Family history

Several years ago, my father and a close friend were bird-hunting when my father was shot by his friend. Both lawyers, my father had been turned down for service in World War II while his friend had gained an officer's commission and had only just been discharged from the Army.
I was not quite four. My father would go into surgery, lose the sight in his right eye and by some miracle keep his left eye intact. He was hospitalized at the same hospital where I had been born and he would remain there for the next year.
My mother lacked a driver's license so she quickly mobilized and was driving soon. I was terrified of the visiting nurse who seemed to be inside our home for an eternity. I can remember her shooing me away from the room in much the same manner as a prison guard might. Ironically, during the long spell that my father was hospitalized, friendly nurses actually brought me to his room through what seemed like a secret passage. He was always lying on his back and was told not to move around much, he said. We tried to communicate, the son and the bandaged father. I vividly recall one visit when he asked if I wanted to share part of a grapefruit with him. Now, years later, the sight of a grapefruit instantly brings that back. And I do love grapefruit.
My father was leery of drugs due to his younger sisters' involvement with "those jazz musicians and drugs" years earlier. He always maintained that during the landmark surgery to keep his left eye, no drugs were and the surgeons working on him would sometimes tell him to imagine moving an eyeball in an effort to make the surgery a success.
He was a close friend of the surgeon as well, who was heard to remark after the operation that he and all of my father's other friends would long outlive him.
He was wrong. My father had outlived the surgeon and the shooter by at least two decades when he eventually died in 1984. It was the anniversary of D-Day. The surgeon, whose ranch I often visited near as a teenager, would die in Colorado on a bear-hunting trip, found near his car, an apparent suicide. The man who shot my father campaigned for the governership of our state more than once and came within a whisker of winning. He also died from an apparent suicide.
Our families had been close and it was probably a bit surreal for my father that as he was being wheeled into the hospital for his final days, one son of the shooter was leaving in a wheelchair, diagnosed with cancer, I was told. Pushing his wheelchair was another son of the man who had gone hunting with my father on that fateful day. His role, other than that of son and brother, was that he was the doctor in charge of emergency services at the hospital.
While my father was a practicing attorney, he often campaigned for his close friend, stumping for him in remote hamlets, when the candidate himself could not be there. He seemed tireless.
No one could have expected my father to lead a normal life after being shot and blinded in one eye. He was extremely careful never to let his driver's license lapse, lest he have to take an eye exam. Until the day he died, he carried bird shot under the skin of his arms and head. He wore a glass eye and quietly underwrote guide dog training for those who were completely blind and in need of a helping hand.
He had been an avid hunter and sportsman up until the time of the accident. I remember mother telling me how he had subsequently thrown out his guns and all his other sports equipment.
The one part of this account that no one ever seems to believe is how I was often bedded down under his hospital bed after the accident and told not to make a sound. I didn't. I can still remember one of the kind nurses actually opening the window and parking me outside on the fire escape to evade the rounds of a supervisor for a short time. I have no witnesses, I've outlived them all, but after what had happened, after all these years, it remains vivid in my memory....

Only the Strong Survive

Debating whether 2 watch Barfly; it will do one of 2 things: either increase my presence at bar harbour's bars or quell any thirst for being there...it is fukking cold here, and although it could be worse, the ice couldn't be...even the neighborhood ice rink took a hit when some bright light decided to plow it with his pickup and broke through...arrgh!...the silver Subaru I have written abt in a recent blog may finally have met its demise...seems last Friday it was cruising along on I-95 abt 95 when substitute driver swerved hard to avoid a tailgate that had landed in the roadway and the Subaru shot off the road and rolled and rolled...no one hurt, but if this Subaru rises out of this one, then it is one for the ages...thinking abt this makes me wanna have a drink somewhere so until we meet again...

Poof, they're gone!

I dunno know if it is because of the time of the year (winter, below zero) and attendant lack of sunlight, but lately people have been disappearing before my eyes, some of which were not surprises but others, in a word, mysterious...now a friend has left for a visit to that former Danish protectorate, Iceland, and I knew she was going a couple days prior...we actually saw Synecdoche in New York the night before she left and I am left wondering if this is where people who disappear end up: Iceland, I mean...I just don't know...she disappeared for band practice so I wandered off for something to eat and ran into another friend who was also to disappear (for the second time in several weeks) and thought this time, I had better keep both eyes open...to recap, a few weeks back, she swung by in her trusty Subaru and off we went to a local bar...it was incredibly dark in Bar Harbor owing to there being a power outage and when she parked and we got out, POOF, she disappeared...not within sound of my voice, not within range of my limited vision in the black night, I ambled off to the bar thinking she would be there already...no such luck so I felt my way home, grabbed a flashlight and went back to the bar, where I heard her voice ask in the semi-darkness where had I been...she maintained that she had been there all along and what had happened to me, did I get a better deal somewhere down the street...POOF...no amount of explaining could solve the mystery of that lost time...as I said that was several weeks ago and I had almost forgotten about it when POOF, it happened again last night...we grabbed a bite to eat along with several delicious whisky samplers at another local watering hole before heading to the BAR OF THE FIRST DISAPPEARANCE...everything fine, even played a little bar trivia to be a good sport...bear in mind that the temps outside were about 10 below zero...she got up and walked throught the door, leaving her new down parka behind and POOF, she was once again gone...haven't connected with her since, tried reaching her by phone to wish her happy birthday, but as of this moment, POOF!

Far-out west (and south) news

My once-upon-a-time home, Aspen, lost its considerable New Year's Eve celebration income because one guy didn't feel like celebrating...he planned to place 5 bombs around town in out-of-the-way locations like banks and bar and blow the hell outta the town. (An old Aspenite, his friends said he would never have blown up the town, just bitter.) He loved the Old Aspen, things like Ajax chairlift no. 1 and the unpaved roads thru town that disappeared in the 60's, to be replaced by seemingly endless decades of bling...he's gone, he did himself in, and his imagined explosions would have done little to slow the bling...meanwhile in the Mesa County Jail sits an old friend of mind charged with being a courier in quite a large weed-trafficking operation that authorities say stretched from Arizona to Maine...he was quoted at the time of his arrest in early December as saying "Now, this is really going to ruin Christmas for everyone!" I'm rooting for his early release if, in fact, he is ever convicted...
Then, tonight, I have news from the coolest person in the world who has been in a Mexican ritual sauna lodge all day and ready to conquer any obstacles in her path...this is a person who cares more about the state of the world than anyone and, believe it or not, will someday be a great leader of many people...energized by struggles she has witnessed.

Every cloud has a silver Subaru...

A few weeks back I get a cell text that goes something like this: "Dude, a huge tree just crashed down on my car parked across my street." I did what I could to offer help but she was too distraught...when the car came out from under the very tall cedar the next day, it turned out to be still driveable so off she scooted to the 802 (Vermont)...for the holidays. Haven't gotten any distress messages lately from her, only a message asking that I save a copy of the local newspaper that carried a front-page photo and story of her mishap...
Normally, that would be the end of it, but there's more...oh, man...a few weeks back while winging down Cottage Street late afternoon (a lot of traffic) before the tree-meets-car day, a guy on a bike got banged into by a driver who he said kept driving while politely yelling out her car window "I'm sorry," without stopping right away...shaken he goes into the nearest store to call the cops only to learn that his recent history with the cops was not going to get him very far...he had been busted on a Saturday afternoon, sitting in his idling Saab outside one of our two fine laundramats, for drunk driving...cops remembered he had not been especially cooperative and asked him a question that proved to be a deal-breaker for prosecuting Subaru driving: "Did you have a light on your bike (no) because we can summons you to court for that." Wham! Their conversation was ended then and there.
It turns out I know both parties but they had never formally met, and after hearing that he had left a note after finding her parked car downtown later, I ran (no) bumped (no) saw (yes) her outside local bakery and suggested perhaps they should talk..."Is he gonna be mean to me?" she asked...Probably yes if you don't get in touch, I said...Upshot is that she did and she paid for repairs to his classic VERY VALUABLE bike...
A few days go by and she tells me she cannot believe it, but this guy by a stroke of luck lives next door to her now..."Can you fucking believe that?," she posits. "No," I reply, "I cannot fucking believe it." A few more days pass and we are struck by a one of the rain and wind storms that blew a transformer across town, effectively shutting down power everywhere within fives miles...No use sitting in the dark with my emergency lantern, might as well go to a bar and see how the other sufferers are coping...candles, that is how the bar was coping...I had just told a friend of mine who had accompanied me to the bar (and immediately separated from outside due to the incredible darkness) the tree-crash story, when I hear from the other end of the bar, a silhouetted guy telling someone a tree in his yard had crashed down on her car across the street...It was pretty eerie hearing all this in the greatly reduced light at the bar and as I looked down the bar his whole appearance looked a lot like Sweeney Todd...