WOOF! It’s been dog-days hot and way too quiet around here. Moving day was last Wednesday, now we have a surplus of empty rooms that echo when you walk through them. No more waking in the morning to a happy sound through the floor grates, little D1D2 chirping in her high chair.
And D1D1 isn’t here anymore to watch the 2019 Isle of Man TT with me.
I went on about how these are public streets with bumps and houses and stone walls and trees, you don’t want to fall off and hit “the furniture” as they call it, not doing 38-mile laps at an average speed of 130mph, clocking 200 in the straightaways, blah blah…
She’s 5. She just wants to see the riders zip by. I never got the feeling she was riveted by the running commentary.
In the newfound emptiness, I said to the bride the other day, “Why are we here?”
“What do you mean why are we here?”
“Babe, it’s not an existential question. Tell me why we’re here in this big empty house.”
“We live here.”
This has been going on for 48 years now, a conversation between a written-word brain and a math brain.
Pencil marks from the last four years. The record of D1D1 growing all the time.
Million-dollar days, free for the taking. All stashed away now in the brain bank.
The family came over yesterday evening, we grilled burgers and visited for a while. D1D1 brought drawings for us.
This one’s a map from their house to our house, so we can stay in touch. Note the burger and the ice cream cones. I suppose those are her stipulations for staying in touch?
Mark and Becky in Massachusetts sent me a note on the anniversary of the day we met last summer while camping in northern British Columbia. It was the day the Game Boy Killers were on the loose in the area. They’d shot a man for his car at the Stikene River crossing on the Stewart-Cassiar. This after murdering a young couple on the Alaska Highway.
That was a gorgeous lake we camped on that night. The place was deserted, except for Becky & Mark’s site, and mine.
The view from the road on the way in.
Late that evening. This is pretty far north… lots of light in July.
All these months after the cancer thing, I still get encouragement of the “you’re-tougher-than” sort, which is not at all the case. Last week, before moving day, I helped the next generation paint a few bedrooms in their new house. A day and a half of work did me in.
To my friend, Marc, in Pennsylvania, I’m tougher than Dollar Store sirloin. To Scott, in New Brunswick, Canada, tougher than boiled owl. Honestly, I’m just shot through and through, and have only lately realized it. My stamina has not even begun to come back.
I think I may have sabotaged myself in the spring, when I was so eager to get outdoors to fell trees and stack firewood. Four months later I’m still discovering what a toll chemo takes. You don’t realize it at the time but a little dab’ll do ya. It sure did me.
One good thing: my junkie veins are healing. That’s been only recently, within the last three weeks. It used to feel like I had lines of frozen peas under the skin up and down my arms. Hard little lumps at the infusion sites and the go-to veins for regular lab work.
There’s an untold number of punctures involved in a six-month course of treatment. Dunno what the lumps were. Scar tissue? Inflammation? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Anyway, they’re just about gone now, so something good must be happening.
My friends Vincent and Nic kindly toasted me from a watering hole in Kenya. Nic’s a writer, Vincent’s a professor of economics and university administrator in Nairobi.
Note Vincent’s brew, the Kenyan Tusker, so-named because, in 1923, a bull elephant killed the founder of the brewery, which is kind of cool. It goes without saying but, you know, you really need to pay close attention in a match that ends when the first player scores. Elephant, 1; hop-scented guy with big-game rifle and British colonial mustache, zip.
On my behalf last week, the bride located what may be the only Kenya-connected beer cooler in Rhode Island. They had six bottles.
She kindly left four for somebody else.
Remember H, one of my younger Phantom readers? He wrote to tell me he had graduated from elementary to middle school, and included this with his letter:
Speaking of the Phantom, I happened to see this old Valentine’s Day card in the loft of the storage shed last week, while busy taking things down for the move to the new house.
I used to make spoof cards every year for the bride and the girls.
This was the bride’s, for which I appropriated a cover from the Swedish comics I was writing for at the time. The inside page is a send-up of the Phantom origin myth, created in 1936 by Lee Falk, my esteemed predecessor on the daily and Sunday newspaper strips.
For those of you unfamiliar with the lore: A seafaring man, sole survivor of a pirate raid, washes up on a beach in Africa. He’s taken in by the Bandar pygmy tribe. On the skull of his father’s killer he swears to devote his life to fighting evil.
Years later, he’s mortally wounded. His Tarzan-like, jungle-boy son attends his death and takes custody of the skull ring. The son adopts the costume and the ring and the legend lives on. The Bandar hail him as the immortal Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Cannot Die.
This goes on for 21 generations, from 1536 until the present day.
Eh, so I changed the words a bit, artistic license…
So that’s what’s going on here, a whole lot of not much. In the larger world, of course, momentous events. Godspeed to Operation Warp Speed, albeit brought to you by the proud sponsors of Operation It’s A Hoax.
Hopefully you & yours are well and haven’t come down with the plague, or been roughed up by the secret police as they dominate the dystopian battlespace.
Until next time, enjoy the dog days of 2020, all.
Tony DePaul, July 27, 2020, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
Maybe the Valentine’s Day cards should make a comeback!! I still have all of the ones you gave me!
Maybe… But that would take planning. All I plan lately are my naps.
OMG, I’m not tough at all. My first remarks to my wife when they had me stand up from the bed to take a few steps post-cancer-surgery were “I think they killed me, I’m just not quite dead yet”.
Yeah, but you took that step, big guy.
Hi Tony,
You may not have the same stamina you once had but you’ve still got a thinking mind expressed through your sense of humor. Good to hear from you – always a good read.
Isle of Man TT is just about the craziest , most skillful riders I’ve ever seen. Cancelled this year I’ve read. And they shut the whole island down?
Boiled owl? One can not help but wonder if anyone has ever tried to eat boiled owl?
Cute story about the Tusker beer. And again in the amusement part of my brain, what label might the beer have worn if the brewery owner was done in by a jealous husband?
Recovery, from many things, takes a lot of time. For old gents used to expending any or all amounts of energy to complete a task, and now finding we have limits, it requires a new attitude. Often, if patient and careful, we make progress over the years. And of course, days will vary – nothing is linear.
Take care,
Dennis
In another life, I’d love to have the talent to race the TT. Assuming I top out at 5 feet 6, around 140 pounds.
I almost feel a little guilty about paying the race any attention at all. The speeds are so fast, everything’s running right at the limits of the materials. It’s almost a blood sport. Better to have raced it in the 1920s when you’d see a guy riding along with a cigarette hanging off his lip.
Remember that year…? When was it? A decade or more ago? Six riders killed? Terrible.
Checking facts via electronic means, rather than my own very foggy memory: 1970 saw 6 rider fatalities. 2005 saw 3 rider fatalities along with one marshal in June. September of that same year saw 6 riders and one bystander. That seems like a high price for a sport.
Oh wow, you got the Tusker after all! Now that’s just the first step to you coming to ride in Africa. We’ll make this happen yet. I loved the Phantom Valentine card to Pam!
Possible, I guess. In a year I can’t see yet.
Air Canada flies motorcycle freight to Casablanca out of Montreal. You and Nic can plan me a route into Nairobi.
Indirect, not right across the Sahara, thanks. Think coastal breezes.
Haha! Sheila, you’re wonderful! I laughed out loud at every line.
Duano, Jim, I’ll take my mickey mouse blood cancer any day. I continue to be completely intimidated by the regimens you guys endured. You’re tougher than, you know, Dollar Store sirloin, boiled owl, etc.
Brad! Bonneville Salt Flats this year? That’s an iron piggy ride, your opportunity to save me from breaking my neck riding the piglet on the MABDR. I’ll need to buy a straw cowboy hat, I suppose. The one I have is black wool, good for heatstroke in the desert.
CCjon, old traveling pal, take it easy on that Rocket rig. That’s awesome horsepower just a twist away.
Thanks for reading, all.
Why are we still here…. riding motorcycles for over a half century… should be taking a dirt nap by now… some days a split second made the difference… yet here we are… trying to figure it all out… appreciative to be able to still ask the question. Thinking about all the close calls, the brushes with death we have had over the years, no small miracle we are here today to ask… what is the purpose of my existence?
Daily the answer changes, though to be better than I was yesterday is a reoccurring dream. Now in my seventy-fifth year, there is a lot of learning and growing yet to be. No time to sit back and reflect, there are places to go, things to see. Time for resting is when we are old. Today, let’s go…
I feel for you. No more than I had, I still haven’t recovered from cancer treatment. Of course, I’m still under the influence of androgen deprivation therapy. That’s supposed to start winding down this winter. Sunday we climbed the berm that lines our local flood control canal so we could walk on the top of the dike and it just about did me in. In the days PC, I wouldn’t even have breathed hard. And as I’ve said, my treatment was nothing compared to yours. Thank goodness, working on my model railroad doesn’t demand much physical activity. Take care.
Good to hear from you. Life is a real trip, isn’t it? Down here in one of this week’s epi-centers, quarantine for me is in day 140 with no end in sight. Masks R’ Us. Love ya, brother.
We have this “culture” of toughness, you know? Kickass, and all that. That’s great rhetoric and all, but the truth is cancer kicks you around and nearly kills you – or it DOES kill you. But if you come out on the other end, you’re as weak as a baby and have the stamina of a hundred-year-old person. And is not like bouncing back from the flu, the treatments take it out of you for a long time. You figure that out about the third time you overdo it doing something, and it takes a week to recover from that manly moment.
I have never been so tired and so weak, and lacked stamina after my cancer treatment. It knocked me out for six months, and it was another six months additional before I got back to 90%. You never get it fully back to 100. But 90% is better than being in the dirt, so you adapt and adjust! Patience and time…..
Why are we here? It’s Musical Chairs and the music stopped.
Maybe it’s Hotel California. I’m not sure we can ever leave our elderly quarantine.
Woodstock to here makes little sense as a trajectory.
I’m open to armchair adventures, though