Apparently So

Naked Lips and All

With apologies to Aesop, I'm going to tell you the moral at the beginning: Never, ever use your face to fib.  Ignore this warning and your retribution will be swift and brutal.

To frame this revelation, I moved recently.  Moving always gives you an opportunity to sift through the assorted detritus of your life, neatly packed into cardboard boxes.  You can re-discover all kinds of things when you pick through your life's souvenirs, from the accolades and the badges of honor to the traffic ticket and the remnants of a broken heart.  While doing so, you often come across pictures from the days when digital meant your watch.

After looking at snapshots stretched over a few decades of living, I realized something that in hindsight should have been obvious: Throughout most of my adulthood, I've sported some form of facial hair.

Post college, it was a thick black moustache that would have made Friedrich Nietzche proud.  In my early years working at Hewlett-Packard Company and patroling left field for my competitive men's softball team in Fairfax County, Virginia, I wore a full beard.  And if Dr. Brown from Back to the Future ever shows up in his DeLorean, I'll zip back in time and trim the darn thing.

For the past 10 years or so, I've worn what most people call a goatee.  Wikipedia defines it as "A beard formed by a tuft of hair on the chin.  The word probably comes from the tuft of hair seen on an adult goat.  In recent years, goatee has come to denote a style of facial hair that connects to a moustache."

My version is the latter, with a moustache, and I keep the whole ensemble closely cropped so no female goats or lonely shepherds follow me down the street.

All was fine until last month when I noticed something natural but horrifying: The majority of hair on my chin had somehow managed to turn white.  Seemingly overnight, my salt-and-pepper goatee looked like I'd gone down on a salt lick.  If my chin were a bag of Fritos, I'd have a surgeon general's warning plastered across it.

For weeks, I debated whether or not to do something to hide this abominable snowman's beard.  In a moment of moral ambiguity, I purchased a package of a men's facial-hair coloring product.  I hid it in a drawer in my bathroom and would peek in every few days to see if it were still there.

We interrupt the chronological flow of this narrative for a relevant few words about marriage.  If you've been married for a long time, you often hang on -- even if it's rockier than El Capitan -- for one reason and one reason only, and it's not the kids.  It's because the thought of ever having to date again scares you to death.  I have now been separated for more than three years and divorced for almost one, and I've had very little success in meeting women who return my interest.

Women to me are like a giant ATM with a huge stack of $20 bills inside.  I have a card that goes in smoothly, but I have no idea what the PIN is.  I keep clacking in random sequences of numbers, but no cash ever comes out.  And then the machine mutilates my card and spits it onto the sidewalk.

Don't get me wrong.  I have many wonderful female friends and my camaraderie with them significantly enriches my life.  It's just that I haven't been in love in a very long time and I miss it, sometimes achingly.  If love is a lake, my life is the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Since we humans are always looking for a scapegoat, I started to blame my lack of pheromonal bliss on the white in my beard.  It couldn't be the fact that I'm still wounded from my divorce or that my higher power doesn't think I've evolved enough yet for a successful relationship.  It had to be all those tiny white hairs, standing upright and saluting.

So one night, I put some Lucinda Williams on, took out the package hidden in my bathroom drawer and set out to alter Mother Nature's handiwork.

I followed the directions carefully, first putting on the thin plastic gloves they thoughtfully included in the package.  Then I squirted a thin line of what looked like loose cat poop from one tube into the mixing tray and then a line of chalky toothpaste from the other.  I mixed the chemical solution together in the tray, using the hard plastic end of the application brush.

Then I cleaned off the mixing end of the brush, as directed, turned it around and dipped the sturdy bristles into the solution.  I brushed the mixture into my goatee, chin first, until I had the whole thing covered.  It took only three minutes by my watch -- which doesn't have a second hand -- and the instructions said I should keep it up for no more than five minutes.  Wanting the full effect, I dipped the brush back into the glop and applied some more.

After five minutes, I stopped.  I glanced briefly into the mirror and my goatee seemed to be getting darker and darker.  The next step called for me to rinse off the mixture.  So I turned the knob on my shower, felt the water until it was hot enough and jumped in.

Just in case these chemicals were more dangerous than advertised, I held my hands over my goolies to keep the rinsed-off solution away from those tender parts.

I finished showering, toweled off, wrapped a drier towel around my waist and stepped in front of the mirror.  I grabbed a hand towel, wiped away the condensation and expected to see this handsome, dark-goateed man staring back at me.

I was shocked  by my reflection.  This huge, charcoal-looking smudge encircled my mouth.  My face looked like a child's drawing of the tramp clown, the one with the thick five-o'clock-shadow drawn in.

The goatee was dark all right.  Every last hair was black.  But the solution also seemed to have dyed black all the skin underneath.  I looked like a middle-aged man with a Barnum-and-Bailey's fetish.

I swear if I wallked down the street looking like that on any day but Halloween, people would run inside and slam their doors.  I could have passed for a hobo criminal who escaped from the insane asylum.  Try that for a Match.com description.

I walked out to the kitchen and my cat ran away and hid under the dining room table.  Oh, this will have the women flocking my way.  Everyone wants to date a man who looks like he drew a goatee onto his face with a charcoal briquette.

So I lathered up my face and shaved the whole thing off.  My face was as naked as a mole rat, as smooth as an ice rink after the Zamboni's passed by, as soft as the nape of an alpaca's neck.

The next day, I went to a meeting at noon.  The first person I saw was a close female friend and she said, "Hey, you shaved off your beard!"

"Yes," I replied.

"How come?" she asked.

"I cannot tell a lie," I said.  "I'm going to run off and play left field for the San Francisco Giants.  And they don't allow facial hair."

"Oh," she replied, thinking it over.  "Tried to dye it, huh?"

Crap, I said to myself.  Women.

Stressed for Success

It's been happening every night for a week now.  After I change out of my doctor's scrubs, brush my teeth and say my prayers, I climb into bed and place my weary head onto my pillow.

As I lay there, I replay the day's craziness in my mind: a work pace that would kill a jackrabbit, the constant deadline pressure from working on my experiments, and all those tasks and chores I didn't have time to do.

I toss and turn for what seems like hours until the Trazodone kicks in and I finally slip into the arms of Morpheus.  Then, every night, as regular as a German nutritionist, the dream starts.

I'm sitting in an enormous pipe that stretches as far as you can see in either direction.  It's quiet in there, except for an occasional drip that echoes through the dank metal tube.

My head starts nodding and I'm about to fall asleep in my dream when a voice that sounds like Hannah Montana on helium screams, "Howdy, y'all!" and breaks into maniacal laughter.

In the distance, I hear a rumbling sound that's getting louder and louder.  I look up and see the cause of the commotion.  A huge wave of water, filled with peculiar objects, is raging down the pipe and heading straight for me.

As the wave slams closer, I spy Dolly Parton, floating on breasts the size of ice cream trucks, as if they were gigantic water wings.  Riding on Dolly's back is celebrity fossil Joan Rivers, who's wrapped in a red carpet.  She's tugging at Dolly's blonde wig and screaming, "What are you doing?  I said I needed a lift!  I need a lift!"

They rush away and a half-dozen members of a Welsh rugby team swirl by, jogging in place and chanting a Dylan Thomas poem about canaries.  They're on the roof of an enormous black SUV with Tony Soprano at the wheel.  He's shaving his heavy beard with an old-fashioned straight razor that's dripping with blood as he reads the Wall Street Journal and weaves through rush-hour traffic.

Up pops the woman who emcees the pledge drive for my local public broadcasting station.  She's standing on a raft of unsolicited direct mail, screaming that I'll never see the final episode of "The Mating Dance of the Australian Cheek Warbler," until I send her $10,000 -- and match it myself.

Then the river hits me with the force of a tornado in a telephone booth and I'm swept underwater, gasping for air.

I usually wake up about then, thank goodness.  I shake the madness out of my head, pry the cat off my face and roll out of bed -- primed for another day on the Tilt-a-Whirl of life in the 21st Century.

Does your life seem like it's raging out of control?  Are you constantly stretched in multiple ways as if each of your limbs is attached to a team of plow horses who were just shot in their muscular bums with a dart gun and who are now angrily running off in four different directions?

Whether it's the competing demands of work or your children or your parents or your friends or volunteer activities or exercising or all of them together?  Fixing breakfast, fixing lunch, getting the kids out the door, but your son forgot to get your signature on his PE homework so you have to run back inside for a pen.  You sign the form, you pile into the car, you drop them at school, you make an illegal U-turn.  Somebody honks and you flash them the bird as you drive off to work where you can't get anything completed because no one cares about your deadlines and everything's a crisis and your boss is a micro-managing lunatic when he isn't hitting on you.

During your 30 minutes for lunch, you try to run as many as you can of the two dozen errands you couldn't get to during the weekend with all the play dates and soccer games and photo days and taking everyone for a hike and visiting your mother and making dinner for your friends because it's your turn and grocery shopping at the three different stores it takes to find all the things you like.  And the kids need baseball cleats and ballet shoes and underwear and the dog is out of kibble and your daughter's hamster has to have that special kind of food that it likes, oh, and those little chew toys, too?

Of course, everyone else is out running their two dozen errands and traffic is worse than rush hour.  You finally find a parking space a half mile from the store's entrance, dash inside, find what you need and the man at the front of the line finds out that the three-liter bottle of Grey Goose vodka isn't the one on sale -- it requires a mail-in rebate form -- so he asks for the form and the clerk, who could not care less because who wants a job like this anyway?, slowly tries to find it in the stack of papers next to the register.

He finally decides forget it and walks away but you have to get back for the 1:00 meeting and the lady in front of you decides she wants stamps, but then doesn't have enough money for them anyway after a careful search of every last crumbling piece of lint in her ancient purse.  They finally check you out, you run to your car, back out and drive to the office, and you're just about to make the meeting except your ex-husband calls on the way and he can't remember if he's supposed to take the deduction for Christopher on his taxes or little Isabella because he can't find the Marital Separation Agreement.  He needs the information right now because he's meeting with his accountant at 1:00 and, sorry, he could have called you a week ago, but he forgot.

And your call-waiting bleeps and you recognize the number so you put your ex on hold and it's your dad's nursing home saying that they can't get him off the roof again and is it OK to tranquilize him this time?

When you finally do manage to get home for the day, feed the kids, water the plants, tend to the animals, pay the bills, clean the kitchen and finally have a moment for you, you're too tired to do anything but have a glass of wine.  And as you start to relax, your neighbor's kid -- the renters -- starts practicing with his garage band and the drums thud and rattle and crash as the electric guitar pierces the air like a wolverine with its tail caught in the disposer and you want to call the police but you hate conflict and you have to live with these people so you take two Ambien and another glass of wine and you go to bed and you toss and turn yourself to sleep, and you keep having these strange dreams?

Does any of this sound familiar?  If so, my friend, you may be suffering from what we in medicine call the silent killer: Stress.

In strict scientific terms, stress results from having dozens of things to do and only the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual bandwidth to handle somewhere around 10 of them.  Stress can cause heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, gastric upset, shortness of breath and -- according to a groundbreaking study at the Cambridge Medical University -- an uncontrollable urge to stand up on your couch or desk and sing emotionally wrenching Pink songs.

We're seeing this tragic sight more and more often in these tumultuous times of ours.  Out of nowhere, someone will suddenly hop onto his desk and mournfully sing:

                            "I'm not here for your entertainment

                            You don't really want to mess with me tonight..."

Although modern medicine has been doing its best to treat the symptoms of stress-related illnesses (SRIs), the leading medical associations are baffled as to a cure.  They have recommended everything from acupuncture and Zen meditation to individual therapy and neural stimulation, but you've come to me because of my revolutionary and innovative approach.

Last year, I was awarded a federal grant of almost five figures to study my radical proposal for curing SRIs.  While most doctors recommend developing coping skills and taking medication to cope with the escalating demands of our modern world, I believe they're concentrating on the wrong end of the problem.  My contrarian hypothesis is that -- instead of treating the symptoms -- we should be working to increase a human being's capacity (in layman's language) "to do stuff."

You may recall an experiment they forced us to perform in high-school chemistry.  We stirred a granular solid (sugar) into a stable liquid (iced tea) until a small mound of solid (gunk) formed at the bottom of the beaker.  Great, we thought.  Time for lunch.

But there was more.  The liquid had reached what we professional scientists refer to as "the saturation point." You could stir that beaker like a monkey on meth, but it would not dissolve one more single crystal of sugar.

However, as our teacher explained, as the temperature of a solution is raised, its capacity to dissolve a solid increases.  Aha!  So we fired up our Bunsen burners, applied them to the bottom of the beakers and, Voila!  We produced the sweetest iced tea outside of Athens, Georgia, itself.

Using the same logic employed at the highest levels of government, if something works this well with iced tea, why not try it with humans?

Moments ago, I lit a Bunsen burner and placed it under my chair.  Already I'm starting to type at least 40 percent faster.  I've created three new word-processing files and am writing and editing multiple medical journal articles on my discovery, all at the same time.  I'm also entering the data I'm collecting into two different spreadsheets while creating Power Point slides for the presentation I plan to give at a medical conference next month.

I just called my publicist, too, and we're discussing the media strategy for the book I'm writing.  I'm working beautifully -- thinking, writing, planning, talking -- going like gangbusters.  I'm working faster and faster, churning out the production of a dozen workers -- although I am getting a little hotter now and sweat seems to be dripping down my face and my chair is smoking and...

Hey!  What's this?  Some force seems to have taken control of my legs.  I don't know why, but I'm rising to my feet.  I'm, I'm climbing onto my desk.  Hey!  What is this?  Why am I clearing my throat?  Why am I about to...

                            "If someone said three years from now

                            You'd be long gone

                            I'd stand up and punch them out

                            Cause they're all wrong."

Rats.  It's Pink again.  Another great idea, up in smoke.  I'm going back to bed.

 

 

Cetacean Break

Since I used to be married to the same woman for more than 21 years -- for better or for worse -- I'm used to having someone around.  It's been about three-and-a-half years since my ex-wife and I separated; the divorce became final 10 months ago.

I get lonely sometimes. especially when the kids aren't around and loving couples are exchanging bodily fluids on the HBO movie I'm watching.

Sure, I have good friends who I enjoy and I can always go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for company and a spiritual connection.  But I don't have that special someone in my life, the one who makes my heart go boom-boom-boom instead of my 401(k).

So I thought about clickety-clacking an ad to go on the San Francisco version of Craig's List.  I'd place it under the Men for Women section for the Peninsula, which reaches down past me in my Mountain View home, all the way to San Jose.

Since I believe so strongly in the truth (with a small "t", of course), it would read something like this:

Middle-Aged Writer Seeks Interesting, Happy Woman
I'm a balding, 50+ man looking for an interesting and happy woman close to my age.  I'm hoping you're reasonably attractive and reasonably fit.  It's important that you're independent and smart.  It's a must that you have a sense of humor and a sense of wonder about the world.

Not sure if this is important to you, but I happen to be white or Caucasian or pink or whatever you want to call it.  I don't care what color you are.

Me?  I string words together for a living and I know that sounds boring to some people.  But I'm good at what I do and I enjoy it.  I'm average height, 12 pounds over ideal weight, reasonably attractive, in OK shape.  These are the things I love: my two children, my friends, baseball, animals, Tejava iced tea, Stanford Women's basketball, live music, books, movies, Cirque de Soleil and the wonders of nature in California and other parts of the world.

Here's the hard stuff: I have Crohn's Disease and have had it since I was 14 years old.  The good news is that a company called Centocor introduced a new medication four years ago and it's working wonderfully.  I'm in complete remission now and have been off that miserable Prednisone for almost 18 months.  All I have to do these days is go into my clinic every eight weeks for an IV infusion of the drug.  It's a very peaceful three hours.

I'm also a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and I've been clean and sober for more than three years.  I've done a ton of inner work in the process and can now say that I'm finally at peace with myself.  I'm getting good at living in the moment, and reacting with kindness and understanding rather than rage.

I know some of this might make you leery, so here's something on the plus side. A lot of guys are egotistical, skirt-chasing a-holes who couldn't keep it in their pants with a carton of Krazy Glue.  I'm someone who believes in and practices monogamy.

I can also be very kind, gentle and thoughtful.  I know, I know -- so's your dog.  But I can also fix a full tea service with either hand -- bet your dog can't.

Finally, I am a classic introvert and need to be alone to recharge -- Myers-Briggs has me nailed on this one.

So if all of this doesn't make you run away screaming or gulp a handful of Ambien, please drop me some electrons with photo and I'll do the same.

Now you see why I don't work in Marketing.  And why I'm still alone.  Heavy sigh.

Some days I feel like a blue whale (and that's not a comment on my waistline).  Have you ever seen one up close?  A blue whale's skin is marred with barnacles and other parasitic creatures, stuck like dried pasta to his sides.  His body is etched with long white and gray scars, reminders of every battle he's ever had with a Great White Shark or giant squid or orca or even a motorboat or cruise ship.

Up close, he's a mess.  He looks like a monster -- the stuff of nightmares -- not the romantic, story-book image we have of the ocean's monarch.  But back up the camera to about 30 meters away.  Watch him soar through the blue-green ocean -- up to the surface -- where he breaches into the world of light, blows the used air from his lungs, sucks in clean and shimmering oxygen, and crashes back down into the water.

See him dive.  He fans the water with his powerful tail, rhythmically pushing down, down.  Then he levels off, pulling up his huge head with those wise, knowing eyes and he glides to the right slowly, rolling and twisting through the dark blue depths with the poise and grace of a prima ballerina.

It's hard to believe such a massive creature can be so lithe, so graceful underwater.  But it's absolutely true.  He's beautiful when he swims.

And that's what it's like for me.  I struggle through life sometimes.  But  when I sit in front of a keyboard, my brain engaged and my fingers flying -- the blank page before me filling up with those tiny letters so neatly arranged into little presents -- I feel like a blue whale, gliding easily through the water.  I feel alive.  I feel free.

I feel beautiful.

 

 

Walking the Doggerel

When I was much younger, I wanted to write children's books.  I wanted to play with the words and make them jump and dance and do tricks while drawing exquisite pen-and-ink sketches that tugged the reader into the scene.  I'd give my little poems names like "Raining Cats and Doggerel" or "Von Braun's Swagger."  Here's one I call "Assailing, Assailing":

                           "Sargasso, seize the scallops,"

                            Cried the cruller captain's crew,

                            "Hustle in the mussels

                            And we'll pop them in the stew."

                            "Alba, core the albatross

                            And grind his bones for tea,

                            For the Prince of Wales

                            Has left his post,

                            And joined us out at sea!"

Oh, the rhyming schemes would be perfect, no syllable off the beaten path -- unlike all that stinking doggerel you find in greeting cards or when sportswriters try to be poetic.  My beautiful drawing would show the crew wearing ring-shaped cakes on their heads -- with candles and melting ice cream -- and sea gulls pecking at the crumbs as the crew tug on the nets and pull up hundreds and hundreds of scallop shells.  And the elfin but muscular Alba will be clinging to the feet of a huge ocean bird and dragging him below decks.  This drawing will capture both the excitement and the marvelous absurdity of a child's imagination.

When I was in high school, I discovered the joy of Shel Silverstein, through his sad, sad book The Giving Tree.  He followed that with his fun, scary, rollicking children's poems in books such as Light in the Attic or Where the Sidewalk Ends.  The best part of Shel's work is that you can pass his genius down generation to generation by giving his books to your children and your friends' children.  Which gives you yet another reason to read them again.

As the brilliant, eccentric novelist Tom Robbins once wrote, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

In my imagination, I was Shel.  I worked and worked at it, writing more bits of doggerel.  This one's called, "Don't be Cilia":

                            I have a paramecium

                            I went and named him "Bud."

                            He loves to hike

                            and roller skate

                            and wrestle germs for fun.

                            He even knows a special trick,

                            my paramecium

                            'Cause every time

                            I call his name,

                            He makes another one!

Shel, Shel, Shel.  That's all I thought about.  I wanted to buy a long black gunslinger's coat and shave my head and grow a thick, neatly trimmed beard.

Shel had a bit of an edge to him, so I had to have a bit of an edge, too.  I named this one "Pecking Order":

                            Little boys chase pigeons,

                            Keep them pigeons on the run,

                            Eagles pick up little boys

                            And eat them just for fun.

                            Nature watches out for

                            All the birds that peck and coo,

                            But I'd rather be an eagle,

                            Wouldn't you?

Next to the words would be a wonderful drawing of a boy shown from above.  He has a quizzical look on his face since he's just been plucked off the ground by a mighty eagle with massive wings.  The eagle has the boy in his powerful talons, while the pigeons scatter on the ground below.

A bit later in my life, I decided I'd try my hand at limericks -- every book of doggerel has to have some limericks in it, accompanied by lovely pen-and-ink sketches that make the reader laugh.  I started with one I call "Yowtch!"

                            In histories about the Mid Ages,

                            We read of King Henry's wild rages.

                            If a word too misleading

                            appeared in his reading

                            He hastily burned all the pages!

To appeal to a more common denominator, I wrote one that was a bit naughty.  I also made the mistake of telling it to my then 13-year-old twins, who told it everywhere they went.  I spent weeks huddled in my room waiting for a call from the principal but it never came.  This one is "Mama Llama":

                            Our mayor, Francesco de Jama,

                            was casually humping a llama,

                            when an angry vicuna

                            said, "Listen here, jun-yah,

                            You keep-a your hands off my mama!"

The rotund mayor would have a silk scarf cavalierly tossed around his neck as he stood behind the llama, his pants bunched around his ankles.  The vicuna, holding a stuffed baby dolphin, would be lecturing the mayor, obviously displeased.

I couldn't think of another dirty one, so I jumped back into the mainstream.  My book would have such gorgeous drawings next to the words, which would pop off the pages like this:

                            The artists rebuke poor Rene

                            for finishing one work a day.

                            Though he often complains,

                            the stigma remains:

                            He just does it for the Monet.

Our Frenchman Rene has a wild, flowing beard like old chubby Monet had.  He's painting furiously in his lovely, upscale studio with struggling artists of all kinds pounding on the doors and windows with signs and banners in protest.  A rich gentleman in evening dress is dropping a bulging bag of coins onto the floor and smiling.  Rene bows gracefully and you can see a dozen of his finished paintings in the background -- all looking vaguely like the rich man,

Oh, my books will be so great!  They will make people laugh and cry and learn important life lessons.  And I'll be famous and loved, just like Shel.

Except for one small problem, one that makes me a little crazy sometimes.  It's so awful, so sad.  It's, well, it's that...I...um...I...uh...I...can't...draw.

I can't draw a lick.  I'm terrible.  If I were a swordsman, I couldn't draw blood.  I couldn't draw a bath.  I tried pen and ink once and it looked like a dog had peed on a Rorschach Test.

I was completely depressed about this for a long time.  But now I'm at peace with my limitations.  I understand and accept what I can do and what I can't.  And I came away from this exercise in humility with one conclusion: Shel was a genius; Shel was the best.

I really hope there is some kind of heaven so some day I can see what he's been up to lately.  Because if there isn't, what a terrible waste of talent that would be.

For now, rest in peace, Shel.  Rest in peace.

                              

 

Kitty Caboodle

Spencer the Wonder Cat -- my boon companion, kitty poet and pillow mate -- took off the other day.  It happened right after we moved into my like-new mobile home -- the last affordable housing in Silicon Valley.

It was so hot that day that you'd brand the back of your thighs if you sat bare-legged on something metal.  So I opened the doors to try to conjure a cross breeze and the rascal bolted.

I found him next door on the west side, sitting in a sun spot, doing advanced calculus problems in his head, or whatever it is that cats do when they lounge in those rays that have come so far just to warm us.

I slipped my fingers under his front paws and pulled him away from his calculations.  He gave a protest meow -- not an angry one, but an indication for the record, please, that he had been quite close to solving a difficult problem and would now have to start over.

I took him back inside and shut the doors.  Spencer is an indoor kitty.  After years of having cats with outdoor privileges and paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars in veterinarian bills to patch them up after nocturnal bouts of feline fisticuffs, I decided to limit Spencer's world to the 867 square feet of my previous two-bedroom apartment.

Now that we've relocated into a relatively spacious 1,100 square feet in our very own double-wide, I chose to make Spencer a kept cat, and an inside one at that.

Somewhere in the continuing chaos of moving in, he slipped out a second time.  It was, after all, unbearably hot and I guess I left the door open again as I fluttered about, unpacking boxes and attempting to instill some order onto this colorful collection of clutter.

I called for him and there was no answer.

"Spencer!" I yelled.

Nothing.

So I searched the Lilliputian backyards of my new neighbors, adding the sound of his name to the casual chatter of all the birds and squirrels chittering about.

"Spencer!"

No answer.

Now, my catastrophic thinking can go from zero to 120 faster than an Italian teen-ager in his daddy's "borrowed" Ferrari.  Spencer had been gone for maybe 10 minutes and my mind had him unanesthetized on a cold metal table in a perfume-tester's laboratory, strapped down and yowling for help.

I walked up and down my curving street with all the homes side-by-side.  If I were up in a helicopter, the homes would have looked like members of a marching band spelling out the "S" in Spencer in a football stadium.

No answer.  So I took several deep breaths, reminded myself of the tools at my disposal and -- here's a concept -- actually used them.

I did the half-smile, a great trick I learned in a mindfulness class.  With this technique, you relax the corners of your mouth into a neutral position, then slightly pull them up into a smile, mimicking the famous one on the Mona Lisa's face.  Then you do the same thing with your eyes, pulling your entire face into a half-smile.

I sounds silly, I know, but it is an incredibly powerful meditation technique.  The other day, a Yahoo-ligan cut me off while driving and them compounded his transgression by flipping me off.  As I felt the testosterone clutching my body into a massive fist of retribution, I remembered to half-smile.

The simple act of breathing deeply and half-smiling stopped my anger cold.  It was as if the gods had dropped a prize-winning Halloween pumpkin onto my internal surge protector, immediately shutting off the power to my Y chromosome.  I continued driving, calm and at peace, and completely ignored the miscreant.

Although the half-smile allowed me to regain my perspective, it didn't bring Spencer back.  I went inside, planning to try again at dusk.

My mind rolled tapes of Spencer in my head as I waited for dark to fall.  My kids and I had rescued him from our local Humane Society when he was a three-month-old ball of fur.  I picked him because he's a handsome cat with his charcoal grey and black-striped body, his blazing green eyes, those black tiger stripes across his grey and white face, the classic tabby "M" on his forehead in black with white highlights, and the tuft of snow on his chin.

He looked healthy and energetic, scampering through his cage.  Little Spencer purred when I held him, resting his tiny head on my arm.  We were sold.

After filling out several forms and swiping about a hundred and fifty dollars onto my credit card, my "free" kitten came home with me.

And now he was three years old and gone.  At dusk, I walked up and down the mobile home park, in between the double-wides, calling his name.  I even walked over to the adjoining neighborhood on the other side of the park, where real houses cozy up to our trailer park, like lovers lying spent front to back.

Nothing.  So I said my prayers and went to bed, fully expecting him to make his way back home by morning, even though he was unfamiliar with the new neighborhood.  I left my windows open so I could hear his pitiful cries when he came back, demanding food and a soft bed to lie on.

Morning came.  I walked outside.  I strolled over to my neighbor's backyard.  No Spencer.

My 13-year-old daughter, Ellery, had spent the night and she was upset, too.  So she set to work on my PC making a flyer we could pass around.  She downloaded a picture of our missing cat, importing it into my word-processing program.  I added the title, "Missing!", along with Spencer's description and how to contact me.

Ellery helped me go door-to-door, which is way outside my comfort zone.  But I screwed up my courage and was undaunted as I searched for my errant knight of the dinner bowl.

We passed out more than 70 flyers, leaving them on the door step of each mobile home. If someone seemed home, I knocked on the door and explained our search.  All seemed friendly.  Some had stories of their own lost pets to share.  Some didn't speak English very well, so I pantomimed Spencer's escaped and my search.

They pantomimed back some form of "No, I haven't seen him," or "This crazy gringo has been out in the sun too long."  Either way, I thanked them and we left.

We returned to my home, hot, tired and discouraged.  I drove my daughter over to her mom's house, ran a quick errand and went back to my place.

Once inside, the gods told me to launch another search party.  The feeling was vague but powerful and I believe it's rude not to answer when the universe calls.

It was about noon, 24 hours after Spencer took off, when I walked outside.  I went next door first and thought I saw something grey 50 feet away, sitting on its haunches in the backyard near a small pile of rotting wood.  I walked toward the animal but it scurried away.

Spencer?  Is it Spencer?  But he wouldn't run from me.  We were boon companions, snooze partners, cat-brush campadres.

I caught up to the animal, who was trying to burrow into the wood pile.  It was Spencer!

I yelled his name and stooped to pick him up.  As I grabbed him, he yowled loudly and twisted away.

"Spencer!" I shouted.  "What are you doing?"

I cradled him with both arms, which seemed to bother him less, but he still tried to pull away.

I carried Spencer inside and examined him.  He was hot, very hot, and he swore in salty cat language whenever I touched his side.  He was hurt.  My immediate guess was that he had run into the neighborhood trailer-trash bully, a savage, tattooed, buffed-out, Big Gulp-glugging beast who attacked my Spencer, a bookish, refined, civilized, NPR-listening cat who's in touch with his feminine side.  Spencer never had a chance.

So I found a local 24-hour, seven-days-a-week veterinarian clinic on the Web and drove Spencer over.  An interminable wait later, a doctor examined him.  I pointed to a small tuft of fur stuck together on his right side.  She pulled it off, revealing a puncture wound through his grey skin.

One peculiar thing about cats is that they have the healing powers of a super creature.  If they get a cut on their body, it will close very quickly, almost before your eyes.

However -- as with all super creatures -- this preternatural healing ability comes at a cost.  If a cat is bitten through the skin, its wound will close off within a matter of hours, leaving the bacteria from the other animal's bite inside with no place to go.  The bacteria procreate as all God's creatures are wont to do, and the result can be a nasty, potentially fatal, abscess.

The doctor caught Spencer's abscess before it could completely close over, which meant that he was probably bitten in the early hours that same day.  So after shaving off his fur around the puncture wound and giving Spencer an IV-bag of fluids, along with antibiotic and anti-inflammatory shots, Spencer was saved -- for a total of around $225, including the week's worth of pills I needed to give him twice a day.

It seemed a bargain compared to past emergency vet bills.  So I swiped it onto by faithful credit card and thanked the staff.

As I drove poor Spencer to the safety of home and recovery, my thoughts turned to my wonderful friend Vivien.  She's an ebullient, smart and lovely Chinese colleague in her early twenties who not long ago came to the San Jose, California, area to work for a month.  She chose Vivien as her English name.

Vivien lives in Shenzhen, China, and worked in employee communications at one of my previous company's hard disk drive manufacturing plants.  She reported to me on a dotted-line basis and came to San Jose to learn about American culture and to teach us about hers.

Vivien taught me a great deal about how employee communication worked in her country and the cultural barriers that needed to be overcome.  I tried to reciprocate, explaining what did and didn't work among U.S. high tech workers.

During one of our many lively chats, I told her about Spencer and mentioned that cats had recently overtaken dogs as the most popular pet in the U.S.

"Do you have a pet?" I asked her.

"Oh, no," she answered, shaking her head and frowning.

"Why not?" I pursued.

"In China, we're still trying to feed ourselves," she said, with no hint of irony or malice.  It was a simple fact, a truth with a small "t".

"We're not ready to feed an animal, too," she continued.

It made sense.  I suddenly felt silly and embarrassed.  We have so many riches in this country compared to almost everywhere else in the world.  And we extend this wealth and our love to cats, dogs, horses, birds, lizards, snakes, amphibians, even fish.

We're a country in the enviable position of being able to care about the welfare of a turtle when there are so many human beings in the world who go to bed hungry every night.

So one day, as the Chinese people use their entrepreneurial skills, hard work and access to western markets to get wealthier and the Communist state falls -- its back broken by the weight of 1.3 billion hungry people yearning for blue jeans, YouTube and freedom -- maybe then my friend Vivien will get herself a cat.

Then Spencer can have a kitty pen pal in China.  And Vivien and I will make a pact that stretches across the Pacific Ocean.  To protect our extended family members -- and to keep them from squandering their precious lives -- both of us, at all times, will keep our dear kitties inside.

 

Introduction

On a rainy Saturday afternoon a couple of months afterI started this book, I slipped into my local Korean-run deli for a smoked turkey sandwich on a toasted salt bagel.  My friend Heather called and we chatted on my cell phone whule I waited for my order.  I told her I was pleased with the morning's work and was in a cheerful mood because of it.

She knew I was writing a book.

"Do you think it will get published?" she croaked in a voice turned husky by an awful winter cold.

"Doesn't matter," I lied.

"What's it about?" she asked.

"Lots of things," I said.  "Carly Fiorina, adultery, Chinese fireworks, Vicodin, hope.  It's a story of my life over the past five years.

"Oh," she said.  "Kind of like taking out the garbage."

My ego dropped its bat and sprinted to the mound, like a Major League batter who's just had his ribs tattooed by a rival pitcher's fastball.  But its younger, mindful twin tackled him around the ankles and sat on his back.

And I laughed loud and long.

"Yeah," I said.  "That's it exactly.

Verbiage

Most of my professional work was done in the famous, very innovative and extremely self-important Silicon Valley -- the area south of San Francisco and north of Morgan Hill.  Only 40 years ago, the area was lush with orchards growing plums, prunes, cherries and other kinds of fruit.

Today, it's buildings, shopping malls, houses, apartments and strips of businesses lining El Camino Real from San Jose to San Francisco.  It's still beautiful, but one can only imagine with a stinging sense of sadness how naturally stunning it once was.

If you live in Silicon Valley, you know that you can't throw an iPhone without hitting an engineer -- which sometimes seems like a good idea.  The place is filthy with them.

I've worked with lots of engineers.  For the most part, I adore them.  They can do all the things I can't from installing more memory in your PC or fixing a broken washing machine, to designing and installing a spectacular Christmas light display that's synchronized with classical music and broadcast for blocks on an unused AM radio frequency.  Engineers are darn useful people.

And although I'm reluctant to generalize quite so broadly, unfortunately some of them also can be quirky, data-driven, literal-minded, socially awkward and as sensitive to the needs of emotionally driven people as a scorpion on a toilet seat.  So I admire these engineers, too, of course, but talking to them can be as difficult as navigating your way through a company's voice-recognition answering system while gargling Tic-Tacs.

Here's an example that makes my blood pressure read like a pair of great bowling scores.

Whenever these latter engineers refer to the beauty of words carefully crafted, those pearls of prose strung together with the skill and precision of a master jeweler, they always -- without fail -- use the word "verbiage."

Oh, you've heard them do it.  They stand there with their glasses on, right in the opening of your cubicle in their short-sleeved white shirt with the blue vertical stripes and they give a dismissive flick of their wrist -- as if writing were the essence of insignificance, lower in the scheme of things than a dung beetle's bottom, as disposable as a square of used toilet paper stuck to the sole of their Rockport shoes.

"And then," they say, "you can add the verbiage."

Its the way they say it. It's as if -- in their minds -- "verbiage" is a cross between "vermin" and "garbage."  And not just any vermin and garbage.  It's a bloated, bubonic-plague-infested Norwegian wharf rat with pus oozing from its open sores, and a dump truck load of putrid, steaming, maggot-wriggling trash that's been coagulating for a month in the sweltering heat of the sultry summer sun in Washington, D.C.  That's what they seem to be saying!

Well, at least that's what it sounds like to me, he sighed.

So whenever anyone dares to say "verbiage" in front of me, I fine them a dollar and give them the long explanation why.  Sometimes they laugh.  Sometimes they just stare.

I'd be living in a palace in Barbados by now if they simply would have paid me.

With a Small "t"

For the better part of my professional career, I’ve worked in employee communications for high-tech companies like Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and then back to HP.  These companies are so enormous, complex and rapidly changing that it takes people like me to help employees understand what in the world is going on and where the company is heading.

What’s most important about the job is trying to help employees connect the dots from the company’s strategy all the way back to their individual jobs.  This helps them decide what their priorities should be and lets them see that what they’re doing on a daily basis is important, that they’re part of something that matters – something bigger than themselves.

One of the job’s responsibilities is to write the chief executive officer’s internal messages.  This includes the company vision, quarterly results explanations, progress updates, slides, webcast talking points, video or podcast scripts, and all those organizational change memos that clog your electronic In Tray.

At HP, I wrote for Lew Platt and Carly Fiorina.  When people ask me what I did, I often tell them I was the Memo Writer to the Stars.

In a job like mine, if you earn the trust of the CEO, you can have incredible access to the top decision-makers.  And if the company truly believes in open and honest communication (I can count them on my toes), you can even tell the truth most of the time (with a small, humble “t”, of course).  You never get to tell the complete, 24-karat kind of truth for obvious reasons – highest on the list is to avoid panicking the masses in hard times.  At a place like Hewlett-Packard, there was a time when you could come close.

In fact, one day at HP, I did tell the unvarnished, raw-as-a-newborn-baby’s-butt truth.  By the end of the next day, I was gone – figuratively at first, then, oh so literally.  We’ll talk about it later.

In any job – depending on your personal values, your financial circumstances and your market value – you need to be willing to walk away if you’re asked to cross an ethical line.  That’s what happened to me.

The best advice I’ve ever heard on the topic comes from Chuck House, a former HP leader who spent 30 years with the company before leaving to work with software start-ups.  In a Fast Company article in the late 1990s, Chuck was asked the rhetorical question:  Can you tell the truth without jeopardizing your career?

“My honest answer is, you never know until you try,” Chuck said.  “Three decades ago, as a naïve your engineer at HP, I persisted in championing an idea despite opposition.  I came away from the whole experience with a motto:  Come to work each day willing to be fired.”

I whole-heartedly agree.  You can only spend so much of your life standing on the bank watching the river flow by.  Sometimes you have to close your eyes and jump in.  And see where it takes you.

In my opinion, even on your worst day in the profession, employee communications is a far more honest place to work than the marketing department, which is where some companies relegate us.  In marketing, the skills required are similar and the pay is better and everyone dresses a lot nicer.

But you have to be good at something I’m terrible at, which is – to be kind – always spinning the apple so that only the good side shows.

You never let anyone see the bruises or the discolorations when you’re in marketing.  In good employee communications, you have faith in the overall intelligence of your audience and the strength of the company to show them the entire apple – with a complete explanation of how the soft spots got there, what the company is doing about them, and practical tips and guidance on how the individual can help.

When I managed a team – both at HP and then later at Hitachi -- I banned the folks who reported to me from ever using the word “spin.”

“We can go so far as to say position,” I told them, “but I never want to hear spin –- it implies that we’re lying and that’s something I refuse to do.”

Here’s a story about the difference between real life and marketing.

In April 2000, Carly Fiorina, then chief executive officer for Hewlett-Packard, and her marketing minions had an actual replica built of the garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the company in 1938.  They paid tens of thousands of dollars to build this ersatz garage on a grassy knoll on the grounds of the company’s Hanover Street headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

This is where they shot the commercials the company ran that year – you may have seen them – with Carly in her Armani suit, leaning against the garage and purring with that sexy voice of hers – the one that sounds like a Siamese cat after a lung-rattling hit of good Mexican dope.

On the same day the advertising agency had dozens of people scurrying around to shoot these commercials with Carly, a modest home stood on a quiet residential street less than a mile away.  At 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, the real garage still stands – the place where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began perhaps the greatest adventure in technology and enlightened management in history.

In 1989, to celebrate the company's 50th Anniversay of incorporation, Bill Hewlett was driven to the original home of HP where many employees had gathered to celebrate with music and an ice-cream social.

As the car crept up Addison Avenue, Bill looked out the window and asked the people with him, “Which one is it?”

While everyone paid all this fuss to honor the company’s icon -– the garage -– its co-founder had never been back and was never interested in going back.  The only icons he cared about where hard work, creativity, treating your people with respect and beating the competition.

Although Bill and Dave never cared about the garage, Carly resurrected it and, while CEO, continually spun the founders’ legacy and mythology to suit her purposes.  It may have been good marketing; it was lousy employee communications.   And, in a truly karmic sense, it eventually came back to bite Carly in her Armani-clad behind.

Jolly Coppers

Way back in 1977, Randy Newman wrote and recorded a lovely, cheerful song -- one that filled me with hope and made me smile every time I heard it.

In Jolly Coppers on Parade, a stream of police officers, motorcycle cops and black-and-whites pass by, moving in formation.  The song evokes a happier time, a pause in our hectic lives, as seen through the eyes of a young boy.

                  "They’re coming down the street

     They’re coming right down the middle

     Look how they keep the beat

     Why, they’re as blue as the ocean.”

A couple of days after my brutal discovery, I was sitting on the couch in our quiet house, shell-shocked and staring into the emptiness of the room. Earlier that morning, I had called my wife, told her I had a gun and threatened to use it on her lover. I didn't, of course, but I was so very angry and that was the first thought that came into my head.

The phone rang.

It didn’t register at first.  By the third ring, I reacted to the sound as we all have been conditioned to do and walked slowly toward the source of the noise.

“ Hello?”

“This is Officer Lloyd Garrity of the Sunnyvale Police,” said a firm voice on the other end.  “Is this David Price?

“Yes.”

“Mr. Price, this is a very serious matter and I need you to do what I say.  Do you understand?”

“What?” I asked.

“Mr. Price, this is a very serious matter,” the voice repeated.  “I need you to do what I say.  I am outside and I want you to walk outside with the phone.  Can you walk outside with the phone?”

It was cordless, so I said yes, that is possible.

“Good, Mr. Price.   Now walk outside very slowly and put your other hand up in the air where we can see it.”

     “How the sun shines down

     How their feet hardly touch the ground

     Jolly Coppers on parade.”

What in the world is this? I thought.  Who is this guy and why is he bothering me?

“Do you know what’s happened here?” I spit into the phone.

“Yes, Mr. Price,” said the voice, “we know.  Now I need you to come outside very slowly and with your other hand up in the air.”

I was curious now.  So I walked through the kitchen and into our dark garage, which opens onto the street outside.  I passed through the dusty, cluttered area where shelves stacked to the wood ceiling held a lifetime of memories.  I opened the latch of the heavy wooden garage door and slid it over to the right so I could slip through into the mist of the light rain falling outside.

“Walk out slowly,” said the voice, “with your right hand in the air.”

I did what he said, but I’ve never cared for people ordering me around and his voice of authority made me angry.  What was this about?  Why was he bothering me?  Did he really know what happened?

     “Listen to those engines roar

     Now they’re doing tricks for the children.”

“I can see you now,” the officer said.  “Look to your right.”

I turned and saw a man in uniform about 100 feet away.  He had his right hand and arm in the air, waving them slowly from side to side.  Another officer stood behind him.

Next to the waving man was a black and white Sunnyvale Police car.  Another black-and-white angled out behind it, preventing any cars from driving into the scene.

“What is this?” I shouted into the phone.  “What are you doing?”

“Stay calm, Mr. Price,” said the voice.  “Keep your hand high where I can see it.  Walk down to the street.”

I took a few cautious steps down our short, steep driveway, moving carefully toward the sidewalk and the gutter.

“What are you doing to me?” I shouted, this time at the officer instead of through the phone.

As I said that, I saw movement to my far left, opposite from where the waving police man and his buddy stood.  I turned toward the movement and saw three more police officers, marching together, three-abreast.   The one on the left was a man.  The one on the right was a woman.  The one in the middle was a man.  He held a rifle.  He pointed it at my chest.

          Oh, Mama

                     That’s the life for me

                     When I’m grown

                     That’s what I’m gonna be.”

The five of them converged on me as I stood on the sidewalk, the light rain falling, steadily now.

“I didn’t do anything,” I shouted.  “I did NOT do anything.  They’re the ones who did it.  Why are you bothering me?

“Put your hands behind your back,” said the woman officer, taking the phone from my hand.

“But I didn’t do anything wrong,” I pleaded, crying now.

“Mr. Price,” Officer Garrity said, “you threatened to kill a man around 10:30 this morning.  Is that correct?”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I sobbed.  “You’re arresting me in front of my house, in front of my neighbors, in front of everyone.”

“We’re being quiet,” said one of the male officers.  “You’re the one making all the noise.”

The woman handcuffed me behind my back.  There’s nothing happy about handcuffs.  Nothing at all.

By this time, one of the officers had retrieved his car.  He drove down the street, made an illegal U-turn and parked in front of the driveway.  The woman urged me toward the car with her arm. My face felt wet from my tears and the rain.  I couldn’t see through the streaks on my glasses.  My swollen sinuses started leaking mucus from my nose and onto my moustache.  With my hands locked behind my back, I couldn't wipe it away.

She pushed my head down firmly so I wouldn’t bang it on the car door frame and I slid into the Sunnyvale Police car, sitting on the hard, light-blue plastic seat.

     “They’re coming down the street

     They’re coming right down the middle.”

I tried to bargain with the young woman police officer as she drove me away to Valley Medical Center, where the mentally health challenged criminals are temporarily warehoused.   I pleaded my case as she drove.  I told her what happened in exquisite detail.  I told her that it wasn’t my fault.  I asked her what she would have done if this had happened to her.

She didn’t say a thing.

“Are you listening to me?” I pleaded, desperate and frightened now.  “Do you even care?”

She didn’t say a word.  She just drove.

     Oh, it’s all so nice

     Looks like angels have come down from Paradise

     Jolly Coppers on Parade.”

My Three Thumbs

In the maternity ward of a city hospital in Camden, New Jersey, a nurse handed my mother a blue-blanketed baby.

The 24-year-old woman with her damp hair brushed back and those sweet, timid brown eyes hugged me to her chest.  She cradled me securely with her left arm and explored this new prize – her second son – with her right.  She stroked my cheek, my neck and my shoulder.  Down my arm she went, past the crook of my little elbow, my forearm and my tiny right hand.

She felt my fingers as my hand reflexively grabbed at hers.  One, two, three, she counted, breathing slowly, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the physical exertion.  Four, five, six.

Six?  Wait a minute. That can’t be right.  Let’s try it again.

One, two, three, four, five, SIX!

“Nurse!”

Somehow the attendants in the delivery room missed a little something.  But you’ll never slip an extra thumb past a mother.

Technically, it’s called thumb polydactylism, one of the most common birth defects affecting the hand.   A Wikipedia entry claims that one out of every 500 babies is born with some form of polydactylism, from a small stub of soft tissue to a fully formed thumb or finger.  It is believed to be genetic and carried down from generation to generation.

When my former embryonic self was a mere 15 days old, one of the tiny tissue buds that would become my fingers split.  Eventually that split turned into my extra thumb.

My family talks of a great uncle in Wales who had the same condition, except he kept his.  I imagine people were startled when he shook hands with them, and wrapped that extra thumb around their fingers.

Oh, imagine the things you could do with that extra digit!  You could become an accomplished pianist with a rollicking, boogie-woogie style that would put Jerry Lee Lewis to shame.  Or a professional baseball pitcher!  You could sling a three-seam fastball that rose, dipped and darted to the side -– nastier that Mariano Rivera’s splitter.

Alas, my parents kept me from the life of a great entertainer -– or a circus freak –- by asking the hospital’s pediatric surgeon to remove my bonus gift.  Much later, my mother told me how she had fretted over the decision.  She said it wasn’t fair to make such a difficult choice without knowing what I would have wanted.

I told her it was fine.  It is what it is.  And when you toss in my Crohn’s Disease, alcoholism and chronic depression, I’m enough of a genetic freak show as it is.

If people are curious, I’ll explain my prodigious digits.  I’ll show them my left and right thumbs side by side so they can see how the right one is nearly half the size of the left -- like a Mini-me brother.  The right one is also almost wrinkle-free, since I have quite limited motion with the upper joint.

Then I’ll spread my fingers as wide as they go and place my hands together, palms touching.  That way people can see that my right thumb splits the difference between where my normal left thumb and index finger are.

I also tell them it’s no big deal.  I’m right-handed and I pitched in organized youth baseball leagues through 9^th grade and even threw a two-hitter once.  (The first hit I gave up was a cheap single.  The second was a moon shot to right field that went as high and far as the Neptune probe – you could have eaten a hundred Memphis-style barbecued ribs and still had time to wet-nap your face and hands before that baby came back to earth.)

I also played guitar and juggled (not at the same time).  I admit I was no threat to Clapton, Stevie Ray or Cirque de Soleil, but I wasn’t awful either.

Twenty years after my appearance on this earth at that hospital in Camden, my two remaining thumbs and I got a job as a teaching assistant at an elementary school in Aurora, Colorado.  My main responsibility was to help the teacher, Mrs. Warren, ride herd on 30 or so 3^rd and 4^th Grade kids in an experimental teaching program.

For the most part, the school had open classrooms where the children had limited structure, even at an early age.  The kids who couldn’t cope with that and needed a more rigid structure were assigned to my class, which resembled a traditional school room.

One day all the kids but one were outside at lunch recess, running like dogs.  Cal -– who was one of the fit, athletic kids -– stayed behind.  He sat at his desk with his head down, resting on his arms.

I asked Mrs. Warren what was wrong with him.

“He’s upset about his thumbs,” she told me.

“His thumbs?” I asked.

She told me that Cal was born missing a thumb on his left hand and with an extra one on his right.  He’d had the extra thumb removed shortly after birth, just like me.  On some days, being different from the other kids makes him sad, Mrs. Warren said.  Today was one of those days.

I briefly told her my story and she asked if I would go share it with him.  Of course, I said.

So I walked over to Cal and asked if I could talk to him. He nodded softly.  So I told him about my hand, showed him the difference between my right and left thumbs.  I let him see the scars on my wrist where they removed part of the extra tendon and attached it to my baby thumb to try to give it more mobility in the top joint.  I let him trace the pale scars that snaked across the base of my thumb, the ones from the operation I’d had at 14 to take away the bump left from my initial surgery at five days old.

Then I told Cal that none of it mattered.  I said that I’d pitched in Little League, I play guitar.  I shared my family’s story about my great uncle in Wales who had kept his third thumb.

And we laughed.  We were two freaks of nature, different from the others and with an immediate and special bond because of it.  After we finished talking, Cal got up and ran outside.

Later that day, when the kids were engrossed in a project, Mrs. Warren called me over.  I anticipated her thanking me, telling me what an inspiration I was to Cal.  Thanks to our talk, she was going to say, I was his new idol and the boy was ready to think positively and move on with his life.

“I talked to Cal,” she said.  “You know what he said?”

“No,” I replied, eager to hear the praise that was coming my way.

“He said: ‘Mr. Price’s thumb is even uglier than mine!’”
 

“Oh,” I said, the hot flash of embarrassment reddening my cheeks.  Oh, my. 

I was certain she could hear my ego deflating, but she didn’t let on.  So I just smiled.

At the end of the school day, I watched Cal get up from his desk and gather his things.  He seemed like just another happy kid.

As he walked out the door, I remember thinking, "Good for you, Cal.  Good for you.  Three thumbs up, my little friend.  Three thumbs up."