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.