Peter Stewart, 1944-2011

This morning I received a phone call from Norma Jean. Pete's struggle with emphysema had come to an end.

Pete’s chosen epitaph: “He was born. He lived. He died. And that was that.”

But there was so much more.

He loved much. In partnership with Norma Jean, he was the best of friends to his friends, always offering and providing uncommon levels of support and presence during the hardest of times. He was a very proud and loving husband, father, and grandfather. His pets were always members of the family. He loved laughter and beauty and knowledge, and he was the best of the best at motorcycling, photographic art, firefighting, and so much else.

And he was much loved. This is the measure of a man’s success, the only kind of success that really matters in the end. He sometimes worried about his level of success (as it is commonly defined by American society), but Pete will always live in our hearts because he fully embraced life and friends and love, and in so doing enriched many lives in the most important ways.

I love you, Pete. You are released from the limitations of this world and of the body that carried you through so many years and then simply ran its course. You and I didn’t always believe the same things, and I’m talking about some pretty big things, yet somehow our differences were minor, and today I pray that you are learning something new, and that we will embrace you once again when our own times come in the not-so-distant future.

Pete, My Brother

I have five sisters scattered around the North American continent. My three older sisters — Jan, Norma Jean, and PJ — comprised the “first set of children,” then my parents somehow managed to go nine years before I was born in 1959. Then came three more girls in quick succession. The first girl born after me, Tina Maria, did not survive. So I grew up with my little sisters Markee and Fia. We were the “second set of children.”

No two of my sisters are alike but they are all beautiful, all wonderful, all fun and funny and good, and each of them has a single brother (me). I, on the other hand, have never had a full brother or even a half brother, but I have friends who are like brothers in all the ways that count. And I have five brothers-in-law, all very good men.

Only one of my brothers-in-law, Pete, has been in my family for longer than I can remember. He married my sister Norma Jean when I was six, so I should possibly remember the wedding, but I don’t. I do, however, have numerous memories — from early childhood throughout adulthood — in which Pete played a role. In my mind he has always been there, has always been a member of the family. If any one man is my brother, it's Pete. He has influenced me, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in debatable ways, but never in bad ways.

Now, as he approaches his 67th birthday, his emphysema is making the rules and he’s being placed in Hospice care. When Norma Jean called this evening, the phone connection was somewhat poor. I think she said he might have a week left. I was afraid to ask her to repeat herself because I didn’t want to confirm what I thought she said. I’m contemplating a road trip, but Norma Jean seemed to be advising against it. I'm really torn.

Why is it always like this? Doesn’t everybody die? Won’t we all soon follow? Pete is five years older than my father was when he died, and only two years younger than my mother was, so he’s had a good run and by all accounts a very good and special life, but it still seems too soon. It always seems too soon.

Pete is a non-theist. He doesn’t believe in God. Religion is superstition. Christians are mostly wrong and dangerous, as are Republicans/conservatives.

I believe in God and I’m a Christian, yet I consider most of Pete’s honest positions to be perfectly understandable and absolutely worthy of my respect. Much of today’s organized religion ignores reason and blindly follows some very scary leaders. Many Christians and other religious persons are obviously wrong and clearly dangerous. This can be said of many (if not most) groups of human beings, but religion seems to be at the top of the list when it comes to stirring up hatred.

And while I don’t trust any politicians, today’s conservatives scare me more than liberals. As I read the gospels, Jesus seems quite liberal, even radically so. He spoke regularly against the methods and practices of the conservative religious leadership of his day, yet he spoke with an honest desire to enlighten those same leaders, to help them see the errors of their ways, and when they approached him as individuals, he welcomed conversation and he treated them with respect, and even with love. He cared about them. They had him killed.

Pete doesn’t believe in God but he believes in people, and he believes in love. Therefore, in my mind, he believes in all the most important things we can hope to know about God. Many of my fellow Christians will lecture me on doctrine, but I couldn’t care less. The Bible was written by fallible human beings who would be utterly astounded at many of today's interpretations. Yes, of course those writers were inspired by their experiences of God, and they have done much to guide us (in good directions and not so good directions), and they continue to guide us, but we can't even begin to understand God's ways, and I refuse to put him in a box of limited literalism, or to believe there is any limit to the number of ways in which God can choose to manifest himself, or to reach people.

As an epitaph, Pete says he wants: “He was born. He lived. He died. And that was that.”

Well, it’s his epitaph, but I think he’s leaving out an important element. I would prefer: “He was born. He lived. He loved much. He was much loved. He died. And that was that.”

Pete is very firm in his beliefs and almost certainly would not want me to write about him within the context of my spiritual beliefs, but he has never tried to change me, and he has never judged me. He just lets me be me, and he always smiles when he sees me. This never fails to remind me of someone else I know.

(I really had to work to keep this short, Pete, because I'm a lot like my brother. Please know that I will always, always love you.)

Click here to go to Pete's blog.

Pete with his granddaughter Lexie

A Simple Beta Blocker

Have you ever seen someone speaking in public, or rather attempting to speak in public, and you couldn't help but notice that he (or she) was shaking like a leaf, and that he didn't seem to have good control of his voice, like maybe it was wobbling and weak, or maybe all he could manage to produce vocally was a few croaks and/or squeaks?

Well, that person might have been me. For as long as I can remember, my body has betrayed me in such situations. Yes, there's a psychological trigger in there somewhere, and no, I can't get around the problem by imagining people in their underwear or by knowing my material inside out or by visualizing/meditating in advance.

As I understand the problem today, and please don't expect me to be medically accurate, I would say my adrenal gland has a faulty spigot. I stand up in front of people and face them, and my brain does its little psychological trigger thing, saying "OK, you might want to be just a little tiny bit nervous," and in response to this trigger, my adrenal gland releases a veritable FLOOD of adrenaline into my bloodstream. Totally disproportionate to anything I was feeling. Totally stupid. And totally scary.

Instantly, my heart is beating so fast and hard that I literally fear for my life. I truly feel like my heart might explode. People are watching me but they have no clue what I'm feeling. My brain begins to simply lock up. I can't think. I croak and I squeak. I shake uncontrollably. Effective communication is out of the question. Totally, totally stupid and senseless and frustrating. And did I say scary?

One of my favorite movie scenes, because I can identify with it, is Don Knotts making his nervous speech from the gazebo in the town square in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. If you've seen it, I can only say I wish I could speak so well in public. I can't, not without help.

Anyway, I am now 51 years old and throughout my life thus far I have deliberately skirted around many opportunities due to this problem. I have learned to live with it, to accept it, to forget about ever trying to speak in public.

So naturally I received an email at work recently informing me that I had been chosen to be one of eighteen people at our site who would be facilitating 4-hour classes for an audience of 500 managers (about 20 at a time) over a period of several weeks.

Suffice it to say I can't afford to lose my job, and I'm no longer in a position to say no to this kind of responsibility. So I started researching medications used by various types of performers and other professionals dealing with stressful situations, and I found myself reading forums on sites dedicated to social anxiety. And while I saw names of several different medications, Xanax among them, the name I saw most often was Inderal (which has the generic name propranolol).

(If this picture tells you how to make a batch of propranolol,
you're a hell of a lot smarter than me.)

Inderal (i.e. propranolol) is a beta blocker, commonly prescribed for hypertension. It is also used for performance anxiety, by speakers, musicians, actors. Some surgeons use it because it keeps their hands from shaking when things get really stressful. Olympic pistol shooters have been disqualified for using it.

Inderal blocks the action of epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (another stress hormone). That's all I know, or think I know, or want to know.

Bottom line: I went to my doctor and explained the situation. He seemed to think something from the benzodiazepine class (e.g. Xanax) might be more effective for performance anxiety, but I thought benzos sounded a little too scary due to relatively high risk of dependence. He eventually agreed to let me try the Inderal because he was on the verge of suggesting a beta blocker anyway due to borderline high blood pressure and occasional inexplicable heart palpitations, both of which (he said) should benefit from the beta blocker.

Anyway, with the help of Inderal (which I am now taking every day), I have now helped to facilitate three of these 4-hour classes, and I'm totally amazed! It's like I'm a normal person. I still get a few butterflies, just as I always have, but they never morph into full-fledged fight-or-flight responses. During the first class I helped to facilitate, I kept holding my hands in front of my face and marveling at how perfectly still my fingers were. I was standing up front, speaking loudly and clearly, and I had no problem thinking or listening or laughing or maintaining eye contact.

After decades with what I considered to be a social handicap, I still can't believe it's suddenly under control. If only I had known about this 36 or 37 years ago, when I was completely incapable of talking to girls. :-)

I just had to share my new-found abilities. Thanks for reading!

Exercise Machine Blues

Lately, I seem to have developed all the symptoms of sitting-too-much disease — neck pain, back pain, imaginary RLS, inability to rise, etc — and I fear I may be approaching that particular kind of personal crisis that can only be assuaged through the purchase of a magic life-changing exercise machine.

Over the past 20 years or so, I have purchased a few exercise machines, some in response to glitzy infomercials, so I'm a little distressed to think I might actually be considering another. There's something about knowing I might be pouring money down the drain (repeatedly) that has always caused me to question the integrity of that gray lumpy stuff in my cranium.

I think the first magic exercise machine I purchased was a NordicTrack skier, and it also came the closest to changing my life. The first time I got on it, I lasted less than 5 minutes, but after a couple of months, I could ski for an hour and I was feeling pretty amazing. (Of course, I was also 20 years younger than I am today.) But it was the cheapest model I could buy, it was noisy and somewhat rickety, the sliding skis sometimes came a little too close to skewering our pets, the glued-on footpads started sliding off the skis (albeit at a glacial rate), and my wife never could get the hang of the machine because it didn't fit her body as well as it fit mine (even though it could be adjusted in some places). It gradually fell out of use and became a collector of dust and clothing, and I ended up selling it.

Then came the Healthrider, which was a "rowing" machine. It was quieter and therefore a better choice for exercising while watching TV (especially when other people in the same room were also trying to watch TV). My wife and I both used it for quite a while, but she started complaining about it hurting her lower back, and I started feeling a little disappointed in the results (as compared to my memory of the NordicTrack skier). You know the rest: Dust. Clothing. Garage sale.

The third machine was a NordicTrack skier. (Fortunately for me, my wife seems to have forgotten that I actually purchased two of them.) I guess I was trying to return to what I now imaged to be the glory days of the first skier, but after another year or so, well... dust, clothing, garage sale.

After a few years passed without any exercise machines in the house, we decided an elliptical machine might be the ticket, and we found this one (by NordicTrack!) at a local sporting goods store. It was a lot bigger than it appears to be in this picture. When you have nothing but 9x9 rooms, all with windows and doors and closets and furniture, it can be hard to find a good place for such a behemoth. But it was pretty handy as a clothes hanger, and you could actually stack all kinds of things on that rear thingy, but as you might guess from the picture, sometimes the stuff would slide off, so we began to doubt the usefulness of the machine.

We finally found a buyer who had a big enough truck to take it away, but it didn't want to leave and kept trying to grab the walls and door frames as we carried it out, and it managed to leave a few marks and scrapes to remind us of our act of betrayal.

Now we live in a smaller house, with fewer rooms, so I'm thinking about a smaller magic machine, possibly one that can be collapsed or folded, and stored away without too much grief and suffering.

I'm somewhat partial to the idea of getting a Total Gym. I suspect it probably doesn't collapse and stow as easily as Chuck Norris would have me believe, but it's "the machine I always wanted but never purchased." I still imagine it to be potentially wonderful, but that's probably because I've never used one and the infomercials have been brainwashing me for years. And Christie Brinkley can be persuasive.

The problem is, the Total Gym seems to come in about 650 different models, with dozens of available attachments and extras (and several price ranges), so I can't even do the web research without feeling like I overextended myself. Maybe I'm already too old to actually unpack, assemble, and use the machine.

The other day, my wife surprised me by mentioning that she had watched an infomercial for, and was possibly considering, an exercise machine. It's the Malibu Pilates Chair, and it supposedly makes it possible to perform dozens of different exercises affecting all major muscle groups.

I don't get it. It's a funny-looking chair. Just from looking at the picture, I suspect you would have to already be in pretty darn good shape to use it effectively. But at least it looks like it might be easily stowed. And you could stack stuff on it. Might not be the best clothes hanger.

Somebody help me. I don't want to offend my wife by dismissing the Pilates Chair out of hand, but it looks to me like it might end up as the stool sitting in front of her make-up mirror.

Then there's the Rowbike:



How cool is that? Maybe it's a little dorky, but it's cool at the same time! The first time I saw the Rowbike, I knew I had to have one. But I was wrong. Now I know I never will. It's too easy to imagine myself ending up with scraped skin and broken bones. And since my wife won't let me have a motorcycle — as though it were her decision! —I'm guessing she wouldn't let me have a Rowbike, either.

So what to do? Total Gym? Pilates Chair? Jumping Jacks? (I might need a "sports manzier" for that last one.)

Blogging Kindergarten

I think my understanding of the blogosphere is beginning to gel. The growth of this understanding has been stunted by the lifelong skimpiness of my social skills. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way; I just happen to be an introvert by nature.

I have blogged (elsewhere), but my blog was basically a one-way street, a facade for others to see, very much like my old, stagnant MySpace page, which thankfully no longer exists. Sure, I would receive occasional comments on my blog posts, and sometimes I would comment in return (on my own blog), but the blog was still basically about me, about my posts. The simple existence of the blog created pressure on me, pressure to constantly add new bricks or a fresh coat of paint to the facade. And it never occurred to me to try to conserve enough energy to seek out the blogs of others, to look into the lives and interests of those people who took the time to read and comment on my posts.

But then my oldest sister, DJan, retired and redirected some of her considerable energy to blogging. (Unlike her, I am not known for having considerable energy.) And she talked me into getting a Facebook account about a year ago. Although she had moved even further away after retiring, way up into the Pacific Northwest, the Internet was actually beginning to keep us closer together. And without her doing so intentionally, but rather simply because I had an increased ability to follow little bits and pieces of her life, she began to teach me things, to lead me by example.

For Facebook’s part, its unavoidable and surprisingly enjoyable focus on social interaction—as opposed to what I perceived as complete non-interaction on MySpace—has guided me into tiny little relationships I would have normally avoided. I still have trouble believing the number of old friends and acquaintances who have entered once again into my life, if only in a small way, little links and connections I never expected to be there during this later part of my life.

And while DJan’s blog posts are giving me amazing glimpses into her life of retirement up there in Almost Canada, it’s the comments she receives from her loyal readers, and the comments she leaves on those other readers’ blogs, that are beginning to open my eyes to the small community aspect of blogging. Small communities (of good friends) that just happen to span the continent, or even the globe.

So while MySpace is stagnant and uni-directional, perfect for creating facades, Facebook is a little like blogging kindergarten, a kindergarten that teaches social skills more than writing skills (and it might be a while before this introvert feels comfortable enough to really graduate from it).

True blogging is like Facebook on steroids, with far more substance and no need or desire to filter things out. But most importantly, blogging, like Facebook, is about relationships. It’s about back and forth, about community. I’m finally beginning to understand the depth of that, and I’m finally starting to think (with just a touch of excitement) about blogging again.

But I'm shy, so let’s just wait and see. Maybe I need to retire first.