Asterix the Gaul

Asterix is one of my favorite cartoons.  It is not as well known in the United States as in Europe, but I love Asterix.

It is a French cartoon.  When I was a young man, National Geographic did a series about the Celts.  The cartoonists drew a special cartoon with an arrogant Julius Caesar pointing out in the Atlantic commanding, “Are you quite sure there is nothing out there?”  Well there is, but Romans were not known for their sailing technique and the correct ship rudders had not been invented yet.

The village is in Brittany, the last place in Ancient Gaul Caesar has not taken yet.  If you enjoy Warner Brothers Cartoons, Asterix is a two thousand year old Yosemite Sam.  Yosemite’s only hope though, would be to shoot Asterix before he even got close.  Yosemite would only get one shot, then Asterix would finish him off in the ultimate barroom brawl.  Yosemite Sam, muttered something about varmints before he expired.

If Obelix, the menhir delivery man kills you it is simple.  Your gravestone is the murder weapon.  Obelix & Company provide cheap quick burials.      Obelix was tried as a quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals.  Just a few problems:

He had to eat wild boar between every play.

He would throw the football well out of the stadium.  Many a tailgaiting party was interrupted with cries of “incoming!”

He tried throwing menhirs to the wide receivers.  It tended to lower their life expectancy.  The word was out, “you really don’t like your wide receiver?  Send him to the Cardinals!”

Casualties on Sundays in Glendale became horrific.

Even with my butchering the two many characters, it is a great long running series.

An Idea for the Sudanese Lost Boys and Girls

It woke me up at 1:30 in the morning.  So I decided to think about it.  What about a way to set up microloans for them to build businesses.  I don’t have that kind of money.  I am just passing on the idea.

A Man and His Cat. It’s A Wonderful Thing.

Yerbie has had a rough month.  When Jack died, he lost a buddy.  I have yet to meet a person Yerbie didn’t like.  I have been out sick this week.  Yerbie will go to sleep on me.  The phone rang yesterday.  No, I was not asleep.  I couldn’t untangle Yerbie, who thought this was quite amusing.

Holiday decorations came out yesterday.  More ways to confuse a cat.

Mumbai

I can only quote the New York gangster Lucky Luciano in the 1920’s talking about Chicago.  “A real Goddamn crazy place.  No one’s safe in the streets!”

Well that has been Mumbai, India this week.  The world’s economy is already in trouble.  Mumbai is India’s most important city, for tourism, culture and trade.  Only the sea did not bring gifts this week but an angry human tsunami with barbarism in its wake.

Who thinks they are going to a cafe or a hotel and they are going to be riddled with bullets from automatic weapons?  With armed men demanding to see papers; snarling “Are you American or British?”

One of the people the BBC spoke with on cellphone later turned up dead.  Can you even reason with such folks?  They don’t seem to take entreaties very well.

Hopefully, the Indian autorities will accept help from the world community to smoke these guys out.

So Far, Impressed by President Elect Obama

Those of you, who saw my previous posts realize how wary I was of Mr. Obama.  Then again, I was wary of both candidates and enjoyed lampooning them.

I must confess, our President Elect has not even taken office yet and is working hard to be ready with the right choices and the best people.  He and President Bush have been gracious to each other and provided an example of a smooth transition of power, you will not see many other places.

Keep it up, Mr. Obama.  This is impressive.

The Mark of a Person

In the past, many would have said the mark of a man, but this goes for everyone.  It is dealing with the difficulty life throws at you.

You are indeed fortunate if nothing bad has ever happened to you.  Or are you?  If you are fifty years old and have the first major trauma in your life, are you going to have the life experience as tools to cope?  Remember, we learn from our mistakes (or should learn from our mistakes).  (Then again, some mistakes don’t allow learning.  If you go off the edge of the Grand Canyon, there are no do overs).

As I get older, I don’t like the phrase “being tough.”  Resolute is a better word.  It should be inside you.  If you have to strut and posture (like I did as a teenager), it is acting, not being resolute.

Resolute is not complaining about what you cannot solve and working on solutions for the rest.  It is bearing it quietly and getting back to work.  Make sure you learn a lesson from what happened.

A Death in the House.

“Michael, would you come in to the guest room and take a look at Jack?” my wife Elaine asked.

We arrived home from work at 4:30 that Monday afternoon, November 3, 2008. We were accustomed to Jack taking naps during the day, for he is a night owl.

For our first fifteen minutes home we took care of things in the house. Jack would normally wake up when we began emptying the dishwasher, and come to assist.

When he didn’t come out, Elaine called me.

We went in the guest room and pulled back the blanket. His skin was mottled,and he was cold.

“I think it’s a little late in the day to do CPR,” I muttered sarcastically. Elaine called 911. EMT’s and two Police Officers were there within a minute. They took one look at Jack and said, “He’s been gone a while, rigor has already set in.”

“Elaine had been an LPN for ten years in nursing homes. She had seen dead people before, but they were senior citizens and it was professional. It is slightly different when you find the body in your house.

Well, enough about the body. It had a name. John Terence Trimble, but anyone who knew him called him Jack.

I first met Jack not quite a year after we moved to Tucson. I was working in my job in Tucson,

At  work, if the call volume was down, we could take VTO (voluntary time off) and hang out. I became accustomed to a rail thin man with a weather beaten face and a few teeth. Two things were always the same about him. A cigarette and a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. I noticed something else. He always networked with other people in the company to borrow money cigarettes etc. which were always paid back religiously. He went out of his way to be friendly to everyone there.

I must admit I was a little wary of him at first. Not sure what he wanted and why. A bit like dealing with a panhandler. There are some lessons further along in this essay, which will talk about judging.

Once I started speaking with him, I realized we lived within walking distance of each other. Elaine and I would drive him home. I got to know his sister and her three kids and would help them with things. Jack was a whiz at all sorts of things. I grew up in an apartment. He taught me how to do certain things around the house (more about that later).

Little did I think down the road he would end up living with us. On Friday, November 8, 2007, Elaine called me in work. I was already nervous because it had to be an emergency for her to call me and not just email me. “Pima County Pre-Trial Services called. Jack’s been arrested for molestation. They want to know if he can stay with us since we don’t have kids.”

Life throws you some interesting situations. This is one your Mom and Dad cannot sit you down for during your childhood and tell you if this comes up, how you can handle it.

I had to make the decision at once and said yes. I knew damn well he hadn’t done anything and if Elaine and I thought for a moment he had, we would have said no. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I shook my head all day.

We arrived home that afternoon to find Jack on our doorstep. One of our neighbors asked me in Spanish if he Jack belonged here and I said “Si.”

Later, Elaine and I went to his apartment to get most of his few belongings. That night he told us the story. We could not believe what we were hearing. No one could believe it. He called his mother and his childhood friends.

Going over his tribulations with this and the subsequent criminal trial is for another venue.

We did not think he would be living with us for three-hundred and sixty days. He did not think he would be with us that long. He became a major part of the house, doing things around it to help us out. He sometimes bought groceries with money sent by his mother. I ended up with the younger brother I never had. He taught me not just to fix things, but about life and getting through the difficult times. For he had many.

One of his childhood friends, emailed us after Jack’s death. As he put it, the second half of Jack’s life was “shitty.” Jack was forty years old when he died. Many of the men in his family have a heart defect and some of them did not make it out of their twenties. It reminded me of a story from my favorite sport, baseball. Major League Baseball was setting up the players’ pension fund. Jerry Coleman, a Yankee player and longtime broadcaster kept telling Mickey Mantle he had to stop smoking, drinking and generally carousing. The men in Mantle’s family all died young working as miners. Mantle laughed and told Coleman he would not live long enough to collect. That was Jack’s attitude. He would not live long enough to collect Social Security or a pension and sadly, he was right.

I am going to give you the short version of Jack’s life, because you will need to know this to understand some of the lessons he passed on.

He grew up in Damascus, Maryland, which is forty miles west of Baltimore and forty miles north of Washington, D.C. Damascus is the northern end of Montgomery County, but not the chic areas where major government workers live. It was a farming community that grew when people working in Washington could no longer afford to live closer.

Jack played football and hung out with people who are still his friends and the parents of some of his friends had a job waiting for him back in Maryland which he was going to take in December, 2008.

His excellent SAT scores got him into Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where much of his family is from. He was going to school, met a young lady he started dating and things were going well.

Then his life began to go badly. He was working as a bicycle messenger to pay the bills. He was hit by a car and nearly killed. This forced him to spend months in the hospital causing him to lose his scholarship. His fiancée  stuck by him. They moved together back to Maryland and she was going to have a baby. Then, tragedy struck again. She was on her bicycle and was killed by a drunk driver.

Jack took another bicycle messenger job, this time in Washington and was again hit by a car, this time in front of the U.S. Capital.

He eventually moved back to Pittsburgh. He had done landscaping and tree cutting as well, and went to work as a roofer.. He played in pool tournaments and seemed to be doing well.

Well then, why did he leave Pittsburgh for Tucson? For those of you who know Pittsburgh, it is a city built on many hills. Jack lived in one of the valleys. Pittsburgh gets some severe winter snowstorms. One snowstorm blocked him into his house for six days. No electricity, heat, phone etc. He told me the temperature had dropped to eighteen degrees Fahrenheit in the apartment. With his health, he was afraid of dying alone and not being found for a while.

Like many who move to Tucson, he figured the milder weather would help him. Then he had his problems here.

Why am I telling you this tale of woe? I stated early on he taught me more than just fixing things. Many of you have heard the Native American saying, “Do not judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.” (Then again, there is also the Chinese saying, “If you save someone’s life, you are responsible for them. In the case with Jack, both were right to a certain degree).

How would you feel if your life for the last twenty years had just the things I described and nothing else? Would you be bitter and permanently angry at the world? Would you just say the hell with it one day and take your own life? Could you walk in those shoes?

Jack could and did walk in those shoes with remarkable humor and grace. Anger at stupidity and injustice but not bitterness. He stood up for his friends when they needed him. I misjudged him completely when he was first at Infonxx. He was not just a taker. He was a man of his word and if you were part of his world, he would stand up for you.

There are few like that left. Having Jack around was a little like having a mirror and you could learn about yourself.

We would talk about all sorts of things, politics, sports, and workplace issues, whatever. He was sick of hearing about the Presidential Election we just had. Luckily, when Pima County Victim Services came the night he died, the counselor with me was able to get me to laugh about some things. I told the counselor (thank you, George), Jack died when he did because he was literally sick to death of all the election analysis. Jack figured with the garbage going on with the economy, neither candidate was going to make much of a difference. Well, he didn’t have to stand in line to vote.

As I write this, my two year old orange and white cat Yerbie is keeping me company. Yerbie likes people and saw Jack as his buddy as well as me. For two weeks, Yerbie kept poking his head in the guest room looking for him. Jack would sit outside having a cigarette and sometimes both of us were out there chatting. Yerbie would look through the screen door and cry, because he could not be out there with us. For two weeks, we had to leave the TV on during the day. The day of Jack’s death, I now realize Yerbie knew something was very wrong and kept trying to get my attention. Yerbie bonded with all who came to the house that night. Elaine’s cat Lucy on the end, cocked her eye open at the Medical Examiners stretcher and went back to sleep. Poor Yerbie!

That morning, we were on our way to work.  The last time I saw him alive was 5:30 A.M.  He was all smiles, sitting out there with his cigarette and Mountain Dew.  When we came back late Wed. nights, from our class, the Tucson Citizen Police Academy, he would greet us and ask us how it went.  Or from a writers meeting.

I lost a teacher and an adopted younger brother. Thank you Jack. You were gone too soon.

Tucson Citizen Police Academy, November 19th, 2008. Just Swat Me, Cause it Was a Blast!

The Hardesty Police Substation was named after Officer Hardesty, who was killed in the line of duty our third day living in Tucson.    We can walk to it if we feel like a good stretch of the legs.

We had to meet in front and Sgt. Hammarstrom gave extremely explicit instructions.  There was to be no messing up A and B tonight, LOL!  

It is a working police station, so there would be cops, suspects, etc.  and a labyrinth of hallways to get to the back garage, where our class would be.  The next in line had to hold the door open for the ones following.  I think we made Sgt. Hammarstrom proud.  We got it right.  We will be disciplined yet!;-)

      Our class was in the back garage.  First, Captain Tarrant spoke.  Then two of the lieutenants, spoke, then Officer Pickler of the Bomb Squad.  Bomb Squad has few openings, people tend to stay, because there is a lot to learn and things change all the time.

     Roughly 15% of the devices the Bomb Squad is called out to are real.  They seem to come in two types:

1.   Chemical bombs, your friendly neighborhood Meth cook.  Heck, you are already cooking stuff up.  Be there witches in the city?;-)

2.  Military Ordnance.  Grandpa brought back all sorts of things that go boom from World War II or Korea.  Grandpa dies and his heirs are left to call and say, “Uh, there is a box in storage that says, danger, explosives.”

     In the London Underground, there are signs everywhere telling you what to do if you see an unattended package.  I remember being in London and tube lines closing all the time, because someone found a package.  I brought that up and Officer Pickler, said yes, the U.K. is more savvy.  Someone will call out to you if you leave a package on an Underground seat.  There was the British show Danger, UXB.

     Then we got SWATTED.  Sgt. Allen and Officer Callan.  They had all sorts of neat toys.  Keep in mind, their job is to take you alive if possible.  They are ready for the worst, but hope it does not go that far.

     They set off a flash grenade in the parking lot.  Yours truly thought of it as not big deal.  I know, punk kid originally from Brooklyn has set off M-80’s.  I know, I am a brat.

    We finished by going into the different vehicles.  Another amazing night.

Tucson Citizen Police Academy November 12th, 2008, I’m Rattled!;-)

The first speaker was Chief Leavitt.  There are four Asst. Chiefs in the Tucson Police Department.  Chief Leavitt now does Administration, meaning things such as the budget.

All you have to do is see the news to know how the economy is doing.  You have to pay for police protection.   You have to pay for the manpower and the equipment.  (More about Bomb Squad and SWAT equipment in the next post).  Chief Leavitt said you need to have as a base two patrol officers for every 1,000 citzens.  (Of course, the other choice is for people here to STOP COMMITTING CRIMES)!  You have to know what to buy and deploy the resources you have.

Then Officer Beller had great fun scaring people.  He killed a rattlesnake and then set up a cross and rocks on some dirt in front of the classroom.  The ladies screamed etc.

Part Two was two of the motorcycle cops, Officers Nielsen and Ryan.  They have been working together for so long, they can finish each others sentences.  Officer Ryan also works on SWAT.  They talked about the intersections with traffic cameras and parts of the traffic laws.  They asked if anyone had every been pulled over by them.  Of course, Ofc. Beller’s favorite foil, Zach had to raise his hand.

There are some occasions in which keeping your mouth shut is the better course.  The two officers joked about going to dinner and having the waitress say, “You are the one who gave me that ticket!”  It is a sort of reverse celebrity.

Next Week.  Bomb Squad and SWAT.

A Little bit of Bushmills.

Nice and mellow after a crazy day.  Point is to sip slowly and not down it.  Always in moderation.