Everything has its advantages and disadvantages, I suppose. Advantage to say, digital photography over film is that it allows you to take virtually unlimited photos without much cost beyond startup for camera, computer, etc. Disadvantage is that it allows you to take, and store, virtually unlimited photos. The most memorable among them can get lost, needle-in-a-haystack style, amidst the ever-growing stack of others that may have been worth saving, but still, not quite so memorable.
As a former boss of mine used to say, “our strengths are also our weaknesses.”
Individual photographs, like individual or isolated memories, get lost--not irretrievably, they’re still stored in our minds or on our hard drive or Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and sometimes we can recapture them when somebody else happens across them, bringing them instantly back for us.
After work tonight I wandered over to my Flickr account, just to see what, if anything in my photo stream, other people had wandered across today, and I found this:
You may not be able to tell, but the photograph is of one cat’s paw, one dog’s paw, comfortably touching each other as their respective owners slept in the sun.
The dog and cat are both gone now--Sally the cat, an adventurous soul, hitched a ride somewhere in the undercarriage of a pickup truck; Bubba, the dog, loved to run, and particularly loved to run AFTER things, for instance, cars. He could run forever, swift as Secretariat--until he misjudged a car’s speed one day and tried to cross the highway ahead of it.
It is too long a story for OS, but Bubba started out life blind as a puppy, never began to see--or realize that he COULD see, I’m not sure--didn’t begin to be able to sort out images filtering into his brain until he was close to 4 months old. By that time he had been with us for nearly 2 months. All the cats more or less adopted him, but Sally also befriended him, and they spent a lot of time just wrestling and wandering around together and even simply dozing together on the lawn.
That somebody came across this particular photo, paws pausing together, brought the photo, the memory, back to me.
“These are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.” Bob Seger again (I’m sure I’ll quote and re-quote that line at least 1,438 times over the course of however long I keep posting here.)
Happy Monday to all, and to all, a good night.
One of the last reports I transcribed last night was a “death summary.” The patient (whyinhell are they called “patients,” anyway?) was elderly, though not particularly old at 81, had a fairly nondescript past medical history, wasn’t taking the customary 28 medications and supplements that most people her age (and much younger) seem to consume every day, had several family members in attendance for her grand, albeit unexpected, finale. She had just caught a pneumonia a couple of weeks ago, was apparently recovering from that, but then developed a pulmonary embolism from having been flat on her back in a hospital for a few days.
Nothing about her “story,” as I heard it, dictated in slow, measured tones by a doctor who seemed genuinely to care about the lady and her family, was particularly noteworthy, I suppose. As I do with all death summaries, though, I was as careful as I could be to get every dictated detail accurately--death, after all, is not the same thing as a sore throat or a fractured tibia. A death summary is the permanent “permanent record,” so you want to get it as right as you can. Yes, yes, I know--it’s just the final few hours or even moments of a real person’s life, does not begin to capture what the person was, who s/he was, how much s/he might have mattered to the grandkids or the coworkers or even in her role as “crazy cat lady” in some flyover Midwestern neighborhood. Still, it was her last moments, and deserved to be recorded accurately and, more importantly, with respect.
So I made sure the “i’s” got dotted and the “t’s” got crossed and all the commas got put in the right place. It was the least I could do.
Having been in this business for a while, I’ve transcribed a lot of death summaries. The one I remember forever is the first one I ever transcribed, concerning a 4-year-old boy who one day started walking funny--”my little crooked man,” his mother called him. His name was Drew (I even remember his last name, but won’t repeat it here--it’s a privacy thing, you know?). The doctor dictating the report was the general pediatric section chief I worked for, and who had hosted just hours earlier a retirement party for another doctor in our section.
It was late January, snowed a ton that day. I had fortunately just put new all-weather tires on the car, so had little trouble making it over to section chief’s house, where I shoveled snow off her sidewalk and front porch, helped greet people (including another of our pediatricians, who was about 8 months pregnant and took a fall, stumbling over the curb). Good night, at least to that point and even to the end of the party.
Monday morning I came in to find a micro-cassette on my desk, awaiting transcription. I plugged it in, then listened to my boss relate the story of Drew and his final moments, which came to pass about two hours after the retirement party ended. “His eyes rolled back in his head,” my boss dictated--and the 4-year-old was gone.
Two years after that, not long before said boss was getting ready to move to Minnesota, I was at my desk one morning and got a call from an inpatient floor, about one of our longstanding patients with a longstanding “idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis.” The patient, a girl named Pam who was born on Valentine’s Day 1972 and who doggedly worked towards a degree in allied health professions even while lugging around an oxygen tank, had been admitted a day or two earlier. “Pam’s gone,” the caller told me. And for the first time in four years of working with her, I tracked my boss down in a patient room and interrupted her examination of a patient. “It’s Pam,” she said, the instant I poked my head in the door.
On Monday, just a couple of days later, I was transcribing Pam’s death summary.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all fine and everything, when the ashes and ashes or the dust and dust have at least a little something--you know, a “life”--separating them.
(And how I got off on this particular tangent, I will never know.)
Yesterday morning I saw a snowy owl--at least, near as I could tell by matching up pictures I took of it with pictures of snowy owls I found online.
A snowy owl has no more business in this little corner of Missouri than Michele Bachmann has in a presidential race, so I was initially doubtful. Unlike this writer, snowy owls thrive in seriously cold places (think “inside the Arctic Circle); while it can be cold in the winter here, it never gets much below minus 20. Snowy owls like it a little cooler, from what I gather.
How the bird managed to find her (I THINK it was a “her”) way down here to my neighbors’ rooftop will likely remain a mystery to me, given what I’ve managed to find online so far. No migratory maps I’ve come across show them venturing much farther south than southern Minnesota or maybe northern Iowa, quite a ways north of where I hang my hat (or would, if I ever wore a hat). She was clearly lost.
Have to give her credit, though, for making the best of her situation. She perched very patiently on that rooftop for at least an hour, probably a good deal longer, yet she obviously never lost sight of the need to hunt, the need to survive--this breed of owl apparently will pick some high ground and settle there, scanning the country around it, for as long as it takes until it spies a potential lunch and goes immediately, hungrily after it.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am thankful for having the chance to see the bird, so far from where it “belongs;” I am thankful that I have neighbors thoughtful enough to call me and let me know the bird was there; I am thankful that there was still a little room left on the SD card in my camera to allow me to photograph it.
Come to think about it, I am thankful for so many moments.
When I was about 10, it was coming up to the lip of a ditch crossing our farm and seeing a red fox (rare then, rarer still now) lapping at the ice far below me. Around the same time, it was driving to a grocery store and being startled by a deer leaping across the street in front of us, right in the middle of town.
A year or two later, it was making my way around a pile of brush in some woods separating two ponds I used to fish, and coming face-to-face with a mama skunk and two or three or more of her babies--I froze, didn’t stop to count, just backed off and ran away, but I can still see the skunk and her brood in my mind’s eye, my memory.
Much later, it was the possum lumbering in its odd, almost hunchbacked way toward me on a dark walking path early one morning, and the hawk with whom I came face-to-face when going out on a smoke break in the middle of midtown Kansas City; the hawk was resting in a tree at the edge of the parking garage, I was on the second floor, just about at eye level.
There were the baby raccoons, four or five of them, huddled 15 or 20 feet up against a tree trunk in streetlight, around 4:30 a.m. when I was engaged in my morning walk.
The humongous river otter that appeared one morning in a pond near my house, a long way from the nearest river (the Mississippi, actually).
The enormous beaver that waddled into the headlights, down by “Goose Pond” (not its actual name) in Kansas City North one night when we drove down there just on a lark.
I won’t even mention the rattlesnake stretched out on a rock, a squirrel in its mouth (well, I guess I did just mention that).
The world can be full of unexpected wonders, if we are open to them.
To borrow a line from Bob Seger, “these are the memories that make me a wealthy soul.”
