Month: January 2014

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The Saving Power of Silly

I’ve seen Missy the Charmer, Missy the Artist, even Missy the Ninja. But once in a while, our amazing lady decides to be Missy the Rebel instead.

Toothbrushes are firmly handed back, or dropped in the sink. “No.”

A sit-down strike begins at bedtime. “Don’t wan’.”

A storm begins on waking up, where every little thing seems to be wrong. “Noo!”

Sometimes it takes reason. Sometimes it takes time. Most of the time it’s challenging. When a disabled adult isn’t happy about something, but has trouble forming the words to say why, it often leaves you to go on guess, or inference, or memory.

Thankfully, on the stormiest days, I’ve got an ace in the hole. You see, I’m not just Scott the Writer, Scott the Guardian, or even Scott the Amateur Actor.

I’m also, when I need to be, Scott the Irritatingly Silly.

“Hi.”

Missy turns away, shaking her head.

“Hiiiii.” (Little kid voice)

Missy’s face scrunches, one hand making the “go away” gesture.

“Hiii.” (Gollum voice)

More waves, but now she’s fighting a smile.

“Hiii.” (Monster voice.)

The smile wins, turns into giggles.

“Isn’t he awful?” my wife Heather says from behind me, smiling herself. The impressions keep coming, Mel Blanc with twice the energy and half the talent, until all of us are laughing helplessly – Missy included.

What can I say? Silly works.

I’m not always sure why.  But I know it’s true of more than just Missy. Sometimes, at my own moments of low ebb and lower motivation, all it takes is a bit of the ridiculous to get my balance back. One recent round of the blues was shattered beyond repair by a long exchange of jokes about turning The Lord of the Rings into social media “click-bait.” (“Nine People Who Decided They Could Just Walk Into Mordor, And The Surprising Results!”)

OK, I’m a geek. But you get the idea.

Mind you, I wouldn’t try this at a funeral or to someone with chronic depression. But sometimes we just get ourselves on a feedback loop. Annoyance leads to annoyance, frustration to frustration, and each new irritant is harder to get rid of because we haven’t unloaded all the old ones yet. You know you’re grinding yourself down, but you’re not quite sure how to stop – sort of like being a Rockies fan in mid-July.

At a moment like that, it’s not always a bad thing to throw a wrench into the gears.

And silly makes a great wrench.

It interrupts the cycle. It reaches past the wall of thoughts and tweaks the instincts, for an immediate reaction. It turns the world upside down for a second, and gives you a new, more ridiculous angle.

It gives you permission to laugh. No, that’s not quite right. It surprises you into a laugh, and takes permission for granted.

Done right, that surprise moment of feeling good can start a new feedback cycle. One that leads in a better direction.

Maybe it’s appropriate that I’m thinking of this at Super Bowl season. After all, what could be sillier than watching a few dozen men in bright orange juggling a football? But for many, it reaches to the emotions in a different way, pushing aside other concerns in a burst of sheer exhilaration.

Instead of brooding on the past, or chewing on the future, you’re in the moment. And the moment doesn’t seem so bad.

Does it really work? Ask Missy sometime if you like.

Make sure to say hi.

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Claiming Space

By the time I came to bed, a furry mountain range had already seized most of the acreage.

“Blake…”

Big Blake, the Clydesdale Canine, remained motionless, the dark fur of his muscular body almost invisible in the night. He may not have known the principle about possession being nine-tenths of the law. But he certainly knew how to sprawl across nine-tenths of the bed, leaving only the space my wife Heather was sleeping in, and a small corner of empty mattress that might fit an adult hobbit.

Might.

“Come on, Blake.”

Even appealing to Blake’s bottomless stomach won’t always move him off the bed at times like this. And since my own back isn’t up to lifting 80-plus pounds of sleepy dog, what usually follows is half negotiation and half dance, until the thought finally penetrates his mind. “Oh. I am not a Chihuahua. Perhaps I should move over a bit.”

And with great reluctance – and no small amount of nudging – the mountain finally moves.

What makes it frustrating sometimes is that Blake is not a bad dog. Not really. Sure, he’s a klutz who tends to think with his belly instead of his mind, like many a rescue dog before him. But he loves deeply and is loved dearly, an enthusiastic member of the family who practically flies over Pikes Peak when one of his people comes home.

But when he takes up more than his share of space, it still gets on your nerves.

For football fans, that might sound familiar.

The first direct exposure many of us had to Richard Sherman, a cornerback in the Seattle Seahawks “Legion of Boom” was last Sunday. Over the last couple of days, I’ve heard a lot about what a decent guy he actually is, and his background seems to bear it out – the guy who got out of Compton and into Stanford; the guy who, off the field, usually has time to spare if someone else needs it.

But all that got shoved into the background after the NFC championship game, where his game-sealing interception in the end zone was followed by a quick round of trash talk. “Well, I’m the best corner in the game! When you try me with a sorry receiver like (Michael) Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get! Don’t you EVER talk about me.”

Now, this is sports. A certain amount of braggadocio comes with the game. To compete before a crowd requires supreme confidence, whether it’s the quiet certainty of a Champ Bailey or the flamboyance of a Muhammad Ali. Most fans know that.

But when someone seems to take up more space than he should, when the interior monologue becomes too exterior, especially in an unguarded moment – that’s when it’s going to rub the wrong way.

And that’s why Sherman made a lot of Bronco fans on Sunday.

For that moment – a moment, admittedly, with his “game face” still on and his adrenaline soaring – he came across as rude, obnoxious and willing to put himself before and above the team.

It only takes one of those moments to obscure a lot of nice.

To his credit, Sherman seems to recognize that. When he apologized at a recent news conference, it was for pulling focus from his teammates. Not for believing himself great (or Crabtree mediocre), but for letting his passion push the rest of the team off the stage.

I’m not a mind-reader, so I can’t tell you how sincere he was. Only those who watch him carefully will be able to say for sure which is the posturing, the behavior on the field or the apology off it. But at the least, he understood what it was that had pushed the button and sent things over the edge.

That’s a start.

(It’s also starting from a better place than the Seahawks fans who threw food at an injured San Francisco player, but that’s another story.)

I’ll give the guy a chance. After all, I give Blake plenty of opportunities to clear some space, too.

But if the “best corner in the game” gets beaten a few times by Denver’s high-flying receivers – well, I won’t be terribly disappointed, either.

Now, let’s put this whole thing to bed.

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Snownose

In the shady recesses of the Rochat back yard, the last holdouts of snow still linger.

For a little while each day, so does Duchess the Wonder Dog.

For those who haven’t met her yet, Duchess is our eldest dog, an 11-year-old mix of border collie and black lab who’s both too smart for her own good and too shy to be believed. A rescue dog, she latched onto my wife Heather like a furry guardian angel and still gets anxious on the rare occasions that the two of them are apart.

She’s getting a little slower these days, as older dogs do. She rests a little more, takes a little longer to hear her name, trots downstairs a little more slowly when it’s time for a run or a meal. She’s hardly on her last legs yet, but those legs have less hurry and more care than they used to.

Until the winter comes. And then something magical happens.

A sparkling fountain of youth arrives.

When the nights are cold and the ground is white, Duchess is in her glory. She crouches. Buries her nose in the snow. Takes off at top speed for the next drift. Buries her nose again. Then repeats and repeats and repeats, running an Indy 500 course through the yard, looking more like a puppy than a Grand Old Lady with every snowflake.

Like Clark Kent becoming Superman, Duchess has become Snownose the Unstoppable. No fear. Just pure unadulterated joy.

It’s worth watching. Even if it does mean opening the door … and opening the door … and opening the door again in hard-freezing temperatures just to see if she’s finished up her business yet. Not only is it fun to see the young dog I remember, but I even get a little jealous of how thoroughly she can lose herself in her wonder and exuberance.

That is, until I recognize in her joy an echo of my own.

No, I don’t spend Friday nights sticking my nose in random snowdrifts. (Well, not unless the walk is really icy.) But I have noticed that when I start to write, the rest of the world falls away for a while. Even headaches of near-migraine level will get pushed to the back as the cranial supervisor declares “Sorry, no time for that now. We’ve got a fresh shipment of words coming in and we need the space.”

Maybe it’s an extreme focus on the moment. Or the power of routine for someone who’s been putting fingers to keyboards for far too long. But at its core, I think it’s a passion, a liberation, even an embrace.

It’s knowing what you were meant to do. And then doing it.

And it’s a joy I think too many of us never discover.

That’s not a condemnation. Especially these days, many of us just try to make it from moment to moment, doing what we need to do just to keep life going. For someone burdened by the “now,” asking to reach for something more may seem frivolous, even cruel.

It’s not an easy escape. But when it happens, it can give the moments meaning.

And once reached, it’s hard to resist going back.

I know an author, Christopher Paul Curtis, who wrote his first novel on an assembly line. Literally. He’d double up on hanging car doors to give a friend a break, then take a few minutes to write here and there when his buddy did the same for him.

He reached for his joy. Even in the middle of a car factory.

And it changed his world.

Maybe it’s a battle to find even five minutes. Maybe those five minutes won’t produce the next hit song, or the recipe of the year, or the business that lets you lean back and retire.

But if the effort takes you out of yourself – no, takes you more thoroughly into yourself – that’s the real prize. And the more it happens, the more you want it to happen. Even if it means fighting for that five minutes again.

When you get there, it won’t matter.

All that will matter is the chill of the night. And the waiting dance of the snow.

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Gone to (Tea) Pot

There are things that must happen in a Missy morning. But the greatest of these is tea.

Get the kettle singing. Ready the Tetley’s – always Tetley’s, never any flavored stuff. Mix it up with a bit of milk, enough to turn a black cup into the beige of a Volvo station wagon.

Oh. And make a full pot. There will be refills.

“I wan’ m’ tea.”

“Coming right up.”

For all her disabilities, both physical and mental, Missy is still the daughter of an English mother. And that means a cup of tea is as much a reflex for her as her puzzle ball or her 120-decibel stereo. It launches her off to her day program in the morning and it greets her on her return in the afternoon, a cup of liquid welcome. A sip of home.

Often, it’s a sip of memory, too.

In my mind, the memories are always of Val, who was Missy’s mom and my grandmother-in-law. One of Longmont’s ubiquitous “English ladies,” Val passed on many things to Missy, including a small stature, a love of dancing and a steaming teapot. I never visited the house for long before a cup found its way to me – though I picked up my share of wry looks for taking my own tea black, without milk or sugar.

I know. American barbarian, that’s me.

Val’s gone now. But the tea remains, the cup held carefully in her daughter’s shaky hand. It’s a space in the day, one where nothing has to happen, where it’s OK to just be.

That’s a small accomplishment by itself.

“Being” isn’t something that’s greatly prized in our country today. We’re a nation of doers, where who you are is measured by what you’ve accomplished, or at least whether you have the decency to look busy. We treat absence of activity like a mom faced with bored children: “If you don’t have anything to do, I can find you something.”

No time for reflection. No time for discovery. No time for second thought, or maybe even a first one.

That’s a great way for a piston to live. For a person? Not so much. Having that small space in the day is like having a period in a sentence: essential for any clarity and meaning.

But there’s more to it as well. At a very basic level, a cup of tea is a small act of caring.

I lived for nine years in Kansas. Not once in those nine years did I enter a home without being offered a glass of water or a cup of coffee in the first minute. It was the fundamental decency of a host or a neighbor, welcoming another with something of your own.

It was a small ritual. But it had a big message behind it. Stay a while. There’s no rush. You’re among friends.

It’s those little, almost routine acts that can mean the most.

Love doesn’t have to be big or elaborate. It can be – I still remember the newlywed obsession that led me to organize a “12 Days of Christmas” onslaught of surprise gifts for my wife Heather – but truth to tell, the saintly and the passionate can be a bit intimidating for the rest of us. Fearing not to be perfect, we can fail to be merely good.

But a life lived with love can find a voice even through the everyday and the mundane. Maybe especially through them.

Maybe it’s in the things we do without thought that we see who we truly are.

And once in a while, the ripples of those small efforts for another come back in a wave.

This morning, after getting ready for the day, Missy looked up at me with a sweet smile. She reached out with both arms.

“Love me?” she asked, eyes sparkling.

The hug that followed was warm and long.

And then, we went downstairs for tea.

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In The Blink of an Eye

Pay no attention to the eye doctor, Scott.

Yes, he is going to be holding a needle in his hand. Yes, it will be approaching your eyelid. But we’re not going to think about that, right? We’re just going to lie back and breathe and get nice and relaxed and cozy …

“Aaaah!”

You thought about it. Didn’t you?

One more try. Deep breath. No, steady breath. A deep breath warns your body that something’s wrong, that you’re about to plunge into shark-infested waters. No, we’re calm. We’re calm. See how calm we are? Nothing out of the ordinary, doot-do-doo, oh, look, here comes the nice doctor reaching for my right eye…

Oh, look, there I go making the Olympic high jump team.

“And we’re done,” the doctor said, setting up an appointment for a second try to remove my eyelid cyst – this time, with medication.

And the patented Scott Rochat Whole-Body Eye Defense triumphs again.

Darn it.

Some people have a blink reflex. I am a blink reflex. Ever since the age of 15, I’ve known that my body will intercept threats to the eye faster than Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and Mr. Miyagi combined. No conscious thought required: the jumps, squirms and jerks of Eye Fu are completely instinctive, a true union with the Tao … or at least with the “Ow.”

As you might guess, this presents a few problems.

I’ve never worn contact lenses, for obvious reasons.

Theatrical makeup takes three times as long to put on as it should, and sometimes requires a second person to hold me steady.

Even giving me eye drops require catching me off guard – at which point, the chances of success rise to 50-50.

So when I had a head-to-head collision last summer with Blake, the Dog of Steel – well, can you blame me for thinking/hoping/praying that the bump on my eyelid was a bruise? Or at worst, scar tissue?

No such look. I mean, luck.

Sigh.

I suspect most of us have similar weak spots, that one fear or reflex we can’t master, no matter how important it may be. My wife Heather can face the prospect of major surgery with firm resolution, but the approach of a tongue depressor will send her running to the nearest wastebasket as her gag reflex goes into overdrive. A former Denver Post columnist, Mark Obmascik, once wrote about a hiking partner who had such an aversion to needles that the man blacked out during an interjection – and came to in the parking lot, learning that he had punched the nurse and fought his way out of the hospital.

The mind may know better. But it’s not in the driver’s seat anymore.

There’s an irony to writing this so soon after New Year’s. After all, this is the time for grand resolutions, for the conviction that life can be changed for the better and that we’re the ones to do it. That we can control ourselves, take charge of our circumstances, make ourselves into the people we want to be.

That’s not a bad attitude. And it can lead to some great things. But even the best will in the world can hit limits. The spirit is willing, and all that.

And in a weird way, that’s reassuring.

It’s good to be reminded sometimes that I don’t control everything. It’s good to be reminded that I have to make allowances for others, to account for a world with its own drives and imperatives, even to – hardest of all – ask for help. I need to remember that “what I want” isn’t the most important thing in the world, that even my own body is a gift for today that might not answer the wheel tomorrow.

It’s called humility. Not the most common attitude in America these days, I know. But vital.

If it means some frustration at times, so be it. I’ll get through it. My reflexes are real and they have to be accommodated, but accommodation doesn’t mean surrender. This can be done.

Am I sure?

Eye-eye, sir.