Laid Off - Not working can be hard work!

Hanging out with nothing to do. Is it Heaven? Or is it Hell? (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

My mother always said it was better to be “pissed off” than to be “pissed on.” I always liked that saying, it made sense after all, but two weeks ago, something I never thought would happen to me, did in fact happen – I lost my job.

I was “laid off.”

A lot of things go through your mind when the carpet is pulled out from under your 26-year career as a photojournalist, but the one thing I couldn’t seem to shake from my head after the whole thing went down was the single burning question: Is it better to be “laid off” than to be “laid on?” Because being laid off certainly feels a lot like you’re being laid on.

It wasn’t like it was any big shock or anything, I could sense it coming for a month or so before it actually happened, but when it did happen, it still caught me by surprise. I can only relate the experience to watching a terminally ill loved one suffer for months, but when they actually die, somehow you’re still not ready for it. And like the death of a loved one, the death of a job – of a career – is just as painful, and the steps of dealing with that pain and grief are very similar.

First comes the relief. Why I felt relieved, I’m not sure, but it might have had something to do with the fact that it truly was over. No more walking on eggshells. No more uncertainty (as it pertained to my previous job). In essence, I was free and it felt pretty good, at least for a while – maybe an hour or two.

After that came another kind of uncertainty, and this one, I fear, may stick around awhile. This uncertainty leads to high anxiety – the kind that keeps you up at night while you try to find some way, any way, to think about something other than the fact that you are now unemployed for the very first time since you were 14-years-old.

But it’s not a constant. With the fear comes a dose of excitement. The “Hey, I don’t have to work today!” feeling. Unfortunately, that excitement is usually quickly replaced with the “Holy crap, I don’t have a job!” feeling of doom.

It’s a seesaw battle every day for a guy like me. It’s especially tough when you go from very much being sought after for 26-years, to suddenly no longer wanted - kind of like being Mel Gibson or Charlie Sheen, only I’m not cashing in on being bat-shit crazy.

Nobody can really predict how anything will come to an end in his or her lives, but I certainly would never have figured my last day of work would have ended the way it did – not in tears, but with a chuckle, sitting in an office being fired by the very same folks I’d photographed earlier in the day at a business expo where they were extolling on how great everything was going with our company and how the economy in Washtenaw County was on the upswing.

Well, I guess it's great for them – they’re still working.

The irony of the situation didn’t escape me, I laughed a little as they handed me my walking papers. The whole situation made me think of my mother, the very same woman who died last March nearly a year to the day I was being let go (from now on I proclaim we skip March completely and go straight to April) and even though she didn’t leave me much when she died, my mother did leave me with a sardonic sense of humor, one I knew I could rely on to help me get through this thing - how do you put a price on that?

So what now? I was already going through a full-blown mid-life crisis, now I was about to go through a full-blown mid-career crisis. What does a 45-year-old guy with mad skills do at this point in his life so he doesn’t go mad?

As it turns out, being unemployed is actually a pretty busy way of life. The filing for unemployment, trying to scrape up enough cash to buy camera gear, getting portfolios together, making calls, trying to remember to eat, sleep, and occasionally go to the bathroom, all eat up a great majority of time. It’s like I graduated from college again … or just died, I’m not really sure which.

Luckily, if my perspective was ever at stake, Mother Nature put an end to that by destroying half of Japan with an earthquake/tsunami combo the very next day, reminding me that my "so-called" problems were really just a hill of beans compared to being swept out to sea and drowned, or being slowly poisoned to death by nuclear fallout.

Who knows, maybe the Mayans were right. Maybe it’s all over in 2012 and all I gotta do is get to December and then the jig is up! (Or maybe they just got tired of making their calendar by the time they got to the year 2012 and they just stopped - hard to say).

The aftermath from the whole event has been fairly amazing, if not amusing. The other day I got a letter in the mail made out to me in scribbly children’s handwriting. There was no return address, but inside the letter was a Meijer gift card for $25 and a little typed note that said, “Please accept this gift, we feel really bad for you and your family.”

I was touched, and I did go out and buy dinner with the gift card, I just feel bad for the poor little guy (or gal) who probably envisions me standing all disheveled by the side of the road holding a cardboard sign that reads, “Will shoot family portrait for food.”

The amount of help I’ve received has only been surpassed by the amount of advice. Everyone seems to know what I should do, or at least, could do, with the rest of my life. Everyone, that is, but me.

“Now you can go and do something you’ve always wanted to do,” they tell me, “something you really love.

But what if you were already doing what you really loved? What if it was your dream job? What if the next job you get should have been your first job? You know, the one you hated so much you left it to go and do what you really wanted to?

It’s an interesting thought.

Soon, all the kind thoughts and support will begin to fade in much the same manner they fade in the weeks and months following a funeral. It's not that people won't, or don't still care, but life goes on, like it or not, whether you're alive or dead, working or unemployed.

In the meantime, I’ll try and stay a photographer and I think I’ll keep writing too; both bring me joy, and if I were to be swept out to sea tomorrow (or if the Mayans weren’t kidding around with this whole Armageddon/calendar business and the world really does come to an end in 2012) I’d rather not spend my last days doing anything other than what I’ve been doing for the past 25-years.

It’s the one thing I’m really good at and what I truly love to do.

Why change now?

Stuck - The Fine Art of Going Nowhere

Floating ... sinking ... going nowhere, doing nothing ... stuck! (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Today I’m stuck.

Stuck in a rut that I can’t seem to, and don’t really want to get out of. I was stuck yesterday too. And the day before that, and the day before that.

Every dream … every thought ... stuck in neutral, trapped in mud.

Hard as I try, I keep going back to the beginning - back to square one - doing the same thing over and over and over again. Just an endless cycle of spinning my wheels … going nowhere … doing nothing.

If I died today I guess I would have had a good life - a wife, three kids, a handful of plaques and a trophy or two. But today I don’t feel lucky. Today I don’t feel blessed. Today I just feel stuck.

I thought about exercising. I thought twice.

I thought about writing something funny. Nothing came to mind.

I thought about reading a book but turned on the TV instead. Nothing was on, 135 channels but not one thing.

I folded a load of laundry and pulled the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. I never plugged it in; I just put it back in the closet and left the floors dirty.

I opened the fridge to see if there was something good to eat even though I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t find anything so I shut the door. I opened it again just to make sure.

I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror - I was old. I washed my hands even though they weren’t dirty. I dried my hands and then looked in the mirror again. Still old.

I felt my neck for a pulse – still alive.

I walked back into the kitchen and flipped through a stack of CD’s. I opted for quiet.

I grabbed my jacket and keys and opened the door. It was raining outside. Hard.

I hung my coat in the closet and threw my keys on the kitchen table. A wasted day, a wasted week, a wasted month, a year, a life. No ambition. No motivation. No stimulation. Just emotional straightjacket, spiritual quagmire, buried-in-an-avalanche stuck.

It won’t last forever, probably not even the rest of the day, but right now I’d trade places with just about anyone else in the world.

Today I’m a loser, a whiner, and a complainer. I have no positive thoughts, not a one. Today I’m miserable and shitty.

Today I suck. I wouldn’t want to be me if I had a choice. But I don’t. I’m stuck with my no-good-rotten self for the rest of the day, probably tonight too. Maybe tomorrow will be different.

Maybe tomorrow I grease the skids and move forward, if just a little.

Maybe tomorrow I don’t look so old or feel so worthless.

Maybe tomorrow the sun comes out and dries up the rain.

Maybe I do 50 push ups and break a sweat. Maybe I eat something healthy and go for a run.

Maybe I write something funny or go for a drive. Maybe I take a good picture or chat with a stranger.

... Or maybe tomorrow I wake up and stare at the ceiling for an hour before I get out of bed. Maybe I don’t get out of bed at all. Maybe it never ends. Maybe I stay like this till the end of my days.

It’s not that great, but it’s not so bad.

Sometimes I'm fine standing still, doing nothing, going nowhere. Sometimes heaviness and doom are my friends. Sometimes it’s better being worse.

Sometimes I just want to be stuck.

But sometimes I don't.

Sleepless in Ann Arbor - Things that make me go, hmm?

If only my brain had one way. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

I don’t sleep much these days. Actually, I guess it’s been about 14-years since my last good night of sleep.

Back then I could blame my lack of slumber on my newborn daughter. Two years later, my second daughter was the culprit, and then 16-months after that, my son - infants, especially breastfed ones, make a night of uninterrupted, blissful sleep pretty much impossible.

The problem was once they started sleeping through the night, I found that I still couldn’t. Somewhere in those five years my body became programmed to wake up every few hours to unite a crying infant with its mother’s boob, wait for them to tank up, and then return them to their crib.

And that’s where I stand today – minus the baby, boob and crib parts.

I may have the world’s largest diseased prostate gland but I’ll probably never know because even though I routinely wake up and take trips to the pisser in the middle of the night, I’m pretty sure my prostate isn’t to blame. Sometimes a funky dream is the guilty party, but more often than not it’s my maladjusted biological clock combined with an extremely overactive brain.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to shut off my brain.

Ever.

And it’s not like every thought entering my skull that wakes (or keeps) me up at night is even worthwhile. If I stayed awake worrying about financial woes or my health or something like that, it might make sense, but usually I’m thinking about something stupid like: I wonder if everyone sees color the same way? Is my green the same as your green? What if we only both know it to be green because that’s how our brains have been trained? What if my green actually looks like your red?

This is the kind of shit that keeps me up - and when I’m up, my brain really starts a grinding.

I wonder what will keep me up tonight? (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Here’s a small sample of some random thoughts that were bouncing around my noggin this very morning between 5 and 5:15 when I awakened for no apparent reason.

How can BP pump billions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the better part of a year and gas prices don’t budge, and even go down, but lately if a camel farts in the Middle East, gas prices shoot up 30 cents a gallon overnight?

Are people just religious because they’re afraid of death? And if so, why isn’t that fear strong enough to make us glorify Jesus with amazing paintings like the kind Caravaggio painted during the Baroque period? That was some good art!

Why is it that spring is the only season that doesn’t already feel like it’s arrived when it finally does? I mean it already feels like summer well before June 21st, and it already pretty much feels like fall by September 21st, and it for sure feels like winter long before December 21st, so why doesn’t it already feel like spring well before March 21st?

If students are smart enough to get into college (say the University of Michigan, for example) why then, aren’t they smart enough to look both ways before walking out into the street? And why is college when most of them start smoking? Certainly they’re smart enough to know that cigarettes aren’t good for them. Not to mention they’re twice as likely to drink themselves to death than any other demographic.

If I had to lose one body part, which one could I do without? What if it were just a finger? A toe? An organ? How about senses? Would I rather be blind, deaf, or dumb? Would I miss it if I couldn’t smell anymore, or would it be a blessing?

Should I get rid of my 3-iron and put another hybrid in my golf bag?

Will I ever get cancer? I wonder if I have it now but don’t know it yet? Do you not have cancer one day, and then the next day you do?

Did the folks who jumped out of the Trade Center even know what was going on at the time? I wonder if they felt a strange sense of calm as they fell to their deaths?

What if I won the lotto and threw away the ticket without ever checking my numbers? If I did win, would I really be happier, or just less broke?

Why does hair appear in so many different places on my body at different times of my life? I had plenty of hair on my head for 20-plus years, and now it’s mostly gone, but I have plenty on my chest and my back, and lately in my ears and my nose. Even my eyebrows are starting to look a little too Thomas Edison these days. My legs, however, are smooth as a baby’s ass when they used to be plenty hairy – what’s up with that?

Is my mother really dead, or is she just playing a cruel joke on all of us? Can she hear what I’m thinking right now, or is she just rotting away in her casket? I wonder how long before she’s nothing but bones?

Why do we equate heaven with the sky and the clouds, and why do we think dead relatives are always favorably looking down on us? What if they’re really disgusted by us and are hoping we don’t die soon because they’re enjoying their time away from us? If there really is a heaven, how far back does it date? I mean could Thomas Jefferson be having a tryst with Anna Nicole Smith right now? (Assuming, of course, they’re both in heaven).

What is so hard about golf that I couldn’t become a professional? I mean it’s really nothing more than getting your body to repeat the same thing over and over again with a great amount of consistency and mental fortitude. Why couldn’t I do it?

I wonder if my kids will ever get married? I wonder if any of them are gay and don’t know it yet? I wonder what they’ll be when they grow up? I wonder if they wonder what they’ll be when they grow up?

Are dreams really just little slices of what it’s like after you die? You know, not always good, but always very interesting. Or do you just fade to a black nothingness and that’s it?

If I took every day of my life when I was sick, or just had a headache, and added them all up, I wonder how many weeks, or months of my life I will have wasted feeling like crap?

When do criminals turn bad? We all start out innocent babies; at what point does someone start down the wrong path? Are some people truly just evil? How can that be?

Do people really die in their sleep, or do they wake up first in a terrified panic alone in the dark? Is drowning truly the most painful way to die? I wonder if you know you’re going to die the second before a fatal car accident? How does anyone know?

Where should I put my son in the batting order this year?

How come some people can play musical instruments so well, and other people really suck?

If the world were made up of nothing but people like me, how many businesses would go bankrupt in less than a month?

Why do dogs like humans so much?

Is anybody really, truly happy?

Why the hell can’t I just shut off my brain and go back to sleep?

Hmm? Now I have one more thing I have to think about ... CRAP!!!

Family Portrait

The Horwedel kids - circa 1982. (Photo by Olan Mills Studios)

The coupon came in the mail one day in late August of ‘82. Normally, a coupon like that would be tossed in the trash (like 95% of all our other junk mail, and occasionally the actual mail too if my old man got to it first) but for some reason my mother saved this coupon and set it aside.

None of us kids paid any attention to the mail – that was mom’s job – so I don’t think any of us even noticed the coupon or what it was for. We also hadn't noticed the fact that my mother had been scheming to get us into a portrait studio for a few years. The coupon for a free sitting at Olan Mills Studio and a $15 - 8 x 10 was just the final push she needed.

“Kids, we haven’t had a family portrait in nearly five years.” She said to us, seemingly out of the blue one day. “I’ve got this coupon for Olan Mills in Sandusky, I think we should get one done before you all go back to school.”

Looking back, I can see my mom’s point. I was about to be a senior in high school, my sister Dina was off to her first year of college, my brother Lance was going to be a freshman in high school, and my other brother Duke was a seventh grader – it was hard to say when any of us would be living under the same roof again after that summer, and I think my mom wanted to make sure she marked that transitional time in her kid’s lives (and hers too) by having us sit for a formal portrait.

That was where my mother severely underestimated the amount of resistance with which her idea would be met.

“Ahh, for Christ’s sake Mom, none of us wants to wear some stupid monkey suit to some stupid portrait studio so we can roast our asses off under some hot lights for two hours!” I complained.

“Yeah Mom, Lon’s right.” Lance chimed in. “Why can’t we just set up a tripod and shoot one ourselves?”

“Because I know you guys too well.” My mom said. “You’ll probably go and do something moronic … besides, Lon can’t print color in his darkroom and Olan Mills can. Now just make your mother happy and go and do this Goddammit!”

“Fine!” I snorted, “But I’m not wearing a stinkin’ suit.”

As luck would have it, I didn’t have a suit that fit anyway. Nor, it turns out, did my brothers. We’d all been victims of growth spurts that summer (thank God) and my mother soon realized that the $15 – 8 x 10 could well cost her hundreds of dollars is she were to outfit her three sons in new suits for the portrait.

Quietly, we all breathed a sigh of relief, except, of course my mother, who wasn’t so easily deterred.

“Well, just wear dress shirts then.” She said sternly.

“Awww Mom, c’mon!” We complained in unison.

“Look, you’re getting the picture taken and you’re going to look nice.” She fired back.

“Wait – whaddaya mean ‘you’re getting the picture taken?’ Don’t you mean ‘we’re’ getting the picture taken?” I asked.

“Oh no! I’m not getting my picture taken.” My mother said, realizing for the first time that maybe we had the upper hand.

“And why not?” I asked.

My mother fished around for a good excuse, but all she could come up with was: “Because I just got my hair cut and I look like a damned squirrel.”

“Well if you ain’t doin’ it, we ain’t doin’ it!” I said.

My mother calmly lit up a cigarette, gave me her patented "evil eye" and then blew a puff of smoke in my face.

“Guess again!” She said.

It didn’t seem fair. It didn’t seem right. But we kids knew what we had to do. We loved our mother very much. We couldn't let her down. That’s why we knew it was both in her, and our, best interest to directly disobey her.

As painful as we knew it might be, we surely didn’t want to saddle my poor mother with some cheesy portrait - one that didn’t reflect the true, rebellious individuals she had raised. We needed to give her something that was uniquely us … something she could really be proud of … something she wouldn’t soon forget! A photo she would cherish for years to come – one that would more accurately reflect the individual spirit in all her kids, but most importantly, one she would never place on a mantle or a wall anywhere in the house. Even if it meant she was going to kick our asses when she saw the finished product.

Getting all four siblings on the same page was the easy part. None of us wanted any part of a formal sitting anyhow, so once we decided to change “formal” to “abnormal” we actually started looking forward to the photo session.

The first part of the ruse was for us boys to pick out dress shirts and ties from the closet we shared, making sure we complained every step of the way so my mother wouldn’t become suspicious. My sister actually orchestrated the whole thing, and for the first time in our childhood, we actually worked together as a team. It wasn’t exactly "Oceans 11" or anything, but it was pretty exciting. There we were, trying to pull a fast one on our mother – the same woman who had brought all of us into the world - and the same woman who let us know as often as possible she could just as easily take us out.

Picking out clothes we had no intention of wearing was easy - picking out clothes we actually wanted to wear proved a little more daunting. My sister kept waffling back and forth between something slutty Goth, or something slutty punk, eventually settling for a hybrid of the two complete with a plastic lobster. My brother Lance quickly chose a “British rock star” look, which wasn’t much of a stretch since he was a really good guitarist already. My youngest brother Duke had his sights set on a military look, which also wasn't much of a problem until he threatened to boycott the whole thing when we told him he couldn’t bring real weapons to the sitting. We got him to change his mind when we told him he could smoke one of my dad’s cigars instead.

I, unfortunately, had no idea what the hell I was going to wear. I toyed with the idea of showing up in just my underwear since I had been a notorious streaker as a child, but my sister had her reservations about the photographer even taking a photo of us dressed as we were, let alone mostly nude.

Eventually I settled on a very unoriginal “We are the 80’s” look, complete with a dorky headband it looked like I stole from Olivia Newton John, and an open shirt with an arrowhead necklace I actually did steal from my dad.

Once our outfits were chosen, we stuffed them into a gym bag and hid them in the back of our 1976 Gran Torino station wagon. As luck would have it, my mother scheduled our photo session on a weekday in the early afternoon, meaning my dad would still be at work. Our other stroke of luck happened to be the fact that our mother didn’t drive - that and she was more than happy to get us the hell out of the house for a few hours, meaning she wouldn’t be along for the session either.

Unsupervised, it was our responsibility to make good on our promise to our mother, but it was even more important to make good on our mission to remain ourselves.

A mile out of town, I quickly pulled the station wagon off the road into a cornfield I often went parking with my high school girlfriend. Once safely out of view, my brothers, my sister and I, changed out of our dress clothes and into our official portrait session attire. If any of us had second thoughts, none of us voiced them.

We remained nervously quiet the rest of the drive to Sandusky. I think we were more afraid of getting into trouble from the photographer than we were my mom. At that point it didn’t matter. We pulled into the Olan Mills parking lot without saying a word. My sister checked her hair and makeup in the rearview mirror one last time as I grabbed the coupon off the front seat. Lance snatched his guitar out of the back of the station wagon and slammed the tailgate shut. Duke stepped out of the car, glanced out over Lake Erie, and lit his cigar.

The four of us walked shoulder to shoulder toward the studio. As we approached the front door, a well-dressed family of four who had just finished their session, exited the studio. They froze, somewhat horrified at our sight. The dad grabbed up his wife and two little girls, both dressed in pink frilly dresses, and pulled them away from us.

“Excuse me sir.” I said politely.

My brother Duke just tipped his army helmet and calmly said, “Good day, Ma’am.”

Behind us we heard the nice family of four scurrying through parking lot, followed by the sound of slamming doors and tires squealing. Ahead of us we heard the gasp of the studio receptionist when she saw us walk into the waiting room.

“Is my three o’clock here yet Phyllis?” The photographer shouted from the studio in the back room.

Phyllis wasn’t quite sure if we were the three o’clock, or if we were there to rob the joint. My sister and I assured her that we meant no malice, and we were, indeed, her three o’clock appointment. While we were talking to Phyllis, the photographer popped his head in to see what was taking so long. When he caught sight of us he stopped dead in his tracks and did a double take.

Duke snapped his heels together and saluted him.

A moment of awkward silence followed as the photographer looked us over. Phyllis waited for someone to say something or tell her what to do. Silence continued to hang in the air when a huge ash broke off the end of Duke’s lit cigar and flitted down onto the floor. Seconds later, the photographer erupted in laughter.

Soon, we all were laughing - even Phyllis (nervously).

“Come on in kids.” The photographer said, still chuckling and shaking his head in disbelief. “But son, first you have to put out that cigar.”

In the end, everything worked out just fine, and even though he made my brother put out his cigar (he did let him keep it in his mouth) I’d like to think we made that photographer’s day. He still posed us in an awfully formal fashion, but in some ways it made the picture even more funny and unique.

After the shoot was over, we drove back to the same cornfield and changed back into our duds. When we arrived back at the house my mother asked us how things went.

“Ahh … just fine." I said, "It wasn’t so bad after all.”

Like I said earlier, the mail was always my mother’s thing, so none of us knew for sure when D-Day would arrive, we just knew we were in for an ass-whoopin’ when it did. Then, one day while we were watching TV in the living room, we heard my mother crying in the kitchen. Not knowing what possibly could be wrong, we went to check it out, and there, on the kitchen table were roughly eight proofs from our photo shoot.

Slowly, we began backing away, fully expecting her to wield a wooden spoon from underneath the table and start smacking us upside our heads. But she was unarmed (not even a measuring cup) and she couldn’t stop crying. Soon, we realized she was crying from laughter.

We couldn’t believe it, our plan had actually worked! We’d directly disobeyed her wishes by trying to capture the essence of our individualism with our quirky portrait and our mother seemed to truly appreciate it.

My mother liked the portrait so much she proudly displayed it in our house right up until the day she died last March. The week she died, my brothers, my sister and I, found ourselves under the same roof for the first time in a long time, just like my mother had predicted nearly 30-years earlier.

We looked through a lot of family photo albums that week, but I think I can safely say our favorite photo came from that hot afternoon in late August, when we all piled into our Gran Torino station wagon and headed west toward the Olan Mills Studio in Sandusky, Ohio, with the warm summer wind in our hair, and cigars a blazin'!

(For the record, we had so much fun the first time at the Olan Mills Studio; we actually made a repeat performance the very next year – with coupon in hand, of course.)

Pet Peeves - This is no cat fancy!

Meet our family cat Levi - the bane of my existence! (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line I’ve grown to pretty much disdain our family cat.

It might have something to do with the fact that I’m the only one who actually feeds the damn thing. My kids are so neglectful, I often wonder how long the cat would survive if I did nothing to keep it alive. A week? Two weeks? A month?

There could be tumbleweed blowing around in his water dish and they wouldn’t bat an eye. The cat literally could be sitting half-dead, skeletal-like, with an empty food dish dangling from his mouth and they’d just step over him on their way to the television set.

When I bring this up with the kids, they tell me, “Dad, we give Levi (that’s his actual name) love - that’s way more important than food.”

“Great.” I tell them. “Make sure you put that in his eulogy after he drops dead from starvation!”

Of course, if they can’t bother themselves with something as simple as pouring water into a dish or putting food in a bowl, you can only imagine the amount of neglect they show to his litter box. Yup, that’s right, I’m the lucky one who gets stuck cleaning up not only his litter box, but also the floor next to the litter box where he routinely dumps about 85% of his turds, saving the other 15% to slide down the side of the box in a lovely brown trail of impossible to clean nastiness.

On top of his crap (which I normally let harden into hockey puck status before taking his pooper scooper and flicking it into an open plastic bag with a wrist shot Bobby Orr would be proud of) he also leaves a weekly average of at least three or four piles of cat puke all over the house. (Although in the cat’s defense – he does manage to avoid all carpeted surfaces, aiming for the hardwood floors in the hallway, or the cement floor in the basement instead.)

Even with all the messes, I might be inclined to still sort of like the cat (he was extremely cute as a kitten, after all) if not for all of his annoying “cat” habits. For example, he has this way of driving me nuts with his incessant meowing. I suppose it’s not his fault - it’s not like he can talk and tell me what’s on his mind, but when I’ve fed him, changed his litter, and cleaned up his vomit, why the hell can’t he just leave me alone so I can eat my breakfast in peace?

I’ve come to realize that he’s a very finicky bastard, even by cat standards. He won’t eat anything in his food dish that’s more than 15-minutes old; it has to be fresh out of the bag or he won’t touch it. Have you seen the price of cat food? He obviously doesn’t know he's middle-class.

He also has this uncanny knack of clawing everything in the house that once was made of beautifully stained hardwood until it’s his own personal pile of kindling. Something in that cat’s brain either doesn’t compute, or just doesn’t give a shit when it comes to learning because I could literally shoot him in the head with a blow dart when he’s scratching the hell out of one of our doorframes, and 10-minutes later he’ll be doing it again!

My love for yogurt is gone as well, thanks to the cat. I used to love yogurt. It was the perfect snack for me when I was trying to eat better. But now if the cat hears either the sound of a spoon coming out of the silverware drawer or the lid being pulled off a cup of yogurt, he’ll appear from out of nowhere in a millisecond, and constantly meow until you let him lick the inside of the container when you’re finished. If I don’t give it to him, the kids get all over my case, but those dimwits let him have half the container. That’s all fine and good for them; they don’t have to clean up kitty diarrhea three hours later!

Another one of his finest qualities is his amazing ability to get under my feet at the most inopportune times - like when I’m bringing a load of laundry up the basement steps. It’s no problem for him - he’s got nine lives. If I trip over his fat ass and send him flying down a flight of steps onto the concrete floor, he still has eight more to spare. I, on the other hand, have but one, and the thought of me lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the steps with my head bleeding profusely into a fresh load of whites, isn’t necessarily a good one.

But the worst part about that damn cat is that he actually likes me, and I wished he didn’t. If I go to work out, he’s there to annoy me. When I come home from work, he’s at the front door wanting attention. If I take off my shoes or my slippers, he lies on top of them and puts his paws inside the heels. He never gives me any space. Never. I can’t even begin to tell you how uncomfortable it is to feel his stupid, little cat eyes boring through the back of my head while he sits and stares at me from the foot of the bed when I’m trying to get intimate with my wife. YEECCH!!!

I feel like I’m turning into my dad. He’s hated cats for as long as I can remember. My only memory of him even touching a cat was when he was carrying one of them through the house by the scruff of their neck muttering, “Stay out of the Goddamned house!” before jettisoning the poor cat out the back door.

But I never used to be like this. I actually liked cats when I was a kid. We had tons of cats when I was growing up – most were the outdoor variety, thanks to my dad, and some weren’t around long enough to even earn a name, but some were so beloved that not only were they given a name, but we’d sneak them inside the house past my dad where soon they’d became a vital part of our family. Cats like Cupid, Moose, Cisco, Uncle Smokey, Winifred, Fourfeet, and Fandango. I remember them all fondly, even though most of them met some horrifying fate.

Fandango’s death, in particular, was a fairly gruesome one, but it didn’t stop my mother from using it as a learning tool. Apparently, when I was real little I used to play a little too close to the street for my mother’s comfort, so when poor Fandango came out on the losing end of a game of chicken with a Ford Maverick, she jumped at the chance to teach me a lesson by scooping the poor cat’s mangled corpse off the road with a snow shovel, and shoving it in my 5-year-old face.

“SEE –THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLAY TOO CLOSE TO THE ROAD!!” She screamed, as one of Fandango’s eyeballs rolled out of his crushed skull and off the end of the shovel.

It wasn’t exactly a fond memory, but I must admit, I did stay away from the road after that.

Cupid arrived at our house shortly after Fandango’s "educational" death. She was easily the prettiest cat we ever owned - a beautiful calico with long hair and green eyes. She also was the meanest bitch of a cat in the entire town of Berlin Heights. Many a dog bore the scar of her claws on their nose, and there wasn’t a tomcat in town she didn’t f#*k up a time or two if they got too close to her when she wasn’t in heat. Still, somehow she managed to birth several litters of kittens in her lifetime, so I guess she couldn’t have been all that bad.

Two of those kittens were Crisco and Cisco. Both were from the same litter and both were snow white carbon copies of one another, only Crisco had long hair, and Cisco had short hair. Unfortunately, Cisco didn’t last long, about a year I guess before he met his untimely demise thanks to the errant riding-mower skills of our elderly and somewhat blind neighbor, Colonel Hine. Crisco, however, lived for nearly 20-years before he died, growing to be so gargantuan (23-pounds) that we actually renamed him Moose.

Moose was always my favorite cat - a big, white, pillowy fella who loved to play with my long blonde hair when I was a kid, especially when it was wet. He was a gentle giant whose only weakness was the taste of fresh baby rabbits. This presented a bit of a dilemma for my siblings and me because we loved Moose a lot, so we hated the fact that he forced us to play goalie on him with a broomstick whenever he would to pluck a freshly born bunny from its nest by our neighbor’s barn and bring it back to our house where he would devour it under our back porch.

Moose - Nice cat? or bunny killer? (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

We were the rabbit’s only hope - his last line of defense. If we could swat Moose upside the head with the broom and make him drop the bunny before he got under the latticework of the porch, we often could save it and return it to its nest. If not, there was nothing we could do except plug our ears to try and drown out the bunny’s high-pitched squealing until Moose delivered the fatal blow and settled in for some rabbit stew.

Uncle Smokey was charcoal gray and actually was Moose’s uncle. He went from being one of the coolest looking cats you ever saw, all fluffy and smooth, to one of the mangiest - and in only a few years! My mom always thought he had some rare feline disease. Whatever the case; he had one serious case of cat B.O. (if that’s even possible). It got to the point where we couldn’t let the poor guy anywhere near the house after a while. I’m sure he didn’t understand it, but he really stunk. We even toyed with the idea of painting a white stripe down his back to see if a family of skunks might take him in. But it was no use; scrawny, smelly, and unwanted, Uncle Smokey disappeared one day in the spring of 1976, only to be found later that summer in the woods behind our house decomposing on the rocks in Old Woman’s Creek.

Winifred was a carbon copy of Cupid, only years younger and much smaller. Her claim to fame was nearly slashing out my brother Lance’s throat one day in a typical fit of cat personality change that made Sybil look fairly balanced. One second she was purring contently as he cradled her in his arms, and the next second, without any warning, she went totally loco and Velcroed herself to his neck with her razor-sharp claws.

Lance never touched Winifred again, but he did write a song about her, changing her name a little and singing to the tune of “Wild Thing.” It went something like this:

“Wine-freed … dum, dum, dum-dum, dum, dum … You make my neck bleed!!

Fourfeet was around about the same time as Winifred. Oddly enough, it also was the same time the movie “Dances With Wolves” was popular, so we spent the better part of that year either naming, or renaming everything we saw, Native American style. For example, my brother took to calling me “Head Like Egg” and I started calling him “Breath Like Shit.”

I’m not really sure if Fourfeet was male or female - we never really bothered to check because we were to preoccupied wondering how in the hell it wound up with two extra paws on its front feet. Fourfeet didn’t last long, but I don’t think he (or she) met some horrible end. Come to think of it, neither did Winifred. Maybe the two of them ran off together, I’m not really sure. I just know I came home from college one day and both were gone. From that point on they were known only as “Odd Tracks in Snow” and “Claws Like Razor.”

Maybe I liked all those cats when I was a kid because I never had to anything more than just love them and have fun with them (And boy did we have fun. I’ll never forget the day my brothers and I decided to float a fresh batch of kittens off our sun porch with my G.I. Joe parachute. My mother just about had a coronary when little meowing kittens began floating down past the kitchen window while she was doing the dishes. But we knew what we were doing - they all landed softly, perfectly unharmed in the flowerbed by the side of the house). But my dad didn’t have to take care of them either, so I’m not really sure why he hated cats so much.

Who knows, maybe when he was a kid he liked cats too and he just grew to dislike them as he got older. Maybe it’s just in my heredity to do the same, or maybe I just can’t handle getting too close to a pet that I know will soon go the way of Uncle Smokey (God, I hope not) or Fandango.

Whatever the reason, I can honestly say that none of it makes me feel any better about the prospect of cleaning a fresh load of cat shit off the basement floor tomorrow morning.

Hanging On - Remaining friends through thick and thin

Acting like fools on a King's Island roller coaster - and wearing identical Tubes concert t-shirts too!

I ran into my cousin John at a Super Bowl party in Toledo, Sunday night. We hadn’t seen each other for quite a while, so I asked him how he was doing.

“I’ve never been more depressed in my whole life.” He told me.

“Must be an epidemic.” I replied.

It wasn’t exactly the best way to start off the evening, so for the next three hours we watched the Packers beat down the Steelers and tried to figure out why it was we were feeling so down.

Watching the Super Bowl and talking about sports was easy for us - talking about life was completely different - something we’d never really done all that much before. But there we were, talking more about the way we were feeling than about dropped passes or botched National Anthems - not exactly typical guy stuff.

John and I grew up down the street from each other in our small hometown of Berlin Heights, Ohio. He was a year older and a grade ahead of me in school, but for most of our childhood we were pretty much inseparable. I always considered us best friends instead of cousins, and I made it a point to defend that notion whenever some neighborhood kid would tell me John couldn’t be my “best friend” because we were related.

Growing up, there wasn’t a single thing John did that I didn’t do myself. When he got a basketball, I got a basketball. When he took up golf, I took up golf. I even made it a point to try and have a crush on the same girls he liked. It was probably annoying as hell for him, but he never complained. That’s just the way it was, and that’s the way I thought it always would be. But things change, and our friendship was no different.

It all started when John graduated from high school. Without him around, it really took the air out of my senior year – a year that was supposed to one of my best. I had fun, sure, but for the very first time in my life, I suddenly felt alone.

John went to work at his dad’s gas station while I finished up my last year of school. I rarely saw him during the week, but we’d still get together nearly every weekend to play some kind of sport or go to a concert, or at least talk about them.

When I graduated from high school I got a job working as a bag boy at the local grocery store. By then, John had left the gas station to go to work at a printing press. At the end of each workday, we made it a point to meet up and hang out, usually on a golf course somewhere.

That was a great year for me. We were still young and relatively carefree, and even though we both sensed the end of our carefree days was near, it didn’t bother either one of us because we knew the groundwork of our friendship had been laid and no matter what happened from that point on, we would remain best friends the rest of our lives.

Over the next several years our communication often would flitter between very little to non-existent. It didn’t matter. We’d grown to be the ultimate guys. We didn’t need constant communication to strengthen our bond or know how important we were to each other.

When I got married in 1996, John was my best man. (I had been his in 1987). He had two kids by then and had another one on the way. He was a busy guy raising his young family, working a ton, and stressed to the bone, but he still found the time to be at my side on my big day and I appreciated it. We didn’t speak much in the days leading up to my wedding, or even at my wedding, but we did go out and play golf the day before.

Before the year was over my wife and I had our first kid. Two years later we added our second, by then, John and his wife already had three girls. Not to be outdone, my wife and I added a third child two years later. That was enough for me, but just to be sure I got a vasectomy - it was the first time in my life I actually did something before John did - a few months later, he followed suit and got one as well, but his wasn’t quite as successful and later that year, his fourth child, a girl I nicknamed “Houdini” was born.

For the past 15-years, John and I have lived similar lives in different towns and somehow we’ve managed to carry on our friendship with little or no communication, usually seeing each other only once or twice a year.

We’ve muddled through the highs and lows of life doing the best we can while trying to do things the right way. We bought houses, had kids, and lived our lives clean. Yes, we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, but for the most part our kids have turned out normal, maybe even above average, and soon, before either one of us really wants it or expects it, they’ll be out on their own.

We’re older now - much older. We’ve both seen parents die the last few years, and when the economy went down the crapper, we watched our careers go down with it.

On Sunday I guess it really hit him, and me, that not only were we both suddenly middle-aged, but also we had not a single, solitary clue of what the hell we’re doing, or how the hell we’ll cope with the challenges we’ll surely face in the coming years.

When John told me he was depressed, I immediately felt the need to talk about it. Truth is, I’d been needing to talk to somebody starting with the day I went to see a college financial advisor who told me I ought to seriously consider getting a new job – one that pays a lot more, and now I had a captive audience.

“Maybe we’re depressed because our kids are getting older.” I said just before kickoff.

“Maybe.” John replied.

“Or maybe we’re depressed because we’re getting older.” I said.

“Could be.”

“Or maybe we’re depressed because for the first time in our lives we’re parentless and everything we’ve ever worked for in our lives has blown up in our face!”

“Jesus Lon, you’re not really making me feel any better.” He said.

It felt really strange to be talking to John about something besides sports, but it also felt good.

Modern technology had cost us both our jobs. The Internet helped kill the newspaper I worked for, but it also sent a lot of magazines to an early grave too. Since John’s press printed mostly magazine ads and inserts, he never really stood a chance. Both our companies fought valiantly to stay alive, but both eventually threw in the towel.

In many ways John and I are lucky because we both found new jobs doing essentially the same thing we did at our old jobs. But neither one of us is particularly happy with our new gigs and it’s not just because we're making a lot less money.

“Did you ever think you’d work anywhere else at this point in your life?” I asked him.

“Never – I thought I’d retire at my old plant.” He said.

“Yeah, I really liked working at The News too.” I said. “I know taking pictures is taking pictures, but it just isn’t the same.”

We went on to reminisce about our time as kids – simpler times that didn’t involve anything more than a ball, a glove, and a front door to walk out of. No video games, no cell phones, no computers. If we we’re bored we’d sit on my front porch and count cars to see if there were more Ford’s driving down the street than Chevy’s. It was a time I wish my own kids could have experienced, but they too, are victims of the modern age.

“I’ve lost my daughters to technology.” I told John. “They can’t go anywhere without their stupid cell phones buzzing every five seconds.”

“I don’t get this whole texting thing.” He said.

“Tell me about it, Olivia spends half her day texting her damn boyfriend. I asked her why she doesn’t just call him and she told me texting was easier. How in the hell is texting on a microscopic keypad easier than talking?”

“Maybe they just don’t know how to talk to each other.” John said.

“Exactly! Modern technology is bass-ackward - I mean if the phone had been invented after email or texting, people would be saying, ‘You mean I don’t have to type on a keypad anymore … I can just talk to someone on this thing … THAT’S AMAZING!!!’”

“It won’t be long before nothing is printed on paper anymore either.” John added.

“Now John - why would anyone want to read a newspaper or, God forbid, a book, when they can just go online and fry their eyeballs on a Kindle or burn the tops of their thighs reading their laptop on the shitter?” I asked sarcastically. “Christ, people can’t even drive down the frickin’ street anymore without their GPS telling them where to go.”

“This must be how people felt during the industrial revolution when cars started replacing horses.” John said.

“Probably.” I said. “But at least the horses were better off.”

We both sat silently for a while and watched the end of the first quarter, then a commercial for the latest iPhone came on.

“Can you imagine how different our lives would have been if we had that crap when we were kids?” I asked.

John didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We just shook our heads at the thought and for the rest of the game we did what we’ve always done best - we talked about sports.

Tragedy Strikes Across the Street

The scene out in front of my house Saturday morning. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

At 5:20 yesterday morning I was rustled awake by the sight of flashing lights dancing across the bedroom wall and the sound of men talking outside our house.

The weather forecast called for 3-4 inches of snow overnight so I figured it was just the snowplow crew taking a break before getting back to work. My wife wasn’t so sure; she hopped out of bed to take a look. Seconds later I heard her gasp, “Oh no!” from the other room.

At first I thought maybe one of the plows had smashed the living hell out of my car parked on the street, but it was much worse. The flashing lights weren’t coming from a snowplow at all, they were coming from fire trucks parked in front of our house - the neighbor’s house across the street was on fire.

The scene was so surreal that for many seconds all I could do was stare out our kitchen window in disbelief as firefighters turned our street, and part of our front lawn, into a makeshift command center.

There weren’t any visible signs of fire, but heavy smoke hung in the air transforming our entire neighborhood into a kind of giant horror movie set as silhouetted firefighters moved in and out of the haze carrying pickaxes, hoses and ladders.

It was hard to digest the information, especially at 5:20 in the a.m., but at some point, probably less than a minute or two after being awake, the photojournalist in me kicked in and I realized I probably ought to saunter outside in the cold and start making pictures.

My arrival on the scene fully equipped with camera gear via our front door took police at the scene completely by surprise. I’m sure they weren’t expecting any media coverage in such a small neighborhood, especially that early in the morning and from some guy who just walked out of the house from across the street. Without any police tape in place, the officer didn’t really know how to react to my sudden presence, nor could he tell me for sure where I could, or couldn’t be.

But there I was - in my own space really. The same street where my son and I play catch nearly every day of the summer. The same yard from where I’ve retrieved probably close to a million Wiffle balls over the years. Now it was the scene of a working fire, and for the first time in 26-years as a photojournalist, it really hit me. Not so much that a house in my neighborhood was burning down, but more the fact I didn’t really know who lived there despite the fact our front doors are less than 50-yards apart.

I asked the officer if everyone got out okay. He shook his head somberly and told me two occupants were pulled from the basement. I got a pit in my stomach. The word pulled is never a good one when you’re talking about the scene of a fire or an accident.

Exhausted firefighter exit our neighbor's house after getting the fire under control. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Just up the street two other people who lived in the house were wrapped in emergency blankets talking to officers. For the next 20 minutes I switched into autopilot and continued to photograph the scene. By this time the rest of the neighborhood was awake and congregating on the street. Most of them knew me, or of me, because of my career as a photographer at The Ann Arbor News and now at AnnArbor.com. I knew a lot of them as well, but like the folks who lived in the burning house, there were plenty I didn't know.

When I finished shooting, I went back inside and started editing photos on my laptop at the kitchen table. My wife and three kids (who now also were awake) sat on the same table peering out of the window as the scene continued to unfold across the street.

Every now and then my wife would give me updates as I continued to edit photos. I told her what the officer had told me and the first thing my wife asked me was if I knew who had died.

Sadly, I had no idea.

Shortly after 6 a.m. I called my editor and told her I had pictures from a potential fatal fire in my neighborhood. Before the hour was over, she texted me to let me know that both the victims had been resuscitated by paramedics and both had a pulse by the time they arrived at the hospital.

The normal reaction to news like that is a sigh of relief before you go on about your business pretending everything will be okay and the victims will carry on with their lives as if nothing happened. But I didn’t feel relieved at all. A pulse means nothing, especially if they were without one for as little as five, four, or even two minutes. The damage, most likely, had already been done.

Oddly enough, for the rest of the day we continued on the best we could as if nothing had happened, pretending everything would be okay. But it wasn’t normal, and everything wasn't okay.

I took my daughter to softball practice at 10 a.m., weaving in and out of the fire trucks still parked on the street to get out of the neighborhood. Only when we got back, TV crews were on the scene interviewing my wife for the six o'clock news.

At 1:30, we took my son to his basketball game. He scored 13-points and even canned a half-court shot at the buzzer that sent the crowd into euphoria. When we got home, he and his friend played snow football in our front yard, only across the street investigators continued combing the scene of the fire. Police tape now encircled the block and the insurance disaster team also was on site boarding up all the house windows. The scene reminded me of a picture I once saw where kids were happily playing soccer in the middle of a war- torn street in Iraq.

There was a pall hanging over us the rest of the afternoon – a "flatness," my wife called it. It may have been suppressed for a while, but it never really went away. Any time we started feeling normal, the campfire smell that still hung in the air, or a glance out the kitchen window would quickly bring it back. Our normal activities we’re merely distractions between a trip to the store to buy new batteries for our smoke detectors and a sit-down session with the kids where we drew up a very detailed fire escape plan.

It was that strange kind of tug-of-war all day: Normal life vs. the "House-across-the-street-caught-fire-and-may-have-killed-two-of-your-neighbors" life. Cars came and went for much of the day, most stopping to gawk at the scene before slowly driving away. People came and went too, some were relatives of the house’s occupants, some just curious.

Later that afternoon, my wife found out from the mother of one of the house’s occupants, that one of the two people pulled from the basement had, in fact, died, the other had been life-flighted to Grand Rapids in critical condition.

I found out later the man who died was a 20-year-old musician. He was one of four young people who lived in the house, but I didn’t know any of them beyond the occasional wave, or “Hey, how’s it going?” on the street. If I saw any one of them in a crowd of people, I doubt I could pick them out.

I realize now that I don’t know a lot of my neighbors. Not like when I was a kid growing up in a small town where everyone knew everyone. If I wiped out on my bicycle in front of a neighbor’s house, they’d take me in, clean the blood off my scraped up knee, give me glass of lemonade and then call my mother. They had names like Bessie Green, Wilbur Best, Martha Ritz, and Colonel Hine. Sadly, I didn’t even know the name of my deceased neighbor until it was finally reported in the news. Things just aren't the same anymore, neither here in a transient town like Ann Arbor, nor in my old, small hometown in Ohio where the likes of Bessie Green, Wilbur Best and Colonel Hine are long dead and gone.

The morning after. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Last night I thought sleeping would be an issue - as it turns out, I was so exhausted I slept just fine. This morning the sun shines brightly on our neighborhood, the sky is bright blue and a fresh coating of snow clings to the tree branches. Visually, it’s a picture-perfect winter day. Later I will make my son’s birthday cake and he will open presents. We’ll try the best we can to return to normal as he celebrates his 11th year of life.

But it won’t be easy when the smell of smoke still hangs in the air; the victim’s cars still sit in the driveway, and their garbage cans still line the street - all reminders that no amount of sunshine, blue skies, or birthday cake can bring back a young man’s life or make the blackened, smoke-charred house across the street feel any less sobering.