Perma-Change

In the middle of a rotation that won't last forever, like most things. Last weekend in Portland, Audrey and I went on a trail run in our beloved Forest Park. At the outset it seemed like summer still, with blue skies, yellow sun, and green leaves. The primary colors of summer. But in the depths of the shady park, there was change. The brown hue was creeping into the floor and walls of this windy hallway of a route. On some corners, near the dried up creeks, the decomposing leaves allowed a rich, musty air to hang in the nostrils until our fast-paced lungs could exchange it on the next uphill. The next morning we woke up to gray skies in Portland. The day after that it was September. And here I am contemplating Change.

On the drive back to Roseburg, I surfed the FM channels of the Toyota's radio. At one point I drove right into some airtime that was hosting all sorts of great Latin music. Rumba, Salsa, Afro-Cuban, Mambo....and I was soaking it up like a laparotomy sponge. But as my trajectory was southbound on Interstate 5, at a rate faster than most police officers would be comfortable with, I knew the rhythms were not going to last forever. And then, sure enough, before you could say "Tito Puente y su Orquesta", it was gone. Evaporated 15 minutes after it was born.

This rotation won't last either. Though shorter than a summer, and longer than a 4 minute Samba, at times it feels like both. At times, hours fly by, running from case to case. Other moments are stretched slowly out like an outgoing tide, like listening to the surgeon tell the 49 year old man that his metastatic colon cancer gives him less than 20% chance to still be alive in 5 years. In a few weeks, I will be a distant memory to this hospital and vice versa. I will be the new face elsewhere and a new town and a new state and will become my temporary home. You have to like the word "new" to survive this year.

Change is inevitable. You don't need a blog to tell you that. We see it in September, we hear it on the radio, we sense it in the mirror every morning. The question becomes how to interact with this change. For me, I prefer to trail run towards it, tap my hands on the steering wheel with it, pretend to know the words in Spanish for it and scrub in through it. I hope this finds you all interacting with change in your own personal way. Yours Truly, CD...