Those of us living in Paradise are experiencing something very unusual for this semi-arid location. More than enough rain. For the past week the gods of lightning, thunder, and precipitation have drenched us in water and in sound. In the upcoming week’s forecast it looks like there is more of the same coming our way.
Last night there were two instances where the flash of the lightning and the awesome, chasing-the-cats-under-the-bed crack of the thunder were nearly simultaneous. Enough so that I got up from my chair to see if anything in the neighborhood was smoking. I relaxed when I was reasssured that neither my friend’s homes nor myself were on fire.
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On a walk yesterday a small bird flew by too quickly for careful identification but it was a brilliant yellow color and wait … was that a flash of red as well?
There’s only one bird that I know of locally that fits both of those observations – the beautiful Western Tanager. They are smallish, about the size of a red-winged blackbird.
Hadn’t seen one in years, and now I’ve experienced two sightings in the past week. Lucky me.
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From The New Yorker
I was a brand new pediatric resident when I participated in the care of the only lightning victim I ever had as a patient.
He was a twelve year-old boy who had been caddying at a suburban golf course. When a shower caught the golfers out they sought shelter under a large tree, which failed to protect the boy.
Unfortunately nothing was done in the way of effective resuscitation by the golfers or the ambulance crew, and we didn’t receive him at the hospital until more than twenty minutes after the strike. That was far too much time to be able to bring him back, but when children are involved I have seen so many times when caregivers go off label and try what they know in their hearts will be absolutely futile for far longer than they would on an adult.
It was the only resuscitation I ever was a part of where open-chest heart massage was tried. When the code was called and we backed away from the table no one spoke, and most left the room wearing grim expressions. A couple of nurses started silently picking up the debris of the code – the gauze squares, needle covers, IV tubing sets, et al.
At that point I noticed for the first time the small burn mark on the boy’s scalp and on the bottom of one foot. Portals of entry and departure for the enormous electrical force that had stilled his heart.
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From The New Yorker
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My trusty MacBook Pro has died. It was nearly seven years old, which is ancient in the land of computers, but that stalwart device still did everything I wanted it to do. It now has a motherboard problem, and just like that wise old adage says; “When Mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy.”
This Mac always had its quirks, and on more than one occasion I had to restrain myself from chucking it into the trash can as its internal demons ruined a piece of work.
It also had the infamous evil Apple keyboard that had to be replaced in toto a few years back, and afterward forced me to become a bastardized sort of tech serviceperson whenever one of the keys key would become stuck and require cleaning. And there were moments when the cursor seemed not under my control but of some unseen force that was not my friend.
But until last Saturday it always came through for me, and I will miss the mini-combats and hair-tearings. In the Norwegian-American Book Of How Life Should Go, on page 78 or thereabouts, it clearly states that: “if life is too easy it tends to make one soft and gradually more useless. Aggravations are what built the Norwegian character that we would all be proud of if being proud wasn’t a sin.”
Therefore it is with mixed emotions that I will retire this machine, with honors. There were devils inside that brushed aluminum case, but they were my devils and if I was not fond of them, I was at least accustomed.
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I’ve been a Stephen King fan since he and I were pups. We have matured together, as he keeps getting better at his craft of writing and I get better at my role, which is that of the “Dear Reader.” The first book of his that I read was a short story collection entitled “Night Shift.” Lots of gore and gut-wrenching there. Just recently he published another such collection, “You Like It Darker,” and there are real differences between the two.
These are the best of his short stories yet. There is subtlety, for one thing, a quality not always present when he was a younger man. There is the maturity of recognizing that we don’t live in a black and white world, nor one that is simply shades of gray. We live in one that is filled with colors with fuzzy borders melding with one another rather than bumping up hard and sharp. The characters here have more depth as a result, are more interesting.
King took the title from the Leonard Cohen song, You Want It Darker, and apologizes in an epilog to Cohen for changing it slightly. Liked it.
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Little Home In The Valley 