Alan Bain and I were supposed to fly down to Washington DC, our nation's capital and the home of more "Go Go Dancers" establishments per capita of any other city. Go Go Dancer places leave me cold. If you're going to sell simulated sex on a stage, call yourself a strip club and be done with it. I think a decent strip club with good food and a cheerful atmosphere has nothing to be ashamed of. A "Go Go Dancers" club is trying to pretend people come for the music, and that's just sad.

But this is besides the point. Alan and I had no plans to go to Go Go Dancer places or strip clubs. No, we were going to go to a Boarding School conference. Sometimes, I wonder about our priorities.

On Thursday, Alan and I were supposed to get together and finalize the presentation, bounce stuff off each other, and stuff like that. Instead, I got diagnosed with Cardiomyopathy and Alan suggested we meet the next morning -- or I could cancel the trip if I wanted. No big deal, Eric.

---

A conversation with my brother in law George:

George: Is there anything about your condition you're curious about? Something I can help you with?

Me: Well... yeah. To be honest....

George: Yes?

Me: Doctor Fleet didn't really answer when I told him... what are the chances of this slipping into heart failure.

<Pause>

George: Eric, you're in heart failure.

Me: Er?

George: You have to prop your head up to breath while reclined. You congest when lying down. You have fluid in your legs. You're short of breath and in pain when doing moderate or even light activity. That's class two heart failure.

Me: Oh.

George: In class four heart failure, you can't even breath sitting down, the fluid is so bad....

Me: Then... let me rephrase. What're the odds I'll drop dead suddenly?

George: Until I see your Echo tape I don't know.

---

There wasn't much chance I wouldn't go. I was supposed to meet Gail and Phil there, and I'd been looking forward to this. I mean, I love traveling and I love to fly. I never got over that eight year old's sense of wonder at leaving the ground, at seeing the landscapes of the clouds, at seeing the sunlight that you can't see on a rainy day. I love the thrum of the engines, vibrating you slightly and lulling you with white noise. I like Flight Attendants and their fake smiles and occasional real laughs. I love drinking soda out of an ice filled plastic Manhattan glass and striking up conversations. Last Christmas when I was flying back from Pueblo, I sat next to a strikingly beautiful woman with honey skin and long brown hair, wearing a hand knit oversized fisherman's knit sweater in cream, with a light earth tone skirt. I didn't stare, though I wanted to. I didn't drool, because I try to be a nice guy. So I read.

She interrupted me, and it turned into a six hour conversation over the Midwest. At one point she went to the bathroom, grace in motion and poetry in shivers, and I went back to my book. If I'm reading when she gets back, she won't feel obligated to talk to me. I was 16 years old again. She interrupted me almost immediately and we picked up and discussed Tufts university and catering. She was a nutritionist. Her meal came before everyone else's in the plane, despite our being in back. "Always take the special meal," she said. "You get served first and the food tastes better."

"What meals should I select," I asked. "As a gourmand?"

She laughed. A throaty laugh. "I like the kosher meals or Hindu meals, mostly. But the vegetarian can be good. Once, I ordered a vegetarian breakfast and they didn't have any -- just omelets. They ended up giving me three muffins and four fruit cups from other meals."

If this were a novel, we would have held hands at the end, talking as we got our luggage. We would have traded addresses and tentatively started a flurry of letters. Her boyfriend (she was going out, of course) would fly into a flurry of jealousy when he discovered them, and realized that while she and I were perfectly platonic, our understanding of one another's souls and inner selves would have been too much. He would lay hands on her but she would escape. Our marriage would be presaged by meteors in the sky. We would rest on a chartered boat drifting through the waters after the receptions, and I would help her out of her clothes, and she would turn out to be a man. I said it was a novel. I didn't say who wrote it.

If this were Penthouse, we would have had sex in the bathroom on the plane. At one point the phrase "return your tray table to its full, upright and locked position" would be used as a crude metaphor.

But, this is neither. This is just life. We did talk our way down the concourse and to the baggage claim, and she did trade addresses with me. About two weeks later I lost hers, and I'm sure she mine, and I can't remember her name to save my life. But I only knew her for six hours, for God's sake.

This trip was Southwest Airlines, which means no meals. Just peanuts (which I can't have -- salt, you know -- but they had raisens too) and drinks, and I can't have soda either.

But not go? No. Whether I was in New Hampshire, Maine or Baltimore Airport I would have a crap heart. By God I was on my way.

---

Auntie Nin, who I've known forever and a day and who I don't speak to as often as I should, had this to say:

Hey, Buster! I haven't given you permission to die, and I ain't givin' it! We're gonna need you to help Frank referee the Cranky Old Ladies' Wheelchair Races in a few years... you know he can't handle that kind of stress all by himself ...

John Bankert, my old friend and confidant, had this to say:

Anyway, if you need anything at all while you work through these troubled times, you need but ask. I simply can't have you dying on me just yet, I don't have anything to wear to a funeral right now.

His beautiful wife Lisa said the following:

I WILL tell you this - don't you dare check out any time soon, my dear . . . I have NOTHING appropriate to wear to your funeral! Besides, we'll need you to bolster Molly's personal posse of bodyguards when she starts dating in a few years - between you, Hamish and Frank, any boys she dates will feel sufficiently threatened.

Husband and wife with the same sentiments. You can see how their tastes run in tandem. And see how they managed to produce a beautiful little girl.

My big friend Frank had the following to offer:

I don't care what Lisa Bankert says, my hips would look terrible in a black dress! [...] You're going to make it through this bro. You're strong, you want to live, and you know damn well I'll kick your ass if you die on me.

All went on to talk about personal things. Their hopes. Their fears. Their love for me. But the point is more the running theme. I don't have permission to die, because they have nothing to wear, I have work to do and damn it, they don't have time for this.

Gallows humor. It sounds insensitive, but that's ridiculous. It's a way of coping. Of talking. They all want to say something to me, and "dear God don't die, Eric" gets old after about a minute. This is kind of a way of facing death, and accepting it, and sending love.

I like Gallows humor. I like things that puncture grave topics and let you slip behind them. When confronted with the ineffable, I have the urge to spray it with silly string. Comments like this apply, and make the whole easier.

---

Washington DC is a profoundly ugly city.

Oh, there is beauty there. The monuments, which the taxi took us past. The people -- I didn't meet a single person who wasn't cheerful in the Capital.

But Washington DC itself isn't pretty. There's concrete and haphazard collections of buildings. The Suburbs are sprays and sprawls of prefabricated building.

Entering the Renaissance Mayflower, you forget all that. High capped ceilings of white and off-white. Angels and gargoyles along the tops, like you were in a museum. There are gold flourishes everywhere. Nearby, the smoke free piano bar sits, with a pianist cheerfully maiming When You Wish Upon a Star and smiling as she does it. That old Disney tune is like the Rocky theme for piano-bar hacks.

They shout "Front" there, like in a Cary Grant movie set in a hotel. Men in full uniform with hats bring your bags up there. Most of the money I spent in Washington DC went to tipping people.

The room wasn't huge, but it was well furnished. The bed could have slept six comfortably. And the Wake Up Call has one of the most decadently civilized touches I've ever seen. Unlike most hotels, with a coffeemaker in the bathroom and "complimentary coffee," the Mayflower brings up a pot of coffee or tea or hot cocoa and leaves it outside your door, along with the Washington Post. So, the phone explodes next to your head, a cheerful person says "This is your wakeup call," you pull on pants (the robes in the room are not meant for people my body shape) and open the door... and there's tea, all ready for you. I had two cups before I even bothered showering.

Not, I would add, that I was asleep when the phone rang. Maybe heart disease changes you, so you don't need more than four hours sleep a night.

---

Alan is robust. He's a long legged, tall man, an Australian Rules Football player. While soft-spoken, he clearly prefers to be doing instead of waiting.

I try to pace him. In airports, walking city streets for food, through hotel corridors.

He hears me breathing hard, and slows. Alan is nothing if not sensitive, and I think he likes me as a person as well as a coworker.

But he is very alpha male. He is strong and virile and someone I want to be a peer for.

So I try to keep up. To run with the pack, when I know I can't. It's a macho thing. It's why I carried my own damn backpack in the airport. I'm not helpless. I'm not an invalid.

It's a lie. And it was stupid. Pride is the stupidest of all emotions, and the worst reason on Earth to do anything.

The medication is helping. I didn't feel that horrible pounding in my chest, but my breath kept just pulling away from me. I just couldn't find the air. Little short distances and I had to claw for oxygen.

We ate at California Pizza Kitchen. I had a salad pizza. When it came, we were both stunned. The thing was an ultra thin crust, clearly baked separately, no cheese or sauce... with a pile of greens, rugala and onion greens with a light vinaigrette piled atop it.

I had two slices of crust and a quarter of the salad. Alan ate his full pizza. He remarked on my lack of appetite. And we talked -- about educational reform and the future and the presentation and sports. A good night's babble. Afterward, we had another breath-robbing walk to the hotel, went to his room, and did the run-throughs on the presentation. Alan is an old hand at these, and had a lot to say and suggest. It was a lot of fun -- it felt like we were in high school, and we had a Winter Carnival sketch to throw together. I did that three years running at the school. My senior year I had other stuff going.

We broke it off and made plans for the next morning, as I was meeting Phil that night. "Hey, Eric," he said as I was leaving. "Take care, 'right? Watch yourself."

And I said I would

---

You occasionally hear from people you've barely met or never met when you do these things. Lisa's sister Lynda, who I was partnered with for their wedding, sent me a supportive e-mail. It wasn't really Gallows humor but it was light in tone, as Lynda tried to explain who she was to me.

I remember Lynda. She's good on a dance floor and wears sunglasses well. Her's was the best dance I had of the evening. I also remember Lisa and Lynda coaxing fellow groomsman Gary out to the dance floor for the Macarena, while John, a fellow name of Rob and I drank scotch, watched and thanked God they hadn't coaxed us out there.

I also heard from Sara, who is an online writer of good repute and terrific skill. (Hers is a different breed than this journal -- more artistic in places, and perhaps more personal in a lot of ways, and less in others. Plus she gets interviewed by Great Britain's Channel Four and has photo shoots in Cosmo, which I can't claim even on a good day -- I look like Hell in spaghetti straps.) I learned all this reading through her current project after her e-mail.

Sara found me through Bill's web page. They're friends. She wasn't sure if Bill just read my journal or if we knew each other, but she followed the link and she had good advice.

And Gallows humor. Quoted just in part here:

Well, at least you have something cool-- the same thing that Bobby Simone on NYPD Blue had. He died, though. But I wouldn't worry about that if I were you because you're not trying to leave the show or get out of your contract, so the writers won't kill you off. In fact, since you're your own writer, you'll probably live a lot longer.

I love it. See -- self-publication and promotion has extra benefits! And trust me -- I'm not about to make trouble with any production people. In fact, I'll cheerfully renegotiate my contract down if it means I get to do a few more seasons of the show, thanky!

It got me to thinking, though. Sara's letter was great. But I know people who'd read the above and think it was insensitive. That Sara needed to be a lot more concerned about the gravity of the situation and how it weighs on my little brain. They'd want to know how she could be so flippant, and her not even knowing me.

These are the people who need gallows humor, I think. Or gallows. I'm not sure which. Either way, I was glad to receive e-mail from both Sara and Lynda. And Leo, who I haven't spent much time with but who's a very close friend of Frank's, and who once wrote a song about me. Plus, I got him started on the competitive pillow-fighting circuit -- but that's another story.

---

Philip came to see me Friday evening. It was about 9:30 when he got there, a bit wide eyed. Well, the Hotel made "opulent" seem inadequate.

"This is wild," he said, coming in.

"Yeah. I love traveling on other peoples' money."

He laughed, then hugged me. And we settled down to talk. Originally, we were going to the movies, but between my evening fatigue and my shortness of breath, we decided just to take it easy.

Perhaps that was a mistake -- I was fighting the oppressive sleep by ten, and not because Philip was boring. Far from it. He's always a lot of fun.

So we ended up not seeing much of each other, while I buried myself in a bed to sleep for those three or four hours before it all forced me awake again. I hate the inconvenience factor more than most things. If I want to be up all night, I'll be up all night. My crap body shouldn't get a vote.

---

This is all good for ratings. I'm up close to two thousand hits a week, which is more than a little stunning. I figure a good number of those (since page by page isn't that high) are people showing up and trekking back a few entries when they get here. Two hundred people averaging ten entries each would do it, after all. And the numbers get easier if we assume more than ten entries each.

So hi there.

---

The average presentation at one of these conferences involves a man intoning into a podium mike, occasionally glancing up with a wry grin as he hits the part of his speech that's tagged as a joke.

Alan and I don't work like this. The podium was there, along with chairs and provided pads of paper for the two of us and the guy who introduced us to sit. None of us did. We had a nice projector set up for our use, which we didn't use. We used the smaller, higher resolution one from the Academy instead, sitting on top of it. And we wandered in front of the projector, our presentation glowing in the background, while we wandered the aisle and spoke to the people directly.

Alan is a master at this. He works the crowd with the homespun charm of a PBS comedian. And they eat it up, drinking in his presentation like starved men. He is more than right -- he is entertaining. And through that, the rightness of his message soaks into them through the back door.

And then it's my turn.

I'm a trained improv actor. I know the points I need to hit. Alan's been working on how to get there with me. Almost all that goes out the window as I walk in front of the projector and start talking. I look in their eyes, gathering them in. I solicit answers. I grin and get some laughs -- especially about budgets. Technology budgets are a sore point at any independent school that isn't Brewster Academy. By depreciating it, I make us comrades against the night -- or the business manager at least.

We're applauded well, not politely. I know the difference. We're both surrounded by people afterward, talking and asking questions and testing our knowledge. We come through. We collect and give out business cards, giving out more than we take in. One is from the Headmaster of American Hebrew University.

"We have a unique school," he said. "It doesn't exist."

"That would do it," I said, grinning.

It turns out that while Catholic Boarding Schools are everywhere, there isn't a single Jewish boarding school in the United States. So, this guy's got the funding and mandate to build one over the next few years. I find the lack of Jewish boarding schools amazing, given the history of scholarship involved. It's possible we'd help them develop their technological infrastructure. I'd personally be very happy to do so.

Alan looked sidelong at me as we break down. "Which one of us hasn't done this style conference before?"

I toss Shakespeare at him until we go upstairs to check out. Knowing you're the most entertaining speaker on the agenda means not having to go to the rest of the program.

Mission accomplished, and then some.

---

Gail drinks her tea with milk, which in an airport bar means cream. She looks far more like my cousin Vicky than the 19 year old wearing the lei I remember from Bill's party way the heck back when. But then, I don't much look like I did in 1988 either. Eleven years will shift a person.

It doesn't matter what she looks like, as she's a good friend and her husband, Michael, is quiet but intelligent. He doesn't seem to say much, but when he speaks his words are interesting and often very funny.

We agreed to meet Gail and Michael at the airport, going there right after the presentation and checkout. This gave us roughly four hours of chat time. Which meant we listened to a lot of bad disco.

Alan came along and disappeared to work on his next week's presentation -- I felt badly dragging him along to an airport like this, but he wanted to share the cab and defray expenses. I felt very good seeing Gail and Michael though. Gail and I felt like we were picking up a conversation midstream, not meeting after an eleven year break from a single night where we had way too much to drink and not much chance to talk. Which makes sense, as she barely remembers me from the days of Relay and the like and I barely remember her.

We discuss Judaism. She's one of the rarities -- a convert. It makes for a fascinating conversation.

"You know," I said, "I'd convert but it'd be for the wrong reasons."

"What's the wrong reasons," she laughed.

"I'd do it because I like the ritual, the scholarship, and the tradition of intelligence. It seems to me an agnostic shouldn't change religions because he likes what they do on Saturday."

She grinned a bit. And got a bit more serious. It was very important, she said, that I knew she wasn't just visiting because of my heart condition. She wanted to do this anyway.

I knew that before she said it, of course -- she's that kind of cheerful person who invites casual aquaintences to her house for the weekend. She clearly genuinely likes people, and she and I have always gotten on well. But I can understand her needing to say it.

It was a good afternoon. And Alan and I got our boarding numbers (Southwest does their entire plane "First come first serve." Get there early enough and sit anywhere you damn well like. Get there last and it's a crap flight for you) and they were 1 and 2, so we got the sweet Southwest Seats over the wing. (The Wing seats are set up like old Railway compartments, with seats facing the back on one side and the front on the other, giving everyone there more legroom).

I was in an aisle seat facing the rear of the plane, and that's a darn strange angle to fly from. A takeoff in a normal seat is a feeling of being lifted into the air, with comforting G-forces moving you into your comfortable seat. Well, facing the rear of the plane is a lot like being flung from the ground while G-forces try to tear you from your seat and plunge you back into the Flight Attendents area.

I read Analog on my Palm V, using the backlight so I wouldn't disturb my neighbors who were sleeping. I had to turn it off for takeoff and landing, which concerned me. The Palm V's electromagnetic signature is considerably less than any calculator of the last two decades. If that's enough to screw up the plane's instruments, we're going to have planes plunging out of the sky, soon.

---

I had a bad moment in the Manchester airport. It was back to square one -- no air, desperately clawing to get oxygen back, heart pounding hard.... that sudden feeling you're going to die. We'd walked across the airport (I'd even checked my computer bag this time, so I'd have no strain of carrying) and something -- maybe the shifts of pressure in the flight -- just wiped me.

Alan had me sit down and he got the luggage. He was okay with that. I just felt silly. Macho, like I said before. But this is the life I live in now.

When I got home there was a phone message from my doctor's office. Apparently I've been prescribed more medicine, and it's waiting for me at Hall's drugstore. More pills. More fun. Back to life.

Mm. That's a positive statement, isn't it? Back to life. I think I'll go with that.