Obligatory Weekend Pictures

 

Iowa has the virtue of being halfway between Missouri and Minnesota. This past weekend, it also had the virtue of springtime weather best appreciated from a campsite. Dave packed some trail mix, I packed a tent and some sporks, and we met up in central Iowa in order to...

 

- Wander around the University of Iowa campus.

 

- Camp at Lake MacBride.

 

- Wonder how they decided on this amount for the fine. I smell a compromise.

 

- Eat at this place. Its green awnings and shiny Diner sign beckoned.

 

- Giggle at this typo. (Except it's not typed... hmmm. Should it be called a Paint-o?)

For your own amusement (and mine), please caption this picture. 

Lunch with the BabaBelievers

 

This place looks like something from Disneyland, right?

It's actually a hospital in Puttaparthi, India, that provides specialty care free of charge to anyone and everyone. Their motto is "Love All. Serve All," which is a philosophy that I admire greatly. I met two retired doctors who have been involved in the project. The idea of volunteering with them appealed to me immediately, so when they invited me to lunch to talk more about it I jumped at the chance.

 

The lunch conversation was, in a word, unique. Rather than talking about hospital volunteer opportunities, it veered oddly toward spiritualism.

Two years ago, I went on a day-trip to visit the shrine of a controversial "Saint" in Guatemala (follow the link and scroll all the way down). In some ways, this lunch talk gave me similar feelings of admixed disbelief-awe-confusion-bemusement-fascination. 

 

I'm skeptical of everything they said, but my lunch hosts believed in the stories so ardently that it was kind of riveting to listen to them talk about it. At the very least, it inspires a sense of wonder when a person expresses deep faith in something, even if that something is impossible for you to believe. So rein in your doubt and join me for a zesty ride while I relay the highlights!

 

1. The hospital was founded by Sathya Sai,

                  aka Baba Sai,

                           aka Swami,

                                     aka Guru.



aka Baba Sound of Music

 

2. According to my lunch hosts:

 - He could conjure rings and other jewelry onto your fingers

 - He could pick mangos from a tamarind tree

 - After being inspired to build the hospital, he made the 9-year project take only 1 year.

 

Give Baba Sai a high five for building that Disney Castle Hospital in one year!

3. They told me three stories about the Swami's magic.

 - A wealthy old American couple came to visit him in India. While there, the husband died. Three days later, his grief-stricken wife went to Baba Sai. Baba told her the husband was not dead, and sent her back to the hospital. Down in the morgue, the dead man woke up and told everyone that Baba had brought him to life again.

- A young couple got in a car accident. The man's legs were crushed, and the woman died. Baba Sai told the man that if someone would give the woman an injection (...of anything), Baba would use the injection to infuse the life energy back into her. One saline injection later and *poof* the woman came back to life. Meanwhile, all the shattered glass from the car accident appeared in their kitchen.

- An old guy was told he had lung cancer. He refused any treatment until he could go to India and ask Baba Sai's advice. Baba pointed to the guy's chest and said, "I cancel your cancer. No more cancer."  The man eventually allowed doctors to take a biopsy while having open-heart surgery for something else 3 years later, and the biopsy showed only scar tissue.



Canceling cancer delights Baba Sai.

So many questions about this...
- It's certainly different from my own beliefs, but different is not necessarily bad. I'm willing to think of him as someone who tried to help people, but reluctant to accept that he's some type of magic man. Am I wrong to doubt?
- It's unusual to meet highly-educated people with extreme beliefs, like these two doctors who believe in all the *poof* and reanimation stories. Can extremism in one domain (spirituality) be separated from all the other domains of life (profession)? Can you doubt someone in one domain while trusting them in another?
- They invited me to India to visit the hospital for a week, stay in an ashram, observe how the hospital runs, and lay the groundwork for returning to volunteer with them after residency. Given that I completely support their goal of providing quality free healthcare to the poor, but I think the Swami miracle stories are probably hooey, would I be a hypocrite if I volunteered there?
- Is it possible for something pure (like a good, honest, well-run charitable hospital) to be built on something dubious?
 

To everything, there is a season. A time to mourn.

Have you ever known that something was gone--known it as a cold, hard, fact; carried that fact with you every day--but the grief didn't strike you until much later?

Last week, a woman came to the eye clinic. She came toward the end of the day, all the way from some forsaken holler in rural Missouri, accompanied by every possible member of her family. She had her sister with the hooded sweatshirt, and her other sister with the home perm, and her dad with the faded spot on the back pocket of his jeans where he always carries the can of Skoal chew, and her mom in the wheelchair that she's been in ever since she lost both legs just below the hip in that accident on the railroad tracks.

She didn't want to come to the doctor's office alone. After several weeks of headaches behind her right eye, she had gone to see an optometrist near her home town. She'd never had her eyes checked before. At that optometry exam, the vision in her right eye was so poor that she could barely see a hand waved in front of her face. He dilated her pupil, examined her retina, and said that her eye had "tumors everywhere." He told her to travel to St Louis for an urgent exam with an eye malignancy specialist. She was terrified.

When we examined her that afternoon, it turned out that what the optometrist had thought might be tumors were actually scars from a retinal infection that had long-since burned out. That led to this conversation:

"When did you notice that the vision in your right eye was blurry?"

"A while."

"About how long ago? Think back to when you were a little girl. Did you have good vision then?"

"No, I never saw much from that eye. Not as long as I can remember."

"Has it gotten any worse?"

"No, it's always been this blurry my whole life as far as I can tell. It hasn't been a big deal."

We explained that she didn't have cancer, that her poor vision was from scars that had probably formed when she was very very young, that she didn't have any active infection in the eye anymore, and that the eye wasn't the cause of her headaches. Her family was extremely relieved. They hugged. They smiled. They started gathering their things to leave. But she paused a long time and then asked:

"So what can you do to bring back my vision?"

We gently explained that we don't have a way to bring back her vision. There's nothing we can do to reverse the damage from scars like hers.

And that's when the very surreal moment happened.
"You mean I'm blind in my right eye?"
She started to cry. First a sniffle, then tears, then crying. Sobbing really.

She'd had poor vision in her right eye her entire life.
She had known it. She had lived with it.
She had never asked for answers about it.
She had never looked for any help for it.
In that moment, her right eye was the same as it had always been.
But suddenly after 34 years of knowing it, she realized it.

Sometimes grief comes late, but it hurts just the same.
 

Quantifying Gratitude

First, a bit of background:
We generally take it for granted that commodes in the US can handle flushing just about anything. In addition to toilet paper, many a goldfish, car key, and Lego block can go down the pipes without any consequences. However, the plumbing infrastructure isn't quite as robust in most parts of Central America, so instead of flushing paper down, it all goes into a bathroom wastebasket instead. Hence, signs like this one in a bathroom in Mexico:

The where-should-paper-go aspect of this isn't what made me want to take a picture. Instead, what struck me about this sign was "Thank."
One single Thank.
How come people always say "Thanks" or "Many thanks"? It's always a vague plural.
Shouldn't the quantity of thanks be proportional to the size of the favor?
If something was appreciated but really wasn't a big deal, why don't we just give it one Thank?
If something deserves gratitude, why don't we quantify how many Thanks it gets?
For example:
 - You gave me a piece of gum after lunch. One Thank!
 - You watered my plants while I was away on vacation. Fourteen Thanks!
 - You saved my entire family from a burning building. Nine hundred fifty-three Thanks!

(And just for the record, I do think that avoiding overflowing someone's toilet warrants more than one Thank.)
 

I had a match, but she had a lighter

OKAP exam is done!
And now, for the best trip of the year...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpdA605FZ5E

 

Yep. That solves everything.

This week, I came home to find a surprise box in the mail.
Better yet, the surprise box was from Dave.
Even better still, the surprise box from Dave was full of this:

It doesn't matter that I'm spending every waking minute studying this week. Cookies fix that.

It doesn't matter that today I did practice tests until my eyes were bleary; until I couldn't remember whether I had stopped to eat lunch or not; until I wasn't sure if I was even wearing pants or not. Cookies fix that.

It doesn't matter that the bracket I filled out for March Madness had Georgetown playing Gonzaga in the final championship game. Instead, I have cookies.

I'm pretty sure cookies can solve just about anything. They're absorbent enough to clean up BP oil spills. They're caloric enough to feed the famine-stricken. They must have a use in the cure for cancer, and a role in writing the next great American novel. They'll still be tasty with cold milk as we stare down global warming. I don't know why anyone bothered inventing CPR, because they should've just tried using cookies.

My point is that through the delirium of a winter that's been too long and a week that's been too hard, getting a box of cookies in the mail makes all the difference. Thanks Dave.

An old cowboy's long ride

For a large part of my childhood, an old cowboy named Hulen Rogers rented a little house next to ours. He was already old when I met him, and just got older.

He was relentlessly in search of a job doing anything cowboy-related. He didn't have a phone of his own, so he'd come over to our house and give my dad 25-cents per call, working his way down the job postings listed in the back of niche magazines like Horse 'n Cow and Ranch Digest and Cow 'n Horse. (Ok, I made up those titles, but I swear something like them exists and he subscribed to all of them).

His phone pitch was always the same:
"This is Hulen Jack Rogers. I train cuttin' horses. I'm lookin' for a job, and I'm standing by ready to come out there to work for you any day."

When he got too old to "train cuttin' horses," he kept calling, saying that he could string barbed-wire fences and exercise the older livestock. When he got too old for that, he kept calling, saying that he could work as a barn man. When he got too old for that, he kept calling, and got a job sitting in a tall tower on a mountaintop watching for forest fires.

All those phone calls drove me crazy then.
Now I look back and feel amazed by his work ethic.

He used to bring his guitar over to our house and play old cowboy songs. Ridiculous awful songs with lyrics like "Bumby-o, Bumby-o, chewin' on your gummy-o," that went on and on, agonizingly, endlessly, badly.

I used to dread the sight of Hulen walking across our driveway carrying a guitar.
Now I look back and realize I met one of the last authentic singing cowboys.

He would start every interaction with "Whatcha doin'..." then end his own question by filling in exactly what you were doing. If you were cooking eggs, he'd lead with "Whatcha doin'...cookin' eggs?" If you were watching paint dry, "Whatcha doin'...watchin' paint dry?" If you were juggling flaming torches with your hands while embroidering a rendition of The Last Supper with your feet, he'd ask "Whatcha doin'...uhhh....whatcha doin'?"

The endless litany of "Whatcha doin" set my teeth on edge.
"Whatcha doin'...bracin' yourself for me to ask whatcha doin'?"
Now I look back and think about a lonely old man who wanted to talk but didn't know how to start a friendly conversation.

I appreciate Hulen more and more as time goes by. The older I get, the more funny and wise he gets. I've visited him every time I go back to Round Valley, because he's honestly become one of my favorite locals. The last time I was there, he spun a long story about the time his least favorite horse bucked him off in a canyon and ran down the mountain without him. "That damn fool horse run straight into a ranger from the Forest Service. The ranger thought he'd do me a favor by catchin' him. I reckon the horse won that one, though."

Today, I found out Hulen died.
It turns out that I miss him.