Life and going live in the ER

When the alarm began its high-pitched bleating this morning at an ungodly time shortly before 3 a.m., I hauled myself up from bed and already forgotten dreams and went through a ritual than I do most mornings. Finished sipping the water from the cup on my nightstand, slumped down the hallway with my furry roommate, Patrick, to let him out the back door to do his business, then hit the shave-and-shower routine.

I rarely glimpse into the mirror in the morning, particularly so at this hour, because I fear I’ll see some visage of Dorian Gray leering back at me or a bald clone of Linda Blair’s noggin’ turning 360s at warp speed. Suffice it to say, I am an early riser most mornings, but not at an hour when drunks, stoners and disappointed barflies are starting to flock to Denny’s for a nightcap of greasy eggs and oozing meatloaf.

But there I was. On assignment to help with live remotes for our local ABC affiliate, WRTV-6, beginning at 4:30 a.m. and running at the top and bottom of each hour until 6:30 a.m. It just happened to be with reporter and cameraman I have worked with several times in the past. Good folks and always on top of things.

Their news truck’s microwave tower was up and linked to their downtown Indy station.  We chatted a bit about our families, the horrible weather and how TV meteorologists had pegged this latest hellish spell. Then they met some of our great crew working the overnight shift in our Emergency Room (ER ) – the people who treat others’ pains and illnesses and keep them alive while the rest of the city sleeps.

There is an unspoken word you never use when talking with ER staff. You never ask if the shift has been “quiet.” Maybe it’s a superstition or just a tradition, but you just find other ways to ask it. An emergency room is a world of mixed-bag experiences. I always have admired the way our teams operated. And this just happened to be a blessedly q---t night.

  

'A hurtin' kind of day'

I had just passed the "Home of the Big Peach" near Bruceville off U.S. 41 North and was anticipating the next landmark of Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. That's when it happened. That’s what I get for surfing FM stations in southern Indiana, constantly changing the dial from the Doobie Brothers to John Coltrane; from daily grain sales in Princeton to syndicated screeching preachers warning that Jesus is coming back soon and isn't going to be in a great mood.

But there it came. A big, salty drip from the corner of my left eye halfway through Mercyme’s “I Can Only Imagine.” Another one. Then another. Not wanting to be left out, my right eye decided to get a piece of the action.

Just a few hours before, my family and a multitude of others had said goodbye to my uncle, Patrick A. Henry. A bon voyage party to a man whose best journey began last Friday afternoon. It was an emotional gumbo seasoned with a deep dash here and there with respect, sadness and occasional silliness.

Emotions mix with goodbye to first newspaper, daughters

Nearly 30 years have flown and fluttered away like November leaves in an aimless incoming winter wind. But there it was; a transition escalating me from the first leg of my journey as a reporter at the aggressive daily in southwestern Indiana, The Mount Vernon Democrat, to the tantalizing Mecca of Hoosier journalism of Indianapolis.

I had been offered a job at United Press International, which, at the time, had a solid reputation of fierce competitiveness against the Associated Press, yet in the not-so-distant future of financial fiasco. I took it any way, deciding it was just another way to punch the ticket.

For more than three years, I cut my teeth in virtually every capacity as a reporter, news editor, columnist, night-time editor (a constant friendly battle with anxious press guys) and the always looming deadline of getting the words into ink.

I had a great respect for the guy who had hired me, Bill Brooks, but he earlier had counseled me: I wouldn’t hire a writer who didn’t have the ambition to leave me.

So I did just that.

And then there came the most crucial confession to my daughters, Two young ladies who spent weekends with me and nudged me lovingly along after the divorce. It was bittersweet, all of it, to explain and prepare to experience. Here is the last thing I wrote, word for word:

Sex, death and life in the colony

Amazing things, those little critters ants. 


They have many attributes. For example, your average ant can lift more than 20 times its body weight. If you could run as fast for your size as an ant can, you could keep pace with any contender for the Kentucky Derby. 

Your typical ant has two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with others. God forbid that gastric bypass is ever required.


Some worker ants are given the job of taking the rubbish from the nest and putting it outside in a special trash dump. Environmentally conscious they are.

An ant colony is virtually Amazonian in nature. The larger colonies consist mostly of sterile wingless females forming castes of "workers", "soldiers" and other specialized tasks. There are "male" drones who basically are buzzing around waiting to die. 

Male and female ants are both born with large wings. When the ant matures, these wings are used so that it can fly into the air to mate. Once they are done doing the deed, something strange happens. The male ant's wings fall off. Then he dies. 


Bummer if you're a dude ant. But that's what happens when you have unprotected sex. 


Meanwhile, the female ant immediately searches for a place to start a new colony as a fertile "queen," ready to make new conquests and kill again. Her sole job now is to be everybody's mother and lay eggs which soon become larva then pupa then adult. She gets to live an estimated 10 years.



Then one day she croaks and one of her progeny takes her place. Kind of the way it's been operating for centuries in England, with the exception of there being no male heirs to the throne.

And ants are smart, too. At night, the worker ants move the eggs and larvae deep into the nest to protect them from the cold. During the daytime, the worker ants move the eggs and larvae of the colony to the top of the nest so that they can be warmer. 

Scientists say an ant's brain may have the same processing power as a Macintosh II computer. But who really owns one of those ancient things any more?

King Solomon once wrote, “Go to the ant, consider its ways and be wise.” I think one of the things he might have meant is consider the source of the ant's strength. Each ant has a specific role or pursues a particular task. And  helping others. 


In the end, they are working to make their colony more productive and sustain it for future generations. 

When you have an average life span of about 90 days you don’t want to waste much time. Your mother has high hopes and expectations of you. God save the Queen.

Unexplained lights in a Hoosier night sky

I haven’t thought much about it over the years, much less shared the story either in spoken word or print. After all, most things we observe which defy a clear explanation, much less understand, eventually tend to get filed into the misty realm embedded deep into our memory banks.

It was late summer of 1978 and me, my then-wife and first-born infant daughter, were driving to her parents’ house in rural Vanderburgh County, Ind. It was twilight and we made our way over the meandering road when we noticed three objects glowing and blinking in the sky over farmers’ fields. They didn’t appear to move much, yet, the closer we got to our destination, their collective illumination seemed to intensify.

We didn’t think much of it; it seemed likely these were the lights of National Guard choppers, or perhaps some reflections making final approach to Dress Regional Airport in Evansville. As we got out of the car, the mom-in-law met us in the driveway and gestured off in the distance. Did you see those on your way in?

The three of us looked at the spectacle, shimmering perhaps a mile or so away. We were transfixed as the objects appeared to be arranged in a slight pyramid shape and their lights were rhythmically alternating colors of red, green and white. Never moving and holding their place in mid-air. I don’t know how long we watched this go on, but after a while they disappeared one by one. And we went into the house.

I vaguely recall thinking, Well, that was pretty weird and something you don’t see every day in southwestern Indiana.  It felt weird, neither good nor bad. 

To my swashbuckling Dad -- Happy Father's Day!

For the most part, it’s an asterisk sort of day. It’s wedged tightly in between the end of Mother’s and Memorial days and the Fourth of July celebration.  It seems as if the Hallmark and the bad necktie industry long have conceded that fathers need their day of acknowledgement, too. Besides, why pass up a chance to make a few extra bucks?

Father’s Day must have been a real drag for Adam and his Dad, in the post-Eden age. Sibling rivalry affects more than its actors.

Let me tell you about my Dad. George “Buck” Stuteville grew up hard during that Great Depression. Served his country, saw buddies die and had the tattoos on his arms to prove he had seen the elephant show and was not eager to see the sequels. When it was time to go home, he did. Dropped most of his GI vices, got married and then got about the business of becoming a father, a process played out three times between 1953 and 1964.

MerryMobiles and philosophical Injuns

The grass was cut, yet my front lawn still seemed to hiss and pop, fueled on by that angry, broiling star 92 million millions away. I plopped down on the front porch bench and took a long, hard draw from the pristine Gucci bottled water.

And that’s when I heard it down at the end of the street. It could have been It’s a Small World After All or an early Led Zeppelin tune for all I Know.  Then it came in to site – a battered white van with faded painted images of popsicles and ice cream cones. The driver slowly nosed down the street, a cigarette clenched between his teeth; his head swiveled lazily from left to right looking for customers.

None to be found. So he goosed that jalopy, tossed his smoke into my neighbor’s yard and continued on to the next block.

And there I was back in my old boyhood neighborhood. Country Club Manor in Evansville, circa the early and mid-1960s. Streets bearing regal names such as Kensington, Stratford, Tremont, Sheridan, Colonial and so forth. Mostly tiny and well-kept homes occupied by WW2 veterans who used the GI Bill to put roofs over the heads of their wives and offspring.

With school out that first week of June, summer did not officially begin until you first heard that tantalizing distant sound: the tinkling approach of the MerryMobile, playing crisp songs from a small PA horn. We would stand curbside and eagerly await its arrival.

It was quite a vehicle, more precious to a kid than any convertible Corvair or Sting-Ray bicycle. This was a shiny red, white, and blue vehicle, shaped like a carousel. In reality, it was an oversized, glorified golf cart. No way were you ever going to parallel park that wagon. And almost always, the MerryMobile was piloted by a late-aged teen boy more than likely a college student earning summer bucks.