Chapter One
Passport Expired? 

Eight days after being told he could be dead within a year, Marcus Blake was slowly re-emerging from the numbness. The disease known as the Q virus wasn’t contagious but was almost always fatal. Medical data set his chances at five percent or less.

Like many people, Marc had wrapped life’s daily activities around himself, choosing to believe that death only happened to others or was at least a long way off. After enduring the prolonged death of his wife a few years earlier, maybe he assumed he’d already paid his dues. But here he was again, sorting death’s details: ‘Which doctors have expertise with this virus? Should I bet on conventional medicine or also look at natural alternatives?  Have I made promises I haven’t kept?’ 

‘I’m sure other people ask themselves these same jittery questions when death starts knocking. With a dull-toothache kind of feeling, we wonder, “Have I loved enough? Have I been kind and generous enough? My financial bank account may be in decent shape, but what about my relationship bank account?”

‘I guess I’m going to find out.’

Chapter Three
Earth Life!

Absorbed in their café conversation in which life and death danced right on the table, Marc and Kai didn’t notice that most of the lunch customers were gone. Marc asserted, “Here’s the way I look at it: Life’s a little like a game of Scrabble. You make your best words with the letters you get and the skills you’ve gained, but if the right letters don’t show up, maybe you do the best you can with the time you have left.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It is what it is. But get me wrong – I’m going to fight this, in my own way.”

Kai took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, choosing his words. “Look, I know you’re a Scrabble champ and all, but what are you saying? If you don’t get the letter Z you don’t give it 110 percent? I see it differently: life isn’t happening to us, we’re happening to life. When the chips are down, you get up and get more chips.” He knew he sounded abrasive, but he wouldn’t buy into Marc’s metaphor of life as a fatalistic game of Scrabble.

Now Marc was a little peeved at Kai for his safe and unthreatened position in life. “Easy for you to say, dude.  But hey… I’m kind of in a corner here. I don’t think you’ve ever been told you may be dying?”

“Touché.”

 “Look, as you can imagine, after a week here on death row I’ve been thinking a lot about the ‘meaning of life.’ Although it’s drummed into us that we’re alone in the world – that Death waits for us like some drooling, deranged monster – I believe that we humans, and plants, and even the bacteria in our guts, are in it together. Earth life is a single, co-evolving organism. Nobody’s alone! So when I die, I continue because the rest of me continues.” Looking at Kai intently, he concluded, “So, I’m… safe in the universe, whether I’m alive or dead.” Then he sat silent as if his words had just checkmated fear itself.

Chapter Five

The Last Exams

Marc sometimes thought that many Americans’ adopted shelter was inside the walls of their warm, humming desktop computers. Websites, apps, and social media (he hated that term) had now replaced nature and camaraderie as points of refuge. To be a member of this digital dreamland and demonstrate extreme bravery, who would not boldly click a selfie on a slick promontory overlooking a majestic, thundering waterfall? Would the simple, good life of his youth might never be seen again?

Had it been swiped away by billions of selfies grinning from billions of screens – in some cases, seconds before death? Grins become grimaces when a lethal plunge or unseen projectile completes the story. In Russia’s Ural Mountains, two hikers got a last, coolest photo of themselves holding a live grenade which somehow did not destroy the phone. Another fun-loving vacationer hung in there during the Running of the Bulls, snapping a close-up of spike-sharp horns irrevocably in search of his trachea.  But let’s be honest; when it comes to getting that certain, wacky Facebook shot – preferably taken on a good hair day – no risk is too great. 

Chapter Six

The Great Chocolate Cake Robbery 

As he drove, his mind was still occupied by challenges on the home front. How could he make sure that he and Ellie didn’t take that low, mucky road through the portals of hell, where he typically employed semi-cynical humor posing as cheerful and she groused about not being heard? The inevitable result was a grumbling stomach, and he didn’t want to go there. Rocket had noticed that the two women in his life didn’t always see eye to eye, either. Sometimes Ellie tried a little too hard, which in turn made Sara push her mother even further away. He also wondered about getting Zak enrolled in school. Would he go to Brookside Elementary, or would Sara and Zak move out before school started? He hoped not.

Regarding marriages, he concluded that whether you’re right or wrong in a given discussion or debate, sometimes you just go along. Smoothing the rough edges of a marriage was like signing a contract for an online software purchase: you don’t have time to read and analyze the six tiny-font pages they throw at you, so you just click “agree” and you’re on your way. ‘Oh hell,’ he thought, accelerating on the empty road, ‘it’ll work itself out, it always does.’ He tuned in KMKX, the local classic-rock station: Bob Dylan was singing Positively Fourth Street.

From Passport Expired?

A cherished memory: on one camping trip Karen and Marc had taken with Kai and May, the two men sat leisurely on a creek bank, their fishing lines dangling in the water. Neither was much of a fisherman, but they’d miraculously reeled in two mid-size trout and baked them in tin foil with lemon and thyme – probably the most delicious and energizing food Marc would ever eat. That night, invigorated by the hike, the fish, fresh air, bright stars, companionship, vodka and pot, his lovemaking with Karen seemed to reach a new height of intimacy. The melodic, lilting music of the two women’s laughter the next morning – folding tents and drinking the last of their coffee – still brought a sense of gratitude. The pitch and timeless splash of the creek seemed to be coaching, “Here, this is it, right here.” Recalling that trip, Marc reminded himself, “By God, I’ve done some things. Real things.”

From Best Friends for Life

The workshop’s floor was brick, with sawdust tightly packed into the seams from Rocket’s sweepings and footsteps. The workbench was lit by adjustable track lighting, trained on an almost completed Indian figure. “This is a Pomo Indian woman, a basket maker,” Rocket explained as his brother bent closer to see the fine detail of the carving. Rocket picked up a narrow-bladed chisel and mallet to demonstrate. “The Pomo were traditionally acorn eaters and salmon fishers, but they also ate small game, wild greens, mushrooms, even grasshoppers,” he said, tapping his mallet gently on the chisel.  Marc loved how his brother’s work was interlinked with the work of the Pomo artisans. Energy that flowed through their baskets – adorned with willow shoots, woodpecker feathers, and shells – had its origins in Pomo cultural traits and beliefs, then was expressed by Rocket’s own hands, and finally felt by viewers of the totems.

“This cultural story you are telling in the totems reminds me of a beautiful nature story I’ve told in a class or two, about the forests further up the Northwest coast, literally built by salmon. Fingerlings no bigger than fat pencils are born upstream in the forests, then migrate into the ocean for three to six years where they grow into mature fish weighing up to sixty pounds. When they return to their birthplaces their bright silver scales turn deep red and purple. After their chosen mates dig out a little hole, the females bury their eggs, then quickly die, leaving behind all the rich nutrients they’ve amassed. Black bears, insects, fungi and plants distribute those nutrients, and four-fifths of the nitrogen in the forest was shown by research to have come from the ocean.”