Güd wrtr

You can get through your whole life
without one, I tell my students.
Really. You can. Periods and commas
will do you fine, if you use them
correctly, if you resist the urge
to polka dot a page or sprinkle
them through a field of letters
like so many chocolate chips.

If a period puts a button
on the end of a sentence,
halts a declaration, and
a comma serves as a mere pause,
when you combine them—
that simple dot over a curvy
wink—you arrive at the spot
dividing two complete thoughts.

A semicolon creates parallels;
it speaks of relationship—
your road running next to mine,
each of us equals,
holding our own weight
in this lovely dance
of a sentence together.

Thinking of my dear poet friend Marie Reynolds on the first anniversary of her passing, grateful for so much about her… among other things, that she was able to hold her book of poetry, “Seaworthy,” close to her before she died, so happy with that great achievement. It is a fine collection, and I am honored to have published her elegant, wise poems with the help of some of her local poet friends.

She was my best poetry buddy, editor, gentle critiquer, and her suggestions were always spot on. I miss her for that and for her devotion as a friend. But in the wake of her passing, Marie left us many gifts, not least some of her friends who’ve become closer, people with whom we can remember and celebrate her.

I am so pleased to call Rose Varesio, Annie Andrighetto, Susan Flynn, Julie Brower and others my new friends. I’m also grateful to her family for their love and care at the end of Marie’s life. Thanks, Marie, for your bountiful gifts to so many.

light year

(for Rose and Marie)

how long is a light year?
you asked

i looked it up:
a unit of length equal
to the distance traveled by light
in one earth year,
about 6 trillion miles
or 9 trillion kilometers

a trillion has 12 zeroes
after a number,
which feels like a very
dark year

like this one,
missing her

because the second
definition of a light year is:
very far, in distance or time

which is how she feels
to us much of the time, like
the milky way stretching
over 200,000 light years

except for moments
like now, when we talk
about her, and she’s
right here, in our spiral spur
of milky river across the sky

in that pinpoint of light
in the corner of the room

just there
and there
and there

A half century later I’m the one searching
for those piles of rocks along Auburn Folsom Road.
The man who led us there died 15 years ago,
and I begin my quest for river rocks thinking of him.

But as I drive past the spots where we once hefted rocks
into the trunk of my father’s Chevy, the two-lane road
has morphed into a four-lane highway, one side
rimmed with houses, shopping mall, light rail
replacing railroad tracks. No longer a safe place
to pull over and paw through piles overgrown
into hillocks sprouting grasses and trees.
Five decades of rain and dust and debris have turned
the mounds into living organisms—although perhaps
they always were alive, those river rocks keeping
their stories to themselves.

I want these rocks—suddenly attached to memory
like ions clinging to water molecules. I want
them in my life again, in my yard,
far downstream from where I started.

As I drive and search, the prayer arrives:
“Our father, who art in heaven, Roger be thy name,
guide me to a quiet place where I can safely
lift rocks in peace, in the name of all that is holy—
river, rocks, you, the universe, amen.”

And I turn down a road into a space once populated
with grasses and oaks, perhaps a deer trail or two
the only way through, to find myself arrowed
into a small, empty parking lot. I park, head down
a bike trail that I suspect meanders toward Lake Natoma,
dredged more than sixty years ago from American River soil,
those rocks joining the huge field of tailings left
a century earlier in the rush for California gold.

And around a curve they stand, gleaming as if brand new
under summer sun: naked mounds of river rock.
I climb one pile, feel stones shift as my weight
bears down, chuckle at the top to see a field
of exposed piles undulating northward,
as if deposited just for me.

I grin my thankyouthankyouthankyou to the sky,
set to work hefting, selecting, tossing keepers toward
the bike trail, know that I will come back, come back,
come back to this place outside of time.

Again and again I will load rocks “yay big,” as he
used to say, into a red bucket on a wheeled cart,
tow it up the trail behind me to my own waiting Honda,
transfer each rock into that welcoming space,
head back down the trail for more—
each step a meditation,
each rock a memory,
each breath
love.

How many times did he load us into the car,
my mother, my sister and me, head south
down Auburn Folsom Road by the huge mounds
of tailings left over from gold mining days?
There, we’d pile out, he’d open the trunk,
and tell us to look for rocks “about yay big.”

“Yay big” was a different size every time—
sometimes small enough for a child’s palm,
sometimes ones that took two hands to lug
to the trunk. But my father, young, crewcut’d,
before his belly grew and his enthusiasm shrank
for yard projects, had rock walls to build.
And there they were—all those lovely, roundish
river rocks dredged from the American River,
just sitting there.

The summer men walked on the moon
for the first time, my sister and I imagined
not astronauts on another world retrieving rocks,
but Gold Rush miners lugging them in wooden
wheelbarrows, then later bucket dredges that
assembled great piles like pyramids, a field
of humped stones 10 miles long and 7 miles wide.
I didn’t know then that the river was dredged
to build a second dam downstream from the one
that created the lake we swam in, skied on,
saw as ours—Folsom.

My father was as proud of those dams
as if he’d built them himself, ones that
ended annual flooding of one of the rivers
that circled Sacramento. Years later, when
I migrated to the college hunkered down
next to the American bordered by tall levees,
my father assured me that, no matter
how much it rained, I’d be safe because
of the dams upstream.

I think of that in winter when rain pours
and the river rises fast, once again
channeling the liquid mystery of movement.
“California doesn’t do water well,” my father
would say. “It’s either too little or too much.”

Sometimes during deluges, I head for my alma mater
snuggled next to the levee and climb its manmade
steps to the top. I watch the hefty American
rush its muddy way to become one with
the Sacramento surging down from Mt. Shasta,
and, thus braided, forging on to the sea.
I think of the rocks embedded in its rich soil—
perhaps like those still lodged in moondust—
that will likely never see daylight, others tumbling
in the current that carries the stories of river,
the whoosh of watery highway,
right past us.

Some years ago Dick pulled off a nifty surprise for my birthday. In July 2012 we took a driving trip down Highway 395, along the back side of the Sierra Nevada range, overnighting in Lone Pine, which is the perfect kickoff spot for, among other things, the Alabama Hills. Beginning in the silent movie era, Hollywood folks migrated north to film movies in the Alabama Hills, gentle contours of rock set against the rugged peaks of the Sierra.

The morning of my birthday we were in our hotel room in Lone Pine when we heard a knock at the door. I opened it to see our dear friend Cora Johnson, who had driven up from her home in Southern California just for the day to surprise me. That’s the kind of friend she is.

We spent that lovely July 30 driving around the Alabama Hills, looking at spots where old movies were filmed, including “Gunga Din” and Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy cowboy film, and later “The Lone Ranger” and “Bonanza.” We also toured Manzanar, the former World War II relocation camp, where some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated. Then Cora aimed her car south and drove home to Cerritos.

Cora, of course, and her BFF from college, Connie Raub (both of whom have known and loved Dick for more than a half century), were the two angels who literally flew to his side in January. They mother hen’d Dick for two weeks on Oahu after his surgery to help him regain strength and confidence before flying home with him to Sacramento. In mid-February. Since they both live in snowy places (Cora now lives in Minden, Nevada, and Connie many years ago moved to Colorado Springs), getting home from Sacramento proved to be tricky. Cora ended up spending some extra time in Sacramento at the home of Dick’s sister and brother-in-law Marge and John Thompson. Then the Thompsons drove Cora halfway up the mountain where they met one of Cora’s Minden friends who delivered Cora home at last.

I often remind people who think that Cora and Connie had a lovely two-week vacation on Oahu of these two things: (a) They were taking care of a man recovering from heart surgery, monitoring his medications, blood pressure, exercise and food intake, and (b) They all froze in the little rental house Pearl City, Oahu, in the clouds (no heat in those houses), far from the ocean. In other words, it was not easy duty, but they were a superb example of longtime friends and the things you do for love.

I say all this to explain that Dick and I have been trying for years to figure out a way to surprise Cora. This year we had even more reason to do so. We finally managed it a few days before Cora’s birthday by arranging a dinner at the Chart House overlooking Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side. What Cora didn’t know was that Connie was coming to Sacramento to see relatives a couple of days before our scheduled dinner, so we sneaked in a Special Guest Artist just for the occasion.

And it worked wonderfully. We drove into the Chart House parking lot to see Cora waiting for us. Dick and I got out of the car first to greet Cora as Connie hunkered down in the back seat. “I need to get something out of the car,” Dick said, and he opened the back door with Cora standing by, and Connie popped out, stunning her former roomie.

Much laughter, many hugs. We had gotten the band back together for the first time since mid-February. We had a lovely dinner—peach-bourbon glazed scallops and shrimp for Dick and Cora, summer vegetables and shrimp for Connie, and macadamia nut-encrusted wahoo for me. And for all of us for dessert two plates of the Chart House’s famous hot lava cake (ooooo! not on anyone’s heart-healthy diet).

We have so much to celebrate this year—not just our three summer birthdays (Connie’s in June, mine in July, Cora’s in August) but more than a half century of friendship between Cora, Connie and Dick. And though I am newer to their group, they have made me part of their tribe, as we consider each other family, or, as they say in Hawaii, ohana.

Once again we are grateful for our ohana… these two here and all of you out there who have been cheering Dick on since January. Mahalo nui loa to you all!

(And haouli la hanau… happy birthday, dear Cora!)

This guy is #1!

Six months ago today he had a triple bypass, resulting in a refurbished, snappy heart 💜.

Nine days before that, he was felled by a cardiac arrest in the Honolulu airport and was revived—after excellent CPR and assistance by two bystanding angels—with the use of an AED, an automated external defibrillator.

Today he’s wearing his AED Institute shirt with gratitude to that organization for placing AEDs in airports all over Hawaii. He literally would not be here without that foresight. A big mahalo to all who saved and supported Dick Schmidt from his first moments to today… and me, too!

We were pleased to see a Google doodle tribute today to Dr. René Favaloro, highly regarded for his pioneering work on coronary artery bypass surgery using the great saphenous vein… one of the large veins in the leg. He was born this day in 1923 in Argentina.

The technique he developed is what Dick had done in January in Honolulu by Dr. John Y. Lee at Kaiser Moanalua hospital. Working in Northern California as a cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Lee become a pioneer in endoscopic vein harvesting, which involves removing the leg vein through a tiny one-inch incision for bypass surgery. He extracted Dick’s great saphenous vein that was used to create three bypasses around blocked arteries. 

This time I go first,
hand my boarding pass
to the young man at the gate,
who scans it—beep!—
& says, “Have a good flight.”

I turn to watch you—
in photo vest identical
to the one cut off you
nearly five months ago
when you collapsed
at another airport gate.
You step forward,
extend your arm,
pass in hand.

You stand tall, do not pitch forward
like a domino as you did then,
do not make an early departure.

“Have a nice flight,”
you hear the young man say.

“Thank you,”
you are able to say.

And I feel my heart literally skip
a beat—this time with relief—
as, free & clear, we make
our way down the jetway,
as we have dozens of times
together,

our hearts leaping in the most
blessedly ordinary manner,
aware again of grace bestowed,
as something essential
envelops us—something
that feels acutely
like joy.

I am pleased to say that a story I wrote about Dick’s heart adventure has been published in the June issue of Sacramento Magazine. (You can read the whole story below, if you like.)

It’s an odd enough sensation to be sitting in a hospital in Honolulu, watching your beloved sleep most of the time following the cardiac arrest that felled him and his literal jolt back to life. It gets a bit more odd when, after posting about said event on social media, you get an email from a longtime friend/magazine editrix. “Can you write a version of this story for me?” asked Krista Minard. Some people might be annoyed by such a request at a time like that. But give me a good writing assignment, one with a powerful narrative and interesting details (which this one certainly was), and I’m on it.

Not only did working on the bare bones of what became “Departures and Arrivals” occupy me in the freezing hospital as we waited to learn about further tests and eventual surgery for Dick, it also reminded me (former journalist that I am) that there’s nothing as good as taking notes as things happen… as opposed to trying to remember details later. So, with Dick’s permission to tell the story as it unfolded, I did.

I don’t know if Krista knew how much she was saving me at the time, giving me something else to occupy my mind, but that assignment focused me and produced posts for this website (click on “Dick’s Great Heart Adventure” on the home page, if you haven’t read those posts and would like to). It was a win-win for us both.

I love to tell the story about how I was the editor of Sacramento Magazine in the early 1990s (the last century!) when Krista Hendricks, as she was then, was hired as our receptionist—a job she didn’t particularly want and, she’ll tell you, she wasn’t particularly good at. She wanted to be a writer for the magazine, but we weren’t hiring writers and she was, frankly, at that point not ready for such a job. But she let me know she wanted to write, and offered to type up copy for me (in those days we took stories written on paper and typed them into our little Macintosh computers). On her own time she also typed  transcripts of interviews I did with journalists for my master’s thesis. And she proved to be a fine feature writer. I gave her as many assignments as she wanted, and Krista became a huge asset to Sac Mag, as we call it.

She left us to work for the Neighbors section of The Sacramento Bee for a time, but came back to do freelance writing for us at the magazine, and eventually she was hired as a writer/editor. And after I left the magazine—and another editor was named and she left the magazine—they wisely made Krista the editor, a job she’s held for more than 25 years.

Every now and then she asks me to write something for her, or I volunteer an essay, which has been a lovely thing for us and the magazine, too. The travel pieces I’ve done about Hawaii have included Dick’s photos, too. Krista’s a terrific copy editor, and I rely on her to edit some of my longer projects, including all three books published by River Rock Books, the tiny press I run with my good friend and colleague Katie McCleary. In fact, here’s Krista and her daughter Anna at our most recent River Rock Books debut of Ed Cole’s novel, “The Love Story of Pinky Wollerman.” (You can get an electronic version of the book here. There should be printed copies available soon on Amazon, too.)

Thanks, Krista, for once again putting Dick and me in print… and online!

Departures and Arrivals:
Caring humans and an electronic device save a man from cardiac arrest

Jan Haag

The mid-January morning began like dozens of others we’d experienced. My longtime partner Dick Schmidt and I rose on the island of Kauai, gathered ourselves after two weeks in one of our favorite locations on the planet, drove to the airport and boarded a plane for Honolulu. Once there, we deplaned and found the electronic board that lists departures and arrivals. We sighed, realizing that we had a significant walk to the Hawaiian Airlines gate where flight 20 would bring us home to Sacramento.

“We can do this,” I told Dick. Days before we’d made a serious downhill and then uphill climb to a beach on Kauai’s north shore.

He nodded and grinned. “Slowly.”

We love to walk, but over the previous 18 months or so, Dick had been gradually slowing down. He’d have to stop to catch his breath, though for decades he and I walked a speedy two-mile route through the former walnut orchard where he lives. Twenty years earlier he’d had stents installed in one of his arteries, and recent tests showed that his cholesterol numbers were under control. He and his doctor chalked up the fatigue to Dick carrying extra weight and being out of shape. Add to that an Achilles tendon injury last summer that transformed into sciatica on his right side, and we figured it was understandable that 75-year-old Dick—a retired Sacramento Bee photographer who’d spent decades walking and sometimes running to assignments—had slowed down.

After reaching gate C1, Dick and I found ourselves near the end of the line to board. He was about to hand his boarding pass to a gate attendant when he felt extremely dizzy, then pitched forward like a domino. He fell into the metal stand that measures the size of carry-on luggage, bloodying his face, I noticed as I sank to the floor beside him. I also saw his carotid artery fluttering in his neck. Though I didn’t know it yet, his heart was in ventricular fibrillation (VF). It was abundantly clear: Dick had died.

“Dickie, no!” I called. “Come back! Come back!”

I felt someone at my side. “I’m a nurse,” a man’s gentle voice said.

I stood, another kind man put his arms around me as the nurse determined that Dick’s heart was not beating, and an off-duty firefighter also behind us in line knelt by Dick to start chest compressions.

Those people, we learned much later, turned out to be Claudio Alvarado, a UC Davis Medical Center pediatrics emergency nurse, and Salesi Maumau, a Honolulu firefighter who grew up in Elk Grove. Unbeknownst to me, a Hawaiian Airlines employee called 911 and another, Chris Ohta, ran for an AED, an automated external defibrillator, which are placed 90 seconds apart in Hawaiian airports, close enough to run to them. When Chris returned, Claudio and Salesi applied the AED pads, Chris called “clear!” and the machine delivered a massive shock into Dick’s chest.

It turns out that AEDs don’t restart hearts; in fact, they stop VF so the heart can have a chance to restart itself. When the AED is on and attached to someone, it analyzes the heart every two minutes and will only deliver another shock if it detects VF or certain types of ventricular tachycardia (VT). In Dick’s case, one shock brought him back among the living.

All this took about three minutes.

By then EMS personnel were with us, and our two angels whose names we didn’t yet know boarded the plane, having saved the life of a stranger. Within minutes Dick was loaded onto a gurney, having no idea what happened to him. Once in the ambulance, on our way to the hospital, as I sat shaking in the front seat, I could hear him talking to the EMT in back, giving correct answers to questions.

I knew then that our lives had changed forever, thanks to the kindness and skills of strangers. What neither of us knew, however, was how many angels would emerge in the days and weeks to come to put our Humpty Dumpty back together again, how much aloha would be extended to us at every turn, how many times we would look at each other and say, “Wow.”

•••

More “wows” came that day and the ones that followed. After being transported to Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center—which happens to not only be the closest hospital to the airport but also our health care provider—Dick was tended to by a host of tender folks in the emergency department, all of whom wanted to hear the story. We told it again and again, scarcely believing it ourselves. No, Dick said, he didn’t see a white light or a tunnel. He felt dizzy and then felt nothing. He thought he’d merely fallen when he woke up and saw people around him.

Dick’s split lip was sutured by the first of many medical people, all of whom appeared like white-coated angels. He was moved into a single-bed room, and nurses found me a pull-out chair/bed. We settled in as best we could with what we had in our backpacks because our luggage had flown home without us. The room was cold, but everyone who walked in—including those with warm blankets—brought a generous, concerned heart.

The day after Dick’s comeback, a miracle arrived in the form of two women, Pamela Foster, RN, and Jenna Tanigawa, from the AED Institute in Honolulu. The Institute places AEDs all over Hawaii and offers free training to people of all ages about how to use the devices. Pamela, a former ER nurse, came to Hawaii after being invited by Chief Martinez Jacobs, the state Department of Transportation airport fire chief, to create an AED program in Hawaiian airports. They told us that AEDs have been used on 69 people at 13 airports in Hawaii since August 2006. Fifty of those people arrived at hospitals with their hearts beating.

Dick is the 50th survivor, Pamela told us. That’s a significant number for him. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Dick’s first trip to Hawaii, which is, of course, the 50th state.

Another wow.

I sat in the hospital for days, watching Dick sleep a lot, as he gradually grew stronger. Tests revealed that his heart was repairable—not with more stents, as we had hoped, but with a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). The doctors wanted him to recover for at least a week before surgery. I missed the first two weeks of a new semester, but my colleagues at Sacramento City College pitched in to find subs to cover my classes. Friends on island brought and sent us things to keep us warm and comfortable in the hospital.

My little chair/bed was parked by a big window in Dick’s room out of which I could see the Moanalua valley for which the hospital is named. Big eucalyptus trees with their peeling bark revealed striking greens and luscious browns. Every time I’d turn my eyes away from the window to see Dick propped up in bed, sleeping, I’d think, “He’s here. He’s here.”

•••

On the sixth day after Dick’s cardiac arrest, 5 a.m., Blood Guy knocks softly on the door. He’s the third person who’s walked in our room in the last half hour, which they don’t do in the better hotels, and this is one expensive place to stay. The first two took Dick’s vitals, weighed him, pulling off all the blankets in this too-chilly room, removing the pillows, one of them holding the heavy heart monitor. They call out a number in kilos, which means nothing to us, then replace his pillows and blankets, which I will have to get up to adjust because I’ve learned how he likes them.

When Blood Guy knocks and enters with his kit with small vials wearing different colored plastic caps and his rubber band tourniquet and, of course, his stabber, like everyone else who shows up in room 329, he’s curious about our story.

Barely awake, Dick gives him the 30-second version.

“Sorry your vacation ended this way,” says Blood Guy, then adds, as most people do, “but it’s good, I guess, that you didn’t get on the plane or that you weren’t in flight. I’m sure you want to get home, though.”

“Glad to be here,” Dick says, and he means it.

And even at this early hour, my eyes and brain fuzzy, I detect the sincerity, the layers of meaning in those four words. And so softly that Blood Guy—as he prepares to turn off the light and let us try to sleep—can’t hear, I say, “Me, too. Me, too.”

•••

One day I got a text from Pamela Foster saying that Camron Calloway wanted to visit. Camron, it turned out, was the man who put his arms around me in the airport as his partner Claudio Alvarado, the UC Davis nurse behind us in line, worked on Dick. Camron is a courier for the Air Force who flies in and out of Honolulu regularly, and he appeared in his light-colored camos to tell us their story.

Camron likes to board planes early, which he’s entitled to do as an active-duty military man, but Claudio was lagging behind that day. Camron was annoyed at his partner, and by the time he and Claudio made it to gate C1, they found themselves near the end of the boarding line. Behind us.

“They shouldn’t have even been there,” Foster told us the day after Dick’s cardiac arrest. “They should have already been on the plane.”

But two weeks later there was Camron in Dick’s hospital room, pulling out his smart phone and getting Claudio via Facetime so the four of us could laugh and wipe our eyes as we got to meet two of our on-the-spot angels.

There was the wow of Dr. Nicholas Dang, the cardio-thoracic surgeon who, because Dick asked, ungloved during surgery to shoot video on his iPhone of Dick’s unrepaired, beating heart. He did the triple bypass and then shot Dick’s repaired, “snappy” heart, as Dr. Dang called it. Two days after surgery Dr. Dang and I stood at Dick’s ICU bedside, all of us watching the videos, marveling at the difference: How many of us get to see our own hearts in action?

So many angels appeared. One of our favorite doctors, Diana Kim, who followed Dick from beginning to end, stopped by almost daily. Erin and Jamie, two visiting nurses, followed us from the regular floor to the ICU after Dick’s surgery. Erin, we joked, literally gave Dick time when she found a clock for his ICU room that didn’t have one. That clock turned out to be a metaphor for our experience: From the moment of his cardiac arrest, everyone we came in contact with gave Dick more time on the planet.

There was the wow of two of Dick’s longtime friends, Cora Johnson and Connie Raub, flying from their homes in Nevada and Colorado, respectively, to spend another two weeks caring for Dick after I needed to return home to teach. We rented online a house in Pearl City from someone we didn’t know who turned out to be a retired Kaiser psychiatrist and her husband. We later learned that they took that house, which was for sale, off the market to rent to us.

Two days before I flew home, Jenna Tanigawa arrived at our rental house to not only train Cora, Connie and me in CPR and use of the AED but also to give us our own AED to take home. We hope never to have to use it on anyone, but, as Pamela Foster suggested, we will carry it in the car in case we see someone collapse as Dick did.

A couple of weeks later, after celebrating his 76^th birthday, Dick, Cora and Connie flew back to Sacramento. Dozens of people gathered at the airport in Honolulu where all this began exactly one month earlier—fire and rescue personnel, including Fire Chief Jacobs, Pamela and Jenna, Salesi and his wife Eryn—for a Celebration of Life with speakers and leis and much aloha.

Salesi acknowledged Claudio’s role and downplayed his own, saying, “He took the lead. I just did compressions.”

Then Pamela stepped to the mic and said, “That’s what it’s all about.”

Indeed it is. Without someone performing CPR and someone else finding an AED to apply the shock if it is needed, statistically people who collapse in VF or VT have a low chance of survival. We learned that AEDs don’t hurt the victim; in fact, AEDs are the best and often only chance to bring someone back to life.

Dick continues to recover well, walking daily and increasing his mileage, not having to stop and catch his breath, regaining strength, self confidence and momentum. Everywhere we go, we look for AEDs. We think often of the instant and permanent community we became part of in Honolulu, people who live the definition of aloha, whom we can’t thank enough. They are our ohana now, as we are theirs—family bonded in the sweetest way by their kindness and care for a traveler in need—who, thanks to them, continues to move forward in the rest of his lifetime journey.