Australia is a lot like home, but really different.

Christmas in Brisbane this year will be not much different — in temperature — from Christmas in any of the places we’d likely be if we were spending the holiday in Texas.

True, it is summer here in the Southern Hemisphere and our Christmas Day high is projected to be 80 degrees Fahrenheit (or, as Australians, Canadians, and lots of other folks would say:  about 27), but Houston and Abilene are projected to reach 70 degrees and it’s supposed to get up to 61 in Dallas.

So we’re getting set for a Texas Christmas Day, more or less, here in Queensland’s capital city.  And we’ll be with friends at dinner (which is what I grew up calling the noon meal), celebrating the blessings of a year of sadness and joy, gains and losses, all redeemed in the eyes of some of us by proof in November that American is still a democracy after all.

There is so much to be happy about here and at home.  One participant (she signed her posting just “L.”) on an Americans-in-Brisbane bulletin board listed several of the aspects of the United States and Australia that she especially appreciates.

I’ve categorized her comments and edited them for your consideration:

PLACES

•    Australia – The beauty of buildings in Tasmania, Ayers rock, the coloured sands of Rainbow Beach, sunset over Sydney Opera house, the birds that are so colourful, red outback dirt…

•    United States — the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, wild flowers, oak trees and giant Redwoods…

PEOPLE

•    I love that in Australia I don’t have to have a title (and) I can get more done with a friendly chat at the pub or shop than by dropping the name of the university I attended. And that when we first meet someone we don’t say “what do you do for a living”? Plus the Aussie sense of humour; it is beaut.

•    In the US, I love that we don’t ask when first meeting someone “how many kids do you have?”  Also that we are very good at invention and that our attitude is not “no worries” since sometimes we need to worry.  I am happy to be a mover, shaker, and get the job done no excuses person.

THINGS

•    In Australia, we don’t have 24-hour shops everywhere. Retail materialism is not quite full on.

FOOD

•    In Australia, pumpkin scones and Tim Tams, Tim Tams and more Tim Tams.

•    In the US: blackberries, cherries, apple pie, Reece’s peanut butter cups.

Although some of the things “L.” fondly misses (football US-style and muscle cars, for example) will never make my own list, I like her main point, which is that there is much to like about both countries and we miss the best of one when we’re in the other.

Until we’ve found a way to be in two places at once, though, that’s just life, isn’t it?  Like “L.,” I feel blessed to have two countries.

Merry Christmas from Down Under.  May 2009 avoid the worst of its mis-directions and fulfil the best of 2008’s promises.

Oh, and one more thing.  Kristi and I just learned a new Aussie-ism from our friend Nicola, a born Brisbanite: “fish-o.”  She has bought her contribution to hear family’s Christmas dinner, seafood, at the local fish-o.

Whether your Christmas dinner is coming from a fish-o, a beef-o, a pork-o, or a veggie farm, we wish you the very best.  – Bob, for Kristi and Nicola, too

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Last week, in a small church in Cisco, Texas, my wife and I attended the funeral of my brother, Gary, who, after falling and hitting his head in a shower, lived for five weeks in what the doctors called “a locked-in state.”

Seeing him in his intensive care bed at Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, not moving, with his mouth open and his eyes closed, was a shock for me and for Kristi at first.  He looked dead then.

But he wasn’t. Over the next week or so, we visited him regularly, alone or with friends and other family members. One morning Kristi stood on one side of his hospital bed with her fingers in the palm of his inert left hand and I asked him to squeeze her fingers if he knew we were there.

Kristi burst into tears because the squeeze was so definite. Despite severe brain trauma that left him unable to open his eyes or speak, for the next few days he nodded in answer to questions, gave us more squeezes (once for “no” and twice for “yes”), moved his left hand up toward the tracheotomy which must have given him pain, and signalled “thumbs-up” and stuck out his tongue when asked to do so by a nurse. For one nurse, he even moved his lips to mouth words.

I am here and I know you are here with me, he told us with these limited signals, and when a doctor told us he could probably see, we held his eyelids open for him. Gary indicated that he could, in fact, see us clearly.  He could hear us.  He could respond.

With his permission (given by finger squeezes), we read aloud to him bits of an amazing book called My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor. From Taylor, though, we learned [click to continue…]

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[Note: No change in my brother Gary’s condition, except that his hand-squeezes in responses to questions are much weaker now than they were when Kristi and I were first visiting with him in his hospital room. (See earlier blogs if you have no idea what I’m talking about.) The medical folk say head-injury patients cycle up and down in responsiveness, so we shouldn’t read too much into this.  I hope to be with him again after Thanksgiving.]

AUSTIN, TX – For about seven hours over the last two days, I’ve been doing something I may well never do again, but used to do a lot: I’ve been driving alone on Texas highways.

After saying what I hope is to be a temporary goodbye yesterday to my hospitalised brother, Gary, I drove on Interstate 20 west to Sweetwater to visit my other two brothers and their families.  Then, today, I drove to Austin, for a two-day total of about seven hours by myself in a car.

No telling how many hours I’ve spent alone on Interstate Highways during earlier eras in my life, driving across Texas, or between Texas and Massachusetts or Florida or California.  My cars broke down only now and then, and gas was, by today’s standards, almost free.

“Cheap” today means about $1.80 a gallon at most of the stations I passed today, but I was able to fill up in Sweetwater this morning for $1.65 a gallon, about half of the price unleaded cost here a year ago.  We happen to have returned during what will surely be a temporary price drop.

That makes it easier for me to decide to drive to Houston for Thanksgiving with Kristi and her family and then drive back to be with my family members, including Gary.  (I hope he’ll be more alert by then.) This adds to the “carbon footprint” of our trip, admittedly, though the big environmental costs must be the flights from Australia to here and back.

Even though I am making this road trip anyway (mea culpa), it’s probably progress that I know, now, more about the environmental costs of burning fossil fuels than I knew earlier when I roamed the highways so frequently.

And there are some other good signs that I saw today.  While I was rolling along open roads [click to continue…]

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FORT WORTH, TX — The hospital where my brother Gary was first a patient here, Harris Methodist, is near Kindred Hospital where he is now (no changes of significance in his condition so far).  It has provided us with a wonderful and inexpensive gym, for which we are grateful. In addition to letting us maintain some degree of fitness, that gym provided me the chance to glance through back issues of various magazines, including Texas Monthly.

Thank goodness for that, since the blaring big-screen TV in the work-out room is constantly tuned to the propaganda of Fox News.  I got it switched to CNN once, but it’s a hopeless battle.  At least I have headphones to tune out some of the blather.

An article in the April 2008 issue of the magazine helped me resolve the other day some long-standing issues I’ve had about the fiery conclusion of the 51-day standoff at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993.

By Pamela Colloff, the article quotes directly from negotiators, law enforcement officials, Davidians who survived, and others and seems to be remarkably even-handed in its depiction of the tragedy that claimed the lives of law men and Davidians, 76 of them on the fiery last day, 27 of whom were children.

Based on what this article says, I am confirmed in my beliefs that bone-headed decisions on the part of law enforcement people created a situation which could have been avoided, made it worse at many points, and materially contributed to the final tragedy.  While all the surviving Davidians received jail terms (up to 40 years), only two law enforcement officials were fired and they were re-hired in lower-level jobs.

While confirming much of what I thought was likely true on many points, Colloff’s report told me much I didn’t know about David Koresh and the events of the day the compound burned out in high wind with so many trapped inside.

Koresh and his crew had stockpiled guns and ammunition.  He seems to have believed [click to continue…]

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KENDRED HOSPITAL, FORT WORTH, Sunday morning, Nov. 9 – Hospital time, my brother Mike says, isn’t like ordinary time, and I think he’s right.  Even for visitors, being in an artificially lit place with few windows to the outside seems to loosen one’s ties to signals of daylight, noontime, twilight and such.

How much more odd everything must seem for a patient, especially for a person in intensive care such as Gary, my brother who fell in a shower two weeks ago and banged his head so hard that he caused bleeding inside his skull.

Along with his wife, Kay, with Mike and our other brother Ronald, and with family members and friends, Kristi and I have been visiting with Gary off and on for several days now.

Jet lag and artificial environments form a disorienting mix and the shock of seeing Gary comatose in a hospital bed, looking dead, eyes closed, not moving … Well, it was all a bit hard to take at first.

After five days, first in Harris Methodist Hospital and now in this long-term care hospital, we are seeing signs of progress: small but steady increases in the movements of Gary’s left hand and arm, tiny eye-blinks, the movement of his left foot from side to side, nods of his head.

Our first moment of elation came when he squeezed our fingers in a “yes” response to “Can you hear us?”

A second came after a neurologist took the time to tell us that he knew of no reason why Gary would not be able to see if someone held his eye lids open.  We’ve been doing that and, with squeezes and slight nods, Gary has confirmed that he not only sees, but sees clearly although his eyes remain mostly fixed in place and his pupils are dilated.

We’ve been holding his eyes open while reading aloud to him from a brain scientist’s story of her own brain trauma, hospitalisation, and recovery, My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor (Viking, 2006).

It is an excellent account of what it’s like to be a wounded patient in the hospital system, and [click to continue…]

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Last Sunday, someone who had read a ‘dung beetles and cow plops’ blog I wrote two years ago sent me a message that was anonymous but encouraging.

(By the way, for those of you who read my last couple of blogs, my seriously ill brother in Fort Worth is showing slow but steady signs of improvement, so we’re deeply hopeful of getting to see him soon as he begins a long road to recovery.)

In that two-year-old blog, I wrote about a story in The Australian newspaper concerning dung beetles and how they have saved Australia from a plague of flies.

A writer named Julian Cribb reported that flies used to be so bad in many places here in Australia in the summertime that they were a health hazard.  Nobody wanted to be outdoors in their worst seasons because they’d quickly mob you, especially if you had worked up a sweat, which is easy to do in most places here around Christmas time.

Cribb’s article claimed that 270 million cow patties plop down on Aussie dirt every day.  Left on top of the ground for a couple of weeks, each of those bovine gifts can produce 3,000 flies.

Even with my limited math skills, I could calculate that 270 million cow plops times 3,000 per day for, say, 60 hot days  = a lot of flies.

Evidently that’s what happened each year until dung beetles were introduced in the 1960s and went to work balling up and burying bits of fresh cow stuff before flies could fill each plop with eggs destined to become maggots and then buzzing menaces to human (and animal) comfort.

“The greatest recycling enterprise in our national history,” Cribb wrote, came about because of the efforts of George Boremissza, coleopterist (beetle expert), who introduced the industrious little creatures to this land where so many non-native species – rabbits, foxes, cane toads — have produced natural disasters.

In 2006 Cribb worried that the drought Australia was going through (eased somewhat, now, but not yet ended) might kill off the beetles.  When soil is dry, it becomes too hard for the mighty little workers to dig into so that they can bury their balled-up plunder.

That buried dung enriches pastures, thereby increasing yields of meat, milk, and wool since the fertilized soil can support more steers, milk cows, and sheep. All of whom produce new sites of competition between flies and beetles, of course, every day, all year long.

Wait, the news gets worse.

George Boremissza’s beetle program was axed after a couple of decades, according to Cribb, and dung beetle science here is as dead as the dodo. Very few scientists are trying to figure out what to do if the beetles can’t continue to silently, daily, diligently save our necks from flies.

It’s not the kind of science that can lead to intellectual property capable of producing profit.  So flies, which are usually only a minor nuisance here now even in the summer, could make a devastating comeback.

But maybe not.  My anonymous blog reader sent this message to my old blog site as a comment: “I am working on an integrated solution right now. Watch for it in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index entries for 2009.”

I will.  I hope your solution, dear reader of my old blog, is brilliant and cheap, even though it will be hard to compete with beetles, millions of them willing to work for… well, you know.

Hey, and what about this?  If the beetles die out and the ‘integrated solution’ falls short, we could all become vegetarian.  Fewer cows = fewer plops = fewer flies.

Sounds like a winning formula to me.

Wait, what was that sound?

Oh.

I think that, for many of you, my idea just plopped.

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My wife and I will be flying back to Texas soon in hopes of seeing my brother, Gary, recuperating from an accidental head injury resulting from a fall.  We worry that we could be going home for his funeral.  At best, life is tenuous and his situation is far from the best at this moment.

With personal reasons for being more-than-normally aware of death, I have been impressed this week with a sad but wonderful movie from 2003 and regretful about  the loss of a writer who has given me considerable pleasure.

Tony Hillerman has died at 83, of heart problems, at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The author of crime stories set in the Navajo Nation, he was perceived by many Navajos as an accurate purveyor of their stories and culture.  I had assumed he was a Navajo, but he wasn’t.  He just talked to lots of people who were and listened well.

I’ve never been drawn to murder mysteries, but I will miss Hillerman.  I hope he left behind a finished manuscript or two.  I’m always open to hearing more about the lives of his two main characters, policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.

Gary, my brother, has heart problems, too, in addition to the head injury which may hasten the end of his life.  Together and, more often, separately, Gary and I have driven many times through a small town in Texas called Cross Plains.

A wild grass fire burned out a big part of Cross Plains a couple of years ago, but you can get a glimpse of its main street buildings as they were before then if you watch, as my wife and I did last week, a movie called “The Whole Wide World.”

Set in that town in the early 30’s, this is a fine independent movie now on DVD and it’s about another writer, the exceptionally successful author of pulp fiction adventure stories, Robert E. Howard. The closest I’ve come to reading his work is to see movie marques a while back advertising one of his best-known characters, Conan the Barbarian.

In all the times I drove through Cross Plains when I was traveling to or from Fort Worth and wanting to avoid Abilene, I had no awareness that Howard had lived and written there.  Its big claim to fame for me [click to continue…]

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We’re discovering, in the last few days, the most negative aspect of being an American living in Australia: separation from family in a time of crisis.

One morning last week, my brother, Gary, fell in a shower stall and hit his head.  He is now in a Fort Worth Hospital on life support and we have no idea if he is going to regain consciousness or die from bleeding inside his skull.

My other two brothers, who also live in Texas, are keeping us in the loop as much as they can via email.  They have no clear notion of what’s ahead, either, but one of them has been at Gary’s bedside today and will be again tonight.  At best, it would be a couple of days before my wife and I can be there, and given the need to disengage from responsibilities here, it could be a week or more.

We’ll go, whether to see Gary as he recuperates or to be with family mourning his loss.  We don’t know enough to decide, rationally, whether to hurry our departure or not.  Costs are a factor, though not a deciding one.

There are no bereavement fares on international airline flights, we’ve learned, so our Brisbane to Dallas-Fort Worth flights will be about $AU3,000 for each of us, give or take a couple of hundred, but, as my wife says correctly, if you’ve got the money and it’s family, you just do it.

Fortunately, I got to talk to Gary on the phone for half an hour (at a cost of well under $1, a cheap rate which has made being here so much easier) a few hours before his accident.  And the brother now at his bedside spent a couple of very fine days with him on our farm in Runnels County this month, fishing and eating their catch.

It’s the treats like that – gathering with one’s kin to enjoy being together – and crises such as what we’re experiencing now that make up the down side of what is, otherwise, the wonderful gift of living in Brisbane, Australia, Southern Hemisphere, several thousand miles away.  — Bob

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A world-traveling Australian friend of mine here in Brisbane, James Hills, just sent me a young Norweigan woman’s blog containing  a heart-warming story about a random act of kindness done years ago by someone you know.

At least you’ll recognize the name when you get to the bottom of the story translated into English from a Norweigian newspaper by blogger Leisha Camden.

The story is about a young woman named Mary, who, in 1988, was an out-of-luck traveller at the Miami airport, and there’s even a recent picture of her with her husband at the end of the post.

I highly recommend that you click here and go to Leisha’s blog site.  If you have time, read the comments at the end, too.  Some stories that will likely be ignored by all the major media outlets are worth a bit of extra attention, especially these days.   ( Problems? Try copying and pasting into your browser this URL: http://leishacamden.blogspot.com/2008/10/not-that-it-matters.html )

Enjoy.  – Bob

PS – The good Samaritan here, in a recent TV debate, could be heard to be saying (if you played the tape back and listened carefully), “That’s a hard one,” when his opponent stumbled over the difficult name of a world leader.  No smirk.  No one-upsmanship.  Just understanding and compassion.

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