The Curmudgeonly Professor

A Message of Hope and Gratitude from a Murder Mystery: A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny

I keep my wife supplied with piles of books to read during her illness.  I look for authors off the beaten path of the Costco best-seller table and take a chance on writers we have never read or heard of before.  One of these writers is Louise Penny, an award winning Canadian author of the Chief Inspector Gamache Mysteries. 

My wife often reads for various periods during the night when she can't sleep.  She came in my den this afternoon and told me she had read something she never expected to read in a murder mystery that had touched her deeply.  Then she read me the following story.  The story is about a man named Finney who was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II.  He often went to the dock, as he put it, "to do his sums."

Gamache, the detective, went to the dock to talk to Finney.  "I wasn't a prisoner," Finney said.  "You were right, I was in a Japanese prison camp, but I wasn't a prisoner.  It's not semantics, you know.  It's an important distinction.  Crucial."  "I believe you."

Finney continues:  "I saw a lot of men die there.  Most men.  Do you know what killed them?"  Starvation, Gamache thought to say.  Dysentery. Cruelty.  And Finney goes on: "Despair," said Finney.  "They believed themselves to be prisoners. . . But they died and I lived.  Do you know why?"

Gamache replies: "You were free."  Finney speaks: "I was free. . . The mind is its own place.  I was never a prisoner.  Not then, not now."  Then Gamache asks Finney about the "sums" he does when he goes to the dock.  Finney had been an accountant and knew all too well that money buys only space.  And he asked Gamache "Do you know the sums that I do?" . . . "I count my blessings." . . . "Every day each of us does our sums.  The question is what do we count?"

I thought my wife was through with her story, but she had one more to tell, a story of Pandora's box.  Pandora was warned never to open the box, but the temptation was too great and all of the horrors escaped into the world.  "But not everything escaped.  Something lay curled at the very bottom of the box."  . . . one thing sat and stayed.  Didn't flee."  "What was it? asked Bean.

"Hope." (quotes and paraphrasing from pp. 320-321).

My wife told me that when she read these unexpected sentences during her difficult night, she knew the message was for her.  And when she read these thoughts to me with tears in her eyes I knew the messages were for both of us:  Do our sums by counting our blessings.  And Hope.  And eventually we dried our eyes and felt we could continue our journey.

Thank you Louise Penny for your beautiful prose.  And, by the way, the book is a wonderful detective story and I need to get the other books in the Gamache series.

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Book That Will Change Your Life: "365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Gratitude Changed My Life" by John Kralik

This little book shows the beauty and power of the two words "Thank You" hand written on thank you cards.  Not emails, not text messages, not phone calls.  But messages actually written by hand on note cards and sent to the recipient.  The author, John Kralik, was a struggling attorney with a world of woes and problems when he made the decision to write 365 thank yous during the coming year.  The subtitle of the book is "The year a simple act of daily gratitude changed my life."  By thanking friends, family, clients, doctors, dentists, people he came in contact with or that helped or crossed his path, he enriched his own life and set in motion a series of events that led to the changes in his life and the lives of the recipients of his thank you messages.

Starting off the year, with a struggling law firm, delinquent bill paying clients, a divorce, living in a substandard apartment, and facing a mountain of woes and misery, Kralik writes: "I would try to find one person to thank each day.  One person to whom I would send a thank you note." (p. 17)  During the year, he thanked clients for paying their bills.  He thanked the Starbucks guy.  He thanked people through birthday cards.  He kept thanking people through the financial market crash.  He kept a spreadsheet with all of his original messages.

Kralik's advice is to keep the messages on point, addressing the action or friendship briefly and explicitly, leaving all extraneous matters aside.  He stresses that you should "[replace] all thank you emails with handwritten thank you notes." (p. 215)

The author discovered that recipients of his cards often saved them as keepsakes, placing them in a prominent location where they could serve as a reminder of the wonders of a simple hand-written thank you.  Imagine a world in which everyone bothered to tell each other "thank you" in an indelible and permanent way for all of the good that others have done for us, and imagine the effect your cards will have on others as they follow your example.

My wife has long been a thank you card practitioner, sending out our beautiful photo note cards with a short thank you message.  This past troubled winter, that included thanks for food brought in, for visits in our home, for visits by telephone, for prayers offered, for rides given to treatments, for gifts.  My wife sends a birthday card to each member of our family, which consists of 5 children, 19 grand children, 4 in-law spouses, and 15 great grandchildren.  We hear stories about how even the youngest children are excited to get their card with the number of $ for their age.  No matter how sick my wife was, she sent me to the mailbox with the card or went to the ATM for the money to send with the card.

We have found that people usually save our photo note cards, framing them and hanging them on the wall or placing them in a frame on the mantel, a reminder of the thought behind the card and of the beauty of the image that enhances the message even more.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough or the powerful message that it contains.  You will never forget Kralik's experience, and, blessedly, if you follow his example, you may find more blessings in your own life than you ever thought possible.  I invite your comments and reactions to this wonderful little book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Confronting Multiple Myeloma

Last October, just after my wife and I returned to St. George for what we thought would be a normal winter out of the cold, snow, and icy roads of northern Utah, we received an urgent call from her internist's nurse telling us we needed to see a nephrologist immediately.  A routine blood test taken just before we left Salt Lake showed an abnormal level of protein and creatinine, among other markers.  We made an appointment with a kidney specialist and a week later sat in his office as he looked at her lab numbers and told us that these numbers were consistent with a diagnosis of kidney failure and multiple myeloma.  My wife's face fell in shock, and I reeled from the news.  She had just had blood tests a few months before and all results from that test were normal.  How could these abnormal markers come up out of nowhere?

I thought about blogging about our experience with this disease, but my wife asked me not to do so and the effort was just too much, just too heavy for me.  Now that nearly six months have gone by, my wife is in remission from the myeloma and is about to be taken off dialysis.  Her main problem now is that she has had excruciating sciatic pain from her hip down her leg and is basically immobile from that pain.  I have had to learn to do the cooking, laundry, cleaning, vacuuming, grocery shopping, and any and all other household tasks to keep our home going in some kind of rational order.  We are trying to schedule an appointment with another pain specialist to see if any relief is in sight.

Most of us have mixed feelings about going public with our personal illnesses, trials, and tribulations.  Yet, any time we confront a crisis, we find that we are members of the select fraternity of people suffering from whatever malady we have.  And there always seems to be some comfort in sharing experiences and bolstering each other's spirits.  We have learned that the key is hope, the route is through countless prayers from countless friends and family, and that, somehow, we must keep going from day to day.

Throughout the coming days, I will recount the highlights of this six month odyssey into the spiraling darkness of multiple myeloma and our moment of sunshine, at least for the moment, from a remission, however temporary, in the hope that someone else may relate to this story and find some hope in their own situation.

Flowers, Above All, Send Messages of Hope and Beauty: More Yellow Daffies

 
Lately I've been posting more photos and less words.  Surprisingly, I get more page views from the photo postings than from most of the verbal postings.  When you see a photo of flowers, such as the one just above, what do you think?  Do you try to put words into your feelings when you see the flowers?  And are the unspoken words from  nature's gifts more eloquent than the words we write?

We Also Heal Ourselves When We Lend a Smile and a Helping Hand to Others

The following is from an email I sent to my children and siblings on January 8 concerning the progress my wife is making in regaining her health.  I am reproducing it here after receiving numerous comments on it from those who read it.  Perhaps these comments may help someone else:

We've learned a lot from all of our time sitting in doctor's offices, the dialysis clinic, the cancer treatment center, waiting rooms, the ER, the hospital, and wherever else our adventures have taken us.  So many people are in so much pain and endure it the best they can with a straight face laced with grimaces and strain.  We have seen much kindness and consideration from health care professionals of all types.

We continue to feel blessed from the phone calls, cards, notes, and attention from family, friends, and our neighbors both here and in Salt Lake.  Lo and behold, one day a big jug of chicken soup appeared  miraculously on our doorstep, a gift from my siblings.  The soup and most of all the love and thoughts behind it were gratefully received and acknowledged.  My niece and her husband continue to be our backbone and our help here, rescuing us from the ER late one night and staying with us awhile after we arrived home for awhile and helping us with transportation and errands.  They have provided us with food and my niece gave us half of her delicious cherry chocolate birthday cake.  Neighbors check with us constantly, bringing food and little gifts.  One dear neighbor, a feisty Englishwoman in her 80s, came by the day after her husband's funeral to see Velna.  When I commented on this she said, simply, "Oh, I'm all right.  It's Velna I'm worried about."  People have volunteered to bring food, do our housecleaning, haul us around, run errands.   I know we need to accept help when needed but we've always been so independent since we got married and never felt we needed help to do anything and, by and large, we didn't.  But we are learning the meaning of gratitude.

Just a couple of other things.  Part of my ability to endure all of these hours in medical facilities, some times for 7-8 hours a day, has come from meeting and talking to people.  You can sort of sense when someone will talk and when you should just let them pass by.  But mostly if you see someone struggling to move, to walk, to lift, you know they will welcome a smile and a cheerful word.  I stopped to talk to an elderly lady struggling to get around her car the other day in the grocery store parking lot. She had just left her shopping cart crutch and was trying to get to the other side of her car.  After a word or two, she brightened up like a light and said, "You know, tomorrow is my 88th birthday!"  I wished her happy birthday, profusely, and watched her suffer with pain as she slowly got into her car.  I struck up conversations with several of the patients in the cancer infusion treatment clinic.  The elderly lady sitting next to me while waiting for my wife to finish her treatment was quiet as a mouse and was just a little wisp of a thing but she lit up with a smile and told me about her children, grandchildren, and grandchildren.  Another patient was an artist, a potter and teacher of art and pottery, who was busy drawing incredible pictures in an artist's sketch book.  I commented on his beautiful work as he leafed through his sketch book and thus we had a wonderful conversation to help him pass the time.  What struck me was, when I left, he told me "I can't tell you how much I appreciate visiting with you."  I helped a lady in a "wheelie" cart get into the dollar store the other day, and then kept my eye on her to help her get things from the shelves as she went through the store.  The lady at the grocery checkout counter looked so exhausted the other night that I commented to her, and she told me she was on the late shift and then would go home and take care of her five kids and get to bed some time in the middle of the night.

We never know what is troubling others, when others are weeping inwardly our outwardly, struggling with pain and fear and uncertainty about tomorrow, next week, next year.  A smile, a kind word, an offer to help, a pat on the arm when appropriate.  Some may even need to cry on your shoulder.  And some times you may need to cry on their shoulder. Like when we see a small child with a big smile who is too young to know he or she is not supposed to talk to older people, and the child smiles and waves at us and our spirits are brighter the rest of the day as our own smile spreads across our face.  Smiles and love are the most contagious of all human virtues. Love to all. The not-so-curmudgeonly professor.

 

 

 

The Morning Sunrise Brings Hope for a Brighter Day

Unretouched photos of morning sunrise in St. George UT on December 14 201o

 

Above, beginning in the east 

 

And moving to the south . . .

And then to the west . . .

Steve Green, in the lyrics to the beautiful song "Morning Has Broken," has written the words "Praise to the morning."  During the dark days of the Great Depression in the 1930s, my mother, still in her 20's, was often left alone with her children in a two room tiny home, uninsulated, heated by coal stoves, no electricity, no plumbing, no telephone, 12 miles from town while my dad worked wherever he could find a day's wages. One night the temperature hit 20 degrees below zero and she writes that she bundled all of us into one bed and waited out the stormy frozen night.  But then when the morning broke, she writes that, once again, she had hope as the bright rays of the sun lit the horizon and then knew that she could go on.

I think even the bravest among us will admit that maybe once in awhile, if not often, we feel a bit afraid and intimidated by the dark.  We can't see, and our minds can wander places we would rather keep it from visiting, and fear and uncertainty can lurk.  But morning brings with it a new day, light, maybe even clouds and rain, but a new day in any event.  And with the sunrise we look to the east, to the south, to the west, and we hope and pray for a better day, and hope that we will have the courage and fortitude to continue with our lives and find joy in the sunrise and in the coming day. And we give thanks for who we are and what we have and for those whom we love.

My Favorite Mountain

 
For over ten years, I have been able to see this mountain from my window, watching it change from green in the spring to shining patches of yellow aspen and reds along the slopes in autumn to white in the winter.  This mountain is the same one on the header of this blog.  I have memorized every crag, every slope, every ridge.  The days come and go, the weather changes, people live and die, but the mountain grandly stands there, impervious to all of the comings and goings and tears and aches and pains and laughter of those who live near its granite peaks.  Each morning I could look out and find some measure of peace as the sun gradually came up over the peaks, lighting another day.  Each night I could find rest as the moon made its way up and over the ridges to share its migrating yellow lamp with the night.  So I will miss the mountain while I am in St. George for the winter where I look at the mesas and Utah Hill to the west and the massive Pine Mountain to the north and the red cliffs and extinct volcano craters that dot the desert landscape.  And then when I go back to Salt Lake in the spring when the temperatures climb in the desert, I will miss all of the postcard images I have of St. George.  The yellow aspen patch that stayed awhile in a little valley near the top of the mountain has gone by the time I took this photo of the first snow of the year, but I can remember it clearly as a bright and cheerful messenger to the valley, warning everyone who can see it that autumn, however beautiful, is a harbinger of winter, and then we must live again with our memories with a different kind of winter beauty until spring when the earth will come alive once more.

Aging and Illness and Health Insurance

Last night my wife and I attended a dinner for a couple from our neighborhood who are moving to a new home.  She was operated on two years ago for a knee replacement and somehow the nerves in other knee were destroyed and she has been in a wheelchair ever since.  Just in the little circle at our end of the table our friends were dealing with the following health issues: Passing 12 kidney stones and related surgery; carpal tunnel surgery; side effects of statins following artery stents that ruined legs; colonoscopies; endoscopies; duodenal inflammation; ulcers; skin cancer;  general undiagnosed fatigue and illness; gall bladder surgery; hip replacement surgery; spinal stenosis; atrial fibrillation; dental implants; hearing loss; asthma; hitting the doughnut hole on drugs.  And there are probably other unknown ailments and many financial health-related financial issues.

Words that come to mind are: compassion. concern. help. life. endurance. health insurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aren't we supposed to be our brother's, and our sister's, keeper?  Aren't we supposed to seek the public good?

The Blessings and Curses of the Common Cold

My wife had a cold that lingered for more than a week and I thought I had escaped getting it.  Then my son gave me an LA Lakers tie on Father's Day and I have been deathly ill ever since.  An omen that turned out to be a curse, besides causing deep emotional scars conjuring up images of dreaded Laker players every time I see the tie.  I have hidden it but it's like the old Shakespearean dilemma of "out, damned spot."

The following commentary has not been approved by the American Medical Association.  I happen to be a doctor of philosophy, but apparently I know nothing about either economics or medicine.  The problem with a cold is that it doesn't seem too bad for a couple of days, then, inexorably, incrementally, and exponentially, the hateful malady takes over your body and your system.  Here are some of the blessings (none) and curses (many) of the common cold:

• You never know when a cold will turn into bronchitis, pneumonia, lung congestion, hearing loss, speech loss, strepthroat, whooping cough, or many other maladies, some of them fatal.
• A cold makes me so unspeakably miserable that I find it necessary to update my spouse about every 15 minutes or so on just how miserable I feel, even though she's not much better.
• After coughing and sneezing non-stop and going through 5 boxes of Kleenex, then you start wheezing after every breath, sounding like you have a built in tracheotomy.
• Since my nose is all stuffed up, I have probably suffered oxygen deprivation.
• Even after the main symptoms of the cold have disappeared, the hangover effect lasts another three weeks during which time you feel even more miserable, dejected, discouraged, and angry at the moron whose germs ultimately led to your suffering, whoever that was and wherever you picked it up.
• I miss my Mother, but I do not miss the fate worse than death of having a mustard plaster slung onto my chest like a mass of wet concrete, burning the hide off my body and frightening the living heck out of whatever ails me.

But folks, this is July.  Terrible colds don't happen on July 4.  What kind of insanity is this?  I don't think I'm ever going to get any better.  Woe, woe, woe is me (from the Book of Lamentations.)

Some Flowers to Comfort Us as We Mourn Those We Have Lost

A Chicken for the Doctor: Another Look From the Past

Today, the idea that we might pay the doctor with a chicken has become a political joke that everyone is making fun of, and has become a political liability, perhaps, to the person who brought the idea to national prominence and considerable ridicule.  However, in earlier and harder times, paying the doctor with a chicken, or even with anything else of some value, minimal or otherwise, was the only way poor people could pay doctors and often the only wages doctors received.  Following are some photos of a sculpture of a little boy and his mother bringing a chicken to pay a kindly doctor.  This sculpture is located at the Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George UT.  I have posted these photos before, but the popular discussion of the topic warrants showing them again.

The sculptor has captured perfectly the look of kindly compassion on the doctor's face and the looks of anticipation and concern on the faces of the little boy and his mother.

Many people had no money, or precious little during the Great Depression of the 1930s, including my parents.  My dad was gone more often than he was home during this troubled decade.  When my little sister became seriously ill, my parents took him to a town 12 miles away to see the doctor.  In Mother's account book appears this item: "picture to Doc Tom for $5 doctor bill."  My dad had just begun making inlaid wood pictures during the middle 1930s, and they paid for this visit with one of his very first pictures.  Some sixty-five years later, Doc Tom's daughter called me, whose husband was also a retired physician, and told me about the picture.  She said it had hung in her parent's living room all the years she was home, and then hung on the wall in her home for all of the decades since.  She told me that the picture belonged to me and our family, and she wanted to give it to us.  The picture had been sadly neglected and, with age, the inlaid veneer and frame were peeling.  My sister, ironically the sister for whom the picture paid the doctor bill, and her husband lovingly and beautifully restored the picture to its original condition.  Now the picture hangs on the wall in my bedroom and I cannot look at it without my eyes clouding over.  On the back etched with a wood burning pen are the words "R. M. Blood Dec. 1935."  Here is the picture:

Since this inlaid picture was one of the first ones Dad ever made, the design is simplistic.  Over his lifetime, he completed hundreds of complex inlaid pictures. He became an expert in sizing up patterns and varieties of woods to use to display artistically mountains and animals and Victorian houses and cowboys and many other things.  But this picture, perhaps among the very first, is an icon and a tribute to his perseverance during the Depression and a tribute to the kindness of Doc Tom and, subsequently, of his daughter, who recognized its worth to our family.

 

Ten Ways, More or Less, to Get Out of a Funk

We all get down and in a funk or blue mood now and then, some more than others.  Staying in a funk is not good, because that can become chronic depression.  The trick is to get out of the funk and downer as quickly as we can.  Here are a few ways to cheer up:

1. On dark and dreary days, or even at night, turn on all the lights and burn a few extra watts for a little while.  Darkness adds to dreariness which adds to sour dispositions which adds to depression.  Lighten up your environment.
2. Get up off your butt and move around.  The newspaper this morning quoted research which showed that people who sit all the time are likely to be in bad shape.  Modernizing their language a bit, such folks tend to become lardbutts (spellcheck didn't like this word, but it gets the message across) and slugs.  I also happen to know such inactivity can lead to phlebitis and who knows what other dire consequences.  Get up.  Move.  Walk in place if it is a bad day.  Walking in place is what saved Nelson Mandela.  It can save you.
3. Learn something new.  Learn to use a computer, send and read email.  Get your eight year old child or grandchild to teach you.
4. Buy something new, preferably something that you will totally enjoy, and especially try to find something that will help keep you busy.
5. Think of all the people who are a heck of a lot worse off than you are and count your blessings.
6. Go see or call at least one of the people you know who are hurting, who are worse off than you are, who need an arm to lean on.
7. Change two or three things in your daily routine.  Same old same old gets boring and contributes to monotony.
8. Don't dwell on the past.  The past, in economic terms, is a fixed cost.  A fixed cost is a dead horse.  You can't beat a dead horse to death.  It is already deceased.  Focus on now, this minute, this week.
9. Make up with someone you've been totally hacked off with for a week or a decade even though what they did to you seems totally unforgivable.  It will take a huge load off your dark mood.
10. Do something besides watch TV.  If you're addicted to video games, uninstall them.  Skip the round of murders, fires, auto accidents, robberies, and other bad stuff on the ten o'clock news.
11. Actually, we have expanded the list to 11: Don't waste time talking to people who will drag you down even more.  Tell them later, and move on.
12. And still, we go to 12: Find an uplifting book, one with a cheerful story, an inspirational story.
13. And yet, we go to 13: You might even resurrect your spiritual side and depend on your sources of spiritual strength to help bail you out and move on.

What I'm Hoping for This Week

I hope that I can find the field of poppies in full bloom in Alpine.  I hope that we can get downtown to Temple Square to see and photograph the flowers blooming there.  I hope I can learn to play Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook just because my granddaughter thinks she is so smart.  I hope I can finish reading several books in progress.  I hope all of those in chronic pain can get through the week with a minimum of misery and enjoy the gorgeous summer weather.  I hope that hope can trump fear, that hope can trump pain, that the images of love and life and family and flowers and those things and people that we cherish and love and hold dear can keep us going, can keep a smile on our faces, and that, through our faith, and through our hope, we will all have a good week.  I hope that we can all find things to hope for, and that the power of this hope, together with our faith, will help us surmount the problems that we face.  Go Magic, as in Orlando Magic, in NBA finals.  Otherwise my week will be miserable.  Unless I find the poppies and then we can all cheer up.

Images of Hope and Peace at the Entrance To Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George UT