Month: April 2016

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Say McWhat?

A couple of years ago, our dog Duchess acquired a middle name for the first time.

“Her middle name is Hunter,” declared a young boy at one of Missy’s summer softball games – a player who, by amazing coincidence, was named Hunter himself. As the pronouncement was made, Heather and I silently tested out the new addition to our timid canine.

Duchess Hunter Rochat. Hm.

It wasn’t bad. And it fit her old habit of chasing down every rabbit in the backyard that she could find, back in her younger days in Kansas. So, without further ado or ceremony, Duchess Hunter Rochat it was.

If only things were that simple for the British.

Some of you may have been following one of the sillier stories in the news cycle: a $300 million polar research boat for the United Kingdom whose name was thrown open to an online poll. The National Environment Research Council was probably hoping for a name connected with penguins, or explorers, or something else sober and traditional.

What it got was over 124,000 votes for “Boaty McBoatface.”

The name had been thrown out as a joke by a former BBC host, then took on a life of its own. By the end of the contest, according to The Guardian, it was crushing the competition with four times the votes of the second-place entry.

Alas, this week, Science Minister Jo Johnson threw cold water on the proceedings. She said the British government would review all the submissions in order to find a more “suitable” name.

McBoo.

“Admittedly, calling a boat Boaty McBoatface was a bad idea, voted on by idiots,” Guardian columnist Stuart Heritage said. “But it was our bad idea.”

I’m often a bit skeptical of Internet democracy. But this time around, I’ve got to agree. It may be ridiculous. It may be downright stupid. But it honestly deserves to survive, no matter what the regret by the gray-faced bureaucrats.

McWhy? Consider this:

1) The National Environmental Research Council wanted to attract more attention to its scientific activities through the contest. It might be fair to say, mission accomplished.

2) As my sister pointed out, it makes an excellent object lesson for anyone conducting an internet contest. When you make a choice open-ended instead of giving a pre-set ballot to choose from, you can never be quite sure what you’re going to get. I mean, imagine if Dave Barry had gotten hold of this one. (He didn’t, did he?)

3) It’s fun. Utter, glorious, stupendously silly fun. And to be honest, we need a bit more of that in the world these days.

Sure, we face serious problems everywhere we look. There’s always a crisis to consider, a candidate to defend, a cause that’s earnest and urgent. And as we all know, it doesn’t take much to stir up an online fist fight around any of these, full of sound and fury and not much real conversation.  Often, the sheer heat of the “debate” protects any of it from being read, unless you’re already a partisan of one side or another.

In the midst of all this, a boat that sounds like it came off the set of Thomas the Tank Engine might be a much-needed piece of whimsy.

Not everything has to be life-or-death. In the physical world, something put under pressure too long will deform or break. Minds need to release pressure, too, for much the same reason. And if it’s by laughing at something silly that isn’t hurting anyone – well, why McNot?

The British used to be famous for eccentricity. Surely the nation that gave the world Mr. Bean, Doctor Who, and the makeup artist for Keith Richards can accept one more excuse to sit back and laugh at itself for adding a little more weirdness to the world.

It’s healthy. It’s refreshing. It breaks people out of their ruts for a moment and makes them smile. So why not bow to the inevitable?

Or just call it Hunter. You know. Whatever floats your McBoat.

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Exit, Left

There’s been a Marian-sized hole in my heart this week.

Those of you who read this paper regularly understand. Not long ago, the Longmont Theatre Company lost one of its stalwarts, Marian Bennett. On and offstage, she touched more lives than a workaholic chiropractor. She could communicate volumes about a character with one perfectly timed gleam in her eye and make you breathless with suspense or helpless with laughter.

I want to say she’s irreplaceable. She’d laugh at that and deflate the notion with her familiar Texas twang. And maybe she’d be right. All of us are … and none of us are. We all bring something unique that goes quiet when we leave. And barring a dramatic change in the history of the world, all of us are going to leave. Life is hazardous to your health, and the rest of us have to be ready to carry on when time brings another of us into the majority.

Easy to say. Hard to feel, to acknowledge, to own.

Especially when it’s someone close.

Doubly so when it’s someone who so undeniably lived.

 

Fill  to me the parting glass,

And drink a health whate’er befalls,

Then gently rise and softly call,

Goodnight and joy be to you all.

– The Parting Glass, traditional

 

The phrase “grande dame” can be easily misconstrued. It can suggest someone on a pedestal at best, a prima donna at the worst. But it literally means the great lady. Marian herself was charmed by the title until she looked it up in a dictionary and found that one of the definitions was “a highly respected elderly or middle-aged woman.”

“That (title) made me feel pretty good until I realized they were saying I was old,” she told me with one of her stage grimaces.

But Marian really did fill a room. Some of it was physical – she was a tall woman who naturally drew attention. A lot of it was that she did her best to reach out to everyone nearby. She wanted to talk, to chat, to hug – but you didn’t feel smothered. You kind of felt like your next-door neighbor had just come over to catch up.

On stage, that translated into the most perfect sense of timing I’ve seen in an actress. She could discard her dignity entirely to cross the stage in roller skates, or gather it around her to become King Lear himself, but she was always who she needed to be, where she needed to be.

Part of that was because backstage she worked like a fiend. (She and I often drilled lines on opening night, just to be absolutely sure.) Part of it was confidence, the same confidence that led her to travel, to speak her mind, to welcome a friend on one meeting. A lot of it may have been her willingness to look cockeyed at the world, and enjoy it when others did, too.

She could be nervous or anxious, like any actor. But I never saw her afraid. You can’t be if you go on stage. You have to be able to look inside yourself and then share it with the world.

Come to think of it, that’s true off stage, too. Life is more fun, more alive, if you can live it without fear. Not without common sense (Mar had plenty of that) but without drawing back from what you might find.

Even that makes her sound like a lesson. Granted, we all are to each other. But we’re all so much more, too. We’re friends and family and teachers and neighbors, connected by more than we can see.

And when that connection is broken, it hurts. For a long time. It never quite heals the same way … and it shouldn’t. You’ve loved them, cared for them, taken on some of their memories. Of course, they’re not going to vanish from your mind and soul like an overdue library book.

They’ve touched you – and you bear their fingerprints.

Goodbye, my friend. It was a pleasure to know you, an honor to work with you.

Take your bow with pride.

I’ll see you after the show.

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Five Years On

A lot of things can happen in five years.

Five years ago, Peyton Manning was a badly injured Colt with an uncertain future.

Five years ago, Longmont was talking about how best to prepare for a 100-year flood, given the new, larger flood plain map that had come out a few months before.

Five years ago, the Colorado Rockies were … well, maybe some things don’t change that much.

And in the Rochat household, it meant the biggest change of all. Because it was on this week, five years ago, that Heather and I first moved in with Missy.

I still can’t believe I just wrote that.

For the newcomers to this column, Missy is my wife’s physically and mentally disabled aunt, the same age as I am physically, but so much younger in mind and spirit. We became her caregivers in 2011, arriving at her home with hope and uncertainty and way too many cardboard boxes.

I’ll be honest. I was scared out of my mind.

Heather and I had talked about doing this ever since Missy’s mom had died a couple of years before. Heather was excited, even eager. I was … well, uncertain is a charitable way to put it. Questions seemed to orbit me like race cars on Memorial Day.

“What if Heather gets ill again? She’s had a lot of chronic conditions in the past …”

“What if I don’t know what to say to Missy? Sure, I’ve visited before, but living is different …”

“What if something goes wrong? What if it’s more than we can do? What if What if What if What if …”

It became an internal echo chamber after a while. The questions were no longer really all that coherent, just background noise for a rising theme.

Maybe you know what it’s like. Walking in the dark, one foot forward, not sure if you’ll find a road or a cliff ahead. Wondering if it wouldn’t be smarter to stick to the known trails, the safe odds.

Which, in retrospect, is kind of silly. Life gives no guarantees. Even the safest ground can crumble beneath your feet, while the most threatening cliff can represent a chance to fly.

And for five years, we’ve done more than fly with Missy. We’ve soared.

I’ve had the chance to discover how a woman who says maybe a few hundred words a week can fall in love with the written words of her nightly bedtime story. We’ve explored worlds from the epic sweep of Narnia to the small towns of Homer Price. She even became an eager part of the Harry Potter fandom, complete with Hogwarts blankets and a loud whoop at Voldemort’s defeat.

I’ve learned how a woman who walks through the world with halting steps finds fascination in everything around her, from a classic car parked in the next space to a cute dog walking across the street. And how she seems to know literally everyone in Longmont, even picking her long-unseen grade-school teacher out of a crowded Main Street festival.

I’ve learned how fearless Missy can be about expressing herself, right down to shouting “WOW!” in the middle of a church service.

And through her, I’ve seen the world and myself through brand new eyes.

My questions weren’t entirely wrong. Heather did develop more health problems. (So did I, for that matter.) I do sometimes struggle to understand what Missy is asking or what she wants. There are times when it feels like we’re making it up as we go along.

But what I didn’t anticipate is that it wouldn’t matter so much. That the answers we would find would be worth so much more.

That the love of a new-found family could be bigger than all the fears the shadows could hold.

Five years. It feels like forever. It feels like yesterday.

No. It feels like the springboard to tomorrow. And I can’t wait to find out what the next five years will bring.