Last Shuttle Mission, Space the final frontier?

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July 8, 2011

Today we witnessed the 135th flight and the last mission of America’s space shuttle program. This is the conclusion of a 35 year program. We are told all future American space missions to the International Space Station (ISS) will be done by private enterprise. Unfortunately, we have yet to see any private space shuttles capable of going to the ISS. We are told it may be five years or more before a private company can do this. In other words, this country will have to endure at least five years of no direct access to space, and instead have to rely on other powers, most notedly the Russians and Europeans, to bring our payloads to the ISS. And who knows if that five years is going to be a true five years or much longer? In the meantime we are told that NASA is going to put its efforts into space transport systems that will allow us to go into deep space and to various astroids and ultimately to Mars.

First Commercial Spaceflight
June 1, 2012

Today we have witnessed the first commercial flight into space. SpaceX, a private company, has successfully launched a rocket and sent a capsule to the international space station and returned it to earth. History has been made today and I am absolutely delighted. We did not have to wait five years, the job was done in less than a year. Another mission is planned for September, just a few months away. This is the beginning of a commercial space industry and I have no doubt it is going to be huge.

I grew up with this mantra, “Space, the final frontier…” I am a son of the Star Trek generation. I consider space exploration the single important enterprise of this country. It is not a matter of staying on the forefront of research and technology, it is our vision of our selves as a nation and even as a species that is at stake. Growing up in the 60s and 70s our news was inundated by the Vietnam war, by the conflict in Ireland, by Watergate, and by wars in the middle east. It was also the time of the Cold War and we constantly faced the threat nuclear annihilation. Most families including my own had a room in their house that could be used as a bomb shelter, futile as that was. No one has such a thing today. Yet in spite of it all we had a vibrant space program. I watched Neil Armstrong make that first step onto the lunar surface with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind!” I remember these words and I remember where I was when they were spoken. It seemed the whole country, nay the whole world, watched every space launch from the time of John Glenn. In spite of the terrible problems we all faced on earth, this country always led the way to a higher goal through its space exploration. As a Canadian we considered the American space program our program as well. Indeed American space exploration was truly human space exploration.

Today we also face horrific world problems, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, global warming, terrorism, and so forth, yet I do not feel the pull of that higher vision, space the final frontier. Yes we have the magic of the Internet and access to unbelievable communications through smart phones in our pockets. The technology in my pocket far surpasses that technology that put the first man on the moon. My children are extremely adept at digital technologies, yet they do not seem to have that higher vision that space once afforded us. Our current President, Barack Obama, whom I consider to be an educated and inarticulate man, has failed to give this country the higher vision that space exploration can give. Instead he has squandered the opportunities of space exploration. When we no longer pursue these things not only do we lose the infrastructure that creates them, we lose the ability to see our future and to look beyond the problems of earth. We remain bound by a parochial vision. I think it’s excellent that a commercial space industry is developing and I think President Obama did a good thing by promoting this new industry. Yet I feel our president would have done better to articulate what is beyond the mere commercialization of space. Have the untold billions of dollars that have been pour into Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism been made at the expense of our vision of ourselves as a nation? I hope not. In the past the cold war and the Vietnam war certainly drained our national coffers, and sucked the life blood of this nation yet we still maintained are vision of space exploration. We had a vision of our nation and our species that was greater than ourselves. Yet I do not see this same excitement in my own children or in my society as a whole. Space and science have become the sideshows of technology. A nation that lacks a higher vision of itself is a nation in decline. I ask that our president fix this problem and give us the higher vision.

Mad Men, The Making of a Movie

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May 25, 2012
Last weekend a particular episode of the AMC show, Mad Men, aired so I am now released from my nondisclosure agreement and I can tell of my experience on this television shoot. Some of what appears below was written during the shoot, some was written later.

Mad Men
November 30, 2011
Los Angeles

I will never again look at a TV show or movie the same way. It’s midnight in downtown Los Angeles, and I’m in the middle of a shoot for the American Movie Channel show, Mad Men. This is the first time I’ve witnessed anything like this and I am absolutely stunned and fascinated by how much work and how many people are involved, and how boring the whole process is. I arrived on site at a Los Angeles street corner by 12 noon and now it is after midnight, over twelve hours later, and I’m just now finishing. They tell me this 12 hour shoot will produce about 4 minutes of actual show time! And there must be a hundred and fifty people involved.

Two weeks ago an email arrived from a movie studio asking if I would consult for an episode of Mad Men that was to shoot in Los Angeles. I’d never heard of the show, but I replied anyway and there was an immediate response explaining the show’s needs and asking me to come the next day to meet the director and writers. They were shooting a scene from the early days of the Hare Krishna movement where their main character was visiting the first temple in New York City in the 1960s. My job was to ensure everything was authentic, that the actors wore the proper clothes and knew what to say, and that the set looked just right. The director and writers wanted to know the finest details of the Hare Krishna movement during the mid 1960s. It sounded intriguing, so I agreed. The next day I went to the studio in downtown Los Angeles and met with the director, the actors, the writers and even the creator of the program. I thought this was only to be a pilot episode, so it was a surprise to learn this was actually a production episode in the fifth season. In fact this program had received numerous Golden Globe awards. It was then I realized I was involved with something millions of people would see. In fact the creator himself, Matthew Weiner, had been a writer with the famous HBO series, The Sopranos.

Once I agreed to help, they had me sign a nondisclosure agreement and receive a stern lecture about privacy, not to even tell my spouse. I was also informed that paparazzi would be around during the shoot and not to speak with them at all. I’d be sued if I violated these conditions.

On the first day I sat in a large room with all the producers, directors, writers, and advertisers. It was a surprise to learn the advertisers were there to screen the script so they could decide whether they wanted to change their sponsorship of this particular episode. Apparently every episode is screened in this way. This was surprising, but having seen what is involved, it now makes perfect sense. Filming a television program or movie takes huge amounts of money, evidenced by all the people and equipment on this site. Everything is clearly about advertising dollars. A show is solely a vehicle to sell product and advertising revenue is what makes it happen.

After reading the script we broke into groups where the actors and writers came to me with questions. What did the first temple in New York City look like? What should the actors wear? How do they tie dhotis and saris? What kind of incense should be burned. What kind of pictures should be on the wall? Who should play the hand cymbals and how are they played? Once the swami entered the room, how would the devotees act? What would he say? How should they respond? How should they sing? What tune should they use? They asked questions in extreme detail! On that first day I spent six hours with the writers, set designers and actors. I was told to return for the actual shoot in about 10 days and be prepared to spend a full day.

Precisely one day before the shoot I was given the address of where and when to appear, everything had been a secret till the last minute. When I arrived the shoot was on a downtown street and police and security were in a abundance. A small shop had been procured just like those early days of the 1960s in Manhattan. They had reenacted the Hare Krishna movement in the streets of Los Angeles. A nearby parking lot had been taken over as a staging area for all the crews, camera, makeup, electrical, costume, catering, security, restrooms, and, of course, the actors trailers–everything that goes into producing a show. In fact a small army had descended on the streets of Los Angeles and whatever was necessary to supply that army was on site. There were literally hundreds of people operating out of this area. I never realized so much was involved in making a television show.

This one day on the set taught me much about how movies are made. Only two cameras were used, one on each side. I thought there would be more. The first shooting is called the Master where everything is shot from the farthest distance away. This Master is shot five or six times with the actors repeating the scene each time. Afterwards the actors leave and replacements, stand-ins, come and take the actors place while the crews move the cameras and lighting in for a closer shot. The stand-ins serve as focal points and framing for the camera crews. Once the set is ready the actors return along with the makeup and costume crews, who go through and touch up the actors for the second take. The shot is then retaken exactly as before except with the cameras in this closer position. They might do this shooting another five or six times. After this the actors leave and once again the stand-ins return to take their place as the crews move the cameras and lighting for another take that is even closer. This is third take. The time between when the actors leave and return is about 45 minutes. This getting closer and closer and reshooting and reshooting goes on repeatedly until they have just what they want. There might be 5 or 6 takes. After this everything is totally reversed. The cameras are pointed in the opposite direction and another Master is shot, looking out from the actor’s perspective. The whole process is repeated as before, moving farther and farther away from the actors on each successive take. Each time, as before, the actors leave and the stand-ins take their place while the crews move their cameras farther and farther back. Add all this together and it is easy to see the tremendous amount of time it takes. While all the shooting is going on, behind the scenes, a bank of monitors with directors and other spotters watch every detail of the scene. These people call out start and stop as necessary and they control how many times a particular camera shoot takes place.

Shooting a movie is laborious, tedious, and honestly, boring. Hurry up and wait is the axiom. Except for the beginning and the end, my time was spent walking the streets of Los Angeles and sitting in my car in a parking structure. Downtown Los Angeles is not a pleasant place. My job on this day was to check the set for authenticity. I had the setup people switch out the wall pictures of Durga and Shiva with pictures of Krishna and Vishnu, and replace the image of Ganesha on Prabhupada’s desk with an image of Krishna. I also helped the actors dress in dhotis and saris and put on the forehead clay. Once the shooting began I just waited for hours and hours. At last about 1130 pm I received a text message from the director asking me to come and show the Swami how to play hand cymbals and chant at the same time. I’d been waiting in my car in the next door parking garage watching past episodes of this show on Netflix. So here I was showing my own ‘guru’ how to chant Hare Krishna and play the hand cymbals. We took 12 shots, yet the swami just could not sing and use the hand cymbals at the same time. I had coached him over and over, but it was hopeless. The hundred or so other actors and support staff who had been patiently waiting become vocally abusive. Poor swami! Finally the main director had to be called. Had it not been so late he would have fired the swami on the spot. In the end the director decided to adjust the scene and dub over the swami with music. It was both an amusing and frustrating experience. The moment the scene was finished everybody immediately dropped everything and vacated the set. It was nearly one in the morning and everyone was thoroughly fed up.

One of the highlights of my experience was when the actors first arrived on the set. I was with them adjusting their dhotis and saris and suddenly news rang out, the paparazzi are here! Immediately the actors and even me were given black parkas that went down past our knees and had hoods that completely covered our heads, paparazzi coats. We were shuttled into vans, hidden away and driven to the site, which was not more than 300 feet away. As we got out of the van all the casting people stood in lines around us blocking any photographs that could be taken by paparazzi. This seemed to be standard for the actors, but for me it was exciting. The very fact of paparazzi indicated the status of the show.

I wouldn’t want to do this for a living, but at least it was exciting to be with the actors, support crews and even the paparazzi for a few days. It was fascinating to see how a movie is made and I learned much I can use in my own videos. It was a fun day and I was well paid. Yes, I love those advertisers.

SpaceX, Dragon Day

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Today at 3:44 AM SpaceX, a private and commercial company, successfully launched its first rocket with a payload headed for the International Space Station. This is an historic flight comparable to the Wright brothers flight. I am declaring it Dragon Day, named after the space capsule, Dragon, that is being put into orbit. A few years ago I noted the first successful rocket launch by this same company, SpaceX, of a test capsule just into space and then back down again. That was also an historic event and now today a few years later this same company is actually taking its first commercial payload to the ISS. Before this I have severely criticized President Obama for his neglect of space. I thought it was an absolute travesty that this country could no longer service the ISS and we had to rely on other countries, most notably the Russians, to service our interests in space. I can see now it was actually a good strategy to turn routine space work over to private companies. So with the expertise of NASA combined with some government and private funding this routine work of servicing flights to such places like the ISS is being successfully turned over to private companies. It still remains to be seen whether this particular rocket launch can successfully dock with the ISS, but it is just a matter of time before such a docking can take place. I certainly hope this particular rocket launch is a successful docking mission. Yes indeed, let NASA utilize its expertise in cutting new ground into space exploration and let routine things be turned over to private interests. I now clearly see the wisdom of such a policy.

5/25/12

So sitting in the John Wyne airport waiting for a flight to San Francisco, I’ve just received the good news the docking with the ISS was successful. This is the beginning of a whole new industry.

What a fantastic time of history to be living! I have seen the development of television, cellular telephone, the Internet, space travel and now the first commercial spaceflight within my lifetime. But more than anything else I am waiting for the discovery of extra terrestrial life and some form. Will I ever see such a thing?

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Canoes, Loons and the Wolf

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04/29/12
Eastern Ontario in Canada where I grew up boarders on the Canadian Shield. During the last ice age huge glaciers, hundreds of feet thick, descended across North America covering this area of the country. When these glaciers melted they left behind thousands of freshwater lakes so now the whole of this region is peppered with these lakes and today one can take a boat and travel from lake to lake to lake seemingly without end. This is called portage, and the best boat in the world for this type of travel is the canoe.

I cannot remember how old I was, but at least from 12 years, my cousin Kenny and I would take these portage trips. We would almost live in our canoe during the summers. At first we just took overnight trips. My father or my Uncle Jimmy would drop us off on the side of a road near one of these lakes along with our boat and gear and then pick us up at a prearranged time the next day. As we became better at wilderness skills and our parents became more confident of our ability to stay alive, these trips would extend for two nights, three nights, four nights and eventually for a week or more. In those days there were no cell phones or gps–all we had were topographical maps and a compass, and once in the bush we would seldom see a soul. Canada was a sparsely populated country back then. Thinking back I can hardly imagine that our parents let us do this. All we would have is our sleeping bags, a tent, some tarps, our fishing rods and a few cooking utensils and, of course, our canoe. We lived off the land, fishing for food and drinking water directly from the lake. This is almost inconceivable now!

Each lake might take a few hours to paddle across before we came to a small land bridge that connected to the next lake. We would then carry our canoe and gear perhaps for a quarter of a mile, but never more than a mile. From there we would do the same to the next lake. This was portaging andlake by lake we would gradually move ourselves miles into the bush. In the evening before nightfall we would stop, set up our tents, light a fire and spend the evening on the shores of one of these lakes. The solitude and the beauty of the bush was unforgettable. We would often see deer, wolf, moose, bear, beaver, lynx and many more animals in their natural habitat. I cannot describe how much I enjoyed this experience. We hardly ever had trouble with the animals except I can remember one night waking up to the sound of our tent being ripped open and in the dim light of a flashlight seeing the huge paw of a bear ripping through in the dark. Kenny and I blurted out a primal scream at the top of our lungs. We thought we were in real trouble, but somehow our hysterical scream scared the living daylights out of this poor bear and in the dark we heard him thrashing through the bush as fast as he could. I’m sure he’d never seen humans before. These kinds of things happened only rarely, but when they did they remain indelibly etched in your soul.

There are two residents of this northern Ontario lake country that I still miss today, the loon and the wolf. A loon is a waterbird like a duck that I have only seen in the northern bush. There is no sound that can even remotely compare to the eerie and laughing cry of the loon echoing off the misty waters of a northern lake at dawn. And once you have heard the haunting howl of a timber wolf on a full moon night, and felt every hair on your body stand on end, you will never forget the mystical experience of the northern bush country. Today, living in my new country in the American west, I still long for the solitude and the remoteness of those youthful days. So I seek the deserts of California. There may be no place for the canoe in this waterless world, and the color green may have been replaced by an all pervasive brown, yet I still find solitude, remoteness and peace in my new home. Even though I no longer hear the haunting howl of the wolf still my hair stands on end when I hear the laughing loon-like cry of the coyote. My new world is also a mystical world.

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Crisis Over

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Dear Malati,
August 20, 2011
Riverside CA

It has been six months since your two heart operations and almost daily people ask me how you are doing. Before today, all I could say is that you appeared to be doing well. In fact, I did not know your actual condition. You have no pulmonary heart valve, so the question was, how well could your body adapt to this new situation? The rest of your organs, your arteries, your liver, but particularly the right chamber of your heart needed time to absorb the new pressures created by the back flow of blood returning into your heart after each pump. So yesterday we went to Loma Linda for a check and as it turns out your body has been adapting well. It is good to be young! However, you are gradually finding out that you do, in fact, have a real liability, a life long liability. You were told to refrain from severe physical activity such as intense hiking or biking, and that even activities like tennis, swimming, running should be kept to a moderate level. In other words, there is a whole range of activities that you must avoid or keep to a moderate level. And in fact, Malati, you told your doctor that you have trouble running as much as you would like. You experience some shortness of breath, palpitations, and even a little chest pain if you over do it.

Malati, I suspect you had the idea that once these operations were behind and you were sufficiently healed you could achieve what would be considered a normal level of physical activity that any woman of your age might expect. You hoped that if you just exercised enough you could get herself up to ‘normal.’ What we learned yesterday is that this ordeal is never going to completely end, and being normal is never going to happen the way you would like it to be. So it is understandable that you may feel shaken and depressed by this meeting.

On the other hand, I was delighted in hearing the news of this meeting. A few months ago we were facing the prospect of losing a child and so to come back here, just six months later, and discover that your body is adapting well to its new situation was good news indeed. What I heard from your doctor is that you can go on and live a relatively normal life. You can marry, have children, a career and look forward to a full life. Yes, you will be a permanent cardiac patient. Yes, you will have to be moderate in your lifestyle, and yes, you will have to be vigilant with your health, but that is a small price to pay for what could have been a terrible disaster. Since this meeting, I consider your immediate crisis and subsequent healing period over, yet I know there will be challenges. You will need an artificial valve at some point in the future. But overall I am delighted with the outcome. You look well and you should plan for a full life.

In fact there is no such a thing as normal. There are just statistical averages. Each of us are individuals with unique strengths and weaknesses. So accept what is ‘normal’ for you. Yes, you may have some physical limitations that you did not expect, but Malati, you have an extremely sharp mind and intellect, beyond the average. Focus your energies in that direction. You will excel if you do. You have only lost 8 months because of your health crisis. This may seem a lot, but in fact it is just a blip on the screen of your life. You have just twenty years of life behind you. Take the next decade to finish your education and start a career. It’s an exciting time for you because you can do almost anything in the intellectual realm that you wish. Feel your purpose in life and move in that direction.

Losing control, part II

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4/8/11
There is a terrible sequel to this story: Malati had to repeat this first surgery one more horrific time. Yes, another open heart surgery! Three weeks after Malati’s first surgery on March 17 she began to feel ‘wrong.’ She developed a persistent low grade fever, nausea, and a cough, all symptoms that resembled the flu or a simple cold. As a precaution I called Loma Linda, Malati’s medical facility, hoping to gain access to their network, but I was told that they could do nothing to help us and that we should take Malati to an urgent care center. They utterly refused to deal with her in any meaningful way. I was astounded. A patient who was just three weeks out of surgery and who was having problems could not get access to their help? Not knowing what to do I took Malati to our primary care physician, and when he called Loma Linda even he was brushed off and told to just put her on antibiotics, which he did. What Loma Linda did seems highly negligent and uncaring to me. Still Malati insisted that something was wrong. In the end I took her into the emergency room at Loma Linda and after 24 hours of waiting and testing they discovered the cause of her flu like symptoms: she had massive amounts of fluid built up around her heart and lungs. This is called effusion and is the result of inflammation. It is something that occurs in only about 4 percent of patients who have heart surgery. Malati’s life again was in imminent danger. This fluid builds up and then solidifies into a jelly thus encasing the heart to the point where it can no longer beat and the recipient has a heart attack and dies. She was just hours away from this situation. So a recovery that seemed to be going well suddenly turned deadly. Once again Malati was taken into surgery; only this time the doctors decided to not only relieve the effusion, but also remove her pulmonary valve outright and scrape out her heart muscle, thus reducing the size of her heart that had built up as a result of the stenosis. When a restriction exists within a heart the heart muscle “bulks up” and strengths itself so it can push more blood through the constricted valve or other path way. If that restriction is removed and the pressure is suddenly reduced the over strengthened heart still continues to work with the same force to the point where it “implodes” or crushes into itself and quickly fails. The patient dies of a heart attack. This is the reason the heart muscle must be scraped out and weaken. The medical world calls Malati’s condition a “suicide ventricle.” This, of course, was a much more evasive surgery than the first procedure or even the first surgery, and is what should have been done at the onset. Yet hindsight has 20/20 vision. This second surgery would drain the fluid buildup around the heart and lungs, remove the damaged pulmonary valve completely, scrape out the muscle of her heart and replace the inflamed portion of her pericardial sack with a bovine tissue. This was to be a much more involved procedure and would take over eight hours. Two open heart surgeries within less than a month! Could a body survive such extensive trauma within this short span of time? Needless to say the answer is yes and the surgery was successful and Malati to this point is making good progress. But I remain guarded. Believe me the emotions of the second surgery are no less than the emotions of the first!

4/13/11

Today we are almost four weeks out from the second open heart operation and Malati has gone to the cardiologist for her third echo cardiogram since the surgery. Everything is going well except the doctor is concerned that the amount of leakage or back flow blood into her heart is excessive. We are hoping her internal organs will adjust to the new situation over the next few months. Her liver is apparently taking too much pressure as a result. This is a problem that will eventually force a future procedure or surgery to place a tissue valve inside Malati’s heart. A part from this Malati is doing well. The fluid buildup did not return.

4/16/11
During the course of these two operations I am still deeply concerned about Malati’s condition and I fear she is not properly looking after herself. After the first surgery she was out jogging only two weeks out. Now she has left our home and is living alone again only four weeks out from the second surgery. She spent the weekend driving around Los Angeles visiting friends and staying up late. The doctors told her to stay quiet for six to eight weeks, but she is not heeding their advice. Malati is also not keeping her wound covered as the doctors asked her to do. They told her to keep it away from UV light from the sun in order to minimize scare mark. Instead she is actively showing her scar by wearing low cut shirts. I fear a relapse, but there is little I can do. She is refusing to acknowledge her condition and she has become hostile to me when I try to get her to slow down. Sukulina is also not supporting me. In fact she helped Malati move out of our house after only 4 weeks since the second surgery without even telling me. The doctors asked her to stay at home for six to eights weeks after the first surgery and this is the second surgery. A full eight weeks seems fully justified. Sukulina’s mind set is beyond my comprehension. I feel very alone and I am extremely concerned for Malati’s condition.

5/24/11

A month has gone by and Malati seems to have calmed down. She looks well and is finally keeping her wound covered. She spent a few days with Nikki and Evonne, and before she came to them, I quietly asked them to talk to Malati to calm her down and look after herself. I am not sure who said what, but ever since then Malati has turned around. I am now paying for her food and mortgage, plus I have given her a job to help her get her life back on track. This weekend she is moving out of the desert to our Riverside apartment so she can go to school down in the Riverside area. There is no future in the desert for a young girl. Malati herself came to me and asked for the apartment. I had suggested this months ago, but at the time she vehemently refused anything coming from me. Our relations appear to have improved. Perhaps with all the medications she was taking and just because of the extreme stress of what she went through she was acting out and someone had to bear the brunt, and that was me. I am not sure what has caused the turn around. Perhaps Nikki and Evonne’s help made the difference. Regardless, I am delighted.

I am still concerned to know how her body is adapting to a heart without a pulmonary valve. In a few weeks she will go for another echocardiogram and then we will know. I do not want her to go through another surgery to place a bovine valve in her heart. This whole affair has been extremely emotionally draining for all of us.

I have been asked how much my years of sadhana and spiritual study allowed me to cope with this crisis. I wish I could report that it makes a crisis easier to deal with, but it does not. I’m sure I experienced the same confusion, hopelessness and fear as any other person. Did I chant? Did I pray? Did I plead? Yes I did. Did it help? I suppose, but it didn’t remove the fact that I had to go through this pain and feel every possible emotion. There’s no way to know how I may have dealt with this crisis had I not experienced years of spiritual discipline. And what if the outcome had been worse, would I have lost faith? I’ve seen too many families broken by this kind of personal tragedy. Would I be any different? Besides, I only went through a partial test, suppose it had been the ultimate test. For the first time in my life this crisis brought me to a state of total loss of control, complete helplessness, the point where the only recourse was to God. I am grateful to a few close friends who helped me through this.

Postscript
04/25/12

Malati has since moved out of Riverside away from the apartment and away from my close support. In September 2011, only three months after being in the apartment in Riverside she decided to move to Washington state where Keshava, her brother, is living. For me it was an abrupt decision. One weekend she just packed her bags and moved away. It was a typical Malati ‘just do it’ kind of decision. It’s absolutely true that I would have counseled her not to do go, but I was not given the opportunity, I was out of town that weekend. Her brother said he could get her a job at the local Costco where he works. From my perspective it was the end of Malati’s education, it was removing herself from both her family and medical support system. It was not the right time to make such a radical change in life. I would have preferred she get her school back on track, give her body more time to heal, and stay close to her family and doctors where she could be monitored, at least for a year. We were providing her all the necessities of life, an apartment, food, and utilities, all she needed to do was focus on completing her education. But this was not to be. But what disturbs me more than Malati leaving was Sukulina supporting Malati’s abrupt decision to leave. Why couldn’t Sukulina and I sat down as a united team and tried to persuade Malati to stay back and at least finish some more school for a few more months, and then if she still wanted to leave we could have helped her. But Sukulina and I are not on the same page when it comes to these matters. This causes me great pain. As it turned out Malati moved to Washington state got a job over the Christmas vacation with Costco, but was not rehired as a full time employee. Subsequently, she experienced chest pains and had to return to Loma Linda for a checkup, yet no explanation could be found for her pains and so she returned to Washington. At present Malati lives in her own apartment with her dog and is working in a dairy store. She seems content and so I accept her decisions, although I’d much prefer to see her in school. Everyone follows their own path and finds their own way in life, and even though I have tried to guide Malati and the other children in ways that I think are in their best interest, I realize that in the end people do as they wish. One learns by good advice or one learns by life experience. Being a parent is often a desperate affair and at a certain point there is often no choice than to just let go of those you care for.

Losing Control

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4/14/11
The moment is etched vividly into my mind. I was standing on the main altar; it was New Year’s Day, and I was serving the endless stream of people moving though the blessing line when I received a text from my wife alerting me that Malati was having chest pains and we had to do something right away. My heart sank. Malati had been born with a congenital condition called a pulmonary stenosis or restriction in her aortic valve. For twenty years this had never amounted to anything serious, but that apparent calm was about to end. The next day I called our primary care physician and got Malati in for a checkup. Our doctor was horrified with what he heard and immediately ordered an EKG. The results were not good so Malati was referred to a cardiologist, who did a echo cardiogram the next day. Her stenosis immediately showed up and she was then referred to Loma Linda Medical Center for a series of tests that led to the conclusion that she should have an aortic valvuloplasty. This is a procedure where a long plastic set of tubes with a ballon on one end is inserted through an artery in the leg, passed through the body and into the heart so that the ballon can be used to force open the pulmonary valve. It is a relatively non evasive procedure and fairly routine, except, when they did it to Malati her heart objected and stopped! Nothing seems to be routine for Malati. I waited in my car during this procedure and I will never forget receiving the call from the doctors asking to meet me outside the hospital. They informed me the procedure was a failure and that Malati’s heart had actually stopped during the procedure and she had to be revived by an electric shock. She would need immediate open heart surgery. We had come for a relatively routine procedure and now we were looking at a whole new scenario. Suddenly the game had gotten much more serious. The feelings of dread and fear that set in were overwhelming. Malati went for surgery the next morning and what follows is what I wrote the day of that surgery.

A Child on the Brink
February 19, 2011

Malati is well, in the sense she is alive, and once she recovers she can live a normal life. Before the operation she was a ticking time bomb of death, to put it bluntly. The doctors called her problem a suicide valve. They cannot believe she was even alive to this point. Malati is one lucky young lady! Coming out of recovery she looks like she has been hit by a freight train, but she will be fine. She will need 6-8 weeks of recovery, which includes no school, no work, no driving. We expect her to stay in the hospital for about 5 days. From here my greatest fear is infection. I have asked Sukulina to remove all animals from the house and to clean everything as much as possible.
As for Sukulina and I, we have been to hell and back. The whole thing has been a terribly humbling experience. There is merit in humility, but I’d never wish this on anyone. Thursday was the day of Malati’s valvuloplasty and we were told that it would be relatively routine and safe. Once that failed it became a day of watching all control slip away, a disconcerting experience to say the least. To stand in front of the hospital and be told by the doctors that the procedure was too dangerous and that her heart had even stopped and had to be shocked back into existence was an experience I will never forget. It ranks along with my, where was I when Kennedy was shot or what was I doing when the world trade towers came down. It was a life-defining moment.

In the end everything worked out and we are pleased beyond measure. The words that came across the pager by the OR team, “The repair work is complete. Malati continues to do well,” has become immortalized in my brain. Out of sheer relief, I cried. The cardiac surgery team is what I call the “swoop team.” It is some ethereal team of divinely empowered beings, who swoop down on their patients like a band of eagles, perform some incomprehensible magical feat, then fly back into the heavens only to circle around and swoop down once again on some other on-the-brink patient.

On an emotional level the whole experience leaves me seeing the need for sky gods once again. In times of helplessness and hopelessness no impersonal force can satisfy the cries of a child for it’s mother.

Twins and Hockey

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Wednesday, February 8 2012
Orange CA

Yesterday was a good day. Sukulina and I got to see the twins along with Ramai and Evonne. Wow they are tiny! Not only because they were born premature, but because they are new borns, twins and fresh out of the oven. Tiny feet, tiny toes, tiny hands, tiny fingers, tiny ears, and big heads. Huge heads compared to their bodies. Already they are very different. Satva is oriental in skin tone and eyes, Naryan is more caucasian, with a lighter complexion and more rounded features. Satva is active and demanding (as in ‘feed me now!’) while Naryan sleeps and seems more peaceful (as in ‘everything is cool, relax’). Naryan is a full pound bigger. They say, this is because he sleeps more. Even now it is obvious they are going to be two very different persons. They are born only 5 minutes apart, so they have identical astrological charts including even their 9th divisional (navamsha) charts, yet their appearance, activities and personalities are highly distinct already. What does this say about astrology?

After visiting Evonne and Ramai and the twins, we headed to the Honda Center in Anaheim to watch an NHL hockey game. The Anaheim arena is a beautiful facility. And it’s huge! I’d never been there before. But, of course, I’m not accustomed to being in such places so I have little experience to know what a big or small arena looks like. Plus, I’m easily impressed by just about anything. We arrived an hour into the game, which was surprisingly crowded. I think it was 3/4 full. That’s a lot of fans for a Wednesday evening in a part of the country with no history of hockey culture. The crowd was distinctively white and the ages seem to run from young to old. It was a spectacle that brought back a lot of memories of Hockey Night in Canada, that Saturday night ritual which is the hallmark of every Canadian. Would I return again to watch another hockey game? Probably not. I’m just not interested in hockey. I only wanted to see the spectacle and take action photographs. The best part was that first image, walking into the arena and seeing for real what I’ve seen on television a thousand times while growing up. That was breathtaking!

As we drove home from the game Sukulina read aloud the Wikipedia history of the NHL. This is an amazing thing to be able to do, researching from the web at 110 kms/hour.

Between seeing the twins and live hockey it was a good night.

The Banks of the Trent River

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I woke up this morning to the sound of rain tapping on the roof of my Dacha. This is music to me, a sound that I enjoy; it reminds me of my childhood at my grandparents cottage along the Trent River. In that part of the country rain is common so I heard the sound of tapping rain on the tin roof of the cottage regularly. My grandparents had an idyllic dacha on the shores of the Trent River, which flows through Eastern Ontario joining Georgian Bay, the upper part of the Great Lakes, with Lake Ontario, on the lower end of the lakes. During the war of 1812 between Britain and United States, this river was made navigable by the construction of many boat-lifts called locks and canals to provide a strategic water route to move military personnel through Ontario and into the United States by crossing Lake Ontario. Today it’s use is strictly recreational, yet it is interesting that its original use was military, much like the interstate network of highways across the United States. There is little doubt this cottage played an important role shaping the way I live today. My love for the sound of rain, the feel of fresh air at night, the sound of frogs and crickets and birds, and my love for space and the rural life all have its origins in this cottage. Even my attraction for the deserts of California has been directly acquired from my youth growing up on the banks of the Trent River.

Spring and Sunshine

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A husband to his wife
My love,

I’ve had this page open all night,
Trying to write a few words of love,
But I feel nothing, no words come at all.
My separation from you is too great;
I have become cold and numb.
Fate has taken you away far too long;
My feelings have sunk down, they can no longer be reached.

I am a bear who has fallen into hibernation
Only the sun and warmth of spring can wake me.
It is my winter and you alone are my sunshine and my spring.
If we meet for a few moments it is like a warm day in the depth of winter.
I begin to thaw, but soon you leave again,
The night returns and the freeze sets in.
I wait once more for your return.
You are my spring. You are my sunshine.

Your husband