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The Neverending Story

So: I almost died again. That’s happened before, but this time was an even closer call. And another child of mine saved my life.

This is part of my continuing memoir about health issues. I thought I was done with this story, and even titled the previous entry “This Might Be the End.” But it wasn’t.

So think of this as the post-credits sequence.

This dispatch might have a few moments that are not for the squeamish. In fact, maybe I need to post a

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: The account that follows includes a lot of gross stuff. Though I’m embarrassed to share this, I feel compelled to do so, since this whole memoir is about learning to listen to our bodies, even at their most loathsome moments. Keep a puke bucket handy.

OK, to backtrack:

Eight years ago, I had knee-replacement surgery. When I awoke in the recovery room, I could tell something was different. I was numb below the waist. Nurses assured me that this would pass, but after a day, not much was passing. I couldn’t urinate, or at least not much.

I was sent home with a catheter and with a schedule of home visits by nurses. Thus began a ballet of take it out / put it back in / take it out / put it back in.

With the catheter out, I felt an overwhelming need to pee, but could not. All the catheter in’n’out introduced an infection.

I was living alone, but my ex-wife dropped in once a day to check on me, usually with one of our boys in tow. She found me once pasted to my sheets by sweat, with my teeth chattering. It was a horrible, delirious fever. She wanted me to call an ambulance but I refused.

The next time I looked up, my daughter Sarah was there. Twenty-four hours had passed but it’s as if I’d blacked out. She’d come up from Brooklyn and finally got me to the hospital and surgery and eventually to the world of self catheterization.

Lifesaver No. 1: Sarah McKeen

Sarah McKeen and husband David Tracy

That was my first sepsis experience. I had another such experience two years later, at Travis’s baseball camp.

Other times, I felt the tingles of sepsis brain fog at the back of my skull. I called my primary care physician, Dr Chu, who immediately prescribed the antibiotic to knock things out.

Catheterization was just part of my life and the process became so much a part of my routine that I could do it in my sleep. Unfortunately, I might’ve done that a couple of times. I’d be halfway through the procedure when, all of a sudden, I realized I had not put on my gloves. Or that I had not swabbed Mr Happy sufficiently before sending my tubing up my schwanz.

My medical supply company didn’t send everything I needed to self-cath, so I had to order a few other supplies. I ordered the same gloves used at my doctor’s office.

Son Jackson pointed to a line on the packaging of the gloves that noted that they were not sterile.

And so now we’re more-or-less caught up.

Savannah and her husband had moved nearby and had just welcomed their third child, Thomas, to the world just a week before my near-death.

Travis was graduating college and immediately starting a job with a global software firm an hour away from my home.

Charley was home for his final summer vacation and would finish his degree the next year.

By this point, Jackson had been living with me full time for six years. I’d tried to keep life simple by renting houses, but the owners always ended up selling out from under us. So I finally gave in and bought a house – a new house (built in 1880) by New England standards, and just right for the two of us.

I’d hosted Travis’s graduation party and Savannah had just birthed grandson Thomas when I began to feel a bit wookety.

I spent a Sunday on the couch, watching old movies. I was a Boy Scout, so I’m always prepared. I kept a saucepan on the floor in case I needed to vomit.

Still miserable at the end of the night, I trudged up to my bedroom, self-cathed, then gobbled a gummie and hit the sack.

Next day, not much change. The nausea was worse and I coated the saucepan with my bile.

Then, early evening: I felt a stirring in my gut. Jackson was upstairs. He had two rooms of the house: his bedroom and a game room and an overlarge closet (bigger than some bedrooms I’ve had), which he turned into a soundproofed recording studio. ‘Tis there where he creates the music he releases to the world under his stage name, beenz.

(To hear his album Look Alive, click here. You can also order the CD on this site.)

So I hear him upstairs and he sounds occupied, talking to someone on his headphones.

That stirring!

So I try to get up off the couch, but can’t. I have no strength. I sense my gut setting off its alarms, so I do the only thing I can do – I roll off the couch and start crawling, hands and knees, to the bathroom.

Jackson never uses this bathroom. He’s in command of the upstairs bathroom, usually littered with used towels and overflowing garbage cans. I rarely venture in there.

My bathroom, off the kitchen, is as immaculate as I can make it. It has a shower, the washer and dryer, and the usual stuff including that which I most need at that moment: a toilet.

I don’t make it.

I still can’t stand up. When I reach the bathroom, I try to grasp the sink and pull myself to a sitting position, to no avail.

And here it comes.

As awful as it was, I took solace in this fact: at least it was my feces. If I’m trapped on the floor of the bathroom with excrement leaking onto my body and clothing, at least it was mine and not somebody else’s.

(Cue Eric Idle)

And then it happened again.

And again.

Throughout this, I was wrestling with my clothing, hoping to be able to pull myself up to the toilet. But the sink didn’t help, the doorknob didn’t help and the toilet didn’t help.

But then a weird thing happened: I time traveled.

I lay there on the floor, on top of the bathroom rug, feces all around me. For the next hour – or so it seemed – I was a child again.

When I was a little boy living in Germany, I would wake in the night sometimes and go announce to my parents that I was sick. After checking me out and pronouncing me okay, my parents told me to lie down and see it my urge to vomit passed.

So I would curl up on the little green bath rug and sleep the rest of the night there. Both parents are gone, so don’t call the Department of Children and Families, you busybodies of the 21st Century. As a matter of fact, sleeping there on the little green rug for the rest of the night was tremendously comforting.

Several decades later there I was on another bathroom floor, on another bathroom rug. I’d come full circle.

Maybe this is how it ends, I thought. Here I was, pinned to the floor by the cruelty of gravity, awash in my own waste.

After an hour or so, I made another effort to pull myself up. I was halfway to a standing position when I fell again, this time slamming into the shower door. Thank God it didn’t shatter.

Still on hands and knees, I reached out of the bathroom to the kitchen cabinet where the paper towels were stored. I began cleaning my foul waste from the floor, aware that Attack Number 4 could occur at any instant.

I was weak, and I couldn’t think. I recognized my sepsis brain fog and knew I was in big trouble.

Then came the thundering hooves of Jackson McKeen down the stairs, then I heard him on the other side of the door: “Dad, what’s wrong?”

He’s not psychic, far as I can tell. It’s just that – our grossness alert is still in effect – the pungent aroma emanating from the bathroom had reached his upstairs lair.

“I’m okay,” I lied. “I’ve made a mess in here. I’m going to clean it up, then I think I’ll go to bed early.”

That was my plan: somehow I’d sleep this off.

“Bullshit!” he shouted. “You’re going to the hospital.”

“No, I’m okay. Just let me rest a little, and clean this up. I don’t need the hospital.”

“You’re an idiot,” he said. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

He was right and I knew it. I would later recount this story to my brother, a physician, and he said: “You don’t exhibit good judgment when it comes to your own health. Jackson is your better angel.”

I wonder why that is, after all I’ve been through. But my brother was right.

I acquiesced to Jackson. “Okay,” I told Jackson, “but grab me a couple garbage bags and put them outside the door, then leave the room. I can’t leave the bathroom like this.”

“Fuck the bathroom,” he said.

“Just let me clean this some,” I said, “or I won’t go to the hospital.”

“Idiot!” he said again.

“You can help by going upstairs and getting me some clean clothes to wear.”

So I set to work cleaning up the befouled bathroom. I couldn’t stand upright, but managed to somehow get my loathsome bod into the shower stall, where I used the spray nozzle to remove waste from my legs. I had to revert to a crawl when I was done, because even if I had been able to assume a standing position, I worried I would fall again.

Jackson had gotten me a clean pair of jeans and my lucky hospital shirt. This was the shirt I’d worn to the hospital for every one of my surgeries, a tribute to Hunter S Thompson. On the front, in gonzo script, it read, “Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die.”

I hope the shirt would work its charms again.

I closed the bathroom door. “Do not go in there,” I said. “I will give it a thorough cleaning when I get home.”

Or if, I thought.

I still could not stand upright, so I was a human jackknife as he got me to his car. I walked hunched over and it took every ounce of strength to fold myself into the passenger seat.

On the way there, I asked him to be my interpreter. “I can’t form sentences,” I told him. “You need to be my advocate.”

Why resist the emergency room?

Partly, I always wonder if my illness is more important than a gunshot wound or an automobile accident.

Partly, I remember an emergency room visit a couple years before. I spent 8-10 hours on a gurney in a hallway of the emergency suite, listening to the screams of an elderly (i.e., my age) man who could not move his bowels.

Fuck! Fuck me! For hours and hours.

I was ready to grab an ice cream scoop and dig it out of him.

Overcrowded emergency rooms are nothing new. But when Jackson got me to South Shore Hospital that night, I was surprised by how quickly I moved through the system. The machinery was well-oiled.

Even at these moments, I could not stop being me. When I was finally taken to a private room in the suite, I was assigned the proverbial pretty nurse. I wanted to ask, “Excuse me, but shouldn’t you be selling poppies from a tray?”

But I did not.

My chronic dehydration caused a lot of problems. My veins had largely collapsed, so it took six or seven sticks before we finally got an IV going. Allie, the pretty nurse, was being helped by an aide who eventually ended up tapping a vein on the inside of my elbow.

I was dying of thirst. For once in my life, I craved water, but I was told no fluids until any tests a doctor ordered had been conducted.

I was there all night, delirious, slipping in and out of consciousness. Jackson expertly described all of my health issues from the previous decade up through the bathroom floor that evening. I faded in and out, but every time I looked up, there he was: sitting on the floor against the wall and if he slept, I never saw it.

Jackson’n’Me: The Early Years

Lifesaver No. 2: Jackson McKeen

After spending the next day in an observation suite, I was given a private room when one came available. Turns out it was on the dementia ward.

I was still unable to function. I couldn’t stand or walk. I was catheterized with a Foley catheter – that’s the one with a balloon that inflates inside – and had to use a bedpan. It was still foul. All I can say is that I will never eat Jell-O Chocolate Pudding again.

Turns out I was the victim of a double whammy. I had sepsis, but I also had something the nurses nicknamed C-diff, which is short for Clostridioides difficile. The Centers for Disease Control define it as “a highly contagious bacterium that infects the large intestine, causing severe, watery diarrhea and painful colon inflammation (colitis). It typically occurs when recent antibiotic use disrupts the gut’s healthy bacteria, allowing C-diff to overgrow and release damaging toxins.”

So I was getting it from both ends. I had been on a couple of antibiotics in recent weeks and that seeded my problems.

None of my other issues went away. The doctors took me off Gabapentin – probably trying to minimize my meds during my hospital stay. The neuropathy pain was off the charts and I could only sleep after plunging my tootsies into the ice-water bucket provided by the nurses.

Jackson with brother Travis on Travis’s graduation day

My James Brown fever (I wake up! In a cold sweat! Unh!) lasted three days. When my teeth weren’t chattering, I was a hunka hunka burning love. I got to 102 degrees, if memory serves.

I had a headache that lasted three days. I lost my appetite. I had to learn to walk again, to come to a full stand without crumpling into a heap on the floor.

Within a few days, I was able to get to the toilet on my own (with the help of a walker).

It took over a week, but finally I was physically able to be discharged.

It sounds benign, but being in a hospital bed that long damages the psyche. I was still in my mental pea-soup and so could not read or concentrate. Jackson came to see me and served as my translator. The other boys also visited.

Savannah, with her newborn, did not visit. I did not realize how contagious C-diff could be.

She’s a nurse, so when I told her I had something I never heard of called C-diff, she texted back, “Oh shit.” As I recounted my evening from the bathroom floor and how, if not for Jackson, my plan was to crawl upstairs to sleep-off my latest infection, she texted back, “You would not have woken up.”

That made me realize how close I had come. And I kept hearing my brother’s words in my noggin: “You don’t exhibit good judgment when it comes to your own health.”

So I made it home after more than a week.

I was weak and couldn’t – still can’t – do more than one thing a day. The Visiting Nurses Association checks on me every other day. We’re trying to find a better set of supplies for my daily cathing. We’ve changed some other medications.

It’s good to have a great primary-care physician in my life. Though I’m sure she’s not proud of it, Sofia Chu knows the ins’n’outs of this abandoned reptile carcass of mine.

I was lucky to be under the care of such fine nurses and physicians. Yes, I did send a thank-you card as a matter of fact

So I hope I’m on my way back.

Don’t be like me. Please use good judgment with your health.

Welcome, my friends, to the story that never ends.

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Stopping By Woods for 9,861 Evenings

Henry David Thoreau was a rank amateur, to hear Christopher Knight tell it.

Sure, Thoreau spent some fine time alone in his cabin by Walden Pond, but he still allowed himself human contact. He’d hit up some friends for dinner now and then. So yeah, in Walden he painted a picture of himself “as solitary as a dervish in the desert” for his two years at the pond.

Whose woods these are, I think I know. I ought to — it’s my backyard.

Hold my beer.

Knight was on total radio silence with humanity for 27 years. Top that, Hank!

Knight was on a drive in central Maine and when his car ran out of gas, he got out and walked into the woods.

Police caught up with him nearly three decades later and in all of that time, Knight told investigators he spoke only one word (“Hi”), when he happened to run into a hiker.

It’s unclear why Knight did all of this. Michael Finkel spends most of his book, The Stranger in the Woods (Knopf, $24.95) trying to get an answer, but the reality is out of his reach, still planted somewhere in Knight’s noggin.

Knight’s family was mildly reclusive, but functional. By all accounts, it was a loving family, just not touch feely, as Knight says. Though all the residents of the area where Knight camped called him “The North Pond Hermit,” Knight disdained that word. He was a stoic, he said, in the classic sense.

I would’ve learned none of this had not Finkel’s book hit me in the nose.

I was reaching for a book off the top shelf in my office and I dislodged The Stranger in the Woods. It caromed off my nose and landed on the floor. I picked it up.

As far as I could recall, I’d never seen this book, had no idea how I got it. But I opened it, read the first sentence, and did not stop until I was finished with the story.

I wonder how the book — published in 2017 — got on my shelf.

I was aware of Finkel. I read his earlier book, True Story, and knew that several years ago he was dismissed from the New York Times for creating a composite character in a story on modern-day slavery in Africa. 

When the whistle was blown on that story and the editors sent Finkel packing, he learned that a murderer in Oregon had been operating under the name Michael Finkel. The unraveling of that man’s story was the basis of True Story, later turned into a film with Jonah Hill as Finkel and James Franco as the killer.

I’d liked True Story simply because Finkel was so readable. I often talk about narrative velocity in class and Finkel writes like an X-15.

(I also trusted him. He spent much of True Story apologizing and admitting his shame and remorse. I gave him a chance, and the rest of True Story won me over.)

Knight’s story is still a mystery. Why, at age 20, did he walk into the woods. He hadn’t planned to. He had nothing with him — no clothes, no camping gear. To live, he stole.

He was a polite burglar. He never trashed the homes he entered. He didn’t take the usual valuables — electronics, jewelry, etc. He’d take a can of tuna from a stack of cans in the cupboard. He’d just take one. He might take a tarp out of a shed.

He earned the Hermit nickname early on, and he hated it. He also hated it when people began putting bags of food and supplies on the doorknobs of their cabins. He didn’t want charity.

A lot of those cabins were for weekend or summer use, so they were often empty. Still, Knight never slept in one. He slept outside for 27 years. Did I mentioned that this was in Maine, where they have significant winters.

Click here to order.

Yet he never built a campfire in the boulder-shaded home he set up. He stole a propane stove and that was all he had for cooking. He didn’t use it for heat.

When police finally caught up with him — he was spotted on the live feed from a video camera at a camping complex — he asked that his family not be contacted. He had been raised right, he told the cops. He knew that stealing was wrong and he did not want to bring shame to his family.

The story is fascinating. We all make choices. Knight’s was unusual, but you get the sense it was, in some strange way, the right decision for him.

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This Might Be the End

I don’t think this story will ever end — at least not until I end. 

Not until I …. shuffle off the mortal coil . . . get deleted . . .  eat weeds by the roots . . . get carried away by angels . . . become a null parrot . . . bid adieu to Earthy scenes . . . change a fleeting world to an immortal rest . . . depart from this in hope of a better life . . . take the big sleep . . . cancel my subscription.

And those are just a few euphemisms for death.  (When I was writing Everybody Had an Ocean, which is about rock’n’roll stars in the 1960s, I knew there’d be a lot of fucking in the book. To avoid overuse of the Fuck Word, I wanted euphemisms for the act. My pal Sarah Kess helped me put together a list of more than a hundred such, and that list was so much more fun than this death list. My favorite was “crashing the custard truck.”)

I could go to my eternal reward later this afternoon. Or I might stick around for thirty more years. Of my parents and grandparents, four out of six made it deep into their nineties. 

You never know.

So, back to the point: where and when does this end?

How about here? This may be a good stopping point. 

(Click for “The End” by the Doors.)

I still have neuropathy. The primary medication for this is Gabapentin. I take the maximum amount, but the neuropathy does not go away. If I stop taking those pills, the pain is significantly worse. 

So I keep taking Gabapentin because it lessens the pain.

What helps more is the mushroom supplement I put in my coffee, and cannabis, whether in tincture form in coffee, or gummies. I dislike smoking, but will burn one down in a pinch.

Cannabis gummies give me terrific sleep. When I catheterize before bedtime and take a gummy, I sleep through the night. I’m not sure I’ve done that regularly since my footie-pajama days.

Without gummies and / or Gabapentin, the neuropathy is sometimes so bad that it wakes me. If I’m having an onset before hitting the sack, it can keep me up for hours.

I describe this neuropathy sensation as if “I’m walking on your feet.”

I never know where my feet are going to go. I have no control. 

I warn students about my neuropathy at the beginning of each semester. I feel they deserve a warning and to not think I’m just lazy. I tell them I may sit down, which is something they’re probably not used to in large lecture classes. But standing too long, with the neuropathy, feels like dancing on nails.

I also warn them that I walk like a drunk, but that I’m not drunk. Again, I’m never sure where my feet are going next.

This can’t be helped. 

(For the record, I don’t drink much anymore. I have maybe 3-4 beers a month, perhaps the most startling thing my friends note about my health issues of the last few years.) 

This all started due to ass cancer. So perhaps you wonder about the state of my ass.

It’s fine; thank you for asking. 

It’s not a perfect ass, but after what it’s been through, a little gastric eccentricity now and then is to be expected.

I think back on my former gastric horror shows and think of those events as masterpieces of CGI. That couldn’t have really happened, could it? No body could produce that much foul waste, could it? Those scenes had to be special effects, right?

I still have problems with the southerly orafice now and then. Fortunately, none of these incidents have turned into a public spectacle, like the train station incident years ago. Knocketh thee on wood, please.

When I go someplace new, I immediately locate the restroom for possible emergency use. I never go anywhere without crafting a contigency plan. I have changes of clothes in my car and in my office. At work I store these emergency clothes, along with old research papers, in my refrigerator. Not sure why I do that, but I do.

This fecal fear means I limit my activities sometime and pass up doing things a normal-assed person might want to do — things that an abnormally-assed person like me might fear to do.

But I have to put my ass first if I want to avoid disaster.

That’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say.

I am this way because I wanted to stay alive. This is the price I pay, so I accept it.

Every couple of weeks I fall. These falls happen at the strangest times. The most recent one, last Sunday, came after I walked into my house. I didn’t trip on a cat toy or hook my shoe on the threshhold. 

I just fuckin’ fell.

One or two of my boys have been with me when these falls happen. It’s still kind of freaky to us all. It’s only happened a few times in a public place. Usually, it’s inside the house or in the driveway.

It’s astonishing that these little dudes, whose diapers it seems I was changing just two days ago, have turned into big, hulking men, helping their father to stand. 

Life, it is short.

Jackson thinks my falls are related to dehydration. I’m not sure. I should drink much more water than I do — he’s right about that. But more water means more pee and that introduces other sorts of issues.

In addition to “my urologist,” I have “my neurologist.” The falls could be related to something in my melon, but so far no evidence of that.

You heard right. I’ve added a neurologist and an allergist to my Rolodex of medical professionals.

Here’s why:

In addition to the falling, I started getting the shakes. I couldn’t open jars or even the boys’ juice packets. I could not write by hand.

A couple of times my right hand shook so hard in lecture that I held it behind my back so my students wouldn’t see.

On top of the shakes, I began to have memory issues.

I was being interviewed for a Bob Dylan podcast a few years back when, right in the middle of analyzing one of his songs, the floor fell out from under me. 

I could not think of the next word I planned to say. I could say other words. 

I told the host, “I don’t know what’s happening.” Also: “This is really embarrassing.” Lots of silence coming from me. 

The host, Rockin’ Rob Kelly of Pod Dylan, tried to coax me through. “Just take your time,” he said. “Relax.” 

He got me through it. This emptiness lasted a full minute — absolutely no idea how to continue my thought.

Eventually words came back to me and we finished the interview. Rob edited my brain malfunction from the recording and when I listened to it — which I did, because I wanted to know if I sounded weirder after “the incident” — it sounded great. I made sense as I analyzed one of my favorite weird basement-tape Dylan songs, “Clothes Line Saga.”

As I listened to the podcast, I couldn’t tell when my brain left the room. I sounded somewhat lucid, considering it was me.

But that scared me.

Then the same thing happened in class, and that was terrifying.

I jabber for a living. Talking is what I do. And in one school year, I had an incident in the fall semester, then an incident in the spring semester. In both cases, it happened in a lecture: my non-stop yapping suddenly stopped.

Both of these incidents happened in my History and Principles of  Journalism class, a large lecture, with usually between eighty and a hundred students. 

Neither brain malfunction lasted as long as the podcast incident. Maybe thirty seconds, though it could have been shorter. Maybe the students mistook it for a dramatic pause, not realizing the panic inside my skull. When your brain decides to hop a psychic freight, you’re unable to correctly judge the passage of time.

Those incidents worried me and I asked Sofia Chu, my primary-care physician, if she would recommend a neurologist, and she did.

I spent a summer shuttling to different members of a neurology practice. The first session had some testing. The second session was long — four hours of testing and being interviewed. We also played some memory games.

I have to admit: the tests were exhausting. I was mostly embarrassed by my issues with short-term memory.

My mother had Parkinson’s. My sister has Parkinson’s, as do several friends. I feared that was my problem, but after some initial concern, turns out I don’t yet have it. I have a “slight cognitive malfunction,” which, my neurologist assures me, everyone gets at my age.

To this, I offer a big whew.

However, it’s given the boys ammunition. 

“Damn,” I say, coming home from he grocery. “I forgot to get detergent.”

“Are you having another slight cognitive malfunction, Dad?”

It’s Charley who likes to tease me. I ask for help with some task — folding laundry, for example — and when the job doesn’t get done in sufficient time, I take issue.

“Are you going to fold this laundry or are you going to make your poor ol’ cancerous dad do it?”

“You’re cured,” Charley says. “Your cancer is gone and your ass is fixed.”

Then he goes ahead and folds the laundry.

My pain migrates. One day my left forearm hurts to all hell, then the next day it’s my right shoulder and the next day my left knee.

I can’t figure that out.

About two years ago, I began having rashes and these too migrated. My left arm would be clear, but the right arm looks like the lunar surface.

One day, I have a huge bump at my temple. Looks  like I’ve been in a prize fight. The next day I wake up and the painful bump is on my lips, which are swollen and look like boiled frankfurters.

I went to see a dermatologist and before he could take a look at my regular skin eruption, he was digging a chunk out of my arm. I had to come back two weeks later so he could get more of my arm for a second biopsy. 

The thing probably would turn into skin cancer, he said,  but he caught it in time.

He put me on a course of medication and sent me to an allergist. The allergist couldn’t figure out what it was that I was allergic to, but she gave me long-term medicine that keeps the skin eruptions at bay.

So long, hot-dog lips.

Jackson serves as my health-and-wellness conscience. He has lived with me full-time for about six years. I tell friends, “Well, somebody has to find the body.”

He’s very concerned for my health. He’s a slob in many ways and perhaps that’s not entirely his fault. I suspect it’s genetic.

But he does do some things: he cooks a couple of nights a week, he does the lion’s share of the mowing, and he keeps the main part of the house clear of his stuff. He realizes that tripping on his gnarly Crocs left in the hallway would bring about one of my falls.

What he does best: constant harassment about my water consumption, which is, in his view, inadequate in the extreme.

He’s right. To remind me of my needs, I have a splendid new T-shirt with this printed on it:

DRINK WATER

LOVE HARD

FIGHT RACISM

To order this cool shirt for your own bad self, click here.

Chemo and radiation battered me and so my immune system was shot to shit. 

I’ve worked in Boston for a decade and a half, and was a proud user of public transportation.  

But then I began to get spooked. Transit riders would sneeze, slinging their goo across the subway car. I have no time for such hijinks. 

I also tired of being pressed together with others, in a mass-grope on the trolleys that run through campus. During my subway trips, I’d amuse myself by watching the snot trails on the faces of my fellow passegers.

Being immuno-compromised and in such proximity to the germs and expectorations of others was not a good combination.

So I began driving to work — in the worst driving city in the country. 

In the Marco Polo Guide to Boston, the “Driving in Boston” section reads, in its entirety, “Don’t.” In another section, the guide advises tourists who insist on renting a car to go ahead, but to be sure to leave it in the rental-car lot at the airport.

It is a difficult city for driving. They don’t call the locals Massholes for nothing. Driving to work is truly a contact sport. It’s kind of like watching Death Race 2000 unfurl on your windshield twice a day.

My carbon footprint might be the equivalent of a pacyderm’s but being solo in a car allows me to tend to all of these sudden issues — urinary, gastric, mental — when, on public transportation, I might be trapped.

Still: I miss commuting to work by ferry. There’s nothing quite like approaching Boston from the water.

I’ve always been a believer in therapy, but I had not gone to see a therapist regularly in many years. After my wife moved out and the horrifying process of divorce was under way, I decided it was time to see someone.

She became one of the most important people in my life. I ended up meeting with her weekly for six years or so. 

At the start, we picked through the remains of the second marriage and rather swiftly I began to feel at peace about the end of all that. Then we settled into multi-year sessions devoted to parenthood and the possibility of romantic love coming into my life again.

We kept talking. We finally came to mutual agreement that things were much improved — thanks to therapy and anti-depressants — and so we could end our sessions. She told me she was always there if I needed her. 

I haven’t called. I’ve been tempted, but mostly just to get on the horn and say, “Waaasssss uuuup?”

I’m not going to compromise my therapy sessions, but I will say that there was great value in what she said about helping my children through the post-divorce years and the aftermath of trauma. 

Childhood is anguish and suffering. Other children are cruel. Adolescence devours lost dreams. 

I had a pretty demanding job, but I was never off. 

My real job was at home, and I built my life around the boys. I’d get them on the weekends, so there was no time for a social life. That was okay with me; I so valued my time with them.

After a while, Jackson came to live with me full time, so my life was rich and also a challenge. Mostly, I struggled with trying to get this stubborn boy to do his homework and to consume the meals I worked so hard to prepare.

My failure rate was high with those tasks, and others. I will say he has tremendous hygiene and has excellent manners (in situations that do not involve his immediate family).

My life was a whirlwind of commuting, work, baseball and football games, coaching basketball (Charley’s town-league team), and chaufeuring the boys around the South Shore. 

That was our life:  Movies. Red Sox. Game Stop. Fish sandwiches at the Mill Wharf. Friends. Sleepovers. And in the summer: Road trips!

Savannah had moved away to Florida, so the house was all-male. Travis captained the high school baseball team, Charley captained the football team and often, after games, the house carried the fragrance of Essence du Athletic Sock.

I made a lot of pancakes and a lot of pizza. In my defense I also made chicken with sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese, manicotti Florentine and New England Boiled Dinner.

I’d apologize for the sameness of my life each week when I saw my therapist. 

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” I’d start. 

For some reason — probably because it’s what I’ve done all my life — I framed my weekly accounts into pithy stories, as if it was my job to entertain my therapist.

But after a few years of therapy, a few years of a certain kind of sameness, I began asking her: “Am I really living or am I just waiting to die?”

Instead of resorting to the well-what-do-you-think cop-out, we would explore the question.

Through dating apps, I’d met a variety of fantastic women. Several have become treasured and terrific friends. 

Alas, I was no one’s Mister Wonderful.

And how could I be? I asked my therapist. I’m a mess, and came pre-loaded with a list of health issues that that would serve as a date-killer if I was asked, “How have you been?”

I’d have to tell the truth. That’s just the way I roll. So who would want to wake up with Mister Has-Bowel-Issues  every day?

When I wrote one of my dating profiles, I said that I was “pre-cancered,” which I thought might get that stuff out of the way. 

One of my former girlfriends saw my profile and said I was under-selling myself. She got my password, hijacked my profile, and sang my praises. 

I got a lot of responses from that — people interested in what she said, not interested so much in me.

I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. Maybe the women I’ve met through these dating apps see me as friend material, not boyfriend material. (Though the term “boyfriend” at my age seems to be stretching it. I suppose I’d be a geezerfriend.)

Is that a bad thing? To be a friend? I say no. I’ve never had too many friends.

I have loved many intelligent, beautiful and hilarious women. Sometimes, I can’t believe I’ve had the life I’ve led. These women have given me a tremendous highlight reel. I’ve remained friends with most all of them.

So, here I am. Maybe I need to face it: the romantic part of my life is probably over.

That could change, but I’m okay if it doesn’t..

Years ago, when I lived alone in Florida, I’d often wake at 4 or 5 in the morning and be unable to return to sleep. I’d get out of bed and go to my home office and listen to music, drink coffee and read

Often, the record I’d listen to was World Gone Wrong by Bob Dylan. He performs some traditional country blues, including the title song (originally known as “The World is Going Wrong”) by the Mississippi Shieks. 

That album contains one of Bob’s greatest performances. “Delia” is one of the saddest songs I know and Dylan has never sounded more moving, when he sings the song’s refrain: “All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I have lost a lot of friends in the last couple of years.

There was my friend of longest duration, Lucia. I met her when I was 16 or 17 and she was a worldly woman, about five years older. She and her roommate Kathie and I were inseparable for a few years. We attended our first Bob Dylan concert together.

Later in life, Lucia lived with her husband in a house overlooking the bay in Pensacola. Despite the six-hour drive from my home in Gainesville, I’d frequently go there for weekends. It was my refuge.

One of my few acts of semi-heroism occured there. One of Lucia’s friends came to visit and brought along one of her pals. We chatted and had some drinks, then Lucia and her husband went to bed. 

Marcia and Susy and I went down to the dock. Susy stripped down to her skivvies and jumped into the bay without checking the water. She hit a submerged boulder and fractured her skull. 

I got her out of the water and carried her up the steep slope — really a cliff, which brought to mind  The Guns of Navarone. Trekking up the slope was  a difficult task even when not carrying a grown woman. 

I got her to the emergency room. She had to stay in the hospital, but I was back at the house before Lucia woke up. She was startled to hear of all the drama that occurred while she slumbered.

Susy thinks I saved her life. As I see it, I just transported her to the hospital. But if she thinks of me as her hero, I’ll take that.

Lucia had a worn leather couch in her living room. You could lie there and watch the bay, down the embankment, and listen for the sounds of the water and the cars on the Scenic Highway (its real name). She called that leather couch “The Spaceship,” because once you laid down, you went on a trip to dreamland. As a guy whose never had much luck taking naps, it was revelatory.

I miss Lucia. I wish I could take another ride on the Spaceship.

Then there was Tom. I have an excellent older brother, but Tom became an auxiliary brother. He was about 10 years older and had had many lives. He co-wrote some songs with Jimmy Buffett, had published a half-dozen novels, and collaborated on two unfinished screenplays with Hunter Thompson. 

I owe two books to Tom: meeting him and interviewing him enriched my biography of Thompson, Outlaw Journalist, and he bequeathed to me Thompson’s idea for the book that became Mile Marker Zero.

Tom’d lived in Key West in the 1970s and knew the cast of characters — writers Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison, painter Russell Chatham and actor Margot Kidder.

Tom said he was too close to the material write the story of that creative and carnal community, so he entrusted the story to me.

But beyond that, he invited me in to his creative, multi-faceted world.

His death was sudden to so many of his friends. No one knew he was sick. He was unselfish and stoic to the end.

And now Jim and Russell and Margot are also gone.

Then there’s Jon. He was another friend of long duration. I saw him at work most days for 25 years. In addition to the usual friend exploits of beer and chicken wings and baseball and football, he served as a great role model.

Jon was a lot of things, but to me he served as an ideal of what a father should be. I saw his example and tried to follow it.

When I heard of his death, it was a stunning blow. Jackson berated me for not flying to Florida for the funeral, but I didn’t think I could hold it together. The last thing his family would want was a blubbering man in the back pew.

And there were others — Bill the painter, for example. He was a man of great talent and enthusiasms. We would pass a note online most every day. He was another father I deeply admired.

And Mike, a pal from 25 years of going to football games together. 

And Meredith, a student who became a great friend, killed in an accident long before her time.

I was talking with my friend Wayne today. He lives in Florida and I was recalling that of the people in one of our Venn diagrams of overlapping friendships, we were the last two left. 

It’s sobering.

I talk about death a lot. I make my somebody-has-to-find-the-body joke with Jackson, and he rolls with it. What else can you do? 

I often hear the great Hoosier poet John Hiatt singing in my cranial jukebox:

‘Time is short and here’s the damn thing about it:  you’re going to die, you’re going to die for sure.  And you can learn to live life with love or without it,  but there ain’t no cure.”

A few years ago, I was asked by the university to record some sort of message to the students on the verge of graduation. I think they expected me to say something funny, but I thought I’d been given a serious and enormous charge.

“Don’t check out of this world without leaving the place better than you found it. Make sure that it matters that you were here.”

My whole life, I’ve fretted about that. What would I leave behind? I’m proud of the work that will remain — both as a storyteller and as a teacher — but in the end, I see that the whole point of being here was to leave behind the legacy of my family. I have seven children and (so far) six grandchildren. They have — and will continue to — make the world better.

I can’t ask for more.

Last night, I dreamed I was dying, but slowly. I knew it was coming and was at peace. 

As I prepared for death, my friend Wayne put his hand on my forearm led me from room to room in an old house. I recognized it as the Indiana farmhouse where my family lived temporarily when my father was transitioning from the Air Force to private practice.

That was the summer I was 13. I think of that time frequently and memories are vivid.

In each room of the house, we found my family and friends from the many places in my life, from England and Germany, to Nebraska and Florida and Texas. 

Of the family and friends, some were dead and some were living. I wondered: Is this heaven?

The dead were talking with the living, swilling highballs, smiling at the others. I saw my parents, my grandparents, my friends I’d lost.

Gradually, the friends drifted away, but he children and grandchildren stayed.

The house had no furniture, but all seemed content to stand and play their roles in a collection of conversational bouquets.

It was like a well-cast cocktail party where everybody was happy and fluttered from room to room, trying to talk to everyone. I was the orchestrator of this party. I’d subliminally created the guest list and brought everyone together.

I was in constant motion, checking each room to make sure everyone was happily engaged. I wanted no wallflowers.

They didn’t know I was dying and that this was my farewell. I just wanted to watch and see that everyone was happy.

It wouldn’t be long before I would exist only as a memory.

Ifelt a hand on my shoulder. It wasn’t Wayne’s. He’d crossed the room and was talking with the boys, getting them to laugh, as he always did. 

The girls were all laughing too. The hand rested lightly on me and I started to turn but couldn’t see anything or anyone. 

I wondered if it was that presence I negotiated with so many years ago — that time in New Mexico, when I think I died. I’d asked for more time. Jackson was in utero. Travis and Charley weren’t even thought of yet.

I can’t leave; not now. This is not it. I’m not finished.

That was so long ago now. I’d gotten what I asked for. I got a lot more time.

If it’s time to cash that check, I’m ready.

Then I woke up.

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Be All You Can Be. Read.

Will you look at this beautiful thing? 

I’ve had this poster, framed, in my house for more than a half century. Before the United States Army co-opted the slogan “Be All You Can Be” for its recruiting efforts, that was the slogan of National Library Week, with that one crucial addition — “Be All You Can Be: Read.”

I’ve always taken that saying to heart. When I think of my father, who died when I was 20, I think of him with a book in his hand. He was never without. There was a book on the arm of his chair and one at the breakfast table and one in the formal living room. He always had one on the front seat in case he got stuck waiting in a parking lot or at a long stoplight.

And now: I have become him.

Dear Old Dad, as a young man with a pooch. I’d bet good money that there’s one of those wartime paperbacks in his back pocket.

As the saying goes, “Children learn what they live.” I’m rarely without a book. I start my day with coffee, newspapers (one on paper, two digital), then push back in my tattered leather chair for an hour of quiet, alone and lost inside a book.

This poster by Peter Max was published to celebrate library week in 1969. Max’s work was ubiquitous then. Collectors were paying enormous amounts for his work, but I’m proud to report that I got this beautiful thing for free.

I was a mid-teen that year, transitioning to high school, though it was on familiar turf. I was a student at Indiana University High School in Bloomington, part of a kindergarten- through-Grade- 12 school that had been an experiment managed by the university’s School of Education. Super-secret and newfangled teaching techniques were loosed upon students at the school. In fact, the original team name of the school’s mascot was the Guinea Pigs.

But then, in the early 1960s, the school moved from the heart of the university campus to the fringe. The new school was built with shiny metal roofs and was split into a series of buildings. It always made me think of what a small liberal arts college on Mars would look like.

We also became the Univees. I have no idea what a Univee is,

The University School campus. This picture does not do justice to the striking look of the place, but it was a swell joint to go to school.

Soon, we were no longer so experimental and the university passed us off to the local school system and what we called U-School was phased out.

I was in the last class to graduate, the class of 1972.

The building in the heart of our Martian campus was the library. 

Let us now praise wonderful librarians. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from archivists and librarians over the course of this life. Because of my work, I’m often in the lovely hives of a library.

Whether it’s a towering university library (Indiana boasted for a time of the largest university library west of the Hudson) or a cozy small-town ediface (I thanked the staff of the Cohasset library in Massachusetts in my book Everybody Had an Ocean), I find some of the finest people I’ve known behind the desk, ready to help.

At University High School, we were blessed with two great librarians: Norma Miller was in charge and was assisted by Pamela Brown.

Keep in mind. I was a kid with my hormones on a full, rolling boil. There was a reason I rarely ate in the Commons, but instead spent lunch hour in the library.

I was in love. I ached to be older, to be someone with whom Pamela Brown wanted to spend time, perhaps over a cup of coffee, discussing great literature. Too bad I had not yet learned to tolerate coffee. Too bad — as her courtesy title made clear — that she was already married.

There was a reason all of the boys in my class enjoyed trips to the library.

Norma Miller and Pamela Brown

Mrs Brown was beautiful but also kind and encouraging. (Can’t seem to refer to her coldly as Brown or Pamela Brown. She was Mrs Brown then and always will be.)

One day, not long after the spring semester resumed, I came into the library and she was standing behind the counter, and for once something other than Mrs Brown drew my attention.

“That just came in this morning,” she said, nodding at the poster. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I was speechless, a rare thing for me. We both silently beheld the poster for a while, loving the psychedelic artwork, the image of the Youth following a path set by the Seer. 

The Youth and the Seer … or Master and Grasshopper.

And that slogan. It expressed to me the beauty and splendor of reading, of passing on our legends and tales and knowledge, of learning what it was like to be another.

Not that I was much of a reader then. I’d read a few serious books — let’s say “grown-up books,” since “adult books” has a different meaning —and was pleased with myself for moving past my Hardy Boys obsession from a few years earlier.

Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had affected me deeply, as did A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I read A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Those works of poetry have always stayed with me.

Kurt Vonnegut in the 1940 yearbook from Shortridge High in Indianapolis.

Mrs Brown encouraged me to read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. “He’s from Indiana,” she told me, as a special inducement. I was always on the lookout for great Hoosiers. (I later learned that my great Aunt Inez had known Vonnegut since he was a little boy.)

Slaughterhouse-Five was followed by other suggestions. Somehow Mrs Brown sensed, without us really talking much, that I was on my way to being a reader. From that point, I was gone.

(We didn’t talk much because I was pathologically shy. I was often nervous and tongue-tied in her presence. Still, she spoke to me a lot. Her eyes told me she was aware of my infatuation.)

Mrs Brown at work. Photo by Skip Augustine.

What was important: Mrs Brown recognized the reader gene in me and made sure it was watered and manured to maturity.

I spent most lunches in the library, usually plopping down in an easy chair to read magazines. ’Twas there, in that library, when I read Joan Didion for the first time.

Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, shared a biweekly column called “Points West” in the Saturday Evening Post.

This particular Didion column was about a young woman so desperate to be a movie star that she used her savings to buy a full-page ad in Variety, announcing that she was going to be famous.

Didion drove to the young woman’s house and took her for a ride, then recounted their conversation in her column.

I saw this as a tragedy in the making and a couple years ago, curious about what happened after Didion’s article, looked up the young woman’s screen credits. She had two: Shattered if Your Kid’s on Drugs and Blood Orgy of the She Devils. No idea what happened to her after that.

For once, I turned the tables on Mrs Brown. At the end of lunch hour that day, I took her the copy of the Post with Didion’s article on the wannabe movie star. “You should read this,” I said. “It’s good.”

When I came in the next day, she said, “You were right. That was a great piece.”

Joan Didion

A few years later, I worked at the Saturday Evening Post and loved to steal afternoons in the archive, reading every column (I’m pretty sure) that Didion wrote for the magazine. 

I owe so much to that library — to Mrs Miller and Mrs Brown. A word of encouragement and a simple act of kindness can mean so much to a kid that age. As a teacher, I always wanted to be like Mrs Brown. She set the bar high.

I was one of the last days of the school year and everyone was getting restless to get the crank rolling for summer.

I came into the library and before I was much inside the door, Mrs Brown was standing in front of me.

“We’re getting ready to close up for the summer,” she said. “I thought you’d want to have this.”

What she handed me was folded into a neat rectangle. I didn’t need to open it to know what it was.

My face must’ve flushed. She smiled indulgently. 

She’s probably in her eighties now. I hope she’s still with us — that she’s out there somewhere, still having a good life. I hope she’s still reading, still helping people.

I want her to know that her gift has been hanging on the walls of every one of my homes over the last half century, and that every time I look at it, I’m reminded of her kindness and encouragement.

Thank you, Mrs Brown. You made such a difference in my life.

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Up the Ol’ Mississippi

Daughter Sarah called the ambulance over my objections, but what else could she do when I had so obviously lost control? I was suffering a cognitive malfunction (I suppose that’s a polite, clinical term for saying I was fucked up) and desperately needed help. 

This is part 45 of my Asshole blog

I barely remember the ride to the hospital, too preoccupied by what had just happened.

I was thinking I was all right, but as I sprawled on my couch with Sarah and the two emergency medical technicians and was unable to come up with the names of everyday items — keys, coffee cups, shoes — that they held up before me.

I was in serious trouble..

I’ve always been the kind of guy who doesn’t want to make a fuss and who is embarrassed by attention. I didn’t quite feel myself stepping backward into the fog (as I had when I first died years before, in New Mexico) but the inability to talk or to approach anything with reason, was scary.

At the hospital, I hoped to find out what was wrong — but also was afraid of what I’d learn.

The ambulance arrived at the hospital’s emergency bay amid lots of shouting and scrambling around by all of the nurses and EMTs. As someone who often wilts from attention — everywhere outside the classroom, where I hope for attention — I was on the verge of humiliation. There I was, inert on a stretcher, with a variety of anxious faces looking down at me, asking questions.

With my cognition so impaired — that was the scariest thing about all of this — it was Sarah who answered all of the urgent questions with an efficiency and urgency. The medical staff found her helpful in the extreme.

I was moved to a three-walled room in the emergency suite, shut off from everyone else by a curtain. They allowed Sarah in with me, and she was repeating everything she had told the EMT’s and the first-line-of-defense people at the ER. Now she was talking to the nurse who would actually be overseeing me.

I was oblivious. My head is usually a gumbo of the long-lost jetsam taken residence in my skull. At any time, I have a bubble of remembered literature floating into some long-forgotten song, as well as the images of family and the pieces of time I store, those moments that for good or ill I’ve replayed in my cranial cinema for all of my life.

But all of that was gone. My brain was empty as a white-on-white room. All things were muted. I was in the hospital bed, but when Sarah and the nurse spoke, it was if I was buried under a Kilimanjaro of pillows. The voices came from far away, traveling slowly. Seemed that a question was followed by a full minute of silence before the answer. I’d stepped inside of time and pushed at the walls, like a low-rent Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained.

Inside this expanding time, I had trouble following the conversation until the word surgery dropped like a ripple in a pond.

Until the coming of this routine (sorry, Dad) knee surgery, I’d never feared going under the knife. I would add up the number of surgeries I’d had in my life, but I can’t count that high.

In a strange way, my previous surgeries had not only worked, but somehow provided an odd kind of comfort. It was always good to know that I would continue to function, that these trained people had opened me up, goofed around with my organs, and that I’d survived and would, no doubt, continue to live.

When the nurse left to go get some paperwork for Sarah, I turned to my eldest (and trustworthy) child, now a woman in her late 30s, and offered my contribution to the emergency-room discourse.

“Please,” I whispered. “No spinal.”

“I’ll tell them,” she said.

“That’s how this all started.”

My father was a good man and would never want to embarrass anyone, especially his youngest son. He’d never say I told you so, but I felt it. It had not been my choice to go through the knee surgery under a spinal block, but I knew I’d never do it again.

I had the usual meds, the ones that make patients relaxed and silly, and then they came to take me away to surgery.

“Who’s the doctor?” I asked. I wonder if they’d called in Clifford Gluck. He was the urologist I’d first seen a couple of years before, when this whole health walkabout began. I visited him  to see how it would go if my vasectomy was reversed and I would procreate again. 

And then everything happened — cancer and all of the stuff that followed.

“It’s Dr. Tracy,” the nurse said. He’s the urologist on call. 

“My urologist is Clifford Gluck,” I said. “Shouldn’t we call him?”

(I’d never felt so old as I did at that moment when I said my urologist.)

“We don’t have time,” the nurse said. “Dr. Tracy is on duty.”

I did not meet Keith Tracy, my new urologist, until after the surgery. He was a busy guy that day.

I’m not sure about what they did during that surgery, but I came to afterward, back in the same room. Before I opened my eyes, I heard the soft sounds of fingers on keyboard.

Was I writing in my sleep?

When my eyess opened enough to focus, I saw Sarah sitting next to the bed, working on her laptop. She is an artist of multi-tasking. 

She has a demanding and rewarding job in New York, yet kept up with her work while managing our part of the surgery. She hadn’t even had to take a day off. That’s the McKeen work ethic in practice.

I’d have to spend the night in the hospital, but I felt I was recovering well enough for Sarah to leave. I insisted. I felt like I’d disrupted her life enough. Besides, Nicole had volunteered to help if I needed anything.

My room was comfortable, like all of the accommodations at South Shore Hospital. Too bad hospitals don’t give points for each stay. I would have earned a few medical vacations.

If my brain hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d try to recall all the nights I’d spent at South Shore. But I was too tired.

I settled down into the hospital routine. You actually don’t get a lot of rest in the hospital, since you are awakened every couple of hours for them to test vital signs. Plus, I was catheterized, so the nurses also had to keep track of my urine bag.

The day after the surgery, I met my new urologist, Keith Tracy. He was an affable guy, probably about half my age. 

He talked a little bit about the procedure, but he buried the lead, as we say in journalism.

“We came close,” he said. “You were about 20 minutes away from being dead.”

I had sepsis. I knew little about it, but I knew it was serious shit. Thank God for my iPhone. The often moody Siri overcame her grudge against me and offered this definition:

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection. This overreaction can lead to widespread inflammation and organ damage. It is a systemic infection with life-threatening organ dysfunction .

From the Cleveland Clinic

So after a few days in the hospital, I was sent home. There was a catheter with a tube down my leg that led to a bag that I had to change now and then.

I could never tell when I was urinating. It was like a tap, turned on all of the time.

I thought, I could live with this. But I knew things were more complicated than that. Of course.

In my follow-up visit at Dr. Tracy’s office, he had one of his nurses show me how to self-catheterize. (Self-cathing as we say in the trade.)

This was tough. First, I had to wash my hands, then put on rubber gloves. Then I had to clean Mr. Happy with an alcohol wipe. Once that was done, I had to face the catheter. It was a plastic tube, about a yard long.

That’s right — a yard. Thirty-six inches of plastic tubing. 

Imagine: you insert that thing up the Ol’ Mississippi and it pulls all that pee from your bladder that doesn’t come out the usual way. 

You use a lubricant, like KY Jelly, to limber up the catheter, and you add a little bit to the crown of Mr. Happy’s head, to make for smooth sailing as the tube is inserted.

For all of your urological needs!

There are many adventures on the journey. At a certain point, the tube has to negotiate its way past the prostate gland. This requires an intake of breath and holding of same. It’s kind of like the Jungle Cruise at Disney World. Once we are safely past the rapids (prostate), we wait for the tube to drop into the pool of urine.

Stop immediately when the flow begins. Push too far and you piss blood. (That happened on several occasions.)

I’d always hated catheterization. I remember my first surgery, a hernia operation when I was 20. The nurse (a male, but insensitive to this procedure) seemed delighted to shove what I was sure was a garden hose up my willy.

That was miserable and peeing was painful for days afterward. From that point on, I asked nurses to delay the cathing until I was under anesthetic. I feared cathing more than any surgery.

All of this happened as the school year was beginning. My administrator and good friend, Sarah Kess, had been managing the office in my absence. There was some concern in the college administration about whether I could return or whether I’d need another medical leave.

I was determined to get back in the classroom.

I was not ready to return immediately, so Sarah K (the K is my Kafkaesque way of keeping her straight from my daughter, Sarah M) covered my classes the first week. She mostly told the students I had had a medical emergency but that I would be back next week.

I wondered if maybe I did need a medical leave. When I looked in the bedroom mirror I didn’t recognize me. There was a haggard, elderly man in my room. Who is that dude and how did he get in here?

But let’s go back a bit, back to when I was still wearing the nurse-installed catheter with the tube down my leg into the bag of whole goodness attached to my ankle. 

Dr. Tracy’s nurse had not yet taught me to self-cath when I made it back to the university. I still had the bag at my ankle, still had to visit my urologist’s office to get the catheter replaced every other day.

I was moving slowly. As often happens after surgery, the primary feeling is of fragility, not pain. And that’s what I felt. I used my cane and treaded deliberately. 

What could be sexier than walking around with a urine bag on your ankle?

Thank God for public transportation, which saved me hundreds of steps. I took the ferry from the next town over, Hingham. It was a quiet, often beautiful ride and afforded time and atmosphere for cat napping. 

When we arrived at the dock, there was a short walk to the subway. There was one transfer and then the subway came above ground and conveniently stopped in front of my building. A wee bit of hobble and I was at my office door.

That would seem to be a full-day’s work, just getting to the office, but my duties were only about to begin.

When Sarah K saw me, I could see myself in her face. She seemed wary and concerned.

“Are you sure you’re ready to come back?”

“I’ve got to do it sometime.”

I sank into the chair across from her desk, where we habitually indulged in our morning debriefing sessions. Those were often the highlights of my day. I know few people with such a terrific sense of humor.

“You look gaunt,” she said. That was my rare moment of joy in those days. Overweight most of my life, I’d longed to be gaunt. Later, Sarah said it would have been more accurate to tell me that I looked near death. Because I was — or recently had been.

My first class was upstairs — and in the same building. I scored on that one, meaning I wouldn’t have to drag my sepsis ass down Commonwealth Avenue to some basement room without windows.

Just one floor up, but I needed to use the elevator.

When I got to class, the students were already there. I made my way to the front of the room.

“I’ve had some health issues lately,” I said. “Would you mind if I sat?”

No one objected, so my carcass collapsed in the chair at the instructor’s desk.

The class was Literary Journalism, something I’ve taught with great joy and relish for decades. I love the subject, so I spent that first day giving the class the lay of the land and getting them stoked — I thought — about journalism that could endure and become art.

I could feel that I was not all there. It’s as if the sepsis had left scar tissue on my brain. I was still not able to retrieve the words I wanted from my skull. But at least I was much improved over my halting, stuttering performance with the EMTs.

Class was a three-hour block, but I asked if we could end early. No one objected.

“Thank you,” I said. “Does anyone have any questions?”

A hand shot up in the second row. “Yeah,” a young woman said. “Are you going to live?”

Good question. I didn’t laugh it off. I told her I’d do my best.

Class over, I moseyed down to my office where I again planted myself in the seat across from Sarah K’s desk.

I told her more catch-up stuff and then ended with what the student had asked in class. I intended that as my closing line of the update, some comic relief.

But Sarah did not find it funny. She urged me to take care of myself.

Then it all hit me: the cancer, all of those medical procedures, my divorce, not seeing the kids daily, my mother’s death. I thought of all of the humiliations I’d had because of my health condition. I’d gotten through it all, but now I had to face this: the self-catherization. This was it. This was the low point of humiliation. I was at the bottom, clawing to get ever deeper.

I had met my limit.

Poor Sarah. She came to work that day to do her job and now there was a blubbering old man in her office. 

I was done. This was it. “I can’t take it anymore,” I told her, choking out the words.

And, for one of the rare times in my adult life, I cried.

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She Was a Good Cat

It is with great sadness that I report the death of my cat, Ramona. She was a sweetheart and I miss her.

I got her from the animal shelter at the urging of my youngest children and she spent half her life with me.

It was a Christmas seven or eight years ago. My wife had moved about a few months prior and so I was alone much of the time. The kids were with me three days a week but the other four days were deathly quiet.

Ramona

To fill the void, I talked to myself. I’d done that all of my life, but usually there was someone in the other room who’d ask, “Are you talking to me?”

After the separation, no one answered, yet I continued talking to myself.

The kids decided I needed someone or something to hear my yammering, so we went to the shelter right after Christmas.

I went into the cat room. There were several needy meowing cats, but I took to Ramona instantly. The shelter had given her a name, but I can’t remember what it was.

Compared to the other cats, she was quiet and mysterious.

She also was withdrawn, and beautiful. The vet tech got her out of the cage and set her on my lap. The kids and I petted her and made the decision quickly.

“The first couple days, maybe a week, expect her to hide,” the tech said. “This one is very skittish, very afraid of people. We think she suffered some trauma. We found her in a dumpster. But be patient. She will come around.”

They weren’t sure of her age, but estimated she was seven or eight years old. She ended up living with me for about the same amount of time. I’d guess she was 14.

To honor Bob Dylan, I named the cat after one of his songs. (Listen to “To Ramona” here.)

I brought her home and she was as advertised. She hid behind the couch.

But that night, after the kids left, I was reading in bed when I felt a slight movement on my mattress. I put my book aside and there she was. She camped out on my chest and her eyes told me she wanted petting.

It was smooth sailing from that point on.

She turned out to be the opposite of the tech’s expectation. Ramona rarely left my side when I was home, and she would root at my hands until she got the underside of her chin stroked.

Years passed. We eventually lived in three homes together. She survived the arrival of my son’s kitten, Carlos. He loved her and wanted to play with her, but Ramona would take none of his shit. She was the boss.

Carlos

When she got sick earlier this year, I took her to a vet. She said there was an impacted and infected gland. She could offer a temporary fix, but it was likely she would die soon anyway.

A second vet told me the same thing. Think of her quality of life, the vet said, and they urged me to have her put down.

I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Maybe I was wrong.

But she was still Ramona.

At home, she could be her usual self, skittering around the house and challenging Carlos when he wanted to chase her.

But I could tell she was getting weaker.

The other night, still up at 2 a.m., I petted her and told her good night. When I got up at 6 the next morning (yes, I know I need more sleep), I found her dead.

She was a good cat and I miss her. I loved her and she loved me.

Rest in peace, Ramona.

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Life is Short, So Dance

I am from Indiana, and therefore I am rhythmically impaired. I cannot dance. I would have to improve to become a bad dancer.

But I love watching people dance.

I haven’t seen anything as joyful as the dancing in The Life of Chuck since Fred Astaire danced up the walls in Royal Wedding.

Four actors play Chuck in this new film by Mike Flanagan. As a young boy, Chuck (Benamin Pajak) is taught to dance by his grandmother (Mia Sara; be still my heart).

Against social norms of middle school, the boy joins the dance club. So there are scenes with Chuck and his much-taller dance partner (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss) from an upper grade.

Together, the young couple dazzles their classmates by moonwalking.

You’ll wish you were that age again. I’ve always thought that middle school was the worst period of life. This film makes me want to reassess.

Mia Sara beckons young Chuck to dance with her while she makes dinner.

So there’s some lovely scenes with the young folks.

And then there’s the adult Chuck, played by Tom Hiddleston. He starts dancing in the street, inspired by a drumming busker. He sees a young woman (Annalise Basso) in the crowd, who is recently brokenhearted. He extends his hand and thus begins another life-affirming dance sequence.

The film is also in part, a love note to caring teachers. (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kate Siegel play the teachers.)

Mark Hamill is wonderful as Chuck’s grandfather and he uses his voice and gravitas so well. And Matthew Lilliard has a deeply moving life-is-short scene.

I’m not going to tell you anything else about the movie, because you should go into the theater knowing nothing. Experience the joy of discovery. I’m sure Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are in heaven, giving us two thumbs up for this picture. I urge you to see it.

This is based on the novella by Stephen King. l best love King’s stories that do not involve the supernatural. He’s so good at writing about kids. “The Body” (filmed as Stand By Me) is a great example of how he has expertly mined his childhood.

I am rarely so moved by a film. I didn’t cry but I came close.

(Then again, I often get weepy at the movies. I was a blubbering mess when I took son Jackson with me to A Minecraft Movie. He was so embarrassed by my behavior that he made me walk 11 steps behind him when we left the theater.)

Janice (Annalise Basso) forgets her heartbreak when Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) invites her to dance in the street.

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Recommended Reading

I miss writing book reviews.

In the 1980s, I became a prolific book critic for the Orlando Sentinel. Around 2000 or so, I began writing for the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and then added Creative Loafing to the mix by the mid-2000s. I even carried the title of book editor for a while. Since moving to Massachusetts, I continued with Creative Loafing for a few years and wrote a dozen or so reviews for the Boston Globe.

Alas, the Sentinel, the Times and the Globe have cut back much of the space that used to go to books and to freelance book revievers.

I miss the reviewing and I miss working with book editors, especially the late Nancy Pate (Sentinel) and Colette Bancroft (Times).

I also miss being able to tell people about good books to read.

So, if you have interest, I’ll give you one-or-two sentence reviews of the stuff I’ve read so far this summer. (And it’s been a good summer — Michael Connelly, Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King all released new novels in May.)

. . . . . . . .

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin, $45)

This book is huge (1,174 pages) and it sometimes difficult to read because of its size. We need to have a lecturn and a page turner to read this.

But the content? Can’t remember if I’ve read any biographies of Mark Twain, though I did read the first part of his autobiography, about his early days in journalism.

I can’t imagine any biography topping this one. Ron Chernow has amassed an enormous amount of information and woven it into a rich, lively narrative.

He’s also assessed Twain — Sam Clemens, of course — by today’s standards, discussing the question of his racial attitudes and his banning by school boards.

This is a tremendous book and will be the fastest 1,174 pages you’ll ever read.

. . . . . . . .

What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown (Random House, $30)

What a wonderful novel.

Imagine: the Unabomber took his 4-year-old daughter to the cabin when he went off the grid. Fourteen years later, she leaves behind the only life she’s known in order to discover the free world.

That’s essentially the plot of What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown.

There are few novels where I feel I am absolutely inside the head of another human being. I recall Sam, the adolescent girl in the middle of Bobbie Ann Mason‘s brilliant novel, In Country. Fatherless, she seeks to learn about the identity of the man — her father — who died in Vietnam before she was born.

Yea, me, an old guy … I feel that I am inside a girl’s head at a time of turmoil.

This is why we read — or at least, that’s why I read.

This book so well recalls Mason’s ealier masterpiece, which came out in the mid-1980s.

I thank both authors for taking me into a world so unlike my own.

. . . . . . .

To Anyone Who Ever Asks by Howard Fishman (Dutton, $32)

Speaking of disappearing, this nonfiction book tells the story of a unique and much admired singer-songwriter, ahead of her time, who just … disappears one day, never to be heard from again.

It’s another huge book, so well done that you find yourself ripping through this telling of Conne Converse‘s life.

It makes us thirst to hear her music, much of which is difficult to find. This calls for a significant eBay search.

Howard Fishman tells her story with grace and does not waste a word. It’s another huge book so well done you are propelled through the narrative.

This book came out a couple of years ago. You’ll probably have to order it from your friendly neighborhood bookseller.

. . . . . .

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House, $27)

I’ve read both of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novels this summer. (You can see Long Island Compromise at the right in the picture.) Fleishman is her first novel, and it came out in 2019. It’s the story of a marriage falling apart and a spouse who disappears.

This book was utterly absorbing. I carried it with me wherever I weant and would steal moments at long stoplights to jump back into the story.

By the way, it was adapted by its author, whose unwieldy name invites typographical errors. The television adaptation (which starred an excellent Jesse Eisenberg) is on Hulu, if memory serves.

If you’re not married, this book will make you sink to your knees and thank a higher power that you are single.

. . . . . . .

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (Knopf, $27)

I’m an Anne Tyler junkie and have read all of her novels. Those books are like three-course meals as she explores the minds of characters caught between the familes into which they were born and the families they choose.

This novel is short, yet full of the characteristic Tyler insights and observations. It’s not that huge meal, but more like sampling a few appetizers. Literary Tapas! Short enough to read in an afternoon.

Her writing is perfect. I urge you to read all of her work. Start with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant or Saint Maybe.

I’m so glad I had a friend who turned me onto Tyler because she said I reminded her of the protagonist in Saint Maybe. I had to read that book to see if I too saw the resemblance. I did (it was a compliment) and from that moment I was hooked by Anne Tyler.

. . . . . . .

Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown, $30)

Michael Connelly is my crack. I confess my addiction up front.

I’ve never met a Connelly novel that I did not immediately devour.

Connellly has so many great characters — Harry Bosch, Renee Ballard, Mickey Haller, Terry McCaleb, Jack McEvoy and others. This book introduces a new character — Stillwell, a detective who’s been exiled from downtown LA to Catalina Island.

I’ve never been to Catalina, but after Conelly’s evocative writing, I feel like a local.

Seriously: this guy’s writing is intoxicasting as a drug.

Light up! Enjoy, before his novels are designated controlled substances by the DEA.

. . . . . . .

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, $30)

Carl Hiaasen‘s books are propelled by rage humor. He’s so angry at injustice that he can only channel his operatic temper through vicious comedy.

How many authors — after 30 years of writing novels — are still peaking? Hiaasen’s last novel, Squeeze Me, was his masterpiece. Fever Beach is a suitable follow up.

The world sucks and it’s being run by assholes. You will enjoy his rage against the machine.

And by the way, you will not find a word out of place. This man is an immaculate storyteller.

. . . . . . .

Not by Type by E Jean Carroll (St. Martin’s, $30)

E Jean Carroll reached out to me in the early 1990s after I’d published my first book on Hunter S. Thompson and she was working on hers.

We crossed paths online again years later when my BU administrator turned out to be E Jean’s former PA.

E Jean is an Indiana University graduate. And … a cheerleader! There’s a good chance I lusted after her when I as a high school kid in the stands and she was jumping like popcorn on the sidelines.

Not My Type is Carroll’s account of her Trump trials. It’s unsparing, brutal and quite funny at times.

And I have always liked E Jean’s humor. I now also admire her resiliance and restraint.

I’ve read a lot of Trump Porn, including excellent books by Bob Woodward and Maggie Haberman. This book is a must-read for all of you out there preparing articles of impeachment.

. . . . . . .

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country by Robert Hilburn (DaCapo Press, $34)

It’s been a Randy Newman summer here at the ol’ homestead.

What a great artist! Has there ever been a more vicious song than “Sail Away”? His songs should be used to teach American history.

Robert Hilburn gives us the blow-by-blow of Newman’s life and gives us a new appreciation of this American treasure.

Hilburn’s writing is exceptional.

Alas, I wish the publisher had a better copy editor. I was shocked by not only the copy editing but the presece of a few minor errors of fact. Minor they may be but if newspaper and book publishers paid and respected excellent copy editors, it would be an even-more-groovy world.

. . . . . .

Hold the Line by Michael Fanone (Atria Books, $28)

I’ve been interested in this guy ever since he came into mass consciousness after the January 6 attack on the nation’s capitol.

Michael Fanone has written a powerful memoir. He was defending the Capitol on January 6 and was tasered by the rioters. He suffered a heart attack and a brain injury.

The first part of the book deals with his earlier career as an undercover cop. It’s nice to see the lid lifted on policing and Fanone does not shrink from telling the bad along with the good. This part reminded me of Serpico by Peter Maas.

Fanone holds back nothing. He drops a lot of fucks and motherfuckers here and there, and does so deftly.

Some of these words are used to describe such weasels as Jim Jordan of Ohio and Lindsay Graham of the great state of South Carolina. Those guys are botches of humanity. Same goes for former House speaker Kevin McCarthy.

When you finish this book, you will want to call Fanone and ask him to run for congress.

He is a great American.

. . . . .

Never Flinch by Stephen King (Scribner, $32)

Steve, Old Boy, I enjoy your work but can you cut back on the appositives and all the off-tangent parenthetical stuff?

Minor bitches, these.

Stephen King once again gives us his wonderful protagonist, Holly Gibney, who first showed up in Mr Mercedes.

King said she was planned as a minor character who soon grasped his heart. he has confessed that he fell in love with her.

That’s understandale.

King just keeps getting better and better.

These Gibney novels are catnip. Read them in whatever order you want. The Mr Mercedes trilogy is a good place to start. Or you can start with The Outsider.

Get off your ass and read one of these books!

. . . . .

I’ve also been reading a lot of older stuff this summer.

I’ve been on a hard-boiled crime-fiction binge, reading James M. Cain, Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler. I love the way those dudes write. I believe they can clear out all the useless stuff in our brains. Reading their books is like using a mental supposiitory.

I also read the only major work of Flannery O’Connor‘s that I’d never read — The Violent Bear it Away. I’d read her stories, her only other novel (Wise Blood) and even her prayer journal. I was surprised by the fluid nature of this narrative. It was one of those novels you inhale.

If you’ve never read any of her work, I urge you to read Flannery O’Connor. She is life-changing.

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The Heroes of Woodstock

This was written for Curiosity Stream.

The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair wasn’t even in Woodstock when it planted its cultural flag 55 years ago. Woodstock didn’t want  the festival. Neither did neighboring towns in upstate New York. An industrial park downstate even passed on the opportunity.

Woodstock Ventures logo (PRNewsFoto/Woodstock Ventures)

So when we look back on that momentous weekend of music, the first hero we see is a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who offered his fields near White Lake, New York, to the high and hirsute concertgoers.

The festival’s four investors saw the horde descending on the concert site and decided to forego profit and turn it into a free-for-all. Though it took years to repay the debt, it was the right decision.

For the record, the business half of the mangement team was John Rosenman and John Roberts, self-described as “young men with unlimited capital.” The music-and-artists half of the team was promoter Michael Lang — the ever-smiling explosion of curls who became the face of Woodstock — and Artie Kornfeld.

(Kornfeld had an interesting career trajectory. He was just a few years down the road from the time he wrote car songs with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Jan Berry of Jan and Dean. After that, he became the producer for the Cowsills, the family band he had brought to prominence. The Cowsills became the model for the television show “The Partridge Family.”)

Certain impending apocalyptic disaster was avoided due to the soothing and soporific voice of emcee Chip Monck, cautioning the crowd about poor-quality acid, and Hugh Romney (aka “Wavy Gravy”), the commune leader who helped feed the masses and care for those overcome by the event and / or drugs.

Romney deserves enormous credit, not only for helping Monck keep a calming and placid lid on the weekend, but for solving the too-real problem of feeding many more guests than were expected. (Apropos of nothing, it’s interesting to note that Romney was married to Jahanara Romney, who — as Bonnie Beecher — had inspired the song “Girl from the North Country,” written by her college-era boyfriend, Bob Dylan.)

That weekend also gave us indelible images of a generation of musicians:

Jimi Hendrix played to the departing crowds on the festival’s last day,  delivering a pre-elegiac performance. (He was dead 13 months later.) His version of the national anthem became iconic.

Janis Joplin sang with grit and fervor, lost and fragile and unbearably intimate in front of a half-million listeners.

Sly Stone was his revolutionary self, bringing together the sacred and profrance with a beat you could dance to.

Rain-soaked Joe Cocker passed on a message from the absent Beatles: we get by with a little help from our friends.

Of course, not everyone as at their best. Members of the Grateful Dead still shake their heads over how bad they were at Woodstock. Jerry Garcia once said the Dead always seemed to be at their worst when they had the largest audiences.

Maybe you were among the half million that wallowed in Max Yasgur’s mud. The odds are against it, so what you know of Woodstock comes from the three-hour documentary film — oddly, called Woodstock — released in 1970.

The film crew that worked for director Michael Wadleigh included a diminutive cameraman scrambling around the front of the stage.

That young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, trained his camera on the ecstatic faces and the skilled-and-sure fingers of the performers. He offered the film audience an intimate view of musicians at work. (Let’s tip our hat to Scorcese’s long-time collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose innovative editing talents conveyed the weekend’s magic.)

Woodstock was the career-making performance by a new group from San Francisco called Santana. Michael Shrieve, the group’s drummer, had turned 20 just the month before. The closeup images of Shrieve that appeared a year later in the Woodstock documentary showed a creative mind at work — you can admire Shrieve’s ability during his solo, but the camera’s focus on his eyes as he challenges and surprises himself is revelatory.

It’s a rare and wonderful look at an artist at work. More than a half-century after that weekend, we still have that. All those involved in telling the story are heroes of a sort.

Woodstock set a standard still in need of an equal.

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An Auto Biography

This is a remembrance of my mother’s last car, which I have donated to National Public Radio.

My mother wasn’t like the other mothers. To borrow the title from a Steve Reeves classic of my movie-going youth, she was Hercules Unchained. My friends’ mothers (and fathers) were dull, doing the ol’ lives-of-quiet-desperation thing, while mine looked at life as a continual weenie roast.

My mother had a great sense of humor and a love for all things new and fun. Even in her seventies and eighties, she referred to her contemporaries as the old folks or geezers. If we’re only as old as we feel, my mother remained 19 almost all of her life.

Dear Old Dad and Mom

This is not to imply that she was an irresponsible parent. She artfully raised three children. When my father died (young, at 53)  the three of us were out of the house, so she didn’t have to worry about taking care of children as a single parent. 

She was devastated by my father’s death. Perhaps because it was so sudden and came when both of them were barely in their fifties, she felt life’s brevity more clearly than most and decided to squeeze everything she could from it.

Cars were always important to us. We were a military family and moved a lot. Along the way, Dad collected convertibles. When I was a young boy, we were stationed in Europe and all five of us fit into a Triumph TR-3, despite the fact that the car did not have a back seat or seatbelts. We were a lot smaller then. 

My mother once drove 120 miles per hour on the autobahn. Life was a weenie roast, as I say.

When we returned to the States, Dad began his Cadillac obsession. For several years, we had only two legal drivers in the house yet had three cars — two Cadillacs and the Triumph, all convertibles. One of the Caddies was candy-apple red. There must have been something extra in the formula in Detroit the day they painted that car because I’ve never seen a color like it. Strangers approached my father in parking lots to gush over how much they admired it.

But it aged and was traded away. So were the others, always replaced by Cadillac convertibles. Finally — years later, out of the military and in private practice — Dad found another candy-apple red Cadillac convertible, an El Dorado that would qualify us for yacht-club membership. A few months after buying the car, he died.

1973 Cadillac El Dorado

Mom kept the car but rarely drove it. Too painful, she said. 

She began her relationships with Chrysler convertibles — first LeBarons, then Sebrings. It fell to me eventually to sell the Cadillac. During a visit, I found I needed a car for an unexpected road trip. Mom told me to take the car and not bring it back. I sold it to a collector in Dallas.

My mother outlived my father by 44 years. Into her late eighties, she still drove. Her last car was a champagne-colored Chrysler Sebring convertible. She was a careful driver, never had an accident, never even got a ding in the door.

When she was too old to drive and moved to an assisted-living place, she gave me the car. It was 15 years old by then. I had to drive it cross country, from my mother’s home in the Midwest, to Massachusetts. The drive went without a hitch and the car turned some heads when we drove through Cooperstown, where I showed my son the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But over the years, the inevitable problems began. I considered it my weekend car. I’d put the top down — even in January, when we’d have an occasional good day — and cruise the towns along the South Shore, where I live.

Its last gasp came when my two youngest sons — just little boys when I got the car — used it to take their dates to the high school prom. They posed in their tuxes by the old convertible. It had one last night on the town.

2000 Chrysler Sebring

After a quarter century, the car still had its looks but became unreliable and, finally, undriveable. 

My mother died at 96. I held on to the car. When a mechanic quoted a several-thousand dollar estimate to make vital repairs, I knew it was time to let it go. It was hard to do, I told the mechanic. I had sentimental reasons.

My mother would have understood. When my father’s Cadillac sat rarely driven in the garage after his death, I’d urged her to do something with it. “Maybe we could turn it into a planter in the back yard,” I told her. I’d get a smile but no words.

At least her Sebring has come to a more useful end, in the arms of public radio.

The last gasp: Son Travis and Georgia, his prom date, take the Sebring for one last ride.