You know those pileated woodpeckers that you almost never see outside of bird books, which have those pointed heads the shape of which looks remarkably reminiscent of one of the flying dinosaurs - so much so that after hearing that dinosaurs were antecedents of birds, not lizards, you go, "Duh!" and slap your forehead and wonder why YOU didn't come up with that?  And then you realize (if you are not of a religious bent) that your whole life has been stunted intellectually by believing what you heard instead of your own eyes?   The religious, of course, never DO realize that.

Well, one of those very birds was hanging around moving from branch to branch in my pear tree just now in a vain attempt to get at the rich nutty goodness of my seed-infused suet block which I have hanging on a tricky jerrybuilt set of hooks and wires in a (vain) attempt to keep it from the squirrels without realizing that it also precludes the visits from equally weighty avians whom I would love to see dining at my doorstep now and then.  And as I reflected on what could be so rare as a visit from said woodpecker, i realized that a Shaggian visit to the blogosphere was about as rare, though considerably less lovely.  So, deciding that one rare turn deserves another, here I am. 

Unfortunately a parallel can be drawn between the DavidShag degrees of busy-ness versus busy-ness as most people describe it, and a dog's perspective of life-expectancy years versus our idea of reasonably longevity.  Given that caveat, I have been busy in DavidShag units, although at what exactly I can't say.  Watching TV (Friday Night Lights is back - hooray!), reading Newsweek, getting cruise control put into my car to save the Shaggian driver's license - only $400 for the installation, and $200 for the rental car which I had to keep for a week, since the car surgery was done near Reedville and the work life ('life' being a bit of an oxymoronic concept in relation to my work) being suffered in Smallville with 150 miles between the two, so I had to take a week-long rental. 

So my life being wee and small, and becoming ever wee-er and smaller as it sinks in that I will never be able to retire with the thin husk to which my personal fortune has been reduced (Hell of a job there, Georgie!) - a mere half of what it was a year ago at this time, I must write of the lives of others.  I will note that my first cousin once removed, whom I have referred to herein previously as "Warren" was featured in an article in Penthouse, no less, amongst profiles of such celebs as Knievel, Junior and various sports figures and so on, who were termed 'bad-ass Americans', despite the fact that the lad in question has a rather fine ass in my view.  Well, not in my direct view, alas, but you know what I mean.  And Life with Mother has had a turn that led to Luke bringing down the house at a local hospital.

There is nothing that Mom hates so much as going to the doctor, and now that she is demented to a degree that all she understands of medical procedures is that strange men are making her take off her clothes, this aversion has become a pretty spectacular feature of her persona.  So when Luke went to get Mom last week at Desolation Pines and found that she had fallen (out of bed, presumably) and her arm was bleeding and she was unable to walk, he knew that the day was not going to be the stroll in the park, metaphorically speaking, that he had envisioned.  One is always concerned when one's mother cannot walk as a result of a fall, although it is a well-known fact that no Shaughnessy ever breaks a bone so it was unlikely that she had pulled that old senior citizen gag of the broken hip.  She herself was in merry mood, chattering away six to the dozen on topics totally irrelevant to the current situation.  Luke felt it was incumbent on him to drag her off to a local hospital.  This is never an easy task in the Reedville area, since for one reason or another there is a local convention that decrees that ERs are always unavailable here when one requires them.  This may be the only place in America where one has to schedule one's emergencies ahead of time.  I remember once, long ago, I had what was later diagnosed as prostatitis (I may have that spelled wrong - spellchecker certainly thinks so - pretty darn uppity for software that thinks 'spellchecker' is spelled wrong), but the symptoms are 1) unbelievable knifelike agonies whenever one pees, accompanied with 2) discharge of quantities of blood from - well, from where you would imagine - teamed with a rather mean-spirited joke on the part of the body that dictates that the third symptom is that as soon as one finishes peeing one is seized with an intense need to pee again.  Maybe that was partly because I had been drinking beer at the time, but whatever.

Being younger by far at the time (I haven't drunk beer in 26 years, for starters), I was unable to take the long view about peeing blood - well, actually I didn't mind peeing blood so much - it could have been a great ice-breaker at a party, but the pain was something truly revelatory.  It got so I had to grip the walls and clench my teeth hard to get through it - it was a level of pain unique in my experience - and yeah, yeah, I know about the pain of childbirth and all that - don't even go there.   And would you believe I had to call several local hospitals to find one whose ER had not been closed because of an overload of business that day? 

All this is beside the point except to illustrate why Luke had to convey Mom fifteen miles south to find that the ER there was unable to treat her and then fifteen miles north from his starting point (or 30 miles in toto from the unhelpful ER in the south, for the math-challenged).  Mom was not liking this a whole lot, and Mom is a lot less reticent about her likes and dislikes than she was wont to be of yore.  Far less did she like removing her clothes and being pinched and prodded by the prurient fingers of science.  Poor Luke was seen as the cause of all this discomfort and personal embarrassment, and while Mom, not yet having lost her instinct for public politesse, is generally not terribly unpleasant to the actual medical personnel with whom she is dealing (or vice versa), she is more than willing to vent her displeasure on Luke without let or hindrance.  Luke was pretty distraught in the first place, worrying about any injury that could render Mom unable to walk, and having to drive untold miles to get help and wait ages for service, all the while bearing an unending screed of complaint and vituperation for his pains.   Luke is, to put it mildly, not known for his patience in any situation, and this was getting to the point where Mother Teresa herself might have muttered a discreet, "Damn it all." 

Finally the last straw was reached when she turn on him and said (in front of several medical personnel) "You!  You bring me here to be stripped naked by these men to do nasty things!" and he riposted angrily, "Well, you made me go to Catholic school!"  The folks in the hospital were highly amused. 

It turns out that the fall had merely aggravated her arthritic hips, which we had no idea she had.  That is the way it has always been: you never knew if Mom was in pain.  I literally never knew her to be in bed from any ailment in my entire life - or hers.  I asked her once if she had been a little scared prior to my birth (I was the eldest), since if I were going to have nine pounds twelve ounces of anything - or even half that - come ripping out of my insides, I would have been prostrate with terror.  "No," she said, "I didn't really think about it until it happened." 

Another family member who has been having a more interesting life than mine is Liam, my singing brother.   Although it happened some time ago, I only heard about  it when he dropped in this January and he and his wife and George and Luke and I were huddling about the fireplace - January was hellishly cold from start to finish, if 'hellish' is a term that can be applied to cold.  It seems that Liam had, some time back, taken a night shift job at a 7-ll in Phoenix to supplement his microscopic income from writing and recording and performing music.  One evening a girl had come in and asked for a pack of cigarettes.

 "You know," he said to us, "how you know you are screwing up and you just kind of watch yourself do it?" 

I do know, since I have often had that experience.

"Nobody," he went on, "ever asks for a pack of cigarettes.  They ask for Marlboros or whatever.  All the alarm bells were ringing.  But I went right ahead."

"'What kind?' I asked her.

"'Um, that white pack,' said she.  More bells - she didn't even know the kind she smoked!

"But I took her money and gave her the change.  I laid the cigarettes on the counter.  And then she started to leave without them.  And the alarm bells became deafening.  But was that enough for me?  Oh no!  I picked up the pack, held it up, and yelled, 'Hey, miss!  You forgot your cigarettes!'  And at that moment a flashbulb went off from outside the window.

"Next day, in the local paper, there is a big picture of me holding up the pack of cigarettes.  The headline talked about local stores ignoring the age checking for cigarette purchases, and underneath the picture the caption says says, 'Local clerk goes the extra mile.''"

So that is what is happening with folks out my way who DO have lives...