Stay of Execution

Letters I'll Never Send: To My Dead Dog

Dear Belle,

You would have loved this day.  It smells delicious, and it's sunny but not so hot that you would be panting helplessly on the dining room linoleum.  Yesterday's thunderstorms mean mud puddles and streams in the woods, and you would have splashed and lapped and laid down in the cool dirty water without regard to how it would make you smell.  You knew how to savor the sensations of a day like this. 

The grass has grown over your grave and the rosebush is blooming and dropping petals down on you.  Standing back there you can hear a buzz of invisible bees, quivering somewhere inside the flowers. 

I miss you every day.  That's what I want to tell you.  When I mow the lawn over your grave I remember digging it, and laying you in there, stiffened and wrapped in a blanket.  I remember seeing you dead at the vet clinic, patting you and talking to you and crying.  I remember seeing you alive at the clinic, all ripped up, tired and bleeding but wagging weakly at me, giving me a little lick.  If were given magic powers and I could do anything this is what I would do: I would go back in time to that hour when you slipped out of the yard to go for that fatal ramble, and I would keep you right beside me.  I wouldn't look away.  If, somehow, I wasn't allowed to do that I would go back in time to when I was patting you and you were still alive and the vet was telling me you were stable and would recover from the attack.  I would stay there, with you, all day long, patting you and talking to you and cleaning the blood off of you gently with a cool wet washcloth.  Maybe if I had stayed things would have been different.

I Forgot One

I forgot a favorite song.  I love "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." 

There's a version I remember from a mix tape I had long ago, back in 1994.  That's the version that's my favorite version.  I don't know who the singer was.  Not Dylan.  More tuneful.  iTunes didn't locate my phantom memory version, but there's a nice cover by Eddie from Ohio.  What a haunting sad song.   

All Requests: What I Think About Anti-Depressants

An anonymous commenter asks for my opinion on antidepressants.  I think they're a good thing, generally.  I didn't always, and I don't fully understand them, so it's not an unreserved endorsement.  Reading Listening To Prozac left me with plenty of questions about temperament, mood, identity, and how and whether those can be altered by antidepressants. 

But I've watched someone I love get sucked under by depression.  I know that her depressed self wasn't her "true self."  And now that she's on antidepressants, her "true self" is back.  We could get all semantic about what the "true self" means.  I used to think a lot about that, and imagine that people on antidepressants were somehow "cheating" and taking happy pills to avoid coping with things that the rest of us just had to deal with.  But watching it happen to someone I know is like watching someone drown.  The onset of the apathy and despair, the helpless sadness, it just wasn't the person I knew before the onset of depression and it didn't connect to the circumstances of her life. I finally understood the chemical imbalance explanation of depression.  On medication, my dear friend is back.  It doesn't mean she doesn't get sad.  It just means she's not drowning anymore.

Over the last month I've been closer to depression than I usually get.  I think it's a function of going from a very hectic, overwhelmingly busy schedule with the sailing team to open, unstructured time.  The other coaches I talk to tell me the seasonality of the work is a very hard thing to adjust to.  It is for me.  I know how to fight depression for myself: make sure to exercise, don't let yourself oversleep, set goals and find people to hold me accountable, shake up my social life, don't retreat from the people I love, go outside, do things for other people.  That's my recipe.  Still, sometimes are harder than others, and a couple of weeks ago were pretty hard.  Maybe the rain had something to do with it.  This week has been easier -- I've been outside more, I'm absorbed with a project, I've met some new people, I feel like it's easy to be happy again, without monitoring myself.  Maybe it's the coffee. 

This Is What My Kitchen Smells Like

You can only imagine what the yard is like, with the grass, the salt sea air, roses, honeysuckle, peonies, and sunshine. 

Dad

I spent the day on the water, doing something I know how to do because of my dad.  I was in a place I love fiercely because my dad also loves it.  And he loves it at least in part because of his dad, who loved it and brought all of his kids there.  I was in a community that has the deepest respect for my dad, and I had confidence that I knew how to direct a complicated regatta because last year my dad did it with me.  This year he wasn't there, but he loaned a motorboat and his wisdom and confidence were with me the whole time.

Like my friend Anthony, who wrote something remarkable this Father's Day, I am who I am because of my father.  But unlike Anthony, my father's presence in my life shaped me, not his absence.  And his presence has always been positive.  He gave me this deep-rooted love of sailing, boats.  He gave me a loyal sense of place, rootedness.  Through him I know what it is like to be part of a larger family, a community, to be connected to a place through generations.  He and my mother both love nature, but my dad's intellect is scientific and imaginative.  From him I learned to be curious about how things work, and I inherited his interest in the future, and how technology and science will make life different than it is today. 

My dad is a great teacher.  He's patient and straightforward but he doesn't coddle fools.  He is funny and clever.  He's got a quiet certainty that I love -- he doesn't waffle or hesitate, and I don't know if he perceives moral quandries.  His moral compass is well-calibrated and his logical mind so clear that he always knows what the right thing to do is.  I can't think of a time -- I don't think I can even imagine a scenario -- where he did not do the right thing.  I don't often ask people for advice, but when I feel lost or mixed up it's my dad's input that I value the most. 

I love you, Dad.  Thanks for sharing your life with me.  I am so proud to be your daughter. 

Summer In Maine

Today and yesterday were worth a million dollars.  It is the kind of brilliant jewel-blue-green June that makes Maine a summer delight.  There are buttercups and daisies nodding by the side of the road, lupine and roses and peonies blooming, and the trees and the grass are this lush sweet green, swaying in the summer wind.  It's spectacular.  The evening lingers until late, and the warm dusky glow is rosy-purple-orange-blue fading into a starry cornflower.  It smells like a ripe summer night, like possibility, like skinny dipping and a full moon. 

I spent today being the Principal Race Officer for a regatta my yacht club runs every year.  My grandfather actually started the regatta, way back when.  I did it last year, with my father, and I think I'll plan to do it again next year.  I was at the club for 12 hours, and came home with some homework.  I'll be there again most of the day tomorrow.  I'm wiped out and contented.

I had eight volunteers helping me on the water.  Five of us were in the big race committee boat, and I had two small motorboats, each with two people, helping me move marks around.  There were maybe 40 boats racing, in six different classes.  We were busy.  One of the things that was cool was that the people on the race committee boat were all women.  I didn't do that on purpose, but when I discovered it was possible, I thought it was kind of neat, and encouraged the guys to go on the mark boats and the women to stay on the RC boat.  I am quite certain there's never been an all-women race committee for a big regatta at my club before, and I think it's cool to be part of.   We weren't perfect, but we were close -- efficient, smooth, calm, and focused. 

Ruby shot the gun almost 50 times, and never misfired.  We did 12 starting sequences and one postponement, and we set four different courses for the PHRF classes, sending A, B, C, and D classes on different routes around the bay.  We had to move the line and the one-design's drop mark a couple of times, but the southerly breeze came in pretty steady and let us run races instead of making infinite adjustments.  I tried to set the PHRF courses so that the classes would all finish approximately at the same time, and I was perhaps a little too successful in my estimate, so we had the cruisers, the J/24s, and the A class boats all converging on the finish line from different angles at the same time.  It was challenging to track the finishes, but the classes didn't interfere with one another and I don't think the racers knew how much the committee was multitasking as we scored the different races.  I felt like I did a much better job than I did last year, and was calmer and happier while doing it. 

Tomorrow the forecast is for temperatures near 90 on land.  That means a beautiful seabreeze and another day where being on the water will feel like a luxury. 

Here's a picture of two of my team members, Mary and Ruby, taking a rare breather between one-design races. 

The Nature of an Obsession

After having a big cup on Monday, Tuesday, and two cups on Wednesday, I completely forgot to have any coffee yesterday.  I forgot to even wish for it, dream about it, anticipate it, or scheme to obtain it.  Nope.  Just went about my day, drinking some tea, perfectly content.

Today, though, I'm going to have a cup.  I've remembered to obsess, and I've already planned out where I'm going to get it. 

All Requests: Dogs In The Workplace

Bill wonders what my views are about dogs in the workplace. 

I think it's pretty sensible to ban dogs from the workplace.  There are too many annoying and unpredictable dogs.  There are too many people who have legitimate anti-dog sentiments -- fear, allergies, distaste.  It doesn't seem right to give sentimental dog-loving employees the right to impose a disruptive and distracting factor on an environment that their co-workers can't choose to leave.  People who own dogs invariably think they are cute and loveable even if they are stinky, hyper, and annoying.  You can't leave it up to the dog owners to make a judgment about what their co-workers will like, or the place would be full of terriers and poodles and pugs.  So I think no-dogs-at-work policies are okay. 

But in a small workplace, where it's possible to know whether people who work there like dogs or not, and where the boss and all the employees can get to know the temperament of the dog who's there, I think it's great to permit dogs.  I love going to boatyards or shops or clothing stores or offices where there's a friendly dog who waddles wagging up to greet me, or who ignores me, sleeping in the shade.  It's an extra bonus; it makes me comfortable, it makes me want to stay and talk longer.  When I'm in places like that I assume the employees are happier.  It tells me a business is friendly, sensible, and flexible.   

Book Review: Flourishing

I'm reading Flourishing.  I'm enjoying it.  It's more scholarly than I had hoped for, and because each chapter is written by different authors, usually more than one author, the quality of writing varies widely from chapter to chapter.  Lots of footnotes.   Basically, it's a literature review of the various psychological studies that have and have not been done on various aspects of human happiness.  The scholarly nature of the tome makes me feel less flaky for reading and liking it, as does the conscientiousness of citations and the limitations with which the authors draw their conclusions.

The chapters of the book cover various elements of human experience, and each summarizes the research into people's different responses and their different levels of perceived satisfaction or fulfillment.  Section 1 includes a chapter about resilience, one about turning points, and one about optimism.  The second section talks about engagement and finding meaning, about personal goals and the differences in life satisfaction that people who set and achieve certain kinds of goals, and about relationshops.  The third section looks at studies about creativity and genius, about people's approaches to work and hobbies, and about well being in the workplace and its relationship to business outcomes.  I haven't read the fourth section yet -- doing well by doing good, elevation and morality, and something with "Meta-Hueristics" in the title that I can only hope to figure out the meaning of when I read it. 

Product Endorsement: Hello

I generally use Gmail's internal chat program, because I like the archiving function, and, primarily, because I'm lazy and it has everyone I can chat with right there in the address book, and I don't need to open another window.  Before that I used AOL instant messenger, and occasionally Yahoo's instant messenger.  I don't chat all that often, and really chose my client based on who I needed to talk with and what they were using. 

But today a friend offered to help me fix my pesky photo thumbnail problem. We were chatting via Gmail and he ran me through some diagnostics and we got nowhere.  I said, I wish I could send you a screen shot, and he said, if you have Hello you can.  I'd played with Hello before and thought it was cool but perhaps a novelty.  But now I get it, just how useful it is.  You can send your screen back and forth to people as well as looking at pictures together.  You can see what they're looking at while you're chatting.  It's a totally different tool, and a much better one, than a basic chat. 

I recommend downloading it and playing with it.  It's supercool.