I concur

While doing my rotations at various hospitals in the area towards the completion of my AEMT-CC class, I have seen life imitating movies, which has in turn imitated life.  The other night I was either on the set of the movie "Catch Me If You Can", or I was doing rotations in the emergency department.  It went down almost exactly like this, verbatim....  click and listen, and then let me know if you concur. I do. Amazing what a guy like me can do wearing a stethescope around my neck and a lab coat over my street clothes, walking around a hospital. 

People are childish

I think I'm going to throw something through my TV if i have to see that Lexus car commercial where the guy in it has a rambling monologue comparing his new lexus to the Big Wheels toy he got when he was a kid. I would rather just see a copule of views of the car and some statement saying "get this car... it will make you feel like you were a kid again." Or show some nut job driving the car across a high school lawn doing donuts, and drag racing- "this car will make you feel like a kid again."

Everyone likes to try to feel like a kid again. That's why we eat ice cream, and go on amusement park rides. If there was some way for me to feel like a kid while being an attorney, I'm sure I would love my job as much as I do volunteering in EMS/Fire. But right now, I haven't found much that beats the adrenaline rush of going from zero to 100 when a call comes in, and the feeling of satisfaction and comraderie I get after a job well done with a patient or at a fire. My baby sweetheart princess and my power ranger son are always doing kid things- splashing in puddles outside, playing in mud, you know, doing things that 4 and 5 year olds just do because they are kids, and they like being kids. My wife and I constantly tell them not do do those things- but what match could our authority possibly be to their feelings of just being a kid?

All the time I spend going to continuing education classes; doing rotations at hospitals and county ambulances; responding to calls, training at the fire service academy, etc. etc. its all about feeling like a kid again. Even for the paid guys around here though, it certainly ain't for the paycheck! Here is what FDNY pays. Cha Ching, baby.  Yah, right. I don't think my wife would have a problem with me becoming a full time paramedic if there was an extra zero at the end of those figures. She still tells me "don't go on the call, Rich," whenever she hears my pager tones sound off.  That's followed by the obligatory "it's too dangerous" or "you're gonna catch something from these sick people" from her. But what she's really saying is, "help me with the laundry instead." Doesn't matter much though. Same thing's happening... such pleas are no match for a chance to be a kid again, if only for a short while. 

A call was toned out this morning. A kid hurt himself when he slipped on ice on his driveway while horsing around.  He loves ice hockey, just didn't want to put on the skates. The mom kept muttering "I kept telling him he was going to get hurt if he kept on doing that".  Mabye he'll learn to be a paramedic later on in life. It's not as painful. 

Of mice and gentlemen

I just came back from a birthday party for one of my son's friends. It was in a movie theatre- a private showing of Desperaux, a mouse, who called himself a "gentelman". Following a code of honor is what made him more than a mouse, and even more than a man- Desperaux was a "gentleman". There's not much to do for adults when you're in a movie theatre, other than watch the movie. I, on the other hand, watched my son as he lost himself in the fantasy of the movie. Most of the other kids just chatted with each other about stuff that kindergardeners talk about... diareah, and doody, and what level they got to on DS Mario Brothers.

As we left the theatre, I held the door for a mother wheeling her baby carriage. My firefighter overcoat on, ruggedly unshaven, it was a friggin Norman Rockwell painting from the 1950s. "Daddy, you're a gentleman," my son Brandon told me. I was convinced that Brandon absorbed concepts from the movie that i have tried so hard to teach him since he was born. That is, until he asked me to stop at Waldbaums to get a block of cheese.

Of Belts and Suspenders

Question: "Does what you wear define you?" Even for that day, or moment? I put my belt on this morning. Then I clipped my fire department pager to it, and then my iPhone right next to it. I put on my suit. Then I put my fire department heavy coat on over it on the way to work. I slung my computer case over my shoulder. And then I stuck in its outside pocket copies of the drug protocols I have to study for next week's medic class quiz. Funny thing is, not all of this 'stuff' weighs me down daily as much as my struggle to accept the fact that I HAVE to be satisfied with my career as an attorney while pursuing my passion to be a paramedic.



A call comes over the fire pager on my way out to the car- auto accident, northern state parkway, exit 42. And then some follow up transmissions from various jericho fire and rescue officers- but none from an ambulance. I'm on my way. Oh, wait.... I'm SUSPENDED. That's right. Suspended. For three whole weeks. All because I wasn't able to attend a two hour class on how to use the radio. Later in the year, the fire department decided to make SCBA training part of that class too (thats the breathing apparatus used when you go into fires and such). Regardless... what is the point here??? I am suspended from responding to an auto accident because I supposedly lack training in how to use a breathing apparatus on my fire gear? Or is it the fact that I lack training on how to use a radio? I get it.... my radio skills are good enough to respond to 5 active fires in 2008 amongst the hunddreds of other calls to which I responded; good enough to take part in department operations training at the fire service academy where I took part in extinguishing fires in hi-rises, commercial properties, and vehicles; good enough to handle other auto accidents that resulted in life-threatening injuries; and good enough to ride on Nassau County ambulances for my rotations; but hey there, Ms. auto accident victim at exit 42 this morning, please stop bleeding as soon as you can, I can't help you right now because IM SUSPENDED. Please have your accident at another time and day. Thank you for your courtesy and consideration. It's so macabre, that the first chief who responded isn't an EMT. He did go thru the classroom training though, so, I guess he can use his radio and breathing apparatus to help this lady. Jericho's tax dollars, hard at work. Protecting our citizens and saving lives, one policy at a time.

I'm at my law office now. I took off my warm overcoat decorated with fire rescue patches and the like and threw it on the leather chair, revealing my tie and button down to my employees. One of my paralegals comes in and tells me she is going home because she feels sick. I told her I couldn't help her either- IM SUSPENDED.

New Year but not new here.

I decided to open up my blog again. How can you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been, right? I think my older entries are more interesting than the new. But hopefully even newer entries will be more interesting than those were.

Anyway, if you like or dont like what you see/read here, shout it out. dont be shy.

Darth Vader Must Eat

People in Star Wars never eat. But they must have, right? There must have been a canteen on the Death Star.

When Dads Were Models for All of Us

This article hit home for me. Taken from the NY Times....



When Dads Were Models for All of Us


Long ago, I grew up with three dads: my own and two neighbors who had enough left over after dealing with their own kids to feel like dads to us as well. They lived in split-level houses next to one another that they bought around 1953 for about $30,000 at 39, 35 and 31 Tanners Road in Great Neck. Back then, they were too busy with the grand and quotidian duties of fatherhood to meditate too much about it. So, on Father’s Day 2008, a respectful salute to fatherhood before play dates, before anything 24/7, or 2.0.

Gilbert Isaacs, next door to us, never went to college, but he was the smartest man we knew — exotic and mysterious in his brazen detachment from Little League, pro sports and the other defining elements of suburban life. Instead of a lawn in the backyard there was the Japanese pebble garden he had designed and the 10-foot-tall copy of a famous Isamu Noguchi sculpture he had fabricated in his basement.

He knew about everything — orchids, the paintings of Emil Nolde, medicine and astronomy — not in the showy, keeping-score, intellectual résumé-building of today, but just because he wanted to know.

Once, he diagnosed his barber’s eye ailment, and was always greeted from then on with a respectful, “Good afternoon, Doc,” under the assumption that he was a physician, not someone who owned two jewelry stores in Queens with his brother.

Jesse Biblowitz could have been his opposite, someone so comfortable with the rhythms of our little cul-de-sac, it was hard to imagine him anywhere else. Where Gilbert’s eye was sardonic and clinical, Jesse had an unerring ability to see the best in everyone and radiated a sweetness hard to square with his big, stooped frame.

My brother called him the Golden Jesse, which didn’t really mean anything, but seemed just right. Going to play tennis with Jesse and assorted kids, relatives and visiting dignitaries every Sunday was about sports but mostly about life. You called every ball near the line in. You were awarded a second serve for any possible distraction. If Uncle Si didn’t want to move, you hit the ball close enough so he could remain stationary. Before the Jordan Rules, they were the Jesse Rules.

And my father, Jerome Applebome, who we never forgot was Dad-in-Chief, never strayed far from active-duty mode, invariably asking who wanted a nice peach, seemingly always around whether he was or wasn’t. He radiated a kind of Thurberesque suburban mensch-hood, fighting a losing battle with wily raccoons, implacable crab grass, balky commodes and the cruel vagaries of sports wagers, done in by every miracle play and impossible field goal. But without preaching, he was a master of teaching us how to do the right thing, how to be a father and a friend and an honorable person. He was a blend of Gilbert and Jesse, intent on litigating any political or intellectual point, every bit as goodhearted as Jesse without Jesse’s air of effortless suburban Zen.

We were lucky. Maybe some kids today grow up with the same air of total familiarity with their neighbors. But just as almost no kids seem to just go out and play ball in the street without an adult telling them what to do, it doesn’t seem today’s style.

But the dads were lucky, too. Gilbert and Jerome wouldn’t have made a glamorous buddy movie, but what great friends they were. Each trip to what was then called the appetizing store on Sunday became a gala excursion. Every visit by Gilbert later in the afternoon, when he’d torment my father by intentionally showing up at the most crucial moment of the game on TV to subtly shift the betting karma in the wrong direction, became a form of friendly suburban kabuki.

All three remained friends, almost brothers, for their whole lives, taking trips and spending holidays together, even if the Gilbert-Jerome bond was stronger than the Gilbert-Jesse one. Gilbert died in 1999 at the age of 82 and there was an appropriately sedate memorial a year later.

Jesse died in January at the age of 87 and there was an appropriately demonstrative funeral in which perhaps a dozen speakers found remarkably personal ways to paint the same picture in different brush strokes. My father’s 90 and still on duty.

There were, then as now, endless varieties of fatherhood, and it’s not as if they were all saints then and we’re all distant Hummer-driving power dads now. But on Tanners Road, there did seem to be more time, more grace, more of a center, more very visible models of the way to do it right than most kids, urban or suburban, grow up with today. People moved less often, they didn’t have P.D.A.’s to check on weekends, they had less fancy jobs but perhaps richer lives. You can postulate reasons, but Google can’t tell you exactly why.

Then or now, the one thing that doesn’t change is that it doesn’t last long. There we were in Jesse’s car, looking through Gilbert’s telescope or playing catch with my father, and poof, then we weren’t.

Chances are whoever counts as dad in your household is a bit bruised this Father’s Day. His stocks, if he has any, are down, his blood pressure’s up. While I was doing mall duty with my daughter last week, a salesman regaled me with tales of a pen that cost more than all three houses on Tanners Road combined.

Maybe if you’ve got one of those hedge-fund über-dads, he’ll appreciate that sort of thing. If not, buy yours a full tank of $4.50 gas, tell him how much you love and appreciate him, and hope he’s as lucky as Gilbert, Jesse and Jerome and those in their orbit were.