Author Archives: Mark P

Four months in

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My brother is currently on his second type of chemotherapy treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer. The first, which was a conventional type, did essentially nothing but make him lose his hair. The results of the second, a targeted therapy given orally, are not known yet. However, he has been having some significant pain, probably due to a tumor pressing on a nerve. He has been on morphine and oxycodone, which gives an idea of the level of the pain.

The last time I went to Chattanooga, he was pretty much his old self, but had been having enough pain that he took his pain pills. As the afternoon wore on, his pain subsided, but so did his alertness. But the time I left, he was half dozing in the living room, occasionally waking up enough to make confused comments that conflated his dreams with the conversation the rest of us were having.

We spoke to him on the phone Sunday evening. He voice sounded terrible and he sounded confused. I think it was partly due to the effect of his therapy, which makes him hoarse, and partly due to the effects of the pain medication he’s on. He said he felt pretty bad. His wife suggested that we call back right after lunch on Monday, which we did. He didn’t answer. Later Monday evening his wife texted us that he had gone to the hospital, where they had found elevated bilirubin levels. This could be caused by a tumor blocking a bile duct.

I’m planning to drive up to Chattanooga Tuesday (the day of this post) to visit him in the hospital. I hope they know something by the time I get there.

My brother was diagnosed just before Thanksgiving, so about four months ago. The median survival rate for untreated cancer at his stage is about three and a half months. With “good” treatment this increases to about eight months.

My brother’s younger son and his new wife were planning a family week at the beach next week, but it’s not looking like that will not happen.

Pet sitter tales

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I’ve learned a couple of things in the last few days.

The first is that a whole lot of people who want to be pet sitters read the local newspaper. We really need a pet sitter, so we bought an ad for a month. So far more than a dozen people have responded. We have met four so far.

There’s the divorced mother of one who lives with her own mother down at the other end of Texas Valley. Then there’s the young woman who just moved to town. She works part time at a chain bookstore and plans to give her two weeks’ notice on another part-time job. She has a degree in meteorology and geography. Another young woman does bookwork for her brother’s business.

We just talked to a woman who also lives in Texas Valley who lost her husband in a car wreck last year. She went to a pet store to buy some cat collars and ended up adopting a black lab mix. She said she thought when she heard the dog’s story that she was going to rescue the dog, but the dog ended up rescuing her.

Another woman had rescued about 40 cats some years ago. She got them spayed and neutered and then took care of them until, one by one, they all died of old age.

I found out when I worked as a reporter many years ago that everyone has a story, and they all want to tell it. All you have to do is listen. They aren’t necessarily big stories, but they’re big enough to them. And, sometimes, it really is a big story. I used to live down the street from an older couple. I usually spoke to them when I walked my dog past their house. Eventually I learned that the man had been on a Southern Airways flight from Huntsville, Al, to Atlanta in 1977 when it ran into a severe thunderstorm over Rome, lost both engines, and then crash landed on a rural highway in the little town of New Hope. He told about walking out of the plane, shielding his face from the flames with his hands, while other passengers sat in their seats, struggling to get out without realizing that their seatbelts were still fastened. Seventy-two people died, including seven on the ground.

So, if you listen long enough, you hear the story, big or small.

But that’s not the other thing I learned. That other thing I learned is that I would really like to say yes to all the people who want to pet sit for us, or at least most of them. Unfortunately, we just need one. We’re leaning toward the divorced mother of one, but we still have five possibilities to interview.

I wish we could get someone to find a pet sitter for us so we wouldn’t have to say no to anyone. But then we wouldn’t get to hear their stories.

Daffodils

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What are they looking at anyway?

Every time I go past them I have to glance over in the same direction to see if there’s anything worth looking at. Oh, that’s south. They’re looking at the sun.

I planted the bulbs just a few weeks ago. I was surprised when they started coming up, and here they are, all flowery and everything. I hope the freezes we have coming up in the next few days don’t damage them.

Catching up with the cats

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It’s been far too long since we posted a bunch of cat photos, so here goes.

Silly cat games: which leg is this? Or did Sylvester grow a leg sticking out of the front of his chest?

It’s been a long day, full of eating, sleeping and … well, sleeping.

Toaster ovens are nice to sit behind.

Why do cats like to drink nasty water from a house plant? In Mollie’s case, it’s because the water is the same color as her coat, and she really, really likes her coat.

“Don’t be shy, little kitty. You have a beautiful coat. Almost as beautiful as mine.”

The back of a couch is a good place to sleep. But then, pretty much any place is a good place to sleep.

“Here’s the fierce vulture sitting on a tree limb waiting for a victim …”

Smokey and Mollie like to play, but Smokey likes to lie down even more than he likes to play.

Mollie on the bed in the guest bedroom.

The Teddy Bear is Leah’s from 60-plus years ago. She remembers her family having three sisters from a local orphanage for Christmas many years ago. The youngest saw her Teddy and picked it up. She called it “her Teddy Bar.” Leah still feels a little guilty about not giving it to the girl, but, after all, Leah was just a little girl herself.

Memories of steam

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I was going through old slides and prints and found this print from a photo I took sometime between 1973 and 1976, when I was a reporter for The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle. It’s an old Southern Railway steam engine that was being used for excursion trips. The quality of the photo is not great. When I used to turn in my rolls of film to the guys in the photo department, they made prints that were just good enough to last until the paper was ready to print the next morning. This one hasn’t stood up very well through the decades.

I’m almost certain that this is Southern Engine 4501. The first time I saw 4501 was the evening before it was to leave Augusta for the next leg of its trip. The engine was cold and dead, sitting in a yard with old guys crawling over it trying to fix something. All of them were about as old as the engine itself, which was made in 1911. I think the men retired from Southern at about the same time steam engines left regular railroad service. Now they were called back to drive the old thing.

This photo was taken the next day, when the beast had been awakened and was sitting ready to run.

We’re used to being able to jump into a car and have it rolling within a few seconds, but steam locomotives are a different beast. You have to build a fire under them, and that takes time. And, once you have the fire going, you have to wait till it builds a full head of steam.

A steam engine with a full head of steam is the closest thing to a living creature that man has ever made. There is a constant hiss in the background and every 20 or 30 seconds a kind of clunking chuff. Various train forums trace that sound to the air compressors steam engines used.

You’ll know when it’s getting ready to start moving. There is drama and sound. The engineer will open a valve on the steam cylinders and a huge cloud of hot mist will hiss out just in front of the drive wheels. That’s the engineer clearing condensation from the drive cylinders. If you’re standing in the wrong place, it will feel like a steam bath.

Next, there will be a chuff as the drive wheels start to turn, and a cloud of steam and coal smoke will shoot out of the stack. There will be another chuff from other side of the engine, and then another from the near side, four in all for every rotation the drive wheels make, and four puffs of steam and smoke from the stack.

I can’t remember exactly when I was invited to ride in the cab of the engine, but that’s the kind of invitation that I could not turn down. I climbed up into the cab with no knowledge of where the train was going or how I would get back to town.

Riding in the cab of a steam locomotive is like nothing else in the world. All that track that looks straight actually isn’t; there are little dips and side-to-side wriggles, all of which translated to the engine rocking all the time. And there was noise. Overwhelming, continuous, deafening noise.

I think there were four men in the cab, plus one reporter. The engineer and the fireman were the only ones actually doing anything. The day before all had worked late into the night, so they were tired. One of them sat up in the window, his head rocking back and forth, sleeping, despite the noise.

When the fire needed more coal, the fireman stuck a shovel into a pile of coal in the tender, and then turned around and stepped on a pedal at the rear of the firebox. Two half-moon-shaped doors clanged open, revealing the glowing, roaring fire. He tossed the shovelful of coal into the fire, then stepped off the pedal. The doors slammed shut. Then he did it again.

Eventually the train stopped at some little town not too far from Augusta. I don’t remember where it was – Edgefield? Graniteville? I don’t know. But I decided that I should probably take that opportunity to get off the train.

When I climbed down from the cab, I was deaf. My ears were telling me that they had had enough and just weren’t doing any more work for a while. I was also kind of lost. I called my office and got the number of a stringer in that town, and he gave me a ride back to Augusta. I’m not quite sure how I made that call, but I do remember telling anyone I spoke to that I couldn’t really hear anything.

My hearing, or most of it, eventually came back. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like to ride those engines every workday for years. Those were some real men.

On several occasions Engine 4501 seemed destined for the scrap heap, or a life as a static display at best, but it’s still pulling excursion trains for the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.

I think maybe Leah and I should ride a train pulled by that old engine sometime.

 

Engine 4501 has two small leading wheels (on a single axle), eight drive wheels, and two small trailing wheels. That makes it a 2-8-2, or what is known as a Mikado, apparently because the first steam locomotives of this configuration were made for Japanese railroads. The 2-8-2 wheel layout was probably most often used for freight, but working steam locomotives are so rare these days that museums and excursion railroads have to use what they can find. The drive wheel diameter is 63 inches. That’s also maybe a little small for passenger train use. One rule of thumb is that the normal top speed in miles per hour of a steam locomotive was equal to wheel diameter in inches. Passenger trains ran faster than freight, so passenger locomotives typically had larger drive wheels. The smaller wheels also allowed the engine to deliver more power for a given distance traveled, making it better to move heavy freight trains.