I keep thinking to myself that I could manage all this better if only the world would shut up about it for a bit. There is constant chatter and no real news and for people like me who are anxious and readily self-isolating, far too much frightening stuff designed to rein in the cavalier and the rebellious.

A while ago in talking to a friend about the mass media and the internet I mentioned that the difficulty isn’t finding information, it’s dealing with the firehose of messaging coming at you and filtering out that which is not only useful but true.

Years ago I loved part of an English history lecture discussing the rise of newspapers in England. It coincided with the popularity of gin, and the professor spoke of how the press inflamed the issues of the day for a readership dealing with the gin epidemic, particularly in London. Reading newspapers, getting intoxicated, and arguing politics during an addiction crisis. You see? The present not only has echoes of the past, sometimes it’s a hell of a good mimic, too.

My friend was amused by the firehose analogy, I’m not sure where I first heard it. My sense is we all deal with dialing it down in our own ways. I like watching the world news and the Missus joins me up to a certain point, but I think how depressing it can be wears on her. I find myself becoming very deliberate in choosing information sources, and dearly missing some that have retired and/or simply vanished, certain programs or columnists.

If I could change one thing about the public discourse in American politics, it would be to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. The swift boating of John Kerry was dreadful enough. Al Gore never said he invented the internet (he correctly said he sponsored legislation to fund ARPANET). The distortions piled on Hillary Clinton were worse. Yet so long as they succeeded, they increased. And you can see where that has gotten us.

Science has measured and discussed the positive and negative effects of ions for years. I’ve heard that the ocean shore carries a different ionic charge, which can be energizing for many critters, and as proof  I give you our Edie girl:

On the morning of our third day at Tomales Bay, we headed out to exercise the dogs. It was still a little cool as we drove out to one of Point Reyes’  beaches. When we got there, we had the beach to ourselves; I’m always impressed with how high the waves are. It seems to me as if the water is higher out where the waves form than it is along the waterline itself.

Edie was just nuts from the get-go. There’s something about the beach that fires that little girl up beyond belief.

She ran loop-de-loops, tongue lolling out, and took off for the hinterlands then came charging back

Ernie tried to give chase upon occasion, but since his injuries when Edie rolled him a few years ago, he’s no longer a sprinter.

Boy chases girl — sounds familiar, huh?

If girl escaped boy this often, we wouldn’t have a population crisis.

We ran and chased her some, but the difference was Edie had channeled the Energizer bunny. She just kept going and going.

When she ran down into the water, Mrs. O said, “she’s not getting back into the truck.”

And she was quite a (happy) mess.

At times she outran the camera lens.

And still she kept going.

I took 35 pictures down on that beach, and this is just a sample of them. I’ve put them in chronological order, except that the first Berserker image up there was actually one of the very last I shot; here’s the larger image of Edie girl toward the end of our walk (and her run).

As we left, we put her in the back of the truck, to keep the wet sand out of the backseat. Softie that I am, however, I opened the back window so she could see us. Oops! She shouldered the window open and tried to squeeze into the cab, bringing a lot of wet sand with her.  I forced her back into the bed of the truck, half-closed the window, and on our ride back I think she came to like being back there, as she got better sniffs.

As far as the ionic effect, the web sites say positive ions cause the ill winds, scirrocos, mistrals, the Santa Anas and bitter winds. But down at the beach it’s negative ions that have such a positive effect. After seeing how happy our Edie is when she hits the beach, you don’t have to convince me.

She won’t stagger across the floor as if drunk again, her hind quarters listing to one side as she navigates from rug to rug on the treacherous hardwood floor.

She won’t suffer incontinence any more, or the indignity of a quick rub down of her hind quarters with a rubbing alcohol–soaked washcloth, to clean her up.

She won’t struggle up any stairs again, needing one of us to reach an arm under her ribs to help her galumph laboriously up stairs she used to sprint up in a few bounds.

It was time, and today for the final time Edie heard that magic word “ride” before going to the SPCA.

More than our other dogs she was an independent spirit, and bold, too. Many years ago we visited friends in the San Juan islands and went for a dog walk before we caught our ferry back to Anacortes. Except Edie caught wind of something she had to investigate. A deer? Perhaps.

She took off through the woods as we called and called, looking for her. We had visions of missing our boat. Finally she came crashing through the undergrowth after her adventure. I was so happy to see her and so ticked off at her—she spent the rest of that walk on the leash while the two other dogs wandered free.

And yet some part of me was proud of her, for her adventure.

I’ve written elsewhere about the time she was enlisted to free a least tern colony of jackrabbits, before the delicate birds returned to breed. I still volunteer there, and as I look at the colony with all its shallow nests and shells, mimicking beach habitat, I remember my girl bounding around inside the fence, nose to the ground, looking for any sneaky rabbits that remained.

When she was young and she had secured some prize, she joyously bounded the length of the house with her treat or toy held high, “I’ve got the pri-ize, Look at me! I’ve got the pri-ize!” then collapse on a dog bed and enjoy her treasure.

Walk was her favorite word, even better than dinner or ride, and walk we did, long routes stretching all four directions from home, routes she knew and explored with her eyes, and ears and especially nose, routes she knew in ways I never will, in ways she could never express to me, except through the body language of a dog, letting me know what places interested her and which directions she wanted to take.

By the end she stayed home more and more. She’d watch as Nora and I prepared to go out, her head would lift, sometimes her shoulders rose with effort, but her body was no longer as able, and she would slump back down on the bed.

Last Wednesday morning she surprised me by following us to the door, insisting to come along, so I brought her out to the shoreline park she knew so well, had known for the 14 years she was with us. She limped along with Nora and me, sniffing and exploring one last time. I’m so glad she had that last visit.

We named her Edie Adams, the wife and comedienne partner of Ernie Kovacs. And for a decade she was a partner with our dear old Ernie.

We did the DNA testing thing, which re-affirmed what we knew, Black Lab Mix, and surprised us with news of some Boxer, Airedale, English and Irish Setter, too. She used her forepaws more than any of our other dogs, batting objects to manipulate them, as Boxers are prone to do. We wondered if her independence was an expression of that Airedale and Boxer heritage.

She was bold, the boldest dog we’ve ever had. When raccoons raised a nightly ruckus at the back of our yard, both dogs would charge out our back deck. Ernie would stop at the top of the stairs and look back to me, what should we do now, boss? But Edie never slowed. She led the charge the length of the backyard, ready to establish her authority.

While Ernie was the typical dog who wants to be people, ever shepherd watchful of us, Edie was always a dog, happy to be a dog, making sense of the world in her easy-going Labrador way. And oh, she could be joyous.

Good friends of ours are done with pets. The loss is too great, and I understand the heart ache. I still counter-balance it with the joy of days and months and years of companionship, despite our sadness today.

Goodbye, our sweet old girl. We will always miss you.

To wit, JellyJules over at Thinking About … recently posted:

WordPress has put in too many updates, and now I can’t figure out how to update my blogroll. There are a few blogs over there that aren’t active anymore, and I’d like to remove them. An old blog friend popped by awhile ago, and is maybe starting up her blog again, and I wanted to add her back to my blogroll. No can do. I looked online, and I can add new widgets, but I can’t figure out how to edit the one I have.

So we messaged and I went nosing around Site Admin for a bit. She’s right. In no place does it say “blogroll” any more. You have to go to “Links” or “All Links” and once you’re in that page you can update your blogroll. It’s reasonably intuitive.

I like what she had to say about old blogging friends, and admire her for hanging in there. I still have ideas for reviving this old thing, too. For one thing, that “About” dates back to the Dubya years!  I haven’t given up the ghost yet–and hats of to you, JellyJules, for still posting.

Granted, that was only 15,000 fewer miles than my first car, a ’67 Ford Fairlane I bought for (I think) $600. But all those old cars (a Chevy Nova, a Dodge Aspen, and a Mitsubishi Mirage) had far more years on them and usually a cost a good bit more in upkeep, too. I had the Aspen for most of a decade, but it lived in San Francisco and went weeks without being driven.

I bought the Toyota in part for the much ballyhooed durability of the better Japanese makes, and I have to say, nearly 120,000 miles later, it has out-performed expectations. Oh, I’ve spent on a few repairs and had a few flats. If there were any recurring nuisances it was the hubcaps that kept flying off like enraged girlfriends, spinning away in their own orbits. I’ve bought at least two boxes of the cheap hubcaps, and long ago figured out that all four don’t  have to match.

Just the two on each side.

I drove the car to Thanksgiving in Minnesota once, taking my old German shepherd Ernie Kovacs along with me, just at the end of his puppydom. As we drove across Nevada he stared out the back window, perhaps wondering at all the miles unraveling behind us, how far we were from home. When we met my wife and mother-in-law at MSP he went berserk. He recognized me as I approached, but we were all bundled up and he was intent on me, so didn’t ID them until doors opened and they stooped inside, where the very air was rent by the furball explosion of him leaping from front to back as he knocked the rearview mirror and us akimbo in his astonishment to meet his mom dog so far away.

Humans! They’re so amazing.

We also visited friends in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Louisville. On our route home we stopped at Graceland, then drove like bats out of hell all the way to Flagstaff in just a bit over a day.

The Corolla has been to Portland and Seattle several times, even up to Vancouver once, several times to Los Angeles, Balboa island in Orange County and perhaps down to San Juan Capistrano. Frequently up to Mendocino and Napa, and countless times up to the Gold Country in the Sierra foothills.

Lots of miles with friends and even more with the backseat serving as the mobile den for four different dogs. On occasion, for guest dogs visiting us, too. A few cats have traveled back there, also, but they were all pretty eager to forget the experience.

It’s strange saying goodbye to a car I’ve had so long. Of course it isn’t like losing a human, or even a pet. But somehow it’s more than tossing out an old sofa, TV, or sweatshirt.

The missus was kind enough to patch holes worn in the seat fabric with heavy-duty denim patches which have held up very well, even as the hounds launch themselves in and out of the vehicle. In the back of my mind I was glad of that, thinking that someday I’d sell the car to a struggling student or maybe a single parent, glad to have reliable if not luxurious transportation. That old four-banger engine just kept on running, so why not?

Then the State of California offered me a cool grand to sell it to them for parts, to get it off the road. Part of the deal is I have to turn it over at least 60 days before the registration is due, or pay for the damn smog check, too.

So it won’t be reliable for someone else for a few more years. Although part of me hopes the salvage yard recognizes a good engine when it sees one, and like a transplanted heart, it will keep running a while longer, for someone else.

That’s probably enough anthropomorphizing—except to say I hope that if any part of the dear old heap does have any mileage left, whoever owns it appreciates its reliability, too.

The book shelves of my first apartments were also easily ordered. After a decade and a half in San Francisco, I moved, following a job across the bay that kept me busy for months. But one Saturday morning I woke with the usual to-do-list, which was interrupted by the realization I’d never properly sorted my books. Many simply came out of the boxes, which I’d filled by size and shape, not subject.

It was a nice weekend—my recollection is it was blustery outside, but inside I stacked piles of books, moving between bookcases in my living room, kitchen, and bedroom. American fiction, travel guides, a stack for Anne Tyler, movie references, et cetera.

I respect the decimal system of Dewey, but my categories are more organic. A History of Eating in America next to a Chinese cookbook; the collected Grantas shared space next to Graham Greene because they fit well.

Then I got married, and my books snugged into boxes for two more moves. Once we bought this house, it again became a matter of catch-as-catch-can. I crammed new books into available crannies, meaning whatever organization I had before meeting the missus is utterly dyslexic now.  Adding a stairwell from kitchen down to garage meant adding a ground floor mudroom replete with new shelves—they got Nero Wolfe plus most of the books I read  between 2012 and 2015.

In an effort to lose the war against entropy a bit more slowly, I’m rearranging clusters and sorting books into stacks in my back-of-the-garage furnace- and computer-room grotto, nearly dismayed at how stricken I am with bibliophilia. Am I more chaotic now, or is it that I have that many more books to sort?

As certain stacks grow, the miscellaneous piles are condensed:

Complicating matters is Pippi, one of Mrs. O’s two semi-feral cat sisters, who wants to use the stacks as stepping stones, furthering the catty-wampus chaos. I’m allergic to cats, so finding all the little caches of cat fur from her siesta sites doesn’t help. And was it the softness of the paper used in an over-sized reference that led her to use it for sharpening her claws?

It all seemed so easy when it fit neatly into shelves over my bed! No matter—I try to keep in mind that I do this for fun. And some part of me is amused to find all those authors from disparate places cheek by jowl next to each other.

I got these Tinker toys as a Christmas gift, perhaps in the hope of encouraging my engineering skills. And there I was, with my nose stuck in a book.

Looking to pare down possessions, I look at this stuff now and wonder if anyone might want it, before I toss it out.

My brewing pal Dave and I have been discussing whether we, as individuals, have changed more or the world around us has changed more.

I don’t know that we have an answer. I mean, some part of me feels like the kid who fooled around with this erector set

or those tinker toys is numerous incarnations ago. I have opinions on culture, history, religion that that kid hadn’t even begun considering.

And yet, at the same time, the world …

My father told me that he remembers sitting at the kitchen table in 1960 with my mom’s mom, his mother-in-law, who worried that electing a Catholic president would mean the White House took orders from the Vatican.

Papists, you know.

Back then these gifts were brand new, well before the Beatles, Vietnam, hippies, X-rated movies, Watergate, Japanese imports, the hostage crisis, Reagonomics, cable TV, personal computers, the Sony walkman (revolutionary, baby! Mobile music!), the Soviet collapse, the internet, and social media, let alone the Cubs winning the world series.

Back then TV dinners were a culinary advance. Nobody cared about cooking with whole foods. If Tang was good enough for the astronauts, it was good enough for us. Hell, tobacco was advertised as healthful.

Doubt me? Check out this ad I recently found cheekily mounted in a bar in downtown Minneapolis:

I heard someone describe how frequently even the cells of our bodies are swapped out over time. Incrementally exchanged. Molecularly, we are made of different stuff, if we have not become different people.

Sometimes it seems the world has been swapped out, too.

The metamorphosis of entertainment is huge. The movie Summer of ’42 has teenage boys speculating on whether you can spot a virgin—they think it might be something in how she walks. It was poignant in 1971, when the movie came out. In the hyper-sexualized world of 2017, with Game of Thrones mores, that sweet naïveté seems different on a cellular level.

Give the kid an erector set, let him learn how to build things—a cutting edge toy in those can-do days after we won The War Against Fascism, as we Americans were remaking the world. Coca-cola capitalism marches on, tooth decay be damned!

Wait, is The War Against Fascism over?

Looking for pictures of it now, I realize how much we took it for granted. In the first decade we lived here I can find pictures of our trees, the natal lilies, the roses, and both butterfly bushes (which tended to grow crazy fast, blossom profusely, then die off just as suddenly). But hardly anything of that wall of geraniums.

We had to replace the trellis behind it when our dear old Doberman/German Shepherd mix Vinnie in his dotage slipped on the steps and fell between the stairs and the trellis, knocking it down.

It was a rainy dark winter morning, and I heard the commotion of the trellis breaking. I hustled down the wet step and found the sweet old boy under the stairs, wedged in among gardening supplies. He wagged when he saw me, as if to say, Wow, am I glad to see you!

We bought a new trellis and attached it to the stairs. The geraniums thrived for a few more years, and then a gradual die off began. We trimmed back the dead leaves and vines, did what we could to encourage it, and took it for granted no more, but it was gone.

When we pulled out the rotting planter, a large old rectangular thing about four feet wide, we could see how the roots had grown through the bottom. This house had a fire half a century ago, and debris was dumped in the back. Mrs. O has tried three times now to keep a hydrangea  at the foot of the stairs and theorizes that something toxic got buried there, which has hindered the hydrangeas—might the roots of the geraniums found it, too?

Or had the geraniums merely lived out their lives? It was happily mature when we arrived.

A couple years went by, and then, one day when we were weeding the base of the hydrangea, there we found them, deep among the invasive spider plants and the tenacious grasses grubbing for rich wet soil at the base of the hydrangea. Two little vines of geranium, the unmistakable faint purplish watermark staining the leaves. Shoots from a dormant root?

I delicately extracted them, with tiny root balls in dirt, replanting them with rich compost, tending them on our sun-drenched deck until they grew so strong we moved them down to the yard, and began looking for a planter.

In the meantime, they grew so happily they were crawling up into the deck stairs, and it was tough to extract them to replant. But we managed, even trying to intertwine vines with the trellis.

We’d have liked a bigger planter, but this should suffice. And we’re happy to have geraniums again, thriving and reaching for the trellis, our leafy resurrection.

It began with a knock on the door one evening and a neighbor asking if our Edie girl was home. As the dogs go nuts barking when anyone knocks, her location was evident. On the sidewalk in front of our house a young man was holding a shiny black lab by the collar talking to people in the neighborhood, looking for the owner.

She had three tags, one for a microchip, one from a Glenn county vaccination clinic, and the other had her dog license number for Glenn county. No name, no owner’s phone number.

As we debated what to do, I said we had a gate to our backyard, so we could keep her safe. Which is how she ended up spending the night with us. Our little Nora belle loved having a new partner in play, even though she was a bit scared of how much larger her new black lab playmate was. Edie was friendly, but a bit put off by the high energy stuff. She growled a few times, establishing her turf.

As the animal shelter was closed (for the next two days!) we called the non-emergency police line, who told us even the shelter’s drop off cages were closed due to flooding from the recent rains.

So it looked like she would be spending the night with us. As she had a sturdy pink collar, we called her Pinky.

She certainly was hungry. She snarfed everything we put down for her. She went on our regularly scheduled walks that night and the next morning. She was pretty well-behaved, and generally attentive, looking to us for signals as to what was expected, and slept upstairs with us.  She started to fit right in.

I called the police the next morning, and they said they would send someone around. Which was when I realized I wanted to have a picture of her. So I tried and tried, but she generally kept her nose down, and when I did call her and she looked at me, by the time I hit the cell phone shutter she was looking down again!

I realized I was getting attached to her.  We definitely did not need a third dog and a lot of big puppy energy! But when the cop showed up and I answered all the questions for his report, before she obediently hopped into the caged enclosure in the back of the police car, I realized I was going to miss her. I asked the officer to let us know what happened for her.

But no one called. So the next day the animal shelter was open I visited and asked. They had had a lot of dogs turned in, but figured out which one I was asking about. They had contacted her owner, who was still in the area and had picked her up.

Good luck Pinky—whatever your other name is.  Whatever happens in canine memory, I hope you remember us as fondly as we remember you, and I hope you have a good long life. Oh, and after about three dozen tries, I finally got my picture.

And after the maddening week we’ve had in American politics, reading old Salinger stories was therapeutic for me. Like meeting a sane old friend! And yet—

It had been decades since I read Seymour — An Introduction, and the dun-colored mare of my take is here, but, since I read it oh, so, long ago, in college, there was much more that struck me about Seymour this time through. Especially some of the freaking characters.

I’d forgotten all that.

In a sort of mnemonic homogenization, the blender of memory had turned the story into Buddiness and Seymourness and I forgot the full cast. Including:

His Grandpa Zozo, a Polish-Jewish carnival clown who drove from immense heights to small containers of water.

The woman having an extramarital affair who comes home to find a balloon on her bed.

His brother Waker, “our monk” who practiced juggling cigar boxes.

His mother Bessie, the vaudevillian dancer, who had lost her twin sister in Ireland to “galloping undernutrition,” and for whom “Security, in any form, has had a fatal attraction.”

The New York City police Bessie consulted in finding a haberdasher, presumably in an act of Celtic unity, “since our Bessie, when we were children, habitually took her knottiest problems to the nearest thing we had in New York to a Druidic oracle—the Irish traffic cop.”

And I haven’t really gotten to “Charlotte the harlot” yet.

But once again I’ve run out of time. I’m going to post this, reserving the right to amend it in the next few days—not that the delay will matter to my “readership” as it were.