under him.  At this point he is still ok, because he is holding onto the rafters.  Tightly.

But this is only a temporary reprieve, he can't hold on indefinitely.  And if his wife were near enough for him to summon her she would have been near enough to sense this folly and put the spousal kibosh on it, pronto.

Eventually he just has to let go and try to avoid landing on the ladder.

Regards the denouement of this little vignette, lets just not go there.  It could have been worse, at least the object up in the rafters did not subsequently fall on him.

If he were in for the Full Wile E., it would have.  And it would have been an anvil.

Learning from my patients

It takes a little more time to do so, but whenever possible I try to ask my patients about their life and work.  You learn such astonishing things.  A recent week was extra good.

The runner up story:

Me: "What do you do for a living?"

Patient: "I am a bear keeper."

Me: "Huh, and how do you learn to do that?"

Patient:  "I took a bear keeping course."

Totally true as it happens.  I looked it up.   Bears!

There are a surprising number of bears that need caring for, cubs who have lost their mothers and so forth.  I found the instructions for the course to be quite charming.  Who knew that bears dislike cigars?  And the part about being physically agile just plain makes sense.

Grand prize winner of the week was a 93 year old woman.  Sharp as a tack, she says she is a lock to make 100.  She was telling me about her childhood.  Evidently her father was a research chemist, working with some of the big names of the day.  As she tells it:

"My mother disliked Henry Ford, he was quite a bigot."

But, she once got a piggy back ride from Thomas Edison!

Two weeks later her mother said: "Close your eyes."

She was led to a window and allowed to open her eyes.

And saw that Thomas Edison had bought her a pony!!

Boots at Journey's End

Although the scientists working on the Human Genome Project have yet to make an official announcement, I think it is quite evident that the gene coding for "liking shoes" is to be found on the X chromosome.  Certainly, on average, men care about shoes at a level roughly half that of women.  And there are outliers.  I for instance have managed a degree of affection for exactly one pair of footwear in my imposing span of years.

It was a pair of LaCrosse hiking boots, sold under their "Quad" brand.  I got them on sale at the local outlet store.

Partly it was a matter of them coming to me at the proper time.  I had been working far too long in a practice setting rife with difficult personalities and politics.  In fact, as a precursor to my making a permanent break with the place, I had just announced that I would be taking the month of June off to go have some fun.

This was 8 years ago.  I worked on my tan.  I grew a beard for the first time since a rather unsuccessful college era goatee.  And I pulled on my new boots and went to Alaska.

It was a fun trip, fishing with my oldest son.  And it was the first of many trips.

I found my traveling boots to be equally comfortable on cobblestones and pasture land.  They have carried me to Alaska three times, and have slogged through digging at Vindolanda five times.  I have walked about 40% of the way across England in them.  They were my daily footwear when I worked as a Carny in the Deep South.

In fact, they were so comfortable that I wore them almost every day, setting them aside only for social occasions when the spousal eyebrow was raised above its usual warning level.

Eight years is a long time for boots, the miles do add up.  I have rubbed them with various polishes and oils, and sprayed them lavishly with silicone water repellent.  But eventually they just got too worn out. 

I took them over the pond for one last dig at Vindolanda.  The leather was dull and deeply cracked.  The uppers were starting to separate from the soles, and patching with a product called "Shoe Goo" was unsightly.

But I figured that I owed my old friends this one last trip.

And there they will stay.  Oh, I suppose they ended up in a landfill somewhere in the UK, but I prefer to just imagine that they are on a permanent voyage.

Here is a picture of them on our last night at the Twice Brewed Inn, Northumbria...

I had of course already taken the precaution of ordering another pair of the exact same boot, and have them well on the way to being broken in.  If my estimate of the respective durability of the boots and my body are accurate, this pair should walk me all the way to retirement!

Fathers Day with Jerry Jeff Walker

I suppose the two grey haired fellows sharing an odoriferous joint might have been doing so as an adjunct to chemotherapy.

But the Grannie in the tie-dyed t shirt, gyrating and shimmying away down front required a less plausible explanation:  I guess you really can go back, at least for a little while.

Fatherhood has landed me in some very unusual places, and in the Year of Our Lord 2012 I found myself in the company of my youngest son at a Jerry Jeff Walker concert.

I have mentioned Jerry Jeff once before.  His was the music of my young restless days, starting at just the age my son is now.  I was tossed unprepared into my freshman year of college.  It was a time of high pressure weeks and party weekends.  Girl friends came and went.  Future plans were misty and out of focus.  And you could go to a place called Rho House, pay a nominal fee for a plastic glass and drink more beer than you should while listening to Jerry Jeff sing “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers” as a wavering conga line snaked its way out the door going who knows where.

A year or two into Med School, and having met my future wife, my interests shifted, but I still kept track of Mr. Walker’s career.  He had married a good woman, cleaned up his lifestyle a bit, played a couple of Presidential inauguration gigs, but mostly just kept on making the kind of music he liked whether or not it was commercially successful.

My son became a second generation fan when I suggested he give a listen, and now has all the good old albums on good old classic vinyl.

But back to Father’s Day.  Jerry Jeff is pretty much retired; he plays a big Reunion show in Texas once a year and a smattering of mostly benefit gigs.  I have to admit, I was not sure what to expect.  The crowd was an enthusiastic full house, but mostly my age and up.  You would see the guys swigging a beer or two while waiting for the show, and not long after see them-in the fashion of old guys and fluids-trekking off to the bathrooms.

Jerry Jeff came on stage to loud applause.  He has put on a few pounds, and walks a bit stiffly.  I read somewhere that he has had some major back surgery.

At first it seemed like it was not going to be much of a show.  His voice was weak, his vocals overpowered by an energetic lead guitar.  He was fiddling with his amp and before each song he would look over his shoulder at the side men and say something.

Eventually he mentioned that his allergies were really “kicking my ass”, and that they were having to switch things around on the fly.  In fact, he said, “I don’t believe that song has ever been done in that key before!”.

He did most of the old standards, and some fun new stuff.  And a very strange thing happened.  His voice got stronger and stronger as the show went on.  He seemed like that rarest of baseball players, the pitcher who is throwing a lot harder in the ninth inning than he was in the first.

To the delight of all he even got up a bit towards the end and was dancing on the edge of the stage while playing a spirited guitar solo.  The fans dancing around down front-and I saw at least one three generation family there-loved it.

Jerry Jeff was what I hoped he would be.  Sure, he is greyer, heavier, slower than he was when I first saw him back in the mid 1970s.  As am I.  But he seems totally comfortable with it, and given his hard living lifestyle early on he is probably pleasantly amused/surprised to be doing as well as he is.

We first generation fans should take that lesson to heart.

The world is a quirky place.  So I never say never.  But it is unlikely that I will see Jerry Jeff again.  Eventually he will kick back to the well earned comforts of his ranch, enjoy life on his own terms, and essentially become one of his songs:

“One day I looked up, he’s pushin’ eighty,

 Got brown tobacco stains all down his chin.

 To me he’s one of the heroes of this country,

 So why’s he all dressed up like them old men?”

Indian Cemetery

One community I work in on occasion is way up in the "North Woods".  Recently, while looking at a map for something else, I noticed that there was an entry for "Indian Cemetery" in an out of the way corner of the city.  I suppose I should not have been surprised, the area historically has had and continues to have a strong Ojibwa community.  I had just never heard any mention of the cemetery, nor seen any signs for it.

It was not easy to find.  Even with GoogleEarth I missed it on my first attempt.  Finally I spotted what amounts to an unmarked dirt driveway running back behind a vacant business:

It somehow did not seem like the kind of place you should just go driving around in, so I parked my car and walked back there in brilliant morning sunlight.  As the clearing opens up you see this:

I got an instant sensation of, well, "alieness" for lack of a better word.  We are accustomed to seeing a cemetery where the dead are marked out in regimented rows, presumably buried six feet down and with the weight of some serious headstones physically and metaphysically anchoring them in place.  But here we get this:

It seems as if the usual rules, or more accurately our perceived rules, have been suspended.  No time resisting granite, we get moss encrusted wooden shingles.  It somehow lacks the sense of permanent memories that characterize most cemeteries.

I am pretty sure that the deceased are actually buried to regulation depth, but seeing their grave markers visibly crumbling and seemingly being pulled down into the earth is disquieting.  I guess it might fit in well with Native American thoughts about being an integral part of nature, and it certainly reflects biological reality.

Keep looking and you start to see small details.

Many of the graves are either unmarked or have small plaques that you have to hunt for.  So I can't say for sure how old some of the earlier burials might be.  I am guessing early 1970s, corresponding to a time when there was a revival of interest in Native culture.  As to the newest uses, the above picture shows new, rough unpainted wood, freshly turned earth and flowers wilted but still holding together.

This is very sad.  The smaller graves denote infant burials.  This one has such a home made look to it.  It poignantly reminds me of bird houses I made with my sons when they were little.  There are too many of these, as the Native community has infant mortality rates some 20% higher than national averages, and SIDS rates twice as high.

Here and there you see things that remind you that the Native Americans have a foot in each culture:

A traditional grave.  An interesting bit of mosaic artwork.  And an American flag denoting military service.  A rather high proportion of Natives do serve in the armed forces, and are very highly thought of there.

I should not make assumptions, but I have heard of little bowls like this being used for small offerings.  Tobacco and so forth.  In my professional work I have to really discourage tobacco use.  Native Americans live on average 7 years less than whites, with diabetes, heart disease and substance abuse being major contributors.  Smoking causes much suffering, yet tobacco is a legitimate part of their culture.

A single feather lying in the grass.  Just random or was it part of a memorial?

I don't know what to make of this last photo.  The graves had the usual assortment of flowers and flags, with the newer ones seemingly better remembered than the old.  Off to one side I saw this:

A rather large collection of grave decorations unceremoniously tossed into the underbrush. They seem similar to decorations left standing.  This was not long after Memorial Day, but does not seem to have the patriotic look of military decorations.  Was there some other holiday, unknown to me, that had all the graves decked out recently?  So many mysteries, and not a living soul about to ask.

Life as a Sausage

Geezer that I am at two score and fifteen, I still do not count it a good day unless I learn something new.  Recently I had occasion to compare notes with a co-worker on the perennial favorite topic of what our children are up to.

She told me that her daughter was a sausage.

Oh, not just any sausage.  Her daughter is one of the famous "racing sausages" for the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team.

Here's the deal.  As a promotional stunt a local sausage company, Klements, kitted out some folks in foam rubber sausage suits and had a race around the ball field after the sixth inning.  It caught on because, well, I don't really know why this would seem like entertainment, but it may have something to do with it being a ball park in Milwaukee and everyone having had a lot to drink by that point in the game.

1 is Bratwurst  2 is Polish  3 is Italian.  These were the originals.  4 is Hotdog and 5 is Chorizo, added later to acknowledge Hispanic contributions to baseball.  Or cuisine, its not easy to tell.

I kept asking my friend more and more questions about her daughter's job, as I consider this very important stuff.

Evidently they interview about 200 applicants a year for roughly 10 positions.  An outgoing personality is said to be a major determinant in hiring, although just how you can project any kind of personality when wearing a foam rubber suit that covers all of you but your knees on down is a mystery to me.

The job pays minimum wage, and you join a crew of roughly 100 sausages.  They work on a rotating schedule.  Some hardened veterans have been sweating under the foam for a decade.

Of course the main duty is the Sausage Race.  I had assumed that this was in some fashion "fixed".  We live in a society where kids get participation ribbons for successful breathing.  Surely there would be some balance, some way to ensure that victories were spread out evenly?  I mean, would you let Chorizo lose on Cinco de Mayo?  But my cynicism is ill founded.  This is a fair, even up competitive race.  Indeed, they publish statistics on this, and the relative lack of success of Senor Chorizo-he of the aerodynamically problematic sombrero-suggests an honest competition.

But the Sausages have other responsibilities as well.  The official Brewers mascot is a certain Bernie the Brewer.  When the team hits a home run Bernie goes down a slide into a simulated giant beer stein.  The sausages stand by on either side of the slide to make sure he does not fall off.  This seemingly trivial factoid acquires significance only when you remember how darned hot the suits are,  and that a home run for the Brewers can happen in any inning.  Those kids-mostly college age and apparently more women than men-are doing some serious sweating for that minimum wage job.

You can also hire one or more of the Sausages for private functions. 

"Really?" I said. "And can you make them run for you?"

"Nope.  No running allowed.  No talking either, they come with a spokesperson."

There is another tradition at Miller Park.  Fans are sometimes picked to wear the suits and run the race.  But there are always official Sausages suited up and ready to step in on a moments notice should the fans turn up too drunk to run in a straight line. 

Apparently the suits are unwieldy and it takes practice to master running in them. 

And of course, there was the infamous Randall Simon incident of 2003.

A city outraged

The dastardly Mr. Simon was arrested, fined and suspended by the Commissioner of Baseball for three games.  He tried to make amends, on his next trip to Milwaukee he bought sausages for a whole section of the stadium, and he on request autographed the bat and gave it to the young lady he had knocked down.  Oh, and somehow she got a nice vacation to the Caribbean out of this.

But when visiting Milwaukee I think Mr. Simon had still better watch his back.

And here as a special bonus, some young people of my acquaintance re-enacting the Sausage Racers for a Halloween party.  Their outfits, while otherwise accurate, appear better suited to enjoying festive food and drink.

ADDENDUM: I have learned a couple more key facts regards the sausages.  They do not have to stay in costume the whole game.  In fact, in their job of spotting for Bernie the Brewer on his home run slide they would be considerably less effective in character.  I mean, they can't see all that well and it looks to be difficult to extend your arms.   Also, regards Senor Chorizo, it has been noted that his won-lost record is quite variable.  In his early years he did rather poorly indeed, probably because of the ungainly and aerodynamically difficult hat.  But for a time he was winning with abandon.  I asked my sausage contact about this and she admitted that for a while there they were putting "track stars" into that suit to even up the odds.  But they did their job too well, and Chorizo was leading the "Sausage League" for a while....