Homeostasis

Now that the hurricane has passed by, I was thinking about life existing in the eye of the cyclone! Homeostasis! Perfect equilibrium! If you think about Abraham Maslow's pyramid of needs met; the eye of the cyclone remains the perfect sanctuary, but it is a job to stay there and not get into the vortex. I'm not sure that the concatenation of activities needed to stay in the eye of the storm is what life is all about! Take your pills, seek friends and love, have a good job, insurance, be good, have confidence, create a beautiful home and children,a good book club, join the service club, grow old gently, die in your sleep! There has to be more than this. Maslow had the idea that all these met needs would ease the development of self actualization! Seems to me that more is needed and it will be outside the eye of the storm that actualization will happen. Homeostasis by definition is stasis: Homo sapiens standing still on the airport belt, carried along in measured pace. Wow! Unfortunately we need stress to temper. If you don't know black you will never recognize white. If you haven't been buffeted by the ill winds of fortune you will never know the quality of your fortitude! Better that you have an illness, lose a job,lose a love,get kicked out of a club and recover from these to know you are made for the vortex rather than the eye of the cyclone. Leonard, in his song, Famous Blue Raincoat, says, "Are you living for nothing now? " Getting old isn't for sissies, so we have to be living for something real!

The Polluter

The pianist and I have an 1990 Nissan Axxess that is in good running order partly because it is softly used and serviced regularly. I tried to start it the other day after we had been away for a while and the battery had run down since a roof light had been left on. When the tow truck man came and jumped the starter he told me to run it for a half hour to charge up the battery. I drove around Lotus Island for a while with the pianist and then took her to her bank. I was fearful about stopping the car at that stage so sat in the car with it running in idle while she did her business. I was musing on nothing in particular when a small, purpose driven lady in earth clothing came over and said, "You people are all the same. You pollute the earth with your gas fumes and use up a natural resource and do not have any regard for the earth or the people in it." She was quiet and intense and having made her clear statement she left me hanging and crossed back over the road. I wondered, "Am I of the tribe of 'You People' and who are 'You People' anyway?" I was never given the chance to explain that I was not one of "Them". A man then emerged from the bank wearing earth clothes and came to my open window and said, "You know your car is running!" "Yes", I said. "My battery is flat and I am afraid to turn it off as yet since it is still charging and I may not get it started again." "That's OK then", he said. I thought, "Thanks a lot green buddy." It is not that I was being accosted and taken to task that took me aback so much, since this is Lotus Island. It's just that I am one of the "You People", separated, categorized, held up as a lesson and packaged as not like us. It's hard for all of us not to jump to conclusions!

Targeting readers

The self publishing industry has two important rules for the novice writer who has no track record in the industry and needs the initial buzz to launch their book. TARGET READER MARKET and UNIQUE SELLING POINT! That is NOT a book that tries to be everybody's cup of tea,or is a whole grab bag of ideas! The book, AN ELDERLY ECLECTIC GENTLEMAN is targeted to the over 60's that embrace the world around them as a part of themselves; who are of an eclectic nature and perhaps a bit eccentric; and whose empathetic, open-handed nature has led them to believe that the small things of life are some of the most important! In search of a unique selling point is a thread in the book that repeatedly describes the ordinary as uniquely extraordinary! As usual, I stumbled into the two rules without the intelligence of knowing what I was doing! This is a reader market for which I have considerable respect, since their perspective gained from age and experience will quickly dispense with insincerity!

A Surgeon Songster

Years ago, one of the old time surgeons in Lotus City, who seemingly only knew one tune, would sing sometimes softly under his breath and sometimes look fixedly at his scrub and sing Sotto voce during his operative procedure. A co-conspirator admitting his scrub to the mysteries of his song. He usually had a commanding presence and could fix you with his eye and say something like, "Fresh fish", and you would ponder that a monumental message had been delivered, since it had a certain sonority to it! Though singing is not that uncommon in routine surgical procedures, it is usually during the closure and when the mood lightens! Most surgeons have a modest repertoire to draw on and will drone on tonelessly, but it is relaxing to the surgical staff to know that the operator is at least content with the progress of the case! The one of whom I speak however, only sang Nearer My God to Thee, which would emerge at intervals during the procedure, not always at the most relaxed or routine part of the procedure. Thankfully the patient in those days was always asleep, so they would not take the hymn as premonitory of some trip that they were not quite ready to make. On the other hand the more optimistic of the patients may well have considered that they were simply being operated on by a saintly man, whose connection with God was immediate and proximate. Since, however, they lay blissfully ignorant of the heavenly melody that was mercilessly massacred by the operator, they could be reassured that their organ in his hands was treated with more skill and care than any organ with which he may have attempted to accompany his hymn!

A Good Man

I recently read a column in the National Post by Barbara Amiel in which she mentioned Septimus Harding in passing. He is one of my favorite characters in fiction and a subject that figures large in Anthony Trollope's novel, Barchester Towers. He is a prime example of the ordinary as truly extraordinary. In the BBC film production, a paragraph is placed as a eulogy provided in an after a dinner toast by his son in law, Dr Grantly, the archdeacon; but in the book it is Trollope's concluding narrative paragraph. Clearly of great importance to Trollope. Here goes: "The author now leaves him (Harding), in the hands of his readers: not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn." One can clearly see why the BBC wanted to place this wonderful narrative as dialogue. The place in this life of the Septimus Hardings of this world is so obscured by the lurid and extravagant that we cannot see them through the haze. When a master like Trollope brings them to life, we are humbled by their majesty!

Shed Seaweed

My son in law and I were sitting on a log this afternoon and the tide was coming in with strong wind and moderate wave action. For the past two weeks there has been a big shedding of sea lettuce and sundry other seaweed carried in by the tidal action. There is a lot of lateral tide movement on our beach as well, and the accessible part of the beach that welcomes the weed is about a five hundred feet long. After a few days, the weed tossed up on the beach dries on the surface and loses much of it's salinity and its definition. In the olden days I used to collect much of this material for compost and top dressing. The ocean gives up its sea lettuce in August and its eel grass in October, both of them gifted to those who scavenge the shore for that kind of treasure. I have always had a fantasy that if I had a donkey and a two wheel cart I could walk the shore and pitchfork the drying weed into my cart with a lot more ease than trying to haul it up my 12 steps from the beach in a garbage pail. In the distant past my earlier Irish generations used this gift to create soil from barren stoney headlands. It was where they were banished to from the fertile valley lands that were usurped from them. As we looked at the drying weed I thought, "The line of drying weed at the tidemark is evenly ten feet wide over the five hundred foot length. It averages two inches thick!" By my calculation that is 833.3 cubic feet of compost from that little area. What the sea gives up today it will take back tomorrow unless we act! I wish I had a donkey and a large two wheeled cart and another life span.

Come see, come saw

The best definition of this is, been there, done that! A cursory look at Google does not come up with this definition which is too bad, but so what? By that definition everything is old hat! That individual is non entertainable! Non instructable! It is difficult to teach or please those who know a bit of everything and have seen all there is to see! The thrust of my blog and my book is that the ordinary is truly extraordinary. That is my whole point. Fancy then, that I'm told that it is very interesting and resonates with all my readers so far but it can't be marketed effectively because the subjects are too ordinary! I haven't succeeded in making the point. "For instance", says one," your piece on 'Puberty,Jim has hair'; why would any one care about that?" Well, I have thought about that observation. The appearance of that first tuft of black in THAT place! Why would not anyone care about that? It was a seminal event in everyone's life! Death of childhood! A fearsome step to the unknown! It was more important than the Iraq war to the adolescent. It was almost more important than anything at the time. It is an example par excellence of the ordinary being extraordinary! If it does not resonate with you it is because you have forgotten what mattered. I cannot help you; I can only tell you! Don't be life weary. Don't be come see, come saw!

The Writer

The writer in some fashion is also a thief given the nature of the job and the occasional stealthy, or often unconscious acquisition of the resource needed to fulfill this job. The keyhole collecting of information, read, seen, heard, thought, where the writer innocently refashioned someone's material, looking at it from a different angle. The sleuth may or may not have had a peripheral role, just observing and recording, unconsciously or consciously. "I think I can use that," they think," I don't have to put it in quotes because it is a foundling!" Even the kernel of an idea or observation expressed elsewhere is fodder! This isn't bad. We are often just building blocks, piling onto the genius of others! Hopefully adding something more! It's a fine line and has nothing to do with plagiarism which is simply the more obvious! Someone said today that there may be no original thoughts! "There is nothing new under the sun". "What has been done will be done again!"( Ecclesiastes, 1, 9) We may just not recall what has been done, where we heard it, where it was recorded, where a small light was lit that we observed. If you think you have a lot of original thoughts there is a chance you haven't read much or observed a lot or have a short attention span! It's not that you need to invent the wheel, you just have to acknowledge to yourself that you didn't. It is a great service to display the "nothing that is new" again to remind everyone about it and know that yours may be an honorable theft, but not unique.

Wheat grass

At the Lotus island market every weekend, wheatgrass is sold as a healthful food when prepared as a juice, with nutritional and restorative powers. It's virtues seemed to me to be something of a more modern and innovative discovery though it was investigated in the 30's and 40's and the art of juicing and marketing the drink occurred in the 50's. Remarkable claims have been made as to it's benefits. Fancy then, that Rabelais (1494 to 1553), physician, author and theolog, in his book Gargantua and Pantagruel,(1534), described the benefits of "wheat in the blade". There is truly nothing new under the sun. I'm not sure Rabelais is everyone's cup of tea but here goes. He writes, "From wheat in the blade you make a fine green sauce, simple to mix and easy to digest, which rejoices the brain, exhilarates the animal spirits, delights the sight, induces the appetite, pleases the taste, fortifies the heart, tickles the tongue, clarifies the complexion, strengthens the muscles, tempers the blood, eases the diaphagm, refreshes the liver, unblocks the spleen, comforts the kidneys, relaxes the vertebrae, empties the ureters, dilates the spermatic glands, tautens the testicle strings, purges the bladder, swells the genitals, straightens the foreskin,hardens the ballock, and rectifies the member: giving you a good belly, and good belching, farting-both noisy and silent- shitting, pissing, sneezing, crying, coughing, spitting, vomiting, yawning, snotting, breathing, inhaling, exhaling, snoring, sweating, and erections of the john-thomas: also countless other rare advantages." The observations of Rabelais render the modern pitch a bit pallid, wouldn't you agree?

Revision

I was reading one of my pieces, now published, where I can't grab and change it! Damn! The conclusion I wrote doesn't make sense and is stupid. I got carried away by my own rhetoric and stuck in a pretty, but shallow conclusion! We can't revise the dumb things we did in the past either. All we can do with the published book is improve the next chapter in the next book. Revise and revise and revise but eventually you have to let it go. Then you look at this later and say,"How could I have said that, missed that, and didn't delete all that?" In point of fact, most people will not judge you as harshly as you do yourself. Years ago the CEO of a college I was a member of, had a painting by Jack Shadbolt in his office that had been donated to the college by a fellow doctor. The painter often retrieved paintings from owners; paintings that he was not pleased with, and would repaint the parts he didn't like! The painting I recall was the old wooden Marpole bridge with people looking at the water. He painted the people out and returned the revised work. It would be tough to collect all the books one sold to change the lines that offend. It's tough to alter the past in your life where the lines were troubling. You just have to forgive yourself and crank up every morning, with the new knowledge and the new humility you have been blessed with. Then you can go and make a whole set of new mistakes. Humble pie has enough calories to help one grow bigger!

Re-seeding

I was weeding yesterday in primarily perennial beds, including open interspaces that we fill with summer annuals. There were the Mid-July beginnings of re-seeded annuals and biennials that Mother Nature provided from the compost we spread in the late spring.I took a certain amount of care to identify and avoid pulling these little offerings out. They get there courtesy of my laziness and Mother Nature's Locum Tenens. (On second thought I am the locum, she is Mistress Of All) I usually can't be bothered clipping spent bloom on the annuals,I suppose due to laziness, so they often go to seed if the deer don't do the job of heading for me! The Lotus Island deer and the bunnies don't seem to like Snapdragons, Poppies,Sweet William or Forget-me-not, so the seed heads are usually left on and then either disappear and hide in the compost, or rest in the flower bed over winter. There is nothing like free and in old flower beds one should weed cautiously to anticipate the new surprises.If you garden for yourself, my view is never give the weeding job to the ill-informed! These small treasures are easily rooted up. I suppose a sensible person would say, "To hell with all this diddling around, just clean up the mess of weeds and replant some robust plants from the nursery and be done with it! For goodness sake, you must have a lot of time to waste!" On what?

Grass is a plant

It's hard to recall that, when you see the beautifully cut carpet lawn of the North American golf course! The so-called lawn of the bucolic Lotus Island set is often the meadow grasses, cut to a higher measured level to read, "uniformity"! Taming the meadow grasses into a simulated lawn does not allow one to discard the recognition that one's grasses are a plant. As I have previously mentioned, we have 200 varieties of grasses on The Pacific Coast and they vary greatly in growth habit! They are not, on the whole, genetically engineered to flourish at half an inch or less. Neatness doesn't count, but sensitivity does if the free spirits of Mother Nature are allowed to flourish! I'm not suggesting for one minute that the fairway be cut to impede the ball from rolling. I'm not even suggesting the lawn proud urbanite change his ways if the genetics of the turf is such that a half inch set is a healthy thing! It's just that the heterogeneous grasses of Mother Nature will live together in perfect accord if you raise the bar a bit as you cut your so-called lawn. The grasses have been living together for centuries on Lotus Island without a lot of outside help. The composition varies from time to time depending on the changes in the climate. Celebrate that! Monoculture is less adaptable. Mother Nature is wise! Celebrate that too!

Book Promotion

The book promotion module I have stresses the need to rely on your family and friends to give the initial impetus to one's book. The idea being there needs to be a seed snowball formed that can pick up size as it rolls down the hill. Ultimately, of course, it will have to stand or fall on its own. As Paul McCartney says, or almost says," I'll need a little help from my friends."

In the meantime, I hope I am not singing out of key.

Tent caterpillars

The massive hatch of tent caterpillar moths has happened this week on Lotus Island. They are everywhere, resting on the house siding and windows in hordes. Invading every cranny and nook where a little warmth can be found. This spring was a moderately bad year for the tents on the apples, and other soft leaf trees so the moth invasion portends a much bigger year next year. Interestingly I had made a search the past winter for egg cases and found few, so concluded that I didn't need to dormant spray. Big mistake! The trouble with Lotus Island is the "green movement" is so driven that even dormant spray is considered by many as dirty pool. This spring I spent a long time cutting off all the tents and drowning the tenters in the harbour but I can't spare the time to drown the whole island population of webworms. Now we have to await the natural control mechanism by parasitic wasps. The tent caterpillars this spring, when observed did not have that telltale white spot, dorsally, just behind their head. I should say the satisfying white spot. The parasitic wasp lays its egg there and on hatching the wasp larvae feeds on the caterpillar. The rise of the worm population provokes a rise in the wasp population. Isn't Mother Nature grand? In the meantime look next year for denuded spring time trees on the island due to the massive egg cases that will come this fall and winter over. Fortunately Mother Nature provides a secondary leaf recovery. If you have apples, plums and cherries, prepare for the worst!

Critics

If you write a book, the most serious critics are those that love you most and are afraid you may stumble. With the book AN ELDERLY ECLECTIC GENTLEMAN the observations were, "Is it still as preachy as the draft was?" Or, "Are you going to leave all the dirty bits in?" And, "Have you verified all these facts you think you know?" Now, I don't pretend to be the Will Rogers of the bucolic island set, but I and anyone else who sticks his neck out and writes a book may get a pitch on the head and fall in the tub with a splash. It's the risk! Worse than getting conked on the head from the critic, is getting ignored. "You might get sued if some recognize themselves", they said,"For heavens sake don't mention any names!" Much of this is good advice but to scramble the adage; perspective is of the eye of the beholder! I have to be truthful without being foolhardy. If you haven't irritated someone in your life from time to time you have to ask yourself "Why?" I was always sought after as a golfing companion when I worked in Lotus City! I served a useful purpose to my companions as I was a cheerful fellow,never kept score, and was a bad golfer. It reinforced to my companions how good their game was in comparison. This useful role may be the service I provide to other budding authors as well. I can no longer, like the leopard, change my spots! I can only curl up and lick them clean!

My Book Sale

My book is based on the blog; the work entailed in production is why I have neglected blogging for 2011. The editing process has been extremely time consuming and has really diverted my muse. The book will be launched about August 01 and is called AN ELDERLY ECLECTIC GENTLEMAN. It is available through friesenpress.com and can be viewed as an upcoming publication. This is all very exciting for me. Having reedited it so many times one ends up having a love-hate relationship with it and barf bag jitters but the Friesen Press people have been super to deal with and very supportive. I wouldn't have had the guts to do this without my family and my literature group and then the self publishing company. Hopefully now I can get back to writing the new stuff that needs to have the pump primed.

Fundamentals of Life

Ingestion, procreation and evacuation are the triad of the fundamentals of life. Everything else is ornamentation in the interest of serving these fundamentals. If you wish to discuss life and you stick to the ornamentation you will miss the main. To fail to embrace the fundamentals fully is to deny the humanness of your vessel. Those of us in the practice of surgery, anatomy and physiology are of necessity engaged in the constant contact with the human vessel and it's fundamentals. Whether the Paramoecium or the Homo sapiens, we are either a one celled tube that ingests,evacuates and conjugates, or a complex multicellular collection of bundled tubing that does the same thing. When you spend your day with a finger in the bowel or the urethra or bladder, the vas deferens or the vagina, the tubing and the side kicks that serve the conduits are travelled daily. If your finger is in the aorta or the portal vein or the carotid or common duct, all these tubes are there to serve to support the fundamentals. The brain is the largest sex organ available and the greatest forager and you will know that if you fail to evacuate for some time, all concentration on other matters flees, and it becomes the most important thing in the world! Great art, music, philosophy: love, compassion, and indwelling spirit: Science of particles, universe and earth, all of these are evolved from this bundle of tubes we call our vessel, but it is easy to forget that without the fundamentals, we are nothing!

Ashes

The pianist and I took our daughter the other day to see our plot where we will eventually be planted! I lay down in the section that we have chosen and it felt comfortable; a grassy knoll next to the Celtic cross in an acreage of rolling hills with a blue sky and scudding clouds above. My daughter took a nice picture of me in repose. I had asked the pianist earlier if she would consider sharing the same urn with me so our ashes could be mixed since I am such a codependent! She was adamantly opposed to that idea and stamped her foot. "I want to rest in peace." she said," I have lived with you for 54 years and shared the same bed but I want privacy for my ashes.My vow extended to have and to hold as long as we both shall live!" Well that was pretty clear. "What's more," she said, "Your ashes are likely to jump and turn repeatedly and snore a lot and that's not going to be restful in peace for me! I'll finally get to have a good sleep! " I rethought the matter and it is probably not practical anyway as the timing is everything in these matters. I'll have to be a big boy!

Syphilis

Received wisdom has always said that the New World provided Europe with potatoes, tomatoes. tobacco and syphilis. I wrote a treatise on syphilis as part of a graduate studies programme at UBC refuting the idea that syphilis originated in the New World. At the time I was taking an Archeology minor on the way to an Anatomy degree. Ancient Corinth, a coastal city, was from the evidence of excavations at the time, the major Mediterranean port into the heart of Europe. From excavations of the healing Temples of Asklepius, one of the more interesting findings were what were called the votive offerings. These were pottery replica of the anatomical part of the patient that the priests of Asklepius had healed.They were accompanied by testimonials and hung on the walls of the temple. The votives could be purchased off the shelf at an adjacent Stoa and given to the priests by the grateful, or if you were rich you could commission a custom made part by an artisan. Curiously enough, many of these replica were male genitalia. Problematic for the student in these matters was that the nature of the disease was not displayed in the replicas so the pathology was unclear. The Asklepians it seems, insisted that only disease free specimens were to be hung on the sacred walls. My treatise advanced the idea that the prevalence of genitalia was evidence of syphilis in the Old World since the primary chancre would ordinarily disappear in time and secondary syphilis, that would appear much later, would not be connected. Since archeologists don't know anything about syphilis this treatise was accepted. That was 1962 and I was 28. As wisdom gradually seeped into my being, connected with age, I now and have for some time realized it was impotence that the priests were curing! Adjacent to the healing temple was the Temple of Aphrodite. Aphrodite was the Goddess of Love and the patroness of prostitutes. Teamwork counts! No wonder St. Paul was so exercised at the Corinthians!

Pride

When I was in grade 12 my mother wrote to her father and her twin sister about me. It wouldn't have been easy for her to write a letter like she did. She told them both that my marks were good and that I would be a good student at University. She asked them for financial help as she and my dad did not have the ability to help. My grandfather and my aunt responded with enough money to augment my summer earnings and the amount my family could provide. After the the first three years I was able to finish paying for my my medical degree classes more or less on my own. My mother was willing to risk her esteem for my sake! There was no other option for her. Later, in the same year that she wrote the letter, when I was still in Grade 12, I met my aunt in Winnipeg at a family gathering. She was a family doctor who practiced medicine and lived with a wealthy husband in Connecticut. I was glad to see her and take the opportunity to thank both her and my grandfather. When you live, as we did in a small town,and your dad is the station master, he may not make much money, but no one else in the town did either so you still are a family that rates. As my friend Ian says, "When we were growing up we didn't have much, but we didn't know there was much!" I felt poor for the first time in my life. We may have struggled, but in the society that was ours, we were never poor. Poverty is often relative!