How my driver's license got a little heart

Back in May I turned 25, which in Ohio meant I had to renew my driver’s license. I actually almost forgot, but remembered the afternoon before my birthday and hurried to the BMV where I got a new picture that gets double-takes because I was randomly wearing my contacts and dropped a bunch of money I wasn’t planning on spending—fresh into unemployment. It was the usual schpeel, though thankfully without a line; I was actually in an out within twenty minutes, perhaps a new record. There were all the normal questions: do you have insurance, are you a citizen, height, weight, etc etc.

“Would you like to be an organ donor?” she asked across the counter, showing such little emotion.

I replied to her with no hesitation, “Yes.”

Prior to that, I had not been an organ donor. There was not a little heart on my driver’s license, just a letter than meant I had to wear corrective lenses while driving. I hadn’t even considered it, despite having heard testimonies in school and in driver’s ed. It’s strange how they show you videos of dismembered bodies to promote safe driving, but then encourage you donate your organs in case their instruction doesn’t work. I even met a double lung transplant once by chance; she works at the bookstore I occasionally visit.

For some reason I felt that my body should remain whole upon death—a selfish thought carried over from my youth. I had no explanation for that reasoning other than that.

A while back I met a young man who knew he would eventually be placed on the transplant list for a double lung transplant after a lifetime of lung infections related to cystic fibrosis had ravaged the set he was born with.

His lungs weren’t destroyed by something he did—not by smoking or exposure to chemicals in the workplace. This happened because of a rare genetic mutation. Rare as in only 30,000 people in the United States have the disease—that’s significantly less than how many people die each month from heart disease and just about equal to how many die each year because of car accidents. Diabetes affects almost 1000 times as many people in the United States. Over five million people in the United States are believed to be suffering from Alzheimer’s. Cystic fibrosis affects just 30,000 people nationwide, 70,000 people worldwide. Columbus, Ohio—the nearest major metropolitan area to where I live—is home to around 800,000 people. Even if we looked at the Columbus suburb of Delaware where I went to college, there is a population of about 35,000.

I think that should give you some perspective. Because I just looked up those numbers to write this and even though I already knew some of those statistics, it still did for me.

My cousin will eventually need a double lung transplant too, as will the young boy who lives up the street from me. They too suffer from cystic fibrosis.

It is surreal to me that right now a friend of mine is in need of new organs. And even though I have known this disease since my cousin was diagnosed just a handful of months before her second birthday—a late diagnosis, actually—almost nine years ago, it has only been within the last few months that it has become real to me. Before meeting that young man, who has since become a very good friend, earlier this year, the idea of a double lung transplant hadn’t even crossed my mind. I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t know it would happen eventually. Now I can’t help but recall all of those dramatic episodes of ER and Scrubs. Do you remember “My Lunch”? Or the movie John Q?

Generally the word ‘surreal’ is used to describe good things: things reminiscent of fairy tales or our favorite dreams. But I can’t find a better word to describe how am I feeling. It’s bizarre knowing that someone else must first die in order for someone else to live.

How do you pray for that?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I don’t think I ever will and to be honest, I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure that is something I want to think about. But whoever it is who ends up giving this gift, I want to thank them while I still can.

But I liked foxes before that band from Norway

The first time I can remember seeing a fox was when I was spending a summer in London staying with a friend. He lived in a small suburb in the southeastern part of the city. There were three of us—my friend, another friend of ours, and myself—staying in the guest room on the second floor of his house, overlooking the street. We were awoken sometime around 1am or so by a rustling outside. It was my other friend who heard it first and he acted as excited as a small child on Christmas morning. There were three foxes outside running through the streets and going through the neighborhood’s trash and recycling. I was very confused when my friends told me to look at the foxes outside. I couldn’t figure out why there would be foxes in the middle of a city. I thought foxes lived in forests or in the arctic—not cities. But in England, foxes live wherever they please.

The foxes in London aren’t the red foxes you generally think of—they’re a little smaller and grey. They’re England’s equivalent to the raccoons of Ohio, scavenging through the most easily-accessible of trashcans for whatever left-behind scraps for dinner. And like with raccoons and some birds of prey, they roam the city because it was their home long before the likes of Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. Although London is one of the oldest cities in the world, the modern city we know used to be much smaller with a lot more forests—though even now it is one of the greenest cities in the world. As civilization expanded, the foxes stayed put, adapting to their new urban environment, not giving up or into mankind’s supreme domination. Instead, creating a new way of life.

Foxes are an inspiration.

I remember when I lived in London for three months in 2008, I was out walking one day in, I think, a business district near Euston Station and in the middle of the sidewalk right at the very edge of a walkway to an office building was a fox. A dead fox. It was bloated and probably had a few flies around, though I don’t recall it smelling. Clearly, it had been there for a while. I remember stopping and staring at it briefly before continuing on my walk, wondering why it was still there. Although it wasn’t squished or even at all bloody, I assumed it had been hit by a car and the 20’ from the road to its final resting place was all the further the fox could make it. I couldn’t figure out why it was still there though—why no one either from the city or from the building, the walkway of which was being intruded upon by the fox, had removed it yet. It was as if I was the only one who could see it. Maybe that’s how the fox wanted to go out.

A few weeks ago I saw a fox dead in the middle of the road. For the longest time I never even knew that foxes were native to Ohio until a couple years ago when I had one run out in front of me one evening as my friend and I were driving to a restaurant in a nearby city for dinner. That fox managed to not get hit by either my car or the one coming from the opposite direction. This fox I saw a couple weeks ago, however, was not as lucky.

I really like foxes. I think they’re beautiful creatures—majestic even. They hold great significance to me. When the fox ran into the road and dodged both oncoming cars, that, to me, was a sign that even though absolutely nothing in my world seemed to be right, it would all be okay eventually. So when I saw the dead fox in the middle of the fox a few backs, I wondered if that too were a sign. And if it was, what did it mean? With unemployment and the job hunt still looming, I didn’t like the implications of that sign. However, my mind was put at ease not long after.

As I drove home from my favorite pizza local pizza place, Firehouse Pizza, the other night right at dusk, I noticed two animals playing in someone’s driveway. I saw pointy ears and tails, so I assumed they were cats. But as I drove by, they stopped playing and looked at me—they were foxes. Younger foxes, I assumed, who were enjoying each other’s company by wrestling around as the sun started to fade away. And I smiled, happy to see these creatures enjoying themselves.

How I learned to use my CD burner

I can’t remember the first CD I bought, but I think it was something by Elton John and I think I still own it. These days my CD rack is too small and there are growing piles on all sides. I’ve listened to all of them at least once—some of them just the one time. Generally, I’ll buy a new CD and listen to it over and over and over and it will be a regular listen for several weeks until something new comes along. Every so often I have to remind myself to listen to something old—something I’ve had for a while and haven’t listened to in a long time. Sometimes you have to rediscover artists and particular albums. Sometimes you need to take a break from your favorite band.

With the ubiquity that is the iPhone and the sudden renaissance of vinyl, I think I am in the minority by still listening to CDs. I own an iPod—a 3^rd generation iPod Touch that is something like five years old. It has no camera, no apps, and all 32gigs are filled with a wide variety of songs. I mainly use it when I go to the gym or on long car rides like to Cleveland or Cedar Point. Or sometimes just cruising through the Logan County countryside. Sometimes when you cruise you want a variety of songs, not just one artist. Sometimes you want to hear a shuffled playlist.  I still make playlists. And mixtapes.

Mixtapes are a lost art. When I was a kid, CDs were starting to become less expensive and more widely available. But it was still long before CD burners and MP3s—the former of which is becoming dated even now. If you wanted to make a mixtape you had to pop a cassette into the player and hit record when your favorite song came on the radio. This could take several attempts—maybe you missed the opening chord or maybe something caused the station to cut out halfway through. If you had a stereo with both a CD player and a cassette player you could record the song directly from the CD and get the best sound. Your car didn’t have a CD player, so a mixtape was ideal. My brother always had a good collection of mixtapes we would listen to his car. Some I liked more than others. I didn’t like the ones with heavy metal, which was a lot of them. I think my favorite one was “Songs for Monkey Love Making II”. I couldn’t tell you any of the songs on it, though I think it included Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently”. I remember those mixtapes and the belting out of Jack Black and Kyle Gass’ comical lyrics being a source of bonding. It is where my appreciation for both music and cruising with the windows down find their roots.

Cassette tapes are more or less obsolete now, though I have heard Sony experimenting with the technology for back-up systems. Now you no longer have to hit record on the boombox, but instead click “Download” in iTunes. Or whatever… “other means” you prefer. A mixtape is no longer a tape but instead a CD-R or a playlist on YouTube or your iPhone. A lot of people will say the mixtape doesn’t exist anymore, but still does—just in a different form. And so long as there are people listening to music it will always exist in one form or another. I make mixtapes fairly often—for friends, mainly. I give them to them as gifts. Sometimes I will write an haiku in the “booklet” or a quote that fits the theme of the mixtape: Songs for Baking, Love Jams NOT from the ‘80s, Baby’s First Mixtape. I actually give my friend’s son a mixtape every year for his birthday. That’s kind of how I rediscovered the lost art.

If I, or anyone, give you a mixtape, you should know that it doesn’t mean we think you have a terrible taste in music. Instead, it means that we care about you. That we took the time for find songs that we think you would not just like but be able to make an emotional connection with and associate with us.