If  you believe in reincarnation, then the sweet, whip-smart soul Suzanne and I set free this afternoon will surely rustle up excitement anew on your earth soon.


 Maisie of Swift River Kennels was closing in on 18 years, born of a line of working dogs who gave not one good goddamn about chasing balls when the house needed protection against squirrels, rats, chipmunks and other targets embedded within her DNA.


Jack Russell Terriers are warriors first and foremost but our little Valkyrie was a cuddle bug as well.


Most of my books were written with Maisie wrapped around my shoulders as if she were a fox fur, head draped on the right side of my shoulder, looking down at the laptop.  She'd insist.  Jump from the floor to the back of the chair, balancing there -- then the draping.

God, she was smart. And brave.  And so fast and agile.

Suzanne found that an impatient Maisie in the backyard would not lower herself to the yipping of a common small dog.

Rather, Maisie would study the movement of Suzanne inside through the windows.  Upon locating Suzanne, she would move to that window, watch until it looked as if she had a chance of eye contact, and then bark once, sharply.

In my case, she trained me to know when she urgently needed to hit the back yard toilette, and then attempted to give me a master's degree.

She would act as if she were about to lose her bladder in the house, get me on my feet moving fast...throw a head fake toward the door, then take me where she really wanted to go.  Upstairs for a nap  Out the front door for a walk.

At the height of her powers, she would do the back door fake and then scamper to the fridge, standing almost on point at the door.

In case I did not get the point, she locked eyes with me, then stared at the fridge, locked eyes with me again, then gestured at the fridge with her head.

She was fearless with all dogs, though she sought fights with those only triple her size.  She figured that was the "fair fight" ratio.  Black labs, she was convinced, were really large rodents.  They could not be tolerated, and were not.

Her agility and speed were such that watching her race in the backyard strained human capabilities.  She would become a white blur, dodging this way, juking that, pivoting on one thin dime and twirling on another.

Opponents larger than her were undone through -- and I do not use this word lightly -- thought.

Gator, a rescue Jack Russell we kept for two weeks before he found a permanent home, was a third larger than Maisie and got his nickname for his long snout and huge teeth-filled jaws.  Gator got the best of Maisie by quite literally putting her entire head in his mouth.  It was mock fighting, with no blood drawn, but a challenge to our pup nonetheless.

She took a break from romping with Gator in the backyard, and lay down on her front paws like a mellow but focused Sphinx and studied the field.

Gator was big, but not the craftiest canine in the kennel.  What he loved -- tennis balls -- Maisie disdained.  And she could see that when Gator had a tennis ball in his mouth...why no power on earth would make him let it go.

So after catching her breath, Maisie waited for me to throw the next tennis ball to Gator  It bounced once, Gator leaped high, caught the ball and pranced back toward me to deliver it, ball firmly held in that shovel-like mouth of his.

She was a flash of white, a tracer round fired across that yard.  She blindsided the larger dog at the shoulder and bowled Gator over so hard that he rolled three times.  Before he could gain his feet, Maisie stood over him, pinning him in the dominant-down position.

And there Gator lay, sprawled before a dog two-thirds his size.  Still not figuring out what Maisie had:   that so long as he held that ball in his mouth, Maisie could act with impunity.

She was clever at play.  At work, pure instinct reined.

Suzanne had been saying that our woodpile harbored rats in the backyard and to set her mind at ease and prove my point, I baited a Hav-a-Heart trap with corn and set it out by the woodpile of a Sunday evening.

Monday morning, I showered, changed into my full metal jacket suit and tie, and headed out the door.

"Did you check the trap?" Suzanne asked.

I gave her a martyr's shrug, mumbled something about "Nothing's gonna be there" and to prove it walked out into the back yard.

A big fat rat stared back at me from the trap.

So, now what?

Shooting a rat in New Jersey with a firearm is some sort of felony.  I sure wasn't going to strangle the damned thing and get my suit dirty.  A thought formed in my head that I could just let the damned thing go.

"Do NOT let that damned thing go," Suzanne said from behind me.

Plan C?  I held the trap up at about eye level and looked at the rodent.  Maybe I could fill  a garbage can with water and drown the ugly thug?

At that moment,  Maisie, who had fastened herself to my heels and turned with me like a tango partner, leapt up in the air chest-high to me and knocked the trap from my hand.

It fell to the ground and popped the trap flaps.   Free, the rat darted at impossible speed back toward the woodpile.

And got about six inches.

The synapses of Jack Russell Terrier's are wired tighter than    a rat's.  Maisie caught, killed and flipped the rat over her shoulder in a fraction of a second, and then looked for the next rat.

I just froze in wonder at what my little pet dog had done.  She looked back at me as if to ask, "Now do you know who I am?"

She was no one-trick wonder this one.  She would also sing on Suzanne's command. (A canine Christmas Carol)

And her standard procedure was to greet her beloved Sarah by scampering up the stairs and sticking her head through the open stairwell to face her loved one face-to-face  body aquiver, tail wagging so hard she near levitated.

So hard to let our little hero go.  So hard to know when.

Our vet said it was time.  A tumor or some close cousin of it had shut down her brain.  And the truth was, our vet said, Maisie had checked out awhile back and our one ethical choice was to let her leave.

This we did Monday with many tears, sobs, hugs, much love and overflowing affection.  We were blessed enormously to have had  such a grand dog grace our household with her love, loyalty, and street-smart shenanigans.

When I was far from fully formed, I fear I favored a judgmental stance on the world in general and the behavior of my peers   I took a hard right wrong turn in Sunday School or something, felt I understood more than I did, and measured life in very serious terms of right and wrong.   Like Atlas, I carried the world on my shoulders and woe be it to anyone who did not follow the rules.  That was tough work for a sixth grader. 

Gerald P. Rodeen  was only vaguely on my scope then – somewhat, I thought, like a head cold or a bad winter flu.  You knew it was out there going around. You hoped not to catch it. 

A part of Boy Scouts played well into my personality then – or into this stern judgmental part.  It had rules, codes, and it allowed me to judge others.  This was noticed by some factions of Troop 32, who shared my sense of righteousness.  They  considered themselves a good judge of judgers.   

It was around this time too that I moved from the East Side of Paxton to the West Side and was somewhat betwixt and between social groups and gangs of guys to hang out.  Again, Rodeen was around – as were an offbeat bunch of colleagues known loosely as the West Side Gang.  

We’d play ball every once in awhile.  They seemed a pretty mongrel pack.  Some of them would bring stolen cigarettes to the games, and others obtained Beechwood chewing tobacco.  They fought with each other – real wrestling matches and punches thrown.  Bloody noses weren’t uncommon.  And then they’d forget about it and play another inning, until it was too dark to see on the field that existed then, at the corner of State and Cherry.  They all swore like pirates. 

Oddly, that seemed like fun. 

My  religious sponsors noticed I was hanging out with the wrong company and sought to intervene. They were eighth graders and saw the big picture.   They had a “five year plan” for Troop 32 and they had decided that I should  one day be troop leader because I was a righteous and serious child -- as serious as they were.   If I stuck with the plan, I was in.  It all sounded good to me. Well, they said, it would get better at the annual Camp Fredericks Jamboree Campout. 

There we faced the usual challenges.  Nothing is more exciting than the prospect of a campout.   Nothing is sadder than the reality of a sixth grader on the second day  staring at raw bacon in a steel pan resting on a cold and smoldering fire, rocking back and forth shrouded in a wet blanket.  

Rules of course were the way around that.  I lead Wolf Patrol – a company of seven or eight kids of about my age or younger.  I was a firm disciplinarian and bossed them around if they were not squared off on anything from the way they wore their kerchief to how they fixed their bunks and policed our campsite. 

Rodeen ran Flaming Arrow Patrol – a loose proxy for the West End Gang.  Marv Archer, Larry Niccum, Mike Maron, Sam Robinson and four or five others formed the core.  

The big event of the camp was an award for conservation improvement.  Each patrol picked a project.  Mine was to have Wolf Patrol build a descending stair case, shored up with sticks and pegs, so that erosion was stopped. 

My stair case led to a small creek and it is there that Rodeen and Flaming Arrow Patrol set out to build a bridge.  

My team worked under my precise direction – and the first few steps were indeed solid and well done.  But the sun, homesickness, real sickness from eating raw bacon -- all these took a tally on my crew, as did my dictatorial style. 

Meanwhile, the Flaming Arrow Patrol was cussing, spitting, throwing each other in the water, splashing anyone who came near them – and building a bridge that I marvel at still. 

They had given it some thought and picked four big logs that they could imbed for several feet into the bank – so they were not just propped up; they were solid.  Then they created a bottom base with other logs – and then packed the top and middle with hundreds of pounds of mud, with other sticks inside – somewhat like organic rebar.  

They threw mud balls at everyone who came by – and not just a few in my direction. They had their usual number of fights and the air above them was blue from words that would make sailors cock their hats back in wonder.  But they were working as a team and no matter what happened, they all came back together just as if they were on the ball field in a pick up game.  

This made me think. 

My patrons came by – the troop elders – and stopped to talk.  Only one or two of my patrol were still working – and essentially I was scrambling to finish the last third of the project in a sort of slap-dash way. 

“They’ve done a good job on that bridge,” I said. to my patrons. 

“Don’t worry,” my patrons said. “You’re going to win.” 

“Guys,” I said, “that is a very good bridge.”

Rodeen came by and looked at my effort at the stairs, hawked a huge lugey up, spit it twenty yards off to his left and said, “Nice try, motherfucker. Looks nice. Up top.” 

At the fireside Circle of Honor that night, of course, my Wolf Patrol project won the prize for conservation.  

There were a lot of coughs and sneezes from the Flaming Arrow section of the camp some of them sounding vaguely like “bullshit” and “asshole” when I accepted the prize.   

As we walked back to our tents, Jerry walked along side me and said in a matter of fact and casual manner.  

“Look, you know we did the best project and I don’t care who got the prize because I know who did the best job.”

“You’re right,” I said.  “That was absolutely unfair.  It was wrong.”

“Well, fuck, why are you hanging out with those guys then?” Rodeen said. 

“I’m not,” I said.  “That wasn’t right.”

“Well hang out with us then,” Rodie said.  “You don’t have to put up with that shit. Hang out with me. ”

And I did. For the next 50 years. 

I assimilated slowly into the West Side Gang then – and began sampling a Huck Finn sort of life that included real life:  cursing, chewing tobacco, minor vandalism and all.  

I think Rodie saw in me a smart guy who instantly understood his values.  He gave me a sense of life and play that loosened up my stiffness and unlimbered my sense of humor.   

Rodie had an unshakeable integrity about what was right and wrong.  I gave to him a broader sense of value and moral structure – along with a lot of laughs and insights into structures and politics. And in moderated form, my seriousness, and Rodie’s sense of mischievousness balanced well. It kept me alive and Jerry out of jail.  

Most times. 

Jerry and I made a great team whether it was pushing the envelope on Student Council or planning the Junior Prom.  Our personalities and skills fit like a glove.

We set our own standards, and they were not for the most part conventional standards.  We wanted to do great things, produce great change.  And together we did in our high school years. 

 Even when we were apart, for decades, those formative years, that template for action and standards and a sense of right and wrong, always were present for me and for Jerry too I think.  We both did do great things in life, we drove great change for good causes and the common good.  We had great fun doing it and we knew that each of us had contributed to the other’s success through the groundings and friendships of our formative years. 

He is present still for me.  Every time I sit down to tackle a project, every time I approach a problem, there is a piece of Jerry there.  I suspect it is the same for many others who knew him and loved him.  

So you may have left, buddy, but you are not gone, not gone at all, young man.  

(Jerry Rodeen, my great lifelong friend from childhood through adulthood, helped me live a full and entertaining life.  Here's one of several pieces I hope to write about Rodie and me.  All non-fiction.  All true. The "fighter" in the story here is real, though his name has been changed.  Paxton-ites might recognize him but I doubt it.  I mean him no harm for youth's foolish moments. I had a good share of them myself, as this story also reveals.)

“Stand up Frump so I can beat the shit out of you.”

Through beer be-goggled eyes, I looked up from the lawn of a farmhouse outside Paxton, Illinois. The kegger had been going on for awhile and I had tanked out two beers ago. I figured we had been drinking for four hours and it was around 11 at night.  The clover smelled pretty darned good and I had been attending to it for awhile.   

“Wut?” I said. 

“You think you’re smarter than everybody else and I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

I could see this was Jed Edwards talking.  

Sober, he always seemed to have a little burn of anger about him.  

Tonight he was on fire. I was sixteen and he was a year younger, but taller than me and ten pounds heavier.  Jed was in the quasi-hood demographic at Paxton High and I was the smart kid.  

Generally we all got a long and I had a lot of semi-hood friends. Jed’s cousin was one of them. We could work this out.  I knew I could reason with him.  This was sort of like one of those tough "story problems."  I would help Jed with his homework.  That's how smart kids got along with semi-hoods.

“Well, is Denny Short here?” I asked. 

“No, he ain’t here,” Jed said. “Short don’t come to these things. You know that.”

“Well, there you go!,” I said.  “You definitely are right!  I am pretty much smarter than anybody else here tonight.”

“Fuck you, that’s what I’m talking about.  You act like you’re smarter than everyone else!”

“No, no man,” I said.  “You don’t understand.  I don’t think that.  I know that.  When we did teacher turn around day, I was the student guidance counselor and I checked the IQ files. I’m slightly smarter than Alexa Noble and Denny is smarter than us all!”

I thought the point was clear and he’d understand. Any reasonable person would concede I was right.  Or, logically, he could go find Denny Short to fight. 

Jed’s jaw hung open for a moment.  Processing, processing.  Then he kicked at me as I crab walked away from him. He had steel-toed engineer boots. 

“That does it, goddammit, I’m gonna stomp your ass if you don’t get up.  Get up off the ground so I can beat the shit out of you.”

“Well, okay,” I said.  “But it’s not going to be much of a challenge.”

Physical contact sports came naturally to me.  Football, even rugby, always have given me great joy.  My pain tolerance is very high, and I could never remember ever being hurt in  a painful way by even the roughest tackle or block. 

Fighting I’ve never ever quite understood.  

Most of my experience with it was bigger guys who were bullies knocking me down and wailing on me.  It just didn’t hurt.  Every few swings or so, I’d ask questions like, “You getting tired?”  Or: “That’s all you got?”  It was interesting in an anthropologic sense, but what was the point?  Eventually, their arms would wear out.  

This drunk, it wouldn’t even be that hard on me. 

So I stood up and Jed pushed me hard and was about to punch me.   I looked at my watch to see how long this would take before I could get another beer.  Then Rodie grabbed Jed by his upper arm and pushed him to the side. 

“Fuck you Rodeen!” Jed said. “You think you scare me?  I’ll beat your ass and then I’ll beat his ass.”

Rodie was about my size. Which is to say, Jed was taller and heavier.  Rodie knew if we were really in trouble, he could holler over to Pig, our good friend and protector who was the size of a lawn tractor . 

But now, Rodie just stood there and said, 

“Jed why do you want to fight anybody?  Just go get a beer and let’s call it a night. Frumpy didn’t do anything to you.”

“Well, he thinks he’s smarter than everybody,” Jed said. 

Rodeen shrugged. 

“Well...he is.  That’s not his fault.  He can't help that."

“Fuck you Rodeen, let’s fight.”

Rodie gave Jed a measured look.  More of a scan really. 

I had seen it before.  It went top to bottom and back, toes to nose, and nose to toes.  

Then he smiled a smile I had seen before. It was a mixture of amusement, confidence and happiness.  I had seen this process and expression when Jerry was chatting up a particularly attractive and friendly young woman.  Also, I had seen the same expression as he sized up a rib roast.  In all cases, it meant that he was confident he could fully consume what he was looking at -- and to do so joyfully.

“One thing,” Jerry said. 

“What?”

“Have you got a buck?”

“Of course I got a buck,” Jed said. 

“Well, if you want to fight me, you’ve got to pay me a buck.”

“Fuck you Rodeen, I’m not going to pay you a buck.  I’m going to beat your ass right now.”

“Nope.  I don’t want to fight.  You want to fight.  You got to pay me a buck if you want me to whip your ass.  You pay me a buck to fight me.  Or you’ve got to fight him.”

Rodie nodded his head toward me.  Jed looked at me and I gave him a pathetic shrug of my shoulders. 

Jed went for his wallet instead. 

“Oh fuck, you Rodeen, here’s your buck.”

Jed reached forward with the dollar to give it to Rodeen and Jerry grabbed the dollar.  He also grabbed Jed's  hand in a firm grip, pulled Jed forward and off balance.  

Then he whacked Jed hard -- two quick left jabs to the  jaw joint.  Both connected and Jed’s head snapped sidewards and back like a punching bag.

Rodie drove forward then, hoisting Jed up on his shoulder, jumped six inches off the ground as if doing a diving tackle, and landed hard on top of Jed who slammed into the ground with all 120 pounds of Rodie on top of him. 

They wrestled for ten seconds, Rodie pinned him and poured it on until you could hear Jed grunt, “Give.”

“Are you done, motherfucker?” Rodeen said. 

“Done...” Jed said in a muffled tone, the fight all out of him. 

“Let me hear it, are you DONE?”

“Done!”

“If I let you up are you done tonight. No fighting with Frumpy or anybody.”

Done, Jed said.  All done. 

Rodie got up and backed off.  Jed stayed down.  After a couple of minutes, he stood to one knee and mumbled. 

“Fuck you Rodeen, you cheated.  I could beat you in a fair fight.”

Rodeen, who had sinus problems his whole life, snorted up a huge lugie, and spit it past Jed’s right shoulder. 

“That costs five bucks,” he said. “Come back when you get smart enough to fight somebody.”

So let me put a little more structure content and reason behind my rants about the best and brightest of our freedom-lovin’ web companies “blacking out” some content on the web Wednesday.

Yes, yes.  The bill itself is too harsh a solution to piracy.  And yes, yes, the rights of copy right holders should be protected.  No doubt about it. 

But that is not what sparks my concern and yeah, anger, about the “black out” strike.  What concerns me more is a Silicon Valley plutocracy that sees itself as above regulation and government -- and has no real intention of ending piracy and honoring copy right law. 

Believe me, these are smart people.  They could if they wanted to. Why haven't they?

Because their intelligence and morality is far more funneled into theocracy and self-interest than any grand concern for freedom. 

The “black out” smacks far too much of John Galt’s strike.  If you know your Ayn Rand, you know Galt’s story.    

And believe me, Silicon Valley right wing hippie billionaires sure do.  It’s the last thing they read before ditching all their liberal arts and history classes, dropping out of Stanford in their junior year when they got their venture capital funding. 

Galt is Rand’s prototypical uber-man -- the super talented one percent of humans from whom all value flows.  Constantly, he and Rand it would seem are fighting the leaches of the untalented (us) and the incursions of the government. 

One day, Galt says to hell with it and goes on strike.  He has organized all the other talented people in the world and they go on strike too.  Suddenly, the untalented lackeys are plunged into despair and hunger.  Galt then comes back and saves the world. 

Yeah, well, it was a 70-page monologue I read 50 years ago.  Whaddya want from me. I think that about sums it up, but even at age 14 I knew it was crap and it still is. 

But it is the bible in a lot of the Silicon Valley. 

So what does that have to do with web censorship and Silicon Valley.  

Tons of these folks are libertartian Ayn Randers living in that same deluded bubble. There should be no regulation of them. No taxes.  No government.  No touching. 

Which is odd of course because you and I and the government actually built them the infrastructure -- the Internet -- upon which they built their billions. 

So what’s wrong with freedom?  Nothing of course, but this is less about freedom and more about the business model and a very warped theology than freedom  It’s more about I want to take anything I damned well want and put it on the web.  Freedom in China?  Doesn’t fit the biz model. Censor away.  We’ll even give you the addresses of blogging journalists so you can throw them in jail. 

But surely I can’t criticize them for their protest Wednesday.  

Well, for a lot of them, I think it was far less about a fear of censorship than it was the overhead -- cast as “freedom.”

If piracy is truly checked, if copyright law is honored, if creative people receive the payment they deserve, then wow, overhead just went way up.  Appropriating content is better even than shipping jobs overseas.  

As I say, these are smart people.  If they want to craft legislation that protects copy right and fight piracy, they can do it. 

Or they can grandstand -- just as the NRA does over the 2d Amendment -- cry wolf and generate a lot of support in the name of freedom.  In a sense, it’s almost union busting.  If these folks can manage to appropriate content for free -- and make no mistake that is at the heart of most of their business models -- then their labor costs are low. If not they go up. 

Far easier to sound the alarm, and cry censorship.  Far easier for the one percent to again con the 99 percent.  Far easier to cast a war against talent as a fight for freedom.  The best I can say for them is that they may also have conned themselves. When you get into the libertarian echo chamber of Silicon Valley, that's pretty easy to do. 

But for anyone who holds a copyright, this type of freedom is indeed as the song says, just another thing  for nothing left to lose. 

So the Italian cruise ship disaster it seems was the captain's fault. No lifeboat drills.  Turned off the auto pilot, came too close to the shore.

Clearly, this was human error and an operational aberration, which any normal human can see.

But having covered maritime affairs off and on for 30 years, I am pretty abnormal.  And I know this industry is every bit as abnormal as I am.

No major ship wreck I can think of has not been blamed on pilot error, captain error, crew error, even errors by the cooks.  

Yup, a cruise line once blamed a cook for sinking a ship.  Guess the captain wasn't around.

So I'll wait a bit longer here to see what emerges.

Keep in mind as you read news stories that the maritime industry is the one industry in the world that has an "error-inducing" system -- a process that actually assures that there will be more wrecks, not fewer. ("Normal Accidents," Yale University.)

The industry does this in many ways,  in part by investing heavily in technology that may or may not work but must appear to work.  And the attention to crew and officer costs is absurdly intense, a race to the bottom of the salary pyramid, often with little concern for skills.  Then, captains and crew -- often from different countries with no common language -- spend sleep-deprived months at sea.  

Insurance is cheap. So if one ship goes down a year, no big deal.

Truth is though, about one big ship goes down a week.  You just don't hear about it because they aren't passenger ships and there are few Americans or Europeans in the crew.

Captains once had control of their ships.  In an age of sail and early steam, they were in fact little CEO's.
But today, they are middle management and subject to the pressures of all senior managers, whose degrees are likely to be MBAs, not a masters in nautical engineering.

Does anyone in today's world think that a major corporation did not have constant contact and control of this ship?  Good lord, they know what their overland truckers are doing.   To suggest there were not daily updates on drills and course is absurd.

So what is the alternative version for the cap here?  Perhaps none.  But it is not hard to imagine that policy drove these bad decisions, not poor operations and execution by the captain.

It is not hard to imagine the captain and his corporate senior going over a check list like this.

Cap:
First day out, gotta do the lifeboat drill.  Go by the book, you know.

Corp:
Bummer of a first night experience.  Wish you could get on board here with the experience.  Nobody wants a lifeboat drill on the first day.

Cap:
Well...okay...but....there's plenty of time and we're out in the middle of the ocean and...

Corp:
Do we have to really be out in the ocean?  That's not much of an experience either.  Can't you get in closer to the shore?  Look here at these beautiful cliffs... that would be a really great view.

Cap:
Well, I suppose, okay but....we can't use the auto pilot and in that close, you never know when...

Corp:
Can you get on board with the experience here?  There are a hundred captains who would take your job tomorrow and I guarantee you I would not hear this from them...they would be committed to the experience...

Unfortunately, this is not a an absurd scenario.

Perhaps here the cap did blow it.  I'd be surprised if it is that simple.