Looking For Bears

"We're going to the dump," Jane announced.

I was lying on the sofa of a cabin in the Adirondacks. We were on vacation and I had purposely traveled thousands of miles away from home just so I wouldn't have to do anything remotely like work. This sounded like work.

I looked up at her and asked, "Why are we going to the dump?"

"To see the bears," she said.



I'd been decompressing for the last several days and was in a state of ignorant bliss. My brain, normally a whirlwind of activity, had hopelessly atrophied over the last couple of days and I wasn't thinking too clearly. Maybe I hadn't heard her right. I thought she'd said something about bears.

"The what?" I asked again.

"The bears," she said very matter-of-factly. She might just have said, "Come on. We're going to the grocery store to buy mayonnaise."

Now there may be a great many people who assume there are bears at the dump, but I am not one of them. I live at the beach. I assume there are seagulls and maybe a few raccoons at our dump, but to be honest, I really wouldn't know. I'd never before had reason to go to the dump. I'd certainly never been invited for a trip to one.

"Jill says that they come down to the dump at sundown to feed," she said. "Sometimes they even have their cubs with them."

Jill was our host. She and her husband Jason had invited Jane and I, along with Jane's sister Bernadette and her husband Michael, up to their cabins for a week in the woods. The cabins belonged to her Aunt who was an heir to some fortune or another.

Apparently, what we would call a resort, these people called cabins. The place was decorated in the most extravagantly subtle sort of way. The way you'd do everything if you had the money. It was like a case study into how things should be done when you don't have to cut corners. This was of course an alien concept for me to begin with.

They called it "the Camp." After seeing it for the first time, I had visions of Merryl Streep and Robert Redford in East Africa lounging about in khaki with wine, candles, tents, and ten or twenty servants. You know, something quaint by the river.

To me the word camp recalled memories of humid tents, clothes smelling darkly of wood-smoke and blackened hot dogs. Not to say that they were altogether unpleasant memories, it's just that this is not what I thought of when I heard the word camp.

The main building was the Big House, which had a fully stocked kitchen, complete with a microwave, bread machine, pasta machine and every other sort of gourmet accessory you could imagine. There was a huge dining room with a table that could easily sit sixteen or so, a comfortable living room with an enormous fireplace, a master bedroom with it's own bath and fireplace, several other small bedrooms, and a huge wrap-around porch.

Separated from the Big House were two, smaller cabins, one of which we were staying in, and the Bunkhouse, where children were housed when the clan got together. The bunkhouse was basically one big room full of bunk beds, perfect for kids, and well out of earshot.

Lastly there was a utility house that contained skis, snowmobile suits, an extra refrigerator and freezer, a large metal sink for cleaning fish, archery equipment...the list went on.

Our cabin alone was amazing. It sat to the far right of the compound and was closest to the boathouse. It was actually the newest of the three and consisted of one large cathedral-ceiling room with a loft-style bedroom overlooking the living area. There was a kitchenette, which consisted of a small closet containing an apartment-sized fridge, a sink, a coffee maker and a minimal, although matching, collection of dishes.

The walls of the cabin were tongue and groove pine planks, floor to ceiling. In one corner was an old, hand-made wooden canoe suspended in the air by a series of ropes and pulleys.

Along one wall were built-in shelves stacked with books of all sorts ranging from gardening to mysteries, personal essays to political thrillers. Somewhat typical for a vacation house except for the fact that most had been autographed by the author with a personal note to our absent hosts.

Everywhere you looked there was Adirondack paraphernalia. In any other home, it would have seemed ridiculous and out of place, but here it looked perfectly reasonable. After all, where else but in the Adirondacks could you decorate a cabin with birch bark lampshades and tree trunk benches and not look stupid?

The paths around the camp were covered with mulch and lined on each side with Birch saplings. To the far right of the cabins sat the boathouse. Inside were all manner of equipment for life on the lake. There was a traditional wooden lake boat that would have made Norman Thayer proud, as well as a more practical if not less romantic, metal fishing boat. You could also find kayaks, canoes, windsurfers, and not one, but two sailboats.

If fishing was your thing, there was an entire wall devoted to fishing poles of all shapes and sizes, as well as an enormous tackle box filled with every conceivable piece of tackle: hook, line, and sinker.

This, I thought to myself, is what Heaven must be like.

The Bible speaks of how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I decided that the reason could possibly be that many wealthy people would simply get to Heaven and think to themselves, "Oh, it's just like my summer home."

We were to be here a week. We had already spent several days lounging about the lake, fishing, creating fabulous meals, reading, laughing and lying in the sun.

But today, we were looking for bears.

We all piled into two cars and went barreling off down the gravel road. The weather was absolutely beautiful with temperatures hanging in the mid seventies and low humidity (at home they were having a record heat wave with temperatures reaching triple digits).

We got to the entrance of the dump and turned in. The thought of seeing wild bears had everyone pretty excited and we'd brought all manner of cameras and binoculars.

"So what are we supposed to do if the bears come after us?" I asked.

Everyone just stared at me blankly. My wife shook her head.

"What?" I asked. "It could happen." No one answered.

It seemed a reasonable question to me. The television is full of stories of animals attacking people armed with video cameras. Maybe some animals just don't like to be photographed. What do I know? I didn't even know bears liked to hang at the dump.

We walked to the edge of a paved plateau that sat nearly fifty feet above the outlying area. From here we had a perfect vantage point that looked out across a sea of trash that rose and fell in waves as far as the eye could see. Even the dumps are better looking here, I thought.

The sun was setting, and shone with that exotic glow you only experience at dusk. The colors had gathered a saturated, brilliant appearance that sang in the air and everything seemed to vibrate in tune to some unheard song. The birds chattered away in the trees and the dogs panted at our sides. It was a life-altering moment.

We didn't see any bears.

Sometimes, that's the way it is though. We didn't find what we were looking for but in the middle of a dump in upstate New York I experienced something that will be with me for the rest of my life.

And the thing I'll remember is not the extravagant living, or opulent cabins, though they were indeed nice and obviously had an impact on me. No, the memories I go back to in my mind are the simple ones. Sitting quietly on a deck by the water, basking in the sun and reading. Lying in the bottom of an old metal boat with a fishing pole between my knees and a breeze in my hair. And of a trip to see a bear where none were to be found.

In fact, one day I'm sure I'll be sitting in an old folks home with a plastic cup of unfinished Jell-O(r) in front of me and I'll be telling my nurse, the one I think looks like my Aunt Carolyn, about this one glorious day I had at a dump in upstate New York.

She'll smile condescendingly; adjust her bra and wonder, not for the last time, why she never finished medical school.

But I'll be gone. I'll be at that dump, looking for bears. And I'll already be in heaven.

Titles

I got a postcard from my dentist yesterday. I like getting postcards. It makes me feel like someone out there cares about me. Even if it is from someone who wants to stick sharp instruments in my mouth. It's still a postcard.
Usually, I don't even know why I'm going. I told my wife Jane about my appointment.

"What are you having done?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Why are you going, then?"

"They sent me a postcard," I said and held it up for her to see.

"Ooooh, a postcard," she said.

My dentist's name is Dr. Tinney. I like him. I've never been fishing with him or anything, and he's never offered me a beer, but as dentists go, he's pretty good. The only thing I don't like about him is that I have to refer to him as Doctor Tinney. Not just me either. Everyone calls him Dr. Tinney; even his wife, who also happens to work there. Of course I've never seen them outside of his office, so for all I know she calls him Hercules when they're alone.

The thing is, he's only a few years older than me. Why do I have to call him Doctor Tinney? It basically amounts to calling him sir, which I don't appreciate. Why not Edward? Or Eddie? I'd even settle for Butch, or Skip.

Truth be told, I've always been a little bothered by the whole title thing. Why are certain occupations worthy of a title and others not? Were those extra years of college so grueling that we have to be forever reminded of the hardships they endured?

I started working when I was fourteen. I worked full time and went to school full time all through college. I even managed to get a degree. I'm still working, by the way, and the only thing people call me is Dave. Not College Graduate Dave. Not Amazing Working Guy Dave. Just Dave.

Some people will tell you that titles are used out of respect, but I don't buy it. Lawyers get to attach a few extra letters to the end of their names and no one respects them.

I'm not looking for a title, you understand. If fact, I already have one. My business card says "Creative Director." I'm a director, which if you think about it, sounds a lot like dictator, which ought to be worth something. But it's not.

A lot of people have titles. We just don't use them in casual conversation or to greet people. You rarely hear someone say, "Hey, Sales Manager Keith! How's it going?"

Technically, I'm also a Senior Vice President in my company, but this doesn't seem to have the same effect in business as it does in politics. In politics, there's always an outside chance some nut will shoot the President and you'll get the good office with the red bat-phone. In business, however, some companies have hundreds of Vice Presidents. Somebody shoots the President of your company, and you just might get the day off.

The sad truth is, no one calls me by either title. I've tried. No Director Dave, or Vice-President McCarty. Sometimes the President of the agency will refer to me in general as his Creative Director, but this usually makes me sound like a Schnauzer.

In the old days, people like doctors and lawyers got a lot of respect for a reason. They were the only ones in town who could read. When your day revolves around cow manure, tractor tires, and whether or not it's going to rain, you're bound to develop a healthy respect for anyone who made it past the eighth grade and can tell you how many bones are in your skull.

It's not just that I don't like titles; I don't like the fact that apparently, people get to choose their own. I had a job once where I picked my own title because I was the guy who designed the business cards. That's really all there is to it. If you can put it in ink, people will believe anything. I decided I'd be the Advertising and Promotion Director. And I was. But the person who had the job before me was just called Sue. I don't even think she had a business card.

Grandparents are always trying to dictate what they want to be called. They dream of the day they can be Pop-pop or Grandma. But the reality is there are far too many Noonie's, Uppie's and D's for that tactic to be working out real well.

Everyone starts with good intentions. We introduce our babies to their relatives as Grandma, or Aunt Jane, and a few years later you have a two year old calling you Dudu.

Some people don't have to work a day in their lives to get a title. In Britain, you can be a Lord, a Duke, or even an Earl just because you were born at the right time to the right parents. And if you really impress someone in the Royal Family, you can even become a knight. Anthony Hopkins, an arguably talented actor, got to be a knight for acting like a guy who ate other people. Now we're supposed to call him Sir Anthony.

I have to believe it used to be a lot harder to become a Knight back in the old days. You had to win a war or kill a dragon or something. Not just memorize some lines and lie believably about eating someone's liver.

In America, you can also get a title of sorts on the whim of your parents. The country is full of John Smith, the third's and Anthony Jones, the second's. It doesn't seem right to me that you should get a title just because you come from a long line of unimaginative people.

If you rise high enough in political office, you not only get a title, you get to keep it when you leave. Senators, Congressmen, and Presidents all get to keep their titles long after their service to their country is over. Former presidents are referred to not as Mr. So-and-so, but as former President So-and-so.

Military personnel also get to keep their titles. They don't even have to say former. For instance, the commander of Operation Desert Storm, Norman Schwartzkoff, is introduced as General Norman Schwartzkoff, United States Army, Retired. This leads me to believe that Norman remains a General. He's just retired.

There are other titles that annoy me. If you become a lawyer and hang around the job long enough, and have dinner with enough politicians, one day they might call you, "Your Honor." This sounds a little too much like royalty to me. I thought we dumped a whole bunch of tea into a harbor just to get away from that kind of thinking. It's just a guy in a black robe, who memorized some old law cases. Not that being a judge is easy, but do we really have to call them, your honor?

But it's not just politics and the military. The church has gotten into it as well. Catholic priests expect you to call them Father. I already have one father to keep track of, and I don't need any more. I'm not about to call someone Father just because he swore off sex and drinks wine in church.

Between you and me, I think the whole thing is a scam. I'm not sure how or why, or what exactly these people are up to but I'm going to get to bottom of it. For now, however, I'm off to my dentist appointment. Maybe I'll ask Ed if he wants to go grab a beer afterwards.

Wasting Time

It's Saturday morning and I've come downstairs to find my wife Jane sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading a magazine. I've been upstairs showering, dressing, and generally trying to decide how I want to waste my time today.

That's what Jane calls it. Wasting time. I'm okay with that. I don't have a problem wasting time. In fact, a large part of my days off are spent contemplating how to waste as much of it as possible. I'm good at it.



Jane does not always appreciate this aspect of my character. For instance, this morning she has already run ten miles and is now having coffee in the kitchen. I, on the other hand, have just gotten out of bed.

"So, what's it going to be today?" she asks without looking up. I imagine that she's either plotting the overthrow of a small country or thinking about tearing out a wall somewhere and installing French doors.

"I can't decide," I admit. "Maybe golfing." I grab a mug out of the cupboard and pour myself some coffee. "Or surfing," I add looking out the window. It's shaping up to be a beautiful day - full of possibilities.

"Not fishing?" she says without a hint of sarcasm and refreshes her coffee. She still hasn't looked up from her magazine and I can't tell if she's serious or just giving me a hard time. She does that a lot. Gives me a hard time. She's good at it.

"I don't know," I say and I mean it.

That's the beauty of wasting time, you have no real agenda and anything pretty much suffices, as long as there is no clear goal and no set timetable.

This isn't to say I don't work hard. I work very hard. It's just that I'm a firm believer in the work hard, nap often, school of thought. This is very different from the work hard, play hard school. Disciples of that particular institution tend toward investment bankers who climb mountains on the weekend.

Let me say here and now that climbing a mountain on the weekend is just work in disguise. Climbing a mountain is not even remotely relaxing and is potentially deadly. I find it very hard to relax when death is a plausible outcome.

Because of the strenuous pace I keep during the week, I don't move very quickly on the weekends. I'm more of a shuffler by nature. By the time the weekend rolls around, I've used up all my hustle and bustle and all I've got left is a little random moseying around.

On my days off, I lumber about, checking out this part of the yard, or sampling leftovers from the refrigerator. I may lie down spontaneously and take a nap, or read three pages of a book I've already read several times while standing at the sink eating a pickle. It really doesn't matter.

The thing is, while I have a lot of interests, I would never go so far as to claim any particular passion for any of these interests. Quite frankly, with all the things I get into, I'm spread a little too thin for passion.

There are people who have passions though. I know because I've read about them. These are people who have found one thing that they do really well, and they've stuck with it. And I have a lot of admiration for them.

People who are passionate about their hobbies do not approach it frivolously. Not being all that passionate about any one thing in particular, reading about a hobby is, for me, a far more relaxing waste of time than actually participating in one. This is namely due to the fact that since I don't devote any significant portion of time to any one thing, I am by nature, a disciple of many things and a master of none.

I have more what you would call hobbies. The word itself implies frivolity and a lightness of heart. Which is exactly what I'm looking for on my days off - a little frivolous wasting of time.

The truth is, I am well known in my family for having a wide range of hobbies, none of which could be construed as overly productive. All my life I've bounced from one hobby to the next, many of them quite strange. When I was a ten, I spent the better part of a summer burning pictures of cowboys into two-by-fours with a magnifying glass. What can I say? It held my interest for a time.

I also read about a lot of different types of hobbies: from fly-fishing and surfing, to woodworking and beekeeping. I get almost as much entertainment out of reading about an activity as I do by participating in one, sometimes even more so.
When you're reading about, say fly-fishing, everything is fluid art and grace. You read about a time when the author was fishing at dusk in Montana where the air was still, the sunset brilliant and the fish hungry. You can almost see the slow, beautiful arc of line as it flows back and forth overhead, sending a light spray of water into the air. The angler is one with nature and everything is flawless. The fish strikes, the man rears back, and the fish leaps out of the water in a powerful display of will.

What you don't see is the guy who's been reading the book, standing in his neighbors yard trying to whip a fly line back and forth (his yard being too small with lots of trees that hang down so that he's already had to cut his line out a few tree limbs).
You also don't get the inside scoop on how a beautiful arc of fishing line can become a rat's nest with the flick of a wrist, or that when you're out on the water, how easy it is for your delicate little hand-tied lure to slap the water with enough brute force to actually kill a fish.

Jane believes that in addition to wasting time, what I'm really after is just a creative way to spend as much money as possible while accomplishing nothing. In fact, she contends that the more money it's possible to spend on a particular hobby, the more I'm attracted to it.

"Not true," I once argued. "I've never expressed an interest in hang-gliding and I hear that's very expensive."

"We live at the beach," she countered. "If we lived anywhere near a mountain you'd be strapping yourself to a kite and leaping off into the wild blue yonder."

"That's ridiculous," I told her, then immediately began thinking about how cool it would be to hang-glide: the thrill, the freedom, the sheer expense of it all. I began to wonder how close the nearest mountain really was and what kind of cool gear one could accumulate.

Last year, for instance, I took up golf for absolutely no good reason. I'd never before expressed any interest whatsoever. But I try to not let little details like that hold me back.

Golf is a pretty simple sport in theory: little white ball, a couple of sticks with which to hit the ball, and a big green lawn with a hole at one end. But you'd be surprised at how difficult it is and how much money you can spend. It's basically a billion dollar adult toy industry. And it's growing.

Within a mile of my office there are no less than four retailers dedicated to one thing - golf. Within ten miles of my home, there are fifteen beautifully manicured courses packed full of grown men chasing a little white ball into a hole.

I'm not really sure what the fascination is. It's a terribly difficult game. It takes years to get even remotely good and even then you have to practice almost nonstop or you lose it all. It's sort of a cumulative thing. Like alcoholism.

Add to that, that it takes between four and five hours on average to play eighteen holes and you have a tremendous amount of wasted time. If you do it right, you can even ride in a cart and drink beer. Not a bad way to spend the day if you ask me.
Even now, as I sit here in the kitchen, basking in the glow of my laptop, it's getting a little late in the day and I have yet to do anything. In fact, Jane just walked in and asked what I was doing. I really have only one indoor hobby that's worthy of a good quality wasting of time, and that's watching TV.

Jane doesn't really like TV. She says she can't appreciate the value of watching fifteen to twenty programs simultaneously in a single half hour period.

No sense of adventure if you ask me.

"So what are you doing," she asks.

"I'm writing," I say.

"What about?"

"Wasting time," I tell her, then add quickly, "You're in it."

"The usual cynical wife role?" she asks.

"Yup."

"Make me sound thin," she says and walks out of the room.

It's actually too late to go golfing and I'm too tired to go surfing. Maybe I'll go stand and look out the window for a while. It doesn't really matter. After all, I've already wasted half the day and I was raised to believe that you should never do anything halfway. Maybe I'll just turn the TV on and take a nap.

Herman's Clinic

In these times of high-tech entertainment, multi-million dollar movies, and over stimulation, the simple art of storytelling often seems eclipsed; a case of the message being overrun by the medium. However, I have found one place, or should I say one person in my life that I can still hear a story told well. My dentist.

I have had other dentists, whom I thought well of. Competent, friendly sorts, capable of reversing the damage I did to my teeth due to my inability to floss. They did not, however, personify the art of the story. Or if they did, they declined to use their patients as an audience.

One of my earlier dentists thoughtfully provided headphones that allowed the patient to tune into whatever station they preferred and thereby tune out whatever unpleasantness they were about to endure. I always appreciated this as his banter amounted to whatever he had scribbled down on my chart the first time we met. For years after our first meeting, a time during which I was doing construction to put myself through school, he continued to ask me if I was still laying brick even though I had graduated and was now the Advertising & Promotion Director for a large record company. The headphones, needless to say, were appreciated.

Dr. Tinney is different.

Where other dentists employ assistants to keep them company while they drill and scrape, Dr. Tinney keeps me entertained with his stories. And I don't mean that he merely rambles on to hear the sound of his own voice. That would be enough in itself for me to prefer the sound and fury of the drill. No, Dr. Tinney is actually a good storyteller. And he is a storyteller in the traditional sense. We can't have a traditional conversation, as my mouth is usually full of cotton, metal or his fingers. He talks. Occasionally I grunt a yes, no, or if there's nothing blocking my way, I answer or try to add something. But for the most part, Dr. Tinney performs a constant monologue. And I listen.

On a recent visit, the conversation turned to his days in medical school, where, to help pay his way, he used to work in the anatomy department cleaning up the body parts from the previous semester and setting up the rooms for the following class. It seems he had come upon this strange job because his father had been a mortician and young Dr. Edward Tinney was accustomed to being around cadavers. The man who Ed worked for was an old black man who had also been a mortician as a younger man and was now in charge of, among other things, the bodies. His name was Herman.

Within the dental college at Ed's university was a graduate clinic that dealt with orthodontia, dentures and whatnot. It was called the Herman Clinic named after some benefactor or another, presumably named Herman. Well rather than tell people that he spent his days off carting dead bodies around for an old black man to make ends meet, Ed simply told them that he worked in Herman's Clinic and let them believe he was working in the post graduate clinic.

Now working in Herman's clinic usually just meant gathering the various limbs and body parts, putting them into large gray tubs for Herman to take away. But one day Herman told Ed that his back was bothering him and asked if he would give him a hand carting the bodies to the basement.

Ed agreed and they wheeled the covered tubs into the elevator and made their way to the basement. The basement was of the sort you would expect in an old large institution like a medical school. Dark, full of strange noises and smells. Herman led him down a corridor and into a room that seemed to Ed to have been drug out of a bad horror movie.

In the center of the room was a large furnace. Herman walked to it, put on a thick leather glove and opened the heavy iron door. Then with no further fanfare or eulogy for the deceased, Herman started feeding the body parts into a furnace.

This is not your average dental chair conversation.

But that wasn't the only story I heard about Herman's clinic. On another visit, probably a cavity in my upper bicuspid, Dr. Ed told me about another adventure he and Herman had carting dead bodies around.

It seemed that on one occasion, Herman and young Ed had to transport the newly dead bodies to the Gross Anatomy room so that the incoming class would have something to dissect. They arrived in a truck of some sort with the bodies stacked in the back. It just so happened that there was a new security guard on duty that night, and he was bent on being all that he could be.

The guard insisted on seeing whatever it was that Herman and this young medical student wanted to bring into his building. Herman just shrugged and motioned for the guard to have a look for himself. As the guard stood and pulled up his pants, Herman gave Ed a little wink and followed the guard out to the truck.

Now according to Ed, the guard appeared to have just finished dinner, as there was an empty box of KFC(r) sitting on the guard's desk. They trio walked out to the loading dock and Herman and Ed watched as the guard opened up the back of the truck. The guard pulled his flashlight out of his utility belt and with an air of authority proceeded to pull back the plastic that covered their cargo.

What happened next was inevitable, I guess. This particular guard had not been around long enough to have become accustomed to what exactly goes on at medical school. The guard froze for second as if he could not believe what he was looking at. In fact, according to Dr. Ed, he thought it took awhile for the guard's mind to comprehend what he was looking at. Even at medical school, you really don't expect to see a truckload of dead bodies on your first night of duty.

The guard turned around about as white as the plastic that covered the bodies and proceeded to lose the entirety of his KFC dinner, chicken, biscuits, beans and all.

The drill whined, and I did my best not to laugh, as I was afraid Dr. Ed might put a hole in something other than what he intended. Dr. Ed asked me to sit up and spit, then finished by telling me that they never saw that guard again.
I understand that a lot of people bail out of medical school in the first few weeks. I guess it's no different with the guards.

You either have the stomach for it or you don't.

One other thing I should mention. For the first year or so I never saw what Dr. Ed looked like. He always wore both a mask over his mouth, as well as a clear plastic shield that covered most of his face. I got to thinking of him as the masked storytelling dentist of Cape May County. And that's just what he is.

So if you're ever near South Jersey and feel the need for a story told well, look up the good Dr. Tinney. He'll jab your gums, and drill your teeth, make you spit even though your lips have ceased to function properly, but you'll come away with more than just a healthy set of teeth and gums. Trust me.