Good Bye Claudia Jean

 “Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day.” – John Grogan, Marley & Me.

Saying good bye to CJ.

6 weeks old

Most dogs are complicated, once you get to know them. Oh, the basics are easy enough - feed them what they want to eat, don't leave them too many scary places when you run off to vacation spots and if it's a nice day a lap around the park will do everyone a world of good. Car trips can be a good excuse to explore, a great way to find a new place to hike and a fabulous excuse to nap in the shade by a Moab waterfall. Those are givens.

It's the individual quirks that matter, and our CJ had them. A Portuguese Water Dog, she came equipped with webbed feet. That's what the true water dogs did; swim nets, retrieve objects, take messages from one boat to another. Protect the boat and the catch. Only...

No matter how much training and encouragement CJ got, she never really liked the water. "That's got to be the slowest swimming Portuguese I ever saw," said one judge at a competition. She used her hind legs as a sort of rudder, not that she ever went fast enough for it to work. At all. Throw one of the training "bumpers" into the water and she'd look at you with utter disdain. The look as much as said "You don't expect me to get that, do you?" She did like riding in the boat, watching our other PWD get wet. She just never really took to being an actual water Water Dog.

But, she had the protective thing down cold. She was with us at a time when we both endured significant work upsets. We'd walk for miles in her company, our Papillon Radar zigging and zagging while CJ trotted along beside us. Ever wary, she didn't get very excited by other dogs, but if we betrayed the least little discomfort with other people, it was all hands on deck time. The behavior wasn't overt - which is even more ominous to anyone with a mind to mess with us. It was the stink eye, the subtle warning, the body language that said, "You're close enough." She never tired of long walks to the park, never once thought that the long conversations Mom and Dad had were repetitious, or boring.

She was going to be my other writing companion, to go along with Radar. We had a second floor balcony, perfect for sitting on wicker furniture, sipping something cold and working on a novel. Radar had seen me through a couple manuscripts and CJ...went out once, looked through the railing at the ground below and quickly returned to the sliding glass door. Never again to venture out willingly. Or, for that matter, even enticed with a treat.

She found her stride, and her favorite moments, learning K9 Nose Work. The sport, a sort of hide and seek with scent (birch, clove and anise), suited her intelligence and even temperament. The sport was relatively new - her license was in the 300s whereas our almost two year old Joy's is in the ten thousands - and many of the teething issues were worked out with her generation. She titled her first time out, won several ribbons and not once did she have to go in the water. It was so perfect a sport for her that, even weeks away from the Rainbow Bridge she still enjoyed a chance to sniff the air for a hide.

When her health started to fail her in 2021, we brought in Joy, a high-motor Havanese, so that our other PWD Jed wouldn't be an only dog when the inevitable time came. It seemed to give CJ, of all things, a new lease on life. She joined in the backyard chase games, barking and running as though years had fallen away. Instead of being a bulwark against Jed being lonely, Joy gave CJ nearly two more quality years. Go figure.

Just a few weeks past her 16th birthday, the last of her litter, it seemed that the time had come. And so we said good bye to our girl, who had seen us through half our marriage, a chaotic and emotional period of moves and medical issues and the passing of our parents, and walked with us into retirement. We assume we will see her again when our own Rainbow Bridge crossing arrives, ready to walk again with us on our next adventure.

Flea Market Memories

"My mother used to take me to flea markets in my stroller, and I would just rummage through the piles. You've got to dig through the overstuffed racks that everyone else just walks by. It's the only way to find the cool stuff."

Lily Collins

Lolo Pass (Montana-Idaho border) June, 1976

I almost always begin any blog with a quote. I want them to be topical, perhaps introductory in nature. At least germane. So I searched "Flea market quotes." There were hundreds.

What amazed me - which I admit isn't a huge ask - was how many of the quotes began, "My [parent] used to take me to the flea market, where..." I'd thought I was the only one, except it was me taking my mom. And, I thank God for that.

How could that be? My mom didn't drive, not that she didn't try to learn. I think it was the time she nearly drove through the wall of the school kitchen at which she worked (it is called, blandly, "pedal misapplication" by automotive engineers) that finally did her, and her instructor, in. The day I got my license, in 1971, my dad, in high dudgeon and with great ceremony, handed me the keys to the family car - a Ford Torino. 

"Your turn," he said.

One of our destinations, on multiple occasions, was a large flea market. We bought books, mostly - both Mom and Dad were voracious readers. On one occasion, I found a treasure that became deeply important to me. I hadn't thought about it in 40 years.

And then, I had some pictures transferred from slides to digital... If that's the correct way to phrase it. And, there it was, in all of its splendor. The orange jacket I wore, through rain and bitter cold, in the early days of Bikecentennial '76. 

It probably cost a dollar. It fit fine, did the job I asked of it (warm, light and very visible) but had one peculiar attribute that sparked a question wherever, and whenever, I wore it.

"Where is East Campbell, NY?"

The jacket had, boldly printed on the back, "East Campbell, NY Volunteer Fire Department." Having never been a volunteer firefighter, much less one in East Campbell, I really didn't know. Purchased in pre-Google days (and lost by the time the internet was a thing) I had only the vaguest of notions where East Campbell might be. Since most of the fire departments in Western NY are volunteer, that didn't help, either. It was bright and warm and that's all I knew.

In August of 1977 I moved to Denver, to start life as an adult. My relocation from Pittsford, NY coincided with a resurgence...well, since they'd never been much I guess technically it's surgence...of the Broncos. Colorado was crazy for these now wonderfully successful football players, a team that featured a defense called the "Orange Crush."

After a particularly stirring gridiron victory by our hometown boys, I put on my East Campbell jacket and went out for a run. Well, you would think I'd been on the field that day, because the driver of every car that passed honked madly and waved at me with crazed abandon. My orange jacket, having been to Oregon and back, suddenly made me one of "them," but a good them, a collegial them. It was obvious, if one didn't get too close, that I was a Bronco fan and was sporting the required regalia.

My mom would chuckle, were she around to read this. That orange jacket was just another thing that bonded us over the years that I drove her here and there, ending only when she passed in 2015. JC Penney to pay her credit card bill, Wegmans to purchase ingredients for dinner, and an orange cast-off jacket from a volunteer fire department in New York.

Page Turner

"Here I am
On the road again
There I am
Up on the stage
Ah, here I go
Playin' star again
There I go
Turn the page"

"Turn the Page," Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band, Back In '72, (1973)

The risks attendant to letting someone read what you write? They are honest when you ask, "How'd you like it?" Actual answers:

"I hated one of your characters. I know you wanted me to like him, but he's an asshole."

"Real cops don't talk like that."

"It feels like two different people wrote this book."

"It was professionally written, but not for me."

Fair enough. But, I'm not sure what to do with information I received recently, a sort of metric that amounts to a review. 

Each morning, when I get up and go on line (mostly me and one of the dogs... One of the dogs and I are the only ones awake) I check my author dashboard on Amazon, to see what's cookin'. The other day... One page, zero dollars earned.

One page.

Technically... I made $.004. That is added to the monthly total, and gets paid out on the 19th of (almost) every month. But, that's really not the problem. Apparently, unlike potato chips, The Fort in the Harbor did not represent, at least to this reader, that ultimate compliment - "A real page-turner." One page?!

Because this method of author compensation relies on the Kindle version, let's look at what KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) believes is page one of Fort. It's the title page! Are they telling me someone stopped reading Fort after only the title page?!

Okay, so maybe it was someone who was in the middle of the book. Or, like a reader recently reported, they had one page left to be finished with one of my novels. But, one page?!

I do get it. Our kids are all themselves parents. They report reading the same page of a book multiple times due to kid/pet interruptions. Pet owners - I recently calculated that we've opened the back door to our house over 80 thousand times since we closed on this house in 2010. That doesn't include breaking up dog disagreements, rescuing lunch from counter-surfing Water Dogs (not always successful) and hustling geriatric pets into the backyard before they "have an accident."

But... One page? At least, before you set down the reading device, brush to the next page. Then I get $.008. And that shit adds up.

Oh, yeah. One of my books actually was written by two different writers. I wrote the rough draft in the middle 2000s, and revised the second half of the book extensively in 2020. In a sense, I was a different, and I hope better, writer when I finished the final product fifteen years after I started.

Cheers!

It's the Mileage

 "Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked."

Mary Schmich, "Wear Sunscreen" hypothetical commencement speech, Chicago Tribune, 1997

Some weeks ago - enough that they amount to "last June," I took the plunge, as it were. Not a big life decision, nothing like that. There have been plenty of those in the last three years. I mean that I ventured to "Mike's Cameras" and invested a few dollars converting into digital form about a third of the photographs - which I'd had developed as slides - taken during Bikecentennial '76.

It was the bike ride I took, from Reedsport, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia...June through August. I was unprepared to see some of the images, having tucked them away more than forty years ago.

There is one taken in the very early days of the ride - my modest fitness level apparent in the shape of my calves. I am looking into the deep forest approaching Eugene, Oregon, in the first week of June. Everything, including me, is clean and bright. My journey had just begun and the miles, the many arduous miles, had not yet tempered us.

In another, I am somewhere near the top of a climb, looking back at the road I have traveled. I was riding a bike with (perhaps - I never really weighed it) thirty pounds of gear that represented home and hearth.

I had not arrived at that point effortlessly, but that I was there at all was a testament to naive optimism as much as skill or preparation. It wasn't long after that I reached the highest point of my journey, in Colorado.

It wasn't long after that a chance encounter led directly to a return to Colorado, mostly for good. She would enter the University of Denver that fall, in the same school year I would graduate Northeastern University in Boston. Although the relationship was short-lived, the roots I set in Colorado proved impossible to ignore. Less than two years after I moved to Denver I found the law enforcement job that I sought, and that would be the beginning of a career that provided - and continues to provide - everything I might ask.

In Missouri I met a couple from San Francisco who, like many of us who'd been on the road for nearly two months, were ready to be finished. "I just want to get to the fucking end," muttered the male half as we rode together in the late July heat and humidity. In August, I got there. The last stop, the last office of Bikecentennial '76. The trailhead that marked the official end of my journey. Good byes.

I had no idea, then, the adventures, the possibilities, that were ahead. Sitting here, happily retired in the company of the love of my life, and our companion animals, I don't look like the young, exceptionally fit rider who met an improbable challenge in one of the summers of my youth.

So many miles have disappeared under the front wheel of my bikes in the intervening 47 years. I am blessed that the front wheel is still turning.