It's REAALLY DIFFICULT to write one of these posts with a puppy underfoot! I can see now why raising babies is a young person's game. You don't get any sleep at all, do you? Even our Louis, who is so much better and smarter than all the other puppies, still only has the bladder the size of a peanut, and has to go out every couple of hours day and night. I haven't slept this poorly since I had to work for a living. No, not even then--it's since we had babies in the house.
This morning I was taking Louis out for his third walk of the day, and I noticed he was trying to hide something in his mouth. He finally admitted that it was a chewed-up Tootsie Pop. I don't know where he got it--it's been many Halloweens since we had them in the house--and I don't know if he found it all chewed up like that or did it himself. It looked like most of the chocolate center was still present, but I've heard about chocolate and dogs so I worriedly called the vet.
They weren't worried. "You know that Tootsie Pops don't really have any chocolate in them, don't you? Just chocolate flavor and brown food coloring." "er, uh, sure, I knew that!" "Just keep an eye on him and let us know if he vomits or acts funny". He didn't, so I stopped worrying about him and looked up Tootsie Pops to see if I had been lied to all these years. I learned (a) they do have some cocoa in them (a bit more cocoa than salt, which can't be that much), and (b) Tootsie Rolls were invented in 1908 but it took a hundred years for them to be certified Kosher.
Now here's our story.
Kathleen has a superpower. She can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, any complete stranger, and within five minutes they are fast friends who have shared all of their deepest secrets, things they might not have told even their spouse. She can build a bond of intimacy over a shared wait in line, a serving of eggs at a greasy spoon diner, or a “shushh” from the presiding librarian. She can learn things from a coworker of mine she met two minutes ago that I hadn’t gleaned in ten years of working side-by-side. (I’m aware that this may also say something about my own super-antipower.)
Kathleen uses her powers only for good, and recently she decided she was going to do some good for herself. Having seen on the news that doses of covid vaccine had started to be available beyond medical professionals, but not finding any mention of it locally, she struck up a phone conversation with one of the staff at her doctor’s office. Within minutes she had built that magic bond, and gleaned that there was some talk of doctors being able to alert the Calvert County Health Department of patients needing (and therefore eligible for) covid vaccination as soon as practicable. Kathleen is immuno-compromised (lupus) so she certainly qualifies, and her new friend promised to nag the doctor until he sent Kathleen’s name in.
When her friend alerted her that the necessary name-dropping to the Health Department had been effected, she began her second campaign. She called up the County Health Department and found someone in the office handling covid who would speak to her. Again within minutes, she made fast friends with that person, who promised to scour the recent communications to the office and, finding Kathleen’s name, she would proceed to nag her boss until he translated this doctor’s request into an appointment to receive the vaccine.
I’ve seen this amazing instant intimacy of Kathleen’s work many times in our years together, but never with so focused a purpose planned from the start and executed so efficiently. Within a couple of days, Kathleen had an appointment to get her first shot, right along with all those people who had conscientious doctors!
Oh hooray! The year-long nightmare might finally be coming to a close! Imagine shopping in a grocery store, being able to pick out the non-damaged fruit from the rejects rather than relying on a staffer there. Being able to go to the dentist, or the hair-cutters! Visiting our grand-kids!!
So last week, we took the trek to get Kathleen her first vaccine shot from the County Health Department, who had cleverly set up a drive-through vaccinarium in a local industrial park.
We were nervous. What if something goes wrong? We double-checked her paperwork and her ID, bundled Louis into the car, and off we went. The lines were relatively short, unlike the Florida horror stories we had seen on TV, and seemed well organized. Louis got a little overwhelmed from all the cars and masked health department workers, and started a non-stop barrage of yapping that made it hard to hear our instructions. At one point I panic-dropped Kathleen’s drivers license, and it quickly scuttled into an unreachable crevice between the front seat and the center console, but fortunately she had another valid ID in her wallet. Disaster averted! And just like that, Kathleen was next in line, and then was receiving her shot, with me sweating anxiously beside her and Louis going apoplectic in the back seat. A brief wait to make sure she didn’t drop dead from the injection, and we’re off for home, mission accomplished!
My own first injection would have to wait another week, mainly because (a) I don’t have Kathleen’s persuasive superpowers, but also because (b) my risk factors weren’t as high as hers, and (c) my doctor’s office seemed less amenable to referring me to the County (although (c) might just be a manifestation of (a)). At one point, my doctor’s office told me that they were expecting a load of vaccine themselves any day, so weren’t referring anybody anywhere else. I observed to them that this sounded like a business decision designed to benefit them rather than a medical decision designed to benefit me, and that finally softened their hearts and they referred me.
Yesterday we did the same drill for my vaccine shot as we had done for Kathleen’s, but without any of the panic. Even Louis seemed laid back in the presence of all the strange cars and people. After all, we were seasoned veterans at this now.
So now we both have had our first of two Moderna vaccination shots, with the second shots (supplies willing) coming in February. What a freeing experience! I feel so much better now after the shot, even though my arm is sore. My confidence that I can re-enter the world is returning. I know intellectually that it will take both shots before I am as immune as modern technology can make me, and further that even the partial benefit I get from one shot will take some time to materialize, but even so!
It’s funny, but my new-found feeling of invincibility actually started when I first received the email inviting me to the vaccinery to get the shot! Just because there’s no scientific evidence that any immunity is conferred by the vaccine before the shot is actually injected, that doesn’t mean that no extra protection is present. I refer you to a Harvard study that showed that a placebo could provide medical benefit even if you know you are only taking a placebo. They suggested that the mere act of participating in the ritual of medical care was enough to provide the benefit. If it works for taking a pill labeled “placebo”, it should work for signing up for a vaccine appointment too.
The word “immune”, by the way, is from the Latin im(not) • munis(serviceable). The parent word “mune” means not immune, or vulnerable. My current condition, and Kathleen’s, where we have some but not all of the immunity conveyed by the vaccine, is termed “half-mune”.
But being vaccinated doesn’t mean taking stupid risks. We both still wear our masks and wash our hands, and will continue to do so even after we get the second shot and our antibody titers rise to the full level.
And you should too! It’s only common sense, and common decency. A vaccinated person can still carry the disease to an un-inocculated (or “full-mune”) person, and can still act as an incubator for millions of little covid bugs to reproduce and mutate. When you think about almost a billion people around the world providing test chambers for those coronavirus germs, it’s no wonder we’re starting to see new and more dangerous variants emerging!
So continue to keep your distance, wash your hands, and for heaven’s sake wear the damn mask when you’re around other people! Provide the benefit to others, even if you don’t want it or don’t believe in it yourself. Apply the lesson of the old story about physicist Niels Bohr (or in some versions, Albert Einstein): when a visitor observed a horseshoe nailed over the great scientist’s door and asked if he really believed the superstition that this brought good luck, Bohr/Einstein replied, “No, of course I don’t believe that. But I’m told that the horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not.” As with horseshoes, so with facemasks.
Thanks for listening, and stay safe, Dorn 1/20/2021
I wanted to paint a tribute to the bakers of the pandemic. I asked my niece, Hallie, of the Wordy Baker blog, to pose a reference photo for me and the painting became a lot more: a tribute to baker Hallie, to kanelbolle, a kind of Scandinavian cinnamon roll, and to our Norwegian heritage. She is wearing an ethnic costume that she made, and I put a scene that I took from the window of Oslo City Hall in the background. I felt like I was on the right track when I kept getting hungry every time I worked on this painting. The Joy of Cooking has a term I like for fancy baked goods: “…Begin, if you like, with a loaf of whole wheat, which requires neither sifting nor kneading, and go on from there to more cunning triumphs”. Hallie’s blog post on how to make kanelbolle is here. I haven’t tried it yet, but the next time I want to be triumphant about something, I think that is a good candidate.
Kathleen met and fell in love with our new puppy Louis (pronounced “Louie”) from a picture of him she found on the internet. Just like Archie before him. And just like me, 45 years before that.
Louis was living at a labradoodle breeder/trainer’s house with his brothers and sisters. We had been thinking about adopting a new puppy to help complete our pack. Nobody could replace Archie, but we recognized we were better, happier people with a dog in the family.
We closed a deal as quickly as we could, then waiting anxiously until Louis was old enough to leave his mom and start a new life on his own. He would be 11 weeks old and ready on December 22, and we wanted him immediately after that. What could possibly be better than a puppy for Christmas!
There was but one significant obstacle to our plan: Louis lived in Kentucky, 700 miles away. That’s a good nine-hour drive, google says. We couldn’t just drive over and pick him up without violating our self-imposed coronavirus safety protocols, which included importantly that we don’t go into any public restrooms, anywhere, ever, until we’re vaccinated.
Why, oh why, didn’t we think about how we were going to get him when we arranged the adoption? It had been well into the fall and we had many month’s experience in not traveling anywhere that we couldn’t get back from before we needed a pee break. But too late now, we’ve made virtual eye-contact with Louis and now no one else will do, whether he lived in Kentucky or another world.
The breeders had the solution. For a few extra bucks they would arrange for an “angel” to fly from Kentucky to DC, round trip, bringing Louis as carry-on luggage. Pricey, but not as pricey as it could have been, and probably not any more expensive than us working out our own corona-proof road trip. We had a brief period of worry that nobody would be willing to brave an airplane flight so close to Christmas, but they found a stalwart soul. Problem solved!
*I’ve christened the new variant of covid-19 “covid-1Q” as a call-out to a fascinating novel I read a few years ago, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. The book (more…)
Or almost solved—the question remained: were we brave enough to go to the airport to pick Louie up? Second only perhaps to a public restroom, it’s hard for us phage-o-phobes to imagine a scarier place than a large international airport at Christmastime, full of people from all over the world. Including people from England, home of the new improved (from the virus’s point of view) coronavirus variant that I call “COVID-1Q”*.
The things we do for love! We made sure our travel “angel” was willing to meet us outside the airport buildings, at the passenger pickup curb. We bought some hazmat suits to supplement the face shields, masks and gloves that we wear to ordinary public places. We brought along some anti-covid wipes, and asked them to apply Louis’s flea medicine to his coat several days early, so we could give him a good covid wipedown the minute we got him without interfering with its effectiveness.
Then we waited. The days ticked by so slowly, as we waited for Louis to take up his new position in the Carlson pack. It was more stressful than waiting for Christmas! I practiced not getting any sleep (apparently Louis liked staying up until midnight, and then rising at 5 or 6 AM the next morning), and we bought two of every toy, treat, bed and jail we could think of, just in case.
The fateful day rolled around, December 23. Everything seemed to be “go” in Kentucky. We debated hopping in the car first thing in the morning, to make sure we weren’t late for the late-afternoon arrival, until we calmed down enough to realize that we’d be safer from the coronavirus vampires sitting at home than idling in a parking lot. We gave ourselves a reasonable amount of time and took off. And let’s just leave those tyvek suits behind, ‘kay?, they’re just too unwieldly (not to say silly-looking).
But where’s the beltway exit to the DC airport‽ Have they rearranged the entire city in the two years since I retired? We (Kathleen, Google maps and I) wound our way through the scenic part of Alexandria and finally found where they had hidden the new secret passageway to the airport. Some of our built-in spare minutes were lost, but we were still okay.
New scares awaited. The airport authority had apparently decided that the zombie apocalypse, with its drop in airline passengers, was the perfect time to set up construction crews to spiff up the airport. (This caused us some worry, but on reflection seems like a sensible decision.) Among the disruptions—the cell phone parking lot where we were to wait for our angel to let us know she’d arrived was closed for construction! More of our precious buffer minutes were lost!
The signs told us to go to the short-term parking lot, which they said was free if you were just waiting for a pickup. But that was within a multi-storey parking structure, which Kathleen felt was just too close to being trapped indoors with all those covid germs. So we exited there and headed for passenger pickup, planning to wait there. But oh no! Passenger pickup was closed for construction too! And unlike the cell waiting area, there were no instructions or detour signs here.
Prison Drawing, c. 1780 Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Where to go? The minutes were ticking by, and we were getting panicky! What if we can’t make contact and the travel angel has to make her scheduled flight back to Kentucky without making the dropoff! It’s hard to think when you’re frantic, and the whole airport complex, which must have circumnavigated four times looking for an opening, was starting to resemble one of those “imaginary prisons” that Giovanni Battista Piranesi drew (in the throes of a fever-induced delerium, it is said) back in the late 1700s.
The only place to pick up a passenger seemed to be at the passenger dropoff curb. We pulled in, immediately behind an airport police car with lights flashing, and hoped he was too busy with some other problem to notice that we were waiting right under the “No Waiting” sign.
We were in time. We called our angel, who was already wandering the airport, and told her of our new rendezvous point, and shortly after spotted her walking toward us with a bright orange backpack over her shoulder. In the backpack was Louis.
Louis took to me immediately, scoring me an immediate first goal in the “favorite parent” contest. I attribute this to my foresight in mailing the breeder a stinky T-shirt a couple of weeks ago to throw into Louis’s pen. (I offered to send something of Kathleen’s too, but she eschewed the idea. Ka-ching!)
Once he hopped into Kathleen’s lap, we forgot about our wipedown protocol. I told Kathleen, “he can’t have any covid, he’s TOO CUTE”. This isn’t dramatic license. I literally said those words out loud. (Don’t judge! This year, in this country, that is not the stupidest covid risk assessment I’ve heard. Not even close.)
The drive back home was mercifully uneventful. We let Louis sleep in a travel crate in the back during the drive home (“poor thing, he must be exhausted, taking two flights to get here”).
We (and Louis) took a while to recover from our respective travel adventures and start to get to know each other, but that’s a story for another day.
Thanks for listening, and Happy New Year!Dorn12/31/2020
Editor's note: this post contains an anachronism and an Easter Egg. Did you spot them?
Trentin Quarantino’s DOG ALMANACK * CHRISTMAS EDITION! *
It’s Christmas time! Are you and your dog ready? I think we can all agree that if anyone deserves to enjoy Christmas, it’s our dogs. They’ve got that good cheer even when the rest of us are grumpy, as might happen now and then, especially in a year with no movies, no restaurants, no travel, and no physical contact with non-nuclear loved ones. In fact, one could argue that they deserve Christmas more than we do!
So why shouldn’t they get it? A dog-year is only 52 days long (by the old rule that one human year = seven dog years). Why shouldn’t every dog-year include a dog-Christmas? If you agree, then your dog should be celebrating Christmas not only on Dec 25, but also on Feb 15, Apr 8, May 30, Jul 21, Sep 11, and Nov 2! Have you been short-changing your pooch??
Recent advances1 in biological science involving telomeres and mammalian DNA methylomes and whatnot have shown a logarithmic relationship between dog aging and years as measured by humans (I mentioned this before here). That relationship can be expressed by
Maybe, if you really want to do right by your pups, you should start by synchronizing their dog-Christmases with their physiological ages, using the above formula. This will result in more Christmases per people-year when they’re younger, balanced by fewer when they’re older.
Here’s a handy calendar of nonlinear dog-Christmases, each indicated by an orange highlight. It assumes Fido was born on Jan 1, 2021. These logarithmic formulas go kind of crazy when you put in values close to zero, so I started counting only when the dog has reached one nonlinear dog-year old, on Feb 26 (let’s face it, anyone younger than one year old doesn’t really get Christmas anyway).
This is great! When the dog is just a puppy, it seems like almost every day is Christmas! This is so great, in fact, that I’m thinking maybe it should be applied to humans too. Imagine if when you were young, you didn’t have to wait a whole 365 days for the next Christmas to roll around?
So I took the above dog formula and stretched it out to match a human life span, and produced a formula that provides more Christmases when you are young, balanced out by less when you are old, so that by the time you reach age 70, you will have experienced 70 Christmases.
If you used this formula to calculate when to celebrate human-Christmas:
you’d get 38 Christmases by the time you were ten years old!! You’d celebrate another eleven by the time you were twenty. Each decade thereafter would be fewer, until in your seventh decade you’d only get three. That’s not very many Christmases for us old folks, true, but you got ’em while you were young and could enjoy them better. That’s fair, right?
But I’ve strayed from my topic of dog-Christmas. Okay, so whenever you plan to celebrate Christmas with your dog, what’s an appropriate present? Here’s the list of what’s most popular with pups in 2020 (to be fair, this list is pretty much the same every year):
favorite
unfavorite
FIRST CHOICE: treats or any food.
SECOND CHOICE: toys, sticks, shoes, or any other object in the world.
THIRD CHOICE: dog DNA test, a dental cleaning, or fake antlers. Literally, the best you can hope for with these gifts is that they don’t mind them much.
And what to watch when celebrating dog-Christmas? I looked, but found relatively few dog-centric Christmas offerings on TV. The 12 Pups of Christmas sounded promising. It’s a Hallmark-y romcom that was redeemed (IMO) by having both romantic leads be unapologetic jerks that got to stay that way even after they found True Love. But the titular Labrador puppies, while they provided high-grade puppy eye-candy whenever on screen, actually had nothing at all to do with the plot. Come to think of it, Christmas didn’t have anything to do with the plot either.
Raised by Wolves, a new sci-fi series on HBO, while it seems good, didn’t fare any better as a dog-Christmas show. But at least it didn’t have a bait-and-switch title. The protagonists were rationalists who didn’t believe in religious sentimentality, and the wolves turned out to be metaphors for . . . well, I won’t spoil the plot by giving too much away.
Max
My best dog-Christmas find was that old stand-by, How The Grinch Stole Christmas. (Not any of the new, dreadful movies, though: it has to be the 1966 cartoon version, with Boris Karloff reading the story. Also acceptable would be simply reading the original story aloud to your doggie.) Now, this is a tale that can grip a canine’s imagination—the hero Max has adventures (snow!), existential crises (he has to wear fake antlers), and a satisfyingly triumphant conclusion (roast beast).
However, whenever, and with whom- or what-ever you are celebrating the holidays, may they be safe and joyous, and virus-free!
Till next time, Trentin “Tin-tin” Quarantino
Editor's note: did I happen to mention that Kathleen and I are getting a new puppy for Christmas? His name is Louis, and he'll be arriving on Christmas Eve Eve. What could be better than finding a new puppy under the Christmas tree! (Except of course there's no tree this year because, well, there's a new puppy.)
Thanks,
Dorn
12/15/2020
– Dorn’s transformation continues (from part 1) ….
My friend Elizabeth revealed to me some arcane wisdom that has been passed down from father to child in her family for generations: that the hair on an adult human body may change color, length, or distribution pattern, but the total amount remains constant throughout life. So far, at least, I can personally vouch for the accuracy of that observation.
For months now I have passed the long hours engaged in that pastime so popular among those of a particular age and culture in this country: making fun of people on TV who don’t take the coronavirus pandemic and protective measures seriously enough, or who are serious but just get it all wrong.
You know the people I’m talking about—those who cover their mouth but not their nose with their face mask, or vice versa; those who wear a mask into the grocery store but take it off to sneeze; and those who not only don’t wear a mask at all, but give you dirty looks if you do, as if you wearing a mask was somehow infringing on their right to catch covid.
It’s a wonderful game, the kind that othering was invented for: it’s lots of laughs, but only as long as the people you are making fun of are others, people in some category to which you yourself do not belong. The fun and games ended for me recently, when I realized that I was in that category.
I learned in Hazardous Waste training decades ago that a face respirator didn’t protect you from those toxic fumes if you tried to wear it over a beard. Though I haven’t trucked in HW for many years, I still always knew this truism, somewhere in the back of my mind. It has niggled at me all summer, but only broke through the surface tension to my waking mind a week or so ago. “Gee, I wonder if my beard is interfering with my face mask’s ability to filter the air I’m breathing?”
A quick test by holding my mask’s edges tight with my hands revealed the awful truth: because of my vanity and laziness (I hate shaving), I had basically been wearing a placebo on my face all year! Time to shave that sucker so my mask can do its job!
Despite the fact that if I didn’t shave I was going to die, I was hesitant. “What if I look silly?” My beard was pretty short, so maybe it would be all right. To see how I’d look, I decided to Photoshop a selfie and take the beard out, or at least the parts around my jaws where the face mask was gallantly trying and failing to seal the aerosol germs out.
Well, that’s not so bad! A casual observer might not notice any change at all (luckily my beard turned white years ago, and blends in with the natural Scandinavian pallor of my cheeks). I’m going do it!
There is another truism, knowledge passed down through the generations in my family, and known I suspect by all men with beards who have reached their third age: there is a point in one’s life when shaving a man’s beard no longer makes him look younger. Instead, it makes him look older. And not in the good way.
There’s no way to know in advance when this gaunt milestone will be reached, even with the technological miracle of Photoshop. But anyone with a beard to shave off will immediately know if he has passed that milestone since the last time he was cleanshaven.
I have.
Well, nothing to do for it but to mail-order some bigger masks designed to cover more of the face (I should have thought of that first!), and start letting the beard grow back in the newly-safe areas. Fortunately, I’m quarantined so the number of people I will shock with my newly haggard visage until the beard comes back will be small. And it doesn’t include you, gentle reader—every horror story writer knows the most terrifying parts of a story are those left to the imagination.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of my head…
* * *
…the hair on the rest of my head has continued to repartition itself, always observing the law of conservation of hair mass (see above). The number of strands continued to decrease, while the fact that I hadn’t gotten them cut since the pandemic started meant that the average length of each strand was considerably longer now than at the outset of our national trial.
I wonder if it’s long enough yet for… a ponytail‽ Not one of those sissy Eurosexual man-buns, but a real he-man coonskin-cap ponytail!
I remember back in, oh, maybe the 80s, I was fascinated by a number of movies that came out where the protagonist sported a ponytail. If I remember right, in each movie, the guy was somehow more than human, or at least other-than-human. The movies symbolized this by each guys’ man-tress, and when the time came for him to discover or reveal his humanity, the ponytail came down. Let’s see, what were those movies?
One of them, I think, was a Steven Seagal action flick where he played a cook on a train or a boat that was hijacked by villians. He turned out, of course, to be secretly a ninja or a Navy SEAL or something like that, and handily kicked bad guy butt while never messing up his do.
Another movie of the time that I liked a lot better (and remember better) was The Fisher King, starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. It was a sometimes funny but mostly poignant movie about trauma and loss. Jeff Bridges was this shock jock who presented a macho coolness (and a ponytail) to hide his pain and guilt over an awful crime. Robin Williams played a mentally ill man who finally gets Jeff to let his hair down.
But my favorite man-ponytail movie of the era, the one that got me thinking at the time that maybe I should sport one, was the hilarious if amoral Witches of Eastwick, starring the one and only Jack “Heeere’s Johnny!” Nicholson playing, as he puts it at one point, “just your average horny devil”. There’s a priceless vignette in it, only a second or two long, where he’s preening in front of a mirror while holding a hand mirror in each hand, trying to triangulate a line-of-sight to admire his own little pipsqueak ponytail. The movie’s not for the faint of heart at a few points, but I found it a real hoot. And an inspiration!
So anyway, I tried, and yes, my hair is long enough for a ponytail now, but just barely. Here’s me in a tableau vivant of my favorite scene from the Witches of Eastwick:
Trentin Quarantino’s 
