Temporarily immortal
August 4, 2008
Thanks to blogger Michael Kruse for pointing me to Into the sunset. It is about the new trend in end-of-life care and raises the question: “The idea that the terminally ill need pain relief and humane care care instead of “curing” is catching on. But what about the people who just grow old?”
In America, the hospice movement was founded in 1974 to deal with the pain relief and humane care of the terminally ill, but what about those who cannot be easily defined as “terminally ill?”
Yet for all its successes, the hospice movement faces challenges that will far outstrip the resources now dedicated to palliative care, even in the richest countries. Hospices are generally associated with cancer, where after a certain stage life expectancy is short and fairly predictable. But the current habit of treating people as “either temporarily immortal, or dying”—as Joanne Lynn, an American geriatrics expert, puts it—makes no sense when patients suffer chronic disease of the heart or lungs, or succumb slowly to dementia, or to general decay. An important category of people, already huge in the rich world and soon to grow in developing countries (see article), consists of elderly people who will never be well, but have no idea when they will die. There is no single answer: hospitals, nursing homes and family care will all play a role.
My mother- and father-in law were elderly folk who would never be well, but had no idea of when they would die. In God’s good time they finally met their end in nursing home beds, and they had good, compassionate care for the most part, but it’s still a hell of a way to die.
To all who are still young enough to shrug off this situation, that’s okay, but it’s becoming more of an attention-grabber for this gent in his 78th year. I was on the local hospital Board of Trustees when the first hospice was formed in my town, so I already have a healthy appreciation for the “live-and-let-die” convictions of hospice leaders. For those not familiar with hospices I commend this article.
Dave, not fearing death but a tad uneasy about the process.
Lake dreams
June 29, 2008
In the early eighties, when we time-shared a lake front condo near the Lodge of the Four Seasons at about the 13-mile marker, I would hop in the car early in the morning and drive a mile to the Four Seasons Village City Hall to start my morning jog. I would cover my 4 miles at a brisk ten minute mile pace. As I jogged along Cherokee Drive I dreamed of moving to the lake full time and living in a small, waterfront home with a dish on the roof for telecommuting to my office at Quintron Corporation, a company I helped found in 1969 and was sure that I would manage until I decided to retire. My dream home would look something like this.
Fast forward twenty years.
My daily walk at a not-so-brisk twenty minute mile pace now covers two miles on a good day. Its starting point is a 3rd level condo apartment in an obscene high rise on a raped hillside overlooking Sandpiper Cove at about the 2-mile marker.
What happened?
Well, such matters as an elevator to lake level and easier maintenance somehow bubbled up to the top of our priority list. So when decision time came, we signed for the condo with a wistful last thought of what-might-have-been and didn’t look back.
It was a wise decision. I have my bass boat cradled on its lift below our condo, only a few minutes from first cast. Marilyn has a lake view and her binoculars to keep track of the Blue Herons. Provisions come up in the convenient elevator. We have become comfortable with the wimpy life.
Dave, almost believing what he just said.
Pershing Rifles
June 13, 2008
During my college years at K-State I joined the R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officers Training Corps), affectionally/derisively pronounced “rotzee.” For paying attention to my Army training and attending the weekly classes, I was issued a uniform and received, as I recall, a $50 monthly stipend. During the summer of my Junior year, we shavetails-in-waiting attended summer camp for a month at Camp Gordon, Georgia. Upon graduation from college we were commissioned as U.S. Army Second Lieutenants.
Associated with the R.O.T.C. in college was a precision drill team called the Pershing Rifles, and I ended up as the ‘Captain’ of the platoon-sized unit and conducted drills once a week, Hup-Toop-Threep-Four! I won’t attempt to describe the intricacies of the march and counter-march stuff, but we drilled carrying (and doing tricks with) the ten-pound M1 Garand rifle.
One of the tricks was synchronized spinning of the rifles as we marched in formation. During half-time of one football game, we performed a drill with loaded (blanks) rifles. After drilling in formation for a while, we peeled off in one long file at mid-field. As the file formed, everyone went to one knee with their rifles positioned vertically behind their left shoulder. Captain Dave was front and center, facing the home stands.. Get the picture? (Oh, well.)
Anyway, Captain Dave, standing at rigid attention, slowly raised his right hand in salute. When his fingers touched his cap, the rifles were discharged, starting at one end of the file and rippling down to the other end. That accomplished two things: It woke everyone up and probably damaged the hearing in a bunch of left ears.
If you will indulge me with some comments on the M1 rifle, I confess to somewhat of a love affair with that weapon. It was the standard infantry weapon in World War II and Korea. Besides learning to do tricks with it in college, I later trained to be a Range Officer at Fort Benning, GA. I fired off many 8-round clips on the various ranges, which may account for some of my high-range hearing loss. No ear plugs in those days. I’m not sure I could field-strip, clean, and re-assemble the M1 now, but I sure could then.
For you gun-nuts, it fired a .30-06 Springfield cartridge, semi-automatic, at an effective rate of 16-24 rounds/min. It was almost as accurate as the bolt-action Springfield M1903 rifle that it replaced. The Springfield became a very accurate sniper rifle.
But enough. I mainly wanted you to know that I got rhythm.
Dave, still hupping along.
D. Paul Ayers
June 1, 2008
The father of the three Ayers brothers was D. Paul Ayers (1907-1967). At our recent reunion, we talked about our parents and tried to re-construct a chronology of our growing up years. I was later asked by son-in-law Kerry Layton for details of Dad’s engineering career. My reply is below.
(Mom’s annotation on back of photo.)
Thank you, Kerry, for supplying this history of S&P.
Laura and Kerry,
I guess I should put some information about my Dad in the ‘Old Gent’ section of my website, shouldn’t I?
Dad was born in 1907 on a farm near Iola, KS (southeastern corner of the state). Granddad was a prosperous farmer, row crops and small dairy, and one of the early adopters of agricultural advances like crop rotation and contour plowing. The farm was one of the few at that time with electricity (windmill charger for a bank of batteries) and indoor plumbing. The outhouse remained, however, to conserve water, which had to be pumped from a well. When we visited, it was out the door to the back that we went.
Dad was interested in scientific things and constructed one of the first crystal radio sets in the area when he was a boy. He did well in High School and was able to go to college in Manhattan (Kansas State Agricultural College in those days), graduating in 1928 or 1929 with a B.S.E.E. degree. His first job was with Kansas Power and Light in Manhattan, Hutchnson, and Topeka, KS. His specialty was design of power transmission systems (the wire highlines that criss-cross the country carrying electricity hither and yon).
In 1947, Dad apparently decided it was time to move on and left KP&L for CopperWeld Steel Company in McKeesPort, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh). We lived for one year in Mt. Lebanon, PA, all very different and eye-opening to this 10th-grader, but for reasons unknown (to me) it didn’t live up to Dad’s expectations, and we moved to Webster Groves. Dad commuted downtown to Sverdrup & Parcel every day with a few fellow-workers. He was involved with the electrical engineering aspects of various S&P projects in St. Louis and around the midwest.
I’m hazy about the particulars, Don and Tom and I couldn’t decide, but Dad left Sverdrup in the mid-1950s for two or three years to be part owner of a business in Hutchinson, KS. Marilyn and I were living in Hutchinson at the time, before and after my brief Army service, but I cannot remember what kind of a business it was. I thought it was a hardware store, but my brothers say I’m not even close, and they’re probably right. I do remember that we all went to a brand new Presbyterian church for a year or two until I left Hutchinson to work at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids. Dad returned to Sverdrup & Parcel in St. Louis and was shortly assigned as Project Engineer for Sverdrup’s part of Bush Gardens under construction in Tampa. I am the only one of the Ayers boys who didn’t find an opportunity to visit the folks in sunny Florida.
Returning to S&P in St. Louis, Dad continued to work as an Electrical Engineer there until his premature death in 1967 at age 59.
So there you have it, Kerry. I sort of followed in Dad’s footsteps and entered the Engineering school at K-State in 1949, studying under some of the same professors as Dad did, some 20+ years earlier. But where Dad learned about dynamos and generators and transmission lines, I leaned more to electron tubes (no transistors yet) and radio transmission.
As sort of a post-script, Dad lost some pension benefits when he left S&P and returned later, so his major goal was to get their little house paid for as soon as possible. They burned the mortgage less than a year before he died.
Never ask an old man to reminisce unless you have a few minutes to spare!
Love,
Dad
Bullet now or cancer later
May 3, 2008
I commend to you a little book I am reading now: The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis, a series of essays based on talks given by Lewis during the 1940s. One of the essays is “Learning in Wartime,” a talk to Oxford students who were uncomfortable because they were in school while their contemporaries were risking death in the early days of World War II. Lewis talks about several ‘enemies’ that may keep the students from doing their best at their studies.
The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man — and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane — need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or that — machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.
In 1952 I was a college student with a draft deferment, and I was quite aware of my contemporaries serving in Korea while I was drilling with the ROTC. I can’t say that it caused me much, if any, mental anguish. I wonder what I would have thought if I had read these words. In those days I assumed I was immortal and didn’t think much about death, like most 21-year-olds.
It’s now 55 years later, and I know I am not immortal in the temporal sense, and I’ve long since lost my reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all. But I am moved by C.S. Lewis’s words and his way of thinking.
Dave, not fearful at all, at all.
Wheaties & cream
March 29, 2008
A month or so ago I was cruising the long cereal aisle at the supermarket, trying to make an important economic decision, when I spied the familiar Wheaties box. Man, did that bring back memories of gorging on a big bowl of sugared Wheaties, lathered with cream from the top of the milk bottle. My mouth watered.
Yesterday I indulged once again. Same Wheaties, but with Half & Half. Ambrosia! Skim milk just doesn’t cut it. I got to wondering how long Wheaties has been around, so I asked Mr. Wikipedia, and this is what I found.
It all started in 1922, in Minnesota, when a clinician accidentally spilled a wheat bran mixture onto a hot stove. By 1925 they had figured out how to box it for the market, and the name Wheaties won over Nutties and Gold Medal Wheat Flakes. It became the Breakfast of Champions in 1933.
Some Wheaties trivia:
- 1926 - First ever singing commercial. “Have you tried Wheaties” (to the tune of Jazz Baby).
- 1934 - First athlete on a Wheaties box: Lou Gehrig.
- 1988 - Michael Jordan holds the record for most times on a Wheaties box, 18 times, followed by Tiger Woods in 1998 at 14 times.
It looks like my heyday roughly coincides with Wheaties’ heyday, but Wheaties is still forging ahead while I’m slowing down. I think Wheaties will win the race.
Dave, which he just boosted his cholesterol count a tad.
The keyboard gene
March 24, 2008
Where does chronic keyboard addiction (CKA) come from in the Ayers clan? I don’t know whether genes can properly be said to come from anywhere or anyone, but several of the family seem to suffer varying degrees of this pernicious CKA malady.
So here is the data. Make of it what you will.
Since dear Marilyn has a pathological hatred of any keyboard, (I think maybe a Royal portable typewriter fell on her head some time in her past), I shall start by assuming that I am the prime propagator of the KB gene in our family. We have four children, and one of those decided to skip a generation, but the other three have shown signs of suffering from CKA. The most seriously afflicted is our firstborn, Larry, followed closely by his sister, Linda, and arguably her matronly younger sister, Leslie. Only equally matronly Laura seems immune.
As an aside, I remember when my brothers and I accompanied mom and dad on a motor trip from Mt. Lebanon, PA, to Niagara Falls in 1947. It was billed as sort of a second honeymoon for the folks, and it got off to a rough start. Somewhere before Buffalo, NY, Dad ribbed Mom a bit about being a matron, now that she had turned forty. Three pairs of big ears in the back seat picked up on it and started calling her “matron mom.” Big mistake. I thought for a while that dad would throw us out of the car and make us walk the rest of the way. And then there was the incident in the hotel room at the Falls when they left us alone while they went out and held hands or something. But I digress.
Larry’s oldest, Tyler, seems to have received a dollop of the KG, and it’s a little too early to tell about great-granddaughter Franziska. And I’m not sure about Tyler’s sis Adrian, although we do get e-mails from her, mis-punctuation and all.
The next logical step in this scientific inquiry is to look back in my past to see where I might have picked up the KG. I think first of mom’s brother, Uncle Bus. I remember his wonderfully descriptive letters written from Okinawa, but he didn’t type. The only other possibility that I know of on mom’s side was her sister, Auntie Lois. She was a Navy Wave in the big war, and she typed a blue streak.
As far as I can remember, and that isn’t very far, no one on dad’s side of the family used a keyboard at all. There apparently were no bloggers then to get them started. I have to smile when I try to picture grandpa Ayers typing away from his combine, or grandma Ayers turning from her laptop to wring the head off a chicken for dinner.
This is getting ridiculous. I’m sorry. (Sort of.)
Dave, clicking away with abandon.
Hale-Bopp revisited
March 7, 2008
Credit & Copyright: A. Dimai, (Col Druscie Obs.), AAC
The Great Comet of 1997 was photographed from the Dolomite mountains near Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy., The image was chosen as the AstronomyPicture of the Day on March 2, 2008. (Click image to enlarge)
On Sunday night, April 6, 1997, I was over the North Atlantic, flying to Brussels on the way to Israel and a 12 day study tour of the Holy Land. All through that short night, Hale-Bobb hung over the left wing tip as I gazed out of my window and thought about God’s cosmos. My puny earth-bound mind struggled to conceive of God as creator of not only Earth, but of ‘heavens’ of which man still knows only a smidgen, orbiting telescopes notwithstanding.
Such scientific knowledge of God’s cosmos is not essential to my salvation, but it sure is an important lesson in humility.
Part of my morning on-line routine is studying a bit of Scripture and gazing at the Astronomy Picture of the Day. The NETBible and APOD have permanent tabs on my Firefox browser for my daily lesson in humility.
Dave, tiny speck.
Half century in space
February 1, 2008
Fifty years ago on January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 was launched into earth orbit by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, thus kicking off the era of space exploration for the U.S.
This was brought to my attention by the Astronomy Picture of the Day that pops up on my desktop automagically every morning.
One of the experiments performed by the thirty pound satellite was measuring the density of electrons and ions in space. The designer of this experiment was James A. Van Allen from nearby Iowa University. These measurements by Explorer 1 led to the discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belt that encircles the earth.
Time marches on. The little Explorer remained in silent orbit until 1970, and Dr. Van Allen died in 2006 at the age of 91.
In 1958 I launched my engineering/business career by signing on with Arthur Collins at Collins Radio Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Although I worked with earth-bound radio systems, Collins Radio was a pioneer in space communications. My memories of those Collins years are a hazy, pleasant collage of engineering laboratories that were a young engineer’s heaven, travel to exotic (for me) places, pulling on a rising pheasant in the cornfields of eastern Iowa, and catching (and eating) crappies by the dozen.
Dave, not sure how much to make of this coincidence.
— -. . — .- -. .—-. … -… .. -.. - — … .- …- . — — .-. … . -.-. — -.. . -
October 8, 2007
There aren’t many of us still around who can read the title of this article. In fact, I don’t blame you if you are bored stiff by dots and dashes. When I received my first amateur radio license in 1947 (I think), I had to pass a code test at a speed of 15 words-per-minute. From the Wall Street Journal I learn that there is one Chuck Adams who is busy translating novels into Morse code. Aren’t you impressed?
— -. . — .- -. .—-. … -… .. -.. - — … .- …- . — — .-. … . -.-. — -.. . - WSJ.com
Nostalgic for simpler days, retired astrophysicist Chuck Adams is translating classics of boys’ lit into a language he fears is going the way of kit radios and marbles: Morse code.
Holed up in his high-desert home crammed with computers, radio receivers and a very patient wife, Mr. Adams uses homemade software to download online books with expired copyrights, convert the typed words into Morse code tones and record them on compact discs he sells on the Internet.
Several years ago, as I walked along on my daily save-my-heart stroll, I wondered if there were any remnants of Morse code still lodged in my memory bank. I started dah-ditting street signs along my route. It was slow going at first, but after a while it came back to me. At first I had to stop to recall the Morse code for certain infrequently used letters, but after a while I had my translation speed up to, maybe, 5 wpm.
Many of those who still know Morse code test their skills with a German computer game called Rufz, the standard for determining world transcription-speed rankings. Players listen to coded, five-character call signs, combinations of letters, symbols and numbers that identify individual license holders. The faster and more correctly they type them, the more points they score. (Transcribing regular text is much slower.)
Last month in Belgrade, Goran Hajosevic broke 200 words per minute — an extraordinary pace. Mr. Adams is tied for eighth in the world, at more than 140 words per minute.
I ham radio’d away using CW (continuous wave, read Morse code) for several years, but I never reached real proficiency, topping out at perhaps 30 wpm.
Dave who has a tendency to lie about some things.
