The "thousand things" delusion

We've all seen them, the books like "One Thousand Places to See Before You Die," with variations "One Thousand Books to Read," "Pieces of Music," "Works of Art," etc, all before you shuffle off this mortal coil and theoretically miss your chance. Cool. At first glance it looks like folks might be giving a nod in the direction of their own mortality.

But first let's do the math. One thousand places. Unless you're independently wealthy, you have a day job, and you get the American average of 13 days paid vacation per year. So, at the outside you might get to 2, 3, or 4 of the must-see locations in a year, what with home repairs, the cost of gasoline and plane tickets, and taking the dog to the vet. One-thousand divided by 4 is 250. Anyone you know living to 250 years these days?

Far from actually coming up against the fact that this life and its opportunities are temporary, the Thousand Things genre feeds the illusion that we are immortal. It's definitely a young person's gig. No real choices necessary, it's all possible.

On the cusp of five and a half decades, I have been feeling strongly that the concepts of "choice" and "priority" are looming large. At the same time, thanks to the wonders of menopause, I've never felt more scattered. Goals have always given me trouble, with no faster way to wipe every thought from my mind than the dreaded questions "What's your five-year plan?" "Where would you like to be in 10 years?"

So here in the next month I will be working on my own version of a Thousand Things list, suitably modified to fit my station in life -- by that I mean, I'll be thinking hard about what's important to me, what's doable, and what I want to put my time, energy and passion into.

Thanks for reading. If you have some experience with setting and accomplishing goals, including what inner obstacles, if any, you overcame to do so, I'd be grateful to hear from you.

The dog who knew Santa

Aspen, the dog who's full of surprises, surprised us again this weekend. Frank happened to catch some of it on film.

A fundraiser, pet photos with Santa, held at a feed store to benefit the beleaguered county animal shelter on the coast. I'm paying for the photos, and Frank, Sturmz (his 15-year-old shepherd/husky mix), Beth (my 11-year-old "little" in the Big Sister program) and Aspen head back toward the Santa mash-up.


As Frank describes it, Aspen leaves Beth's side and dashes up to where Santa's sitting, waiting for the next visitor. She jumps up next to the jolly old elf and snuggles right in close. The photographer, who seemed ill-suited to the task and the chaos associated with it, stands with hand on hip, exuding impatience, wondering where her next real customer is.

Then I get there with the receipt and we descend on Santa en masse. For the first paid pic, Frank and I are snuggled next to Santa, Aspen sitting proudly in front of me, and Sturmz decides to show his butt to the camera -- no matter what. Sturmz' feet drop into the cracks between the straw bales, panicking him -- which he shows by wide-mouthed "heh-heh-heh" panting. Frank hauls him around several times, and each time Sturmz' tail is prominently featured. Santa, presumably having a bit of experience with the situation, finally grabs both dogs with a ho-ho-ho and a hug, and finally the flash goes off.The second paid pic features Beth and me with Santa and Aspen, and it goes off without a hitch. But then it's time for Aspen to say goodbye to Santa, and she just can't. Her immensely strong tail is wagging in circles, and it doesn't help that Santa knows exactly where to scratch her.

I imagine the initial recognition that Aspen showed for Santa as a variation on "It's a Wonderful Life," two incarnate angels comparing notes on their work here on earth. "How many bells have rung on your watch? Have trouble bringing anyone down off the railing?"

On the way out we meet James, an elegant retired greyhound, and Aspen is impressed.

The Daily Slug Toss: Some instruction

1) Locate the banana slug and pick it off the front door/window/wall/azalea plant

2) Grasp the slug with two fingers, not too firmly because the slime doesn't come off easily, and not too lightly because that will mess up the trajectory

3) As you either curse or say a prayer of gratitude for the fact that you are a bleeding heart/a Bhuddist/a wannabe/have a weak stomach

3a) Hurl the banana slug as far into the ivy/grass/redwood sprouts as possible

4) As you wipe the inevitable deposit of slime off your thumb and finger on a least visible part of your clothing/wall/door mat

4a) Search out the next traveler

5) Repeat as necessary

Other duties as assigned

After a numbing 2-hour meeting this morning, and after the hour-and-a-half drive back, it evolved that one of the social workers couldn't find a cleaner for a certain client's apartment, which is piling up with garbage. He's used to living outside, camping, being "free," but now he has a terminal illness and lives in Fort Bragg's only single-room occupancy building, and he lets the trash pile up. And he is in danger of being evicted. So my colleague went and bagged up unidentifiable items for an hour.

Just before I left for the day, another social worker stopped by my desk with a black plastic bag. "____'s clothes. You want to wash them or shall I throw them out?" Our friend with the previously-maggot-infested feet had gotten wet in the rain and she had given him dry clothes. I took the wet ones home.

Just this week Frank had reminded me of the verse in the New Testament about what we were supposed to do to help "the least of these" -- "...hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink..." to which I silently added today, "...dying and you cleaned my apartment, incontinent and you did my laundry."

We held our noses, but we did it. For today, that was enough.

Hazel's revenge

Hazel has been reminding me that Aspen has been getting ALL the attention, just for following a few stupid commands. "Whatever happened to the value of independent thinking?" she asked, none too rhetorically. So her day in the sun, or on the blog, has come, and not because I feel guilty. Just because she's such a diva

Doggie Training, part two!

Aspen and I started in a new class yesterday.

One of the behaviors we worked on was "back up," paired with a wave of the hand, fingers down. She already knew how to back up when she came to us, and we figured she was raised in a trailer, because she was expert at backing down the hallway in our our narrow park-model travel trailer. So it's a matter pairing the hand signal and the voice command with her behavior. We practiced for about 5 minutes in class.

Last night, we had both dogs in the van, and Aspen came forward out of her rear seat and stood next to Sturmz' seat, panting. Frank gave her the fingers-down wave, and she backed up and got back on her seat. Smart puppy!

I hate Blogger's new templates

As a former graphic artist, I'm horrified by the look of the title of my blog.

I clicked on "Customize" to jigger to look of the page, and up popped a box that warned me I could lose changes I'd made before. New and improved, of course.

I clicked OK and my blog title was never the same. I had three choices regarding the photo in the title space: Put the type over the photo, delete the photo, or replace the type with the photo. Huh!?!?!?

Also the profile section looks painfully dorky.

Not sure if the "fashion police" in my background can allow this look for long. I may be site shopping....

A slice of social services life

I had left my cup of decaf in the car, and I went out to get it. On my way back into the building, I ran into a guy carrying a giant backpack and an armful of fluffy puppy. “Quite a load you have there,” I said.

“You wanna dog?” he asked. “I’m tryina get rid of him. I’m suicidal and I can’t handle him.”

“He’s gorgeous. You don’t think he can keep you alive?”

“I think a lot of people are putting that on me. He barks at night and I think I’ll slit his throat.”

Oh God.

“Well, if you’re serious about getting rid of him, I can call the Humane Society and they can find him a home.”

“Nah, he’s not goin’ to the Humane Society.”

“They wouldn’t put him down. They’d find him a home. It’s way more efficient than walking down the street asking people if they want a dog.”

“Hmm.”

“I can hear that you’re feeling really bad. Have you had a chance to talk with anyone about it?”

“I have an appointment with the bald f**ker who works here. I’m about done with all of it though. Next stop for me is off the bridge.”

(I knew he needed a referral to the county mental health office, but we have not had the best of luck sending people there. If the client has been self-medicating with street drugs or alcohol, they are rejected for having a substance-abuse problem. If the client is over 60, they are rejected for having dementia.)

“What’s your name?”

“My name don’t matter. My name is death.”

“Well, let me call the Humane Society and see if they’ll take him, OK?”

“Yeah, go ahead. He doesn’t need to be with me, ‘cause I’m gonna take him with me off the bridge if I keep him.”

I went inside and spoke to M, the notoriously soft-hearted receptionist, about the situation. She shot out the door and started talking to man and dog. I called the “bald f**ker” to warn him about his prospective client’s mood. M called me to say the puppy was a littermate of the one she had rescued yesterday, and that she would be taking it. About a half-hour later the phone in our unit began beeping to let us know someone had dialed 911. The read-out said it was the “bald f**ker” who had called. Yeah, someone said later, he had a jumper...

Aspen, the rescue mutt, is a Canine Good Citizen!

After 6 weeks of Saturday classes, and not really enough practice in between, Aspen, the 90-pound rescue dog from Lake County Animal Shelter, passed her AKC Canine Good Citizen test. I promised her and Frank that I would feature her triumph here.

Read here about what's involved in the test.

Next week we start in a "tricks and service dog" class.

Meanwhile she's having a well-deserved rest.

So why write this, then, if it's dangerous?

First, I don't think it is. The circles I run in don't intersect much with the witnesses in this trial.

Second, I realized that this is part of my dance with the dark side -- long walks on the beach poking dead things with a stick.

Third, I decided that the experience was important enough to me to risk whatever happens by writing about it on my obscure little blog.

And fourth, but perhaps most importantly, I'm my father's daughter. He believed in doing what he could to stand up against bullies, whether it was the Hitler Youth of his boyhood, to whom he stood up by not collecting money for them in his neighborhood, or racism in the US South, which he countered by annual donations to the NAACP up till his death. He countered his fears by doing and saying what was in his heart. Now I have too.

When the next chapter unfolds, I will write an update.

Meanwhile, as we discussed at our last lunch as jurors, I'll be focusing on more uplifting aspects of my life now.

All's quiet, and then ....

I didn't hear from ADA Tim Stoen again for some weeks, then emailed him asking what was happening -- Neither the Red Giant nor I had heard from the defense. Could I assume they had switched tactics?

Yes, he wrote, they had. A new defense attorney had gotten a statement from the defendant's wife saying she had seen contact between jurors and witnesses on several occasions. She had not mentioned these to the judge during the trial, so Tim didn't think her statement would be accepted now. Attached to that statement was another request to have juror information made public.

Tim sent me three other documents -- a copy of his opposition to disclosing juror information, citing the murder of witness Michael Peacock, which I read with complete shock;
a declaration by the DA's investigator as to the condition of the Big Red Dog, implying that the defendant's wife had committed perjury in describing where the toy had been;
and a declaration by a gang expert that
1) through Richard Peacock and his Peckerwood connections, the defendant had likely involvement in the Aryan Brotherhood white supremacist gang; and 2) among the photos retrieved from the defendant's camera was one of him posing in front of a speedboat with the license plate "Rogers Klan," suggesting another white supremacist connection.

Tim said he would argue against the release of our info, that our safety would be threatened.

Well, I was deeply affected by the turn this had taken -- the murder of the shooter's brother, Aryan Brotherhood and Klan connections? It was all feeling very surreal.

I wrote back to Tim Stoen that my information had already been made public. Did I need to worry? (I was worrying already, of course.)

No, he said, for one thing this was all worst-case strategy. For another, if Michael Peacock was killed for testifying, it would have been planned while the defendant was still out on bail. Now he is confined to the Mendocino County Jail, and his calls and visits are closely monitored.

Indeed the judge denied the request to have (everyone else's) information released. The story ran in the Ukiah Daily Journal, and is for some reason now unavailable in a search.

My personal info becomes public

Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen emailed me a list of what would likely happen at the September 11th (!) hearing -- the defense would move for juror questionnaires to be be released based on possible juror misconduct (mine), but he felt sure that wouldn't go anywhere.

The day before the hearing, the Red Giant dropped a sheaf of papers by my office and said it had been his paper's court correspondent who had leaked our connection to the DA, who was then obligated to inform the defense. It made sense that Don would have assumed we were married: He and the Red Giant have in common a background in fundamentalist Christianity -- he's a minister, and my honey has fallen away. So of course the assumption would be that the Red Giant would never live in sin...

On the day of that hearing I was on my way to Ashland, Oregon, for an annual weekend family reunion and a surfeit of Shakespeare.

When I returned, the Red Giant sent an email saying that he and I and our relationship were written up in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, more or less accurately, he said.

The Anderson Valley is home to Booneville, a linguistic fascination that during the late 1800s had its own language. It could be described as isolated. The Anderson Valley Advertiser cannot really be described as a journalistic endeavor, although it takes the form of a weekly newspaper. The flamboyant editor is prone to emotional screeds full of character assassination and guilt by association and implication. I was not hopeful that the story would be remotely accurate.

But, it was submitted by the same Humboldt County reporter who did the good summary referenced earlier. It named both of us and described what I had said to the investigator almost verbatim. Hmmm. Well, I wasn't too worried. Yet.

Finally! Someone wants my side of the story

The ADA had told me I might be contacted by one or both sides of the case about my relationship with the Red Giant. Arriving back at my desk from a home visit, I found a voice mail from an investigator at the DA's office. I had liked him when he testified, and I happily called him back.

We went over all the basics -- I had indeed lived with the reporter in question, but had moved out of our shared space in January of '09. We are not and have not been married. I did not discuss the case with him while I was a juror. I told him how relieved I was that I could tell my side of the story, and put an end to the rumors. We joked that before the defense was done telling the story, I was sure to have been blogging from the jury box.

When I hung up, the co-worker in the neighboring cubicle "prairie-dogged" over the partition and said, "THAT sounded like an interesting phone call!" I filled him in.

A naïf shows up for sentencing: “Why are you here?”

Thinking I would simply set the record straight about not being married to a journalist, I felt kind of good being back at the courthouse. On a restroom visit, I noted that the courthouse had the same leaking soap dispenser as other county bathrooms, with the same garbage can underneath it to catch the drips.

“L” and I had a great wide-ranging conversation of the way over, and she suggested we let the DA’s office know we were there. I thought the right room was on the second floor, but I followed “L” up to the fourth, where we entered the District Attorney's Office of Victim/Witness Services. “L” told the receptionist why we were there, and we were asked to wait. A moment later the victim/witness worker appeared and asked us to wait in the hall. We sat there for 10 minutes or so, then she came back and said, “Why are you here?” Her tone was icy and perplexed. I felt myself wither. I have worked with her in cases involving some of my clients and have found her unfailingly warm and supportive. I was in the middle of some kind of faux pas, I decided.

“I thought I would be able to tell the court that I’m not married to a journalist. All this is happening because of a falsehood.”

She looked perplexed. “Sit right here,” she said. “I’ll let the ADA know you’re here and see what he says.”

Another long 15 minutes, during which Alan Simon and his supporters passed by several times, then disappeared down the stairs. I heard Alan say to someone on the steps, “Ahh, it’s something about one of the jurors. He was SUPPOSED to be sentenced today, but defense is moving for a mistrial.” Oh. Crap.

Finally the victim/witness worker reappeared, accompanied by a public defender, the very one that Richard Peacock had rejected. “I’m here to tell you about your rights,” the attorney said, and my stomach did another swoop of panic. This was bizarre.

Any juror, she told me, once they’re dismissed, is a private citizen, with the right to refuse to discuss the case with anyone who asks.

But I wanted to set the record straight.

Attorney and victim/witness worker exchanged glances. Victim/witness worker said, “Well, you have the right to be in the courtroom as a private citizen. We could get a couple of extra bailiffs to be between you and the gallery.” Huh?

Slowly, as if she were a teacher in a special-needs class, the attorney said, “This is a very emotional case. If you go into the courtroom, you may be exposed to hostility from the defendant and his family, and also, truthfully, from the people of Westport. They were hoping to see a sentence passed today.”

I felt about 2 inches tall. It seemed at once so unfair that I couldn’t just say my piece, and also so humiliating that I had not thought of all this before I came. Of course she had had me wait in the hall – she had had Alan Simon in her office, probably going off about how disappointed he was that there was a jury mess-up and his assailant was not going to be sentenced today.

As I sat there nonplussed, trying to sort out my emotions and decide what to do, the attorney excused herself, and the victim/witness support worker said, “Think of it as a chess game. This is just one more move.” With that, I decided to drive back home with “L” without going into the courtroom. I realized that I was holding on too tightly to the outcome. Tough as it was, I needed to let it go.

Aftermath, part 1

The evening of the verdict I got this email from the Red Giant (Kate is his editor. He had started to write about the verdict.):

-----------------------------------------

From: Red Giant
To: "Susan Fernbach"

I think this has something to do with why Kate didn't want me to do the story

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Markham
Date: Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:24 PM
Subject: RE: Reporter with question about kenny rogers trial
To: Frank Hartzell

Mr. Hartzell,

I recently learned your wife was on the jury in this case. I would be interested in speaking to her if she is willing. I am always interested in getting feedback from jurors in any case I try. Please let me know if she would be interested in speaking to me.

Thank you,

David Markham

--------------------------------

Who the hell had dropped that bit of inaccurate info?

My stomach took a downward swoop, and over the next days I spent hours googling “juror misconduct,” just in case the questionnaires were released as the defense was requesting, and my parsing got me in trouble. I read about jurors cited for contempt and verdicts thrown out, and I was near puking from anxiety. All that work. All our dedication. Potentially wasted due to my clever word games, my love of hair-splitting, someone's wrong-headed idea of my relationship?

Two days before sentencing was scheduled, feeling really awful, I ran into a fellow juror, “L,” in Safeway and mentioned what was going down. She called the ADA and, I learned later, told him I had not tried to influence any other jurors with whatever knowledge I had of the case from knowing the Red Giant. "L" and I talked on the phone and agreed to go to the sentencing together.

A special kind of meaning

In being on the jury, I felt like I was doing something that, in addition to completely absorbing my attention, would ultimately "make a difference." This is in frequent contrast to my county job.

Example: A homeless alcoholic man, classified as a dependent adult due to alcoholic dementia, fell into my ongoing caseload. He was hospitalized with maggots in his feet. After discharge he was prescribed whirlpool sessions to help his feet heal, so I was tasked with driving him to the physical therapy department of the local hospital. While I had no quarrel with this assignment - he's a pleasant enough guy - I had no illusions that my time and effort would result in any major change in his life. He's still a homeless drunk, but his feet are healing.

The polar opposite was true of the trial.

Deliberations, day 3, and the verdict

The two jurors who had more than reasonable doubts about proof of the defendant’s guilt had their questions answered by a reading of Michael Peacock’s testimony, oddly more revelatory in the read-back without his meth-fed mannerisms.

Before we adjourned to lunch before our final appearance in court, I told my fellow jurors how much I appreciated the fact that all of us were taking this with the same degree of seriousness, no one was hurrying us to a verdict so we could be dismissed, and no one took the task lightly, even though it inconvenienced all of us daily. It was, I told them, a welcome antidote for the river of sleaze we’d been swimming in for the past 3 weeks. We all agreed we were the kind of jury we’d want for ourselves or a loved one.

At lunch four of us compared reactions over the past 3 weeks. We all found we needed as much beauty and harmony as we could pack in, in order to compensate for all the darkness we’d seen and heard about. The drive to the coast provided that for 2 of us, and a third mentioned how much her garden meant to her now. We all marveled at how, with no real structure or instructions on HOW to do it, we had become a working jury with minimal conflict, and we had come up with a verdict.

After lunch we filed back into the courtroom for the last time. In the gallery, the defendant’s wife and sons held hands and prayed. It struck me that it was too late for that – their prayers should have been said at the time there was a choice about which actions to take. Again, I was reminded of the deity to whom I myself pray, and how incongruous some of my supplications must seem – too little, too late. The defendant himself sat with his head bowed and hands folded. When the foreperson read our verdict, guilty, and the judge asked each of us if that was our verdict, the defendant dropped his head to the table, then looked at us and mouthed, “I didn’t do this.”

The judge thanked us, and we were dismissed. The ADA attempted to shake our hands, something I felt uncomfortable with. We ran a gauntlet of defense team members handing out business cards and asking us to call them to discuss the trial. The youngest juror spoke for all of us when she said, “I just spent 3 weeks of my life on this, I doubt I’ll be talking to you.”

Walking into the hallway a private citizen, I felt like a hot-air balloon that had lost its tether – weightless, suddenly free but not sure which way the wind might take me. I wandered down to see the jury coordinator and get a document saying I really was there all that time. I thanked her for helping us through this experience with such humor and grace. She said we did the right thing, because “There was a lot you didn’t hear.” I told her the experience had been amazing, life-changing really. She smiled as though she heard that a lot.

Sentencing was set for August 14, a Friday.

Deliberations, day 2

We arrived to a box of 2 dozen Danish from the bailiff assigned to us. “Make it a good day,” said the sticky note on top. Great. Twelve people, high anxiety and 24 Danish. I had been doing pretty well with my newly-diagnosed type-2 diabetes -- I had steered clear of temptation for over a month. This did not bode well for my blood sugar… But, my, were they good.

We had no access to transcripts of the testimony. We could, and did, ask the court reporter to read back sections to us, a task she clearly did not relish. She read extremely fast and seemed to forget what she was actually doing. The identifying “question” and “answer” tags soon got misplaced, and it came out like this:

“Yes. Question.”
“What did you see then? Answer.”
“Nothing. It was dark. Question.”

She reacted impatiently to a request to slow down, and it seemed that hearing the re-reading took more focus than the original testimony.

We asked for the presence of the Big Red Dog, described previously.

When we left, close to 6 pm, we found the lead detective and Alan Simon and several others waiting down the hallway from the jury room. We hurried past them, and left the building. As I waited to cross the street in front of the courthouse, an over-sized pickup was waiting at the light. Mexican music blared from the cab, and a long flowered couch occupied the bed. Looking at the driver and his passenger I thought, “I’ll bet there’s a pretty good chance those folks have not been dealing with issues of life and death all day. Boy, do I envy them.”

More about deliberations

The first few hours of deliberation were one big spew – We had seen and heard things over the past days that had made big impressions, but we had not been able to talk to each other about them.

We covered a white board with a list of questions, many having to do with the order in which events had occurred. Because the time-line was not actually a piece of evidence, we were not allowed to have it in the deliberations. Soon most questions were answered by other jurors, and we had a whole list of new ones.

But it was time to go home and lie awake feeling the import of the decisions we were making. I felt a great flood of compassion for the defendant and for his family, and yet at the same time I knew that justice demanded that he experience the consequences of his actions. It was a humbling experience, a glimpse of what judges and perhaps even the old-testament deity may have felt in similar circumstances....

Instructions and beginning deliberations

On Monday of the third week, the judge told us we would begin deliberate on Tuesday. Closing arguments that day included one more run-through of the time line the ADA had so carefully constructed, and a PowerPoint presentation by the defense attorney, delivered in the same half-bored manner as much of his questioning.

In his instructions, the judge reminded us to render a verdict without regard to possible penalties. He reminded us that we did not have to find guilt or innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt, only beyond a reasonable doubt. He again told us not to read or watch or listen to news reports on the case, and not to discuss the case with anyone.

We left the courtroom one more time, said good-bye to the alternates we'd spent each day with, and went up to the fourth-floor jury room. It had the disused look of a temporary storage room. Most cases in our county don't go to a jury trial -- they are settled out of court by various means -- and now the room showed that. A jumble of audio and video equipment filled one corner, backed by stacks of extra chairs and a few bookshelves. We sat down at the long conference table and began to talk for the first time in two and a half weeks about all we'd seen and heard. There was very little structure that first afternoon -- we were too full of images and impressions we had not been able to share with anyone. We did elect a foreperson, a pleasant, low-key middle-aged man who favored Hawaiian shirts, who turned out to have just the right combination of tact and organization to keep us on track and make sure everyone had their questions addressed. The youngest member of the jury had volunteered to be foreperson, but another member pointed out that the discussions we would be having called for "a bit of maturity."

Things get old

By the end of the second week, I wanted my life to go back to normal. As fascinating as the court procedure and its poetry were, I missed my co-workers, I hated the hot weather, the hour-and-a-half one-way drive was getting to me, the river of sleaze we were bathing in was making me sick, and I was tired of it all. I drove home on Thursday glad for the weekend.