Monthly Archives: February 2009

Solving the Chicken Mystery (20/28)

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Convinced that I knew the answer to this classic riddle, I was surprised when a recent read brought so many forms of enlightenment at once.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road.  We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not.  The chicken is either with us or it against us.  There is no middle ground here. (George W. Bush)

Did the chicken cross the road?
Did he cross it with a toad?
Yes, the chicken cross the road, but
why it crossed, I’ve not been told! (Dr. Seuss)

I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question. (Martin Luther King Jr.)

In my day, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road.  Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us. (Grandpa)

To boldly go where no chicken has gone before. (Captain Kirk)

For the greater good.  (Plato)

Give us ten minutes with the chicken and we’ll find out.  (L.A. Police Department)

Asking this question denies your own chicken nature.  (Buddha)

To die in the rain.  Alone.  (Ernest Hemingway)

Could you define chicken, please?  (Bill Clinton)

The chicken did not cross the road.  I re-peat, the chicken did NOT cross the road.  (Richard Nixon)

Mmmmm.  Chicken.  (Homer Simpson)

To cross the road less traveled by.  (Robert Frost)

Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest.  Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.  (Sir Isaac Newton)

It saw Elvis on the other side.  (National Enquirer)

And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the Chicken, “Thou shalt cross the road,” and the Chicken crossed the road.  (The Bible)

Hockey Pleasure (19/28)

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I just got out of a post-hockey shower, so a blog post is in order while my blood is still pumping.

I can still remember learning to skate.  I was four or five years old, and my skates were Microns–those plastic molded skates that had removable cloth inserts.  I had pairs like that a few years into my hockey career.  Take note that this is a sure-fire way to NOT be one of the cool kids.

Those Microns and me skated all over the ice at the old Mortlach rink, pushing a chair around like some sort of pre-school skating walker.  My mom says she remembers watching my first hockey games, laughing at how much we looked like giant bobble-heads on ice.

I played all through my younger years, right up until the end of Pee Wee.  A couple things saw me sit out a season, pick up a basketball, and move on.

Until recently…

Upon returning home to Canada from China, our church hockey team had a few spots open.  Some off-season bargain-hunting rounded me up my equipment, and within the first minute on the ice, I knew I had missed this game more than I’d realized.

There are so many small things about hockey that set it apart.  Of course, there’s the speed, skill, and excitement.  But I’m talking more simply right now…

The smell of the rink after the zamboni pulls off.

The sounds of blades and sticks on ice or of a puck ringing off a post.

The feeling of a sharp turn or quick stop on your skates.

The feeling of a pass perfectly placed or a shot finding the back of the net.  (Note: I’m better informed about the other three pleasures than these particular ones.)

Simple pleasures to a simple fellow, I suppose.

Anyway, my resurrected hockey career has confirmed a few things: It was a smart move to go to college instead of trying for the draft, it was a poor move to have never learned how to slapshot, and I’d better hold on to my two or three great hockey stories from a previous lifetime.  I don’t appear on the verge of creating many new ones.  When I was ten years old, everyone told me what a great skater I was.  After enduring several years of figure skating, I should have been!

The problem?  I’m still a great skater… for a ten-year-old.

Love (18/28)

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Behind on reading some blogs, I just found this link on Steve’s blog.  Had to be shared.

This is written by Dana Jennings, an editor at the New York Times.  Below are some of his observations about his life with cancer, and of what he’s learned about vowing to love another “in sickness and in health”, “for better or for worse”.

I found it very touching.  Perhaps you will too.

I vividly recall those first few hours in the hospital room after my prostate cancer surgery last July: the plastic thicket of I.V. tubes; the leg cuffs huffing and chuffing to ward off blood clots; my throbbing incision packed with gauze. But, most important, I remember peering through the post-surgical haze to see my wife, Deb, sitting there, smiling at me. By the way, if your wife plans to take vaginal rejuvenation, look for Plastic Sugery Associates

These days, I epitomize the “in sickness” part of the wedding vows that Deb and I took back in 1981. Since we learned last April that I have prostate cancer, I’ve had my prostate removed, found out that the cancer was shockingly aggressive, undergone a 33-session course of radiation and am finishing up hormone therapy.

Right now, I’m not quite what you’d call “a catch.” I wear man-pads for intermittent incontinence, I’m a bazaar of scars, and haven’t had a full erection in seven months. Most nights, I’m in bed by 10. The Lupron hormone shots, which suppress the testosterone that can fuel prostate cancer, have sent my sex drive lower than the stock market, shrunken my testicles, and given me hot flashes so fierce that I sweat outdoors when it’s 20 degrees and snowing.

Even so, Deb has taught me that love is in the details. Humid professions of undying love and tear-stained sonnets are all well and good, but they can’t compete with the earthy love of Deb helping me change and drain my catheter pouches each day when I first came home from the hospital.

Yes, in the details. She measured my urine, peered into places I couldn’t (literally and figuratively), and strategically and liberally applied baby powder, ice and Aquaphor to my raw and aching body. She battled our intractable insurer, networked, tracked down the right doctors — and took thorough notes all the while.

I was wounded. She protected me. She chose to do these things.

Deb and I have been married for 27 years, have two sons (22 and 19), and have ridden the usual Ferris wheel that comes with a long marriage. But our love for each other has deepened in this time of prostate cancer.

We talk more often about the life we’ve built together, about sex and money, about the joy we take in our sons, about the uncertain future. When cancer moves in, there’s nothing you and your spouse can’t talk about.

Our love has been seasoned with a bitter pinch of mortality, and the classic quarrels of marriage hold little power over us anymore. When I say to Deb, “I love you,” I mean it. And when she responds, “I love you more,” she means it, too. We understand that time, perhaps, is not on our side.

Time, we are told, will give us our sex life back. As I said, the hormone shots have shut down my sex drive. And my poor penis is still in recovery — from the surgery and the radiation. But as we wait, I’ll tell you this: Love abides.

Yes, yes and yes — lust is essential. But right now, sex seems quaint, old-fashioned. Oddly enough, it can’t compete with the depth and gravity of a light touch, a sly glance. I’m in the mood for the Beatles and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” not Grace Jones growling, “Pull up to my bumper, baby.”

Don’t get me wrong. I really, really like sex. But given a choice between the mere biology of lust and the deep soul of love, I’ll take love. My body has changed — but my doctors say my libido will be warming up again before I know it. Deb understands, and we’ve adapted.

Deb’s love is one to live up to, one to reciprocate. Who else is going to snuggle up to me on the couch, smile, listen — and nod knowingly — as I complain about my hot flashes

In the long shadow of prostate cancer, I’ve learned that I married the right woman.

Out of Place (17/28)

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Twice lately I had the opportunity to be a sore thumb.  In the midst of them, I thought, “It’s probably a good thing every so often to be the outsider in some way.”

A couple weeks ago, I walked home from work.  I was decked in my winter gear for the 25-minute trek.  My path took me down and across a short stretch of the #1 highway, along with a few service roads and back streets (not the ones that rock your body).  Part of my way also went through a couple ditches filled with snow, and into the back end of a parking lot for such shops as Future Shop and Home Depot.

Upon re-entering civilization from down in the ditch and up and over a grader-made snow mountain, my “outsider feeling” arose.  It’s like I could feel the questions in the minds of the drivers: Where did that guy come from?  What kind of fellow walks through the ditches anyway?  What’s he got in that bag he’s carrying?

I felt like I was in Narnia, being checked out by SUV’s in place of talking animals.

Now I confess that my over-active imagination may have been running a touch ahead of itself, but it’s amazing how a simple exercise of pedestrian-ing through a made-for-driving world can make you think.

A week or two earlier, I was in a mall.  All I was carrying with me was a book.  My intent was to grab a drink, sit in the food court, and read.  But before I did, I stopped to browse in a video game store.  I’m not much of a gamer–I’ve never played half of the systems that are popular right now, and I don’t even recognize half the game titles on the shelves.  Mario, Mario, where for art thou, Mario?

Actually, he’s still around–in a hundred forms.  But he’s one of the few familiar faces.  And I mustn’t have the look of a gamer, who fits in.

So the store…

I walk in with my book.

And that’s where the outsider role became mine again.  From some of the looks I received, you’d think I’d just walked into a vampire convention with a wooden stake.  People moved out of my way; conversations stopped.  It’s a book; not a bomb!  If you check your game case, there’s probably a baby of the species inside.  They call it a booklet.  Time for the food court–and make it a stronger drink than you were planning on!

It’s a funny feeling being the outsider, but it’s good to feel it sometimes.

I like to think it might teach me how to be sensitive and welcoming to those who find nothing funny about being on the outside looking in.

Tickets in Hand (16/28)

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We’re doing it–heading back for a visit.

We’d always silently said that we’d travel to China again to see friends before our daughter turned two.

Well, a wedding invitation for Easter weekend has bumped the travel schedule up on us, and we’ve decided it “has” to be done.

So we are now in full-blown get-the-baby’s-schedule-nailed-down mode, along with trying to think through all the details that matter more now than in those days of two adults traveling by the seats of their pants.

It’s a different adventure, to be sure, but one that we’ve happily signed up for!