Good friends are hard to find ... and harder to keep

I just had a birthday recently. These are always reflective times. My first thought was it feels weird to turn an age that is a speed limit on some highways (55). My second thought was then about some of my friends.

I am at an age where you start to lose some of your old comrades for various reasons. Some die. Some move away. Some are so wrapped up in their careers or their families that they just don't have the time needed to cultivate a good friendship. You remain on good terms with those people but they eventually become more like acquaintances.

Good friends -- whether they be a family member or somebody else -- are really hard to find. These are the people you can tell right away when you are hurting and vice versa. They are the ones you call just to say hello. You have your disagreements with them but you always find a way to patch things up because you value their friendship more than any ideological point you might have wanted to make.

Finding relationships with that kind of depth takes time, a commodity a lot of us simply don't have.

There are a lot of people whose opinion I listen to and consider carefully. But I am surprised to discover there are really only a handful (maybe two handfuls) of people whose opinion on such and such subject really matters to me. Losing access to any of those people would be as painful as having your arm cut off.

I came across this discovery by accident. During by time working in pro baseball, I thought I had many friends who were involved in different aspects of the business. But I discovered that after I left the game (not on my terms), these folks disappeared as quick as possible. They couldn't afford to be in contact with me because it might affect their job status. Although I didn't think so at the time, those people did me a big favor. After thinking about it some more, I realized I don't miss most of those people at all.

It gave me more time to cultivate and learn more about the people who really mattered in my life -- a birthday gift to myself that has no price.

Godspeed, good neighbor

It's sad day in our little part of the world. Our neighbors across the street are moving tomorrow. Shane and Lori are a wonderful young couple with two terrific boys aged six and four. They don't have a new place yet but Shane wants to get a place with a lot of room for the boys to roam and for him to tinker with stuff.

When they decided to sell and look for a new place, they had a wonderful discussion about what to look for.

"When the boys get to be our age, what do you think they'll remember most?" Shane asked his wife one day. "That they had a lot of room to move around or that they had three bathrooms in their house?"

There is no right answer to that one, of course. It is simply a matter of personal preference.

We'll miss them because they are truly nice people. We had little in common with each other but we still chatted about a lot of things. More importantly, we always saw them smiling and the boys were busy ... being little boys.

You always say you will keep in touch when neighbors (or friends) move away but it is hard to do. So, perhaps the best thing to do is simply wish them well in their new adventure and hope they'll remember us as fondly as we will them.

Good luck, guys. Thanks for being good neighbors ... and even better human beings.

Yes, we can be a mean country

I happen to catch a little of one of Fox's stalwart shows last night -- Hannity & Colmes. If you have seen it, you know the drill. Hannity, the right winger, brings on people like Oliver North, who not only broke the law but flaunted it on ideological grounds, and they play a game of "You're right about that." Then he brings on some type of lefty, most of which cower under his bully questioning.

Colmes, the lefty, spends most of his time looking and talking like Mr. Peepers. (Ask somebody from the 1950s about him. Wally Cox played him on TV.)

The discussion du jour was about a comment made yesterday by Michelle Obama about "meanness" in America. Hannity, naturally, got on his high horse and talked about what a giving country this is, etc. The left wing guest, a professor from some California college, said that was off the point. She politely noted out that, in a recent primary in West Virginia, some people actually said they would never vote for Barack Obama because he was black. The professor suggested that showed meannness.

When one of the right wing guests pointed out these are Democrats talking, she quickly acknowledged that was true and said it didn't matter. Wrong is wrong.

There are a lot of very nice people who do a lot of good things in this country. But there are a lot of mean-spirited, nasty, bigoted people who are only interested in themselves and are happy to trample on somebody else's rights to do it. Included in that group are people like Hannity, who firmly believe that his point of view is the only one that should be allowed in this country. People like him have a mean streak, too. They try to hide it behind ideology but it's meanness.

What's worse is they inspire people to try to one-up them in that department. So, we get eggs (and worse) thrown at people who disagree politically. The instigators then throw their hands up and say this wasn't what they had in mind. Too late. They started

Rodney King said it best a few years ago when he asked, "Can't we all get along?" The answer is we could but a lot of people don't want to.

Upon further review ...

As it turns out, cats really do have nine lives. Or, at least they have more than one. We were all prepared to sadly say so long to Polar Bear when the vet called the other day. Dr. Troy said she didn't want to talk us into anything we didn't want to do but she suggested a medicine that might call him down.

We had given him this medicine last summer when Polar Bear started having anxiety problems due to a cat that was running through the neighborhood. We stopped it because ... well ... it was expensive. But if you want to say you have tried everything, then you have to try ... everything.

We now have the only cat in Como Park (and, I suspect, Minnesota) that is on Prozac. Oh, it has another name, a long, drawn out thing that I could only pronounce if I have consumed a half dozen Grand Marniers. Trust me, it is Prozac.

So far, so good. Polar Bear seems to have remembered where his box is and we have not found any droplets of liquid in places that would cause the lady of the house to have a conniption. (That's a good thing, by the way. Conniptions are not pleasant sights.)

PB lives on for now. My wife is considered so liberal that my brother Johnny once remarked "There is nobody to the left of Lynne." (To her credit, she replied, "Thank you.")

However, even liberals have their moments. Dr. Troy wrote a prescription for two months worth of medicine for Polar Bear. When Lynne brought it to the pharmacist, she ordered only a one-month dose. Even for a diehard left winger, there is a time and place to be conservative.

Doing the Right Thing is sometimes hard

I remember my Mother once telling me that doing the right thing wasn't that hard if you thought about it long enough.

Most of the time, this is true. Today is an exception.

I have written before (and his picture is at the bottom of the page) about Pete, the happy dog. When he arrived, we already had a four-legged resident -- Polar Bear, a cat we had rescued. He was about 5 when we got him. He performed the usual cat functions -- wandering the house, sitting in the window staring at the world, sitting on your lap asking to be petted. He never played with toys much and would make quite a racket asking to be fed in the morning.

But he was a good cat who went in his litter and he got along very well with Pete.

However, as I recently noted, he had been having some problems lately. When he peed on a new capret a couple of weeks ago, it was very bad sign. We tried some more solutions -- another test for kidney functions and a light in a room where he spends a lot of time.

But the simple fact is that when a cat begins to pee in places other than his litter box (which has been fine for him for the past eight years), there is a real problem. The final straw came this morning when Lynne got up to make his breakfast in the kitchen. While waiting for that, Polar Bear peed on the floor. He has never done that before.

Thus, the decision was made. We called the vet and asked them to take him for the weekend. We'll talk to his vet when she comes in on Monday but I am fairly sure what the decision will be.

Lynne took him outside and let him run around in the backyard for a bit. Then, we crated him up and took him away.

I feel bad about this but I can honestly say we did all we could. It just didn't seem to pay for more test when we know he is having slow kidney failure. Unlike when my sister-in-law had to put her cat down a few months ago, Polar Bear doesn't appear to be in pain. But if he doesn't know the difference between his litter and the kitchen floor (or doesn't care), then I can't see there is much choice to be made here.

Cats are different pets than dogs. We tend to bond more with dogs because we take them on walks and play with them in the front yard. By their nature, cats are frequently more aloof and mysterious. They keep their feelings to themselves and make it harder for you to love them. To me, that is one of their allures.

On Monday, I suspect we will be in agreement that Polar Bear needs to be put down. And I admit it will create a void in the household. Doing the right thing is sometimes painful. In this case, it isn't easy. But it's still the right thing to do.