HappyPlatypus's 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.