Author: rljwander

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.

April 8, 2026

When Cathy and I eloped to Northern Ireland, we went for a hike along a stream in the Tollymore Forest west of Newcastle. It was a magical walk with ancient yew trees, and arched 18^th century stone footbridges spanning the fast-moving water flowing from the Mourne Mountains to the Irish Sea.

We stopped for a picnic and, being the hopeless romantic that I am, I thought it would be…as the Irish put it… “brilliant” …to set up my nifty iPhone tripod and take a photo from behind while we gazed at Foley’s Bridge in the distance.

Nice metaphor, don’t you think. Two days before our wedding. The river. The passage of time. I even thought of a caption, “Watching Time Go By.”

I know what you’re thinking. It’s okay. You can say it.

Cheesy. 

All of it.

The menu? The photo? The caption? All cheesy. We’re talking smelly level cheesy. Roquefort, maybe Limburger. 

Spontaneity? Hell, it took me 20 minutes to set the shot up, walking back and forth trying to catch us without obscuring the bridge. 

“Just a sec, Cath; I’ve almost got it. Could you scooch just a little to your left?” 

Finally, after exhausting Cathy’s patience, I plopped down beside her and activated the countdown on the remote-control shutter release on my iWatch.

5…4…3…2…1…CHEESE!

“Nice framing” I said to Cathy after retrieving my phone. “Look, I even captured the dandelions in the foreground.” She rolled her eyes.

We’re talking Gorgonzola level cheesiness.

I wonder if the Greeks had a god of cheese. Let’s look it up.

Yep.  Apparently a buff fella named Aristeaus.  Says here that he was the son of Apollo and Cyrene and that he was in charge of cheesemaking, beekeeping, sheep herding and olive oil production.

Diversified, yes, but otherwise we don’t know much about him. Not a lot of press. Quiet guy.  Kept to himself. 

Now the Catholics…they knew how to fill in a back story. This is Santa Lucio, Patron Saint of Cheesemakers. 

So the story goes, ol’ Lucio was stabbed by the farmer he worked for because he pilfered  too much provolone to give to the poor.

Stabbed to death? For that?

Seem’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? How about a reprimand? A note in his personnel file? Maybe dock his paycheck a few liras for every wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano he gave away gratis.

Poor guy is probably running around heaven with a charcutier board pissed that his reward was to spend eternity looking out for cheesemakers and pointing out to the other gods and goddesses that the prosciutto wrapped melon and mozzarella is “particularly good this year.”  Not exactly a corner office for a patron saint.

Here’s how I see it. 

Either Olive Oil Ari or Lucky Ten Fingers Lucio, maybe both, didn’t care for my bit of unlicensed cheesemaking and decided to have a bit of feta fun.  Not a lightning bolt. Nothing flashy. Just the ol’ post-it note prank. 

A pink post-it note.

I didn’t see it at first. It wasn’t until the flight home, as Cathy slept beside me and I was looking through our photos that I noticed it. 

Uhh, Rob…see the bridge?

Yeah.

See Cathy?

Yeah.

You?

Yeah?

YOU!!

Yeah, so wha…?

Good god, Jackson.

You’re getting a bald spot.

Ditch the L.L. Bean and throw on a smock and you’re a dead ringer for a fat friar at one of the nearby abbeys.

When the hell did that happen? Why wasn’t I told? You mean to tell me I’ve been walking around like this, probably for years, and no one said a word?

Talk about a cover-up. 

My own wife? My stylist. The one who cuts my hair. The one who teases me to hold still while she takes scissors to my unruly eyebrows. 

She’s known. For years, she’s known. Yet all this time she’s never said a thing about the Friar-Tuck-look growing…I mean not growing…on the back of my head. 

How about a little “heads up” honey?  A hint? Maybe, a passing comment? (“You might want to wear a hat.”) An innocent question? (Was your dad bald?) You didn’t have to be harsh like “You’re going bald old man.” You could have been subtle and said, “You might want to use a little sunscreen up there.”

Up where?

There!

I only mention this because the good folks at Kaiser have declined my fitting for an ultrasound colander and propose instead to bore a hole in my head roughly where my bald spot is. 

Lucky Lucio and Oily Ari were way out in front, paving the way, marking just the right spot for a cranial skylight. One of those tubular models to let a little light in a dark place.

I’m all for enlightenment, but…

You know the expression, “I need that like I need a hole in my head?”

Well, apparently, I do.

I mean the hole.

In my head.

I need one.

Let me backtrack.

After the off-med ordeal…you remember that? My night of living hell…Dr. Nandipati told us she would make a presentation to a high fallutin Kaiser committee in Redwood City to get the green light on the colander treatment. This is no small committee. We’re talking a whole lot of brainiacs who know their brain shit.   Brain surgeons. Movement disorder neurologists. Neuropsychiatrists. Physical, occupational and speech therapists. Engineers.

Engineers?

The plan was to show them videos of me scribbling, shaking and wobbling.  My psych test results. My history. My meds. My CT and MRI’s. She told us she would give it her best shot, but the decision was not hers to make. It was the committee’s and, as soon as she knew, she would write. 

Sure enough, that afternoon I opened my email to find a letter from her.  

Hi Rob,
We had a helpful review of your case today…it turns out…

“Helpful”, huh?

That doesn’t sound good.

I’m no Belgian, but I know a waffle when I see one.

Brace for impact, Berto.

“Turns out” that for a variety of reasons…good reasons, caring reasons, persuasive reasons…the brain folks at Kaiser (and the colander gurus at both Kaiser and UCSF) think deep brain stimulation is a better option for me. After consulting with Cathy and the fam, I’ve decided to give it a try.

Hell, why not. We’ve been to Kaiser Santa Rosa, Kaiser Petaluma, Kaiser San Rafael, Kaiser Walnut Creek, and Kaiser Oakland. Why not Redwood City?

Forget the ultrasound colander; fire up the Makita.

We know the spot. Those jokesters Oily Ari and Lucky Lucio were just clearing the way.

Sometime this summer, we’re going in.

Be good for the place… let’s let in some light and spruce up the place.

April 2, 2026

Ever notice how things seem to come in “threes?” 

Three Blind Mice? Three Little Pigs?  The Three Musketeers? The Three Stooges? Peter, Paul & Mary? Crosby, Stills and Nash? (Okay, Neil Young might have something to say about that one; you’re right.) The Bee Gees (that is, before Andy)? 

Threesomes? Never appealed to me, but I’ll admit you’ve got your good ones…

Your bad ones…

And your…hard to explain…ones

Scientists will tell you the belief that things come in threes is something called apophenia.  That’s our human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random events as a means to cope with fear and uncertainty.

I don’t know about that. I’m pretty certain there’s something to it.

Take this trio

No, that’s not Three Dog Night.  But good guess.

These fun boys are Jean Martin Charcot, Pierre Marie, and Howard Henry Tooth. Two Frogs and a Brit. Back in 1886 they lent their names to a genetic disease that was all the rage. They called it Charcot-Marie-Tooth or CMT. 

Catchy? No. Imaginative? No. Descriptive? No.  

CMT has nothing to do with your teeth. “CMT” is a nervous system disorder in which some lucky contestants, gradually over time, lose feeling, first in their feet, then their ankles and then their calves. It’s genetic, gradually gets worse and there are no drugs to treat it.

You can spot CMT club members by their club feet. Look for high arches and “hammer toes.” Here’s a good example. 

See the arches? The balls of the feet. The heels. We’re talking precious little surface area to serve as the foundation for an overweight high-rise. This, combined with decreasing sensation, rules out the cha-cha and makes staying upright a tad dicey.

Now normally you would think a loss of sensation might come in handy. (Footsy?). But it turns out that’s bad. Pain is apparently your friend. Your body’s way of signaling “Don’t bend your ankle that way, bozo.” If you don’t have pain signaling boundaries, you hurt yourself without knowing it. Not good.

So, there’s that. I’ve got that little co-morbidity going for me.

Great. 

Let’s see… No. 1: Parkinson’s. No. 2: Charcot-Marie-Tooth…

What other nervous system malfunction have you got for our contestant, God? I’m guessing there’s another acronym up that celestial sleeve, or we wouldn’t be talking threesomes.

[God’s thunderous voice.] “That’s right, Johnnie.” 

“Just to keep this poor wretched nonbeliever miserable, we’ve thrown in a bonus nervous system torment. Some call it WED (Willis-Ekbom); some call it RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) For this clown, we thought sleep deprivation might be just the ticket, so we’ve added an old favorite, PLMD or Periodic Leg Movement Disorder.”

Not familiar? Here’s the skinny.

Every day, starting typically around 4:00 in the afternoon, one or both of my legs jerk. It’s not painful. It’s not the “creepy/crawly” sensation often associated with RLS. It’s not a muscle spasm. Not a cramp. (Although those are often in the mix.)

How to describe it?

You remember those bathtub motorboats we made in Cub Scouts. The ones propelled with a rubber band.

It’s like someone has turned my motorboat paddle end-over-end, tightening the nerves in my legs, tighter and tighter until they can’t twist further. When the tension is too much, they jerk. It looks and feels like a reflex.  You know the one where they hit you with the little triangular hammer and your lower leg kicks. This “build and burst/burst and build” loop happens every 15 to 30 seconds. You can almost set your watch to it.

Sometimes it’s minor. Sometimes it is explosive. If I am standing on the affected leg when it’s bad, I will collapse to the floor.

The insidious thing about my PLMD friend is …it knows. 

I mean…she…knows.

She knows when I’m tired. She knows when I need a nap. She knows when I climb into bed at night.   At the very moment I can’t keep my eyes open, she says,

“NOT SO FAST, JACKSON. GET UP AND WALK.”

Only two things can stop her. Standing up and walking. 

Or drugs.

“That’s easy,” you say. “Take the friggin drugs, Rob.”

I do.  Believe you me, I’m no hero. I always say, “Better living through chemistry!”

So…what’s the problem?

[Whispering] She turns on you.

“Who turns on you, Rob?”

“The PLMD drug.”

The go-to drug used for PLMD is Requip. It’s what’s known as a dopaminergic drug. Works dandy for a while, but with prolonged use, something called “augmentation” occurs. 

Augmentation is bad.

The drug actually begins to make things worse. The symptoms start earlier in the day and grow more severe. The more pills you take, the worse the PLMD gets. And…just for laughs…  the worse the PD tremors get.

Okay, you say, what’s the big whoop? Deploy the chutes. All engines stop. Bring her about, captain. Stop the damn drug and find another one.

I would, but…

But what, Rob? 

“[Whispering]…She  knows.”

“Who knows, Rob?”

“The drug knows”

“Knows what Rob?”

“You’re trying to leave her.”

Requip is like Glenn Close prepping the bunny burn.  She knows when you’re trying to dump her.

Doctors say going off Requip…cold turkey…is worse than withdrawal from heroin. We’re talking sleeplessness, sweating, nausea, intense abdominal pain. And the leg thrashing and Parkinson’s tremors go into overdrive. Sometimes doctors resort to Methadone, oxycodone, tramadol or clonazepam or some really heavy opiates to get you through it. 

The trick is to taper. Slowly cut back. Slip out the back Jack before Glenn Close knows you’re making new plans, Stan.

Back in the day, I took as much as 4 mg of Requip a day. Now I’m down to 1.5. Next step 1.0, then a half, and then I’m free.

“Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last.”

Well…not quite.

You remember the three pebbles? 

The tests you must pass before you get the green light for Focused Ultrasound or Deep Brain Stimulation? 

Right?

The first was the Psyche Test. 

Check.

The second is what the neuros blithely call “an off-med examination.” Basically, the docs want you to come in having not taken your meds so they can size you up with and without your meds. Normally, this would mean a night without my Parky med, Sinemet. Big deal, so I have tremors all night. No fun, but no biggie.

But… a night without Requip?

Gulp.

Which brings me kicking and screaming to February 23, 2026. The Night of the Living Dead. The Night They Put Ol’ Robbo Down. The longest twelve hours of my life.

Quick side note before I continue. I’ve not experienced childbirth. I’ve seen two of them up-close-and-personal and could barely deliver the ice chips without feinting. So, I hear many of you mothers out there saying, “Welcome to the Big Leagues, Berto.” 

I get it. Fair point. I admit it: Put me down for a whining wuss. I don’t blame you moms if you’re not moved by my story. I suspect my night from hell was child’s play (pardon the expression) compared to what you have endured.

But…

But…

Can I just say… 

IT WAS AWFUL!!!

From 7:30 p.m to 7:30 a.m. I stood, then walked a few paces, then stood, then walked. Clutching the edge of the countertop, doubled over in gut pain hovering somewhere between food poisoning and the bends.

Think…one of those inflatable tube men you see at auto dealerships, but without the smile. That was me.

Legs jerking. Hands trembling. Trying desperately to remember Lamaze class and the shallow breathing technique I was taught to model. 

Time stood still. Accent on the “stood.” Not so much on the “still.”

I think I watched every minute…all 720 of them… pass on my phone. 11:25…11:26…11:27. Every passing minute was a godsend. Every pending minute agony. 

There’s a reason sleep deprivation is a violation of the Geneva Convention. It’s torture. Amnesty International, the United Nations, they all say forcing a person to go with less than 6 hours of continuous sleep for more than three days is a human rights violation.

Hell, I average 4.5 hours on a good night. The night from hell was zip. Nada. The big goose egg.

Poor Cathy awoke at 7:00 to find a shell of a man cowering in the corner of the family room. Like when Scout saw Boo Radley behind the door at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Add to that the final 40-minute ride from Petaluma to Terra Linda, during which there was no way to stand-up, no way to walk it off, no way to stop the torture, and …well…

Let me put it this way.

I’ve been tired and hurting before. I’ve completed four solo double-century bike rides…that’s 200 miles, 17 hours in the saddle, 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 pm. I have a pretty high threshold for fatigue and agony. 

At least I used to. 

Now? 

I just don’t know.

I’m tired. I’m seeing things, not in double, but in triple. And I can’t close my eyes to rest.

Want some whiskey in your water?
Sugar in your tea?
What's all these crazy questions they're asking me?
This is the craziest party there could ever be
Don't turn on the lights 'cause I don't want to see.
Mama told me not to come,
Mama told me not to come,
That ain't the way to have fun, No.

March 27, 2026

I’ve taken a lot of tests in my day.

Let’s see…your Iowa Basics Skills Test.  

Your California Class B and C Driver’s License exams, both written and behind the wheel of my folks’ 67 Plymouth Fury Station Wagon and an old UC Davis Unitrans bus.

Your FAA Airman Knowledge Exam.

I know. Don’t ask. It was a short-lived dream. My pilot aspirations never got off the ground.

What else?

The trifecta of scholastic aptitude tests: your PSAT, SAT, and LSAT. I’m guessing 35 undergrad and 20 law school final exams. The Professional Responsibility Exam to prove to the State Bar I was ethical, and the mother of them all, the 3-day California Bar Exam.

Passed them all. 

Well, except one. 

I’m pretty sure I failed a Medieval History exam where the professor…a short arrogant nitwit who spoke with a fake English accent and looked like Sebastian Cabot … strode into the lecture hall, scribbled “The Plague?” on the chalkboard and walked out. My mistake was misreading his tell.  I took from the length of the question and the manner in which he delivered it that he was looking for brevity in the answer. 

I was apparently mistaken in this assumption.

My dad used to tell the story, now legendary in the Jackson clan, of the time, while at Purdue University, he didn’t know the answer to a test question. Out of time and looking for a laugh, he wrote, “…God only knows.” He got the laugh. When he got the test back, the professor had written, “God gets an “A” Mr. Jackson…you get an “F.”

You had to know my dad. He took great pride in that grade.

Looking back, I’m convinced that I passed all of these tests, not through dint of preparation nor command of the material, but because of good ol’ fashioned dumb luck and a good-luck ritual I invoked each time I sat down. 

You see, I would bring to each exam a roll of Wintergreen Lifesavers and place it on the desk in front of me. When the proctor said “Begin”, I would slowly, methodically unwrap my Lifesavers, pop one into my mouth, savor it, look around, and only then take pen to paper. Worked every time.

Fast forward fifty years.

Before a Kaiser Parkinson’s patient can undergo deep brain stimulation or focused ultrasound, he must pass three tests. Kinda like snatching pebbles from the hand of a Shaolin Master.

Pebble No. 1…a psychiatric exam.

Pebble No. 2…a neurological exam after a night without your medication, and

Pebble No. 3…a CT scan of your noggin to make sure your skull isn’t too thick.

Sounds easy enough. 

Off to Walnut Creek we go. We find the place. Cathy sits in for the preliminaries and confirms, as we rehearsed, that I’m a happy guy and that she feels safe at home. The shrink asks her to step out. She gives me a kiss on the forehead and a wink of encouragement. 

I’m on my own. 

The Questionnaire and Interview

First up?  A routine questionnaire. Uh huh…uh huh. I get it. Save your breath doc, I know a good CYA when I see it. I’ve covered more legal asses than this place has bedpans. I get the picture. 

Basically, you won’t fit me for my Colander or a Brain Pacemaker if I don’t have a proper “cognitive baseline.” 

Seems a bit oxymoronic to me, don’t you think.  A Catch-22 actually. I mean…how can you be of the right mind when no one in his right mind would let some stranger take a Makita to his head or shoot moonbeams into his cranium with some ray gun?

Oh, well. Where do I sign?. 

Three hours later I’m done. Three weeks later I search through my online Kaiser records and there it is.

My report card.

Hmph…so there is a chart on me. I knew it.

Confidential? Nah, screw it. My readers are my friends.

Qualified? What the hell! Who’s better qualified than I. Me? I’m pretty sure it’s “I.”

Let’s look…

Current medical conditions?…  “Too long to list.”

Current medications?… “Even longer.”

Chief complaint?… “How much time you got?”

Behavioral observations?…

• ”Patient arrived on time”…(I’ve always said, ‘Better to be at the courthouse early than run into the courtroom late and piss off the judge.” Good advice to you youngsters.)
• “Hygiene appeared good and appropriately dressed”… (I brushed my teeth, shaved and used some deodorant)
• “Mood euthymic and affect congruent”…(Uh oh; what the hell does that mean?)
• “Speech in casual conversation was
  •  “fluent”…I should hope so
• • “prosodic”…that doesn’t sound good
  • “without paraphasic errors”…better look that one up
• “Thought processes linear and goal directed.” (That’s good, right? It sounds good; don’t you think?”)

Gulp.

On to the exam questions. I remember these.

No. 1:

The Digit Span Test

“So, you want me to repeat a list of numbers. First forward. Then backward. We’ll start with three numbers, then four, then five. Up to twelve numbers.”

1-7-3

5-8-2-6

7-2-8-9-3

4-1-7-9-3-8-6

5-8-1-9-2-6-4-7

2-7-5-8-6-2-5-8-4

5-8-2-4-7-9-1-3-2-2

9-9-1-5-8-4-1-3-5-7-9-2

Score?

Nailed it. Perfect score. Off the chart. Strong working memory. 

This stuff is easy.

No. 2

The Trail Making Test

Hmmm…visual attention?

I’m listening.

“You want me to draw lines between randomly arranged numbers and letters. Start at 1, then find A, then to 2, then find B, then to 3 then find C. And you’re going to time me?”

GO! 

Score?

Below average?

What?

BELOW AVERAGE.

So, I had to backtrack and erase a couple of times. Big deal. I’ll give myself a C–. Nothing wrong with a “C”, Rob.

No. 3

Naming

“You’re going to give me 31 color photographs and you want me to tell you what’s in each picture?” 

Okay, sounds right in my wheelhouse. I’m good with language.

GO! 

Score?

Average.

Average?

Yes, average. As in 69^th percentile? 

BUT THAT WASN’T A RADISH. A RADISH IS ROUND AND RED.

No. 4

Reasoning

Complete the pattern.

Uhhhh…what pattern? 

No. 5  

Orientation

Match the lines to the numbered lines below?

3 and 10? No.…5 and 7? Put me down for a 4 and 8…no 9…no 8.

No. 6

 Complex Figure Copy

You’re going to show me a picture. I’m to study it. And then draw it from memory. Then draw it again 3 minutes later. And again, 30 minutes later.

Okay…let’s take a look. 

Ohhhh boy,

Let’s see. A spaceship with a man driving it. There’s a railroad track. No, maybe those are stitches. That’s a kite. A flag…A couple of crosses.

Times up?

Sheeez.

Immediate recall? 90^th percentile. Excellent.

Three minutes later? I dropped to 69%?

Thirty minutes later? Uh…42%.

Good thing they didn’t ask me after an hour.

No. 7 

Similarities

Okay, last one. Need to finish strong Rob. 

“You’re going to give me two words and I’m to tell you in what way they are alike?”

Okay?

GO.

APPLE & BANANA?

Easy. 

Fruit.

SHIRT & HAT

Uhh…they both end in a “t”

No?

I’m just having fun with you doc,

Things you wear.

PIANO & DRUM?

Percussion instruments

SALT & WATER?

My first thought is prerequisites for pasta, 

But I’m gonna go with chemical compounds.

LIGHT & SOUND?

Uhh…

That’s a tough one

Both have 5 letters?

EXIT & ENTRY?

Trick question; they’re opposites.

FREEDOM & TRUTH?

Illusions in current society?

REALITY & DREAM?

Uhh…

THEOLOGY & EUCLIDIAN GEOMETRY?

Constructs to explain a universe which,

in the final analysis, 

is unfathomable. 

Too much?

SOMETHING & NOTHING?

Hmmm…got me on that one, doc.

I got nothing.

Conclusion?

Let’s see…gulp.

“The patient’s premorbid abilities were probably within the superior range.” 

That’s good, isn’t it, Cath? Sounds good. Don’t you think?

I mean, I don’t like the morbid part. If there was a “pre” morbid, there must be a morbid and I must be in it now. Never thought of myself as morbid.

That’s depressing. 

And…?

“There’s more?”

“The patient’s recall was at best low average and memory, while not impaired, was “lower than expected in someone who is quite bright.”

Hmmm.

So, I’m forgetful. 

I suppose that’s true.  I mean, I do remember ” The Plague question.” Sebastian Cabot. And I remember my bus driver test. And ground school. Lift, drag, thrust…Bernoulli’s principle.

So, I do remember some stuff.

But I suppose you’re right. I am forgetful.

After all, I forgot my Wintergreen LifeSavers.

God knows… the premorbid Rob would never have forgotten his lifesavers.

March 21, 2026

When my kids were in grade school, whether at a school talent show, the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, or a PTA meeting, a group of people …usually the same group of people…stayed after most had left to put away the folding chairs. 

You know who I’m talking about. 

Yes, you do.

You were one of them; weren’t you?

I knew it.

I call these folks “The Folding-Chair People.” 

It’s a term of respect.

It’s my shorthand for those who, usually without being asked, step forward to take on a job all should share but most decline. 

They don’t do so for any reason other than it’s just “…what you do.” If I had to guess, their parents used phrases like “For Goodness Sakes” or “Thank Goodness.” Or…hmmm…there’s another phrase…you know…we used to say it all the time…damn it…it’s right on the tip of my tongue…

Oh well, it will come to me.

Anyway, see these folks?

These are “Folding-Chair People.”

I took this screenshot last Wednesday when, by the miracle of Zoom and at their very kind but foolish invitation, I was given a chance to tell them a little about this goofy writing project you are now misguided enough to be reading. I thought I might use it as a means to remember names and faces.

These folks (together with many not on screen) run the Parkinson’s Support Group of Sonoma County.

They can be found at:

https://parkinsonsonomacounty.org/

Their mission is a simple one. Find ways to help Parkies, and those who care for Parkies, to just get through a day. They put on presentations by neurologists like Dr. Nandipati. They foster support groups. They educate folks dealing with Parkinson’s, often alone, on resources available to them. Many of them, I hazard to guess, most of them, have a friend, an uncle, an old workmate or spouse with the damn stuff. Some have lost love-ones to it. 

As often happens with the “Folding-Chair People”, they’re content to continue to fold the chairs.  But they could use a hand. Some have been folding for a long time.

I ain’t asking. They’re not asking. Folding-Chair People usually don’t. 

You young folks?  Thanks, but save it. You tend to your busy lives. Making a living. Pinewood Derbies, Talent Shows. PTA kerfuffles. There’s little enough time to do that.

But if you’re an old fart, maybe on the leeward side of retirement, maybe know someone wrestling with Parkinson’s, and have been looking for an opportunity to fold chairs like you used to, write them and see if there might be a way to help. You can reach them at 

psgsc707@gmail.com

Nice folks.

BINGO!…it just came to me…the phrase I forgot…I remember it now…

“Goodness gracious.”