Category Archives: Woolly Mammoths

Woolly Mammoths

Four Woollies Walked Into a Restaurant

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Samhain                                                            Moon of the Winter Solstice

At the woodfire grill.  Tom, Stefan, Warren.  A Woolly four for dinner.  Warren’s retiring and planning.  Feeling good.  We discussed living out the dreams of our fathers.  Mine wanted to travel the Gulf of Mexico and write a book about his adventures.  Tom’s was an engineer who died young.  Warren’s dad wanted to be a journalist.

Friendship.  We’ve discussed it as a possible topic for our next retreat.  After 25 years together, we can finally broach the issue.  Guys.

Chasing Ice got rave reviews from Tom.  A must see.  After seeing it, he bought a Chevy Volt.  Plans to leave the Lexus gunboat in the garage for the most part.  He’s also going to pass it around his company, to various employees, to get some hard data on its efficiency.  He’s an engineer.

Mostly we saw each other.  Listened.  Spoke.  Friends.  Ya’ know.

I asked Stefan to read my manuscript after Lonnie’s done.  He agreed and said, “Congratulations.”

Family, Holidays, Translating Metamorphoses, Woolly Mammoths

I’mmmm Baaaaccckkk.

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Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

Coming back to the surface after a quick dip below into the land of lethargy and woe. (not really, it just rhymed and I liked the flow.)  Still, feeling more normal this morning, ready to get back at the translating, see if I’m still interested enough to continue.  I suspect that I am.

Tom, Warren, Stefan, Mark, Frank and I met last night at the Woodfire Grill in St. Louis Park.  Discussed Stefan’s Dad.  Possible congestive heart failure.  Long term care insurance:  ponzi scheme or important resource?  The complexity of retirement related issues, especially health insurance of all kinds.  Thanksgiving.  Frank at his daughters with her in-laws.  Mark’s 91 year old mother-in-law cooking a meal for 18.  Warren’s family and their first Thanksgiving without either Mom or Dad.  Tom and his grandson taking several steps at their home.  Our visit to Denver where Jon and Jen took on their new role in the family by throwing their first thanksgiving. (as the child-rearing, career oriented generation)

Watched a TED talk on Monotasking.  Not very good.  Half hearted.  Even so, I find the idea reinforcing since I tend to monotask.  I like to focus on one thing for hours at a time, even weeks at a time.  Over the last three months I had three priorities:  Terra Cotta tour, Missing revision and the Mythology class.  Each one required dedicated time, with no interruptions.

This is not new behavior for me.  When I was in college and seminary, I went the same way, compartmentalizing study, friends and politics.  During my working years with the Presbytery I did multi-task, a lot.  I never like the way it felt.  My feet never touched the ground and the next buzz was already building while one task got sat down.

Art and Culture, Asia, Poetry, Woolly Mammoths

Woolly Art

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Samhain                                                       Fallowturn Moon

I’ve asked the Woollies for American cinquains in response to our tour of the Terra Cotta warriors.  Already have two responses and we’ve not gone to the museum yet.

From Bill Schmidt:

Wonder. . .

Why men of clay,

Buried many eons

Show us rustic, simple beauty.

Awesome.

From Mark Odegard:

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Dogs, Woolly Mammoths

Rock, then Roll

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Fall                                                                  Fallowturn Moon

The way it goes.  Life rumbles along, eggs getting bought and eaten, trash taken out, kisses given, strangers greeted.  Then, a day like today rolls around.

Kate took me into the MIA today so I could attend the first of a day symposium on the Qin dynasty and matters related to its art.  Three great lectures in the morning, another after lunch and a couple of so so ones following Jenny So, the after lunch lecturer.

Concepts, objects, new history all shoved in as fast as a willing brain could absorb it.  And I was willing.  Eager, even.  However the bin gets full, develops what miners call an over burden and the mind says, no more, please not now.

So into the car with Kate to head out to France avenue for a memorial service for Regina Schmidt, Bill Schmidt’s wife.  Woollys and sheepshead folks in the same space.  Bill greeting people with his gracious dignity, pictures and videos going as is the new trend.

Then the service with songs and poems and testimony, a wonderful heartfelt poem by Bill.

All the while wrestling with Kate’s news that Gertie had taken a post-op turn for the worse, feverish and limp.  Kate took her to the vet, they cut off the bandage and she’d developed an infection.  Wind, Water, Wound is the post-op mantra for possibilities of infection.

(Bill and I on Big Island in Lake Minnetonka)

She got a second anti-biotic and Kate brought her home.  She thought about calling me and asking if I could find a ride home to Andover.

So we left after the service, got a bulb syringe to encourage her to drink and some fancy wet dogfood.  She’d not eaten nor drunk water.  Both obvious concerns.

When we got home, she ate all the fancy wet food and, after I syringed several tablespoons of water through her teeth, she drank all on her own.  Her eyes are alert though her temp is still high.  We’ll see, but my guess is she’s turning this thing around.

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

They Can’t Afford the Dues

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Fall                                                             Fallowturn Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s tonight.  This was our first regular meeting since Regina’s death so our conversation focused on Bill while Bill, St. William as Tom called him, kept turning the focus to Regina or to us.

Bill places his hand over his chest and says he prefers to live life from there, rather than here, and he taps his head.  He says we can all live from the place of love.  “All men could have this in their lives.” He spread his arms to include those of us in the room.

“Yes,” Tom said, “but they can’t afford the dues.”  We have a running joke about our dues-zero.

Bill said, “Exactly.  They feel like they can’t afford the dues.  And they’re high.”  We meet at least twice a month and have an annual retreat for four days.  We work at maintaining our relationships.

Those dues pay off in nights like this.  We can gather in a living room with our hearts open to a friend and he knows he can count on us.  And he can.

Feelings, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

We Needed Each Other

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Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

The Woollies gathered tonight at Scott Simpson’s house.  Our usual first Monday meeting night.  Unusual to be in a home for this meeting. (usually held in a restaurant)  Scott and Yin felt a quiet home would be better for a time with Bill Schmidt.

It was.

Bill continues his centered, positive perspective while acknowledging tears and grief.  We listened to him.  Ate a meal together.

Main thought/feeling from the evening.  How rare and precious it is to be part of a group of men who could come together with a member who has lost a spouse, the day after, in fact, and be important enough to matter.  This time, this meeting was, in many ways, like other times we’ve been together, focused on the situation of one of us in a tough or delicate situation in our lives.

Those other times, the retreats, the casual gatherings have glued us together now with a bond not seen normally outside of families.  Bill needed us and we needed to be with him.

A gift beyond measure and one we have given to ourselves, over and over again.  Thanks, guys.  I was proud of us tonight.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

The Terrible Silence

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Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

“I can not image being in Bill’s shoes tonight – trying to accept the finality of her (Regina’s) death and the terrible silence that must be filling the space with the passing of his lover.”    Stefan Helgeson by e-mail

Stefan is a poet and a good one.  His phrase, terrible silence, stuck with me, rattled around. Death causes our friends and lovers to go mute.  They can no longer respond to us.  No more tenderness exchanged at bed time.  No more joint decision making.  No more grocery lists.  Just.  Terrible silence.

This is true and it lasts.  My mother has been deaf to my questions and care for now over 48 years, longer than she was alive.  Death is final and final in a brutal way.  It brooks no second chances, no wait a minutes.  It finishes what life has wrought.

Then we are left with memory.  It is no wonder the ancient Greeks, those of Homer’s era, believed true immortality came only through the poet.  The poet could provide aid to memory, verses hammered out in a form for easy recall.  The poet chose the words and the perspective through which an individual, from Achilles to Paris, would be remembered for all time.  This alone bestowed immortality.

We have more tools.  Cameras.  Voice recordings.  Easily available pen, ink, paper.  Computers and digital storage.  But, I don’t know that we have better tools.  Though a picture may be worth a thousand words, it doesn’t mean as much as a thousand well-chosen words.

So, for all of you who read this and knew Regina, write.  Write about her.  She wrote.  Now take up the pen and write.  In this way Regina can live for a thousand years.

 

 

Woolly Mammoths

Regina Has Died

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Fall                                                              Harvest Moon

Regina Schmidt, life partner of William Schmidt, my friend and fellow Woolly, died at 4:00 pm.  It was peaceful.

Her death follows a stroke last Wednesday which followed smaller strokes in the week or two prior.  As I said below, she had cancer and it was after her chemotherapy ended that she developed the blood clotting problem that would eventually lead to her death.

How Regina’s death will affect Bill in the long term is very hard to say.  Right now though the important thing for all of us who love him is to love him without overwhelming him.

 

Health, Woolly Mammoths

Love Regina

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Fall                                                                                 Harvest Moon

The Woolly Mammoths, together now over 25 years, have entered the third and last phase of life, the autumn/winter years in which the final harvest begins to bend toward the grave.  We have, so far, been able to remark on this reality from the outside, fortunate in our health and in our spouse’s health.  That is no longer so.

Regina got her diagnosis of stage 4 cancer while Bill was in a Woolly meeting.  We knew it from the beginning.  She’s done well and poorly, shown up at events since then and been asked about at others.  Bill has, from the beginning, embraced the process, sometimes trembling, buttressed by a chiropractor’s suggestion that before all else, “He love Regina.” Thus, whatever happens at this point, as Regina lies in the ICU of Hennepin General, he has leaned into loving Regina, a comfort.

Her illness is no surprise, hers in particular, yes, but a potentially terminal illness that’s part of the body’s journey in this last phase of our lives, no. This is not a test.  This is not a test of the Woolly Mammoth emergency hearfelt system.  A potentially life-threatening situation has been spotted.  It will not be the last.