Follow-Up

The latest word on my father is that the cancer has definitely not spread to any other organs. All of the lymph nodes they took and tested were clean.

Now he has to strengthen up for the radiation therapy and, possibly, eventually, surgery to remove the upper lobe of his left lung.

I wish to extend a heartfelt word of gratitude to those of you whose kind words and warm thoughts reached me and my dad. It's odd, this blog thing, that a loose -- if small -- network of strangers can care about another stranger in a dark hour.

Thank you.

That Time of Job, Again

I've been sentenced to Death By Work, again. This month has taken me away from Mrs. Farrago for more than two weeks, already. In addition to the trip to New Hampshire and Philadelphia earlier in the month, the latest has been a marathon affair.

I was off Tuesday, March 13, for Goleta, California, about 15 miles north of Santa Barbara, and the ridiculously ritzy resort called Bacara. It was five days of a paranoid meeting planner, a competent-though-clueless photographer and June Gloom three months early.

On the night of March 17, the client had their final night dinner party, for which I had to be around. Nothing like being at a party where you can neither participate nor vacate. Finally, around 10:00 I was cut loose...to pack my suitcase and make the 2-hour drive with a co-worker to Los Angeles.

You see, I had to be on the Sunday morning 6:00am flight from LAX to Chicago in order to make the two-oh-something flight to Toronto for the next meeting. So we left Bacara about 11:00pm, and arrived in the area of LAX around 1:15am. We did the math at that point and it was this: arrive to hotel around 1:25am. Check in, get to rooms around 1:45am. Prepare for bed, lie down around 2:05am. Wake up around 3:00am to shower and dress, and drive to the airport in time to turn in the rental car and be to the ticket counter by 4:30am. Grand total hours of sleep: approximately one.

So we said a mutual "Fuckit," chose not to even find the hotel, and just stayed up the rest of the night, seeking out a Denny's not too far from the airport to chew the fat and chug down coffee until it was time to turn in the car. One hour of sleep would have been infinitely more difficult to deal with than none.

As usual, when I most need it on a plane, sleep escaped me. I dozed for an hour at most, and arrived in Chicago feeling like I had ridden in the cargo hold at the bottom of the piles of luggage rather than in First Class. Honestly, I can't remember any part of the layover in Chicago, except the excruciating part where we taxied out to the runway only to be called back to the gate for the airline to rectify a "cargo discrepancy" that no one could figure out why they didn't fix before we left the first time. Only when you're sleep deprived....

Toronto is a pretty city. Cold while I was there, but pretty in the sunlight. I discovered the next morning, in the view from my room, an ice-skating rink and a building that looks like a docking site for UFOs.

I did my usual thing there, making the people happy, or at least appear so. And Wednesday morning I was off to the airport again. After a brief delay I was on my way to Chicago...but not home.

I went to baggage claim, retrived my luggage, and caught a cab for the office. There I swapped out a few things between my large suitcase that had been with me to California and Canada, and the small suitcase I had pre-set at the office to take on the last leg of the journey. I packed the one remaining shoot package (the other was sent to Canada), and put everything in the cab, which had waitied outside while I turned everything around.

Back at the airport I was witness to one of the worst weather-related travel days I've ever experienced. I'll just keep it short: scheduled departure on flight A, 5:45pm. Actual departure on flight B, after A was cancelled, 10:40pm. Arrival to hotel in Houston, 2:00am.

The client for whom we were shooting was kind enough to let us start an hour later than originally planned, which allowed us one more hour of sleep. Then it was a day and a half of rigorous shooting.

Finally we were on our way home, but not without more weather delays, only this time it was only a matter of about 90 minutes.

I was home by 11:00 Friday night, all of Saturday when I got to visit my father at the hospital where he's been kept since Tuesday while they cut out parts of his body and run tests on them (hasn't spread so far...), and Sunday morning, when I departed for yet another trip.

Tonight I'm back in southern California (San Bernardino). Shoot tomorrow. Fly home Tuesday. Fly Wednesday to Tampa, shoot Thursday. Fly home Friday. Sunday night to Raleigh, North Carolina. Shoot Monday morning, and go home in the evening. Drive Tuesday afternoon to Springfield. Drive home Wednesday night. Then I'm done. I think.

If I think about it all, I'll go crazy. If I just do it, I'm fine.

Slowly Creeping Up On 2000

Perhaps it's my imagination, but 2000 seems to have taken longer since 1000 than 1000 took from 0.

I have let you down. You are not reading me with the same passion you read me before. Perhaps it is because I have not written with the same passion?

I will try.

An Innocent Man

My father was diagnosed yesterday with lung cancer. Early prognosis is Stage 2 to Stage 4. I don't know exactly what that means. It has not spread to any other organs.

He’s 83 years old. This early in the discovery a treatment has not yet been prescribed It appears that nothing aggressive will be attempted, but rather he will undergo a milder radiation therapy.

He was a smoker, but he quit in the mid-1970s. He was surrounded by smokers just about every day of his life until he sold his barber shop and retired in 2004. So who knows? What if it’s polyester fumes?

So, we – the whole family and I – are in limbo. We don’t know. We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know what’s in store.

I don’t know what to do…what to say.

All I know is that he doesn’t deserve this. He is the most generous, truly genuine man I know. Life has already dealt him a lousy hand with a body that is breaking down years before the mind inside. Why does he have to now face inconvenience and discomfort in treatment, and untold pain and agony if and when he goes beyond treatment?

What hurts me more at this point is that, when my sister – with whom he lives at the moment – broke the news to him, he cried. He’s not supposed to cry. Retirement was supposed to be a time of relaxation, of ease, of a lack of want. A time to reflect upon his long life and feel pride in the part he played in bringing up seven fairly successful, fairly level-headed children.

But instead he has dealt with retarding mobility, embarrassing incontinence, nerve damage in his outer extremities… and now this. A prisoner in his own body; and now his prison is threatening to crumble on top of him.

He doesn’t deserve this. He’s supposed to live out his last years in dignity and comfort and peace.

Hasn’t he earned that?

I Think, Therefore I Blog

(written 3/13/07)

It seems a rare occasion, in this lot life has cast for me, to find a moment of peace at the airport while waiting for my plane. Such was this morning. Granted, it took being slammed with a 6:00am flight, and thus a 2:30 wake-up and a 4:30am arrival at the sleepy airport to achieve such serenity, but please! I’m trying to make this a happy post.

Unlike so many other times, this morning’s routine was peaceful and pleasant. No lines awaited me, there were no problems with my reservation or tickets, the security guards weren’t surly, and the McDonald’s kiosk in Concourse B was open before 5:00!

While I sat in my gate area and dined on my Sausage® McMuffin™ with egg©, I faced the burgeoning bustle of the concourse corridor, and a thought occurred to me: at a busy airport in a major city, one could almost quite literally sit and watch the world pass by. Even at 5:00 in the morning, one can, in the span of as little as half an hour, encounter people from a dozen different countries, three times as many ethnicities, and a handful of languages. Just think what a whole day of delays and cancellations could do!

There’s the older lady who looks like she has a head full of short, white plastic spikes and Grace Jones makeup…who happens to be on my plane and in my row on the opposite side of the plane from me (no…NOT Grace Jones, but that lady with the spiky hair). There’s the family observing the Islamic faith, the women all wearing the traditional style of dark, shapeless dresses from the high neckline down to the ankles, following several steps behind their men. And then there was the attractive, tall young woman wearing a tight-fitting tee-shirt and short shorts, displaying her long legs right down to her low-rise, high-heel boots. Can anyone say “Fishing trip?” And I mean she was attractive despite the hooker wear.

I did my good deed for the morning…for the month…so I can relax until April. A young black woman was struggling with a pull along bag, a baby seat, walking behind an aimless toddler walking every which way, following whatever shiny thing, any baby in sight, any smiling face that caught her eye. The toddler waddled into my gate area, and the mother could only call to her. The woman finally got her daughter’s attention, and they made their way at the toddler’s meandering pace. My flight was to board in ten minutes, but I’m traveling light – another rarity for this trip – so I wasn’t worried about being at the front of the line this time.

So I acted on the whim that struck me, and caught up to the woman and asked her if she needed any assistance. At first she seemed as though she was going to refuse, but when she saw my empty hands (my backpack was slung over my shoulder) she accepted, handed me her crap, and picked up her daughter. Her flight was to board at the same time as mine, but at her daughter’s pace she likely wouldn’t have gotten to her gate until Thursday.

Every time I’m able to upgrade my seat to First- or Business Class, I’m always struck by the same thought: When is the last time you ever hurt yourself with, or felt threatened by someone wielding, a butter knife? What’s that? Never? I thought so. If a loved one was being threatened by a violent person, and you had two choices before you – a butter knife and a fork – with which to attempt to thwart the attacker, which would you choose? Come again? The fork? I thought so.

It is almost comical how our government, in the guise of the Department of Homeland Security, has knee-jerked and hind-sighted our travel industry into what has to be the laughing-stock of the free world. I received my First Class breakfast on the plane. I opened the nice, linen napkin to get to the silverware. Out rolled two heavy, stainless steel forks, a spoon of the same quality…. and a plastic butter knife.

I’m sorry, but a highly trained commando could do more damage with a spoon than a determined amateur could ever do with a butter knife. Do you suppose the DHS thinks people will feel safer if anything associated with the word “knife” is eliminated from a plane, despite that it won’t make them any safer? Will a black man feel any less oppressed by our society if the word “nigger” is erased from our cultural vocabulary?

Several years ago a would-be terrorist from England was foiled by a defective lighter and an alert passenger who saw the man struggling to light what turned out to be some sort of wick dangling from his shoe, which itself proved to have been reconstructed with some sort of explosive. In one of its more sensible actions, as a result of that attempt, the DHS now prohibits travelers from carrying cigarette lighters onto aircraft. Halleluiah!

Because of a more recent, though never-realized plot in the works by terror cells in England to carry onto planes volatile liquids in innocuous containers, and then wreak havoc in the skies, the DHS, in its inept wisdom, has restricted the amount of liquid one can carry on his person through the security checkpoints to three ounces, in small, clear containers inside a clear zip-lock bag. This makes sense at first, but do the Transportation Security Administration guards perform sniff checks on every bottle? Does gasoline or kerosene or grain alcohol in a three-ounce translucent bottle look any different than perfume or cough syrup or mouthwash? Can you differentiate between them? Can the average TSA guard?

What’s that, you say? “What danger is three ounces of gasoline or kerosene if you don’t have a lighter to light it with?”

So there’s nothing flammable in a plane’s cabin now that the little, tiny butane torches have been eliminated? Here’s a startling little fact: in order to appease the arriving smokers who must immediately dart from their flight to the nearest patch of outdoor space or other authorized smoking area to get rid of that awful, clean air in their lungs, the DHS and TSA still allow passengers to carry matches onto planes!

And who needs to smuggle flammable liquids past security? The flight attendants sell alcohol to the passengers right on the plane! In First Class, it’s FREE!

How much clearer should it be? NO FIRE ON PLANES!

If we must appease the smokers, erect smoking rooms (as some airports have), and install wall-mounted, automobile-style electric cigarette lighters so smoker passengers don’t feel the need to carry incendiary devices on our aircraft.

There must be other, better ideas out there. I can’t be the only one thinking about it.

It’s clear that our president has not appointed the office of Homeland Security with an experienced, proactive leader who examines a situation and makes changes based on common sense, or who hires those who do, but rather with a crony who learns too late why you shouldn’t touch that pretty blue flame.

Great! Now I’ve ranted myself right into a rotten mood!

And is Steve Martin getting any residuals from the makers of the movie Happy Feet for titling the movie with the phrase he coined?

Saturday Adventure

It started off as a typical Saturday… a few commitments in the morning, and then I met up with Mrs. Farrago at the local Fivebucks for coffee. Oops… make that Starbucks….

And then we commenced with our plan… earlier in the day she had suggested that we go down to the lakefront to snap pictures of the thawing ice, and the late-winter lakeshore in general. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day, so there was no reason not to agree.

We rode a city bus down to the Nature Museum, which was the closest point to where we wanted to go. I don’t think there’s a spot along the lakeshore where you can’t get an awesome shot of the skyline.



We walked our way down past Fullerton Avenue, among the beautiful people working on their beauty,



happily snapping photos of things and of each other.







And then tragedy struck.

While I was snapping a series of photos like this one

atop one of the many breakwaters, Mother Nature’s evil nature blustered toward me. While I lay prone to snap the photos, one of her dastardly fingers lifted my beloved hat into her air, over my back and legs and into the water many feet below.




Fighting panic, my mind raced for a solution. I remembered one of the photos I had taken earlier

and realized that the subject within was my potential savior! I sprinted …well, sorta walked fast… back to the beach. It could be considered vandalism in the eyes of the casual observer, but a life… nay, a lifestyle… was at stake, and drastic times require drastic measures and whatnot, so I acted!



At first it seemed to be beyond my reach, but the slat was longer than I realized – or the water was closer than I realized, and rescue seemed achievable!



Alas! The water proved too adhesive for me to hook the brim with the slat, so, improvising yet again, I pulled the hat to the wall of the breakwater and slid it up to my other, eagerly waiting, hand. Triumph! My hat, my image, my iconic lifestyle, SAVED!


Later we were accosted by Canada geese.



Normally when they approach like these two did, it’s because they perceive a threat, either the male perceives a challenge to the rights to his mate, or both perceive a threat to their nest. We backed off to maintain a respectful distance, but they just kept advancing!



And then, within mere feet of us they simply stopped. And honked.



These Canada geese, it appeared, are permanent residents of our fair city. It would seem that other humans have given them food in the past, and these geese were begging. And they probably have no intentions of ever returning to Canada.



That was our day of adventure in Chicago. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

(some scenes are dramatized recreations to enhance the story and make it seem more dramatic than it really was)
(click the post title to see all of my photos of Chicago and of the geese and Mrs. Farrago!)

O Little Town(s) of Littleton....

On the road again. Two nights. Flew Sunday night to Philadelphia and rented a way cool Volvo Cross Country wagon, drove 30-some miles to Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.

My colleague, The Producer, made a minor error in the meet time with the client. We arrived at 9:30am at an office complex which the Hertz Neverlost™ GPS system in the rental car couldn’t quite narrow down to exactly which building we were supposed to enter. My colleague whipped out his handy-dandy book with all the dates, times and locations, and discovered that we weren’t scheduled to meet with the client until 12:30pm.

So, with three hours to kill, and too late to go back to bed at the hotel we had just checked out of, we looked up local attractions in the Hertz Neverlost™ GPS system and discovered that we were only 10 miles away from Valley Forge National Monument and Park! Never fearful of soaking up some American History, we ventured out to see where the ragtag rebels of the colonies were whipped into shape through one cold, hungry winter, into a disciplined army that kicked some British arse!

In the evening we returned to the Philadelphia airport with plenty of time to spare, so of course our flight was delayed. There was no clear explanation…the gate agent kept announcing over the intercom that our plane from Chicago had landed, and would arrive at the gate any minute. “Any minute” expanded to 25 minutes, and still there was no plane. Finally, a half-hour after our scheduled departure time, we were told our plane had arrived at the gate. Instead of a flood of people gushing out from the jetway, the gate agents started loading us on…to an empty plane. I still can’t figure out what happened.

We flew, about 90 minutes late (thank you, US STUPID Airways), to Manchester, New Hampshire, the first time I’ve ever set foot this far northeast. We arrived just before 11:00pm, and looked ahead to a 110-mile drive to a place that was equidistant between two major airports. Manchester was the lesser of two evils. How less evil I don’t know. Our rental this time was a Ford (Ugh!) Escape. I hauled ass up I-93 north, pushing about 80 most of the way until we entered the White Mountains. I imagine in summer they’re green mountains, but I’m sure they’re still called White Mountains, no matter how un-white they might be. I don’t know if it was a weather system that had moved through at the same time, or if it was just mountain weather, but it sucked. Snow and strong wind. The roads weren’t slippery, though the snow was collecting there and they looked treacherous.

Ever since I’ve been with this job, there seems to be some peculiarity each year that stands out. One year it seemed like a dozen trips to Orlando, Florida. I HATE Orlando, Florida. You should have seen the size of this one Mouse I saw there! Another year it was the three trips to Hawaii in three months! I know what you’re thinking, but I was working and got no beach time. And that’s practically a whole week on a plane when you add it all up!

This year it seems – on a minor scale, at least – to be shoots in towns called Littleton. In January I arrived at night in the mountain town of Littleton, Colorado. Tonight I arrived in the mountain town of Littleton, New Hampshire. Odder still is the layout of the hotel where we’re staying. The building is a three-story hotel, up on a hillside, facing the town. It’s bitterly cold, as it was in Littleton, Colorado, in January, and it’s snowing. Or I’m having the strangest, longest dream about two months of my life, and I’m still in Littleton, Colorado. Somebody wake me up and tell me the Bears haven’t actually made it to the Super Bowl, yet, because, in my dream they do, and it isn’t pretty!

I wonder if there’s any rivalry between the mountain-Littletons. You know, some “my-mountains-are-bigger-than-your-mountains,” “oh-yeah-well-we-never-had-a-massacre-at-our-high-school” kind of thing going back and forth.

Probably not.

My coffee-for-the-road caffeine buzz is wearing off, now. Funny that it kept me awake long enough to write something that certainly must have put you to sleep!

Visit New Hampsha! Its Littleton is littler than the bigger Littleton in Colorado!