Lionel, I think of you
as an old grizzly bear
all burly and tough
but also a teddy bear
full of cuddly stuff
or as my grandfather,
all seasoned and wise
but also my grandson
full of awe and surprise
Dear Chief …
We asked to meet you to briefly discuss an encounter that I had with the SLOPD back in October 2019. I didn’t think it was serious enough to bring to your attention until events of the last few weeks started a national conversation about police policy and culture in general.
On the afternoon of October 13 Jan hosted a potluck dinner at our home at 265 Albert Drive for a group of people she’s been working with on San Luis Obispo’s time-honored youth exchange program with a school in Stuttgart Germany. After the event, around 7:00 (?) p.m. I got into my Chevy Volt and headed for City Farm SLO at 1221 Calle Joaquin, where I am the Director, to carry out my regular duty of feeding the chickens and putting them away for the night.
I remember stopping at the corner of McCollum and Grand Avenue to turn right and then suddenly feeling the bottom of the car forcefully bumping on the rocks in the median on Grand. I came to a stop, slowly pulled over to the right lane, got out, realized that the car was damaged but still driveable, and pulled ahead to Fredericks St., turned right and found a place to park, planning to walk the two blocks back home and have the car towed in the morning. Not knowing what had caused the accident, but considering that it might possibly have resulted from my thinking about the chickens or from my having had a glass of wine in the course of the afternoon, I was somewhat disoriented and eager to get back home.
As I walked up Fredericks toward the corner of Albert Drive, three SLOPD cars pulled up around me and several officers got out. They looked at my registration and insurance and took my driver’s license. I told them what happened and they escorted me up to Albert and partway up the steep hill to a driveway on the right. There they had me walk a straight line, stand on one foot and inspected my eyes with a flashlight. The tone was not hostile, but it was quite intimidating. I said nothing except to answer the questions posed. When asked whether I wanted to take a breathalyzer test, I said no. At that moment, the interrogating officer took me by the shoulders, turned me around and snapped handcuffs on my wrists behind my back. Having some shoulder arthritis, I was uncomfortable but said nothing and then was ushered into the hard low back seat of one of the police cars, still more uncomfortable, and driven to the police station on Walnut Street.
Once inside I was told that I was required to take the breathalyzer test, which I did, and then was placed in the holding cell. My phone was not taken from me, and from there I texted Jan and told her what was happening.
At first she thought I was pranking her, but when I sent a picture of the inside of the cell, she saw I was for real.
Before long, I was taken out of the cell and told by the officer that I had blown .02 and would be taken home. She explained to the other officers that she had called the watch commander who asked if I was on heart medication, which I was, and who explained that it was this that accounted for results of her eye inspection. She apologized for the inconvenience and I was then driven home.
Once I got there and discussed the situation with Jan, I realized what had happened. Between making the right turn and ending up on the median, I must have briefly blacked out. Although this was of concern, I was relieved to understand. Next morning I phoned the cardiologist, Dr. Sada, and told him of the event. He arranged for an appointment the same day. After a quick examination and looking at the monitor records following a very slight stroke I’d had in August, he concluded that I’d had a “syncope” or heartbeat irregularity that caused the blackout. He scheduled me for surgery the next day and installed a pacemaker, and I’ve had no problem since.
In retrospect I realized I was somewhat frightened during this encounter. My strongest impression, however, was if a 77 year old white man a couple of blocks from home was treated like this, what would it have been like for someone with a different profile.
However, since I never had any other negative experiences with SLOPD, was acquainted with and admired the Chief, and in fact several years ago had two amazing experiences with an officer helping us to deal with a serious family problem with our custodial grandson, I felt no need to pursue it further. But, in view of both local and national events lately, I thought bringing this to your attention could possibly reinforce the value of avoiding heavy-handed treatment of citizens whenever possible.
Sincerely,
This is supposed to be a place for tempered reflection, but events of the past couple of days have left my mind scrambled. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (which I still dont have the stomach to watch on video), the ensuing riots encompassing the country, the Minneapolis mayor’s pivot from demanding a murder indictment for the cop to mobilizing the National Guard, Trump’s oscillation from calling for shooting of looters to phoning Floyd’s family and then to threatening the use of dogs and weaponry on White House protestors, the battle between him and the CEO of his main mouthpiece, Twitter, the complete eclipse of Corona Virus news of the last three months by the perception of danger now reduced and by everyone’s having enough of lockdown, and finally, this afternoon, the glorious launch of Elon Musk’s Space-X rocket. Humans ugly and beautiful, impotent and omnipotent. No matter how much I’d like to turn away from news, the pace and magnitude of the drama keeps me captive.
I tried this morning, as I have several times this week, to avoid it by taking a long walk with the dog up horse canyon on polyland–and by working at the farm a couple of times a day. But back home, after the compulsory nap, I’m back into the NYTimes or Google news, lapping up the latest. Out in the woods I phoned Joe to try to set up a backpacking trip in Idaho as one way to break routine, now that air travel has just become permitted, but he hasnt answered the call.
After weeks of feeling grotesquely privileged by April days of growing gardens, walks on the beach, leisurely prepared meals, low anxiety about getting stuff done, luxurious entertainment by TV, music and books, against a backdrop of news offering suspense and amusement, last night and early this morning provided a brief dose of the darker reality.
A phone conversation with Peter, my younger brother stand-in, detailed his excruciating post-operative condition after successful surgery removing slow-growing tumors from his kidneys. He’s had four botched catheterizations and is now sending urine to a bag, since his urethra is blocked. This makes for continuing pain that the painkillers cant control and required an emergency trip to a urologist in Courtney from which he’d just returned after several days in a Vancouver hospital. Prognosis uncertain.
My last night brought repeated awakenings with more pain than usual in hands, shoulders, back and knees. I applied Jan’s cream, took more Tylenol, tried cannabis oil, and went back to bed exhausted after morning bath. There I half-dreamt that these were early symptoms of infection with the virus and visualized being set up in our guest room, wondering which exposure–Costco to get the Mac and Cheese for the Homeless Shelter or not wearing a mask when seeing Claire and Greg–had led to it. It was only after a third cup of coffee and two more Tylenols that I returned to a semblance of the new normal–readiness to go to the farm to carry out today’s ambitious plans for harvest and planting with Shane and Tree and meeting with Josh and Shea to measure the layout for her planned outdoor farm school.
I’ve embarked on the effort to create a digital legacy with Jake Smallwood from Fertile Minds, a protege of Dusty who got this blog started. If it can work it will cost about $400 to create a setup with wordpress that approximates the setup I had with Dreamweaver in the 20th century. Back to the future. Corresponding and speaking with them brings back memories of Dusty and grief for his loss. But also emphasizes the relevance of the project. Creating a digital legacy. Moving forward on the effort initiated with this.
A life as a project, coming further into focus as the ratio of past to future increases, or alternately, the ratio of future to past decreases.
The project enhanced by current reading a biography of Leonard Bernstein. Fascinating information in immense detail, but all of it external from interviews with his acquaintances and public records–nothing about his own perspective and inner life, since sadly the authoritative author was denied access to the vast archive in his estate by the executors.
The blog form–a dynamic record, allowing for the additions of data created by an ongoing life and of changing of perspective provided by reconsideration of old snapshots, combining immediacy and distance.
We follow the Idaho Mountain Express online to maintain indirect contact with Joe and his family who are sheltering at home in the middle of the highest per capita infection rate location in the country. The news there doesn’t tell us much about what’s really going on and neither do his reports but Jan came up with a long article in Buzzfeed, a national outlet, that gave us a fuller picture–both about the course of the spread and through a number of interviews with rich and poor victims, about the range of human impacts. This quote stayed with me and dominated my morning quiet time in the bathtub and while meditating:
The infectious disease doc came in and said, “You have COVID, and I don’t think you’re going to survive, because you only have 61% of your lung capacity.” They asked him, “Do you still want to have this DNR [do-not-resuscitate order]?” He said yes. “Do you want to be put on a ventilator if needed?” He said yes.
Meanwhile, my dad was gradually improving. He said it was so hard to be alone, with the only people he came into contact with wearing full protective gear. He said it felt like they were scared of him. But he’s a tough cookie. He couldn’t get out of bed or go to the bathroom for nine days, but when they let him out, he took a shower, and came home — that was March 29 — and surprised everyone on the family Zoom call. It was my parents’ 51st anniversary. My mom was just totally taken aback and so happy.
My most persistent concern over the last several years has been the dual business of departure and legacy. The “Better End” talk I wrote for the Sangha and the updating of our estate and advance directive documents last year addressed the first. The effort I’ve put in to scanning photographs and retroactive updating of my blog with uncatalogued writings and documents address the second. But both tasks are far from finished, the opposite of the kind of closure they intend. The ongoing Pandemic adds to my age and health status to make completing them more urgent, and the lockdown should provide the opportunity to get it higher on my list of priorities, but so far that urgency has issued only in procrastination pressure rather than action.
The questions, answers, and subsequent outcome of the old man in the Buzzfeed article captures my confusion about the advance directive. At the moment of actual decision he reaffirmed his DNR, but rather than abjuring any heroic artificial lifesaving efforts, as included in my directive, he asked for the ventilator, which then saved his life and brought happiness to his family. This goes against the news that I read lately indicating that those embattled ventilators have the desired effect only in a small proportion of cases. When writing the directive, I didn’t envision Covid 19, but rather something like a stroke or heart attack after which any recovery would only prolong infirmity. But since then I’ve been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, suffered a (tiny) stroke and a syncope and agreed to the installation of a pacemaker. And life is good. So if I become infected how will I answer those questions?
From Katie: “The fox just ran through my plot, coming from the direction of your plot. It came through the fence just behind the hoop house, headed southwest to the creek.”
Reply: “Before we talked yesterday, I gathered up the dead but unmutilated chickens and laid them in a tote inside the run for burial today. When I arrived this morning they were strewn all over, all partially eaten. My deduction, based on the fact that their feet were still warm yesterday: I must have scared the fox off when I first came out, and he must have returned to finish the job after I left and before you sent the above text.”
My daily news comes from the world center of suffering:
My abandoned home
30 March 7:23 A.M.
The big space in journaling accounted for by relative lack of change. Jan and I are still comfortable with social distancing, mitigated by her ongoing interactions on Facebook and my daily visits to the farm which include live interactions with co-workers Shane and Tree, fellow farmers Abimael, Javier and Katie, volunteers Claire, and Anneke. Continuing harvest for the Food Bank, reorganizing the field map, planting the thousands of starts donated by Green Heart, feeling the ground softened by mini-miracle March drought busting rains makes time there more precious than ever, though often exhausting. Daily routine includes nap, dinner prep with harvest or dutiful restaurant takeout, and entertaining screen time. With students gone and populace on lockdown, the streets and freeway are quiet, the downtown empty. The absences are filled with birdsong and screaming headlines, the most recent being that the national lockdown will continue at least until April 30.
The vocabulary word reminder:
29 March [to Kathleen Balgley]
After the lockdown started I began a journal to record thoughts of what seemed like unusual urgency in the face of unprecedented transformations. But within a couple of days I lost motivation, thinking that even if some new insight emerged, who cares, since both audience and author are likely to be eradicated in the approaching tsunami. Better to just keep working in the garden, prepare good dinners and drink hard while watching movies.
That sentiment was captured in this quote by an Oxford Shakespeare scholar in today’s NY Times:
René Girard, the French critic, wrote in a famous essay that “the distinctiveness of the plague is that it ultimately destroys all forms of distinctiveness.” Mass burial pits for plague victims were one visible symbol of the way the disease erased social, gender and personal difference.
But then she goes on:
Elaborate plots, motives, interactions and obscurities focus our attention on human beings. No one in Shakespeare’s plays dies quickly and obscurely, thrown into a communal grave. Rather, last words are given full hearing, epitaphs are soberly delivered, bodies taken offstage respectfully.
Lots to learn from writers and artists these days after all.