text:
What we know at 2 PM, ET
Brookfield police have confirmed that multiple people have been shot near Brookfield Square Mall in Brookfield, Wisconsin, but there are no details yet about the location or status of the shooter. Multiple ambulances are at the scene and police are grouped in front of the Azana salon near the mall, where victims were seen emerging with gunshot wounds.
The police scanner indicates that the shooter may have been dressed in military fatigues and may have already fled from the scene in a black Mazda, but those details are unconfirmed.
Christopher Pfeiffer, 47, of Brookfield, said he pulled into the Barnes & Noble parking lot at the square and saw a young girl running. "She was screaming, yelling, crying hysterical. She was pleading for help. She kept saying, 'My mother was shot.' And she mentioned that there was a gunman. She ran into the bookstore and I followed her. But I watched her from afar."
CNN reports that hospital spokeswoman Nalissa Wienke says all four people in the emergency room appear to have non-critical injuries. She could not say whether the injuries were due to gunshots. Reportedly, another three victims are on their way to the hospital.
Brookfield is located 30 miles of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, where a shooting at a Sikh temple happened two months ago.
The scene outside the mall
Update: 2:10 PM
The suspect seems to be at large and is being sought by police in the area. Newsradio WTMJ reports that authorities are searching for a 6'1", 270 lb. African-American with a bald head and brown eyes. He was reportedly driving a black 2003 Mazda. Authorities believe he may be from Brown Deer.
Update, 2:20 PM
Although the shooting was initially reported at the Brookfield Square Mall, it appears that the victims emerged from the nearby Azana Salon & Spa across the street from the mall itself.
Update, 2:30 PM
The JS Online reports
David Gosh of West Allis, his father John, and a friend, Ben Luedke, were returning from duck hunting when they saw a woman run out into Moorland Road screaming into traffic.
"She ran right out into the street was pounding on cars," Gosh said.
A short time later, Gosh said, a large African-American man with a handgun ran out and appeared to be chasing the girl. However, at that moment, police started showing up and when the gunman saw them, he ran back into the building - or perhaps into the woods behind the building, where Westmoor Country Club is located.
"He was the shooter," Gosh said. "He was looking for an escape route."
Gosh and his father were fairly certain he returned to the building because they thought they saw him appear at an upstairs window and pull a shade down. However, scanner traffic indicated he may have left in a black 2003 Mazda. He reportedly was dressed in military fatigues.
Gosh's father, John, saw two women come out of the building who had been shot. They were bloody, he said; one appeared to be shot in the leg and the other appeared to have been shot in the back.
Police officers told Gosh that at least eight people had been shot.
Update, 3:10 PM:
The suspect has been identified by a local NBC affiliate as Radcliff Haughton, a 45 year old man, and the shooting is thought to involve a domestic dispute that a judge intervened in very recently. His estranged wife works at Azana, and there are reports that Haughton may have recently slashed her tires at the salon's parking lot recently.
There are also (unconfirmed) reports that one of the people shot was a pregnant woman.
Update, 3:20 PM
On LinkedIn: a Radcliffe Haughton living in the "great Milwaukee area," whose occupation is listed as "Owner, Haughton International Corporations." Haughton International Corporations returns no Google results other than the LinkedIn profile.
[We have no way of knowing whether this is actually the same person who is being identified as the shooting suspect.]
Update, 3:57 PM
Update, 6:15 PM
According to the AP, the suspect Radcliffe Haughton is dead. Brookfield Police Department Chief Daniel Tushaus said police believe that Haughton died of a "self-inflicted gunshot wound."


text:
Translate Your Genealogy Stream on Google+
September 29, 2011 by © Joan Miller - Luxegen Genealogy.
Filed under genealogy, Technology, Tools
Google Translate for Google Plus Google+ has turned into a great meeting ground for genealogists from all over the world. Google+ is the a social networking platform offered by the search engine company Google, with its nearest rival being Facebook. (I prefer Google+ to Facebook for a lot of reasons but that's another post). [...]

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Erland M. Schulson
George Austin Colligan Distinguished Professor of Engineering
Director, Ice Research Laboratory
George Austin Colligan Distinguished Professor of Engineering
- BASc, Metallurgical Engineering, University of British Columbia 1964
- PhD, Metallurgical Engineering, University of British Columbia 1968
Research Interests
Flow and fracture of ice; mechanical behavior of metals and alloys; physical metallurgy and materials science
Current Research Projects
- ENGS 130: Mechanical Behavior of Materials
- ENGS 132: Thermodynamics and Kinetics in Condensed Phases
Erland M. Schulson, Paul Duval
Cambridge University Press, 2009
Selected Publications
- "Friction of ice and its role in ice-structure interactions," E.M. Schulson, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. (in preparation).
- "Experimental observation of the onset of fracture percolation in columnar ice," C.E. Renshaw, E.M. Schulson and S. Sigward, Geophys. Res. Lett. 4, 1795–1802, doi:10/1002/2016GL071919, 2017.
- "Strength-limiting mechanisms in high-confinement, brittle-like failure: Adiabatic transformational faulting," C.E. Renshaw, and E.M. Schulson, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 122, 1088-1106, doi:10.1002/2016JB013407, 2017.
- "On the restoration of strength through stress-driven healing of faults in ice," E.M. Schulson, S.T. Nodder and C.E. Renshaw, Acta Materialia, 117, 306-310, doi:10.1016/j.actamat.2016.06.046, 2016.
- "Low-speed friction and brittle compressive failure of ice: fundamental processes in ice mechanics," E.M. Schulson, Intern. Mater. Rev., 60(8), 451-478, doi: 10.1179/1743280415Y.0000000010, 2015.
- "Sliding heavy stones to the Forbidden City on ice," E. Schulson, PNAS, 110, 50, 19978-19979, doi:10.1073/pnas.1319581110, 2013.
- "Static strengthening of frictional surfaces of ice," E.M. Schulson and A.L. Fortt, Acta Materialia, 61(5), 1616–1623, 2013.
- "Friction of ice on ice," E.M. Schulson and A.L. Fortt, J. Geophysical Research – Solid Earth, Vol.117, doi:10.1029/2012B009219, 2012.
- "Shear localization in ice: Mechanical response and structural evolution during P-faulting," N. Golding, E.M. Schulson and C.E. Renshaw, Acta Materialia, 60, 3616-3631, 2012.
- "Frictional Sliding across Coulombic Faults in First-Year Sea Ice—A Comparison with Freshwater Ice," A.L. Fortt and E.M. Schulson, J.Geophys. Res.,116 (C11012), doi: 10/1029/2011JC006969, 2011.
- "Shear Faulting and Localized Heating in Ice," N. Golding, E.M. Schulson and C.E Renshaw, Acta Materialia, 58, 5043-5056, 2010.
- Fulbright Arctic Chair (Norway), 2013
- Fellow, TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society), 2006
- Fellow, ASM International, 2003
- George Austin Colligan Distinguished Professorship, 1999
- Fulbright Fellow (France), 1998/9
- Visiting Research Fellowship, General Electric Company, 1988
Selected Patents
- High Strength Corrosion-Resistant Zirconium Aluminum Alloys (Canadian Patent 988,749; UK Patent 1,465,960; Italian Patent 1,14,159; West German Application P24 22 578.3-24)
- Electron Beam Apparatus (UK Patent Application 2829/70 and 32059/70; US Patent Application 108,408)
- Heat-treated zirconium alloy product (4,226,647)
- Preparation of zirconium alloys (4,094,706)
Professional Activities
- Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) (Fellow)
- ASM International (Fellow)
- American Geophysical Union
- International Glaciological Society
- Highly cited materials scientist HighlyCited.com
Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91
The New Yorker
April 9, 2018
Sliding heavy stones to the Forbidden City on ice
December 20, 2013
Academic experiences differ by major choice
The Dartmouth
August 13, 2013
Dartmouth Engineering Professor Awarded Fulbright Arctic Chair in Norway
May 29, 2013
Polar E&P: the iceman cometh
March 23, 2012
Cold Truths: new issue of Dartmouth Engineer
Dartmouth Now
March 9, 2012
Ode To Ice
January 27, 2012
Thayer studies granted $2.5 mil.
The Dartmouth
September 26, 2011
Federal agency awards contract for sea ice study
Associated Press via Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
September 22, 2011
Engineering sees increased interest
The Dartmouth
October 22, 2009
Kudos: Recognition for Dartmouth faculty, staff, and students
VOX of Dartmouth
August 21, 2006
Cold Call
VOX of Dartmouth
February 7, 2005
NASA grows ice for space shuttle testing
Spaceflight Now
November 5, 2004
Crushing Mechanism Revealed
Dartmouth News
August 30, 2001
Universal Behaviour in Compressive Failure of Brittle Materials
August 30, 2001
In Dartmouth Engineer Magazine
Kudos: Spring 2018
Web Extra, May 2018
150 Thayer Gifts to the World: Part 1
Web Extra, December 2017
Just One Question: What Was Your Greatest Experience at Thayer?
Fall 2014
Fall 2013
Interdisciplinary Bachelor of Engineering Program Attracts Top-Notch Students and Faculty
Web Extra, September 2012
The Engineering Pipeline
Summer 2012
Cold Truths
Winter 2012
Publications: Faculty Books
Winter 2010
Fall 2006
Lab Reports
Spring 2005


text:
NEW ORLEANS – This year's High Cotton Awards breakfast was very much a family affair.
Members of the winners' immediate families attended the annual event that recognizes the environmental stewardship contributions of U.S. cotton farmers.
But the presence of other members was obvious from the comments of the winners from the four regions of the Cotton Belt and the Farm Press editors who presented them with the coveted Cotton Boll awards.
"The High Cotton award has become an award that also recognizes the value of the farm family and the legacy of families like the Cox family who work hard to preserve a family lifestyle," said Harry Cline, editor of Western Farm Press.
"When Mike was selected for this award he was reluctant to accept it. Like most farmers, he does not like the spotlight. Mike quickly gives the credit for his passion for cotton and prowess for growing it to his Dad, Don Cox.
"So as we honor Mike Cox as this year's Far West High Cotton Award winner, we also honor the Cox family of Imperial Valley, Calif.
As Cline explained in his article about Cox in the High Cotton Award issues, Don Cox grew the family's first cotton crop in the Imperial Valley in 1952. Growing cotton in the Valley has never been easy and insects like the silverleaf whitefly actually drove the family out of the cotton business in the early 1990s.
But Mike Cox got back into cotton when others did not and has continued to pioneer new production techniques to stay in the cotton business.
"There is one ingredient Mike possesses you cannot buy at the local equipment dealer – it is his love of cotton," said Cline. "As his wife, Jody, says, 'Mike has a passion for cotton.'"
"This is a great honor," said Shep Morris, the winner of the High Cotton Award from the Southeast. "I want to thank my family who have always been there for me." Morris' wife, Marguerite; son, J.W.; and daughter, Beverly, were on hand to see him receive the award.
Morris was introduced by Paul Hollis, editor of Southeast Farm Press.
Mid-South winner Bruce Bond, a producer from Portland, Ark., recognized other producers for their contributions to his farming success after he received his award from Elton Robinson, editor of Delta Farm Press.
"When I look around this room I see some guys who know a lot of things and are very innovative," said Bond. "Through the years I've read the Delta Farm Press and other publications, and I've seen your names. I've tried to glean information from those articles, and we've tried to apply that on our farm.
"Like many of you, I've had to make some changes to be able to stay in business, and I just thank you for the opportunity to do that and for this award," said Bond. His wife, Linda, and son, Jason, attended the breakfast.
In his introduction, Robinson quoted Jason Bond, who recommended his father for the award, as saying, "He lives by the motto that he should leave the land in better condition than he found it."
"I want to thank Southwest Farm Press for this recognition," said Mike Tyler, the High Cotton Award winner from Lamesa, Texas.
Tyler, who served nine years as mayor of Lamesa and has an affection for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, was accompanied to the High Cotton Awards breakfast by his wife, Deena.
"When Mike has a day or two when he doesn't have cotton to strip, peanuts to combine, or politics or other farming matters to take care of, he's just as soon be out on his Harley," said Ron Smith, Southwest Farm Press editor, who introduced Tyler.
"But he takes care of his farm before he heads out on the highway. Mike has practiced some form of reduced tillage for years and says production costs have gone down while yields have gone up. Cover crops protect soil from erosion, save young plants from blowing sand and put organic matter back in the soil."
"Shep, Bruce, Mike Tyler and Mike Cox are an inspiration to their fellow cotton producers, business associates and their communities," said Allen Helms, a cotton producer from Clarkedale, Ark., and president of The Cotton Foundation.
"All High Cotton Award winners demonstrate certain characteristics of environmental stewardship, pursuit of excellence, all have quality operations, and they all work on behalf of the cotton industry. When they tailor this to their own operations, they are a credit to cotton producers."
The High Cotton Awards, which are now in their second decade, are sponsored by Farm Press Publications through a grant to The Cotton Foundation. A division of Primedia Business Magazines and Media, Farm Press publishes Southeast Farm Press, Delta Farm Press, Southwest Farm Press and Western Farm Press.
Co-sponsors of this year's awards are Delta and Pine Land Co., Emergent Genetics, Inc., Helena Chemical Co., John Deere Co., Syngenta Crop Protection, U.S. Borax Inc., and Valor Herbicide and Valent U.S.A.
"We say that the folks who have won this award are the best in the Delta or the best in the Southeast or the Southwest and the Far West," said Bob Moraczewski, senior vice president with Primedia Business, who welcomed participants to the breakfast at the Beltwide Cotton Conferences in New Orleans.
"But I can't help but believe that with the contributions these growers have made to producing high yield cotton with conservation and environmental stewardship in mind, these are, in fact, the best producers in the world."


text:
Picnic Time Wine Duets
When a full picnic is too much, the Duet is the perfect wine and cheese tote you can take anywhere. It's an insulated tote made of 600D polyester that has two compartments for wine. It comes with wine and cheese service, including a hardwood cheese board (6" x 6"), stainless steel cheese knife with wooden handle, and a stainless steel corkscrew. The adjustable shoulder strap makes it easy to carry. Convenient and practical, the Duet is perfect for wine and cheese lovers. A wonderful gift idea!
Check out the dog breeds, design layout and fonts and colors below.>
- Item #: PT-WineDuets
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No Reviews. Write a Review


text:
Aqua Ultraviolet Half-union - Black 2-in.
Webbs Water Gardens Pond Water Conditioner Plus
08/22/2019 11:03:54 AM: Looking to keep your pond water clean and healthy, check out the pond conditioner Webbs Water Gardens!
Check out our full line of pond and water garden products at www.webbsonline.com
Atlantic MD250 Tidal Wave Mag Drive Pump Unboxing
07/25/2019 09:48:25 AM: Mag drive pumps are energy efficient, easy to clean and reliable. Take a look inside Atlantics MD250.
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PONDCast Episode 5 Carolyn Weise
07/02/2019 09:52:37 AM: Happy June and the weather is finally breaking! Episode 5 of the PondCast brings back Carolyn Weise from Microbe Lift to discuss the changes taking place in your pond as it gets warmer!
We Have The Largest Selection of Pond Supplies and Equipment Available on the Planet


text:
Huddo necesitaba un nuevo diseño de logotipo y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 100 diseños de 27 diseñadores freelance.
hudson projects
hudson projects is a project management consultancy that manages building projects from their inception to their completion.
It requires strong people management skills to bring design & engineering consultants and construction contractors together to create and deliver new building projects.
The consultancy comprises organised and orderly managers who can control the risks to the design and building of projects without compromising the architects creativity. Hudson projects personel are themselves from a creative background, but understand the importance of controlled, measured risk management that still delivers impact.
HudsonProjects offers the following services:
• Concept Brief Establishment for Corporate Workplaces, Commercial and Educational Facilities
Design vlaue management
• Assessing and incorporating effective project control systems
• Stakeholder Communication Management
• Procurement Planning
• Consultant and Contractor Tender and Contract Management
• Cost Planning and Monitoring
• Risk Identification, Reduction and Management
• Programme Establishment and Execution
• Quality Control Procedures and Management
• Environmental Policy Implementation including AGBR & NABERS
• Public & Private Partnership tender Management
Listed property trusts looking for assistance in their asset porfolio upgrades
Property Managers, Asset Managers or Facility Managers from large corporates
Heads of Property in government agencies
The name 'hudson' to be a typographic logo in some sort of line art.
I would like something that is all lower case, with a thick and sturdy line, whose letters all link together. It is sturdy but fluid.The letters are to be spaced very closely. An example of this is attached logo.
Colour: Charcoal or black. It would be ideal if an orange colour could be cleverly incorporated.
The word 'projects'to be different in some way - more plain.
the text is to be read without a space: hudsonprojects.
Three is no slogan. However, the existing business card has the attached wording explaining what hudsonprojects does. I am not fixed to this font, colour or layout.
Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


text:
Contact: Jeanne Baron
KALAMAZOO—The retirements of 11 faculty members and 14 staff members were approved by the Western Michigan University Board of Trustees at its Feb. 27 meeting.
Trustees also signed off on the resignations of three faculty members as well as two faculty leaves.
Faculty retirements
All of the faculty members who are retiring are doing so with emeritus status. Their names, positions, years of continuous service and effective dates of retirement are:
- Dr. Bassam E. Harik, interim vice provost for the Haenicke Institute for Global Education and associate professor of economics, 34 years, Dec. 31, 2013 (change in retirement date only)
- Dr. George J. Haus, associate professor of special education and literacy studies, 26 years, effective Aug. 31, 2017
- Dr. Leonard Lamberson, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering, 24 years, effective Dec. 31, 2013
- Dr. Margaret M. Merrion, dean of the College of Fine Arts and professor of music, 13 years, effective June 30, 2013
- David Orchanian, master faculty specialist of occupational therapy, 15 years, effective April 30, 2013
- Dr. Galen E. Rike, associate professor of libraries, 21 years, effective June 30, 2013
- Darryl A. Salisbury, master faculty specialist of English language and culture, 37 years, effective June 30, 2013
- Dr. Nancy M. Schullery, professor of business information systems, 16 years, effective Dec. 31, 2013
- Dr. Karen F. Thomas, professor of special education and literacy studies, 18 years, effective Dec. 31, 2013
- Neal T. Turner, faculty specialist II of finance and commercial law, 17 years, effective April 30, 2018
- Dr. Paul T. Wilson, associate professor of special education and literacy studies, 27 years, effective Aug. 31, 2013
Staff retirements
- Connie S. Bashaw, finance assistant in the Office of Student Financial Aid and Scholarships, 25 years, effective March 31, 2013
- Carl C. Dezsi, recreation and sports specialist III in Facilities Management-landscape services, 33 years, effective Feb. 28, 2013
- Charles J. Dineen, pipefitter in Facilities Management-maintenance services, 36 years, effective Dec. 31, 2012
- Sandra T. Duke, academic advisor for the Department of Theatre, 20 years, effective July 31, 2013
- Kenneth A. Fisher, equipment operator I in Facilities Management-landscape services, 15 years, effective March 31, 2013
- Joseph J. Guilfoyle, coordinator of operations in the College of Aviation, 13 years, effective March 31, 2013
- Linda L. Ickes, director of the Business Career Center in the Haworth College of Business, 14 years, effective March 31, 2013
- Dr. Warren E. Lacefield, senior research associate in the College of Education and Human Development, 10 years, effective Dec. 31, 2012
- Tommye E. Ragan, police radio dispatcher in the Department of Public Safety, 25 years, effective May 31, 2013
- Dr. Kathy L. Rix, associate registrar in the Registrar's Office, 17 years, effective Feb. 28, 2013
- June A. Sangsland, utility food worker in the Burnham Dining Service, 14 years, effective April 30, 2013
- Richard K. Schaper, manager of retirement services in Human Resources, 31 years, effective June 30, 2013
- William A. Squiers, master gardener in Facilities Management-Landscape services, 34 years, effective Jan. 31, 2013
- Elaine M. Williams, director of Miller Auditorium, 27 years, effective July 8, 2013
Faculty resignations
- Dr. Thayma Cd Lutz, instructor of mathematics, effective Dec. 23, 2012
- Mark Schreiner, instructor of mathematics, effective Dec. 23, 2012
- Dr. Ghada Soliman, assistant professor of family and consumer sciences, effective Dec. 18, 2012
Faculty leaves
- Sabbatical leave for Dr. R. Wayne Fuqua, chair and professor of psychology, effective Aug. 19 through Dec. 22, 2013
- Professional development leave for Dr. Peter Blickle, professor of world languages and literatures, effective Aug. 19 through Dec. 27, 2013


text: The Assessment Year The Assessment Year introduces you to various disciplines and familiarises you with the aims and expectations of the University of St.Gallen and forms the basis for your further studies. Since Autumn Semester 2013, the Assessment Year introduced two separate language tracks (German/English) in order to improve teacher/student ratio. There is an option between studying in German (German track) or in English (English track). In the German-language track of the Assessment Year you can pursue your studies in an economic or a legal area of specialisation. In the English-language track, only the economic area of specialisation is offered. Whoever wishes to complete the Assessment Year in German (studies in the German track), must demonstrate a proficiency level of German B2 (GER) before taking up studies. Whoever wishes to complete the Assessment Year in English (studies in the English track), must demonstrate a proficiency level of English B2 (GER) before taking up studies. However, for the English track, we recommend a proficiency level of English C1 (GER) and offer a free language test. Please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com. Foreign-language students in the English track also must to provide information about the level of their knowledge of German. During your first two semesters at the HSG, you will develop your study skills and work strategies, as well as the basic academic skills required for you to succeed in your studies. At the same time, the first year of studies helps to reconcile the requirements of the university with the expectations of the students. Course curriculum The course consists of core studies and contextual studies. Core studies are divided up into contact studies and independent studies. Contact studies include the core subjects Business Administration, Economics, Law and other relevant areas. Contextual studies consist of the following areas of competence: Skills Cultural and Social Sciences Foreign Language The sub-areas of contextual studies during the Assessment Year include: The area of "Skills" includes courses in "Introduction to academic writing" as well as "Integrative Project". As part of the "Cultural and Social Sciences" area you can choose from courses in History, Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology. In the area of "Foreign Language" you can choose from a range of foreign language courses. Examinations You will be required to complete different types of exams over the course of the academic year. Besides traditional comprehensive written examinations, there are also seminar papers, group works, oral examinations and presentations to be completed. Admission to the individual majors If you have completed the Assessment Year with specialisation in Economics, you can begin with the majors in Business Administration, Economics, International Affairs or Law and Economics. If you have chosen the Assessment Year with specialisation in Law you can begin with the major in Law. However, you may also change the specialisation during the further course of your Bachelor's studies: In this case you have to complete either Mathematics or Law II of the Assessment Year as supplementary work. Students who do not pass the Assessment Year may only repeat it once, in its entirety. All examination parts need to be taken again. Crediting is not possible, with the exception of the accountancy examination.


text:
U.S.-EU Trade and Economic Relations: Key Policy Issues for the 112th Congress
Description: U.S. and European private stakeholders, concerned about slow growth, job creation, and increased competition from emerging economies, have urged Brussels and Washington to strengthen transatlantic trade and economic ties by reducing or eliminating remaining trade barriers and by cooperating more closely in addressing global economic challenges. A select group of these issues are examined in this report.
Date: January 18, 2012
Creator: Ahearn, Raymond J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Report


text:
A Yemeni court on Sunday condemned to death a Sudanese morgue attendant for the murder of two female students at Sanaa University, an AFP correspondent reported.
Mohammad Adam, branded the "Sanaa Ripper" in the press, was found guilty of the kidnapping, rape and murder of Hosn Ahmad Attiya from Yemen and Iraqi student Zeinab Saud Aziz, both butchered at the university's morgue.
The 53-year-old Sudanese initially confessed to the rape and murder of 16 young women, including eight university students, but retracted most of his confession June 3 after one of the alleged victims showed up in the Sanaa courtroom.
His trial opened on May 27.
German forensic experts were brought in to determine the exact number of victims from body parts found at the university morgue and identified 18 corpses -- SANAA (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)


text: Kate Bowers is a reader (associate professor) at the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London. She has a particular interest in design against crime, crime prevention evaluation, and spatial and temporal patterns in crime. She has managed research grants from a variety of sponsors such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Department for Education and Skills, and the Home Office. She has co-edited two books and has published more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and 15 book chapters on topics relating to environmental criminology and crime science. She has a doctorate from the University of Liverpool.


text:
CNN's Incomplete Fact-Check Assumes Facts Not In Evidence
CNN rated as "true" Mitt Romney's claim that his tax proposals would create about 7 million jobs, noting that the study on which the Republican presidential candidate based his claim makes certain assumptions. But in rating the claim true, CNN assumed facts it did not possess -- and that the study's author admitted he lacked.
During an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, Romney said that his tax proposal was "scored by people at Rice University as creating 7 million new jobs." What Romney omitted to say, however, is that John Diamond, the economist who conducted the Rice University study, had no way of truly scoring the plan.
As National Journal explained, Diamond "couldn't model the full Romney plan, because the Republican's campaign refuses to identify, even to him, which tax deductions and credits they would cut to make the plan revenue-neutral." The article continued:
"They didn't give me a whole lot of guidance," he said.
So Diamond filled in the blanks with largely generic assumptions and noted in his analysis that the specifics could change his results. He also assumed that Romney -- contrary to his stated campaign position -- would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and then impose his 20 percent across the board rate reduction from there.
Diamond's final conclusion was that Romney's reform would add 5.4 percentage points to projected gross domestic product growth over the next decade and would result in 6.8 million new jobs.
The Journal further noted that "Diamond didn't analyze how the plan would affect the distribution of the tax burden across income levels" but guessed that "it's not possible" to avoid raising taxes on lower- and middle-income Americans -- something Romney maintains he would not compromise on.
In his fact-check, CNN anchor John Berman noted that "Diamond says that since Romney does not make clear how he would pay for his plan, Diamond had to make certain assumptions and depending on what deductions and loopholes Romney closes, that could change the results."
Berman concluded, however:
BERMAN: Our verdict here is true with important qualifications on the claim that there is a study that says his plan would add 7 million jobs. It only adds 7 million according to the study if you assume certain details that Romney simply doesn't provide.
But the purpose of fact-checking isn't to assume what is true and what is false -- it is to evaluate factual statements based on relevant information and actual available details. But as Berman acknowledged, he did not have that evidence -- and Diamond has admitted he couldn't accurately score Romney's full plan.


text:
3773 Tree without leaves in field of canola acrylic wall art photo print
Acrylic wall art photography print - Tree without leaves in middle of a field of canola against blue sky near Boree Creek, New South Wales, Australia.
Collection:- Wall Art Prints, Agricultural Prints, Agricultural Images
Acrylic prints give photos an extra boost with a high gloss finish.
Manufactured with 6mm plexiglass acrylic, professional papers and inks for enhanced detail, and a 3mm composite backing.
The edges are diamond polished for a clean frameless finish.
Concealed aluminium hanging rails are fixed to the back of your print (top and bottom), allowing it to sit flush against the wall.
Professionally printed to-order by our printing partner Imagebank Australia, and dispatched 7-10 business days after order.
Size options:-
- 60x25cm (23.6x9.8in) - 1.9kg
- 90x38cm (35.4x15.0in) - 4.2kg
- 120x51cm (47.2x20.1in) - 7.6kg
- 150x64cm (59.1x25.2in) - 11.9kg
- 180x76cm (70.9x29.9in) - 17.0kg
- Australia: - Free shipping
- International:- A shipping charge is added to international orders on checkout. It does not include any customs duties and import taxes that may apply for some countries.
- Acrylic prints smaller than 90x50cm, and shipments less than 6.0 kg are sent via airmail.
- Acrylic prints larger than 90x50cm, and shipments more than 6.0 kg are sent via courier.
Other print options:- Gloss Photo Print, Fine Art Print
Purchase/download the digital stock image:- 3773D
All images are Copyright © Carl Chapman - All rights reserved.


text:
Get instant access to trustworthy and dependable information on Deborah Rhoades in Lemoore at USA-People-Search.com. Check out the list of people named Deborah Rhoades above who were once a resident or still living in Lemoore and their profiles to quickly locate the individual you're looking for.
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At least 269 people in eight states have been infected with a stomach illness since late June that has so far landed 10 people in the hospital.
The Center for Disease Control has yet to identify the source of cyclospora, a single-celled parasite that causes cyclosporiasis, an intestinal infection that causes diarrhea, stomach cramps, nausea and fatigue.
Cases have been confirmed in Iowa (127), Texas (65), Nebraska (68), Wisconsin (4), Georgia (2) and one each in Kansas, Illinois and Connecticut.
While cyclosporiasis is typically contracted by people living or traveling in the subtropics, or through produce imported from that part of the world, none of the infected have travelled internationally.
The CDC said it is cooperating with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to pinpoint the source of the outbreak, which is spread when people ingest food or water contaminated with feces. It was also unclear if the cases are all from the same outbreak.


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Share incentive schemes boost top executives' earnings
Senior executives in the UK's biggest companies have seen their average earnings go up by more than a quarter in the past year.
New research suggests the bosses of top firms made an average of £4m a year.
But Incomes Data Services, which compiled the figures, says pay and bonuses have hardly risen at all.
Instead the increase is due to a rise in value of long term incentive plans which have replaced cash bonuses.
The study looked at the earnings of directors of the 100 largest companies quoted on the London stock exchange, in the 12 months to June.
It showed that increases in basic pay and bonuses slowed almost to a halt - with pay rising in line with inflation, and bonuses falling.
However, earnings still increased by an average of 27%, largely due to the introduction of long term, share-based incentive plans for executives.
These plans - which are now used by 90% of top companies - are designed to match bonuses more closely to the return that shareholders make, says BBC business correspondent Jonty Bloom.
Compared to competitors
But since many started in the depths of the recession, executives have benefited as the stock market overall has bounced back, our correspondent adds.
Incomes Data Services said many executives were benefiting from the recent overall improvement in stock market performance.
It meant that the value of long term investment plans had risen to an average of £938,000 for directors, and to £1.6m for chief executives.
The study also pointed out that the plans were often calculated based on a firm's performance in comparison with its competitors, rather than its own performance history.
This meant that an executive might still be rewarded if the company's performance had deteriorated, as long as competitors had done worse.
Steve Tatton of Incomes Data Services said: "Whether a reaction to government pressure, shareholder concerns or a worse than expected business environment, it seems the brakes have been applied to the basic pay growth for FTSE 100 bosses.
"However, while shareholders will be pleased to see more traditional elements of pay seemingly slowing, these figures show that directors' earnings can still grow significantly as a result of a complex mix of incentives."


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Clippers beat Celtics 96-88 in Doc Rivers' return
Jamal Crawford hit a pair of 3-pointers 23 seconds apart to help
the Clippers pull away in the last 3 minutes and former Celtics
coach Doc Rivers won his first game back in Boston when Los Angeles
Article continues below ...
beat the Celtics 96-88 Wednesday night.
Crawford came off the bench to score 21 points and Chris Paul
had 22 points, nine assists and seven rebounds. Blake Griffin
scored 18 points for the Clippers, who won for the seventh time in
10 games.
Jeff Green scored 29 points against his former coach, who was
traded to Los Angeles last summer for a first-round draft pick.
Jordan Crawford had 20 points and nine assists, and Brandon Bass
had 17 points and 12 rebounds for the Celtics, who lost their
second in a row.


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Has anyone here apart from me played Parade? It's a simple, cute, yet original and maddeningly addictive little Alice-in-Wonderland-themed card game from a Japanese designer. Basically, there are 6 suits of cards, ranked from 0-10. You want to avoid collecting these cards where possible, as they score their face value against you at the end, unless you have the most or equal most cards in a suit, in which case they score 1 point against you each.
It just seems to me that the designer possibly missed a trick with this scoring system. Obviously there are interesting choices to be made in that it's better to collect 5 or 6 green cards rather than the green 7 or 8 on its own; but it still seems like it would have been much more interesting for the cards you have the most of to count positively in your favour. Then it would have been just like Hearts: you'd have had to keep an eye out for players trying to "shoot the moon", and it could often be better to tactically pick up a few cards than just avoid picking anything up as much as possible.
As it is, I feel mitigating your losses by picking up more cards in the same colours is semi-interesting, but being able to turn losses into positive points would have been really interesting - especially as the game can be brought to a premature end by any player having at least one card in each suit. But am I missing something? Would inverting the rules in this way ruin the balance of the game, for a reason such as, e.g., it being too easy to score a ton of points and end the game quickly?
If anyone has both played Parade and can provide some analysis/insight into why it's scored the way it is, I'd be very interested!


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Head Gasket oil leak at 60,000 miles - second engine
My 2003 Forester must be the worst one Subaru ever made. I had some repairs under warranty (faulty hose clamps, axle boot replacement, axle replacement, rebuilt engine due to piston slap). Now, at just 60,000 miles, of which about half is on the "new engine", my Subaru mechanic (not a dealer) told me today that I have a slight oil leakage on the passenger side head gasket. Last fall he noticed a bit of coolant leakage which was odd because I always had the "Subaru Superglue" - or coolant conditioner added to the coolant.
I'm not putting any money into this car. The catalytic converter has also kicked the can (and sounds about the same). So my decision is just to run this car until it quits.
Will I get a warning or will the engine suddenly die?
I'm not putting any money into this car. The catalytic converter has also kicked the can (and sounds about the same). So my decision is just to run this car until it quits.
Will I get a warning or will the engine suddenly die?
It depends on how thoroughly you neglect it. If you want it to go down in a blaze of glory, it sounds like you're on the right path.
I suspect that if your cat isn't working properly at that low mileage, you might have a slight internal coolant leak that has fouled the cat. If that's the case, ignoring it might mean you don't have too many more miles left.2014 Audi Q7 TDI, 2008 and 2013 Subaru Forester(s), 1969 Chevrolet C20 Pickup, 1969 Ford Econoline 100, 1976 Ford F250 Pickup0
I really don't want to deal with this engine anymore. So two choices, put another engine in from a higher mileage car, and replace the c.convertor or get what I can for it now, being honest of course, and look for a second hand Forester. There are lots of these around for sale so it's probably my best option. I have been keeping an eye out for a used Honda CRV but they are rare. So many used Foresters and no CRVs makes me a bit worried though. It used to be the other way around back when I bought my 2003 Forester new.0
Just out of curiousity, I called the Subaru dealer. $1,600 and they do both gaskets (even though only one is leaking) and give a one year warranty. An large independant garage that services only Subaru's will do just the one gasket, for $800, but give only 3 months warranty - with the added warning "that if you don't want problems then don't pick the 2.5L engine". As if there is a choice?0
jd_24 Posts: 92I'm getting both gaskets done + plugs and wires for about $1600 on our 2001 Outback with 200K miles. So your price seems reasonable. My mechanic told me I should do both gaskets. If I remember correctly its the driver side gasket that used to fail the most. The timing belt, front cam seal, and water pump were done a few months ago, so they get skipped this time.
The Subie dealer will change about another $1000 for a cat. converter if I remeber that repare estimate. A non-subaru cat will be cheaper.
Ask yourself this, "Can you find a semi-reliable car for under $3000?"
If we get another 2 to 3 years from it it will be worth it.0
I don't really want a semi-reliable car for under $3000. I would like a brand new Forester with a reliable engine - non turbo. Doesn't exist. I tried to trade in the Forester 4 years ago after the first engine replacement (rebuilt engine), for a brand new Impreza thinking that they had the 2.0L engine, but it also had 2.5L engine. So it made no sense to trade.
There really is no choice. The dealer tells me that as of the 2011 models the engine design has changed. But I heard all this before, when I purchased the 2003 Forester new.
I'm walking away this time.0
"... The dealer tells me that as of the 2011 models the engine design has changed. But I heard all this before, when I purchased the 2003 Forester new. ..."
There was no engine change in 2003. The EJ belt-driven SOHC engine was used in naturally aspirated Foresters essentially unchanged from 1999 to 2010.
But it is true that in 2011 naturally aspirated Foresters were given the new FB chain-driven DOHC engine. This a completely new design.
http://www.caranddriver.com/news/subaru-fb-series-engine-subaru-flat-four-engine- - - s
One interesting change is that the heads of the FB engine have their own separate coolant supply, that does not come from the block through the head gaskets. This will eliminate the head gasket leaks that were possible with the EJ design, and were especially common in your 2003 year.0
Sorry to hear you're still having problems with your car. As has been mentioned, Subaru is moving away from the older SOHC belt-driven EJ 4-cylinder engine to all-new FA and FB 4-cylinder engines, which are DOHC chain-driven engines.
The FA is a performance-oriented engine, first to be found in their new BRZ sports car (FA20).
The FB is more a mainstream engine, aimed at getting high gas mileage, especially so when combined with the new CVT transmission.
The FB20 engine is in the new Impreza; and the soon-to-be-released XV Crosstrek, an Outback-like version of the Impreza (see links), with a jacked up suspension and larger tires. The Impreza is rated for up to 36 mpg on the highway, the best of any AWD car; the XV Crosstrek a little lower.
The larger FB25 is in the Legacy, Outback and Forester models. It too gets improved gas mileage over the older EJ engine.
One especially nice feature of the new FA/FB-based engines is that the oil filter is now on the top of the engine, in the front, thus making oil changes a breeze.
I haven't heard of any problems with the new FB engines; but they are new, so only time will tell.
The larger FB25 is in the Legacy, Outback and Forester models.
Legacy/Outback does not get the FB25 'til MY2013.0
From the article on the Crosstrek:
"Power comes from the same 2.0-liter boxer four that's found in the standard Impreza, putting out 148 horsepower and mated to either a five-speed manual or Continuously Variable Transmission."
I know that when I wanted to trade in my Forester, there was no such thing as an Impreza with a 2.0L engine. In fact, when I checked, I found that the 2.0L engine was discontinued in the Impreza back in 2000.
I do know that in Europe they have different engines - lower hp but the good reliable ones. Not as power crazy over there I guess. So maybe the article is referencing the Japanese and European model Imprezas.
On another note, I found a really nice 2004 WRX Turbo that I am thinking about, although it's not really my style my research has found that the turbos do not have HG problems. A little old but probably better than sticking my neck out with new untried engine. Once burned........
I did try out a new Honda CRV - didn't like the drive too much. So it's off to an independant garage for a HG fix for $600 (for one only) that will gain me some search time.0
ateixeira Posts: 72,587the turbos do not have HG problems
Semi-closed deck block sure helps...0
So maybe the article is referencing the Japanese and European model Imprezas.
Nope, the 2012 U.S.-spec Impreza (non-WRX/STi) has the new FB20 (2.0L) engine.
While the FB20 in my '12 Sport Limited has less HP and torque than my '03 OB EJ25, it "feels" like it has more power. Of course CVT vs. 4EAT, and slightly less weight, helps a lot .0
The closed deck blocks of the turbocharged engines are a stout design that does not have head gasket issues, but you do have to watch out for past treatment of the vehicle. Many of the WRX and STi out there are run through the ringer more than a few times by their previous owner(s), so you could end up with a whole host of other problems.
A favorite tactic? Take an overused (abused?), highly modified WRX approaching its last leg, put it back to "stock," and try to pass it off to an unsuspecting buyer for top dollar. :sick:2014 Audi Q7 TDI, 2008 and 2013 Subaru Forester(s), 1969 Chevrolet C20 Pickup, 1969 Ford Econoline 100, 1976 Ford F250 Pickup0
I know. Just pointing out that the non-turbo EJ engines are about to be history.
Dave, how are you enjoying your new Impreza? Any regrets?
I'm enjoying my Sport Limited; now have ~850 miles.
* Pleased with power (compared to '03 OB 2.5L 4EAT)
* Loving the moonroof (haven't had one since my '86 VW Jetta GLi)
* Getting ~29 to 30 mpg on my commute (was getting ~23 to 24 mpg with '03 OB)
* Visibility is not that great (compared to '03 OB)
* I'm going to have to keep on my toes if I want to keep the front end in one piece (haven't had a car sit this low in years)
* I keep playing with the seat, but my back still gets sore ... I had no idea there was no lumbar support0
Can relate to the sore back, as I have lower back problems. I keep the heated seats on almost year-round, which helps. My WRX has no lumbar adjustment too, but I find the seats pretty comfortable and supportive. Still love the bun warmers...
subiduby Posts: 1I just paid 1400 for the whole cat sensor array and pressure manifold sensor. Now i have to take it back in for the head gaskets at 97000 miles. I've kept my car in like new condition so the whole car looks great, but the engine is another story. Rear linkage is also out, the dealer quoted me 2400 dollars for the headgasket replacement, and 180 bucks for the rear linkage. Ive been the sole owner of this 2003 X model, since May i will have put 4k in repairs in the car. My advice, dump the car and move on.0
That engine is an insult to an otherwise great car. It's sad....our family had 5 Foresters all at the same time. The only ones without head gasket problems were the 2002 (so far!!) and a 1999. Do the math...that's 60% with HG problems!! I still have the 2003 with the replaced head gaskets. One Forester was replaced with a Volvo and the other with a Honda. We love the cars but are so reluctant to have to deal with this engine again that we are waiting (forever?) for a new model to come out with maybe a 2.2l engine instead of the 2.5l0
"... we are waiting (forever?) for a new model to come out with maybe a 2.2l engine instead of the 2.5l."
Your wait was over with the 2011 FB 2.5L engine in the Forester, and the 2012 FB 2.0L engine in the Impreza. New head design, with separate cooling, no more coolant passing through the head gasket.0


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Dempsey set to leave England, move to MLS
LONDON (AP) -- Clint Dempsey is returning to Major League Soccer, ending his six-year spell in English soccer.
The 30-year-old Dempsey played for the New England Revolution from 2004-06 before joining Fulham in 2007. He moved to Tottenham last summer and scored 12 goals in 43 games, but wasn't a regular.
"We have reached agreement with Major League Soccer for the transfer of Clint Dempsey," Spurs said in a statement Saturday. "We wish Clint every success for the future."
Tottenham didn't say what team Dempsey was going to, but reports had him linked to the Seattle Sounders. The Sounders cleared one of their three designated player slots earlier this week when midfielder Shalrie Joseph restructured his contract to no longer be counted as a designated player.
The team website also asked fans to arrive 15 minutes early to Saturday night's game against FC Dallas for what the club called a "special presentation."
Dempsey raved about Seattle when the city hosted the U.S. against Panama in a World Cup qualifier in June.
"It's great to see the game is building and there are markets like this where people have so much passion for the game," he said.
A star for the U.S. national team, Dempsey wasn't a regular in Andre Villas-Boas' starting lineup. Even so, his move is somewhat surprising because Tottenham could also lose forward Gareth Bale this offseason to Real Madrid.
One of the most successful Americans to play in England's top league, Dempsey was first sold from the Revolution to Fulham in 2007. Dempsey spent five years playing at Craven Cottage, where he scored 50 goals in 184 league appearances and became a fan favorite. Last year with Tottenham, Dempsey scored seven goals in 29 Premier League matches, scored three times in two FA Cup matches and had two more goals in 10 other games.
As his stock in Europe rose, so did Dempsey's role on his national team. He's played in eight games in 2013 for the United States and scored five times. His next international appearance for the Americans will be his 100th, and he's served as the U.S. captain most of this year when Landon Donovan was out.
Dempsey came to England as an attacking midfielder but has developed into a potent forward in recent seasons, starting up front for the U.S. too.


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Lens on the IRONMAN Village
by Jennifer Ward Barber
The IRONMAN Partner Village is one of the most popular places in town to spend an afternoon. The oceanside park is transformed on Tuesday night after the Parade of Nations into a destination. Every year the expo grows larger than the last, despite being bordered rather closely by the ocean on one side, and Ali'i drive on the other. Booths have popped up across the street in recent years, and down by Uncle Billy's Hotel. Even if you're just out for a stroll or to grab lunch, it's hard not to get lulled into the bustle of the expo—and even harder not to leave with a new pair of socks. This year even featured a food truck with an emphasis on healthy, locally grown food.
The expo is, in a sense, a glimpse into the changing patterns and evolving potential of IRONMAN triathlon. The "voice of the expo," announcer Eric Gilsenan, has been hosting the IRONMAN Village for 10 years, and says that he's noticed more women and more families. On top of that, there's the issue of numbers. Gilsenan, a 20-year Kona attendee, said he's never seen this much traffic. On Thursday or Friday night, maybe, but never on Monday and Tuesday, like this year. And with car traffic comes foot traffic. "They go hand in hand. There's just more people here."
Part of the explanation for why the expo has grown so exponentially is Kona competitors' tendency to bring larger support crews. Says Gilsenan: "Ten years ago, when I drove Scott Tinley to the airport, he said it used to be one spectator for every athlete, now it's 10 to one. These daysI think it's gone up to 15 or 20 to one! This is the largest expo we've ever had."
Beyond discovering new products, there's also an educational aspect of the expo as well. Some of the companies that Gilsenan hosted on stage included Biestmilch, TYR, Newton, On Running, LifeProof, SkinStrong, GU, Bonk Breaker, Powerbar, Melanoma Foundation, and Computrainer. In addition to product information, professional athletes gave signings, the IRONMAN Foundation athletes put on a panel discussion, and World Bicycle Relief discussed their efforts. Gilsenan said most of the presentations were very popular.
"I think promoting products on the stage is important," Gilsenan adds. "Some people will not approach a booth. But if they hear something, or hear a name at a booth, they'll go and ask for that person and feel a little less intimidated. Everyone wants to be accepted and feel comfortable."
Having worked with a number of companies in the past (Powerbar, Cytomax, and GU), Gilsenan intimately understands the investments sponsors make in our sport. He understands the dynamics at play in the expo—from the return on investment, to the athlete experience to growing the sport and diversity. "The 30-year-old male is strong in our sport," he said. "I want to see more women, more kids, more First Nations involved. It's just good for our sport."
As for his own part in making the expo successful, Gilsenan said he considers it an ambassador-type role. "It's almost like being in radio," he says. "I just want people to feel part of this great sport and this great week."


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About Me
- Shandi
- Washington, DC, United States
- I'm Shandi. I hope you like it here. I don't say much with words...but instead I speak to you with music, images, and by showing you everything i love in art and fashion. if you follow me, i will follow back and we can feed off of eachother. i love comments and feedback. thank you for coming. please stay.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
It Will Never Fail You
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Feb. 12, 2003 — "Way Up There," a NASA theme song written to celebrate the Wright Brothers centennial, also serves as a memorial to space flight and the shuttle Columbia's astronauts. Listen to Patti LaBelle's performance of the song during a Feb. 6 memorial service at Washington National Cathedral.
© 2013 msnbc.com Reprints


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"I wouldn't do that if I were you," she told me the first time we met. Six years old, I was digging under a log, looking for worms. This was back when my father still had all his property, and I could walk for the whole afternoon without leaving his orange groves. I spent a lot of time amusing myself that way, making up games, inventing friends to play with, since I really had none of my own, or looking for buried treasure. My sisters were all much older and hated to have me underfoot, so they'd draw fake maps, age them by beating them in the sand with a baseball bat and burning them around the edges, then send me off on quests. I fell for this sort of thing for years.
She was sitting in a tree, gently tapping an orange that hung near her face, making it swing. My imaginary friends were not the kind you could see. I figured her for a smart-aleck picker's daughter, since it was nearing the end of the season and the groves were full of Guatemalans. She wore a sleeveless yellow dress with a furry kitten face on the front—I remember that very clearly, and remember wondering later how, if she didn't exist, I could have made that up. Her skin was very dark. Her hair hung past her lap. She looked to be about my age. I ignored her.
Lifting the log up, I disturbed a nest of yellow jackets, which flew out, stinging my face and my neck and my hands. I could see her watching me while I slapped at them and yelled and cried. She said nothing but stood up on the branch and spread her wings out behind her, which amazed and frightened me. I tried to run home but could hardly breathe. I found a group of pickers having their lunch in the grass, and collapsed in front of them, swollen and squeaking.
She came to see me in the hospital. High on I.V. Benadryl, I told anyone who would listen that there was an angel in the room, and the doctors and nurses found that charming. Even back then I was a quick and subtle thinker when I was stoned, and by the time my father asked me about it I had figured out that it would be best to pretend not to know what he was talking about. But when we were alone, and she stood silently at the foot of my bed, looking strange not just on account of the wings but because she was dressed as a doctor, with a white coat and a stethoscope and her hair done up in a smart bun, I asked her why she hadn't warned me about the wasps. "I'm not that kind of angel," she said.
Though my father only ever knew a tenth of the trouble I've been in, I was still his least favorite child, and the last person he wanted taking care of him when he got very ill. But every one of my sisters was pregnant—one very much augmented and on purpose, and the other two accidents of fate. How they celebrated the coincidence, and then rued it when it forced them to bully me back to Florida from San Francisco. I was in clinic when they called, and it's a testament to their power-of-three invincibility that they were able to blow through the phone tree and the two receptionists who routinely deny my existence when patients try to find me.
"Dad is sick," Charlotte said.
"He's been sick," I said, because this had been going on for a year, and though nobody gets better from metastatic small-cell lung cancer, he'd been holding his own for months and months.
"Dad is sicker," Christine said, and Carmen added, "Much sicker!" She is the eldest and the (barely) most pregnant.
"He's in the hospital," Christine said. "There's an infection."
"In his bladder," Charlotte said. There are two years between each of them, but they've always seemed like triplets, all with their furrowed brows and disapproving hatchet mouths, all as tall and fair as I am short and dark, all with the same blue eyes that seem just the right color for staring a person down. My eyes, like my father's, are nearly black, and Carmen says I can hide anything in them.
"A little cystitis," I said. "So what?"
"Dr. Klar says he's very ill," Christine said.
"She doesn't know if he'll come out of the hospital," Charlotte said.
"She always says that," I said. "She never knows. She's an alarmist. She's a worrier."
"You have to go!" they said all together.
"You have to go," I said. "You go, if it matters so much."
"We're pregnant!" they said. And then the individual excuses: mild preëclampsia for Charlotte and Christine and a clotty calf for Carmen. They can't travel from New York, where they live within waddling distance of one another.
"People travel when they're eight months pregnant," I said. "People do it all the time!" Though I knew that they didn't, and now the angel was sitting on my desk and shaking her head at me.
"You're a doctor," they said, as if that should settle it, and I wanted to say that I'm impaired, and a pediatrician to boot. I could have confessed right then, to them and to the whole world—I am an impaired physician—and then started down the yellow brick road to rehab.
Instead, I quietly hung up on them. The angel was still shaking her head. She was dressed to shock, in a filthy housedress, with a plastic shopping bag on her head and a dead cat wrapped around each foot.
"I barely know him!" I shouted at her, but she didn't respond. Then I told her I had a patient waiting, which she already knew, because there is nothing I've ever been able to hide from her.
"Put that lady and her evil children behind you," she said, not looking up as I swept by her. She did not like Mrs. Fontaine for the obvious reason, but what she had against her two kids I could not figure out, though she has always done that—pointed out the ones that would grow into car thieves or lottery fixers or murderers, as if I were supposed to smother them with the great pillow of righteous prevention when they were six months old.
The Fontaines were waiting patiently in the exam room, Zebadiah splashing in the sink while his mother fed his sister and his aunt read Highlights. I locked the door, and Zebadiah toddled over to check it, an innocent part of our enterprise. "Baby," Mrs. Fontaine said, meaning me and not her son, "how you been?"
"It's been a rough day," I said.
"Well, your friend has got just the thing for a rough day," she said, and took a little foil-covered package from her diaper bag and laid it on the counter near the sink, and that is all we said about it, because one of our terms of business is a nearly silent sort of discretion. I put down my envelope and she took it, and when her package was in my pocket we talked about her babies.
I examined Zebadiah and then his sister Lily, who was four months old, fat and happy and singing wordlessly as I listened to her heart and fiddled with her hips. The angel paced in the confines of the room, the cats going squish and squash as she stepped, and Lily seemed to be watching her. "A fire from Heaven should come down right now," the angel said. Though the medicine was only in my pocket, just having it in my possession made it easier to ignore her.
"She's beautiful," I said to Mrs. Fontaine.
"She's all right," she said, ducking her head and smiling, and her sister reached out to take the baby and hold her for a moment and proclaim that she was indeed a beautiful girl, and then she handed her to her mother, who handed her to me, and then, without knowing why, I handed her back to the sister. Sometimes it happens like that, something entirely bearable, the baby smiling and laughing and going round and round, from hand to hand to hand, and her brother shouting "I'm beautiful, too!" and lifting his arms to be picked up, and all five of us laughing while the angel scowled impotently. I wanted it to go on forever.
"Does everybody get an angel?" I asked her one day, about a month after I met her, when it finally occurred to me to wonder if every boy and girl had a guiding spirit that was invisible to me. I looked around my first-grade class, squinting to see them, the girls in plaid jumpers, the boys in blue pants, looking so ordinary except for their immaculate posture and drooping folded wings.
"Only the ones who will be great or do great things. And sometimes being great is enough. The great things go out, generated as easily as thought or love. Do you understand?"
I cannot describe how gentle her voice could be in those days.
"No," I said. So when we got home she took me into my father's library, ignoring my pleas not to enter without his permission, and sat me down in front of the encyclopedia. I opened a volume at random, and she marked with her finger the men and women who had warranted an angel to guide them into their greatness. There were fewer than I'd expected, and as many who were greatly bad as greatly good. I flipped backward through the "A"s, familiar with only one in ten of the names she touched, making the letters shine in a way I could see forever after. Attila I knew, having just heard of him in history class, and taken part in a little skit for which I dressed up in my mother's furs and shouted in front of the class with five other boys and the girl whose long black hair had landed her the part of the Hun. "But he was bad," I said, and she said that not everybody listened to his angel.
In medical school, I could not wait to get away from adult hospitals and adult medicines and adult patients, from their aching lower backs and chronic depression and get-me-out-of-work-related injuries. I hated especially the little old ladies with their parchment faces and frail broken hearts, who'd die if you so much as frowned at them. Even a half-dead preemie is more resilient. And I hated the smell—children are not so smelly to begin with, and as they get sick or die they do not give off that odor that fills up adult hospitals and blows out of the angel's wings when she shakes them in agitation. It always seemed to cling to me after a particularly egregious fuckup in medical school, so for days afterward, just by sniffing my fingers, I'd be reminded of how I had almost killed this or that poor old zombie with my bad math.
The angel seemed to like the hospital where my father was staying, but then she enjoyed death, or at least it seemed to excite her. She was always making a show of smelling people and predicting the hour of their demise. It became the only thing I was good at, distinguishing the really sick ones in the midst of the confusing daily crowd of patients that were presented to me as a student and then as a resident, though I never could remember how to save them. As we entered my father's Florida hospital, she had a spring in her step, and though she was dressed as a bag lady once again, she'd exchanged her cats for tissue boxes and shined her wings and put on an elegant, if very dirty, hat. To her mind, I was doing the right thing, and so she had taken it easy on me during the trip, and now she bounced along like a schoolgirl. I think she would have been happier only if I had killed myself.
The nurses did not look up when I walked past their station to the end of the hall where my father had his room, or when I hurried by in the opposite direction, fleeing from him. "Here he is," the angel said when I walked in—she'd run ahead the last few feet and passed through the wall. She gestured toward him as if he were a new car or a sexy motorcycle in a showroom. When I'd last seen him, he was the same dour black-eyed man I'd known all my life, my six-foot-four, imperious, responsible reflection, a man who I always knew should have had an angel of his own. Now he was laid out diapered in a filthy bed, as bald and toothless and somehow as grand as Aslan on his table. He looked up at me when I walked in and said by way of greeting "You!" and managed to invest the word with equal measures of disappointment, accusation, and surprise. I dropped my book and candy box and ran out.
Some nights as a resident, I would withdraw into the bathroom and leave the intern to flounder and drown, later claiming that I'd never got the frantic pages when in fact I had turned off my pager and was sitting on the toilet with my face in my hands or taking little hits of whatever I was really into that month. There was a bathroom near the elevator on my father's floor of the hospital, a nice one-person arrangement with a lock on the door.
The angel was there in just a few moments—I never know what delays her, when she can travel at the speed of guilt and sometimes seems to be everywhere at once. She berated me while I hid my face, her voice making the little room seem very full, all the "What do you think you're doing?"s and "You get back there"s seeming to bounce off the white walls in discrete packages of sound. I am not this sort of doctor, I said to my hands. I am not any sort of doctor and I don't know what to do about what's back there in that room. And she said that even if you are the sort of doctor who doesn't know anything about medicine, and even if you passed your certifying exams only because you paid a certain Dr. Gupta to bypass the pathetic security measures taken against cheats and impostors by the American Board of Pediatrics, you can still recognize a patient at the extremes of abandonment and grief, and even you can do the smallest human thing to improve his lot.
In answer, I gave her a little toot. Not Mrs. Fontaine but another supplier, someone who had been a sort of girlfriend, though only snortable heroin had brought us together, had had a little horn on her key chain which she would bring out in the face of any sort of adversity—a flat tire or a broken foot or syphilis, syphilis being a two-toot trouble. "Toot them away!" she'd say, and laugh really quite innocently. She was beaten by a boyfriend more passionate but less gentle than me, and died one night in the E.R. at the General Hospital while I was on duty seeing children. I recognized her worked-over corpse when I went into the trauma room to fetch a warm blanket for a cold baby.
With just the smallest hit the angel changed. She'd barely warned me not to do it before she was stretching and shaking her wings, and there was that awful stench for a moment, and then there was another odor, fresh grass and cookies and new snow on the sidewalk. And she cast off her haggery with a few shakes of her head, her eyes bright now but not icy like my sisters', and with several sweeps of her fingers—it's always as if she were primping for me—she combed the tangles out of her hair. Three times she shook her hips and the housedress became a lovely blue sari, and her pretty feet were naked.
"Take that!" I stuttered at her.
"Better have another," she said, and I did. Then she stood in front of me with her hands on my shoulders, steadying them while they shook. It wasn't the first time that I'd felt as if I were flying backward: the toilet was a vessel in the air propelled by weeping, and with her hands she was steering me.
"Do I have to go back there?" I asked her, when I was feeling better.
"Not yet, my love," she said. "Not until you are good and ready."
When I was a child, she was always good, but this is not to say that she was never awful. Though many days she was so ordinary a tagalong that I hardly thought of her as an angel, every so often she would put on such majesty that it made me cower. One day in fifth grade, I was half listening to Mrs. Khemlani's talk about cowboys and Indians. "History always moves west," Mrs. Khemlani said, because that was one of the truisms she announced at the beginning of the semester, and she liked to point out how right she was about things at some point in every lesson. Books will always be burned, she said, and women are always second-class citizens, and history from the dawn of time has always swept in a westward circle around the globe.
I was daydreaming about Chinese ladies and their very small feet, about which we'd just been learning in social studies. I was fascinated by the pictures we'd seen, and had held on to the little cardboard shoe I'd made, though it was supposed to be drying on the windowsill with the others, so that I could turn it over and over in my hand. The angel was done up that day in the dress and skin of a Chinese girl—sometimes her form obliged my fancy, though I knew I could not control it, having tried to make her take on the shape of a dog or a corncob by staring at her and concentrating until she told me to stop it.
On little feet, crippled feet, she hobbled up to the front of the class when she heard Mrs. Khemlani talking about the grand sweep of history, a look on her face that I had learned to associate with anger over something stupid she'd just heard. I was used to getting lectures that no one else could hear, or having her place a hand on a book I was reading to say, "Listen, it was not so."
"Once, the most important city in the world was Nanking," Mrs. Khemlani was saying. "Then it was Athens and then it was Rome. Later it was Vienna and after that it was Paris and then London and then Boston and then New York. But, look here, now San Francisco is becoming most important, and where will it be after that? My husband says outer space, because he is an engineer and has a very scientific mind, but I say west, and so back to the East!"
Cindy Hacklight, my neighbor across the aisle, asked what this had to do with cowboys or Indians, but Mrs. Khemlani's response was drowned out for me by the angel's voice.
"Not so!" she shouted, stamping her foot at the head of the class, standing behind Mrs. Khemlani and growing out of her child's form. It was the first time I'd ever seen her in the guise of an adult, and she made herself huge. Her head scraped the ceiling and her wings spread from one end of the class to the other. "Not west!" she said, and pictures started to flash in her wings, men whispering in dark rooms, and soldiers at war, and tanks rolling through villages as they did in old newsreels, and people sitting quietly together. She had stopped saying words but her wings were certainly speaking to me, images were blazing out of the white depths and, more than that, feelings were radiating off them, so that I knew sadness and joy and rage and sourceless love together and in succession, the images and feelings a speech through which she communicated to me the true sweep of history. "It's toward you!" she said, unnecessarily, because she had already made me see myself as riding an enormous tide. Sitting at my desk, I could feel the relentless pressure of history under my feet, pushing me up through some mysterious medium toward a goal I could not describe except by its brightness, but I could see it in that moment very clearly. I leaped up from my desk, dropping my little torture shoe, and threw my hands above my head and gave my best up-with-people "Hooray!" I was eleven years old and thought I understood what the angel had in store for me, and felt sufficient to it in a way I can't comprehend now.
"Yes," said Mrs. Khemlani, who thought I was applauding her theory. "Hooray! Hooray for history!"
Better to be a garbageman than a doctor when your father gets sick. If I were a tree surgeon or a schoolteacher or a truffle-snuffler, or even a plain old junkie, then sickness would just be sickness, something to be borne and not something I was supposed to be able to defeat. For months, my sisters had wheedled me into meddling telephone consultations with my father's doctors, and I had pretended to understand what they were saying, and offered ungrounded opinions to them and to my sisters and my father. Even if I hadn't cheated my way through medical school, the task of recalling whatever I'd learned of pathology in my second year would have been beyond me. I make my living praising the beauty of well children. I love babies and I love ketamine, and that's really why I became a pediatrician, not because I hate illness or wanted to make anybody better, or believed that I could.
But nobody deducts the credit I deserve for being impaired and a fake. The doctors hear that you are a doctor and they enlist you in their hopeless task, forking over the greater portion of the guilt that is packaged with that hopeless task. The nurses hear that you are a doctor and immediately hate you for judging their work.
As it became more and more obvious day by day that my father was going to die, the angel, who has catalogued my every failing and should have known better, berated me for failing to save his life. It was the least I could do, she told me, because even this miracle is nothing compared with what I was supposed to grow up to achieve. And if I could do this then everything else would turn around. It was the first hope, besides death, she'd offered in a long time.
"He is not an enemy you can outwit," Mrs. Scott, one of my father's Tuesday chemotherapy buddies, said. He had got out of the hospital a week after I arrived home, and for another month I brought him back every week for his infusions. He would fall asleep during the infusion, and leave me alone to talk to her. He had told me that he hated the way she whored after hope—every week something else was going to save her life—and I'd have thought he was faking it just to escape her if I hadn't known firsthand the beautiful thick sleep that I.V. Benadryl can bring. Every session, she began by telling him about her latest discovery in the pages of Prevention or Ayurvedic Weekly or High Colonic Fancy, and five minutes into it he'd tell her that he felt oblivion pressing on his face, and five minutes after that his chin was on his chest and he was snoring more softly than he does in natural slumber. And, because I could not shut her up, I always suggested a game of checkers or cards or backgammon. Dr. Klar's infusion salon was packed with those sorts of diversions.
Most often, we played chess, a game that usually generated a lot of thoughtful silence—she'd put a finger to her temple and stare so hard at the board that I expected it to start vibrating in sympathy—but today she was distracted and a little agitated, maybe because she was getting steroids, or maybe because my angel was sitting so close to her, and despite her optimism she was getting sicker from week to week, and I swear that as they get closer to death people can start to feel the angel's ugly emanations.
"It's not a game of chess, you know," she continued, when I said nothing. "I think I just fully understood that right now."
"What's that?"
"You know," she said, putting her hand on her chest. Like my father, she had lung cancer. "Oncoloqatsi," she whispered. That was the name she had assigned to her disease, and she always whispered it, as if to speak his name too loud would be to summon strength to him.
"Oh, him," I said.
"I know it suggests a game, how you move and then he moves—you pick a chemo and he counters with a mutation, or you find the perfect herb to overcome him and he produces another measure of resistance, and the doctors play the game from organ to organ until your whole body is a board. They even doodle you up like one." She pulled down the neck of her blouse to show a piece of skin below her collarbone—it was just a cross to mark a target for radiation. "But this is only the surface. Look deeper, like I have, and you will see the truth."
"I think I've got you," I said, moving my bishop illegally. She didn't even look down.
"How often have I heard that from him? But he never has got me, and it's not because of my disciplined mind. It's because I have learned to resist him in the very marrow of my being. The very marrow, Doctor. It's not a lesson you would have learned in school, but I want you to learn it. I want your father to learn it. I have disciplined my soul against this enemy, and he must do it, too."
The angel sidled closer while Mrs. Scott was talking. She leaned over and took a sniff of the lady's turbaned head. "Three weeks," she said. And then she put her nose close to the shining skin of my father's forehead—every day his skin seemed to get a little thinner or stretch a little tighter, until I was sure that just the faintest rubbing pressure would reveal the dull white bone underneath—and said the same thing.
"Shut up!" I told her.
"It's hard to hear," Mrs. Scott said. "I know it's not your common wisdom, but you don't have to be rude." Dr. Klar came in before I could answer or apologize.
"Hallo, everybody!" she called out. Thirty years in southeast Florida had not dulled her accent much. This appealed to my father, who liked the fact that she was German, order and discipline having always added up to success in his life. Just being in sight of her immaculate white coat I felt accused of slovenliness and failure. "Here is the grandma of your better nature," the angel said the first time she saw her.
My father woke at the sound of her voice and smiled at her. "Charlotte?" he said. Soon after I took him home from the hospital, he started mistaking people and places, thinking that a nurse or some solicitous church lady was one of my sisters, or thinking that he was in his childhood home, in Chicago, calling out for a dog who had died sixty years ago. Me he never mistook for anyone else, though he often seemed surprised to see me. "Still here?" he said some mornings.
"It's Dr. Klar!" she said brightly. She said everything brightly, even things like "What's the use?" or "If he's alive in a month it will be a miracle." She was one of those oncologists who speak life out of one side of their mouth and death out of the other. For my father she had only good news, for me only bad.
"Darling," my father said, closing his eyes again and still smiling. "When is the baby coming?"
"Soon," she said. "The baby is fine. Everything is fine!" She reached out to pat his shoulder, but I caught her hand.
"The bad shoulder," I said. He had metastases all over his body, but his shoulder and his back bothered him the most. He nodded his head and fell back asleep.
"How is the pain, then?"
"Worse. And we're out of Percocet. He's out of Percocet."
"Easy enough to fix," she said.
"An ounce of meditation is worth a pound of Percocet," Mrs. Scott said.
"In certain traditions!" Dr. Klar said brightly, then she beckoned me out into the hall. "I think it's time to stop," she said.
"Stop what?"
"Stop hiding!" the angel shouted.
"Stop the chemo," Dr. Klar said. We had this conversation every week. "What are we doing? What good is coming of it? Why are you coming here every week, when he could be at home?"
"He doesn't want to stop. He wants to keep going."
"Just put out your hand to him and he will be healed," the angel said. "Just put out your hand to him and you will undo all the pain you've caused me."
"Does he know what he wants?" Dr. Klar asked.
"He's always confused here. You keep it too cold. And the Benadryl before the infusion makes him sleepy."
"Carl," she said, putting her hand on my shoulder the same way she did with him, comfort for someone who is already dead. "It really is getting to be time."
And the angel said, "It has always been time!"
Things started to go wrong between the angel and me after Cindy Hacklight showed me her pooty in seventh grade. Cindy had made a sort of cottage industry of showing her pooty to anyone—girl or boy—who would give her five dollars, a large sum back then, before high-school inflation. You got the sense that she didn't really care about the money but understood that what she had wasn't something to show for free.
"Go not that way," the angel said. She saved onerous fancy-speak like that for her most serious moments, for things she really meant, for things that really mattered. But I went with Cindy into the woods behind the gym, where she leaned against a narrow poplar and swore me not to secrecy but to respect for what she was about to show me. It was the one promise I've managed to keep all my life—I maintained my reverence for her bald little pooty then, in seventh grade, and ever after, even when I met it again one summer when we were both home from college. "Turn your face!" the angel shouted as Cindy lifted her skirt. And the angel was ugly for the first time, having put on the apricot face of our headmistress, Ms. Carnegie. I looked back and forth between them, startled by the contrast, how beautiful was the one and how ugly the other, until Cindy, holding her skirt up with one hand, put the other on my head and turned my face to her. "If you're going to respect it, you've got to look at it," she said.
The angel berated me for days afterward—how mild it seems in retrospect, compared with what she dished out in later years. "How is a seducing pooty like a grand destiny?" she kept asking me, and then she'd answer her own question, and eventually she trained me to give the right answer. "Exactly not at all," I said. Yet awakening lust wasn't the problem, though eventually the lust that had awakened made me a monster and a fiend, and I would waste, and still waste, half my life in thrall to it, screwing whoever would hold still for me in high school and forever beyond, to the exclusion of work and food and sleep, though never drugs. I think it was the first time that something so ordinary had been as attractive to me as the extraordinary things the angel said I must dedicate myself to. When I lay with Cindy on the scented ground in my father's orange groves, what I experienced was a very ordinary comfort, and when she raised her skirt in the woods I understood that I could want—so badly—something the angel thought I shouldn't.
My father had a little bell that he rang when he wanted something. Mornings, I would hear it and rise from the single bed I'd slept in when I was a boy, and go downstairs to see what he wanted. At first, after he came home, it was to be helped out into the yard to sit in the sun, and then it was coffee or breakfast when he could not get those for himself, and then it was just to be turned or to retrieve a blanket that had migrated past his hips, and then finally he would just ring it and ring it as constantly as a beggar Santa, not knowing what he wanted, in which case I gave him a pain pill (and took one myself, always supremely faithful to my rigorous policy of one for you and one for me), and that would settle him.
Janie Finn was our hospice nurse. I always hated hospice and hospice people, nurses with smart heels and smother pillows, and the women in charge of the palliative-care programs, who seemed universally to be dark-eyed and dark-haired and very tall. They dressed like nineteenth-century Jesuits and cherished their crushes on death. But Janie brought me liquid morphine and Ativan—and either of those would be enough to make me forgive anybody a mere crime of being. "Your jab and your hook," she said in the kitchen the day she met us. She had placed the bottles in my hand. I hadn't even had any yet and already I could feel a lovely warmth coming out of them; they seemed to catch the afternoon light in a very special way. Janie set her feet and threw out two quick punches. "A one-two against the pain," she said. "One-two! Give it a try." With a bottle in each hand, I gave it a try, and, yes, my fists seemed to have a certain heft to them. I threw a punch at the angel and she actually ducked.
I made a lot of trips back and forth to the pharmacy, and imagined the little man in the back filling the bottles from two big coolers of bright, pure drug, and dreamed of following him back there to put my mouth to the spigots, because I was sure that if I could just ingest enough then the angel would be permanently transformed—and if it happened also to be enough to kill me, so be it. I was sure that she would take me someplace bearable. How she hated those little bottles.
"Just put out your hand," the angel kept telling me. "Touch him and make him well." Though she had hardly screeched at me in those last few days, it seemed like an even worse torture to have her demand the impossible of me so consistently, and to blame me for the fact that my father was getting sicker every day. It made me feel worse than anything she'd ever said to me. I could not ignore a homeless person on the street without her detailing the ways in which I was responsible for his misery, all those missing policies and initiatives, as if the hundred thousand sins of omission that were my unfulfilled destiny added up to national as well as individual catastrophe. It was easier to bear when she blamed me for the woes of strangers, even when those strangers fell out of the sky or burned in their churches. I could make little children faceless, but my father could never be anonymous to me, and as the weeks went by in Florida I believed her more than ever when she told me that every wrong thing I'd done could be redeemed in a single miracle, and that if I could make my father well with one hand then with the other I could do the same for the whole world.
"Make me dinner," my father said, so I did. It was only three in the afternoon, but no matter what time of day it was, the meal was always dinner, and dinner was always the same thing: a chocolate milkshake with a banana and a raw egg and a little Ativan in it. When I brought it to him, he took a sip and he was done. He turned his head and opened his mouth like a baby bird—this was the signal for pain medication, so I took the morphine out of my pocket and squeezed in a few drops. He smacked his lips and turned back to the television, then closed his eyes. "Now I'll take a nap," he said. "Go to your room."
I went outside instead. It was another brilliant blue afternoon. He kept saying he wanted a storm. We mostly watched television when he could stand to have me in the living room with him, and we always watched the weather. It was hurricane season, but all we'd had was near-misses. "Look at that!" he'd say, pointing at a gigantic storm swirling across the Atlantic, or he would shout "Fool!" at the hapless reporters clinging to light poles and declaiming the magnificently obvious. Hurricanes had been the enemy when I was a child—they tore up our trees and scattered the fruit. But now he spoke the names of the female hurricanes with great fondness.
Our nearest neighbor was a mile away, so nobody asked what I was doing when I hung the hurricane shutters on the living-room and kitchen windows, and my father asked no questions from inside. He slept so heavily now that a few times I thought he had already died. I nozzled up the hose and propped it so that it would spray on the shutters, and at dusk I turned it on. The angel was half ugly and half kind, because I was half stoned. "You play tricks on him when you should be calling him out of his bed."
"It's not a trick," I said. I spent another few moments watching the sky and taking just the smallest nip of morphine and then went in. When I came into the living room with a candle, he asked what was going on. "A big storm," I said.
"Finally!" he said.
We had a party during the storm, two more dinners and Ativan and morphine all around, and he was more alert for a while, telling me stories of hurricanes past, of ruined crops and toddlers surviving miraculously when a tornado stole them from their homes and deposited them in the next county.
"I know you have secrets," he said suddenly. And then he said, "Your sister tried to drown you when you were two—do you remember?"
"No," I said, and asked him to tell me more. But then he thought I was my sister Carmen.
"How could you hurt a little baby like that?" he asked, and I said I'd done a lot of bad things.
"Tell me about it!" the angel said. I took another drop of morphine, right in front of my father, because his eyes were closed, but then as if he could smell it he opened his mouth, so I gave him some, too. And then I took some more, and gave him some more, and then switched to the Ativan. But still the angel was a harpy. "Put out your hand!" she said. "Another angel is coming!"
"It's all right," my father said. And then he whispered, "Your mother tried to smother him once. Just a little, with a blanket, and she told me about it right away. But she was depressed, and that's what you do when you're depressed."
"If you were a great man," the angel said, slurring now, "if you were President—and you could have been President—then I would be a national conscience!"
"Shut up," I said quietly to her, thinking that I had pitched my voice so that she'd hear it and he would not.
"Don't tell me to shut up, sassy girl!" he said, and I gave him some more morphine. Though he hadn't asked for it, he sucked at the dropper when I put it in his mouth.
"You can do it," she said, her face flashing beautiful for a moment. And she showed me how, putting out a hand that was soft and white on one side and hairy and rough on the other. She held it over his chest. "All you have to do is finally stop fucking up."
"You're ruining it," I told her, and took a swig of the Ativan, just a nip, really, but you are supposed to take it drop by drop and I knew why as soon as I took the swig. It was too good, and it made everything too beautiful, not just the angel, whose ugly skin flew off as if blown by a real hurricane, so that her wings were clean again and her naked face and body were open and compassionate. Even my father's face became beautiful, still yellow and sunken but now utterly lovely, and how strange to see a beautiful face that looked so much like my own. The room shone with something that was not light, and there really was a thrilling storm blowing outside and shaking the walls. Every so often, he would reach blindly for something not there in front of him, and he did this now, so I reached with him, and the angel reached, too, all three of us reaching out our hands together.
"You have to be ready at any time to have the conversation," Janie Finn had told me, meaning the conversation where you sorted everything out and said your goodbyes, and the dying person sorted everything out and lost all his regrets. "You talk about things and then you let go," she said, making an expansive gesture with her hands, as if she were setting free a bunch of doves or balloons. It was just the sort of thing hospice people always say.
Suddenly I thought that this must be the conversation, as we opened our mouths in turn and shared something important and lovely, and the whole room seemed like a great relief to me and I knew it must to him, too. The angel was struggling, though, seeming to wrestle with herself. Her face was beautiful but her body was ugly again, and my bottles were almost empty. My father's mouth was open, yet I took the last of the morphine myself and gave him a drop of water. He opened his eyes and looked at me and said it again—"You!"—and he shook his head, then closed his eyes again. But when I put my head on his chest he didn't push it away, and though one hand was reaching out blindly above him, he let me put the other on my neck. "I want a better angel, Dad," I told him. "That's all I need."
"I'll take a nap now," he said. "Batten down the hatches and go to your room." But I stayed where I was and took a nap myself. I woke up the next morning on the couch, the fake rain still drumming at the shuttered window, with no recollection of how I had got across the room. The angel was in the corner, her face ugly, but only in that way that all weeping faces are ugly. I sat down next to my father, who must have died very recently, because though his face was cold and his open eyes already had the look of spoiling grapes, his chest and his belly were warm. I put my hands on his chest, and my head on my hands, and stayed that way for a long time before I called Janie to tell her that it had happened. ♦