Ooh, spooky!

Okay, this is a little weird. But before I get into the weirdness, a little back story.

You know Kitty--your voodoo godmother?

She used to be a financial analyst. She's a desciple of Warren Buffett, the guy who uses technical analysis to make gobs of money. Kitty and I used to argue about stocks. Her perspective was all about the numbers; mine was all about the marketing. Most of the time she was right, but when I was right, I was right big. I called Apple Computer back about eight or nine years ago and we're living off the proceeds today.

Anyway, about six or seven years ago Kitty and her husband Paul got tired of LA and retired to Oregon. Kitty used to say that she wasn't creative, but then she started making voodoo dolls. Which, by the way, are beautiful.

When we had dinner with her and Paul last week, she told us how little strange things were happening in their house. Paul's wedding ring went missing, for instance, while Kitty was out of town. She came home to find it on the arm of one of the voodoo dolls.

Another time, someone came over and was making disparaging comments about voodoo dolls. Suddenly, a loud, regular knocking started coming from downstairs. There was nobody downstairs and Kitty and Paul don't have any pets. Paul went to go find out what was causing the noise, but couldn't see anything. Then Kitty said the name of one the voodoo gods and it stopped. Just like that.

All this is preamble.

Yesterday, your mom was in the sun room and I was in the kitchen and suddenly Seymour the kitten's litter box fell off the shelf. The shelf is in the closet in the sun room and is wider than the litter box. I'd just cleaned it earlier, so I knew it was put back square.

Litter spewed all over the closet floor, and the opening was facing out, not sideways the way I'd put it in.

None of the dogs was in the vicinity and Seymour the kitten didn't come running out of the closet, freaked out that he'd made the litter box fall.

Fine.

Like in a bad horror movie, we chalked it up to the wind or the house settling or something.

This morning, I was at my desk and your mom was talking to me from the doorway. Connie was lying on the floor behind her and Scooter was by my feet. Rover was downstairs--she's too old to make it up the stairs.

I was looking at your mom, and heard Seymour the kitten's cardboard scratching unit slide up against her foot. I didn't think anything about it until she said, "Did you see that?" I didn't because whatever had happened was on the other side of the wall, but apparently it had slid by itself.

Again, we wondered if Seymour the kitten had made it happen, but he wasn't anywhere nearby. When we found him, he was lying on the floor of your room, calmly pondering what a lovely life he has.

So now I'm a little freaked out. Kitty said the doll was there to protect you and I trust her completely, but still...

Stay tuned.

Pop goes the belly

Just this morning, your mother asked me if she looked too thin. Which she didn't.

Let me hasten to add that she didn't look fat, either. She looked normal. Normal for her, which is a little bit softer than she looked before she got pregnant.

It's Saturday, so we decided to take a day off from house stuff. We drove out to Astoria to surprise Kitty and Paul.

The trip wasn't exactly well-thought out. We forgot to bring their address or phone number with us and we'd only been there once about five years ago.

Somehow we managed to find the house, by combining her memory of the place with my incomplete memory of the address. But when we knocked there was no answer. The house is up for sale, so I called the number of the real estate agent, who was extremely accommodating, especially considering that a complete stranger called her on a Saturday and asked for the phone number of her clients. Still, before she could dig through six months of e-mails to find Kitty's number, Paul came to the door. He'd been watching football and Kitty had been sleeping.

And they were completely gracious. As always.

We ended up imposing ourselves into their dinner plans--they were having dinner with their friend Helen who was in from Seattle--and then Kitty gave us one of her voodoo dolls. It's up in your room, I'm sure, because it's meant to protect you.

On the way home, your mom complained that her stomach hurt. And once we got in, she took a look. Dum da da dum! A belly.

Not the kind of belly that there's no mistaking she's pregnant, but a lot more than she had this morning. A lot.

Maybe it's gas.

Maybe it's the voodoo doll.

Maybe it's just time for you to make an appearance.

Leaping to a conclusion

This has been on my mind all day.

Your grandfather--my father--had been faced with a dilemma recently. Doctors had found a lump on his lung, but they didn't know what it was.

They did a needle biopsy, twice, but couldn't get enough cells to figure out what it was. So one of his doctors recommended having the lump surgically removed. Another recommended having a biopsy.

Your grandpa talked to me about it a couple of times. The doctor who didn't recommend the surgery told him that stray cells might be released during the surgery which could spread cancer throughout his body.

I didn't say this to him, but it seemed to me that the same disadvantage applied to having a biopsy. It's still surgery, but they take less stuff out.

The disadvantage to having a biopsy, I figured, was that it is a surgical procedure. Having a biopsy might just help the doctors determine that they needed to remove the lump after all, which would mean he'd have to have two surgeries instead of one.

Ultimately, your grandpa decided to have the lump removed. That was a couple of days ago.

He came out of surgery okay, and after a night in intensive care, they moved him to a private room. He didn't have an appetite, though, and started having trouble breathing. Then he developed a fever. Turns out he'd gotten pneumonia.

When I talked to the nurse, she told me that he'd taken a turn for the worse. She didn't sugarcoat it. She said they'd put him on a ventilator and moved him back into intensive care, where they'd planned to remove fluid from his lungs.

That's when Sterling and Angie decided to fly out.

Angie called this morning to give me an update. Turns out that during the sugery, they cut the nerve that controls half of his diaphragm and did something to his thyroid. Bottom line, one lung is no longer functioning and he has essentially no immune system.

I asked whether this was part of the surgery that they'd planned.

I can tell you right now that it wasn't. Nobody in his right mind would eviscerate a 79-year-old's immune system, and halve his lung capacity, in order to remove an unidentified lump. And I can further guarantee you that even if 73 doctors recommended such a procedure, your grandfather would find doctor #74.

He would never choose to have that kind of operation performed. Sure, remove a lump. But it would go entirely against his nature to agree to reduce his capacity to either breathe or fight disease, even if the doctors knew what the lump was and they knew that it was dangerously malignant.

Which leaves two possibilties: 1) It was a mistake. Somebody's hand slipped during surgery. Or 2) It was a bad decision. Once they had him open, they saw that the lump had somehow entwined itself with the nerve and they made the decision to take the nerve out with it.

Sterling is supposed to have a conversation with the surgeon tomorrow, and maybe then we'll get more of an answer. Which is irrelevant, anyway, because either way we're left with a man who has been crippled by the process that was supposed to help save him.

And it makes me furious.

Your grandfather is a lot of things--hard-headed, annoying, arrogant, and narrow-minded, and there have been many times when I've wanted to strangle the man. But he doesn't deserve this.

And here's the thing. He doesn't know yet.

He can't. He came out of surgery, then went onto pain medication. He's been almost constantly delirious, and I'm sure as far as he's concerned, he's simply in recovery.

I can't stop thinking about what they've done to him. It's cruel, really. And telling him might just break him.

It makes me sick.

Although not sick enough to check into that hospital.

Look, we're Sidharta-like

Someday, you'll probably take a course called History of Communication, or something like that. In it, you'll learn about the internet, which by the way, we used to write the Internet, but that changed maybe last year when it went from being a Thing to being a thing.

From my point of view, a course about the History of Communication seems like a silly notion. Not that it isn't worthy of a course, but when I was your age, there was no such thing. When I predict that you'll end up taking a course like that, I guess I'm being a little derisive because courses tend to be for people who don't have firsthand experience in a subject. We're living the development of the internet now; by the time you get to that course, the internet will probably have become whatever it's going to be and entire careers will be built on explaining what happened.

Anyway, in that course, you'll probably hear about something called Craigslist. Your professor will tell you that it was the logical progression from the classified ads that appeared in newspapers, which will seem incredibly quaint to you, but which, as I write this, still exist.

Yes, you can really go to a machine, put a metal disk in that represents currency, and remove paper with printing on it that purports to be current. In our world now, that is still normal.

Mind blowing, isn't it?

In those newspapers there's a section of what you probably call peer-to-peer advertising. Classified ads. If I have a table to sell, I take out an ad. People looking for tables read through the ads and if they like the sounds of mine, they call me.

Craigslist allows me to do more or less the same thing. Which I did. Which is why I'm writing today's installment.

Your mom and I had a couple of pieces of furniture we didn't want to take with us to Portland. So she took pictures of the stuff and I put ads on Craigslist.

Okay, here's how it really went down.

Your mom said days ago that she wanted to put ads on Craigslist. And she went around the place, taking pictures of the stuff she wanted to sell.

And then never got around to putting up the ads.

Two days ago, I kind of got mad at her about it. And I huffed dramatically over to the computer and made a big deal about how once again, I was going to do the thing that she said she'd do but didn't.

I know. Childish. Parents get that way, too.

The reality is that we're both lousy at selling. I'm not sure her reason. She loves recycling. She'll go to a lot of trouble to recycle a single empty water bottle. But then she'll throw away a perfectly good television set. When she's over something, she can't get rid of it fast enough. It never occurs to her that she could sell the television set.

For me, it's a completely different thing. I have a hard time getting rid of things. Not because I think they're so valuable, but because I think they only have value to me. I may hate the television, but it works. And if I got rid of it, I'd only have to replace it. So throwing it out would end up costing me the price of a new one. If I sell something, I have an incredible compulsion to disclose every possible flaw. Because--I think--I have a really negative association with selling. If somebody's selling something, I figure there's probably something wrong with it. Otherwise, they'd hold onto it. Especially when that someone is me. In fact, the only way I'm comfortable getting rid of something is giving it to charity. Because the Salvation Army has no expectations of its worth.

Your mom didn't follow through with Craigslist because it would have been easier just to throw the stuff away. And normally I wouldn't have followed through with Craigslist because I coudln't imagine that anybody would actually want the stuff that we wanted to get rid of.

But here's the magic of Craigslist: You put your stuff out there, but you're not putting yourself out there. I can post a bookshelf for sale and if everybody thinks the price is too high, I won't hear anything back. And that's good. I don't know why that's good, but it makes it easier to do than, say, having a garage sale.

Long story short, we sold every bit of furniture that your mom and I had acquired since we moved to Hollywood. For a profit.

It feels as if we've divested ourselves of all of our worldly possessions and now we can go forth, naked, to find enlightenment in Portland.

Just like Sidharta, only with $2,750 in our pockets.

A big day

Big things happened today. Sarah died. And we closed on the house.

What connects them both is more than you'd think. Both were things that had been anticipated. Both happened more or less without a lot of fanfare.

Sarah passed away in her sleep, after having fought cancer for years. At the end, she was more or less comatose, probably having to do as much with the pain medication as the cancer.

Tamara was there. She brought Smudge because she wanted Sarah to touch him, physically, before she died. Sarah, always courteous, waited for Smudge to arrive, hanging on to life, even if barely, until she could touch Smudge.

Which sounds kind of hippy dippy when I write it, but wasn't.

Tamara is a powerful person--I'm sure you know that. And Tamara feels that she wouldn't have become the person she is without having had Sarah's influence. That's why it was so important for her to have her son touch her friend. Even if the connection was only momentary, it was important for Tamara that it happen.

Apparently it was important to Sarah as well. Her brain was so full of cancer that the doctor had given her no more than a couple of hours to live before Tamara came down to see her. But she refused to go until she'd done the one last thing.

Powerful people do powerful things, even on the verge of death.

And then there's the house.

We'd put a sizeable down payment on the house and the money was supposed to have been wired from my brokerage account to the title company's in the morning. I got a call around noon that the money hadn't showed up yet.

I spent a long time on the phone trying to understand why the brokerage couldn't tell me where the money went. They'd sent the wire, but had no idea why it hadn't arrived. All they knew was that it would arrive. Eventually. And that until then, they had no way of knowing where it was.

To my way of thinking, that's completely preposterous. The money existed. And basic acounting says that you don't take money out of one account without putting it in another.

This reasoning made no sense to the guy at the brokerage. So I gave him my car analogy: A car leaves Chicago bound for New York. You may not know when it's going to get to New York, but the car is somewhere in between the two and at any point, you should be able to know where it is.

I finally came to realize that while I was operating until Newtonian presumptions, banking actually operates more along the lines of quantum mechanics.

It's almost like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal as applied to wire transfers: It may be possible to know your money's state or its speed, but not both.

I got kind of rude to the guy at the brokerage because he couldn't tell me anything except that he was sure the money would arrive by the end of the day. And I don't think I was wrong to, either. As far as I knew, $35,000 had gone totally unaccounted for.

Sure enough, he was right. The money arrived and the wheels of commerce turned, just enough for the bank to fund the loan and the house to become ours. Quietly. Without any ceremony, any sort of finality, any notice of any kind. In fact, we only know for sure that everything went according to plan because we haven't heard otherwise from the sellers, the real estate agents, the bank, or the title company.

We still don't have a key.

And I suppose that's how Sarah's death is similar. A woman goes from ill to sleeping to comatose to no longer breathing and where exactly is the line between life and death? Where exactly is the line between the house belonging to those other people and it belonging to us? Yes, a time will be ascribed to both. Sarah's death will be noted as having officially occurred at a certain time, just as ownership of the house will have passed to us at a certain time. But that time--those times--seem more or less arbitrary. The reality is that the changes of state are fuzzy, not precise. And yet they are definitive, nonetheless.

Sarah is gone; we own a house. The world moves along.

The value of a life

Tamara called today. She’s on her way to her friend Sarah’s house.

You probably won’t ever meet Sarah. She’s been fighting cancer for about three years and it looks as if she’s losing.

I don’t know Sarah very well. I’ve only met her once. But I do know what an extraordinary person she is. It isn’t fair that she’s had to fight cancer. And no matter how long she lives, she’s the kind of person the world will be worse off without. And that brings me to the thing I’ve been pondering since I spoke to Tamara. How do you value a life? How do you value anything?

We all know easy answers. The reason for money is because it acts as a form of measurement. A Mercedes is more valuable than a Hyundai, and money lets you know just how much more valuable it is.

When it comes to lives, we apply the same reasoning, but instead of money we use time. A person who dies at 80 is twice as fortunate as someone who dies at 40.

The problem is, that isn’t quite true. Plenty of people waste the 80 years they get, while people like Sarah make the most of their 40. And I suppose that goes to the shame of Sarah’s situation. Someone like her would make the most of 80, so why is it that she might not get more than 40?

Tamara had the notion that maybe people have a sort of allotment of value to their lives, and Sarah, having given so much to so many, is simply out of life. I don’t know. As much as I want there to be some sort of justice to it all, I don’t believe there is. I believe that some people, like Sarah, simply get the short end of the stick.

When we first went to the pediatrician, he asked your mom and me if we wanted to have blood tests in order to figure out the odds that you would be susceptible to genetic diseases. They gave us a pamphlet explaining all the horrible things you could be born with—most of them saying that if you got whatever the disease was that you wouldn’t likely live past five or three or whatever.

We decided not to get the tests.

We feel that it doesn’t matter whether you’re born with one of those diseases or not. Either way, we want you to make the most of whatever life you have. Knowing that there’s an 80% chance that you won’t live to be 12 doesn’t change the fact that we want you, or that we want to make your life as valuable as we can, whether it’s 12 years long or 80.

I guess we already know the answer about how to value a life, at least for ourselves. But that doesn’t make the answer any less painful when we’re faced with the reality that it doesn’t last as long as we’d want.

All we know is that it isn’t time that makes a life worth living, any more than it’s a stack of money that makes a car worth driving. Those things are just feeble attempts to put a number to something. If you let the number replace the thing it measures, you’ve lost sight of what value is.

Now your mom really looks pregnant.

I know, I said it before. When your mom got back from Philadelphia. When I saw her then, I thought she looked pregnant.

Now she really does.

Not with a big ol' belly or anything. But there's something... I don't know. Womanly, maybe?

There's a Flemish baroque painter from the late 1500s named Peter Paul Rubens who was famous for painting women who were voluptuous. Rubenesque. You'll learn all this in art history. Your mom isn't Rubenesque, but she has a quality like some of the women in the paintings. It's, I don't know, womanly. Fertile, maybe.

Suddenly I understand the appeal of the guy's paintings. The women aren't beautiful in the clasical sense--and certainly not in the Hollywood sense--but now that I see what your mother is becoming, I understand the beauty he managed to capture. These women represent life, which sounds a lot heavier than I mean it to. Ripeness. That's more like what it is.

I know, think of it this way.

The beautiful women that you see all over television and in movies and magazines are the equivalent of flowers; the women that Rubens painted--and the woman that your mother has become--are fruits.

Stop laughing. I'm serious.

When flowers have become fertilized, they create fruits. Fruits carry the seeds of future generations. It's actually a really good analogy.

Let's push the metaphor a little further. When I met your mom, she was just a bud. A wide-eyed kid fresh off the plane from Nova Scotia, out to take on Hollywood. All potential and optimism.

She bloomed into something more spectacular than I could have ever imagined.

And now she's a fruit.

That doesn't sound as nice as I mean it. I love your mom. I love what she's becoming.

The world doesn't owe you a living.

My parents used to say that to me. And every time they did, it made me mad.

We went to lunch at a fancy schmancy sandwich place called Rita Flora. Actually, I don't think I'd ever eaten there, even though I've driven past it hundreds of times. It's next door to and connected with a flower shop.

We only went there because your mom was hungry and when she gets hungry--especially now that you're in there--she needs to eat, and right away. We wanted to go to Jones, which is a very trendy, clubby place right across the street from one of the lots (that's film speak for the place where they make movies), but they were closed by the time we got there.

Your mom mentioned Rita Flora and so there we went.

Typical L.A., the service was... casual. When the waiter finally stopped by, your mom ordered a waffle and bacon. The bacon didn't come with the waffle. When I asked the waiter about it, he went and put in the order. I had a goat cheese sandwich with a salad. The salad didn't have dressing. No apology, no explanation.

I say this is typical L.A. because while many places, being a waiter is a proud profession, in L.A., waiting tables is the job of choice for wannabe actors, screenwriters, and directors. The pay is good, the work is usually flexible, the hours are amenable to having meetings, and the tips are tax-free. Here, one never aspires to being a waiter. It's a stepping stone to something better and when someone claims to be, say, an actor, it's not unusual for the response to be, "Really? What restaurant?"

There's an apocryphal story about a waiter who gets to serve Steven Spielberg. He's so nervous that he drops things, gets the order wrong, and spills food. He finally blubbers an apology. "Mr. Spielberg," he says, "I'm so sorry. But you see, I'm not really a waiter. I'm an actor." Mr. Spielberg replies, "Then act like a waiter."

Where was I? Oh yeah, tipping.

It's become customary to tip 20% in L.A., and that amount is more and more being calculated on the final bill--meaning that it's normal to tip on the sales tax as well as the food. Right now, sales tax is 8 1/4%, so on a $100 bill, the total would come to $108.25, and with a 20% tip that would make it a $132.06. In other words, what you pay is a third more than what your food costs. In a restaurant like Rita Flora, a goat cheese sandwich and a waffle came to $30. I realize that as you read this, $30 is probably not a whole lot to pay for lunch. But today, even in L.A., it's a bit pricey. To put it into perspective, I just filled up the tank of my car for $39, the car payment itself is $412, and our rent is $1854.

So we decided not to leave a tip.

Why am I telling you this? Because we're tired of paying for things we don't get. I hired a lawyer two years ago who made me pay a retainer. He did some work and then refused to return the remainder of the retainer. About the same time, my accountant--someone who I considered a friend--started billing her services to my credit card. And then didn't pay the credit card bill. And then didn't tell me that she wasn't paying the credit card bill, so that in addition to late fees and interest charges, the interest rate itself was being raised to the 30% range.

I blame L.A., and it is fairly endemic here. People try to get away with doing as little as possible, and feel put out when they actually have to do work. I've occasionally been guilty of this myself, and so has your mother. And it's not right. So we've decided to take responsibility and change that.

The first part of the responsibility means doing what we commit to, no matter how inconvenient it may be.

The second part means confronting situations where others expect to be paid when they don't do anything to deserve that payment. So I took my complaint about the lawyer to the California Bar, took my complaint about the accountant to the California Board of Accountancy, and filed a grievance about the waiter with the California Waiters Guild.

No, I'm kidding about the last one. But we didn't tip him.

It's the first time I didn't leave a tip at a restaurant, and in fairness to the waiter, his infractions were fairly minor. But a tip is not a tax. A tip is for service. The waiter got most of the food to the table. Giving him a tip for that would be rewarding him for doing an inadequate job.

We felt guilty, too. We almost snuck out of the restaurant, after double- and triple-checking to make sure we had everything with us. The last thing we'd want was to have to come back in for a pair of sunglasses or something.

By the time you're old enough to read this, your mom and I will probably have gotten more comfortable with the notion of not tipping when the service doesn't warrant it. And you will have been embarrassed every time. And not just for that, but for hundreds of other things we do that seem weird to you but that we're totally self-righteous about.

I'm not apologizing, but I am explaining.

Your mom and I believe in doing what's right. The older we get, the more it matters to us. When we were young, we cared more about fitting in. About not making waves. About being cool.

You don't get this yet. Not the first time you read this and probably not until we're both either really old or dead. But eventually, we hope--we believe--that you'll come to more or less the same place.

This is important: The reason we hope you'll come to the same place is not so that you'll be like us, but so you'll be yourself.

I know. That sounds really stupid. Eventually it won't. I hope I'm still around when that happens.