tales of copper city

Whenever I get depressed....

Whenever I get depressed about politics, I remember that I have been married for almost 43 years to the woman Helen Mirren looks like, Carole Beauchamp.

This picture was taken by Cathy Murphy, the well-known Bisbee and Arizona photographer (and formerly the official photographer for César Chávez and the United Farm Workers union).

Cathy teaches the photography classes at Cochise College including the workshop that Carole is enrolled in. The picture was taken during the class visit to Madera Canyon in the Coronado National Forest, north of Nogales, AZ.  Carole is a terrific photographer in her own right.

Ghost state

Last week I drove 545 miles to Riverside, CA to help my oldest friend.  He's in serious trouble. He has a terrible case of cellulitis; his lower limbs are hugely swollen. His feet are the size of footballs.  He has to wear post-op sandals, the X-L size, and you can barely get the velcro over his reddened, swollen, cracked feet. He lives alone and his bank account has been looted twice to the tune of $10,000, and his reverse mortgage company stopped his monthly payments of almost $800 a year ago because he hasn't paid the subcontractor. My friend hasn't paid the subcontractor because the contractor's work was done without permits and was unbelieveably shoddy.  The subcontractor is a termite company strongly urged upon him by the mortgage underwriter in Riverside. I smell a kickback scheme, but what do I know?

I love New York

In two weeks, we will be returning to New York, to the 25th anniversary convocation of the founding of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany, SUNY. This is part of what I plan to say.

This school was the dream of Dr. David Axelrod, then the Commissioner of Health for New York, and Dr. David Carpenter our first dean and his staff turned that dream into reality. Carole and I joined that effort three years after the school began, in 1988.

My wife and I are so grateful to be asked back to speak at this important celebration. This is an incredible honor, an opportunity to say once again, we love New York.

Living with hopelessness and death

Pema Chodron, in her book, When Things Fall Apart, writes about living with hopelessness and death in a short but utterly shattering chapter that, on first reading, I completely rejected.  I've always been in the hope business, hoping for the next election, the next job, the next town, the next whatever. Chodron argues that we have to give that up; that kind of hope is a delusion. Everything changes, everything goes away, everything can disappoint. "Life is about getting into a boat that is just about to sail out to sea and sink," she writes, quoting Shunryu Suzuki. That's a little strong, especially when you are 73, as I am, but you get the point.

Losing your life

I am always amazed—and that is precisely the right word—that when I need to hear it, the Word comes to me, again and again.

I have been really spinning around, constantly dancing from one scenario to the next, wondering how I will make my new life here in Durham, a life which seems so very different than my life for the past nine years in Bisbee, AZ.

More teaching? Writing fiction? Publishing another book, one more, one last word about public health?

Or shall I take up golf or even bowling? Should we spend more time traveling or playing Scrabble?  Is it time for amusement?

Should I live this stage of my life with some sense of the grim fatefulness of our disastrous course in national politics?

Should I pay more attention to the bizarre turn of Bisbee politics of the past 18 months and the rise of the Usual Suspects?

Fiction (and movies) are my refuge

Part of the reason I moved to the Southwest and the border was to hide out from the evening news.  I stopped watching network news decades ago.  I have watched the MSNBC lineup from time to time, but frankly they only remind me of how crazy things are getting.

My true refuge is fiction and movies. I know, I know, who am I kidding? Still I am at the stage in my life where I can choose to sit around and stew at the state of things or I can enjoy the worlds others create that wake us up to life, wake us up to the wonder that is life itself in the midst of our brief twitch of time.

I mentioned the worlds that Jonathan Carroll creates in his novels in my last post, and he was so kind to send along a comment, from Vienna.  I am grateful for that. Carroll's fiction is a whole other thing,  a kind of magical realism that is totally refreshing but also demanding. Jonathan Lethem can sometimes go to the worlds that Carroll creates. I am particularly fond of As She Crawled Across the Table because it is situated at the University of North California at Beauchamp, and Lethem makes sure the reader knows to pronounce it "beach'-em."  Given my name, how could I resist it?

Life is asking us a question

One persistent theme in Buddhism---so wonderfully updated and spelled out in Steven Hayes's excellent book, Get Our of Your Mind and Into Your Life---is that life is asking us a question, the question of acceptance: Will we say "yes" to living fully, willingly, and openly, accepting the pain, challenges, and demands that living together passionately requires? Or will we deaden and avoid that pain and challenge with a "substitute life" filled cynicism, suspicion, resentment, and diverting amusements? 

My life has for decades been about life together, about the public’s health and democratic politics. In truth, I have had a wonderful career, a wonderful "ride" that has been constantly transforming, a path that has led me to so many, many wonderful people and friends, none more important than my wife Carole whom I met in Washington, D.C. in 1967. 

The elephant in the pews

Every Christmas season our small Episcopal Church holds a Christmas service. The church is packed and there is standing in the back, behind the pews. This past season, Valerie, our daughter was there, and a friend of ours whom we have known since we first moved here, talking to Val in the Fellowship Hall after the service, suddenly asked her, "Why does your Dad believe all of this religious stuff?"

Valerie said, "Why don't you ask him?"

My friend never asks me, but always she brings me the latest news about the most recent outrage from right-wing Christians, or Israel, or the Muslim fundamentalists. Much of what's wrong with the world can be traced to religion, she says. She may be right.

My friend is not alone in Bisbee. Many here share the same stance toward church. Most say they are much closer to Buddhism. "Can't take all that Jesus stuff," they say.

Contingency rules

“This is merely contingency.”

This was the first comment I received after a noon seminar to a group of bioethicists, the new field that had formed to minister to the rapidly growing medical industrial complex

I almost laughed out loud. I wasn’t really sure what my questioner specifically meant by his comment, but I knew a thing or two about contingency.

I knew that for my life contingency ruled and it also ruled in the strange field of public health that I had accidentally stumbled into.

The best health care system in America?

If you want to read a book that will stand everything, and I mean everything, you think you know about health care upside down, then read Phillip Longman's Best Care Anywhere, 2nd Edition: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours.