Current Events

Well, ten months after my youngest nephew returned from a tour in Iraq, he's back in the Persian Gulf. At least this time he's aboard ship and unlikely to go ashore.

Normally the only naval personnel to go ashore like that are corpsman, front line medics, who get assigned to Marine units. (Ask the Marines their opinion of those guys.) The Navy, however, which apparently taught him Arabic, sent him to help the Army in Iraqi Kurdistan do some glorified police work.

The ship he's assigned to was already in the Gulf (and in the news) so it looks like the Navy flew him to Bahrain last week to join the tour in progress. I told Mom and my brother about the reassignment but not the deployment.

I'm going to be very upset if the bloviating chickenhawks back here manage to get him in the way of a shooting war with Iran.

The Persistence of Telephony

Mom got a call the other day from her grandson, Dan, in Iraq. Although Dan's in the Navy he's on detached duty with the Army in Kurdistan. The Navy apparently taught him Arabic. He's a good and thoughtful grandson.

Anyway, Mom was, as always, thrilled by the call. They talked for a few minutes and when Dan hung up she gave the phone back to me. I checked to make sure he was off the line and placed it back in its cradle. Mom, however, continued talking to me as if she were still on the phone. She's done this a number of times and it's always a bit disconcerting because she's talking to me and the conversation makes sense and is appropriate but she acts like she's still on the phone.

So I said, "Dan's gone for now, Mom. I hung up the phone. There's no one there."

She said, "Oh. Well I guess I'd better hang up, too, then," and picked up the newspaper.

"If They Want Me To Get Well, Why Do They Want to Make Me Mad?"

That was Mom's question Sunday evening when reminded of her appointments for Monday and Tuesday this week.

My answer: "That's how they tell you're still alive."

Her response: "They should leave me alone and just guess."

Mom actually had a pretty good weekend. A fair amount of energy and the ability and desire to get up and around the house a bit. She's been going to bed an hour earlier which may be helping. A friend of hers form her old ceramics classes stopped by on Sunday. The woman, Ruthie, had called earlier but neither of them could hear the other on the phone so she just showed up on our front step. They had a nice visit for about twenty minutes or so and Mom was really animated.

Mom's second grandson, Dan, called from Iraq Monday afternoon. He'd called Sunday night but Mom had gone to bed early so he and I talked for awhile and he tried again Monday. He's part of the 50,000 "non-combat" troops still there. He's up in Kurdistan, going on patrol "arresting" bad guys. Technically the Army does the "arresting and he's Navy, but he speaks Arabic ("What's your name?", "What are you doing?", "Lie face down.", "Eat gravel.", the sorts of things that will be totally useless if he ever goes touristing in Egypt or Morocco) so he's the official translator. When he hung up I said, "Wow. A phone call all the way from Iraq! How about that?" Mom said, "Considering what's going on over there, I really don't want phone calls from Iraq." She wants Dan back here in the States.

When the home health nurse asked her questions, she got the date and year wrong, although she knew Obama is president. She also knows she wants her grandson back from Iraq. I'd say her mind is holding the important stuff just fine.

Things That Move...

Startled a buzzard the other day. I was taking my morning constitutional and had to detour across the street because this suburbanite was getting his pool pumped out at 8 a.m. and the pool pumpers had run a hose (we're talking 5-6 inch diameter flexible accordion hose here) from the backyard out to the street where they were recreating the original pool only 3 inches deep and a lot wider. As I moved along the shoreline, a dark shape jumped from the grass and launched itself in that long, slow, shallow awkward ascent typical of large birds, bombers and jumbo jets. It was a good hundred feet down the road before it was able to clear the roofline of a stucco ranch and disappear on the other side. Ungainly, with a long neck, so not a hawk despite the five foot wingspan. I'd seen vultures feeding on roadkill on previous trips (they'll step aside to let a car pass, but won't abandon their prize). I didn't see anything for it to feed on but I didn't exactly search the grass either.

Speaking of vultures, it's a little unnerving to be walking along, noting the occasional hawk/vulture float overhead and disappear, wonder where they disappear to, turn around and realize you're being followed by two dozen of the things. A couple days ago I looked straight up after losing track of a couple of them and found myself at the bottom of a swirling vortex of raptors/scavengers at least 500 feet high. Must have been thirty of them. Toto at the base of a bird tornado. Now I know how Tippi Hedren felt.

Speaking of big ungainly birds, I drove up to the mythical town of Cocoa Beach (geezer reference) to watch the last night-time launch of the space shuttle. Ever since the moon landings we have been slowly cutting back our goals, dreams and capabilities with regard to manned space flight to the point where we can barely get 200 miles above the surface of the planet with rickety technology we will now retire not having any replacement in hand. Needless to say, NASA did not disappoint: five minutes before blast-off they cancelled the launch leaving tens of thousands of us stranded on the beach out in the cold (literally). It succeeded as metaphor, if nothing else.

It took over five hours for traffic to clear out enough to drive home. I took back roads pretty much the whole way, around the north of Lake Okeechobee, a pleasant, flat drive through subtropical forest, farm fields and cattle pastures with occasional clumps of small identical standardized 1940s-era plastered-cinder-block ranch houses each with a broken front window, kitchen appliance in the front yard, and late model vehicle (SUV or truck) in the dirt driveway. Probably built for migrant labor originally, there'd be a half-dozen of them at one spot and then miles before the next bunch. Nothing that could be called a town for forty miles in any direction.

Speaking of the ragged edge of civilization, my eldest nephew called the other day. He's being sent to Iraq. To guard prisoners. Which is perfect military logic because not only is he in the Navy, he spent the first half of his career in Hawaii as a nuclear tech on a submarine and the second half in Charelston, SC teaching nuke tech. I say we send all of our people with nuclear skills and knowledge to Middle Eastern war zones. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway, he starts 90 days of either Army or Marine combat training next month and then Baghdad for nine months. The younger nephew is probably jealous. He's been to the Gulf a couple of times but never been off his ship (that I know of).