Dragons - Chapter 93 (DRAFT)

True to my prediction, two hours later I arrived at the hospital in my rented car. 

It had been a difficult two hours. There were only a handful of cars out at that time of night, with large trucks hauling their cross-country trailers appearing constantly as a series of obstacles for me to slalom through, pushing the speed limit as far as I thought wise. I tried to find something worth listening to on the radio, but quickly decided to turn it off. The unfamiliar lights from the car’s interior and my own dark thoughts were all that was there was to keep me company.

How much had I fucked up? That’s the question I remember coming back to. In trying to walk the line between professional and personal responsibilities I felt like I had failed in both domains. I shouldn’t have gone to Denver. But if I hadn’t, Mary would have fired me, and now Mary was likely to fire me anyway. I should have stayed home and taken care of my pregnant wife. But if I had, there’s no guarantee that she would have gone into labor. I still didn’t know what, if anything, had prompted that. Had Jenny fallen? Had Jacob struck her during a tantrum? Meredith hadn’t given me any clues in our short conversation, but it seemed obvious to me that some incident had prompted it. Women of Jenny’s age just didn’t go into labor five weeks early, did they? Like almost everything else that truly mattered, I realized, I didn’t know the answer. My attention, as always, had been elsewhere. On the urgent, never on the important.

At some point, the nurse Eliana had called me back, as she had promised to. In a few soothing words she had told me that my baby daughter was sleeping comfortably in one of the incubators in their NICU, and that the nurse administrator on duty that night considered her case “stable.” Not knowing entirely what that meant, I decided to assume that it was as good as things could be in the situation, and I thanked Eliana for her effort.

“It’s no trouble at all, Mister Larson. Are you on the road now?”

“Yes,” I said, juggling both the phone and the steering wheel as best I could. I looked at the digital clock on the dashboard and did some quick calculating. “I should be there a little before four in the morning.”

“I’ll be here,” she confirmed. “You call me back on this number when you arrive and I’ll come down and meet you in the lobby. Okay?”

“Okay,” I had said, and now, after abandoning the rental in one of the parking spots reserved for visitors, and pushing my sleepless and tottering frame towards the main hospital entrance, I was pulling out my cell phone and calling the last number it had received.

“Hello,” a now familiar voice said. “Labor and Delivery.”

“Eliana. It’s Alan Larson. I just arrived.”

“Okay. Wait for me in reception. I’ll be right down.”

The glass doors whooshed open and in I went. To my left there was a row of reception counters, to my right a large waiting area filled with modular chairs, coffee tables, and turned-over magazines. The place seemed deserted, not a single human form anywhere that I could see. I looked at my watch. 4:03 AM. 

“Can I help you, sir?”

I looked up and was surprised to see a young woman standing behind the left-most reception counter, knowing that she had not been there when my eyes had wandered over them only a few seconds before. Had she been crouching behind the counter? What had she been doing down there? Picking M&Ms up off the floor? I had no idea why my tired brain decided to conjure up that image, but now that it had I chuckled at the idea of multi-colored candies strewn all over the floor, as if the nurses and night shift workers had had some kind of food fight.

“Sir?”

I rubbed my eyes. “No,” I said. “No, thank you. Someone is coming down to get me.”

And just as those words left my mouth a double set of doors on the far end of the lobby began to open on their pneumatic cylinders, allowing a short, middle-aged woman to walk through. She was in scrubs, her black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her shining skin a light sandy brown. She carried a clipboard and wore a stethoscope loosely around her neck. Her white sneakers squeaked on the freshly waxed floor. She made eye contact with me and immediately adjusted her course to close the distance between us.

“Mister Larson?” she asked, and then didn’t really wait for me to respond. “I’m Eliana Alavarez. Your wife is in the NICU now, trying to breastfeed the baby. Come with me, I’ll take you there.”

It was a lot of information for me to take in at once. I looked somewhat stupidly around at my surroundings, forgetting, for the moment, where I even was. As I did, I noticed the young woman behind the counter scowling at me.

“It’s all right, Cheryl,” Eliana said to the woman, clasping me gently by the elbow. “I’ll sign him in later. He’s been traveling all night to get here.”

I looked back at Eliana, feeling like a child, and like I had forgotten how to move my legs.

“Come on, Mister Larson. It’s okay.”

Slowly, gently, Eliana got me moving, leading me first out of the lobby, through the doors that she had come through, and through a maze-like series of hallways. At that time of morning, there were only a handful of other people we encountered on our journey, most of them obviously members of the hospital’s janitorial crew, two of them health professionals, and one of them, I remember, an elderly patient, seemingly wandering the halls by himself, in his robe and hospital gown, pushing his wheeled IV tower before him like a wizard’s staff.

Eliana ignored them all, attempting from time to time to engage me with some critical piece of information about where we were going and what would happen when we got there. I would need to gown up before going into the NICU. They had eleven babies there now, and mine was the largest of them all, being only five weeks premature. It might be a week or more, but they would try every few hours or so to get the baby to suckle, as that was an instinct that usually developed around this time in the womb, and that the baby would not be released from the NICU until it successfully latched on and had started gaining weight from its mother’s milk.

I’m sure I only understood a fraction of what Eliana was telling me, and I felt myself growing more and more anxious as we kept rounding corners and trudging down hallways. 

“What’s her name?”

“What?” Eliana said. “What was that?”

“The baby’s name?” I said. “Has Jenny named her?”

“Not that I’ve heard. But I’ve been down in Labor and Delivery all night. They might have more information up at the NICU.”

“Were you there?”

We had finally stopped in front of an elevator bank and Eliana had just reached out to press the call button. 

“What?”

“Were you there?”

“Where?”

The words stuck in my throat. I wanted to know if Eliana Alvarez had been there, had been present, had maybe even assisted, with Jenny’s c-section and the birth of our still unnamed daughter, but I was having a hard time forming the right set of words and getting them out of my mouth.

Eliana could tell I was struggling. Her face grew concerned, and she reached out to clasp my elbow again.

“At the birth,” I eventually said with some difficulty. “Were you… in the room when… the baby was born.”

The elevator car arrived, a loud bell ringing and the door opening with a clatter.

“No,” she said. “No, Mister Larson, I wasn’t. But everything went fine. There is really nothing for you to worry about.”

I looked at her, hoping that what she said was true, but feeling, knowing, somewhere deep inside, that everything hadn’t gone fine and that there was, in fact, a great deal for me to worry about.

“Come on,” she said, easing me into the elevator. “Let’s get you reunited with your wife. She can tell you herself.”

We got in, went up five floors, and were disgorged into one of the oldest parts of the hospital, a sign clearly reading “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit” hanging from the ceiling just outside the elevator car. Now there seemed to be a quiet flurry of activity, several nurses and other hospital staff on duty and ready to put me through several hasty processes and procedures. Under Eliana’s watchful eye, I showed my identification, I filled out a form, I was given a plastic bracelet to wear, taken to a room where I was helped on with a gown, a tight-fitting cap, a surgical mask, and a pair of fabric overshoes. I was then led towards a door at the end of a long hall, one wall of which was mostly glass, allowing a view into a large room filled with medical equipment, some of them obviously incubators, and some of those obviously housing small human beings, who had been taken or who had fled their mothers’s wombs before they had been expected.

On the very edge of the door, Eliana, who had introduced me to the other nurses and who had spoken gently to me throughout the process, stopped. 

“I’m going to leave you here, Mister Larson,” she said. “‘I’m not cleared for the NICU itself, but you’re in good hands with Valencia here.”

I looked at the nurse Eliana had mentioned, a large woman with black skin and voluminous braids under her cap, and then back at Eliana.

“Okay,” I said absently. And then, “Thank you. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

She smiled. “It was my pleasure. Be well.”

In a moment she was gone, and I turned back to Valencia who pushed a button that opened a sealed door and led me into the heart of the NICU itself. We walked along the very edge of the room until we arrived at a small curtained area, the curtain hanging from a series of small chains, each set into the metal track, giving the people inside, whoever they were, some small measure of privacy in the otherwise open floor plan. Valencia said a few words I didn’t quite catch and then slowly pulled back one section of the curtain to reveal a small room-like space with an incubator, a woman sitting in a wheelchair with her back to me, and another nurse, standing over the woman, crouching a little, as if helping her with something she was holding.

“Alan? Is that you?”

It was Jenny’s voice, and it took me a full three seconds to realize that it had come from the woman in the wheelchair, and then to realize that the woman in the wheelchair, her head bowed forward and the back of her neck visible because of the hospital cap she was wearing, was Jenny.

“Yes, Jenny. It’s me.”

“Well,” Jenny said, her voice more tired than I had ever heard it before. “Come and see our daughter.”

I slowly approached and, as I did so, Jenny’s head came up and swiveled towards me. She was masked like everyone else in the NICU, her eyes completely devoid of the sparkle that had first attracted me to her. She was wearing a robe over a hospital gown, both draped open to reveal her left breast, and she held in her arms the tiniest and skinniest baby I had ever seen, clothed only in a diaper that, in another context, could have been described as comically large, its spindly arms and legs moving lethargically in the air as if blindly seeking some essential purchase. The baby’s mouth was open, and it was mewling like a newborn kitten.

“She won’t latch on,” Jenny said, somewhat desperately, a different kind of sparkle returning with the tears to her eyes. 

“It’s okay,” the nurse in the small space said, reaching down to gently take the baby from Jenny. “She’ll learn. It may take a few days. We’ll just keep trying until she does.”

I crouched down next to Jenny and took her hand as she worked to cover herself up with the other. 

“Jenny,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Behind her, the nurse was placing our baby back in the incubator. Jenny gave me a long and sad look. “It’s okay,” she said. “When they told me you were coming up, I couldn’t believe you could’ve gotten here so fast.”

“Fast?” I said. “It felt like forever. I should’ve never left.”

Jenny put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Alan,” she said, the tears beginning to streak down her face. “It feels to me like forever is just getting started.”

I choked up, falling forward to clasp her in an awkward embrace.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell by Bertrand Russell

I really didn’t know much about Bertrand Russell before picking up this volume. A British mathematician and philosopher, whose treatise, Why I Am Not a Christian, I had read some time ago and had enjoyed. So, one of the things that really surprised me about his autobiography is how apparently ignorant he was of his own desires, impulses, and motivations. It is the story of a very unphilosophic philosopher -- at least when it came to understanding himself.

It starts strong.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

Okay. There’s someone who should be able to guide the reader through all the happenstance and minutiae that comprises most lives and provide an interpretative overlay that puts emotions and actions into a contextual framework, philosophic or otherwise.  

But, ummm, not so much.

In the train -- Cambridge

Sunday November 4th 1984

5.15 P.M.

My dearest Alys:

It is a great pity all my letters come in a lump and I’m very sorry to have addressed Friday’s Hill. I hope it won’t happen again. I’m so glad thee’s happy and busy too -- if I were imagining thee unhappy it would be unendurable not to see thee tonight -- as it is it gives me pleasure to think thee is near. It has been perfectly delightful to be at Cambridge again. Moore and Sanger and Marsh were so nice to see again. I love them all far more than I supposed before. We had a large meeting last night. McT. and Dickinson and Wedd came, at which I could not help feeling flattered. Thee will be glad to hear that several of them thought my paper too theoretical, though McT. and I between us persuaded them in time that there was nothing definite to be said about practical conduct. I have left my paper behind as Marsh and Sanger want to read it over again. McT. spoke first and was excessively good, as I had hoped. I said in my paper I would probably accept anything he said, and so I did. For my sake he left out immortality, and reconciled my dilemma at the end without it. I can’t put what he said in a letter, but I dare say I shall bring it out in conversation some day. We had a delightful dinner at Marsh’s before the meeting, and I was so glad just to be with them again that I didn’t talk a bit too much. Moore though he didn’t say much looked and was as glorious as ever -- I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody. I always speak the truth to Marsh, so I told him we were separated three months to please my grandmother: the rest asked no inconvenient questions. Most of them were pleased with my paper, and were glad of my making Good and less good my terms instead of right and wrong. The beginning also amused them a good deal. I stayed up till 2 talking to Marsh and then slept till 10.30, when I went to breakfast with Sanger. I lunched with Marsh, and talked shop with Amos and saw my rooms. As he has furnished them -- they’re brighter but not near so nice. Sanger thought my bold idea in my Space paper “colossal” -- I hope Ward will think so too! Amos tells me Ward said I was so safe for a Fellowship that it didn’t matter a bit what I wrote on -- but this must be taken cum grano salis -- it is slightly coloured by Amos’s respect for me. They all urged me to do what I’m good at, rather than fly off to Economics, tho’ all of them greatly respect Economics and would be delighted to have me do them ultimately. I have great respect for their judgments because they are honest and know me. So I shall do 2 Dissertations next year and only Space this -- or Space and Motion, as Ward suggests. But of course I shall work at Economics at once. Sanger is working at Statistics, and explained several hideous difficulties in the theory, important for practice, too, since the whole question of Bimetallism and many others turn on them. I had never suspected such difficulties before, and they inspired me with keen intellectual delight from the thought of obstacles to overcome. My intellectual pleasures during the last years have been growing very rapidly keener, and I feel as if I might make a great deal out of them when we’re married and all our difficulties are settled. I am convinced since reading Bradley that all knowledge is good, and therefore shouldn’t need to bother about immediate practical utility -- though of course, when I come to Economics, that will exist too. I’m very glad to find that passion developing itself, for without it no one can accomplish good thinking on abstract subjects -- one can’t think hard from a mere sense of duty. Only I need little successes from time to time to keep it a source of energy. My visit to Cambridge has put me in a very good conceit with myself and I feel very happy to think we are within our fortnight and that Mariechen will make it fly. I laughed more than in all the time since I left Friday’s Hill and I talked well and made others laugh a great deal too. ...

The most interesting thing about that letter are the editorial ellipses that come at the end. Evidently, the letter continues on at greater length, but the author decided that 750 words of that kind of detailed minutiae was enough to get his point for including it across. 

Except I have no idea what that point is. Disappointingly, of the 376 pages of the edition I have, 193 of them are taken up with correspondence like this. And the overwhelming majority of them are not in the flow of the story -- as in, here’s a letter that’s worth your attention at this point because it captures an essential idea -- but in long and painful “appendices” at the end of each chapter. Why Russell thought it would be helpful or interesting for a reader to pore through communications like these is literally beyond my comprehension.

I Wish There Had Been More of This

Among all those tedious letters, Russell also includes a few excerpts from a journal he kept as a young man. These were written in 1888, when he was not quite sixteen years old.

April 2. I now come to the subject which personally interested us poor mortals more perhaps than any other. I mean the question of immortality. This is the one in which I have been most disappointed and pained by thought. There are two ways of looking at it, first by evolution and comparing men to animals, second, by comparing men with God. The first is the more scientific, for we know all about animals but not about God. Well, I hold that, taking free will first, to consider there is no clear dividing line between man and the protozoan, therefore if we give free will to men we must give it also the protozoan; this is rather hard to do. Therefore, unless we are willing to give free will to the protozoan we cannot give it to man. This however is possible but it is difficult to imagine, if, as seems to me probable, protoplasm only came together in the ordinary course of nature without any special providence from God; then we and all living things are simply kept going by chemical forces and are nothing more wonderful than a tree, which no one pretends has free will, and even if we had a good enough knowledge of the forces acting on anyone at any time, the motives pro and con, the constitution of his brain at any time, then we could tell exactly what he will do. Again from the religious point of view free will is a very arrogant thing for us to claim, for of course it is an interruption of God’s laws, for by his ordinary laws all our actions would be fixed as the stars. I think we must leave to God the primary establishment of laws which are never broken and determine everybody’s doings. And not having free will we cannot have immortality.

This is among the handful of fresh philosophic ideas that Russell has to offer in this book (fresh, at least, to me). I’ve heard people say before that if God knows everything, then he knows the deterministic fate of every atom in the universe. But what I hear Russell adding here is the direct connection of that divine knowledge to the concept of God’s divine plan. In other words, God not only knows what will happen to every atom, what happens to every atom is what He intends to happen. Under that construct, it is not possible for man to have any kind of free will that would allow him to take actions against those plans. Why would an all-knowing, and therefore a deterministic, God allow such a corruption to His plan?

But I’ll take it one step further. Does such a God even need to exist? How is such unalterable unwinding of the universe distinct from just nature itself? If atoms are going to do what atoms are going to do, does there need to be an entity that “decides” what they will do, or even is present to set them in motion? Determinism, from my perspective, doesn’t just threaten the concept of human free will, it also threatens the concept of divine plans.

Here’s another journal entry worth thinking about:

Monday, April 6. I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness. But no other theory is consistent with the complete omnipotence of God of which science, I think, gives ample manifestations. Thus I must either be an atheist or disbelieve in immortality. Finding the first impossible I adopt the second and let no one know. I think, however disappointing may be this view of men, it does give us a wonderful idea of God’s greatness to think that He can in the beginning create laws which by acting on a mere mass of nebulous matter, perhaps merely ether diffused through this part of the universe, will produce creatures like ourselves, conscious not only of our existence but even able to fathom to a certain extent God’s mysteries. All this with no more intervention on his part. Now let us think whether this doctrine of want of free will is so absurd. If we talk about it to anyone they kick their legs or something of that sort. But perhaps they cannot help it for they have something to prove and therefore that supplies a motive to them to do it. Thus in anything we do we always have motives which determine us. Also there is no line of demarcation between Shakespeare or Herbert Spencer and a Papuan. But between them and a Papuan there seems as much difference as between a Papuan and a monkey.

I guess my main focus here is really on that first sentence. A machine endowed with consciousness is more than just an interesting turn of phrase. Given what modern neurology is increasingly telling us -- namely that the chemical initiators of motor action occur before the chemical initiators of conscious volition -- Russell may be saying much more than he realizes. Yes, Bertrand, in a way, we are the consciousness that watches what we have been determined to do, but almost none of us can continually discern that reality through the suffocating illusion of what seems very much like our own free will.

And there are other philosophic tidbits in the later letters that are worth quoting.

One of the things that make literature so consoling is, that its tragedies are all in the past, and have the completeness and repose that comes of being beyond the reach of our endeavours. It is a most wholesome thing, when one’s sorrow grows acute, to view it as having all happened long, long ago: to join in imagination, the mournful company of dim souls whose lives were sacrificed to the great machine that still grinds on. I see the past, like a sunny landscape, where the world’s mourners mourn no longer. On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; but in the quiet country of the past, the tired wanderers rest, and all their weeping is hushed.

That’s almost poetry. And:

And yet I could not bear to lose from the world a certain awed solemnity, a certain stern seriousness -- for the mere fact of life and death, of desire and hope and aspirations and love in a world of matter which knows nothing of good and bad, which destroyed carelessly the things it has produced by accident, in spite of all the passionate devotion that we may give -- all this is not sunshine, or any peaceful landscapes seem through limpid air; yet life has the power to brand these things into one’s soul so that all else seems triviality and vain babble. To have endowed only one minute portion of the universe with knowledge and love of good, and to have made that portion the plaything of vast irresistible irrational forces, is a cruel jest on the part of God or Fate. The best Gospel, I suppose, is the Stoic one; yet even that is too optimistic, for matter can at any moment destroy our love of virtue.

If only there had been more of these observations and insights, it would have been a much more engaging read. Here is a man who thought deeply about the universe without, but sadly, to the seeming neglect of his own universe within.

Help! Help! I’m Being Repressed!

Because the other monumental takeaway I have from Russell’s story of his own life is how painfully emotionally repressed he must have been.

When we came home, we found Mrs. Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable, nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. …

At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an imperialist, I became during those five minutes a pro-Boer and a pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations.

I did not know what to make of this passage when I stumbled across it, and I still don’t know what to make of it now having transcribed it. The loneliness of the human soul is unendurable? That’s what occurred to him on the sight of a woman’s suffering, and upon five minutes reflection he became a new person with a philosophy opposite from the one he had before? That in dominating pain he can find a gateway to wisdom? Rather than some spiritual awakening, it sounds much more to me like he simply took a hit of acid.

But, oddly, this is not the only time in his story that Russell decides to turn his world upside down on the spur of the moment.

I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening. The problem presented by this discovery was very grave. We had lived ever since our marriage in the closest possible intimacy. We always shared a bed, and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room. We talked over together everything that ever happened to either of us. She was five years older than I was, and I had been accustomed to regarding her as far more practical and far more full of worldly wisdom than myself, so that in many matters of daily life I left the initiative to her. I knew that she was still devoted to me. I had no wish to be unkind, but I believed in those days (what experience has taught me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should speak the truth. I did not see in any case how I could for any length of time successfully pretend to love her when I did not. I had no longer any instinctive impulse toward sex relations with her, and this alone would have been an insuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings. At this crisis my father’s priggery came out in me, and I began to justify myself with moral criticisms of Alys. I did not at once tell her that I no longer loved her, but of course she perceived that something was amiss. She retired to a rest-cure for some months, and when she emerged from it I told her that I no longer wished to share a room, and in the end I confessed that my love was dead. I justified this attitude to her, as well as to myself, by criticisms of her character.

Okay. Now this one I’m just not going to believe. He lived in the closest possible intimacy with his wife, but “discovered” one magical day that he no longer loved her? One of those assertions can’t be true if the other one is. This is one of two things -- he is either aware that he is writing to history and wants to obscure his poor decisions and behavior, or he is actually oblivious to the currents of desire that flow within his heart and his soul. 

And yet, after the thunderclap of a revelation, Russell and his wife Alys supposedly stayed together for nine more years.

When the autumn came we took a house for six months in Cheyne Walk, and life began to become more bearable. We saw a great many people, many of them amusing or agreeable, and we both gradually began to live a more external life, but this was always breaking down. So long as I lived in the same house with Alys she would every now and then come down to me in her dressing-gown after she had gone to bed, and beseech me to spend the night with her. Sometimes I did so, but the result was utterly unsatisfactory. For nine years this state of affairs continued. During all this time she hoped to win me back, and never became interested in any other man. During all this time I had no other sex relations. About twice a year I would attempt sex relations with her, in the hope of alleviating her misery, but she no longer attracted me, and the attempt was futile. Looking back over this stretch of years, I feel that I ought to have ceased much sooner to live in the same house with her, but she wished me to stay, and even threatened suicide if I left her. There was no other woman to whom I wished to go, and there seemed therefore no good reason for not doing as she wished.

I kept putting question marks in the margin next to passages like this, really struggling with the concept that Russell was this obtuse -- that even writing with the benefit of hindsight, he could barely perceive his own emotions or the painful impact that this inability was visiting on his wife. Initially, we are to believe, there was no other woman to whom he wished to go, but eventually, that would change, and, when it did, it -- guess what -- seemed to fall out of the sky on an unsuspecting Russell.

The atmosphere of Ottoline’s house fed something in me that had been starved throughout the years of my first marriage. As soon as I entered it, I felt rested from the rasping difficulties of the outer world. When I arrived there on March 19th, on my way to Paris, I found that Philip had unexpectedly had to go to Burnley, so that I was left tete-a-tete with Ottoline. During dinner we made conversation about Burnley, and politics, and the sins of the Government. After dinner the conversation gradually became more intimate. Making timid approaches, I found them to my surprise not repulsed. It had not, until this moment, occurred to me that Ottoline was a woman who would allow me to make love to her, but gradually, as the evening progressed, the desire to make love to her became more and more insistent. At last it conquered, and I found to my amazement that I loved her deeply, and that she returned my feeling. Until this moment I had never had complete relations with any woman except Alys. For external and accidental reasons, I did not have full relations with Ottoline that evening, but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible. My feeling was overwhelmingly strong, and I did not care what might be involved. I wanted to leave Alys, and to have her leave Philip.

He was amazed to discover that he loved her deeply? I suspect what he actually realized was that he wanted to have sex with her, but perhaps in the idiom of his age, these passions had to be framed as one and the same. Either way, again, it is baffling to me that a man as intelligent as Russell could be so ignorant about his own dreams and desires.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 92 (DRAFT)

Of all the many things I’ve told you that I’m not proud of, here’s one that I absolutely am. I never even hesitated. Immediately upon realizing that Meredith was not going to answer my redial -- I imagined her calling, after all, from a pay phone in the hospital lobby -- I put my phone back in my pocket, went up to my hotel room, threw everything that was mine back in my suitcase, went down to the front desk, checked myself out, and then had a bellman hail me a cab to take me to the airport. 

It was only when I was in the cab, and on that long stretch of highway out to the Denver airport, that I decided to call Mary.

“Hello? Alan?”

I could hear the amplified voice of Wes’s keynoter in the background.

“Yes, Mary. It’s me.”

“Alan! Where are you? What is going on?”

I told her in as few words as possible. The phone call had been from my mother-in-law. My wife had gone into labor. The baby was five weeks premature. They were doing a c-section. I needed to get home as quickly as possible. I was very sorry. When I was finished there was an odd silence on the line -- a silence at least from Mary, the ambient noises of the ballroom still coming through loud and clear.

“So… You’re leaving?”

“I’ve already left, Mary. I’m almost at the airport. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry. And who is going to manage this meeting?”

A few choice words came into my mind, but I swallowed them down. “I’m sorry. The conference service manager there is a woman named Brandi Olsen. I have her card. I’ll call her and ask her to connect with you tonight.”

“Oh, Alan, don’t bother. I’ll find her myself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“You should be. Good-bye, Alan.”

And then the line went dead. I sat in the back of the cab looking at my phone as the driver pulled into the departures lane and began looking for a place to get to the curb. The surrealism of the situation was intense, but I remember the penetrating shockwave that Mary’s words had created in the otherwise psychedelic fog of the moment. Was she really going to fault me for trying to get home in time to witness the birth of my child? To be with my wife as she underwent and recovered from a (hopefully) successful surgery? What did she expect me to do after such a phone call? Come back to her table and finish my dessert? Or maybe collect all the dirty dishes that she and Eleanor Rumford and Wes Howard and now Amy fucking Crawford had created, and wash them so they could use them again and again?

Good-bye, Alan.

There had been a tone of finality in her voice, as if she was communicating something more than just the end of a phone call.

Good, I remember thinking as I threw money at the driver and bounded out of the taxi. Maybe I was finally free of her and all her bullshit.

The next several hours were a heart-pounding blur -- moments of self-induced terror punctuating long stretches of anxiety and inaction. At first I thought I would have an easy time of it, as the agent at the ticket counter, once I breathlessly explained my situation, told me there was a flight leaving in twenty-five minutes -- but that it had an overnight layover in another city about 90 miles away from my hometown. That’s okay, I thought hastily. I’ll rent a car when I get there and drive the rest of the way. When she took my credit card and told me the $900 ticket price, I didn’t even blink. That’s what plastic is for. In a few minutes I was running down the concourse, getting stopped by a security line unbelievably long for that time of night. I wasn’t bashful. I told people what was happening -- that my wife was having our baby and that my flight was leaving in twenty minutes -- and they let me skip, some congratulating me and others angry at the peer pressure that was being exerted on them. After security, it was another run down another concourse, and a waiting gate agent, literally holding the door open for me. Crushed into the absolutely last seat on the flight, I counted the minutes as we went through the preflight checklist and began taxiing out to the runway, certain that at any moment one of the engines was going to fall off the plane and we’d have to be called back to the gate. Once in the air I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I tried to read my book, but couldn’t. I tried to slow my heart rate, but couldn’t. Stuck in a pressurized cabin at 40,000 feet with no way to talk to the outside world is sometimes a blessing to the business traveler, but on that trip it was absolute torture. Has our baby been born? Is it healthy and whole? Was my wife okay? More than likely, given the length of my journey and the tone of Meredith’s disquiet, the events that provided the answers to those questions had already occurred. Our baby had been born -- or it hadn’t. The baby was healthy and whole -- or it wasn’t. Jenny was okay -- or she wasn’t. Observers outside my hermetically-sealed box knew the answers, but I was stuck like Schrodinger’s famous cat, both alive and dead at the same time.

As soon as we were on the ground, I turned my cell phone back on, hoping that someone, anyone had left me a message. But after refreshing several times, I had to admit that no such communication was waiting for me. I deplaned and ran down to the rental car counters, discovering, to my growing frustration, lines of people at every company. Choosing the one with the shortest line -- only three people ahead of me -- I fished my phone back out of my pocket and started to make some phone calls. First, directory assistance; yes, please connect me to the hospital I knew Jenny was in; then, hello, yes, my wife is there having our baby, what, yes, please connect me with the Labor and Delivery Department; then, hello, yes, my wife is there having our baby, what, sorry, Larson, Jenny Larson, her name is Jennifer Larson; then, hold please, I was placed on hold.

I looked around, realizing that I could march forward one position in my rental car line, and that three people had already gotten in line behind me. I looked at my watch. It was 1:25 in the morning. 

“Hello, Mister Larson?”

“Yes, hello?”

“Your wife is sedated.”

“What? What did you say?”

“She is sedated, recovering after successful c-section.”

I suddenly started crying. The tears came unbidden to my eyes as my heart rose within my chest and tried to choke me. Jenny didn’t want a c-section. For a moment, it was the only thought that existed, expanding to fill my entire universe. Meredith had told me it was going to happen, but it hadn’t seemed real then. Now, with the voice of this unnamed triage nurse, it seemed overwhelming, permanent, irrevocable.

And I had missed it. 

I swallowed with some difficulty. “And the baby?”

I heard paper shuffling. “A girl. About five weeks premature. She’s in the nick-you.”

“The what?”

“The NICU. Our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I also had no idea what it was.

“Is she all right? The baby?”

The nurse said something but I didn’t hear her because the guy behind me in line told me to get my tail in gear. I stumbled forward, oblivious to whether there was a rental car counter or a yawning chasm in front of me.

“What?” I said. “Say that again, please.”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said clearly. “I don’t have any more information than that. I can connect you to the NICU if you’d like.”

“No,” I said, more out of fear than reason. “No, that’s all right,” I continued, telling her briefly where I was and why I was there. “I’m renting a car right now. I’ll be there in two hours.”

“All right. Are you calling on your cell phone?” She then read off my cell phone number and asked me if that was a number I could be reached on.

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“I’ll get an update from the NICU for you and call you back.”

I started crying afresh, this time actually blubbering, overwhelmed by emotion evoked by this simple human kindness. The strangers around me, even the jackass behind me, could now see that something was wrong.

“Okay,” I choked into the phone. “Thank you, uh, thank you…”

“Eliana,” the nurse said. “My name is Eliana Alvarez. If you’re two hours away, I’ll still be here when you arrive. You ask for me when you get here, okay, Mister Larson?”

“Okay,” I said, distracted by the need to step up to the rental car counter.

“Okay. I’ll call you back in a few minutes with an update from the NICU. Good-bye for now, Mr. Larson.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

I put the phone down on the counter and wiped my tears away with the back of my hand. When my vision was clear, I could see the attendant sitting there on his high stool, looking at me like I was about to melt into the floor.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Relationship Economics by David Nour

This one was assigned reading.

Let me tell the story. I was looking for someone to lead a developmental exercise for me and my team on developing and sustaining strategic relationships. Someone in my network recommended David Nour to me, I hired him, and he took us through four months of content and coaching on the very subject -- with his book, Relationship Economics, as kind of the textbook we would be following.

I had two crucial epiphanies on this journey.

The first came when Nour brought to us the concept of the pivotal contact.

Certain individuals can help accelerate your ability to achieve your goals -- not just meet your goals, because many people can get there by themselves, but truly accelerate your achievement of them. For example, on your own, it might take you six months to reach the chief executive officer (CEO) of Company X to offer your suggestions on how to accelerate revenue growth in Asia-Pacific. Alternatively, the chief financial officer (CFO) of that same company could personally walk you into the CEO’s office in less than two weeks. That is accelerated access, and it can be obtained by knowing the right people, or those whom we call pivotal contacts.

And the epiphany? As staff working for an association, our job was to BE a pivotal contact for each and every one of our members. When they are looking for help on accelerating progress towards their goals, they should view us as a contact within their network that can do exactly that. In some ways, being their pivotal contact is the most important thing we can do.

The other epiphany came when Nour was describing the strategic use of what he calls “relationship currency,” specifically, making “deposits” into a “relationship bank.”

The following graphic does not appear in my edition of Relationship Economics, but Nour did present it to us, and it certainly captures the process the book describes.

Your Relationship Bank is essentially your network -- the people you can connect with on a regular basis if you so choose -- and Relationship Currency Deposits are those interactions, strategic or otherwise. Those deposits can help you leverage your network to get to the pivotal contacts that can help accelerate progress on your goals, but the really important insight here is to work backwards against the arrow shown in the diagram.

In other words, don’t start by making deposits. Start by identifying your Relationship Centric Goal (goals you simply cannot achieve alone and must develop and nurture critical relationships to attain), then by identifying the Pivotal Contacts that can help you achieve them, then make the deposits with the people in your bank who can help you connect with those pivotal contacts.

That tightly summarizes a strategic process that can help you not just reinforce and build relationships, but reinforce and build THE relationships that will help you achieve your goals.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 91 (DRAFT)

Later that night, I found myself at that lead table with Wes Howard and his blushing bride-to-be. There had been an onslaught of arrivals and even more last-minute changes, but eventually everything had settled into place. The room was full with ninety-eight guests, the entrees had been lain in front of each by the gloved-handed servers, and each and everyone was carefully splitting their chops into bite-sized chunks for their consumption between sips from glasses of Cabernet the stewards in their starched shirt fronts were attentively keeping full.

At our table, Wes sat in the place of distinguished honor. To his immediate left sat Amy Crawford, followed, working clockwise around the table, by Eleanor Rumford, a colleague of Wes’s named Dennis Duncan, who had agreed to be our keynote speaker for the evening, his wife Nancy, myself, and, rounding out the group and sitting on Wes’s immediate right, Mary Walton. Of the group, not a single one had reacted with anything other than delighted surprise at Wes’s introduction of Amy as his fiancee.

Not even Mary.

I had purposely not warned her in advance. I could’ve easily. I could’ve called the cell phone that had been glued to her head since the airport that morning, but I decided against it. Let her find out the same way that I did. I was sure that Mary’s reaction as she fell over herself at the shock would have been worth it for its pure entertainment value.

But I was wrong. Mary hardly reacted at all. Upon meeting Amy, she simply smiled and gave the younger woman a quick hug, almost as if they were sorority sisters or, more likely, that Mary had already known about Amy’s presence and her new relationship to Wes. And that, of course, made so much more sense. Mary had to have known about Amy’s presence in advance, which meant, obliquely, that in not telling me about it, she may have wanted to observe my reaction, for its entertainment or other kinds of useful value.

I thought about that a lot as we sat there sipping our wine and pushing small pieces of meat into our mouths, listening and laughing as Wes Howard held court and regaled us with stories both ribald and sublime. This was not normal. Not in any sense of that word. To think that the universe in all its infinite and seemingly random oscillations could have produced such a situation truly strained credulity. But everyone except me seemed oblivious to such an understanding of these events. Wes Howard, a forty-two-year-old serial harasser, was marrying his twenty-six-year-old former victim, a woman who had worked and who had been fired from the company that provided professional services to the organization that Wes was now about to chair. And, at an event hosted by that organization and organized by that company, Wes had brought this same young fiancee to witness his coronation, and she now sat in a place of both personal and professional honor, at his very left hand, while sitting at his right was the woman owner of the company, the person who had fired the fiancee only months before. The two women, once mortal enemies, had now, in fact, embraced each other. There had been no screaming, no angry threats, no scratching of faces -- just a calm and civilized understanding that the world worked in strange and wonderful ways and that, evidently, the affairs of the heart erased enmity and reigned supreme over one and all.

It was clearly bullshit, but like everyone else at the table, I knew enough to simply play along, knowing that those with power would always abuse it, and those who were attracted to power were as helpless as the rest of us.

I sat there and I had smiled my way through three courses -- an appetizer of butternut squash ravioli with rosemary browned butter, followed by a salad of baby kale greens with asian pear, grapes, candied walnuts, and gorgonzola topped with a honey vinaigrette, followed now by an entree of balsamic glazed lamb chops with a white bean puree -- doing everything I could to both look interested and to stay out of any direct conversation. It wasn’t hard. In the eyes of everyone else at the table, I was clearly the least interesting thing going. If memory serves, there was only one question put to me the entire time.

“Alan,” Wes said between bites, “when should I go up and introduce Dennis?”

He was referring to his colleague, Dennis Duncan, an overweight bear of a man in a dishwater white shirt and a rumpled suit coat, and the timing for the keynote presentation he had been specifically invited to give.

“Right after the desserts have been served,” I said, knowing full well that this was a time that, like almost every other detail of the event, Wes had already dictated to me several times.

And sure enough, shortly after the servers placed our desserts down -- a honey yogurt panna cotta in a blood orange sauce -- Wes slowly got up from his seat, moved over to Dennis, and practically laid down on his shoulders as if he intended to put the larger man in a wrestling hold.

“Come on, Dennis,” he said, slurring his words after all the glasses of wine he had downed. “It’s time to get you up on that stage.”

Dennis hastily pushed half his panna cotta into his mouth before rising, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and the two men, laughing, stumbled their way toward the steps placed just on the edge of the riser that dominated the front of the ballroom. In a moment, Wes’s voice was booming out across the ballroom as he spoke into the microphone hovering over the podium that had been long placed and ignored there.

“Good evening, everyone,” he murmured, and then, looking dismayed at the lack of appreciable effect his words had had on the ambient noise of table conversations and scraping of dessert plates, he said, louder and more insistent. “I said, ‘good evening, everyone!’”

Slowly people realized their attention belonged somewhere else, and they quieted down, some turning in their chairs, some actually turning their chairs to give themselves a better view of the stage and the person at the podium.

Wes was drunk. There’s really no other word for it. He slurred and slobbered his way through an overly long speech aimed at his own self-aggrandizement, the main act standing patiently behind him, idly brushing crumbs off his tie and shirtfront. There’s no way I can remember his exact words, but I clearly remember the impression they left on me. I’m great, he seemed to be saying, over and over again. I’m great, and now I’m in charge. 

I looked over at Amy while Wes was speaking, and I remember her sitting there in rapt attention, her hair up and a diamond earring hanging from the ear I could see. When Wes was done, the audience gave him a polite round of applause, but Amy clapped almost violently, crouching forward as if she meant to stand. 

“Oh, he’s wonderful,” she said, as she looked back at the rest of her tablemates -- me, Mary, Eleanor, and Dennis’s wife -- looking, I thought, for affirmation, and receiving it from everyone but me. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

In comparison, Wes’s introduction of his chosen speaker was shorter than the time he had spent on himself, and in a few minutes, he was bounding down off the riser to rejoin us at the table. Now Amy did stand, rising to meet him in her tight dress, embracing, and kissing him as if he had just won an Oscar. Mary, Eleanor, and Nancy Duncan also stood, applauding, but not approaching Wes. Sitting directly opposite from his position, I felt I could get away without also standing, but I knew I had to applaud if I didn’t want to bring undo attention onto myself.

Meanwhile, on stage, Dennis Duncan began his speech, focused, evidently, on the topic that was going to consume most of the evening. “Let me tell you a story about Wes Howard,” he said, breathing heavily into the microphone as he spoke. “This is back when we were starving undergraduates, but I think it typifies the character of the man that will be leading us for the next year. At that time, to help make ends meet, Wes and I both worked at the campus movie theater…”

I suddenly felt my cell phone buzzing in my pocket. Happy to have the distraction, I fished the phone out and looked at its glowing screen in the darkened room. There was a phone number there, from my home area code, but one I didn’t recognize.

Keeping my head as low as possible, I stood, held up the phone for the people at my table to see, mouthed the words “Excuse Me,” and began walking out of the room as I flipped the phone open and pressed it against my ear.

“Hello?”

“Alan?”

“Yes?”

“Alan, where are you?”

I was out of the cluster of banquet tables, on the side of the room, and moving towards the closest exit.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Meredith. Where are you?”

Meredith. I only knew one Meredith. Jenny’s mother.

“I’m in Denver. Meredith, why are you calling me?”

“I’m at the hospital. Jenny’s gone into labor and the baby is breech.”

I pushed my way out of the ballroom and found myself in the mostly empty foyer. Two other dinner guests were there, both also on their phones.

“What? Say that again, Meredith.” I was out of the noisy ballroom but plugged a finger in my opposite ear anyway.

“Her water broke about an hour ago,” Meredith said, her voice, now that I could hear it clearly, sounding agitated. “We just got her to the hospital and they did an ultrasound. The baby hasn’t turned and they’ve taken her up to the delivery room.”

A thousand questions were flying through my brain. But none of them were able to settle on my tongue. “Meredith, she’s not due for another five weeks!”

“I know that!” she snapped at me -- something extremely unlike her. My mother-in-law was an attorney who I’ve debated over the holiday dinner table countless times. I’ve never seen her lose her cool. “But her water broke, and her blood pressure is rising, and they decided that they’re going to get the baby out of her.”

“But you said it was breech.”

“Yes, I know. They’re going perform a c-section.”

It was too much. I felt faint, and I looked around for a chair to collapse in. There wasn’t one nearby, so I leaned against the wall, and struggled to keep my legs from buckling under me. Through the phone I could hear Jacob whining and Meredith telling him to be quiet.

“Meredith,” I said, knowing the truth of the next sentence that came out of my mouth, having been dragged along as Jenny had worked with obsessive intensity on her birth plan. “Jenny doesn’t want a c-section.” 

“I know that, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. The look in her eyes when they told her. My God, Alan, you should have seen it.”

“Let me talk to her,” I said.

“No, I mean it. You should have seen it. Why the hell are you in Denver? You should be here!” Her voice was laced with unspecified accusations. 

“Let me talk to her!”

“I can’t,” Meredith said. “They’re prepping her for surgery right now. I need to get up there. Get home, Alan. Just get home as quick as you can. Your family needs you here.”

And with that the line went dead.

I pulled the phone away from my head, told it to redial the last number that called me, and placed it back against my ear. I heard the circuits connecting and then a distant ring, ring, ring, with no answer.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Life in the Stupidverse by Tom Tomorrow

This is a compilation of This Modern World cartoons, published in the years 2017 through 2020, and a worthy follow-up to the colossal 25 Years of Tomorrow I wrote about previously.

I am as devoted a fan of Tom Tomorrow (pseudonym for Dan Perkins) now as I was then, and have previously commended him for keeping the dying art of satire alive on the Internet and in a shrinking number of progressive weekly newspapers. 

Here’s what Perkins himself, in the introduction to Life in the Stupidverse, says about that endeavor:

Over these past years, cartoonists and comedians have grown used to hearing the same comment over and over again: you must have so much *material*! Unfortunately that’s not really how it works. Satire is the art of taking something to an absurd extreme in order to highlight the problems of the current moment. The thing is, we are living in the absurd extreme. I try my best, but it’s impossible to come up with something so ludicrous that Trump won’t actually end up doing it in reality, often before anyone even reads the cartoon.

Satire in the age of Trump is exhausting.

Indeed. Here are two of my favorite examples from this absurd extreme:

Yes, I can see Perkins’s dilemma. Good thing he’s a master at walking the line between the absurd real and the real absurd.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 90 (DRAFT)

If I haven’t mentioned it before, it felt very much like things were accelerating on me. The meeting with Mary and Don had been a total mindfuck -- one wanted to fire me immediately and the other wanted to maybe fire me on Monday, and they decided by design or by dysfunction to have that argument with me in the room -- but I didn’t feel like I had any time to dwell on it, or even to prepare myself for its eventual, and inevitable, consequences. I remember talking to Jenny that night, while I was busily packing for Wes’s leadership meeting, first about the phone call with Steve Anderson, then about the meeting with Mary and Don.

“Do you really think Steve is going to offer you the job?”

I had the collar of a dress shirt tucked under my chin and I was folding its arms inward so I could better wedge it into my suitcase. “Yes. I mean, I think so.”

Jenny gave me a worried look. “Well, let’s hope so. You may find yourself out of a job on Monday. If not before.”

I tried to reassure her, knowing that anything was possible, but still pretty sure that I wasn’t going to get fired on Monday, and maybe not even then. I got the sickening sense that Mary wasn’t done sending me through the wringer yet, that she would never fire me, that she was trying to get me to quit by working me practically to death.

“Maybe you should start looking at houses in Boston?” I told her, trying to be cheerful, but checked by the tears that welled up in her eyes.

“Oh, Alan,” she said as she moved close and I put an arm around her shoulders. “How are we going to move to Boston? I feel like I’m going to drop this baby any day now.”

She was still a month or more from her due date, but I knew what she was talking about. A move to Boston with a pregnant wife or a newborn baby -- either way, it was going to be a challenge. It had already occurred to me that I might have to move to Boston and hole up in an extended stay hotel until all the difficult details could be worked out. But that, like a lot of other things going on at that time, seemed like too much to take on, too much to handle. When you’re running day-to-day, it’s hard to think about next year, next month, or even next week.

“It’ll be okay,” I told her, pulling her close, and feeling the solid weight of the baby pressed against my stomach. “We’ll figure it out.”

Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t. I didn’t have any idea. All I really knew was that I had to get on an airplane the following morning and help Mary manage what was likely going to be a raging tornado of a leadership meeting. As I lay in bed not sleeping that night, my mind was working double time on all the things that could go wrong and how I was likely to receive the blame for them.

But always there, running deep and dark like a sinister undercurrent to my thoughts, were the words that Mary had offered, telling me that it was Wes Howard -- Wes Howard! -- who had said favorable things about me, and that he was expecting to see me at his meeting. To praise me, I wondered? Was that what he had in mind for me? Was he going to give me a commendation? No, more likely he wanted me there so he could roast me in public.

I was still thinking about this when I met Mary at the airport the next morning. She was already at the gate when I arrived, and I was there at least an hour before departure. She was on her cell phone, sitting awkwardly hunched over on one of those airport bench-chairs, her body turned and twisted so that the charging cord on her phone could reach and connect to one of the few working and chronically over-used electrical outlets in the airport concourse. In the span of three seconds, she saw, recognized, acknowledged, and dismissed me, returning to the more critical discussion she was engaged in.

Sensing that she would want her privacy, I sat in a different section of the gate area, and immediately pulled a bulging file out of my briefcase. I had my own phone calls to make, coordinating more last-minute changes that Wes had left on my voicemail late the night before. I needed to talk to the venue, to some of the attendees, even to our keynote speaker. Some of it could have waited until we were together at the venue, but it would be better, I knew, to at least get some messages onto everyone’s voicemails.

I was still making those calls when my flight was called for boarding. Mary, flying first class, was able to queue up first, and as she walked by me in her business skirt and dragging her carry-on behind her, she offered me a few terse words.

“Good morning, Alan. See you in Denver.”

“Okay,” I said lamely, and it would turn out that those were the only words that we exchanged until our shared cab ride, on the ground in Colorado, as we were headed to the historic Brown Palace Hotel.

“Did you talk to Wes this morning?” she asked me, looking at me like I planned to panhandle her.

“No,” I said. “He left me a voicemail last night. I’m working on making his changes.”

Mary looked away from me and out the window. “Good,” she said, somewhat distantly. “There’s a lot riding on this meeting, you know. For him. And for you.”

“I know,” I said, looking at the back of her head.

When she didn’t turn back to me, or offer any other comment, like her, I turned and looked out my window. It had been a rainy morning in Denver, and the concrete was still wet as we moved off the freeway and onto the city streets.

This is so fucked up, I remember thinking to myself. She’s not even going to talk to me. She’s going to push me into the fire and stand silently by, watching me burn.

At the hotel we were too early to check into our rooms, so Mary planted herself in the lobby, quickly finding yet another often-abused electrical outlet and making more phone calls, and I went to meet with the conference service manager and make sure the meeting rooms for that evening’s opening dinner and tomorrow’s strategy session were being set correctly. I spent a few hours in the banquet room being set for our dinner, sitting at one of the yet-to-be-dressed rounds, doing what I could to prepare for the meeting.

Frankly, there wasn’t much more I could do. I had left my messages and a handful of those people called me back, confirming that they had received and would comply with their new instructions. Now, there really wasn’t anything to do until our attendees started showing up. Organizing these events was often like that. In the days leading up to the event there was always a frenzy of activity -- hundreds of tasks to complete and never enough time to complete them -- but once you got on the airplane and arrived at the venue, you typically spent a lot of your time sitting around waiting for something to happen. And usually, whatever happened at that point, it could only be bad.

Eventually, my sleeping room was ready, and I checked in, went upstairs, ordered some room service for lunch, unpacked my suitcase, and began ironing my shirts. It was a ritual I was well practiced at -- and a good use of the handful of slow hours that always existed before the rush of the meeting began. I was only going to be there for three days and two nights, and had packed accordingly. I had three dress shirts -- for that night, the following day, and the day after that, two pairs of dress slacks, and a single sport coat that would work with any combination of shirts and slacks. They all needed the careful attention of an iron after their journey in my suitcase and I lined them up on the bed and tackled them one by one.

As usual, lunch came to my door in the middle of this task, and I ate it sitting at the well-appointed desk that had been provided for the busy traveling professional. It was probably some kind of soup and salad combo -- I don’t remember what exactly -- but that’s traditionally what I ordered in situations like this. A chicken Caesar, or a Cobb (hold the blue cheese), with a cup of cream of broccoli or French onion soup, you know, the kind with the breadcrumbs soaked in the broth and the lid of crusted cheese over the top. Whatever it was, I ate it in silence, as I have a rule about never turning on the television when I’m traveling on business. 

There is a kind of loneliness that comes when you’re by yourself in a hotel room, and I have always had an unhealthy obsession with it. Even in a place like the Brown Palace, or maybe especially in a place like that, you can look around at the wallpaper, at the soft goods, at the furniture standing solidly on the manicured carpeting, and you can sense all the souls that have been there before you and all the souls that will come after -- a long, uninterrupted chain of humanity, dating back and forwards decades if not centuries -- everyone with their own hopes and ambitions, but all sharing the same basic needs for shelter, for sanitation, for sustenance. Everything provided for you -- the bed linens, the bath towels, the room service -- they are all both unique and eternal. Like you, they will have their existence, but each in time will fade away and be replaced by something or someone else that serves the same purpose and comes to the same end. 

These are the thoughts that would typically crowd in on me, and they probably explain why I hated being on the road so much. But after my lunch and after my ironing was finished I was able to put them all aside because it was time for me to dress in my work clothes and head down to the ballroom where that evening’s dinner would be held. It was still hours before any of the guests would arrive, but there were a lot of details to see to, and a lot of items to set up.

I had to get the boxes we had shipped in advance out of hotel storage and use their contents to set-up our registration table. For an event like our Annual Conference -- with thousands of attendees and hundreds of sessions, this was an elaborate process, requiring the work of dozens. For this leadership conference, it was similar but in miniature. The boxes we had shipped contained the name badges, ribbons, lanyards, and program books we would need to distribute to the various attendees, and they would need to be checked and doublechecked to make sure all the last-minute changes Wes had demanded had been incorporated.

I was deep into that task, my attention wholly consumed by making sure the badges I had made matched Wes’s final invite list, when a strange but familiar voice interrupted me.

“Hello, Alan.”

I looked up. Standing in front of my small table were two people. The first, the one who had not spoken, was Wes Howard, his unruly mop of brown hair framing his blazing and inquisitive eyes. The second, the one who had spoken, was a young woman, her hand clutched to the elbow crook of Wes’s left arm. She was young and thin and attractive, and I felt like I knew her but could not place her in my memory.

“Hello?” I said.

“Oh, come on, Alan,” Wes said. “You remember Amy, don’t you?”

The name was also familiar and the young woman looked at me like that clue should have been sufficient, but I was still not making the connection.

“Amy?”

She smiled and then I knew, the knowledge blooming in my brain like spores shooting off a fungus. 

“He knows, Wes,” Amy said. “He’s just pretending to forget. But really, Alan, how could you possibly forget me?”

It was Amy Crawford, the woman Don had fired for her inappropriate behavior at a meeting much like this one, whose cackling laugh I had heard bellowing from the basement of Club NOW the night I had tried to rescue Caroline Abernathy, and now, here she was, standing before me, dressed in what appeared to be designer clothes, and hanging onto Wes Howard’s very arm.

“Amy,” I said with renewed confidence, working hard to mask the heart attack I was experiencing inside. “Of course, I remember. Just didn’t recognize you for a moment. How are you? You’re looking well.”

“I’m fine,” she said, extending her left hand as if I was supposed to kiss it. I would have been a fool to miss the size of the diamond on her ring finger. “How are you?”

“Okay,” I said, limply shaking her hand and then turning to Wes. “Are you two… Are you… ?”

Wes deliberately put his arm around Amy’s shoulders and pulled her close to him. The movement caused the neckline of her blouse to spread, revealing a healthy cleavage. “Are we what, Alan?”

I felt like a child, not having the words for what I wanted to say. 

“Are you two … engaged?”

The word had magic. At its appearance Amy’s eyes seemed to light up and her face began to shine.

“Yes!” she said, jumping up and down in her excitement but held tight by the tether of Wes’s arm. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she said, extending her hand again, this time without any doubt as to her purpose of showcasing her ring. “Wes proposed last week while we were in the Bahamas.”

I looked at Wes, wondering which of the hundred of phone calls he had made to me had been done from the Bahamas. He looked back at me, smiling like a cat who had just eaten a pretty little songbird.

“It looks like you’re getting things in order, Alan, so we’ll leave you to your task,” he said to me, as if doing me a favor. “Just wanted to check-in and let you know we were here. Oh, and to make sure you can make room for Amy at our table tonight.”

“At our table?” I said.

“For dinner tonight. I think I may have neglected to mention that my fiancee would be accompanying me. We want to make sure that you’ll be able to provide a place setting for her at our table.”

I was nodding my head, understanding Wes’s intent long before he got to the end of his sentences. At dinner that night, there would be a lead table reserved, with its seats scrupulously assigned. Our current chair, our incoming chair, our keynote speaker, Mary Walton, me, and one or two other dignitaries. It wasn’t unusual for the spouse of the incoming Board chair to attend -- I remembered the dowdy and tired-looking man who had accompanied Eleanor Rumford last year -- but last I was aware, Wes Howard had been a confirmed bachelor.

“Of course,” I said, knowing there was nothing else I could possibly say. “It’ll be no trouble at all.”

“Super!” Amy said, as the pair turned to depart. She waved her jeweled hand at me with a backward glance. “It’ll be fun catching up!”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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