Goodbye Blaine

I got some sad news over the weekend. My friend Blaine Lifton died.

I met Blaine many years ago when he was on staff and I was freelancing at DJMC, a retail ad agency in downtown Los Angeles. My art director, the late, great Jim Benedict and I shared an office, and Blaine and his partner shared the office next to us. Thanks to Blaine, it was a great neighborhood to work in.

Blaine was always the person we’d bounce ideas off of. He understood humor as few did—not to mention the ins and outs of the highly-charged agency politics and relationships—and always had a positive energy that lifted everyone he came in contact with.

My permalancer situation ended after a couple years, and unfortunately I lost touch with Blaine. But in one of the very few good things about Facebook, we managed to reconnect years later and remained in touch.

When I went to New York to see Springsteen On Broadway (I know, I’m as surprised as you are), Blaine was the person I saw it with. First we had a long, catching up dinner at Juniors Deli in the theater district, and then we walked to the theater and saw the Boss.

For you fellow Bruce tramps, you’ll appreciate this fact: we sat in row E.

Afterwards, Blaine and I waited with the other fans outside for Bruce to walk from the Walter Kerr Theater stage door to his limo, and then just stood on the sidewalk for an hour talking about the show we’d just seen.

In the years since, Blaine tried a few times to hire me freelance at his New York agency Hyperbolus, but the timing and my availablilty just never worked out. Or maybe it was my day rate. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

Our mutual friend Gina and I spoke in November, and she let me know Blaine was battling colon cancer, and that it had been discovered very late stage. As chemo does, it wiped out his immune system. He caught covid, and passed away last Thursday.

There are certain people that are lights in our lives, and you pick up right where you left off even if it’s been years since you’ve seen them. And they continue to bring smiles to your face every time they visit your thoughts. Blaine is one of them.

God bless you friend. I'm grateful for our reunion and the all too little time we had. Peace on your journey.

Now I don't know how I feel, I don't know how I feel tonight

If I've fallen 'neath the wheel, if I've lost or I've gained sight

I don't even know why, I don't know why I made this call

Or if any of this matters anymore after all

But the stars are burnin’ bright like some mystery uncovered

I’ll keep movin’ through the dark with you in my heart, my blood brother

- Bruce Springsteen

The Lesson

I’m a terrible person. No, really.

I know, you beg to differ. To you, I’m just the handsomest best friend you could have, wildly funny, an unfairly talented writer, a great listener, a shoulder to cry on, generous to a fault, someone whose name appears in the Thank You/Acknowledgement sections of almost all the books my friends have written, a dependable source of Breaking Bad trivia and a dispenser of sage advice.

The only things I’m not are a ride to the airport, someone who’ll help you move or a guard dog for your laptop at Starbucks.

But despite all my many good qualities, I’ll say it again. I’m a terrible person.

Here’s why, and please pardon the abrupt shift in tone but the situation calls for it.

This past Saturday morning, the wife and I woke up to a fire truck and an ambulance at our neighbor Suzie’s house directly across the street from us. Naturally we were hoping everything was alright, but were curious what was happening.

We didn’t have the kind of relationship with Suzie where we’d be comfortable going over to ask what was going on. She’d moved in about eighteen months ago, and had been redoing her house for that entire time. Contractors coming and going from the house were just something we got used to, as was the shortage of street parking.

We’d met Suzie when she initially moved in, but hadn’t spoken to her hardly at all since. She was noticeably standoffish, not just with us but with other neighbors as well.

The prior owner of the house, Bob, had been a magnificent gardener. The front lawn was always impeccably kept, and beautiful rose buses adorned the yard. Since we looked directly at the house, we appreciated waking up to that view for years.

But since Suzie had bought the place, the front yard had gone to hell. The lawn was overgrown and underwatered, and the rose bushes were being given last rites.

And of course me, who can kill a plant just by being in the same room with it, never missed a chance to comment on her lack of gardening skills or her less than sparkling personality.

The ambulance was there for Suzie. I saw her wheeled out on the gurney, intubated and unconscious. She died a day later.

Yesterday I saw a truck in the driveway, and a woman going in and out of the house. I went across the street, introduced myself and asked what had happened. She told me Suzie had passed. She’d fought cancer for the past twenty-one years, and had been diagnosed with leukemia not that long ago, and was on some industrial strength chemo that apparently was too much for her body to take.

Her friend, who had known her for sixty years, went on to tell me what a welcoming person Suzie was, and how she worried about seeming so standoffish. She didn’t want people too close to her because of the chemo and her weakened immune system.

She also let me know how awful Suzie felt about the appearance of the front yard—how’d she’d wanted it to be beautiful not just for her, but also for the neighbors. She was just too weak to give it the attention it needed.

After a bit more conversation, she told me the house will be sold. In the meantime, the wife and I are going to have our gardner go over there and restore the front yard so it looks presentable and like someone still lives there.

I know it’s a new-agey kind of sentiment usually found on inspirational posters and those square day-at-a-time calendars Barnes & Noble sells at Christmas. And in a world seemingly fueled by judgement and hatred, it seems an impossibly quaint notion.

But none of that makes it any less true. It’s the lesson I have to keep learning. A little more kindness and a lot less judgement would make this world a far better place.

Not to mention me a better person.

Rest in peace Suzie.

The account executive of bodily organs

Here's how my Saturday went.

In the morning when I woke up, I found my dog Max on his pillow in our bedroom. Now, Max comes and goes in and out of our room during the night, but he's never there in the morning when we wake up. But I decided to just accept it for what it was: he finally realized he couldn't tear himself away from me.

When I left the room and called him though, he didn't come. He just stayed on his pillow, looking up at me with those big, brown eyes.

Something wasn't right in dogtown.

We wound up taking him to our dog-walker's vet since our local vet's office was closed. After an X-ray, we discovered why Max was being so sluggish: a grapefruit-sized tumor on his spleen.

It sounds awful, but it's apparently quite common in larger breeds - like German Shepherds - and usually around the eight-year mark. Max is eight and a half.

We were in shock how fast this came on him. Just the day before, we were playing with him in the yard, and he was chasing, jumping, barking and just generally trying to kill us (not literally - we love to play rough with him). The day before, the World's Greatest Dog was the World's Happiest Dog.

David Feldman, a close friend of ours for over 25 years, and the world's greatest vet, explained it like this: the problem is the spleen. If it were the heart, you'd notice his troubled breathing much earlier. If it were his brain, we'd see him unsteady on his feet. But in a dog, much like in a human, the spleen is pretty much a useless organ that does nothing, which is why as the tumor grows on it you don't notice it until it's almost too late.

My wife called it "the account executive of organs." Before you get all over me for that, she was an account person in her former life.

We wound up driving Max up to David's office in West Hollywood around eleven last night, and by midnight he was in surgery. Yes there are vets and emergency clinics closer to us, but when it comes to the big stuff, David and his staff are the only ones we trust. After we dropped Max off, we were able to breathe for the first time that evening.

About 2a.m., we got a call from the doctor at David's practice who did the surgery, saying the words we were hoping to hear, "It couldn't have gone better."

Now there are a few ways this can go. The tumor they removed along with the spleen is either malignant or benign. If it's benign, Max heals up and life goes on. If it's malignant, we have maybe two to four months if we do nothing, and maybe six to twelve if he goes through chemo. And of course, chemo brings its own set of pleasantries with it.

So we'll wait for the pathology report and then we'll have some decisions to make. But while we're waiting, we'll do what we've always done: love Max as unconditionally and fully as he's always loved us.

There are four of us in this house. Max's magic is that each of us thinks he loves us the most.