Recognize this man?

His bravery at the Battle of Puebla and unlikely victory over french forces there on May 5th, 1862 is celebrated every year as Cinco de Mayo. His name is Ignacio Zaragoza. The same first name of our favorite bartender at Gallos, where Happy Wife and I ventured to on our bikes yesterday, knowing that the carefree imbibition of tequila drinks would leave us unsafe for driving an automobile. Who knew that three of those babies would make even the bike ride home challenging! Happy Wife took a spill in the mud where the trail was in horrid condition, I nearly fell myself. I quickly helped her up, steadied her bike, and reassured her this happens from time to time, even to expert cyclists with perfect sobriety. What she didn’t need was the remark of the little brat further down the trail: Hey lady I saw you fall in that puddle.

In that second I totally understood Scrooge, “Are the orphanages full then?“

Oh, but we had a grand time, and the food was free. And good. And necessary! Ignacio wasn’t there, but other competent bartenders were, masters at fulfilling — and refilling! — Cadillac Margaritas, the means of our self-imposed depravity.

BIGGER.

You’ve got to love a restaurant concerned enough with the safety of its patrons to provide free shuttle service to and from the church parking lot. It was Sunday after all, and what better way to live this one than to leave the car in the lot after service is over, hop the shuttle to Gallos, and commit a range of uncomely behaviors needing forgiveness the next Sunday!

Now, you may be asking, what, for example, do I mean by “uncomely?”

Ahem. Well, for example, see here:

And no, I’m not providing a “BIGGER” link to this — it’s plenty big enough!

Even dogs were welcome — some arrived on the back of motorcycles.

We celebrated on the patio outside, drenched in afternoon sun and so it was comfortably warm, low 50s maybe, but I don’t know that it was this warm:

At least no drafty butt crackage there. More defiance I think: “It’s spring now, dammit, and I’m going to wear my open-toed wedgies and short shorts if it kills me.” And it might’ve, had she stayed there after sunset.

Finally, an argument against government intrusion in private affairs, as if we really needed another argument. If government men serviced Cinco de Mayo celebrations only one kind of booze would be served in faceless tin cans with the single word “booze” on the front, something like that. But turn it over to entrepreneurs and private markets and viola!, you get innovation like this (not our drink, the table next to us):

I mean really, is this inventive or what? A kind of steady IV drip of Corona into your cocktail! Something I’m quite certain would be banned in New York by Bloomberg and the anti-Big Gulpians — after all, who really needs a Corona continuously decanting into their Cadillac Margarita? It’s not about what we need, sir, it’s about what people want, on Cinco de Mayo, in Alaska. It’s how we roll.

You know it’s really spring in Anchorage when…

BIGGER.

… you see your first spring bear. Spotted this one on our way home from the dog walk this morning. And a glorious morning it was, certainly compared to yesterday morning. The bear was rooting for something to eat, a bear can get a mighty big appetite during hibernation, and after an unproductive minute or two thought it might check and see if the onlookers had anything to offer:

BIGGER.

Today: Snowy with periods of snow mixed with snow tapering to snow later today.

1-800-273-8255

Tempers were raised and disharmony resulted.

The day opened as it usually does around here, expectations no different than the day before, or the day before that. Same ol’ same ol’, copy-paste. However, no sooner had the day begun to unfurl — ablutions performed, lattes prepared, lips converged and parted again with a wave good-bye: “Have a nice day at work, Honey” — when I sensed a palpable disquiet in the air. One I could not put my finger on. And then just as suddenly as it came it was gone. Hmm, I thought, maybe a false positive.

I forgot about it and set about my usual AM routine. I checked the morning e-mail, assessed the notifications on my phone, e-replied to certain matters which needed my attention, traversed the web along my usual route, prepared and enjoyed a second espresso. I was well into an analytical task related to work when the dogs began to stir, a bit sooner than usual I thought, and this should have confirmed my earlier suspicion of an ephemeral disquietude. Being preoccupied with my task it didn’t. It was five or ten minutes to 10:00; usually the dogs don’t pester me until 10:30 or later.

Okay, okay, we’ll go for our walk now. As we got ready to go it seemed to me they were much more snipey toward each other than usual.

It was a gloriously bright day on the bluff overlooking Cook Inlet and beyond, a great place to walk in peace (usually), or hunt should you have the ego of a national emblem:

BIGGER.

But it wasn’t a usual day. I sensed that unsettledness again, the same kind I’d felt earlier, and scolded the dogs to stop sparring so close to the bluff edge — One of you is going to fall down that hill! You might think I should know better than to think they understand me, but you’d be surprised how sensitive a mature dog can be to certain tones of voice. They stopped and came to me expecting a treat. I caved and gave them each one. Hippie parent that I am.

We rounded the final turn on the bluff and walked up and over the south face of the sand dune, by this time of year entirely snow free. We took the short route back to the car as I was anxious to get home to get some work done. Into the car we all went, the dogs into the back seat as usual, but sort of like when you were a kid and your sister was “in your space” in the back seat of the car and you shouted, “Mom, she’s touching me! She’s touching me!”, well, Harry was so growling at Lucy. I scolded him to be quiet, and when he did, caved and gave them both another treat. It would not be the end of doggie discord for the day.

Back at home there was an unusual disembarkation inside the garage, wiping of muddy paws and the removal of Harry’s harness, yes, but also more sniping and sparring — What is up with these two today? Once inside the house I made Lucy her usual breakfast — ground beef, brown rice and pinto beans — fed her outside, and then hand-fed Harry his kibble and ground beef, per Happy Wife’s suggestion that it’s best to do it this way to prevent him from eating like a maniac. It sort of works.

With that done I’m finally back at my work, concentrating, when the dogs start pestering me again. What now?! Outside? Fine. Let’s go. Out they go and I think what the hell I’ll give them each a rawhide bone to keep them quiet for a while. This usually works. I’m not back in the house thirty seconds when I hear this eruption on the back deck. One, or two dogs, I couldn’t tell as I sprinted to the back door, screeching and wailing. I get to the door and look out and all I see is Lucy with a ton of whoop-ass on top of Harry trying to rip him a new one. What the hell?!

I get out there quick and pull her off him, inspect them both and assure myself neither dog was hurt. I see one of the rawhide bones on the deck. Uh huh, I see, so Harry couldn’t find his bone for some reason and thought he might enjoy Lucy’s.

You know, on any usual day Lucy would allow this, do nothing, the fabric of the day’s harmony would continue unbroken.

But for reasons I don’t understand, even though I might have known had I trusted my earlier premonitions, it was not a usual day.

Received the latest rejection to publish a short fiction story I’ve been shopping around to literary journals. The rejection was printed on a small 4×5 card and, curiously, returned with it in the SASE I had provided was the first page of my manuscript?

There were no emoticons — I half expected to see a little yellow sad face.

The card was addressed: Dear Prospective Contributor…

And continued: Your manuscript has been read and evaluated by the appropriate editor.

I should’ve stopped reading right there! I mean, spectacular, right? One copy of my story was read by one human being, what more could a newbie writer ask for. But I didn’t stop, like a glutton for punishment I continued reading. It was all downhill.

We regret to inform you... Ugh, there it was, the big letdown, something to do with the lack of suitability of my work for publication in this journal.

The blow to the ego was softened by the following: Since manuscripts are declined for a great many reasons, this rejection is in no way intended as a declaration of the relative merits of your work.

Now, certainly one generous interpretation of this last may be: In the grand distribution of the merits of all stories ever written, your story, Dear Prospective Contributor, was in fact brilliant, meaning the real loser here is us, our journal and its reputation, because owing to the limited scope of the material we choose to publish your genius will go unrecognized by our readership.

Indeed, this the interpretation I prefer.

As a further consolation to myself it’s worth noting that I’m swinging pretty hard in terms of where I shop this story, and I’m really not terribly surprised, as no newbie writer should be, that I’ve received multiple rejections. John Grisham’s first novel, which became the best selling novel of 1991, had been rejected by 28 publishers. So there. I’ve know all along, of course, that the probability of having this story accepted by any one of the publications I’ve submitted to thus far was roughly equivalent to the probability of me getting drafted as a walk-on to the Green Bay Packers. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained.

I will keep swinging.

Readers here who would like to read the story and provide me feedback should click the Contact link and let me know.

Drove up to Glen Alps with the dogs yesterday. Ten minutes from home. Happy Wife wanted to check on the snow condition for crust skiing, which was evidently superb, I’m sure I heard the word divine used. She’s headed back there today with Lucy. Lacking grace on skis, both Harry and I will go elsewhere in the mountains for a hearty walk. Another sensational bluesky day today, like yesterday:

BIGGER.

See that saddle-shaped pass way back there? That’s Powerline Pass. By late spring most of the snow here will have melted, although in a typical year some will linger at the top of the pass through June, but only a little, and then you can mountain bike from where Happy Wife is standing all the way back to the pass, do a hike-a-bike over the top (it’s pretty steep), and then descend the backside of the mountain on a very fun (though partly treacherous) trail that eventually spills out on the highway about 20 miles south of Anchorage. Hard core dudes ride the road back to Anchorage, as a friend and I did years ago. Dumpy old men in their 50s opt for a bar stool at the Brown Bear saloon and congratulate themselves behind a beer or three while they wait for a spouse to arrive with the car.

Found an old photograph of me and my good friend Fritz the day we did that ride together. Must be at least twenty years ago now. We were just starting up toward the pass on the hike-a-bike, kicking toe holds in the snow as we went. Funny, I was sportin’ a cookie duster back then. He and I did some fun rides together in those days. I very much wish he hadn’t died in ’01, shortly after reinventing himself and earning his MD in his fifties. Back then he and I were geophysicists with BIG oil. I remember being pretty incredulous when he told me he’d decided to go to medical school, “Who goes back to school in their forties?”

BIGGER.

I’ll staple the photo back on the wall in the garage where I found it, I like to look at it from time to time when I’m futzing around out there. It has always been this way, memory fastens us to the past and the future unfurls unknown.

I saw my cardiologist this past week and received a summary report of my visit, which included my BMI (Body Mass Index). According to a reputable web site I am an overweight American. Barely, but still above the normal range. I entered Happy Wife’s height and weight into the calculator at the site and discovered her BMI is in the normal range. But that set me to thinking — she and I, qua married couple, really function as a single unit. So I added our heights and weights together and entered these values in the calculator. Voilà — as a couple our BMI is below normal! The output said the ideal weight for an eleven foot seven inch individual (couple really) is 508-684 pounds.

Say hello to a guilt free weekend of eating and drinking!

Left a comment at Lileks place last week. Attached a photo of our backyard. The snow is in retreat for sure, but the freeze thaw cycle had created rows of snow and ice chevrons, jutting up from frozen ground like angry hackles on the back of some primordial beast. I did this as a gesture of northern solidarity, to assure him eventually winter would leave Minneapolis alone, and we Alaskans understood the pangs of snow in April. An empathy for the still frozen. There exist so many things in modernity to hold our attention, yet still the whims of the season have power to stir our laments.

It cuts both ways. I stepped outside our master bedroom door with coffee in hand, expecting the chill of a late April morn, and instead was surprised by the warmth of the sun that had hours earlier breached the mountains like a kiss in a bluebird sky:

BIGGER.

It felt like triumph over long odds, survival, “We’ve made it through another winter!” Birds of every kind reported from tree branches, a light breeze wafted the first scents of spring, and somewhere, way out there, beneath the still surface of Resurrection Bay, I imagined I sensed the collective arousal of expectant salmon. The first drink of coffee tasted better somehow, the call from Happy Wife in the kitchen downstairs — “Breakfast is ready” — sounded even cheerier than usual. Yes, you think, this is what blessed means.

Even the dogs were exaggeratedly pleased:

BIGGER.

Reading a book by Oliver Sacks, MD: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Kindle version. Can’t say I like the prose style, but the case histories of his patients with severe neurological disorders, especially the symptoms they present with, are fascinating.

One in particular involved a patient who was blind. But there was nothing wrong this patient’s eyes or any part of the visual transduction system, the system that converts images to electrical signals and sends them to the brain. All of that was perfectly intact in this patient. Instead, this patient had a large lesion in a specific part of her brain that normally resolves these signals (occipital lobe), and consequently she literally could not “see” anything.

In another example, the basis of the book title, Dr. Sack’s was examining a man — a talented musician, teacher, and otherwise “normal” — who had slowly lost his ability to recognize faces (a disorder known as prosopagnosia). This was followed by him seeing faces everywhere, in places where there were no faces (on an umbrella for instance), and eventually he started showing symptoms of more general agnosia, the inability to recognize common objects. At one point during the exam this man had removed his shoe for some test Dr. Sacks wanted to perform. When Dr. Sacks told the man he could put his shoe back on, instead of reaching for his shoe the man grabbed his foot and seemed perplexed when he couldn’t put his own foot on his foot. Shortly after that when the exam was over, and the man and his wife (also in the exam room) were getting ready to leave, the man searched the room for his hat and mistook his wife’s head for his hat — he literally grabbed her head and tried to lift it off her body and put it on his head! What I found fascinating was that in spite of his mental deficit this man was otherwise normal. He was an accomplished music teacher at the local university, a job he kept because he was good at it, not out of any sense of charity. Dr. Sacks wondered how this man could be independent in his daily life — eating, bathing, dressing, etc.. His wife’s reply was that so long as he did these things while singing (apparently he sang songs while doing almost everything), he was fine, but the second he stopped signing, even lightly, his activity came to a full stop; he’d become completely bewildered because suddenly he could no longer recognize anything, even his own clothes.

Now, there were certain times during my misdirected youth — close your eyes Mom — when I saw things that weren’t really there, but I have never, ever mistook Happy Wife’s head for a hat.

Comment problem fixed.

Carry on.