1. ABCs 2. The Pillbox 3. Amputees 4. The Deadly Cannon River 5. “Beaver” 6. Blame for 9/11 7. U. S. Senator Paul Wellstone 8. My Payer 9. Tribute to a Great Teacher 10. Dr. William Murray, Hero 11. Commander N. Burt Davis, Jr. 12. Lager Larceny 13. Buzz and Ruth Wed 14. Fritzie 15. George Winslow Blodgett 16. The Sea and Me 17. Einstein’s Take on God 18. Let’s Ban Handguns 19. Nix Nature Center 20. Double Death on Carleton Campus 21. The Sutherlands 22. Magic Musical Moment 23. Musical Metamorphosis 24. Enuresis 25. The Attic 26. Orcas 27. Nose Job 28. Shoeshine Man 29. Close Encounter with Death 30. Nadia Patricia – 11-9-1930 to 8-23-2007 31. Athena 32. Prometheus 33. Asclepius 34. Career Crisis 35. Defining Me 36. Illusion & Reality 37. Cigarette Smoke 38. Racism 39. Big-Time Embarrassment 40. Retribution 41. Hair 42. No More! 43. Unto Us a Child is Born 44. The Brass Sprinkler 45. Genesis 46. My Son, My Son 47. Memories 48. G. W. Blodgett – My Favorite Uncle 49. Mindoro Invasion – 12/15/1944 50. Yes, My Darling Daughter 51. Musical Medicine 52. Fantasy 53. Oxymoron 54. A Third World View 55. A Death in the Family 56. EECP 57. Amazing Aunt Grace 58. Stowe's Clerical Directory of the Episcopal Church 59. Sweet Betse Surace 60. Ruth Publishes in Physical Fitness Magazine  61. I Remember Momma 62. A Wondrous ABC World 63. Humberto Cepeda

Lisa Guns Katie Prather Hillary Radovich Candace Luddy

    “You look just like Julia Roberts!” is the greeting new “clients” usually lob at Lisa Guns their first day at the Saddleback Cardiac Rehabilitation Center’s EECP room. But Lisa is more attractive than Julia and stronger than Erin Brockovich. When Lisa straps me down on the enhanced external cardiac counterpulsation treatment table I can barely wiggle a toe in my lycra leotards. The other four technicians who take turns putting me through thirty-five one-hour sessions on consecutive week days are also powerful as they cinch up the inflatable straps around my calves, thighs and buttocks. During these thirty-five hours the blood from my legs and buns is pumped forcefully into my upper body approximately 126,000 times—once for every time my heart beats. And each pump is actually three pumps—first the calves, then the thighs and buttocks in such rapid succession one is not aware of the triple contractions. That adds up to 378,000 high pressure counterpulsations.

    The theory is that forcing blood from the lower body into the thorax will expand capillaries providing additional blood supply to a heart that is not getting enough blood and is sending out complaining angina pain. None of the five cardiologists who have treated me for coronary artery disease (plugged left, anterior descending coronary artery) since 1990 and have performed five angioplasties on my LAD prescribed this radical, three-year-old procedure I read about it in Facets magazine in early 2002. A fellow Leisure World resident Shad Shaddock is featured in an article attesting to the efficacy of EECP. I know his wife Bebe and confer with her. She testifies to the restorative powers of EECP and informs me that Medicare covers the cost. Good.

    It’s March 2002. My current cardiologist is no longer treating SCAN members, and the first appointment I can get with a SCAN cardiologist associated with Saddleback Memorial Health Center in nearby Laguna Hills is August 6. I have no alternative. Drop out of SCAN, call a reputable cardiologist, make an appointment and persuade him to write a prescription for EECP. After dropping SCAN and returning to Medicare A & B. I obtain an appointment with a veteran cardiologist in one week, and he sees me as an ideal candidate for EECP, having sent fifteen of his coronary patients through the program with positive results. But first I have to have a scan to make sure I have no abdominal embolisms that would burst under EECP pressure and kill me or cause a serious stroke.

    I luck out. Lisa has an opening at 1:30 p.m., but I mustn’t eat within two hours of the appointed time for obvious reasons. I begin treatments on July 15 and run straight through five days a week to the final session on August 30. Lisa lives in Mission Viejo. Her hubby is an Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) captain at the new Ladera station. Alternating with Lisa is Katie Prather whose husband is the commanding officer of OCFA. Taking her turn at belting me down and pumping me up is Mary Ann Martz with whom I share a role model doctor—Dr. Kevorkian. Mary Ann has put in too many years in intensive care and seen too many patients die in agony. A fourth member of this great team of EECP experts is Candace Luddy whose husband owns four mortuaries. Candice’s favorite pastime is floating about in an inflatable chaise in her Nellie Gail swimming pool with a good romance novel in one hand a bloody Mary in the other. Finally, there is Hillary Radovich who has a twenty-year-old daughter at the University of Arizona and a six-foot-five-and-one half-inch, 265-pound son at Mission Viejo High School rated the outstanding lineman in Orange County.

    Soon after August 30 I write a glowing letter of praise to Saddleback about the superb performance and upbeat spirit of this beautiful bevy of five nurses who have given a total of more than 100 years of tender loving care to their fortunate patients.

    EECP treatments are billed at $460 per session—$16,100. Of course Medicare doesn’t cover $16,100. How much they cover and how much, if any, my supplemental health insurance kicks in is still a deep, dark mystery three full months after the last treatment. I have no idea how big a check I shall have to write Saddleback. (It was $1100.00.) Is EECP painless? Hell no. Is it painful? Yes, but not so painful that playing Rodgers and Hammerstein, Chopin, Beethoven and Bach on my high fidelity portable Panasonic CD player doesn’t drown out. I admit to inflicting pain on my team of technicians. When I listen to the “Rodgers & Hammerstein Song Book” I burst into song. Can’t help myself. It’s compulsive and involuntary. Fortunately, my eighty-nine-year-old roomie receiving EECP on the slab next to me is deaf and has a headset tuned to daytime TV soaps. The pumping produces excess vibrato, but I have a powerful diaphragm and muscle through the convulsions. I sense Lisa, Katie, Mary Ann, Hillary and Candie are almost as happy as I am when August 31 arrives.

    Did EECP help me? I don’t know. Not substantially. I have a single-point criterion. Before EECP I could not walk around the block without experiencing angina pain. Now, three months after completing the thirty-five treatments, I still cannot walk around the block without angina pain. I have to slow down to a crawl up the half block with a six percent grade, but I am forever grateful for getting to know and admire the five most gorgeous and talented nurses at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center.

The light of love once blinded us.
We could never get enough,
But now the dimmer switch
Is abruptly pushed to off.
Physical attraction persists
But not the will or way.
The sine qua non of intimacy
Has had its halcyon day.
Magic blue pills are not for me,
And the cortical power is dead.
Infrequent arousal forays
Die aborning in a king size bed.
The gas gauge reads empty,
And the ignition coil is dead.
Why shut off the dimmer switch?
Why not adjust its glow?
The potency of three score and ten
Takes flight at four score and four
The light that once blinded us
Flickers and dies.
The passion of our youth
Lies limp and flaccid in its demise.

Gangrene is my valley.
The moon’s a Roquefort blue.
The sun doesn’t shine; it staggers.
The earth’s a d.t. cesspool.
The rivers of my valley,
Silt filled and sewage choked,
Seep and ooze is sluggish morass
Spenserian dragons roam.
Baudelairean blooms tinkle off key tunes.
Chrome plated is my cottage,
A cancerously crumbly chrome,
On corporate chaos postulated,
Perpetuated by the drone.
Birds? Bees? Trees?
None of these.
The birds eat the bees,
The trees the birds.
The earth the trees.
The orchid alone can call this home.
My valley,
A cankerous coffin exuding death from its putrescent pores.

*An estimated two billion people—one-third of the Earth’s population—try to live on $2 or less per day. Some 20,000 die every day, because they cannot afford to live, while we live in luxury.

“Dave, didn’t you fight the Japs?”
“Yeah.”
“So, how could you buy a Jap car?”

The evil object is a 2004 Toyota Prius, Motor Trend “Car of the Year” in 2004. No U.S. company makes a true hybrid.

Ironically, we pick up Jap-hater Joe and his wife at the San Pedro cruise ship port the previous day—a tedious and time consuming task. We drive them in our 2000 Nissan Maxima—also made in Japan; but, apparently Joe is oblivious, or he would make some kind of scathing remark.
“What did you do in WWII, Joe?”
“I was in Navy Intelligence.”
“That’s an oxymoron,”
“We were doing important work,” he replies angrily.
“What?”
“Identifying disloyal Japanese Americans.”
“How many did you find?”

I know the answer: Zilch. Nada. I guess that information is still confidential more than sixty years later, because he declines to respond or is unable to overcome his irritation at my attack on good old Navy Intelligence. I don’t bother to ask him if he scolded his father-in-law for bringing a huge Mercedes-Benz back from Germany. You remember the Nazis?

I have a strong case. Navy Intelligence is responsible for one of my most terrifying nights on Mindoro Island—December 26, 1944, when it tells us the Japanese are mounting a counteroffensive to retake the island and we can expect thousands of paratroopers and a large flotilla of landing craft to descend on us that night and kill every one of us. By 0300 it becomes obvious no such attack is going to occur, but Navy Intelligence does not bother to inform us, so we spend a sleepless night knowing we are going to die defending Cominawit Point.

But this is not my major complaint. Seven years after I complete active duty and am briefly involved in civil rights political activities in the San Francisco Bay Area, Navy Intelligence lowers the boom, arranges a kangaroo court martial and gives me an “other than honorable” discharge for waging political warfare against discriminatory practices aimed at African Americans. It’s ridiculous. I appeal the Kafkaesque decision, not once but twice. Finally, in 1987, thirty-four years after my discharge and a disgusting display of pleading on my part. (I don’t care about myself, but I have two kids and six grandchildren.) I served honorably, worked my butt off and went through hell for several months in 1944 and l945 in the Philippines—and this is the thanks I get from the Navy. I consider “oxymoron” a light slap at a dangerous and out of control military arm that has nothing better to do with taxpayers’ dollars than hound combat veterans for harmless and legal post-war political activities.

This PT (Motor Torpedo Patrol) boat is from my Squadron Thirteen, one of twenty-six boats in Task Unit 70.1.4. Its three 1,350-horsepower engines are pushing it up to forty knots in a calm sea.We lose three boats—one to a Japanese suicide plane, because Squadron Sixteen’s commanding officer is at the wheel and freezes. I watch the Japanese Val settle down squarely in the middle of the boat and see it explode, break in half and sink. Seven crewmen die. The other two boats are blown out of the water near Luzon by the “friendly fire” of U. S. destroyers that can’t tell the difference between seventy-eight-foot long PT boats and fourteen-foot Japanese suicide boats that are wrecking havoc off Luzon ramming our ships. My good friend, Mike Haughian, is blown to bits by a five-inch shell from one of the tin cans. Some of the PT boat survivors find their way ashore behind enemy lines. They are captured and beheaded by Japanese troops. War is hell. We suffer one-third casualties and earn the Navy Unit Commendation ribbon. And for this I earn an “other than honorable” discharge.

The U. S. Navy Intelligence officer who prosecuted me saw no action on WW II, but he knows I am disloyal because of my activity in exposing Oakland police brutality from 1946 to 1949 as the East Bay correspondent for a progressive newspaper. It’s none of the Navy’s business, but in the McCarthy era of 1953 the octopus tentacles of intimidation reach everywhere.

The official U. S. Navy Intelligence logo is displayed above. I hope they don’t come after me again at 87 because of my opposition to Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, but I’m sure to be on the TSA’s huge and confidential “Watch List.” I have sent several e-mail protests to Bush, the moron and untreated alcoholic Dick Cheney, skilled military duty evader and dangerous bird hunter who conned Bush into believing he’s the president. What we have accomplished in Iraq is not worth the life of a single U. S. soldier.

The NI slogan is “Strength through knowledge.” Tell it to the 6,800 Marines slaughtered on Iwo Jima because U. S. Navy Intelligence is unaware of impregnable, underground Japanese defenses. Tell it to my college classmate, Curly Brueggeman, who is cut to pieces within minutes of hitting the Iwo Jima beach. Tell it to my brother-in-law, Henry Hagen, who suffers near-fatal wounds at Iwo. Tell it to my wife’s cousin, Dr. Bill Murray, a U. S. Navy surgeon who treated as many as 100 Marine casualties a day for 45 days on that deadly little island. I say “U. S. Navy Intelligence” is an oxymoron.