Journal

Cleaning out closets to donate clothes to Goodwill the other day, I got to laughing at the discovery of a T-shirt I haven't been able to wear in more than a decade and that kids under 25 probably wouldn't understand.

The shirt reads, "I shot J.R."

Someone left it on the resort where I grew up and I claimed it, even though I was too young to ever have been a fan of Dallas. Or Dynasty. Or Falcon Crest.

Or any daytime or night time soap operas, for that matter.

When I started college a fresh-faced, dorky virgin in 1988, all the kool kids were all about skipping class to watch Days of Our Lives. I tried, mainly because one of the actresses was really, really hot.

But I could never accept just how over-the-top the story lines were. There was simply no way all that drama could happen to the same characters all at once, I thought.

Surgical Success!

Fast forward a month or two (plus or minus!) until today, and it turns out I've learned that soap operas aren't so wrong. I'm not saying Dallas is Dateline NBC, but then again, Dallas never staged a vehicle explosion by putting firecrackers in a gas tank, either.

I'm just saying.

My father's pancreatic cancer surgery last week was a success, I'm happy -- and relieved -- to report. Doctors removed 2/3 of his pancreas and his spleen, and the tumor they found was encapsulated, meaning it had not spread.

But leave it to my father to throw a monkey wrench into things. I mean, when I was a kid, he'd take the opposite side of everything just to annoy me. If I said the sky was blue, he'd say it was green. His favorite actor was John Wayne, but when I'd say John Wayne was a great actor, Dad would disagree.

Cantankerous old goat.

As a kid it drove me nuts, but it taught me to debate, to think out my positions before speaking and to have a discussion without losing my temper. And nowadays, I love being as ornery.

Apparently so does Dad's body. Dad's mother and her five siblings all died of pancreatic cancer, and when doctors opened Dad up, they found the entire lining of his pancreas to be riddled with ... and I quote the scientific term here, "we don't know what the #&%&^^ this is."

That may not be the exact words, of course, but it's the gist. The doctors, who between them have 60 years of pancreatic cancer expertise, have never seen anything like what they found, and are sending Dad's organ to Mayo for study and writing a medical journal article about it.

Plot Complications!

Dad recovered nicely and returned home in a week, only to get sick and be readmitted this weekend. Apparently complications from a previous surgery arose while he recuperated from this surgery, leading to two strangulating hernias, preventing him from being able to eat. Looks like he'll have to have emergency surgery to correct that.

But Dad remains upbeat, which is more than I can say for me. I'm beginning to think J.R. got off easy.

At work, I have two three-quarter-million dollar accounts up for grabs. This at a time when work just laid off four more people this week. So if I don't win these accounts. ...

Simultaneously, the relationship with my wife is deteriorating, as is her relationship with her employer, which is only giving her 4 to 8 hours a week, increasing our financial pressure while I stew about keeping my job and look for night and weekend work. And fight with my pharmacy and doctor over false allegations of doctor shopping by the irresponsible pharmacist.

The Bare Facts

They say God never gives you more than you can handle, and I always reply to them that I wish God didn't have such a high opinion of me.

But I think about it, and I realize that amidst the garbage in our lives grow roses of extraordinary beauty. All we have to do is look. And smell. And smile.

I wasn't smiling the other day, though, when I came across an ex-fiance on Flickr. Stark. Raving. Naked.

Surprise!

I'm a photographer. And I shoot some nudes. Tasteful, though. Beautiful, I'd go so far to say. Good enough, at least, that I was featured artist on ImageKind last Saturday, an accomplishment that became a rose amidst the garbage of my life.

Granted, most of my photos are not nudes. And there is a big difference between the nudes I shoot, which are mood pieces that are more an exploration of light and shadow, and these images.

Some of them were good, but others. ... To say I was shocked at what I was seeing, at what was shared so blatantly with the world, made me think about art and intimacy. And it made me wonder about how special what we had once shared truly had been.

New life, new hope

And that's when I heard it.

Mewling. Pitiful, powerful and pained. Roxy, my wife, hobbled outside on her crutches, and I raced behind her. A tiny 1-pound ball of black fur was crawling toward the road, calling piteously for a mama who was no longer living. A car bore down on the kitten.

I swooped down and snatched the kitten up, its long hair on end, like that of all kittens, giving it a look of permanent surprise. It couldn't be more than 8 weeks old. Mama had been killed, and it was hungry and lost and scared.

Rox and I hugged, and I clutched the little one, Noodle, to my breast. We took him inside.

An hour later, we heard the calls of his brother, a tan longhair we named Nutmeg. Both kittens, their blue eyes open but their baby teeth just showing, now live in our family room downstairs.

I've been sleeping on the floor next to them, my two furry roses. The first day I fed bottled cat milk every two hours by eye dropper, but I've switched them to soft food now. I've already found a family with two daughters to adopt them and give them a loving home.

In the Play of Kittens

Larry Hagman, who played J.R. on Dallas, has been dead for years and years now. Shucks, I hadn't thought of him for years, and I'm surprised his name came to me just now.

What I remember most about him is an interview I saw him give Good Morning America when I was 9 or 10. He was an anti-smoking crusader back in the 1970s, before opposing smoking became de rigeor. He told the interviewer that he began smoking as a teenager, when a girl told him he could put his hand up her shirt if he finished her cigarette.

I always hoped that would happen to me. It never did.

I got over it.

I've been musing hard about the schizophrenic nature of life, the mercurial way it bounces up and down, back and forth. Sometimes it seems harder that way, but then I realize just how bleak life would be if I didn't have the peaks amidst the valleys.

When we rescued Noodle and Nutmeg, there was no question we would take them in, but in the back of my head, I worried how I would afford them. But I worked the phones and immediately found a good, safe home. Which enabled me to spend this week simply enjoying the mewling, tumbling, bumbling new life. I've felt a weight of sadness and fear drain from my heart and soul and shoulders.

Sometimes God works in mysterious ways.

Sigh. After disappearing for a couple weeks, I was all about returning to journal writing with some triumphant lead, some witty, inspirational, captivating initial paragraph that would have everybody alternately weeping and laughing and ultimately collapsing at their keyboards in emotional release.

But alas, like so many things these days, it wasn't too be.

I sat down, logged on and started to type, and Dazzle cat, my beautiful tortie, left me a present beneath my feet. Would that it were something merely disgusting, like a dead mouse or a disemboweled snake.

Sadly, nope. I should be so lucky.

Hey, what are you trying to say?

Actually, I'm pretty strict about keeping my kitties indoor only, which prevents me from receiving gifts of dead mice and such. Maybe I'm overprotective, but I just don't want to let my furry babies outside. Too many crazy folk out there who hate cats. And too many cars and diseases and pests and other kitties with sharp claws and teeth and, well, you know. Hormones. The average outdoor cat lives to be 3. The average indoor/outdoor cat lives to be 7. The average indoor cat lives to be 12 or more.

Mine, of course, will live forever. Because I refuse to ever lose them. Unless, of course, they keep leaving me presents. Like Razzle Dazzle's round-and-orange brother Kiwi just did, smirking up at me before sauntering off away from the stench.

Yeah. There's a litter box under my desk. It's out of the way, out of sight. I thought it was a good idea at the time. But sitting here, trying to pour out my deepest thoughts and feelings -- and boy, do I have some sharing to do this time around -- I'm realizing that the placement of the litter box isn't doing much for my creativity. Much less my sinuses.

My gosh, my cats can really stink up a room worse than Kramer from Seinfeld!

To quote that great song from Phoebe on Friends, "Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, what are they feeding you? Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, It's not your fault!"

But how I'd like to blame someone!

Still, the way I'm feeling now, the presents Kiwi and Dazzle just left me seem rather metaphorical.

It's not me. It's definitely YOU

I got dumped this weekend.

Broken up with. Ditched. Given the heave ho.

And it came in the form of a letter. One I had to go to the Post Office to sign for. At the risk of sounding like Chandler from Friends, could it BE any more cliche? I mean, I'm not asking for a biplane and skywriting. I'm humiliated enough as it is. But a Dear John letter? One I had to make a special trip to the Post Office to sign for?

A trip I made in a rush at 8 a.m. Saturday because my phone had inexplicably stopped working about a week earlier, and AT&T had graciously agreed to come fix their lines "sometime between 8 a.m. Saturday and 2012."

And to add insult to injury, once I arrived at the Post Office to get what turned out to be a break up letter, it came postage due.

I got a receipt. Just in case, the clerk said. What do you think, should I ask the dumper to pay for it? I swear, the protocols in breaking up are just so fuzzy nowadays!

Could you be more specific?

And I've been broken up with by some real doozies in my time. There an amazing Japanese steak house where I live that I'll never visit again because I've been dumped there by three different girls. I'm convinced that place is bad luck. And I've been dissed on national TV. A former fiance said some things once on Jenny Jones that just couldn't be taken back.

As humiliations go, that ranked even higher than skywriting.

You know, I'm so good at getting dumped that if they turned it into an Olympic sport, I'd be the gold medal winner for sure. I could have my face on the Wheaties box. Bruce Jenner: Olympic Running Champion. Uncle Todd: Olympic Chump.

But as painful as my myriad breakups have been, this one made no sense. 

It came from my doctor.

That's right. My DOCTOR.

No reason given. No excuses. No, we've grown apart. No, we've got to talk. No, it's not you, it's me. Just, I can't treat you anymore after Sept. 5. Please find another physician.

Anger, denial, bargaining ...

Like every other time I've been dumped, I stayed home all day Saturday, waiting by the phone for a call that never came. Of course, this time I had an excuse. The helpful souls at AT&T told me to. And the phone had an excuse for not ringing. The line into my house didn't work.

But I don't think my doctor tried calling, one way or another.

Either way, AT&T didn't show up until Sunday morning about 10:30. That was a little after the 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday window they had given me, but it was closer to the 8 a.m. side than the 2012 side, so I counted my blessings.

My first true love, the first girl I ever kissed back in junior high, is now a doctor. We dated off and on when I was just out of college and she was in medical school, and she eventually dumped me because I wouldn't cut my pony tail and move in with her. That's as close as I've ever come to being dumped by a doctor before.

Can they DO that? Is this something they can do? This is the doctor I'm seeing for my diabetes, which means I pretty much need to find a successor ASAP b/c I need my scripts. But I just dunno if I'm ready to get back into the whole doctor shopping scene. I was comfortable where I was. I trusted him.

I'm sure it wasn't him so much as it was his medical group, which stopped taking my insurance this year and which is with me over some bills that got run up because both my wife and I had major health issues this year. We're paying things off. Slowly. Apparently too slowly. But surely.

But I'm befuddled at the tactics. Does the corporation that wants the money for bills we've run up think they're more likely to get the money sooner if they refuse to let us see our doctors anymore? That's just mean and evil.

And shortsighted.

After all. I have 10 smelly cats. I'm starting to have an idea where to mail the presents they leave me.

:)

The frozen smiles beaming out at me from our wedding photos seem more like accusing grimaces now, and the joyful extended family moments captured on film seem more like a mockery than a celebration of life. Oh, but did these poor fools only know, at the moment these photos were snapped, what woes were in store for them, would they have smiled or laughed or chortled? Would they, could they -- should they -- have rejoiced in that fleeting moment free of pain and sadness?

Or should they have even bothered? What's the point of joy when it is so shortlived, anyway?

Counterpointlessness?

Then again, if not for the valleys, the peaks would not provide vistas that take our breath away. The pain, in essence, almost defines the joy in playing counterpoint, providing the sour to its sweet, singing bass to its alto. It's just a matter of enduring that long, dark trek in between peaks.

But how dark it is. I try, God how I try to be positive. Some people seem to fall into positivity as naturally as I fall down the stairs, which seems to happen once a day anymore. I bring new meaning to the term grace under pressure.

People talk about seeing the world as glass half full or glass half empty, and frankly, I envy the half-empty folk. Am I the only one who it seems, some days, has a glass that's shattered on the floor?

And who has, it appears, stepped on the damn shards?

Bare foot?

I kid, of course.

What Our Parents Warned Us About

But I've been thinking about the Todd that Was and the Todd that Is and the Todd that Will Be, and how the Todd that Has M.S. and Diabetes will, like the Bad Influence in the shadows our parents warned us about, affect the future.

My wife and I have been re-watching the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel TV series on DVD lately. We're big fans, me more so than she, and if you've not become an addict, I recommend you do so with all haste. But my wife much prefers watching DVDs to talking, debating and waxing philosophical late into the night, something of which I've always been fond. Poor wifey. She married a dork.

The silence that has fallen between us in just two years of marriage lies thick as that in the mausoleums in Buffy on the TV. It's as if the first symptom of my diseases and her disability was our sudden inability to communicate. The silence has inserted itself into our relationship, a fifth wheel, the third corner in a doomed love triangle. It is the stake that Spike played for a while in Buffy and Angel's relationship.

Only less welcome. And without the great British accent and ripply abs.

But the silence is there, as destructive as my MS and her lower back disability. It eats away at our relationship like my white blood cells now devour the myelin around my neurons. And as the silence grows, I just wish I had a do-over button, like we did as kids, so we could turn back the clock and start our relationship over, before she was injured and I became sick. Before we lost our voices and our hearts.

Youthful Vim and Vigor

On the TV, Buffy and Angel and, in later episodes, Spike, pursue their love with all the single-minded obsession that I can't recall having since my diagnosis. 

Truth be told, we may not have had it for several years. We have a court date for her disability case against her employer in September. And after that's settled? She'll likely be headed back to her family in California, while I remain here with mine.

Dad meets with a cancer surgeon Friday, and then another one from Mayo Clinic next week.

And I'll keep looking for a second job.

And my feet? Well, I've been praying for a feeling of comfortable numbness. I guess I just wasn't specific enough on where.

Licking This Pity Party

But when I'm at my lowest, here comes Willow dog. She's a half-St. Bernard/half-Boxer lovebug I rescued on what would have been the last night of her life.

Four years ago I went to the vet to pick up my two youngest kitties, Blueberry and Chipmunk, from being neutered, to discover the most darling little St. Bernard face peering out at me from a kennel in the lobby. I pulled this tiny little 8-pound fuzzball out of the crate, and her entire body fit in my hands, and she licked my face with total abandon.

She was a stray and had been there, unclaimed, for two weeks. When the vet closed in 10 minutes, she was to be put down. Two hundred and forty dollars later, she was going home with Daddy.

Four years and 100 pounds later, Willow is Daddy's baby. Prone to fits of gas that can melt the windows and drive the cats yowling from the room, and possessed of softest, most soulful eyes God gave anyone, Willow is the sweetest dog ever. She's never met anyone or anything she didn't find worthy of a kiss, and nothing makes her happier than, well, being alive. Pet her, talk to her, kiss her, groom her or take her for a drive, and she's in heaven. Feed her, give her a treat or simply lie next to her in bed, and she's in heaven.

A Lesson From Willow

But she's a special needs dog. She has severe hip displaysia in both rear hips. She needs double hip replacement surgery, but that's $10,000 I don't have, so we rely on $240 a month in medicine. I wish I could do more, but we do what we can, and Willow appreciates it.

And even in pain, she gives me her doggie grin every time she sees me. Even if the last time she saw me was one blink ago. Pain and sadness don't matter to Willow dog, because Willow dog has what she wants. Someone to pet her. Someone to kiss. And cats to pass gas at.

And suddenly, when I look at the smiles in those family photos on the wall, I realize they're not grimaces. And I realize that those moments of joy I fear are so pointless are not. They are the point. They should be grabbed all the more for their fleeting nature.

Some people may have learend everything they need to know in Kindergarten, but I am reminded on a daily basis everything I need to know by one warm-eyed dog with huge heart and two bad hips.

Carpe diem.