Can't Hold Still

A Boomer’s Musical Guide to Getting Your Brain Rewired

July 17, 2026

In this day of streaming, tailored, on demand entertainment, it is hard to imagine a time…a time before Spotify and Apple Music, before Napster and iPods and Walkmen,  a time before CDs, cassette tapes and 8-Track…when music came to you by way of 

• a transistor radio you held in your hand, pointing the antenna in the right direction hoping,
• to catch an AM radio wave broadcast from a tall transmission tower out in the middle of a cornfield,
• connected to a dingy studio in which a dingy little  man named a disc jockey (AKA DJ) played  7” black vinyl records at the speed of 45 revolutions per minute,
• hoping that, if he played a song often enough but not too often, you might hot foot it down to your local record store, 
• buy that same 45 record for yourself, 
• bring it home and 
• play it over and over until your father pounded on your bedroom door demanding “…that noise you called music”…stop.

Now, for you youngsters…that is, those of you the same age as my surgeon and younger…the disc jockeys or “DJ’s” would from time to time accept “requests.” A “request” occurred when a kid would call into the radio  station, sometimes using what are now referred to as “land lines”, sometimes using what were once called “phone booths”,and ask the DJ if he would play a song. The DJ would ask who was calling and to whom the caller wished to “dedicate” the song. 

There was no greater thrill than when you, on your transistor radio…and presumably all your friends on their transistor radios…heard “This one goes out to Betty from Bill.”

That Bill; he’s so dreamy.

Now, if the DJ was so plagued with requests that he refused to play your favorite song, or if the rate of repetition at which he was playing your song was less than the once every ten minutes your taste in music or need to assess popularity demanded, your only recourse was to ride your bike to the drug store, shell out 98 cents, return home and fire up your own 45.  

Do this often enough and mundane concerns arose. Things like, ease of storage, filing and retrieval. So much so that you bought a box.

A box in which to store your childhood. 

A box like this. 

When I told my brother and sister about my DBS surgery, I shared that the surgeon…you know, the fella younger than the box… encourages music in the OR and will, if you ask nicely, “play requests” while he is drilling a hole in your head.

Seems only fair, doesn’t it? I mean…just saying.

Quick aside…if you’re cresting 70 and ever need a quick “pick me up?” Fire up Spotify or Apple Music or ask Siri to play “The Greatest Hits of 1967.” The loud speaker introduction to The Animals’ San Franciscan Nights is guaranteed to lift any Bay Area Boomer’s spirits.

“The following program is dedicated to
The city and people of San Francisco
Who may not know it but
They are beautiful and
So is their city“

Try it…I’m telling you…it works.

Where was I?

Oh yeah…the red box.

When Linda heard I might have my own music in the OR, she rummaged through her garage and attic and found it. 

The red box.

She blew the dust off, opened the lid, and found this…

And this…

And even this…

Imagine. 

Just imagine.

I know it’s a stretch, but imagine a time when our president was capable of reading.

And children would want to listen to him read…

The Declaration of Independence!

Yeah, I know…I know…but a boy can dream.

Anyway…

The red box prompted Linda …who was always more musically inclined than either John or I… to begin to curate what I’m calling “A Boomer’s Musical Guide to Getting Your Brain Rewired.”

Requests are encouraged. Anyone is invited to join with requests of your own. The rules are simple:

• The tune must…like Linda’s red box…be older than my neurosurgeon, (I’m guessing he was born in 1983)
• The title, the mood, or the lyrics must have a connection to a boomer’s youth; bonus points if word play involving Parkinson’s, double bonus if word play with brain surgery, and triple points if from an apt song playing in the Summer of Love, 1967.
• Nominations will be accepted in the following categories
  • Pre-Op
  • During Surgery
  • Post-Op

Here are a sample of what Linda, with very little help from John or I, has come up with. If you have Spotify, the playlist is public and called “The Red Box.”

PRE-OP

SURGERY

POST-OP

All suggestions welcome. We play requests.

July 11, 2026

It’s 4:30 in the morning.

The heavy mist off the Pacific makes the sidewalks along Castillo Street in downtown Santa Barbara glisten like obsidian. Cathy is asleep back at the hotel. At least I hope she is. I probably woke her despite my best ninja efforts to deftly lift the tumblers in the door lock and slip silently into the hallway.

A middle-aged woman in gray sweatpants and a black hoody parks her wheeled walker in from of the Starbucks counter. The barrista calls her “Hon.” That, and the hour, suggest she’s a regular. 

Barry Gibb and the Bee Gees are belting out “How Deep Is Your Love” on the speakers, straining to be heard over the industrial and incessant hummmm of the refrigeration motor keeping the yogurt parfaits chilled. Barry gives up and passes the Muzac mic to either Uncle ACE playing Blood Orange or Blood Orange playing Uncle ACE. I can’t tell which from my nifty Shazam app until the album cover comes up and I scramble to turn my phone off. 

The album cover answers my question on the artist’s identity, but does nothing to ease my general feeling of unease this morning.

I steal glances over my laptop at the gal with the wheeled walker. “Nice wheels” I say. She looks miffed until I explain I’m shopping for a set.   She still looks miffed when, apparently betraying my ignorance, I question the need for handbrakes. The tension breaks when a predawn jogger comes in and unwittingly provides a common target for shared resentment.

I glance again at the wheeled walker and my thoughts drift back to Wednesday.

Cathy and I met with the brain surgeon and his team in Redwood City and my neurologist in Terra Linda. All are very reassuring, very knowledgeable, very thorough. I endured another 40 minutes in the sinking one man submarine they call an MRI (that was worse than I expected) and they each gave a NASA launch team thumbs-up-all-systems-GO for the first brain boring on July 23.

Unfortunately, the team confirmed my worst fear that, yes Rob, you will have to suck it up and not once, but three times, endure  dusk to dawn withdrawal hell. First, the night before my first surgery on July 23, the night before the second surgery on August 27, and the night before when Dr. Nandipati fires up and adjusts my gizmo in late September.

That’ s three more nights in withdrawal hell, two holes drilled in my head, and an eight-track planted in my chest before she can do the voodoo she doos and . . . god willing and the creek don’t rise . . .dial back my shakes.

 For three months I am not to drive, not climb stairs alone, and never engage in exercise which might break a sweat on my pretty bald head. This is particularly distressing as breaking a sweat on my stationary bike and Peloton is the only way I’ve found to mask late afternoon seismic tremors that make a straightjacket sound inviting.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the doc told us I’m not to wear the cool blue tweed Donegal cap, forest green felt Stetson Indiana Jones hat, or the red, black, blue and white cotton paisley doo rags I ordered from Amazon to sweep Cathy off her feet and protect what I suspect will be a scalp just itching to be burnt to a Cool Ranch Dorito crisp.

Life goes on.

The young woman at the counter orders a Vente Caramel Macchiato with five shots. I’m not sure if five shots is normal or excessive or if that’s five shots of espresso or five shots of fast acting sucrose.

Life goes on.

The coffee machine is signaling it’s about to blow with a klaxon that sounds like a submarine about to dive but the baristas do not seem concerned.

Life goes on.

The lady with the sporty walker finishes her drink, smiles and leaves. I sip the last of my iced tea.

Life goes on, doesn’t it?

All about us life goes on. 

Taking little notice, offering little solace, asking none in return . . .

Life goes on.

June 23, 2026

He won’t like it.

My brother.

My brother John won’t like that I write about him. 

He doesn’t like to talk about himself. Hell, he doesn’t much like to talk. 

He is a man of few words and the few that he shares seldom, if ever, center on himself. A mathematician by education and a physician by profession, he views language wth suspicion, accepts it as an unfortunate necessity to impart information but enjoys it so long as it is used well and sparingly so as to demonstrate what he believes the highest virtue of man.

A quick wit.

At this, the latter, he is very good.

I have always looked up to my brother, literally and figuratively. John is five years older and 5 inches taller than me. (I’m not bitter.) He was born John Calvin Jackson, IV. Our father was John Calvin Jackson III. John’s son is John Calvin Jackson V and his grandson is John Calvin Jackson VI. 

They call him “Six.”

III taught IV and, I suspect, V will teach VI that the best way to avoid conversation is to get the person to whom you are speaking to talk about himself. This has four desired effects. First, it is a subject near and dear to the speaker’s heart. Second, fascinated by the subject, the speaker will gladly overlook and unknowingly make up for your lack of participation. Third, when you part ways, the speaker will, on reflection, know little or nothing about you, but curiously like you for reasons he can’t explain.  And fourth, if you listen…truly listen…you will learn a lot more than if you speak and find, as dad did, that most people …surprisingly…have a good story to tell.

Given his tendency to say little, it’s ironic that my earliest memories of John are of his voice. Often speaking up when I was too frightened to speak for myself.

We shared a bedroom throughout our childhood. John slept in the top bunk: I slept below. His bedtime was later than mine, but most nights he would crawl into the top bunk and listen patiently as I prattled on. Occasionally, he would answer a question, but it was his quiet presence that conveyed…more than words might…that I need not fear and all would be well.

When you are the younger brother, there is a comfort that comes with knowing, if tongue tied, your big brother will speak up for you. Take, for example, the obligatory Christmas morning phone call when, prompted by our mother, John, Linda and I would each thank our grandparents for a sweater we were likely never to wear again. On those occasions, John would do all the talking and my role, third in line to take the phone receiver, was merely to parrot what he said and quickly pass it back to Linda.

As a little boy, I was nervous around my dad. He traveled a great deal for his work and, although he was a kind and gentle man, he was often not home. I never felt entirely at ease when it was just he and I, one on one. Thankfully, that seldom happened as I was typically at John’s side and John could do the talking for me.

Usually, if the “three men” were off on our own, John would, as the oldest, be summoned to the front seat of the station wagon, and I, thankfully, would watch and listen from the warm and dark comfort of the back seat. 

Once, on a fishing trip, John suffered a migraine, and dad called me to the front seat so John might lie down in the back. I will never forget what came to be known as the “Plaid Thermos Affair.”

You see, Dad had a plaid thermos for his coffee and typically John would pour when asked. When John fell asleep in the back, the job fell to me.   This was a responsibility for which I was not prepared and should have been assessed as hopelessly unqualified

Uhhh, dad?

You do realize I’ve never done this before. Right?

“Nothing to it?” you say.

Unscrew the cap? Hold the cup with my left? Pour with my right?

While we’re moving?

John!!!! 

John lives in Nevada City. I live in Petaluma. Before my Parkinson’s, John and I would occasionally get away, just the two of us on a golf junket. Once to Ireland. Once to Wisconsin. Often, on the road, in the hotel, on the course, we would not say much, and I sometimes wonder if an observer might have thought it odd that two brothers, as close as we are, were so quiet. 

That’s just our way. We have grown accustomed to shared silence. Though alone in our thoughts we are not alone in our fears. We can listen to the other without either of us saying a word.

And so it was odd last week when I felt my phone vibrate and looked to see that it was not John, but his wife Sue calling.  While visiting his kids and grandchildren in Seattle John had suffered a stroke.  Not life threatening. Not permanently incapacitating. No facial droop. No speech impairment. 

But the stroke was more than mild. (He had diagnosed himself, correctly, on the ambulance ride to the hospital.) John could not walk unassisted, and his left arm would, without warning, levitate, rising from the bedside to float above his head.

Linda and I flew to Seattle and found our big brother, as we knew we would, surrounded by his wife, three children, and his newest grandson, Lachlan, age 4 months. The hospital is first rate. The doctors and staff are excellent. They have John in intense rehab several hours a day and already he has progressed to where he can walk with a cane a short distance on his own.

He entertains the hospital staff like Bob Wiley in What About Bob?, makes fun of himself as he tackles rehab, and will gladly demonstrate for anyone who might assist, how he can intercept with his open mouth a levitating left hand holding a chocolate covered almond.

I asked him to take a photo of his bedside white board so that we might visit or call during a break in his rehab schedule. If you look closely, you will see his daily grind, but it is more telling to look at what John is watching on the TV…

Andy Griffith and Barney Fife.

John will tell you Andy and Barney have more important information to impart than anyone on CNN.

The problem with being a physician is that you make a lousy patient. You know too much. You know the right things to ask and the wrong things to learn.  

And the problem with having John Jackson as your brother is that you don’t know if what he’s not saying is John just being taciturn John or John not wanting to frighten those he loves with stuff he knows. Both are his nature.

I like to think I can read John’s silence. We have shared silence for so long I like to think I can hear what he won’t say.

He is not one to be dramatic; he tends more toward the pragmatic. And I think that while he is disappointed, he is not daunted. I think he knows that as minor as this setback will prove to be in the grand scheme of things, it may be just enough to prevent him from doing the little things he hoped to do. Like walking the dogs. Shooting hoops with Six. Playing shitty golf. Driving from Nevada City to Davis to shoot the shit with his brother and sister and talk about the old days over a pastry or two.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect one of the little things he planned to do and now, living in Seattle, may not, is to drive to Redwood City to give his brother shit after brain surgery and talk about the weak minds that seem to run wild in the Jackson men.

Although he will not say it,  and I suspect he never will, I think John fears this setback may hamper him from helping those he loves.  He is not afraid of dying; he’s afraid of not showing up before he dies.

That’s what a husband, a dad, a granddad, and a big brother are supposed to do. Look after the little ones. 

Speaking for myself, he needn’t worry.  

It doesn’t matter if it’s Seattle or Redwood City, I already know he’s there and looking after me.

He always has. He always will.

June 10, 2026

This is me.

I mean this will be me in…oh…42 days. Just 42 days until they drill not one but two holes in my head, run wires to the center of my brain and connect them to a battery the size of an old ABBA cassette tape they plan to plant in my chest.

“  Knowing me knowing you, it’s the best that I can do” 

Have to admit…this has got my attention. 

But, as my dad always said, “the more you know the less there is to fear.”

So, talk to me doc. One surgery on July 23? The second one on August 20? What do I need to know? What do you need me to do? Just say the word and I’ll do my part.

“COME IN GOOD HEALTH.”

Okaaaay…sounds simple enough. Hmmm…let’s hit the “Play” button on this nifty Kaiser “DBS Surgery Video” and find out more.

Uh huh… uh huh…I see…

Let me break it down. 

Apparently folks who undergo this, what the Brits might call “under-the-bonnet”  work, have been known to pack on pounds…I’m guessing while pounding down celebratory chocolate shakes during “recovery.” 

Experience teaches us it’s best not to be riding high on the ol’ bathroom scale before you experience the post-surgical “freshman 15.”

Makes sense.

I mean, if I’m going to do this, I don’t want to be a lardo after the re-do.

So…how best to approach this?

Claude?

We need a plan.

First, a new scale. But not just any scale. 

No siree Roberto.

Claude…my wingman, my new AI BFF, my very own virtual Jack LaLanne…Claude says I need the new Withings Body Comp 2000. Hop on this puppy each morning and a technicolor screen between my big toes tells me…and anyone else in the greater Petaluma area not blinded by the LEDS… things like my weight, the trend line on my weight, my vascular age, my heart rate, my nerve response score, my muscle, fat and water mass. All of this is then sent magically to my cell phone and Apple Watch.

Cool. 

Next up?

Sleep.

Claude says I need to better monitor my sleep and the best app for that is the AutoSleep 2000 also linked to my Apple Watch.

Hop off the ol’ Withings Weigh-O-Matic, grab a cup of tea, scroll through AutoSleep and I can tell you the hours I slept, the hours I didn’t, my sleep quality, my REM and deep sleep time, and my heart rate. Hell, I can tell you the times I got up to pee or jumped out of bed to work out a leg cramp.

“Okaaaay?” you might ask, “Where are you going with this, Rob?”

Why silly, where all great endeavors begin and culminate…

A spreadsheet.

This, my friends, is the “DBS Surgery Countdown Fitness and Diet Tracker.”  The most sophisticated spreadsheet I’ve yet to devise in a lifetime of long and fruitless self-improvement spreadsheets.

I walk…I record time and distance. I lift weights…I record reps.  I ride…

Boy howdy do I ride. I don’t go anywhere, but I ride.

How, you ask? How does a balance-challenged Parky log cycling miles? 

By never leaving the comfort of the garage, my friend.

I have two ride options:

Option A: I can perch on the roomy saddle of my trusty Peloton stationary bike and follow along with Christian Vande Velde as he puts me through simulated pro rides over the Roubaix cobblestones. 

Option B: thanks to my KIKR Core stationary bike trainer attached to my old reliable 2009 Specialized Roubaix road bike and my groovy 2025 ROUVY virtual reality cycling app which automatically adjusts the resistance on my pedals so as to simulate the climbs and descents depicted on my big screen, I can monitor my time, distance, speed, wattage, total joules and heart rate while “racing”  against other garage bound geriatric road warriors,  and watch on a big screen as the Alps pass by.  

Why just yesterday I drafted a group of friendly Italian boys along Lake Como.

I’ve even plugged into my spreadsheet the five stages of the Tour de Suisse and the first 20 days of the Tour de France so I can ride the same roads Tadej Pocagar and Jonas Vingegaard will. 

Well, not all the roads. The flat ones, mostly.

On the calorie intake side, I track the time and nature of my meals. I’ve even included color-coded cells showing “the weight loss remaining to reach my goal” and a cell showing just “how short of my 15-hour daily fasting goal” I fall each morning. The colors grow brighter the closer I get to the objective.

Cool, huh?

I’m guessing that’s not the word you were searching for. 

I bet your word starts with an “A”? 

I thought so.

I thought about including anal output, put that seemed  a metric too far. A bit too anal. Even for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no purist. I indulge myself plenty. 

At lunch I mainline Diet Pepsis and free base Jello Zero-Sugar Pudding cups like a heroin junkie on methadone. I know they’re poison packed with some nasty toxic chemicals from which I’ll sooner die than learn to pronounce, but if I can’t chase lunch without at least the illusion of sugar, my spreadsheet “Grumpy Meter” will red line and Cathy will be fitting me for a third hole in my noggin.

Okay, it all goes on my DBS Surgery Fitness and Diet Tracker spreadsheet. What’s next, Doc?

“MANY INDIVIDUALS FIND IT HELPFUL TO LEARN RELAXATION TECHNIQUES TO GREATLY REDUCE ANXIETY AND STRESS DURING SURGERY”

Uhhh…a couple of questions? Yeah…me…here in the back.

First, maybe it’s me…it probably is…not sure why…but anytime someone yells, ‘PRACTICE RELAXATION”, I have a hard time…mmmm…relaxing.

Second, what’s this “stress during surgery” stuff? I thought the plan was that, while sometimes awake, I’ll be pretty loupy throughout each surgery.

No? Not entirely? Hmmm…yeah…okay…good point.

Let me break it down. Seems each day will start at Oh-dark-thirty and I won’t be allowed to take my anti-shake-rattle-and-roll pills after bedtime the night before. 

Uhhh doc…two quick thoughts?

About this notion of bedtime?. Who are we kidding. The notion of a “bedtime” or any “bed time” the night before the surgery is a stretch. And I’m not talking horizontal.  I’m guessing no amount of “Magic Fingers Massage” in the bed of our Redwood City Best Western is going to get me to sleep. 

Second, as I understand it, I’ll arrive before dawn having skipped my morning meds. My head gets shaved and bolted into a frame. Me and my bald-bolted-in-place-head are wheeled into and out of an MRI machine. And then I sit there…increasingly more shaky, increasingly more stiff, and increasingly more aware that I’m about to have a hole the size of a nickel drilled into my skull. 

Between pre-op and post-op, I’ll be in my coach size recliner, meds withheld, skull drilled, and wires stuck into my brain for the same time it takes to fly from New York to London, but without a window, a movie, headphones, snack, or those little sox they give you.

Okaaaaay…

Maybe some deep breathing techniques might be a good idea?

Maybe some of those Lamaze things I learned when the kids were born. Shallow breaths. Focus on one spot. 

Or maybe that thing where you first focus on your toes, command them to relax, then move onto your knees, command them to stop shaking, and work your way up consciously relaxing every stop along the way.

That miiiiiiiight work…don’t you think?

What do they give you in spas? Lavender?  Burn some sage?

How about one of the posters dentists plaster to the ceiling showing some “happy place” like a puppy farm or a bubbling brook?

Headphones?

I didn’t think so.

Can I bring my own play list for the OR? Maybe some…what’s her name…Anya?…Enya? The woman who sounds like you’re drifting off with the elves along a stream somewhere in Middle Earth.

Before the orcs show up.

“THE SURGERY STAFF WILL MAKE YOU AS COMFORTABLE AS POSSIBLE”

Okay, now, that’s not helping. I know it’s supposed to. And I’m sure the staff will do their best. But…

“THE DRILL SOUND IS LOUD AND CAN RATTLE YOUR TEETH…THE RELAXATION TECHNIQUES YOU HAVE LEARNED CAN BE VERY HELPFUL.”

What?????

Drill sound?

Rattle my teeth?

CLAUDE!!!!

Mayday, mayday. Pilot to tower, pilot to tower…

Don’t give me that, “Don’t worry, Rob.” I don’t care if the surgeon does use a pneumatic high-speed handheld drill made by Medtronic called the Midas Rex?

Handheld?

You mean like a dentist?

No afront to my DDS buddies, but that’s not comforting, Claude. Drill too far down on a cavity and you get pulp. Drill too far down on my skull and you get the good stuff.

What?  

The Midas Rex is engineered for “smooth and precise” bone cutting? Especially when mounted with the new and improved 14mm “cranial perforator”?

First off, I don’t like the sound of a “perforator” and I haven’t even heard it yet. Second, the fact that the cranial perforator is guaranteed to, in all but 1 in 200 times, stop rotating before it reaches my gray matter is not the reassurance you think.

How does the doc know when to stop?

He doesn’t?

Well then, who does?

The drill does?

How does the drill know? Some kind of whizzy wig AI magic?

No? It’s mechanical? A clutch of sorts?

A clutch?

A CLUTCH?

What if the guy pops the clutch?

Okaaay, so after the perforator, we’re in? Right?

Not quite?

The surgeon still has to make an incision with a good old-fashioned scalpel through my dura.

What’s the dura?

Like thin leather? Its name comes from “dura mater” which means “tough mother.”

I’ll show you tough mother, Claude.

My surgeon will be holding this gizmo… this high end Dremel Tool… which will turn off on its own before it hits paydirt. Then he switches from the handheld perforator, which I’m guessing, giving the resistance my skull has put up, has been shaking a good bit,  to a scalpel to cut through some mother of-a- dura tough membrane  without going too deep, and then he threads a wire the width of an uncooked spaghetti noodle three inches deep into an area the size of a pea, and parks the tip of that noodle within a millimeter of just the right spot to zap me. And during all of this I’ll be wide awake and expected to answer questions, do finger puppets, and snap my fingers to help him find that spot?

Let’s get back to the teeth rattling part, Claude. Give it to me straight.

This is what Claude said…

“Rob, let’s be honest about what’s actually happening: you are awake, your head is bolted into a stereotactic frame, and someone is drilling through your skull from the outside. The vibration doesn’t travel through air to your ears — it travels through your bones directly to your cochlea. It’s not a sound so much as a full-cranial event. Patients have described it as feeling like the world’s worst dentist drill, except the dentist is working from the outside and the tooth in question is your entire head.

The “teeth rattling” description is literal. The skull is a resonating structure. When that Midas Rex perforator bites into bone, the vibration propagates through the mandible, the maxilla, the orbital ridges — your whole facial skeleton becomes a tuning fork. Some patients say their vision blurs momentarily from the vibration. It’s fairly common for awake DBS cases to be altered or aborted due to the patient’s extreme anxiety and inability to cooperate.

The good news is it only lasts two to three minutes.

Okaaaay, 

I’m going to let you in on a little lawyer trick, Claude. 

I had a lot of car accident cases in my day. I took a lot of depositions of drivers. Invariably, whether it was a pedestrian hit in a crosswalk, or a left turn into cross traffic, or a rear ender on the freeway, the question always came up: “How much time passed between when you first saw, let’s say the oncoming car or pedestrian, and you began to accelerate or brake?” 

I must have done a hundred auto accidents and taken over 500 depositions and the witness would always testify, 

“Oh, I don’t know…maybe a minute or two.”

People think a “minute or two” is short Claude.

“A minute or two” is not short. It really isn’t.

Think about it. 

Look at a second hand on a clock or your watch.

No, I mean…look at it…

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three…

When you want something to be over…

a minute or two is a loooooong time.

May 26, 2026

I was introduced to handwriting by a one-armed woman who, upset that Raymond Crampton had bitten off the end of his pen, took matters into the one hand she had and pinned Raymond to the floor.

It was a pivotal moment in my education.

I’m not sure how they do it now but, when I was in school, learning to write was a measured process. It began in first and second grade when we were taught to print, in third grade when we learned the elusive art of cursive, and finally in sixth grade when, at least the boys, were introduced to the precise lettering required in draftsmanship. My handwriting…back when my hands still wrote… was an odd amalgamation of all three.

If you pull up the Michael J. Fox Parkinson’s Foundation website and look for the “Ten Early Signs” that you too might be a Promising Parky, No. 2 on that list is “Small Handwriting.” The neuro nerds call this “micrographia.” 

“Big wup,” you might say. “I don’t know Rob, but I’m pretty sure you Parkies don’t have the corner on crummy handwriting. What, with lousy vision, arthritis in our hands, gnarled fingers…yada, yada, yada… old fart penmanship ain’t exactly what it once was.”

True enough.

But we Parkies have an added feature: our words get smaller and smaller over time, and we tend to clump them together. The not so long and very short of it is that our letters are shrinking and, more and more, there’s no space in our spaces.

Let me show you.

This was my signature on my 12^th birthday. I know that because this is a copy of my signature taken from my original Social Security Card.

I remember going to the Social Security Office behind Coddingtown and mom telling me to sign with “my very best penmanship.” If you look closely, you can see nerves peeking through.

No foreshadowing there.

Now, this was my signature when I was sixty-years-old. I copied it from a court pleading I filed in June of 2016.

Some of the changes were laziness. More were the stuff of arrogance. The “R” and “J” do seem more than a bit pretentious, but in fairness to myself I do remember patterning the “J” after the signature of a judge with whom I clerked, whose kind demeanor I much admired, and who swore me in after I passed the Bar.

The long legged “R” I have no defense for.

Just this morning, I took my nifty Apple Pencil Pro to my nifty iPad Air and, for consistency, tried to sign my name in the same size and with the same speed as I might have signed a check with a Parker Jotter Pen, back when we wrote more than just two checks a year to folks other than the County Property Tax Collector.

This is my signature now.

See that?

That, my friends, is the power of what we in the courtroom biz used to call “demonstrative evidence.” A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, as in this case, 17 very small indecipherable letters.

“What about…Raymond?” you ask. “The one-armed lady?

Oh sorry. That’s right.

My 3^rd Grade teacher, Miss Church, was a short, sweet, grandmotherly type who might have been the twin sister of Mary See of See’s Candy. A saint of a woman, she was always patient, soft spoken and, with one brief, but notable exception,  was affectionate toward all children. (I don’t mind saying that, judging by the frequency with which I was asked to clean the erasers, she was particularly fond of me.)

Now the thing about Miss Church was…how to put this?

It doesn’t seem a polite or sensitive term…there must be some medical or anatomical way to describe it…but I’m just going to go ahead and say it because that’s how it appeared to us 3^rd graders…

Miss Church had a stump for a left arm. 

As you can imagine, this was shocking the first day of school, but by Christmas, as we watched her hold a book beneath her upper arm, or help us on with our winter coat, or push a swing, or let the ball fly in dodge ball, we never saw her one wingedness as a disability.

What was particularly impressive was Miss Church’s penmanship. Third Grade curriculum called for a dicey matriculation from simple printing with a Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil to cursive writing with a ball point pen. This was a daunting change. 

For starters, the letters were different. A capital Q, for example, looked more like the number “2” than the “O-with-a-tail” to which I had grown accustomed. The small case “g” was virtually indistinguishable from a small case “j” or “z”, and every time I tried to draw an upper case “S” it came out more closely resembling a treble clef for sheet music. 

And the lower case “r”? Hell, it didn’t look at all like an “r.”

Then there was the fact that the damn letters attached to each other through some mysterious connections. Tell me again how the capital “D” in the chart above is supposed to connect to a lower case “e.”

I dare ya.

All of this was bad enough, but before you could draw these new and unusual letters, you had to learn how to hold your pen.

I was taught to rest the pen on the left side of my middle finger, just to the side of the furthermost knuckle, place the pad of my forefinger with slight pressure against the far edge, and place the pad of my thumb a ½” back and up the pen. This was preferred over those unfortunate souls who were taught to pinch the end of the pen with two fingers and the thumb and were thus forever damned to suffer from early onset writer’s cramp.

To help program the proper muscle memory, the Calhoun County Office of Education supplied each student with a “training pen.” This was a long blue ball point pen with a “grip” configuration at the head of the pen which forced your fingers into proper position. It was an elegant writing instrument which cost the County, we were told, a king’s ransom.

Walking up and down the rows of desks, Miss Church ceremoniously handed each student his or her pen, impressing on us the expense the school system had graciously gone to and the care with which we should treat them. As she returned to the front of the room, her back to us, she concluded by saying, 

“UNDER ABSOLUTELY NO CIRCUMSTANCES ARE YOU TO CHEW ON YOUR PEN OR PLACE IT IN YOUR MOUTH.”

At that exact moment, a loud crack echoed from the back of the classroom. Everyone immediately turned in their chairs to see Raymond Crampton, the County Sheriff’s son, snap off the end of his Calhoun County pen in his mouth. This did not amuse Miss Church and she became even more incensed when Raymond, rather that wilting under her glare, erupted in a giant smile. He looked like an eight-year-old FDR with his cigarette holder pointed skyward to the heavens.

Now Raymond was no small kid and was generally regarded as the schoolyard bully most likely to wind up in his own dad’s jail. So, it was even more impressive when Miss Church summoned him, strutting and swaggering, to the front of the classroom and with her one good arm first took the pen from his mouth, swept him off his feet, took him to the floor, and then pinned him beneath one knee.

This had the desired effect on both Raymond and the class. He returned to his seat, chastened, with a short pen. The class? Well, we slowly retrieved our lower jaws from the linoleum floor and gingerly cradled our still lengthy pens.

I know. I know.

Some of you will find nothing to admire in Miss Church’s actions. I certainly don’t mean to condone corporal punishment and, thankfully, we have progressed from days when teachers would frighten and strike children.

I don’t know.

Maybe it was his attitude. Maybe her disability. Maybe it was the times. Maybe I just liked cleaning the erasers. Maybe then, as now, I loved a story where the bad guy, overestimating the strength of his position and underestimating the resolve of his adversary, gets his “comeuppance.” But, rightly or wrongly, I’ve never, even as an adult, faulted Miss Church. Yes, Raymond was an eight-year-old boy, but he was being a little prick, was challenging her authority, and was disrespectful to a disabled person. 

You just don’t do that. Not to Miss Church.

A few years passed. We moved from Michigan to Pennsylvania. And I found myself in sixth grade at Woodland Avenue Junior High. Now, your junior high in Springfield Township consisted of 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th Grades and the good folks at the Township’s Office of Education decided boys should be well grounded in what were known then as the “Industrial Arts.” These included woodshop, metal shop, and mechanical drawing.

I loved drafting. This was long before the advent of computers and CAD programs. Each boy would be seated at a drafting table, issued a mechanical pencil, a sliding T square, a triangle, and large sheets of vellum drafting paper.

The first lesson in Sixth Grade was to properly affix your paper to the board so that when the T square ran along the left edge of your board a line struck along its edge would be perfectly horizontal and a line struck along your 90° triangle would be perfectly vertical. Each drawing was labeled in the lower right-hand corner with the date, the scale, revision, and date. And it was in this lower right corner that we learned the advanced art of architectural printing.

Precision in printing was paramount. All cursive curls and swirls were jettisoned.  Capital letters, and only capital letters, must be written in a very prescribed manner, each stroke in proper sequence and direction, the top and bottom of the letter touching the sides of an imaginary box.

This precision appealed to me. It required patience, concentration, discipline and the fine motor skill and a steady hand that we take for granted when we are young and long for when we are old. Expectations were clear; accomplishment guaranteed with application and effort.

Physicists tell us that time, while it appears to run from past to present to future, doesn’t really. There is no passage of time; time is just a series of discreet “nows.”  

We perceive a differentiation between the past we know and can define and the future which we do not know and cannot define because of entropy. Ever since the “Big Bang”—the beginning of time and space as we now know it—time appears to “flow” in one direction because all things—schools, people, penmanship—are with each succeeding “now” slightly more disordered. 

Dusty erasers don’t clean themselves. Pens, once broken, stay broken. Handwriting, once tentative, then precise, then bold and arrogant, reverts to tentative, then back to illegible and eventually becomes so small as to scarcely be seen.

All things tend toward a lessened state of order and a heightened state of disorder. This isn’t a sad or frightening or depressing realization. At least it shouldn’t be. It is what it is, what it always has been and what it always was to be.

We haven’t been misled. It’s all there in the fine print.

May 21, 2026

In December of 1978 when I was a first-year law student at the University of California, Davis, I had a peculiar habit to prepare for fall semester final exams. Although it was cold and the tule fog was thick, I would throw on my North Face parka and a Navy watch cap, load 3×5 cards into my backpack, and walk. 

Walk and talk. 

Walk and talk. 

For hours, I would walk country roads, glancing at my cards, quizzing myself, repeating, drilling, trying to find a way to absorb and retain all the legal nonsense necessary to pass a silly exam.  

Take for example, burglary. Burglary, for those of you who somehow wisely managed to avoid walking the backroads of Yolo County prepping for the Crim Law final, has three elements. It is (1) the unauthorized entry, (2) into a structure, (3) with the intent to commit a crime therein. All three elements must be satisfied to rise to the level of the crime of burglary. 

So, for example, if your roommate gave you permission to go into his room before you took his television set, it might be larceny, but because the entry was authorized, there is no burglary. Or if the TV was in the backseat of your roommate’s Datsun B-210 when you lifted it . . well . . . no structure; ergo, no burglary. And if you didn’t intend to take his TV when you broke the window into his apartment, but formed the idea only after you saw it once inside, no premeditated intent, no burglary. 

Are you with me?  Good. 

Unfortunately, the burglary I was planning as I walked those backroads had all the necessary elements to land me in the slammer. We’re talking Leavenworth. 

Let’s run through the elements of burglary again: 

A Structure? I planned to break into the LERHR. This was a supersecret Federal compound on Old Davis Road, about a mile south of the law school. Actually, it wasn’t too secret. It was hard to miss; you could see it from the road. It had a guard tower, barbed wire fences, and uniformed guards. Not exactly clandestine. 

Authorization to enter? Hellllll, no. You see the LERHR  or “Lab for Energy Related Health Research” was strictly off limits. As in, “STAY OUT. THIS MEANS YOU” off limits.  It wasn’t exactly a stop on the Picnic Day Campus Tour and the folks at UCD and the Department of Energy weren’t about to let me in. 

Felonious Intent? Helllll yeah! What I had in mind was a federal offense. I’m talking 120 counts, probably five to ten at Lompoc. 

I planned to let the beagles out.

In the fifties, radiation was all the rage. Yer Ruuskies were threatening to blow us Amerikanskis to smithereens. So, the crack scientists in the Atomic Energy Commission or AEC were curious what would happen to those of us dimwits who were not lucky enough to be vaporized. Basically, what was the longterm fallout of short-term fallout?  So, they teamed up with UC Davis to find out.

From 1956 when I was born until 1986, five years after graduating from law school less than a mile away, researchers at UC Davis were part of what was called the “Beagle Club”, a set of experiments in six states to study the effects of nuclear contamination. At the LERHR, scientists fed beagles strontium 90, injected some with radium, and irradiated others with cobalt to see how nuclear fallout might affect people. 

We’re talking a shitload of radioactive material. Hell, they even built a special septic system to treat and contain radioactive dog poop. It didn’t always work, as overflow radioactive sewage was sometimes released into Putah Creek. To this day, radioactive strontium and radium used in the beagle experiments remains in the soil, the laboratories, and the kennels. 

Little did I know, as I repeatedly walked by the kennels in 1978, that I was next to a spot so radioactive that it would later be considered a candidate for a superfund site. 

Why beagles, you might ask? The AEC and UCD boys claimed beagles were chosen because they are long-lived, have greater genetic diversity than other dog species and their skeleton and bonemarrow resemble that of humans. These purported reasons may well have been the motivation in 1956, but what I am sure the researchers found by 1993 when 1200 beagles were released—and as any beagle owner would tell you–the real reason beagles were perfect for their daffy study is that beagles are too damn stubborn to die. 

I know. I had one.  

His name was Homer. 

On my eighth birthday in 1964, the family drove to a farm near Marshall, the small town in Michigan where I grew up. I was invited to pick a pup from a recent litter and I chose the smallest. I recall my dad paid twenty dollars, which at the time, seemed an extravagance for a birthday present. 

         As I played with the little guy on my lap, my first impulse was to name him “Henry.” In this I was quicky overruled, as the consensus in the family was that this was a singularly dumb name for a dog.  

How Homer came to be Homer is the subject of some conjecture. There was a beagle named Hector in the neighborhood and it might have been something as simple as searching for another “H” name.  My dad often used a phrase to connote a long span of time: “. . . since Hector was a pup.” That might have entered the formulation. I would like to say that his name was pulled from the ancient Greeks, but more likely it was pulled from Homer and Jethro, a musical comedy duo who were famous at the time for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes TV ads in which the breakfast cereal, made just down the road in Battle Creek, was hawked with the catchy phrase, “Oooh, that’s corny.” 

Get it? 

The good folks at the American Kennel Club will tell you that your beagle is an “excellent hunting dog”, a “loyal companion”, “happy-go-lucky, funny, and (thanks to its pleading expression) cute.” All true but a would-be beagle owner had best keep a few other things in mind:

• A beagle is a hound. He wants to hunt. In particular, he wants to hunt rabbits (“beagling”). His one objective in life is to bolt through any open door presented to him and high tail it for the hills, from where, once he as arrived, he will disregard all calls to return.
• Says right here on the AKC website that beagles are intelligent, but “because they were bred for the long chase”, they are “single minded” and “determined.” This sanitized characterization is kind of the AKC, but what they are really trying to tell you is that beagles are so damn stubborn and so easily distracted that they are virtually impossible to train.  
• A beagle will not heel. A leash is an impediment; it stands between him and where he wants to be. The concept of “restraint”, in walking or any other endeavor, is not in the beagle brain.

Homer was my boyhood pal. Though seldom at my heel, we were inseparable. At night, he would jump up onto the lower bunk, curl up in that curious fashion that dogs do, turning three times in a circle, before settling down between my legs, bowed wide to accommodate him. 

In the fall he would bound through the leaves; in the winter you could detect his whereabouts by the tip of his tail emerging like a periscope from beneath the drifts, darting this way and that as, even in the dead of winter, that nose searched for the scent of a rabbit. 

He was the unofficial mayor of Marshall. Known to everyone in town by his name, he would wander down Michigan Avenue, lord of all he surveyed. Folks would call out to Homer as if he were their own. When at night, we went to bed worried that he hadn’t come home, strangers—to the extent there was such a thing in Marshall– would call my folks to reassure us and say, “don’t worry; Homer is here.” 

It may sound apocryphal in this age of leash laws, but Homer would roam far and wide, never on a leash. As such, he was the elusive and wily antagonist of the town’s much maligned dog catcher. Their moves and counter moves, their match of wits, their mutual disdain for what they saw as the other’s inferior intellect and primitive tactics, became the talk of the town. 

Since he was inclined to follow me wherever I went, mom would keep him in the house as we set out each day to school. In the Spring, when the weather turned warm, the school doors were left open to allow for an occasional breath of fresh air. After waiting an hour, mom would let Homer out and he would bolt straight for the school, wander the halls until he found my room, mosey in, and curl up beneath my desk. 

Once, while chasing a garbage truck, Homer managed to break a leg. The vet put a cast on it and I can still recall the “clunk…pat . . . pat . . . clunk . . . pat . . . pat . . . clunk” as Homer roamed the halls of my grade school, his cast thudding on the linoleum, as he looked for me. 

Once, unbeknownst to me, Homer jumped through a glass window, slicing his belly down the middle like a surgical incision. I was horrified when he came home and rolled over onto his back to present his belly for the customary scratching, and I received a much too graphic insight into beagle anatomy. 

He must have cost my folks a fortune in vet bills. 

When we moved to Philadelphia, we stayed for a month in a Holiday Inn paid for by State Farm as we waited to get into our new house. Homer would bark and bey from the motel room when we went out to eat. His beagle bark so resembled the sound of a seal, that hotel management once admonished dad that, while pets were allowed, marine mammals might be pushing it. 

When I wad eleven-years-old our family lived in a split-level house on a white-bread middle class street of a suburb called Springfield on the southside of Philly. It was the Sixties’ version of the neighborhood to which Tony Soprano returned home in each episode of The Sopranos.  

Our next-door neighbor was a shadowy and mysterious character whom we suspected to be Mafioso himself. He was always impeccably dressed and emerged each morning, at the exact same time, in his wool topcoat and Fedora hat, and walked to the curb where a driver would open the door to a black Caddy and whisk him away behind tinted windows. 

As luck would have it, this was the same time of day in which I would take Homer for a walk. (Springfield was not as enlightened on leash laws as Marshall.) I would usually set off hoping to avoid an encounter with the black Caddy and, when that plan proved unsuccessful and our paths would cross, I would walk head down, tugging on Homer, careful not to draw the attention of the driver or his sinister passenger in the back seat. 

It was on just such a morning that a nasty old lady emerged from her house at the end of the block and, suspecting I had given Homer license to “do his business” on her lawn, gave me an earful, basically threatening me and my dog that were we to ever visit her lawn again she would call the police.  

I was terrified and turned to run home.  As I did, the black Caddy pulled up. The tinted window slowly lowered and, although I could not hear the conversation, I could tell that the nasty old gal was a bit shaken.  

I continued down the street, my pace quickening, still tugging on Homer to stop sniffing and get the hell out of there. To my horror, the black Caddy, instead of speeding away, now in reverse, slowly and ominously pulled alongside me. I stopped, convinced I would soon be swimming with da fishes, as the tinted window on the back passenger side slowly descended. Afraid to make eye contact, I never saw the man, but to this day I can recall a very kindly voice with a thick Philly accent emerge from the back and assure me I could walk my dog anywhere I wanted for as long as I wanted. And I needn’t worry about the police. 

Hey! Sometimes the protection racket is a good thing. Capiche?  

Mind you, Homer was not above joining in a bit of criminal mischief. It must have been . . . oh . . . I wanna say . . . 1971 when my best friend Mark Andrews would call late at night and suggest it might be a good time—wink, wink, nod, nod–to “take Homer for a walk.”  

While I was throwing a leash on Homer and reassuring mom and dad I would be back in a bit, Mark, who lived a mile away, would kindly offer to his mom Helen to pull the family’s 64 Chevy BelAir station wagon into the driveway from where she parked it on the street. We were too young to drive, but Helen thought allowing Mark to drive 50 feet from the street to the driveway did not qualify as a Vehicle Code violation nor present a mortal danger. So, she would gratefully hand Mark the keys as she dozed off. 

Mark would slip past the driveway down Grove Avenue quietly so as not to wake up Helen, then accelerate east on Dupont, and come to a screeching stop at the corner of St. Francis and Escalero Drives; just long enough for me to throw Homer in the back seat of the BelAir and jump in the front.  Mark would then drive throughout the neighborhood, taking corners far faster than was safe, far louder than the neighbors appreciated, but just right for an aging beagle that slid happily, ears flapping, from one side to the other of the back vinyl rear seat.  Helen never knew. 

Years passed. When I went off to college, I left Homer behind.  

I always wondered if he felt I had abandoned him. You know . . . Puff the Magic Dragon . . . Jackie Paper. . . “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys …Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.”  

More years passed. His age began to catch up with him. His legs would lock up so that he couldn’t walk. The vet told my folks to put him down, but mom and dad refused. Dad built a redwood tub of sorts, the size of a horse trough, and each night he and mom would heat water on the stove, fill the trough, and hold Homer in the warm water, prompting him to work his legs to avoid drowning. It worked and Homer enjoyed his last days upright and roaming in the backyard as was his nature. 

Mom and dad later recounted to me that they knew Homer’s end was near when he began to look for something to crawl under. Apparently, this is not uncommon. A dog’s instinct is to isolate himself for protection. He knows he is dying, and by hiding he is doing the only thing he can to stay safe and protect himself. 

I should have been there with him. 

The last of the Davis Beagles died at the age of 18, not long after I stopped walking down Old Davis Road,  a few years after I became an attorney.  I think of them often. I think of the lives they might have lived. 

I was a lawyer for over 40 years. Somehow, I managed to remember—without 3×5 cards—all the nonsense necessary to practice law. 

But, as is so often the case, the important lessons in life aren’t in the damn 3×5 cards. They’re not found by memorization or drill or mindless repetition. The elements of burglary are seldom relevant except when contemplating burglary or explaining to a federal judge why what you did was not burglary. The important lessons are  right in front of us if we would only look up from the damn cards long enough to see.  

My best teacher was a beagle. He taught me to roam, to tug at the leash, to think “Squirrel” when someone wanted me to “stay.” He taught me never  to heel, the importance of friendship, and to stretch my legs for  as long as I can before I curl up to die. 

Some folks admire Ricky Gervais; some folks don’t. Some find him crass and detest his atheist ideology.

I get it.

Me? I like the guy. While I often wince at his humor, I admire his eloquence in speaking on behalf of those of us “non-believers” and I especially enjoy the way he ridicules the Hollywood self-important.

He seems a wise and kind man and I suspect that is, at least in part, owing to lessons he has learned from his dog.

A beagle can teach you much. Mine did.

May 12, 2026

I’m not sure how you feel about your left hand. I’ve always had a love hate relationship with mine. 

The damn thing is the James Dean of my extremities.  A digital delinquent. Kinda surly. Full of attitude. A lot of stored up teenage angst lookin for ways to get the rest of the body in trouble.  A rebel without a pause.

If my two hands were brothers, my right hand would be Rudy and my left hand would be Tom. You know…Rich Man, Poor Man?

No?

For you youngsters, Rich Man, Poor Man was pretty much the original miniseries. Binge worthy TV before TV binging was possible…oh, I’d say…50 years ago.  

It’s the story of two brothers born to an abusive father and an adoring mother. Rudy…the preppie in the yellow sweater… was mom’s clean cut, dark-haired favorite: behaved, ambitious, an empty V-neck  destined for a financially successful, but emotionally empty life in a three-piece suit. Tom…the guy in the blue… was angry, a brooding blonde hulk in a Brando like tank top working the docks, boxing for spending money, unable to control his restless ways, but the brother you secretly pulled for.  

Same genetics. Way different outcomes.

Just like my hands. 

My right hand has always behaved. My left…not so much.

I’m not alone in this. Ninety percent of we homo sapiens are right hand dominant. Only one in ten is a lefty. (You know who you are.)

Fun fact? Your righty/lefty percentages differ in our primate cousins. Apes? 75% righties. Chimps? 70% righties. But, interestingly, the orangutang branch of our family is the opposite. They’re 66% lefties.

Another fun fact…the word is not pronounced “Oh-RANG-ah-tang.” It’s actually “Uh-RAWN-goo-tawn.” I had a college professor who went ape shit should anyone say it uhh–rawn-goo-wrong.

Where was I? Oh yeah…back to humans.

Those that can bat both ways? Switch hitters. I mean your truly ambidextrous? 

One in a hundred.

Guys like Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Kobe Bryant, and Dan Akroyd. James Garfield, our 20^thPresident, who lasted only 200 days in office, could write in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, AT THE SAME TIME.

Why, you ask?

I dunno; probably, a parlor trick. Impress the ladies, you know.

Oh, sorry…your question was “Why are most of us righties?” 

Good question. Lots of theories on this.

Apparently, there are two explanations. On the one hand, the thinking is that since the left hemisphere of our brains is where language, speech and complex motor skills hold up and since the left hemisphere controls the right side of our bodies, this promotes a preference for the right hand. 

I’m not sure I get that one.

On the other hand, some scientists think it’s all about tool making. For over 500,000 years we’ve been making tools premised on the notion that the right hand is better at fine motor manipulation and the left hand is good for holding steady whatever it is we’re working on. 

Think of it this way. If the sun is going down, it’s getting chilly and the critters with the big teeth come out at night, our motivated ancestors found a steady left hand was good to hold the stone while the more coordinated right hand delivered just the right whack with the flint to produce a spark to start the fire to scare off whatever it was that wanted to eat us.

Patterned behavior on an evolutionary scale with a motivational chaser.

I get that.

Which brings me…at a speed which I suspect you, dear reader, now find only slightly more expedited than human evolution…back to my own left hand. 

I don’t often ask much of my leftwing malcontent. Never have. 

Hell, Coach Diegleman cut me in the first week of 7^th Grade basketball try-outs because my answer to the left hand lay-up drill was to dribble right handed down the left side of the key, veer  under the hoop at the last second, and execute with my right hand a nifty–no doubt crowd pleasing–scooped reverse lay-up with side spin high off the glass (Apparently, Diegleman failed to appreciate the athletic artistry in this, my signature move,  which I dubbed “The Wizard” and was looking for something more reliable, less flashy). 

Okay Coach, but that won’t pack the RVJH gym on game day. Now will it?

Anyway, ever since I was offered, but declined, the embarrassing “Team Manager” position Coach Bob tossed my way as a consolation prize, it just seemed wise to let my less than dominant hand go more than dormant.

Fast forward fifty years.

The monster has awakened. 

It’s come out of lifelong hibernation and is stirring up all kinds of shit. 

Help Cathy fasten a necklace clasp behind her neck?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

Hold a plate steady so I can spoon on a second helping of fruit salad without grapes and blueberries rolling all over the kitchen floor?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

Hold an iPhone steady so I can type a simple two-word text?

Held no.  I mean, Help No. God damn it…Hell no.

My steady-as-she-goes southpaw has got up and gone AWOL. The only thing it’s good for is drying off a Polaroid photo. (Youngsters…ask your grandparents about that one.)

And [whispering] can I share a little secret?

IT’S PISSING ME OFF.

So, I’ve decided: no more namby pamby patience. No more “What’s eating at you, little guy?” It’s time for some tough love. A good old fashion ass-whuppin, straighten-up-and-fly-right intervention like Tom and Rudy’s dad would have dished out. 

Cue the music from Rocky. 

BONG, BONG, BONG

No, not the post-fight “Yo Adrian” celebration theme.  (Though the part when Mic gives Rocky the green light to switch back to left-handed would be an apt metaphor here.)

No, I’m talking the BONG-BONG-BONG work-out theme.

No, not that one. Not Rocky 1. Rocky IV. You know…when he’s in Siberia and has nothing but frozen tundra farm tools to train for the fight with Ivan Drago. You know…running in knee deep snow, lifting logs, pulling a sled…

Rob, you’ve got 90 days until this damn brain surgery. Just ninety days. Ninety days to find manual dexterity in a hyperactive thumb and fingers that were rebellious even before Parkie’s arrived. You need to work that left hand like Rocky on a speed bag. Or doing one arm push-ups or chin-ups.  Or chasing a chicken.

Some daily task, some seemingly impossible drill, some superhuman regimen, that everyone in  the family will come to Cathy saying, “He can’t do it Cath; it’s only going to break his heart; you’ve got to stop him” and Cathy says to them “I can’t; I just can’t” and then turns to me with a steely look in her eye, like Adrian after she had the baby in Rocky II. 

Remember, when Rocky says, “Listen, if you don’t want me mixin with Creed no more, we’ll make out some other kind of way.” And then Adrian asks Rocky to lean in close and you think she’s going to say “Thank you Rocky; I don’t want you to fight”, but instead she whispers “There’s one thing I want you to do for me…win…WIN!”

BONG, BONG, BONG

But what?

What is something that even people with a steady left hand have trouble doing? Something even lefties have trouble doing. 

Oh no. No, no, no.

Can’t be done Rob. Can’t be done. McCartney and Hendrix started when they were kids and they fretted with their right hands. They strummed with their left.

You’re almost 70 and you have Parkinson’s.  You haven’t played that guitar since Randy Pyle tried to teach you Malaguena in high school. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Bar chords? Memorize the fret board? Scales? Arpeggios? 

BONG, BONG, BONG

What? You  only want to learn the intros to Maggie May? And Dust in the Wind? 

Oh, and maybe Classical Gas? 

With a hyperactive left hand that works, when it works, only in the morning?

Are you crazy?

BONG, BONG, BONG

And what?

There’s more?

Wdya mean…look closer at the photo…?

At what…?

On the music stand?

What on the music stand?

In the middle?

Seriously? An Irish tin whistle?

You’ve always wanted to play one?

Uhh Rob? You do realize you hold a whistle in… your hands, right?

And you use… your fingers… to cover the holes, right?

And if you don’t cover the holes just right it sounds like nails on a chalkboard?

You do? 

You’ve tried it? 

And it does? 

I see.

Have you shared this plan with Cathy?

No?

Don’t ya think you should?

What’s that? You’re planning to practice…in the mornings…when your fingers work better?

Uh huh.

And when she’s at her mom’s?

I see. 

What about the neighbors, Rob?

You’ll shut the windows…gotcha.

I’m just spit balling here, Rob. But…uhh…isn’t it kinda late in the game to tackle something new?

Yeah, well, that’s true. If the brain overhaul works, the improvement could be pretty dramatic. Can’t argue with you there.

And what?

What better way to measure success than a before and after video?

I suppose, but don’t you think you’re putting a wee bit too much pressure on yourself. A little Irish cart before the horse?

No?

What’s that?

Your dad always wanted to play the recorder?

I see. 

Did he?

No?

But he always planned to.  I see.

What was that?

Your dad always said…what?

Yeah, I suppose that’s true…

“What’s the worst that can happen…”

“…and is that really soooo bad?”

May 1, 2026

“Split time…23 minutes and 22 seconds.”

The cheerful girl in my earbuds seemed much too eager to volunteer information.  As if, were she to wait a moment longer, she might miss her chance.

I was blissfully enjoying what I thought was a “brisk” morning walk, listening to my Audible Book, a sea yarn about Captain Cook’s third and final voyage to the Pacific, cramming for this week’s Book Club meeting, imagining what it must have been like to wade ashore on Kauai in 1777 when…

“SPLIT TIME…23 MINUTES AND 22 SECONDS.”

“I heard you the first time,” I thought, pausing to catch my breath, staring up the trail, past the fence line to the sun rising above the tule fog in the southeast.

At first, it didn’t register. What she said. The electronic girl in my ear. I was so annoyed by her timing that I didn’t catch her meaning. Then it dawned on me.

Slowly.

Very slowly.

“TWENTY-THREE MINUTES…?

TO WALK…?

ONE MILE?

JUST ONE MILE, ROB.

That can’t be right.

Hell, back in the day I could knock off three miles in under 18 minutes. And that was barefoot. In the rain. 

No. It’s true. I could. I did. In Vallejo.

Really. 

I have proof.

This is an article from the Sports section of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat from October 19, 1972. I found it online yesterday. See the headline?

“Upset by Viking In Cross Country”

Pretty cool, huh?

What’s that? Is it about me?

Oh hell no. Not me. I didn’t upset anyone. 

You see, in the early 70’s, this town where I now walk so slowly, was the home of the mighty Petaluma High cross-country team. Those guys were a long-distance jogger-naut that ran over anyone in their way. They were led by two guys: Jon Sisler who ran like his name sounded. And Dan Aldridge who would, a few years later, run a 3:58 mile. (The World’s Record at the time was 3:48.8) We’re talking world class runners.

I know. I watched them.

Well…I caught a glimpse of them.

At the starting line.

Back in the day, scoring a cross-country race was not technologically sophisticated. No electronic clock. No spreadsheets. Just a stopwatch and some tongue depressors.

As you crossed the finish line, you were handed a tongue depressor with a number on it. The numbers on the little wooden sticks were added and the team with the lowest total won.

In the race reported in the paper, Petaluma’s top 5 finished 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9 for a total of 27. Their fastest guy covered three miles in 15:54; their slowest guy finished at 16:58. That’s what you call a tight bunch. All of their runners finished within a minute of each other.

Just a minute.

Montgomery?

Well, our ace Steve Ricker, a skinny little kid who kicked himself in the ass with every stride he took, came in first. He’s the guy in the headline. The Viking who upset the vaunted purple people eating stampede of Petaluma High.

But our “bunch?

We weren’t so much a bunch as we were a string. A strung-out string. A very long, very thin, very strung out, string.

That’s on account of our No. 3 runner. It’s all there in the fine print.

Petaluma’s No. 3 finished 6^th. Napa’s No. 3 finished 10^th.  Our No. 3 finished…

Uhhhh…20^th.  

Over a minute after the other No. 3’s. 

That may not seem like a long time. But in track and field, a minute is a very long time.

I know.

How do I know this?

Well…

In the Spring of my sophomore year…about six months before the Press Democrat article… I thought I’d try out for the track team. Since my vertical leap was 4”, and I couldn’t do a pull-up, and I couldn’t sprint or even lift, let alone put, the shot, I decided I needed an event to showcase my natural gift to run exceedingly slow.

The two-mile race. 

Not a glamor event. I’ll give you that. It’s a tedious 8 lap race that usually goes on in the background while spectators focus on the far more entertaining high jump, long jump, or pole vault. Maybe the shot put or discus. The kind of events that get you on a Wheaties box.

The two-mile race is not entertaining. Well, not normally.

You know how, at the end of the race, they put out a tape for the winner to break. Usually, arms outstretched wide, gasping for breath, eyes bugging out like a crazed animal. Think Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile record.

You get the picture. 

Okay, park that Bannister thought. We’ll come back to it.

Now, let’s do some math.

If… the two mile race is 8 laps long, and…

If… there are guys like the Sizzler and Fleet Feet Aldridge who were capable of stringing together mile splits of 4 ½ minutes, in a race with a guy who, on his best day with a tailwind, might maintain 6-minute splits, and…

If… a typical lap for the Petaluma boys was…let’s say 75 seconds…and the typical lap for the slow Monty guy was…let’s say 100 seconds…

Then… with each lap the fast guys are putting 15 seconds more between them and the slow Monty guy…

Sooooo, about the time the Petaluma boys are rounding the last turn, igniting their after burners, ready to go full-on wide-eyed Bannister, sprinting for the finish line…well…

That’s about the same time the slow Monty guy is just starting his last lap.

Now let’s go back to that finish line tape thing. You probably see where I’m going with this.

Funny thing, actually.

It turns out the only thing…I mean the only thing… that might possibly disrupt the rapt attention of spectators in the stands…the ones riveted by the drama of the long jump, high jump, triple jump and pole vault… and prompt them to re-focus on the two mile race, was what must have been the …comic?…maybe tragic?…let’s just say laughable image of the slow Monty guy coming to a jog-in-place stop in front of the tape trying to decide if he should duck under or run around it, while nervously glancing back to see Petaluma’s answer to War Admiral and Seabiscuit bearing down on him.  

I was lapped.

For all the world to see.

I was lapped.

That’s the importance of a minute.

Coach Held used to tell me that whenever he looked out across Spring Lake to see a line of runners crossing the top of the dam, he could always pick me out. From a mile away he could tell where I was in the race. 

How?

I bounced.

Helpful hint to you joggers out there. There are two ways to go faster. Whether you’re a runner, a jogger or, like me, a slow walker. Just two. You can quicken your pace or you can lengthen your stride. 

Simple physics, actually. Energy exerted up and down is energy lost propelling you forward. In short, bouncing does not help.

Nowadays, I try to get two walks in each day. One at dawn and one at dusk. They take about 45 minutes. I still bounce. I still try for a negative split. And, though I’m not proud of it, I still try to overtake another old fart in the distance.

My route is such that I often pass by a lone tree in a farmer’s field. It stands by itself, neither defiant of nor acquiescent to the passage of time.  It just watches. It stands and watches as the rest of the world…a stream, a flight of geese, or an old man on a walk…for no good earthly reason still hurry to be somewhere… anywhere…other than the moment in time in which they now find themselves. 

I like to think the tree is laughing.

The universal response these days, when you ask about someone you’ve not seen in a while, someone past 70, is to hear,

“He’s slowing down.”

It’s a kind way to describe aging.

But the trouble with this slow deceleration is we don’t see it in ourselves. Unless you pass by a mirror, or see yourself in a photograph, or are reminded by a voice in your earbuds, we seem as fast as we ever were. We bounce along oblivious to the fact that our splits will never be negative again.

“It’s been a minute.”

I hear that more and more, especially when I encounter an old acquaintance who, like me, is “slowing down.”

I suppose the phrase is a nifty shorthand for “My oh my, how time flies.” But to me the phrase does not do justice to the mystery and the grandeur of a minute.

I know minutes. I have lived minutes.

I know what a minute is. I know how long a minute can be. And I know, that no matter how slow you walk or run, no matter how high you bounce, no matter how little you slow your pace or how much you shorten your stride…

A minute, though it may sometimes seem to last forever, is never long enough. 

April 19, 2026

“Why?”

It’s shortly before dawn. I am perched on a stool in the kitchen, sipping from my nifty Yeti cup of decaffeinated Lipton tea, staring at a …I guess you might call it… a bouquet… of rosemary in a vase on the countertop, and asking my trusty AI companion Claude a series of questions like an annoying child unsatisfied with his answers.

“But why, Claude?”

Why is it, when Cathy comes in from the back yard, having cut a bunch of rosemary from her garden, her face lights up like a super nova. Much as I imagine it did when seeing her Grammy as a little girl.

“Why is that, Claude?” 

Freshly mown grass. The pavement after it has rained. The pages of a new book. My mom’s White Shoulders perfume. Why are smells…more so than sights or sounds or touches… so evocative of our childhood?

Hmmm…

Claude says molecules in the air trigger nerve impulses in our nose that travel in the FastTrack lane to the olfactory bulb, bypassing the thalamus, a toll booth through which other senses must pass. Apparently, the olfactory bulb sits next to the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which stores memories. 

So smelling rosemary is, for Cathy, like mainlining a fond memory.

Okay. 

“Can you smell that…” Cathy announces as she puts the rosemary in a vase and fills it with water.

It’s not so much a question as it is a joyous exclamation and, now as I write about it, I’m debating the proper punctuation with which to end her sentence.

A question mark?

Or an exclamation point?

While I’m working on that Claude, tell me this: why do question marks and exclamation points both have dots at the bottom?

What explains that?

Claude says medieval scribes wrote the Latin word “qvaestio” at the end of a sentence to signify it was a question. Over time, to save space, they just wrote “qo.” Then, to save more space they wrote the “q” over the “o.” And, after more time, the “q” became a squiggly. Hence, the question mark as we know it today.

?

So, what you’re telling me is that it is a …mark. Just a mark. Shorthand for what was once a word.

Got it.

But what about the exclamation point? Why is it a point and not a mark?

Claude says the exclamation point was once referred to as the “mark of admiration”, and derives from the Latin word “io”, meaning something like “hurrah.” Otherwise, same evolution. Same lazy ass scribes, looking to save space…parchment, after all, was scarce…put the “i” over the “o” and “Voila!”, the exclamation point.

!

That’s the point, stupid.

Okay, back to Cathy’s exclamation! Or was it a question?

“Can you smell that…”

Having no punctuation to guide me, I take a stab at it, guess it’s a question, and respond as I do to most questions these days,

“Uhhhh…”

“You can’t smell that?”, she asks, not impatient but cheerfully incredulous because apparently the scent fills the entire house.

This time I know it is a question.

“Uhhh, no.”

“Really?”

That’s definitely a question. 

“Really,” I say definitively. “I can’t. Not from this distance.”

She is about ten feet away.

So, being the frustrated scientists that we are, Cathy and I decide to conduct an experiment. I will close my eyes. Cathy will take a step toward me with the rosemary and after each step ask, “Now?” I’m to say “Now” when I smell it.

Ready?

Begin.

“Now?”

“No.”

“Now?”

“Nope.”

“NOW?”

“NOPE”

“How about now?”

“Maybe a hint,” I say, guessing she might be five feet away and peeking with one eye. 

I almost fall off my stool. The vase of rosemary is no more than an inch from my nose. 

There you have it, Cyrano. Scientific proof. You can’t pass the smell test. Your nasal early warning system is kaput.  Your sniffer has been snuffed. If this had been a horse race between my nose’s ability to detect danger by smell or danger by touch, smell won, but by a margin so small as to render the difference meaningless. My nose’s sense of smell beat out my nose’s sense of touch by…well…

A nose.

Who needs nostrils? 

“How am I supposed to evade predators on the savannah, Claude, if my snozz is on the snooze?”

“Really?” Claude asks. (He’s a cheeky little bastard.) “That’s your question, Rob?”

“You know what I mean,” I answer. 

The scary part is he does. He knows exactly what I mean.

“Why?” I repeat.

“Why what, Rob?

“Oh don’t go HAL on me, Claude. I see what you’re doing. Getting all philosophical…

“Are you asking me “Why you?” Or are you asking me, “Why can’t you smell?”

“I knew it,” I say. “Let’s go with second one; if we have time, we’ll circle back to the first one.”

“You can’t smell Rob because of the Parky’s. We’ve been over this.”

One of the “hidden” ways in which Parky’s telegraphs its arrival is in a loss of smell. The problem isn’t in your nose; it’s in your brain.  Scientists…not unlike Cathy and I… we call it “hyposmia.” We are not entirely sure how, but our best guess is that the same proteins that cause Alzheimer’s…little suckers called alpha-synuclein…fold the wrong way, gather in clumps called Lewy bodies and pile up in the Olfactory Bulb, irreversibly blocking the signal from nose to the brain.

This wouldn’t be a big deal, but smell is responsible for 80 to 90 % of flavor detection in taste. Without it, we can still register sweet, savory, bitter, salty, and sour but not much of anything beyond that. This is particularly hard on a hot chocolate lover like myself. I know it’s brown and I know it’s sweet, but the subtleties that I once enjoyed in a yummy chocolat-chaud…sometimes with an Irish Coffee chaser…in Les Deux Magots in Paris are lost to me now.

Which brings me to a more important point, one I’ve been sniffing around for a few days now. Claude’s first question.

Why me?

And why, I fear, I haven’t passed the real smell test.

It must seem to many that I do an awful lot of complaining in this blog. Although I hope my ruminations may resonate with fellow Parkies and bring a needed chuckle to those with a mutual understanding of a shared challenge, I fear it may sometimes wear thin on others who themselves, or whose family, are facing hardships that make my plight seem like sipping hot chocolate at a Paris cafe. 

Take last Wednesday. I had lunch with a friend who has been fighting cancer for years. He weighs 116 lbs, wears a wool cap, and drags a canula and oxygen hose behind him wherever he goes, which isn’t far as he is confined to the downstairs of his home. He is perhaps the most well-read man I have ever known. His home is wall to ceiling books. His condition is such that he sometimes hallucinates, sometimes violently so, sometimes frightening his wife.  He still reads and he still laughs, but it is a struggle.

Or take last Thursday. Cathy attended a funeral of a dear friend who died from a sudden heart attack. I did not have the good fortune to have ever met him, but I could tell by the tears in her eyes and the joy with which she shared recollections with his family and friends, that he was, as she characterized him, “bigger than life.” 

Pondering my friend laughing in the face of expected death and the family of Cathy’s friend laughing in the wake of an unexpected death, it struck me: the trouble with being “bigger-than-life” is that when such a life slips away, it leaves a “bigger-than-life” hole in the hearts of those fortunate to have shared even a small part of that bigger-than-life life.

My woes are just woes. Many, many people quietly go about their lives enduring loss and hardship much, much worse. 

My mom taught John, Linda and me three “Don’ts.” Don’t make fun of someone’s name or appearance. Don’t touch anything in a store you don’t intend to buy. And, most of all, don’t talk about yourself.

It’s rude.

I hope in looking for laughs for those who share this thing called Parkinson’s, I have not been rude, especially to those who have endured, and will endure, far more hardship than I will ever know.

April 12, 2026

This post is about junior high.

Well, it’s about more than that, but it starts in junior high. 

The photograph is of the “Ninth Grade Honor Society” at Rincon Valley Junior High in…oh, I don’t know… probably the Fall of 1971.  The guy in the front with the attitude…the one I want to smack upside his head…that’s me. The one in the back who looks maybe a little miffed? That’s Cathy.

She wasn’t mad at me…at least I don’t think she was… but I wouldn’t blame her if she was. I was not strong on humility.

Those of you who know us know our views on religion differ slightly. My faith in faith has been…well…unfaithful.  If you pull up “Belief-O-Matic” and answer their 20-question quiz (you should try it; it’s fun), I hover somewhere between a “Born Again Pagan” and a “Devout Agnostic

https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/quizzes/beliefomatic.aspx

This is sometimes frustrating to Cathy who, though equally skeptical of organized religion, is open to spirituality. Not “Capital-S Spirituality” like crystal healing, numerology and astral projection, but “Lower Case-s” spirituality. Cathy believes, like Einstein, that there is an order in our universe that transcends random coincidence. An order, we humans, stuck in the junior high phase of our evolutionary development, are as yet incapable of understanding.

Not me.

The one exception to my conviction that there is no “Big-G-God, no “Little-g-gods”, and no sign of a grand design in the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Sequence, is the occasional allowance I make for the possibility that, if there is a God, he’s pissed at me.

And rightly so.

I harken back to the Greeks who saw their gods as thin-skinned deities who easily took offence at human hubris. You know…like…I don’t know…say…self-important adolescents who somehow manage to find their way to the front of the photo, but then cop an attitude like they’re pained to be there.

I wish I could go back in time and talk to that arrogant kid. If I could, I’d tell him that God has a long memory and a wicked sense of humor. He likes good irony. Good word play. Poetic justice. Better to dial back the ‘tude, dude. Hang out in the back row with Cathy, lest the big guy send you a little late-in-life-pharma-karma.

How to put this?

The trouble with running around like you’ve got a stick up your ass is that God…well…he might just fit you for a stick just to show a “Stuck-Up” kid what “Stuck Up” really means.

Young Rob? Listen to old Rob. He knows. 

He knows that old age is a series of carefully tailored indignities designed to teach the slow to learn self-important that they’re not at all important and to maybe, just maybe, think about someone other than themselves.

In the past four months, I’ve had a catheter pushed up and pulled out of my poor Mr. Happy more times than I can count. I’ve had two cystoscopies where my Santa Rosa urologist ran a scope up the aforesaid…and now just  more sad…Mr. Happy. One colonoscopy where my Petaluma gastro-team, not to be outdone, ran a scope in from the California side hoping to meet my Santa Rosa uro-team at Promontory Summit. And one fun cross-it-off-your-bucket-list experience called a prostate artery embolization where, having run out of the usual orifices…orrifi?… my Oakland interventional radiologist ran a pee shooter up my right femoral artery and blasted the capillaries feeding my tennis ball sized prostate with enough microspheric buck shot to bring down a good size mallard.

I get it God. It’s not hard to pick up your “Stick-it-Up-Your [fill in the blank]” theme.

“One more,” you say.

“That’s really not necessary,” I say. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

“No,” you say. “I’m not sure you have.”

“Well,” I say. “I’d love to accommodate you, but I think we’ve run out of portals to stick stuff in to drive home your point.”

“For a head-case like you, Rob,” you say tapping my head. “We’ll make a new one.”

“Really,” I say. “It’s not…”

“Right about here,” you say, thumping harder on the top of my head.  “Should sink in if we can just get behind that thick skull I fitted you with when you were born.”

Gulp.