Tag: planning

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What a Racket

Ugo Humbert, I feel your pain.

If you’re not an avid follower of tennis news … well, neither am I, to be honest. But the news out of Wimbledon a couple of weeks ago is the sort of thing that any of us could sympathize with.

You see, Ugo’s match got delayed 90 minutes by rain. And when everyone got the word to start up again, he got excited to get back on the court. Maybe just a little too excited.

“Despite coming on court carrying a massive red bag,” Reuters reported, “the 24-year-old sheepishly admitted: ‘I don’t have any rackets – sorry for that.’”

That’s right. A professional tennis player showed up without his racket.

Really, who hasn’t been there? I mean, I we’ve all walked out of the house without something, haven’t we? Car keys, wallet, glasses, phone, the major implement of our profession … it’s all good, right?

OK, it’s easy to tease. But we have all had the nightmare, haven’t we? It’s the athletic version of the “came to school undressed” dream, complete with the inevitable crowd of people laughing nearby. And it’s almost always born of anxiety: the fear of being off guard, unprepared, out of control.

Of course, there’s an irony. What’s most likely to make us unprepared? Anxiety – or rather, the sense of hurry that anxiety can bring.

Don’t get me wrong. There certainly are situations that call for urgency, excitement, even haste. When something’s on fire – metaphorically or literally – it’s a time for action rather than dithering. But it’s easy to get caught up in what needs to be done without spending any thought on how to do it. And that’s how rackets get left behind.

In the ocean, it’s the difference between flailing and swimming.

On the battlefield, it’s the difference between a panicked mob and an army.

In any situation, it’s the difference between impulse and direction. Or the recognition that “Do something!” isn’t the same as “Do anything!”

That’s hard to remember in a crisis. But essential. It requires awareness, thought and preparation. You have to know your goals and what it will take to get there. Sure, you’ll always have to adapt and change for circumstances … but it’s a lot easier to adapt if you have some idea what you’re doing. “Plans are worthless,” Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “but planning is everything.”

We’re having to plan for a lot these days. Alarms scream on the deck from every direction: about the environment, about politics, about viruses, and about 137 other crises besides. (But hey, it’s early yet.) None of these are back-burner questions. All of them are going to require all the ingenuity and energy we can bring.

But energy without focus doesn’t accomplish much.

That’s where we need each other. Not just to support our goals, but to give the “hey, wait a minute” that keeps things on task. It’s the sort of grounding that stage managers give actors, that editors give writers and that friends give friends.

Ugo got that kind of help – belatedly, but it came. Within two minutes, someone arrived with a fresh set of rackets. He was rattled at first, naturally, but went on to win.

It’s a simple lesson: Together, we can keep each other in the game.

Or at least make sure that we’re ready to raise a racket.

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Directions in the Fogg

For the last few weeks, bedtime has been a race. And now, at last, Missy has pulled up smiling at the finish line.

A trip around the world can do that.

No, we’re not defying coronavirus restrictions and dashing through international borders one step ahead of the health authorities. Heck, at the rate baseball has been going, even state borders are starting to look like an adventure worthy of Indiana Jones.

But Missy’s bedtime reading has opened a lot of doors over the years. We’ve journeyed through Middle-earth. We’ve battled evil at Hogwarts. We’ve traveled the stars with Madeleine L’Engle and solved mysteries with Ellen Raskin.  And since Missy’s online activity group has been “visiting” a lot of countries lately, the time felt right  to introduce her to an old friend.

Once again, it was time to travel with Phileas Fogg.

If you’re not familiar with “Around The World In Eighty Days” – is there anyone left? – you have quite the journey ahead of you. I was a kid on summer vacation with my family when I first read Jules Verne’s tale of the incredibly precise 19th-century Englishman who accepts a 20,000 pound wager to circle the world  in the stipulated time without being a single minute late.  It’s a short novel and one that moves as quickly as its characters as they jump from trains and steamships to sailing craft and elephants, efficiently racing the clock (and a misguided detective).

Like a lot of older books, some bits age better than others. But the story still draws like a magnet because the central idea still works.

No, not the idea of circling the globe in under three months. Anyone with access to an airline ticket and a passport – a combination which, admittedly, has become a piece of fiction itself lately – can travel at a pace that leaves Fogg and his friends gasping in the dust.  But the challenge behind Fogg’s wager is still part of us today.

Namely, the idea that with enough planning, even the unexpected can become predictable.

At this stage of 2020, the idea sounds almost humorous. Anything we may have expected on  New Year’s Eve has surely gone through the paper shredder as we’ve grappled with seven months of upside-down events. It’s always hard to grasp how little control we truly have, but 2020 seems determined to remind us of that constantly … with a Louisville Slugger, if necessary.

The thing is, Fogg’s friends back home seem to have already absorbed the lesson. From the start, they remind him of all the things that could go wrong – breakdowns, bad weather, local violence and more. And in a way, they’re right. Fogg’s ability to take advantage of the good and improvise around the bad gets absolutely derailed on the final lap, disrupted by the one complication he hadn’t foreseen. Disaster looms.

It sounds like a pandemic lesson. And I hope it is. Because – spoiler alert! – that’s not the end of the story.

There’s a second complication. A positive one that gives Fogg more time than he thought he had. But without his planning, he would never have been in position to take advantage of it. And without learning to recognize and return the love of others, he would never have seen the opportunity at all.

And that is the lesson we need to learn.

Not to give up. Not to say “Nothing we do will make any difference.” But to plan as best we can, improvise where we have to, and recognize that ultimately it’s our compassion for the people around us that will get us through this. When we look out for each other instead of grasping desperately at normal, we win – because every one of us is “each other” to someone else.

Like all adventures, this will leave us changed. But it can be a change for the better.

Maybe, just maybe, a little Fogg can help us see clearly.

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Making Magic

Heather’s youngest sister hurried up to me as the rehearsal dinner wound to an end.

“Mom’s outside with Heather,” she said. “She’s sick.”

My turn to hustle. Sure enough, my wife Heather was doubled over on a bench outside the restaurant. It had been a warm night and heat is no friend to an MS patient; as she’d stepped outside the crowded dining room to get some air, she’d suddenly had to sit down before she fainted, threw up or both.

“I need the car,” she whispered as her stepmom watched over her. Of course. I hurried off and pulled around, slamming the air-conditioning from Spring Day to Christmas in the Arctic. Her family helped bundle her into the back seat, some asking if they needed to follow us home.

No need. After a few brief minutes in the frigid air, Heather was upright and coherent, talking easily and reassuring everyone. It was like magic.

Appropriate enough. After all, dealing with any chronic condition is something akin to stage magic.

We’ve dealt with a lot of things for a lot of years. Crohn’s disease. Ankylosing spondylitis. Now multiple sclerosis. Each time, we’ve had to meet it with the dedication and training of a David Copperfield, not to vanish the Statue of Liberty, but to make something close to a real life reappear.

It can be done. But like a Copperfield or a Houdini, it takes hours of advance preparation to make things seem natural, even effortless to an audience. The wedding of Heather’s sister Jaimee the next day was typical, where a full morning’s rest, a constantly-present water bottle and periodic micro-breaks outside the reception helped Heather survive a ceremony on the hottest day of the year.

Magic indeed. But you never really get to let the curtain go down.

Chronic illness ebbs and flows, but the need to manage it never really goes away, much like the need to exercise. It’s a constant. For someone who hates losing control of their life, it can even be something of an irony – now you have to take control of your life whether you want to or not, even those things that would normally be automatic for most people.

You measure how much you can do before the fatigue catches up. You inventory what you need for even a short excursion. You balance, compromise, postpone so that the essentials can keep going. Maybe you even learn for the first time what the essentials truly are.

Somehow, you keep things going. Sometimes surprisingly well. Well enough that friends or relatives can be astonished when a breakdown occurs, because they’ve never seen you that sick.

It’s a triumph. But it’s a tiring one. After all, the show must go on … and on, and on, and on.

I’m not saying any of this to fish for pity. If anything, what I feel is closer to wonder. I am married to a strong person in a compromised body, and even on the days when she’s feeling weakest, the power of what she’s already done shouts to me in a voice I can’t ignore.

This is more than magical. This is miraculous. Maybe not the kind of miracle where a lame man is suddenly pole-vaulting down the street, but miraculous nonetheless.

There will be better days. There always are, eventually. But until that intermission hits, the Magically Medical Rochat Family will continue the conjuration. We can’t let the audience down, after all.

And if it means some long highway trips in sub-frigid air, then so be it.

After all, I already knew she was the coolest lady around.

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@%#%!, My Dear Watson

Anyone got any digital soap?

They may be looking for some at IBM, where the renowned computer Watson has been making headlines again. And like many a young celebrity, those headlines aren’t exactly what its “parents” have been hoping for.

No, the supercomputer hasn’t developed a taste for booze, babes and lewd appearances at the MTV awards shows. But it has – however briefly – picked up a mouth that only a gangsta video could love.

That’s right. Watson, the silicon “Jeopardy!” champ, has learned how to swear.

The blog io9 described the achievement with a fair degree of amusement.  It seems that after Watson clobbered humanity’s two biggest “Jeopardy!” winners and retired to a life of medical research, its handlers wanted to improve its natural language skills by teaching it slang. So, someone gave it access to the online Urban Dictionary.

That lasted, i09 says, until Watson told a scientists that something was bull … er, excrement.

Yup. Time for the Lifebuoy. Or at least for a partial memory wipe.

My wife Heather pointed out that this was quite the achievement. After all, everyone swears at their computer, but how often does the computer swear back? It’s an ominous milestone; can the day when a computer reboots its programmer and threatens to throw it out a window be far behind?

But for now, I’m not worried. When it comes to mischief, even the sharpest computer alive – er, manufactured – doesn’t hold a candle to Missy.

Regular readers of this column have probably become quite familiar with Missy, Heather’s nearly 40-year-old developmentally disabled aunt whom we care for. I’ve written a lot about her attention and wonder as we read together, about her joy in the simplest things, about the near-silence with which she moves through life, punctuated by the occasional handful of words.

But make no mistake. There’s another side to this sweet, charming lady.

We call her Ninja Missy.

It’s Ninja Missy who turns up the stereo in her room to max and then slips into my home office to turn on my computer, often blowing the display up to 10 times its normal size in the process.

It’s Ninja Missy who will sometimes flush the toilet to avoid any proof that she hasn’t gone before bed. Or who will occasionally wash off a toothbrush to “show” that yes, she brushed her teeth before lying down. (Add innocent smile here.)

But Ninja Missy’s greatest achievement may have been the flying penguin.

One of the sillier games that Heather and Missy will play involves throwing a stuffed penguin back and forth, with each trying to “zap” the other before she can catch it. It leads to a lot of giggles and the occasional “thump” as the doll hits the wall, and the fact that it keeps Missy’s arm in shape for softball doesn’t hurt, either.

But there comes a time when all games must pause, and Heather broke off one night to go cook dinner. As she was getting things ready, she heard a plaintive call of “Mom …” from upstairs; usually the sign that Missy needs help with something.

Heather came to the foot of the stairs. And was nearly clocked by a high-speed penguin.

Missy had lured her into an ambush.

And that, my dear Watson, is where Missy has the edge on you. And probably will for a long time to come.

All good mischief requires planning. And right now, all of Watson’s planning is done secondhand. It can embarrass its handlers with a bit of profanity – but only because another handler made it possible, not because it got curious and started roaming the Internet one day.

Missy, for all her limits, conceived and executed a plan of her own. A rather effective one at that.

That gives her more imagination and initiative than any collection of microchips ever assembled.

So I’m not worried about “our new computer overlords,” as Ken Jennings once put it. Not with Ninja Missy on our side.

I swear.

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Simply, Simon

After a week of wonders, from resigning Popes to exploding space rocks, the biggest one of all came Sunday.

Right, Simon?

Simon is my newest nephew. He entered the world around 2 in the morning, not far from Seattle. And if that sounds like a UFO report, well, that’s how it feels sometimes.

Funny. You think I’d be in practice by now.

This is my fourth entry into unclehood, you see. The first three came as quickly as skydivers leaving a plane, two nieces and a nephew, all within the last six months of 2010. It was a barrage of babies, the full immersion approach to witnessing infancy.

And then, it got quiet. I had a chance to get used to Gil’s winning smile and shining eyes, to Ivy’s all-absorbing curiosity, even to Riley’s looks of mischief and calls to “go-go” just one more time in her wagon.

Things became normal. Well, as normal as they get in the land of toddlers.

That probably should have been a warning.

I’ve been a reporter for 15 years now. One of the biggest things I’ve learned in that time is to beware the slow news day. That’s when you get the plane crash, or the break in a cold murder case, or the million-dollar federal grant. It may be good news, it may be bad, but it will have you running in overdrive until it’s done. I’m sure someone has inscribed it on a monument somewhere: Those whom the gods wish to see busy, they first make complacent.

And so, when my sister Leslie put up an online picture of Ivy holding a sign that read “I’m going to be a big sister!”, we knew the headline news was ready to start popping again.

I couldn’t wait.

Apparently, neither could Simon. About two weeks ahead of time, Leslie got word that her tenant might be ready to break the lease a little early. That began the teasing period.

Would he come on Mom’s birthday, Feb. 12?

Nope.

Would the new little boy be a Valentine’s kid?

Uh-uh.

Groundhogs have been watched less closely. Messages flew. So did Mom, grabbing the first plane to Washington.

But just like in childhood, nothing happens until Simon says. And Simon said “Hold on a little more … no, just a little more … almost there…”

In retrospect, I wonder if my nephew has a future in public relations.

He finally became Sunday Simon with a few hours’ warning. With him came a reminder: babies set their own schedules.

Only fair. So does life, really.

We like to pretend otherwise. We schedule to a fare-thee-well, measuring minutes, slicing and dicing appointments and deadlines. We think of time as a possession, something that’s rightfully ours, that we can control, shape and dictate.

But as John Lennon once sang, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” And when hit with the unexpected, those plans can be as fragile as spun sugar. And we find out how much control we really have.

It can be frightening. Or it can be freeing. That part’s up to you.

For me, right now, it’s something joyous.

Even wondrous.

Thanks, Simon. And welcome.