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2024 Return to Happy Jack Mountain

Janna and I made a pilgrimage to Happy Jack Mountain near North Loup and Scotia, Nebraska this summer. Okay, maybe Happy Jack is more hill than a mountain, but because Nebraska (Otoe for “Flat Water”) is pretty dang flat, any rolling hill easily becomes a mountainous monument in memory. Happy Jack sits over the chalk mines below, and we’ll get to that wonder of the valley in a future article. The goal of us trekking up Happy Jack — me, for the second time, and for Janna, first — was to land in front of a giant, wooden cross atop the mountain. Easter services are held under the cross every year, but my question, now as an aged, and somewhat wizened 59-year-old man-child was, and still is, this: WHO IS CLIMBING HAPPY JACK MOUNTAIN ON EASTER MORNING? (the threat of dying is palpably real!)

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Chasing Cobblestones: Underfoot and Smothered in Asphalt in the Jersey City Heights

When I was on my recent Red Squares walking tour of Jersey City, I happened upon some street construction that gave me a chance for an aesthetic and professional mulligan: Exposed cobblestones on their way to disappearing again for three decades!

I whipped out my new iPhone 5S and awkwardly began taking photographs to make up for a previously lost opportunity articulated here in a comments stream from two months ago:

I did not take photos of the cobblestones! Gah! I was always mesmerized by them and felt such sadness that the beauty would soon be covered up. I’ll have to look for another street in the area to document! …

Our cobblestones were like square granite bricks and they were put in the street end down — creating a long-lasting, and deep stone that would never wear away. …

I only know the cobblestones here are so massive because I tried to dig one out to keep! I couldn’t do it. Too massive. Too heavy. Too deeply seated in 1600 soil! …

They just covered up the old cobblestones again. They’ll be hidden for the next 30 years until they re-pave it all again.

Here we go!  Caught, in situ, exposed cobblestones half-dead under hot, new, asphalt — and a burning morning sun — but now also half-alive for forever and a half-life, exposed, and memorialized here in this article!

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Side Assaults and Medication Induced Nightmares

If you are on maintenance medication for depression or your heart or some other long-term illness, one thing you should always be aware of when taking a new medication is its effect on your dreams.  Your doctor may not care about your fruitful dream state, but you care because you must. Your dreams are the pathway to a prescient future.

Sometimes, the medicine-induced dream-influencing doesn’t happen for a few months, or the fitful sleep arrives in dribs and occasional drabs that leads to a dribbling memeing.  I discovered, through trial and error, and the momentary comparative experience, that Benicar, my blood pressure medication, was indicating horrific nightmares for many months.

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Dave Brubeck and the Reach for 92

Incomparable Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck died of a heart attack yesterday, one day shy of his 92nd birthday today.  He died on the way to a cardiologist appointment.  It’s hard to argue with the loss of a life at 90, but the Jazz universe will miss Dave Brubeck’s intense energy and dedication to cause because he brought mainstream popularity to chunky and abruptly pleasing music.

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Writing Letters to a Dead Man: Dr. Howard Stein in Memoriam

Yesterday, I received the one phone call I’d been dreading for over 30 years: “Howard Stein is dead.”  It turns out Howard died back on October 14, 2012 after an eight-day hospitalization, but I didn’t learn of his death until yesterday.   I knew he was deathly ill the last year, and when his surgeon recently refused to do a final operation, Howard told me his heart had finally turned against him and become a “ticking time bomb.”

As I paged back through my calendar for the last six weeks to memorialize the final events of my life with Howard, I reflected back on our final telephone conversation on October 1, 2012.  He told me how much he appreciated the letter I wrote celebrating his 90th birthday.  He said he read the letter every day.  That meant a lot to me.  He was my master.

One the first day of October, Howard and I left it that Janna and I would visit him in Stamford, and that he would check his doctor schedule and call me back to let us know what day would work best.

I never heard from him again.

A week later he was in the hospital — never to see the sky again.

As you can see in the graphic below, I tried to call him on October 5th and 11th to check on our visit date.  There was nobody home when I called.  On October 22 and November 13 I wrote him letters — our one, ancient, guaranteed way of always getting in touch when time and tide and humanity and the phones failed us — to inquire about the visit.

I had no idea was writing to a dead man.

Now I know how Bartleby really felt working in the Dead Letter Office.

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