February 21

Facebook reminded me that February 21 has, over the years, become a quiet marker around my heart, an accumulation of dog bowls and operating rooms, art galleries and family gatherings.

In 2022, February 21 found me in a hospital bed at Vanderbilt. The previous Tuesday night my wife and I had checked me into the ER and learned I had suffered a mild heart attack — mild, they said, though it was the most physically stressed I had ever been. I could not walk ten yards from the entrance; a stretcher was brought out and carried me inside. Further exploration showed multiple blocked arteries, and surgery was not so much suggested as ordered — kindly, but firmly 🙂.
 
I wrote some days later that "Its the wee hours of the morning now, and within hours I will be taken in for multiple bypass surgery. I feel no angst that I can sense. I cannot fully explain that, but I think about the procedure in mechanical terms — plumbing, rerouting, flow — and also in spiritual terms -- skilled and caring humans will be opening me up and peering in. The combination steadies me."
 
The Vanderbilt medical team — nurses, doctors, housekeeping, dining — were superb. God bless those in the healing professions.
 
And now, recovered, I can report that I was in hospital care for eleven days. My faculty colleagues stepped in quickly to cover classes and responsibilities. My wife kept steady company, tending to me and to Cece the Guinea Pig. A guinea pig, after all, should not be alone. If Vanderbilt had not scanned visitors at the door, I would have paid someone to sneak Cece in under a coat. In the year following my hospitalization, Cece began her own decline, and I was there for my beast friend. We buried her with Ginger.
 
A year earlier, February 21, 2021, the stakes were lower but the logistics no less intricate. Charly was usually fed first. I spooned her food out carefully — a couple of tablespoons at a time — spreading it so she could not inhale it all at once. This reduced the air intake and, thanks to a blessed tip from the Kennel Club of America (googled under something like “how to reduce smelly farts from a dog”), it significantly lowered the domestic methane levels. Progress is sometimes measured in small mercies.
 
Even after dinner, if we wanted to eat without being stared at and whined at, I smeared a thin film — perhaps half a teaspoon — of smooth peanut butter along the bottom and sides of her dish. Charly then set to work with devotion, addressing the bowl, just as the young greenhorn addressed the dumplings at the Spouter Inn, pushing the bowl back and forth across an expansive floor, so as to capture every molecule. It took a while to find the bowl later, but we gained fifteen quiet minutes. Civilization depends on such arrangements.

In 2017, February 21 placed me before Leonardo at the National Gallery of Art. The photograph, below, suggests a serene, empty space. In truth, it required patience — waiting for the crowd to clear, timing the shutter between passing shoulders and elbows. I am fairly certain that someone’s elbow lies just outside the frame by a micro-inch. Illusions require cooperation.

In 2012, I posted a family reunion photograph from 2007, with me alone, taken by my nephew Ryan, with commentators at the time calling it my Jerry Garcia look.

And on 2009, February 21, I was carried back to a November evening in 2005, when Sekou Sundiata performed his one-man show "blessing the boats" — a Vanderbilt Great Performances event, but staged at Belmont University for reasons I no longer recall, but a point worth making given the religious topic of this post -- we depend on others. I recall the show well, with friend Eric, a story of long-term hypertension born of hard living, kidney failure, dialysis, transplant. Bare bones medically, but emotionally and spiritually clothed in something richer. And this passage below reminds me of another passage, spoken by Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas (saying 29) -- look it up, its a good one, and speaks to why I got into AI. Hark to Sundiata:

"I had taken it for granted that the most important part of the body was located front and center. This is what I mean about the body being a sneak. It'll let you believe things like that until it's ready to tell you the truth. It ain't the heart or the lungs or the brain. The biggest, most important part of the body is the part that hurts." Sekou Sundiata (and read on Fresh Air)

What moved me most about Sundiata's performance was his acknowledgment — brief but unmistakable — of reliance on others. His was a story of resurrection from "the hole", made possible by connectedness, by unearned grace. It stands for me alongside the paralytic's story, lowered through the roof in Mark and Luke. In Sundiata's case, I was present for the telling, and that presence binds me to the memory like a barnacle. Friends made that possible. Community made that possible.

Each year, of the middle years I worked at Vanderbilt, I read Sundiata alongside excerpts from Shirley Chisholm and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The Drum-Major Instinct” at MLK Day celebrations. All three speak, in different registers, about connectedness — sometimes you are meant to lead, and sometimes to follow, and perhaps, we possess not a pure drum-major instinct, but an instinct to belong and to contribute. When bent by insecurity, that instinct mutates into the belief that the only way to belong is to be in charge. If our species has fatal flaws, one may be that we elevate the deeply insecure among us when they have learned to mask their insecurity, sometimes deserved, with bluster.

In 2022, lying in a hospital bed with new routes being sewn for my blood, I was the beneficiary of connectedness. Surgeons, nurses, colleagues, my wife, Cece — instruments of one another’s salvation. As Sundiata knew, the illusion of self-sufficiency dissolves quickly under fluorescent lights.

I thank you FB -- this is what I first thought you could be back in 2008, and sometimes you are that. Today I will mark that February 21 is a special day in my interior religion.

And as for today, right now, at 12:08 PM Central Time on February 21, 2026, I am on Zoom (thank you, Zoom), looking at my mother, who peacefully sleeps, but I am ready to pull out the eldest child card if she attempts to get up by herself -- she is stubborn, that one -- my sister has actually belled her, which makes me laugh no end. I will remember this day, this moment, a year from now, God willing.

"Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil." - This Momentous Day, H.R. White

"None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness and into the light". (Dean Koontz, One Door Away From Heaven)

"blessing the boats"
By Lucille Clifton
"
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that"

Dinner at Warren College February 21, 2016.

Extracts: Abridging Moby Dick

“Before there were flukes sounding in the oceans, there were hooves pressing into mud. In the Eocene heat, in the region of the ancient Tethys Sea, small, dog-like creatures moved from scrubland to the watery margins, their ears providentially built for hearing the possibilities that came from under the water -- for food, for safety, and for danger. Then came Ambulocetus, the “walking whale,” in size comparable to a modern human, amphibious in habitat, at home in river basins, swamp, lake, and sea coasts. Then Rodhocetus and Dorudon, with bodies lengthening; hind limbs diminishing; nostrils drifting back on the skull, serving as minimalist mastheads for breadth; their spine learning the grammar of undulation; the pelvis freed from bearing weight; a tail rehearsing the great downward stroke that would one day riot upon the sea.
 
“The Cetaceans answered their call to the oceans, and were mimicked by isolatos who pushed off from the land to do business on great waters. The psalmist saw the mariners and wrote of how they beheld the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. Whales did not go in ships, but they became the ships, wrapped in blubber, rigged with baleen or armed with teeth, driven on by curiosity, as Ishmael and Queequeg were. Ahab-like vengeance seemed not in the whales' vocabulary, but the consequences of kindred passions in duplicated humanity, like greed, brutality, and obsession, led to the whales' speedy extinction as measured in geologic time.  It is a hard thing, even now, to write this plainly, but the great whales are gone. Not simply hunted in a flurry of foam as in old Nantucket days, but by propellers of container ships and cruise liners, by seismic guns of war, by plastics ground small as plankton, and most of all the whales were diminished by warming currents that annihilated the meadows of brit and the pulpy kraken of the deep.

“Yet even a decade after the extinctions, there are those who keep the vigil, guarding nitrogen-cooled vaults and clean rooms, bastions that are not far from the sea, in the country that Melville said was the great original of whaling in the "West" -- the Danes, and their Nordic siblings. Tissue banks, once assembled for population genetics and forensic work, become arks, very unlike the Star Trek Enterprise returned in time for Humpback Whales to save planet Earth, but rather of a quieter, patient, egg-headed variety. From shed skin and archived biopsies, from century-old museum bones and baleen, genomes are assembled like ships in bottles. The plan, spoken in cautious future tense, is to coax edited cells into embryos, and grow them in artificial uterine seas where pressure and salinity can be tuned like instruments. It would not be, or so we conjecture, a resurrection of memory, since we imagine that no calf would inherit the routes once traced from Baja to the Arctic, but it would be a new beginning. If ever again there is breaching on the horizon, and great whales raise their tails in worship of the Sun, they will have risen from a new covenant, made child by child, law by law, until humanity and the sea allows the island bulks of flesh to sail again.”

Scott Carr, from Extracts, “Abridging Moby Dick” (2051)

My Hawk

When I was 47 I decided to ride a motorcycle. My mother said that my father rode, which I’d forgotten, and that my grandfather, her father, rode, which I had forgotten, so God bless. My wife accepted it almost as easily; she probably thought that it could be worse. I was surprised on both counts.

I signed up for a motorcycle riding course, held over a weekend. On Friday evening we watched instructional, come-to-Jesus films, with some lecture, on motorcycle riding, accidents, limb loss, cracked skulls, death, motorcycle maintenance, and the like. A full Saturday was spent in the parking lot of Nashville Tech, on small bikes, about 150 CCs, walking them, while straddling them, first; then straight-line riding, then turns, which were continued on Sunday, ending in a riding test. We were told that if you dropped your bike during the test, you failed the course. I think the instructors were not as hard-assed as they talked, but no one dropped their bike.

We brown-bagged lunches, and shot the bull with the instructors. I remember someone asking “How do you pick a motorcycle to buy?” and an instructor’s response was “Pick one that you can’t take your eyes off of.” One of the instructors knew Arthur, a mutual friend, and he, the instructor, told me he had seen Art practicing emergency stops on his Harley, in this same parking lot that we were using for class. Art was the best known rider at Vanderbilt, and if practicing emergency stops was good enough for Art, it would be good enough for me.

As part of the narrative instruction, we were told something of riding on actual roadways. In taking a turn, for example, rather than wrestle with the handlebars, the rider should look to where the rider wanted to end up, most often the far end of the turn, and the turning happened by magic. No one believed that, but it is true. On my first rides up Highway 70, past Bellevue, approaching Pegram, and then again to Kingston Springs and beyond, I initially tried manhandling the bike in the wide, gentle turns in those parts, almost running off the road, prevented only by braking, as embarrassing a thing as when a pedestrian slips on a sidewalk in broad daylight, then looks around to see if anyone else saw it. Then I remembered the prescription of looking to where you wanted to be, and with a cooperative motorcycle, the Hawk, you will arrive there effortlessly. Once experienced, though not completely understood, the prescription became a metaphor for life, even if I often only follow it in reflection.

I knew Jan, who worked where I exercised, and who was a riding instructor too, and shortly after the course finished, and after getting my motorcycle endorsement on the strength of the course certificate, Jan told me that she had a bike for sale – a 1988 Honda Hawk 650, actually 647, CCs. We met on Capers Ave, adjacent to Vanderbilt, and across 21st Ave from Dayani, where Jan worked, and where I worked out. It was a nice looking bike, a dark grey body with silver trim, reminding me of a black panther, it seemed ready to pounce. I got on—my feet comfortably reached the ground, and we reviewed the location and operation of everything. I was nervous, but I rode it up and down Capers, while Jan watched from the Pizza Perfect end of the street. The deal was struck.

When I first started riding, I knew that I was not street competent, even if I was legal. When I approached the Hawk, typically in the 25th Ave garage, I’d feel adrenaline. For the first month or so, I would only ride Sunday mornings from about 6:00 am, getting back two or three hours later. I dropped the bike a few times, three I think, in the early months, at oddly sloped, or suddenly executed stops. At just under four hundred pounds, it was light enough to pick up, and like the unfortunate pedestrian, I looked around to see if anyone saw.

Riding the Hawk has been a source of life lessons for me. I’ve shared one, but the zen (little ‘z’) of riding is rich. When I ride, I am the most vulnerable person on the road, perhaps tied in last place of safety with every other vehicle operator, but even if so, I am somewhat unique in knowing it. Nonetheless, sometimes, when riding the Hawk, particularly after a prolonged separation, I have an ineffable, uneasy feeling that there is something wrong, then a fleeting realization that I am not wearing seat belts, then the final recognition that oh, yea, I am riding the motorcycle. Recognizing vulnerability doesn’t bring angst generally, but it brings clarity and attentiveness – sanity and calmness actually. If someone cuts me off, I don’t tailgate them, or pass them and then brake-check them, not that I would do this in a car, mind you, but in any case, I back off, and I thank God.

The Hawk is the most beautiful mass-produced motorcycle ever to bless the streets, except perhaps for the Harley V-Rod. Young children, from the sidewalk or the back of cars, point and cry out when the Hawk passes, looking to their parents for guidance on what to do with the joy that sighting such a magical thing brings. Strangers have approached me at gas stations and parking lots, wanting to buy the Hawk then and there. Poor Jan is probably beating herself up, possibly for the more than twenty years since our deal was made. One man, full grown, in his 60s in fact, was volunteering at the Green Hills library, a polling place, when I walked in to vote, carrying my helmet. He asked what I was riding, and when I told him, he lighted up and grabbed me, with both his hands, excitedly, by the corresponding shoulders, explaining that he had sold his Hawk years ago, and that he had never forgiven himself. I might have felt that my boundaries were violated, but for the fact that I understood instinctively that we shared a love.  Dogs have their own special reaction to the black panther – grrrr.

The Hawk also has special connections to two dear friends – Motorcycle Mike (Fielder), and Will Clendening. Both have passed away. Mike got me into motorcycles, and I had a lot to do with Will getting a motorcycle. Mike took what is my favorite picture of myself, and its no accident that it’s a picture of both the Hawk and me, a cyborg, rider and machine. Mike died of natural causes after a long illness. Will died after his motorcycle laid down and skidded over the divider on a lonely highway between White Bluff and Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee, a few hours after we’d been riding together.

Though Episcopalian, I “joke” that I am part Shinto too, because I act as though I believe that the Hawk and a very few other select things have a spiritual presence, a kami, or perhaps the same holy spirit available to me inhabits them as well. I have always felt that way about animals, vertebrates since childhood, and increasingly non-vertebrates too. I say that I “act as though” because of the attachments I feel – I’d be in danger of becoming a hoarder if I bought more stuff, and if current attachments didn’t prevent disloyal purchases of replacements. In any case, it was with the Hawk that I became conscious of the acting-as-if performative belief. And if the Hawk sees its final ride before I do, it will become indoor furniture, probably in the backyard shed that my wife will require me to get as a man cave, even if the Hawk is worthy of being at the honored center of our living room.

 Picture by Motorcycle Mike in Vanderbilt's 25th Ave Garage

 

The Black Panther
 

Will's place, between White Bluff and Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee