Saturday, February 24, 2007

Alive

I was behind the wheel of our two-door Honda Civic, barreling up I-5 toward Portland, when a smile stretched my lips. I was thinking: Dan is alive! He’s alive and when we get there I can talk to him and we can laugh together the way I feel like laughing now.

This was in 1982. Connie, his wife at the time, had just called us.

“Dan was electrocuted today,” she said.

There was no other word for it. He had taken a lethal 400 volts. No one could explain why he wasn’t dead.

When Joanne and I arrived in Portland, I went to shake my friend's hand.

“Not that one” he said and gave me his left. “The other one’s still a little sore.”

He was lying on their couch, that big brown thing they got such a deal on, and he looked tired, like his limbs were too heavy to lift. He spoke in his normal voice, though, and tried to joke as if nothing serious had happened.

Finally we got the whole story:

They were setting up a conveyor outside on the tank farm at Steinfeld’s, trying out a new idea for streamlined processing of . . . cauliflower, I think. Anyway, some guy forced the plug into a high-voltage outlet where it didn’t belong, and when Dan went to reposition the conveyor, 400 volts grabbed him. He screamed once and tried to get free, but it was useless. The electricity lifted him off the ground and put him back down.

That’s all he remembers.

Witnesses — and there were lots of them, bosses and workers  — said Dan was bounced twice and then hurled, head high, for a distance of about fifteen feet. His body went into rapid convulsions.

At the hospital, doctors looked for entry and exit burns but found none. They gave him a tetanus shot for all the scrapes he suffered hitting the pavement, examined him, and sent him home with a complete recovery expected.

Dan’s sister, Kathy, a nurse there at Emanuel, couldn’t believe they didn’t want to keep him overnight for observation, but here he was at home already. He let Joanne compare one arm to the other, and she said the right arm was still warmer to the touch. Some of the voltage was still coursing around in there.

“I guess the Lord wanted to keep me around a little longer,” Dan said.

His mother, Joy, a compact woman with dark curly hair, was in the kitchen cleaning up after their Kentucky Fried dinner. She had already lost her first husband, Bill, in an on-the-job accident. Kathy was there, too. She had been in nursing school when Joy drove to Portland to deliver the news, and so the job of telling Dan — it had to be in person, not by phone — fell to me, his best friend.

He was telling me now that he would have to go back to the plant the next day, see the scene, and actually touch the conveyor.

“That’ll be hard,” he said.

“Have to get back on the horse that threw you, huh?”

He didn’t answer me, just nodded blankly, and I wondered if he was thinking about the trip we made to the plywood mill to see the machine that struck down his father. He had insisted on seeing it; I’m not sure why. To make it real, I suppose. He was having trouble accepting it could happen — and did happen.

I was thinking about a lot of things. About a silent ride to Eugene in the truck of a family friend some eight years earlier, the highway straight and flat and dark ahead of us. About waking Dan with a late-night phone call once we got into town so he could give us directions to the trailer house he was sharing with some other students. About how he could see it in my face when he opened the door  how I wanted him to see it — before I said a word. Because all I could come up with was: “Your dad is dead.”

Later he would tell me he was glad it was me who broke the news; he couldn’t have taken it from anyone else, he said.

I had lost my own father to cancer so I knew what it was like and I guess that made all the difference, but I remember thinking, What if Dan had died today as, by all rights, he should have? Who was going to tell me, without warning, that he was gone? Who was I going to be able to take that from?

Here he was, though — blinking, breathing, speaking.

Questions of life and death and why were swept aside because here in front of me was something I could accept without question: My friend was alive.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Seven Sayings

Of all the things I've been taught in 52 years, these seven have shaped my thinking the most.

> "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

> "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's."

> "Be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves."

> "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath."

> "Love your enemies."

> "Whatever you want others to do for you, do so for them."

> "Seek and you will find."

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Playing with Guns


I remember a first-grade classmate saying, "You mean your dad and my dad could have been shooting at each other?"

It was possible.

I hadn't really thought about it before then, and it felt funny to admit it, but it was possible.

It was no secret that my dad and mom were born in the old country. For one thing you could hear it. Even when they spoke English, which was most of the time, my parents didn't sound quite like other people.

If you looked close you could see that my dad had been in the war. It was evident in the half-thumb of a war-torn hand. (The left, I think, though I'm no longer certain.) You could see it even more when he was working in the sun and took off his shirt. There on his back was a long, deep crater about the size of a razor clam. The first time I saw it I asked him what it was and he said, very simply, that a bomb exploded near him during the war and a piece of it landed in his back.

I could see that it had been bad, but as a young boy I never even thought about how much worse it could have been.

The day my classmate told me, toy gun a-blazing, about his dad fighting the Germans, I asked my dad about fighting in Hitler's army. I don't recall exactly what I asked, or all that he said, but I do remember the look on his face and the way he shook his head.

He made it clear that he hated Hitler and the Nazis, but then he surprised me with this:

"Hitler did a lot for the German people," he said.

"He did?"

"Ja, sure, in the beginning we were much better off than before ..."

Then, I think, it was impossible for him to tell a young boy everything that was going through his mind.

Forty-some years later, I would sooner forget that my father said what he did about Hitler doing a lot for the German people. But there it is. I remember interrupting — "He did?" — because it shocked me, even then, that the name Hitler could be connected with anything but evil. I was too young to realize (as I'm sure my father did) that the connection was there in what he had just told me -- the division, deprivation, and depravity already implied.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

Nine-One-One

It was a Sunday night in December of 1996, our first year in the house, and we were about to find out how long it would take paramedics to reach our doorstep.

Joanne had gotten out of bed at some point. I knew she wasn't feeling well, and I heard her moan as if ready to throw up. Then there was the clatter of our plastic waste basket tipping over. Then a heavy thump.

I called to her.

No answer.

I found her stretched out on the bathroom floor, her head twisted in a tiny corner where the wall extends just beyond the edge of the tub. Her eyes were open and she was white.

She still wouldn't answer.

I cradled her neck and eased her down flat. Then came the horrifying second when I looked down into her vacant eyes and thought: she's dead.

I didn't want to believe that. I said her name again and again. I couldn't find a pulse. She was so white. I tried to remember CPR and mouth-to-mouth. Make sure her breathing passages are clear, I thought. When I pinched her mouth, I heard her suck air. Good. But her eyes. They didn't move. Didn't even blink.

Back in the bedroom, I dialed 9-1-1, then dragged the phone as far into the hallway as the cord would allow. The part you hold to your ear stretched almost to the bathroom. As I was babbling incoherently, Joanne said, "What are you doing? I'm fine."

I told the operator, but she said the paramedics would be here soon.

A fire truck arrived a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance. Though Joanne seemed to check out okay, they took her to the hospital just to be safe. (Here's the thing: In the morning she was going to quit a job she once loved but now hated, and she had been stressing about it so much she passed out. Breaking an 11-year bond is not something Joanne takes lightly.)

The next day she was resting on the sofa and asked me to fix her some toast.

Grudgingly, I got up and walked to the kitchen.

"You know," I said, "I’m only doing this because you’re alive."