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There’s a premise in big business that no single person is essential to the success of an organization. If I die on the job, microscopic cringely.com dies with me, sure, but if Steve Ballmer kicks-off during a sales meeting tirade, Microsoft will move smoothly onward, or so the idea goes — as far as it goes. Because of course it is frequently wrong. There are many instances where a single person can bring about a sea change in a company or an industry. In the 19th century that meant John D. Rockefeller in oil or Andrew Carnegie in steel. In the 21st century it means Steve Jobs at Apple and Pixar, or Larry Ellison at Oracle. There’s already way too much written about Jobs so this column is about Ellison.

I was thinking about Larry Ellison while preparing next week’s 2011 predictions column. What an extraordinary guy! I’m pretty sure I couldn’t work for him (nor would he hire me) but I have a lot of respect for Larry. For one thing, he doesn’t give a damn about what you or I think of him or his company, which I find refreshing. A few years ago I did back-to-back interviews with Carly Fiorina and Larry Ellison and the difference between the two was like they shared no DNA at all. They were from different galaxies. Or if we limit ourselves strictly to Broadway, Fiorina was Woman of the Year while Ellison had the lead in Glengarry Glenn Ross.  I came away knowing almost nothing about Fiorina while Ellison revealed his underwear brand (Munsingwear).

Larry Ellison is all about the pursuit of wealth, power, and personal experience. He is unabashed. Ask him a question and he answers. Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever done it? “On a riding trail in Woodside, CA.” Bam! Take that, Jack Welch.

This level of honesty doesn’t make Larry what most of us would think of as a nice person. I once heard him refer to having “nailed” a dinner companion, if you know what I mean and I think you do. But with Larry at least you know where you stand, with most of us standing, frankly, nowhere.

Larry knows his objectives and is willing to use whatever power he has to achieve those objectives, which makes Oracle’s ownership of the former Sun Microsystems especially interesting to me.

Sun was a company filled with very smart people who frequently stumbled upon success, and that was the problem. Larry doesn’t stumble and as a result he has in a very short period of time taken the former Sun to new successes in almost every market. This is the same Larry and the same Oracle, remember, which were expected to dismantle Sun and throw most of it away. Instead the former Sun is creating hell for HP and IBM and even causing murmurs of concern at Intel.

But here’s the most amazing part — almost nothing changed to accomplish this. Sun management left and have pretty much disappeared, but other than that the company remains largely intact. Certainly none of the new Sun products being touted by Oracle are Oracle designs — it’s too early for that. The difference in servers and processors and even Java is that Larry’s behind it all now and everyone knows Larry takes no prisoners.

Look at Java as an example. Java was mismanaged from the start: everybody made money from it except Sun. Oracle and Ellison aren’t about to put up with that BS about the world using Java and Oracle getting nothing in return. They’re happy to let freeloaders complain and leave. So Oracle displaced or disenchanted many Java community members when it tried inserting at least one big customer into the product mix. One called Hologic was a medical software company — an academic nobody injected into the technical direction of Java’s future. Oracle didn’t win the vote for this obvious Open Source sellout, but it shows the direction they are headed with the language, which is into a commercial orbit somewhere between Red Hat and Pluto.

I am not defending Oracle’s undermining of Open Source nor do I support it, but the company is at least being clear about its intentions and convictions. Customers like that.

There are plenty of businesses entrenched in Java that can’t easily change. And now Oracle can start charging them. Think about if Microsoft had suddenly owned Java. This is how Redmond would handle it, too. Then there’s the whole Oracle+Apple angle, but I’m saving that for next week’s predictions.

Sun ostensibly believed in free, open software. Oracle and Microsoft clearly don’t. Look where it got everyone.

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I have worked from home since the first time InfoWorld fired me in 1994. When you work at home you live at work, which is precisely why telecommuting has been so embraced by non-smokestack industries that love the low office rents and longer working hours. But the tide may be turning against working at home for some larger companies. Lockheed-Martin, for example, effectively banned the practice recently, sucking nearly all the company’s telecommuters back into the office. IBM, too, is rethinking its work-at-home strategy.

Lockheed earlier this year told its managers they all had to work from plant sites, then followed that by canceling any telecommuting services paid for by the company. In theory workers can still telecommute on an occasional basis, but only on their own dime and only if they score a three or above on L-M’s five-step performance review.

As a defense contractor Lockheed-Martin may be a special case, not so much for the security reasons one might imagine in the wake of Wikileaks, but rather because defense plants tend to be owned not by the contractor but by the government. In today’s austerity it could be that Uncle Sam wants his share of the savings from all that staying home. If Lockheed wants the Feds to cover that light bill there had better be some bodies being lighted. This is pure speculation on my part, though informed by a small role I played 30 years ago in a battle between Stanford University and the Office of Naval Research over billing for indirect costs of research, which is very similar and equally byzantine.

IBM, too, is pulling back somewhat from telecommuting, though Big Blue has no government-owned facilities for those workers sucked back into the mother ship. IBM literally has more workers than desks.

At IBM’s new delivery centers like Dubuque, IA, Boulder, CO, and Columbia MO they now want all the IBMers to work in the office, in sight of management.

Teams are usually more efficient when people can work together. Part-time telecommuting often works best. Then IBM decided everyone would telecommute followed by making the teams geographically dispersed. Now people can work together for years without ever meeting in person.

IBM went too far with telecommuting. In their haste to close offices they made mistakes, distributing teams that had been more efficient working physically together. In this case efficiency often means that oxymoron bureaucrafic efficiency.  When something was needed fast at IBM they used to be able to fill out the paperwork and hand carry it to the group, eventually finding someone who could handle the problem on the spot. Now all requests go into a big queue in the sky and nobody knows who will handle it, or from what country. There is no longer a way to push urgent matters through faster, no way to get them solved by the right expert, either. Worse still, requests can be rejected and deleted from the queue without notice. In a very bureaucratic company like IBM, just buying something may need 4-6 approvals with a queue for each. Telecommuting inadvertently turned the complex into the nearly impossible.

Luckily for IBM, somebody has apparently noticed this snafu. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, though IBM has found a way to screw-up that, too. The new system features low cost delivery centers with terribly inexperienced teams of workers. IBM can’t seem to hold onto what is good. They throw out both the good and the bad for the sake of change.

Which brings us back to Lockheed-Martin and that performance evaluation of three or better needed to qualify for telecommuting. Suddenly there are a lot of Lockheed managers getting ratings in the two range for the first time in their careers. This is a subliminal effect since employees often don’t share their ratings with co-workers, but it is definitely happening. What’s interesting (and sad) about this is what it means for any future Lockheed layoffs. Next time the lower third is cut off, at least some wouldn’t be in that third had it not been for this telecommuting decision.

Management is cocking the pistol for workers they don’t like then allowing the next layoff to pull the trigger.

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FCC chairman weighs-in on width versus length debate

It wasn’t so many years ago, remember, when AT&T (the old AT&T, the U. S. national telephone monopoly) owned the phone wire in your walls. You put the wire there, or your builder did, and you certainly paid for it, but once dial tone filled the lines those lines became the physical property of Ma Bell and you couldn’t legally touch them. Everyone longing for the bad old days should remember when you couldn’t touch your own phone lines under penalty of law. Today or tomorrow, we’re told, the FCC will vote under the guise of net neutrality to re-instill some of those old ways of doing business, at least for wireless networks.

Well it won’t work.

The short story of what’s happening at the FCC is that the agency is trying to grab power over the Internet and to make that happen is paying-off any number of constituencies. With everything eventually going onto the net as a data service, the FCC wants to avoid irrelevancy, so this is how they are doing it with the help of Google and Verizon. Net neutrality partisans appear willing to accept more oversight if it comes with guarantees against packet throttling. And phone companies are willing to accept broader restrictions if they can still throttle or introduce tiered charges on their only networks that matter anymore — wireless.

These new rules, then, establish three fundamental ideas: 1) the FCC has regulatory authority over the U. S. Internet; 2) Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can’t discriminate between data types like video, voice, or torrents on their wired networks, but; 3) wireless ISP’s can discriminate between data types and applications as long as they aren’t giving preferential treatment to their own competing products or services.

So T-Mobile, just as an example, can limit or create a surcharge for Hulu, but only if it isn’t offering a service of its own that is competitive with Hulu and for which it doesn’t make such a surcharge.

The theory behind this rule is that wireless networks are a more bandwidth-limited resource than wired networks.

While the new FCC rules allow tiered pricing and limited packet filtering for wireless networks, they do so with the loud (and I think fairly legitimate) argument that competition will work to mitigate any telco abuses. There are nearly always three or more wireless network providers in any area and those mobile providers that punish their customers will be punished in turn by the loss of those customers to more enlightened network operators.

But to my way of thinking it really doesn’t matter, because those who would put limits on the Internet really don’t understand how the Internet works.

Look for shortly to appear what I’m calling the Trojan App, a hybrid mobile application that doesn’t exist yet but certainly will within hours or days of the new rules going into effect. The Trojan App is a legitimate mobile application that performs multiple functions, at least one of which is to circumvent the new wireless rules.

Here’s what I mean. Maybe you saw the story a couple of days ago about technology being brought to market that would enable mobile phone companies to charge Facebook users by the page for access. Under the new rules a mobile carrier can do that, no problem. But because that mobile network offers its own voice service (they all do) under the new rules they can’t similarly restrict Skype or Google Voice or any of the dozens or hundreds of Voice-over-IP third-party services out there. So what’s to keep Skype or Google or Yahoo or iChat or MrVoIP from offering a mobile version of its service that includes a free gateway to Facebook?

Nothing.

These are perfectly legitimate applications that are protected from throttling by virtue of their competing with a core service of the ISP, yet in this instance they will have gained a secondary function of acting as a Virtual Private Network link to an otherwise-regulated service like Facebook.

It’s a digital loophole.

Some might argue this simply won’t happen but they’ll be wrong. That’s because there is a long and successful tradition of using functional VPNs to accomplish such ends on the Internet. That’s how I watch Top Gear. But even more importantly the major players will do it because they’ll be forced into it by the minor players.

I could set-up in the cloud overnight a VoIP or some other qualifying service like mail or chat or video streaming. If I add a Facebook gateway to my new service and Yahoo doesn’t to theirs, well Yahoo loses.

Okay, maybe Yahoo isn’t the best example, given their decided lack of common sense for the past decade or so, but you get my point. Skype would lose. Google would lose. Microsoft would lose. And you know they won’t stand for that.

The Internet — even the wireless Internet — is a living thing that will optimize itself around any obstruction.

Resistance is futile.

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If the United States is so upset with Julian Assange and Wikileaks for continuing to expose its stash of 200,000+ purloined U. S. diplomatic cables, why aren’t they trying to extradite the guy to face trial in the U. S.? I can think of at least four reasons.

First there’s the problem of actually convicting the guy, which is doubtful. While the Department of State might well be able to extradite Assange, either before or after his date-rape trial in Sweden, they are unlikely to gain a conviction in most U. S. courts. What’s the charge? Violating the Espionage Act outside the United States as an Australian citizen who isn’t accused of having stolen anything? That won’t stick. If it sticks for awhile it won’t continue to stick on appeal. If you charge Assange, how do you not also charge the New York Times?

The second reason is that even if the charge could be made to stick, such a trial would provide Assange for several weeks with a global pulpit. There could be no better venue to air his views about U. S. government secrecy. Of course the government might try to conduct the trial, itself, in secret, but that, too, is doubtful. I think this is the major reason why no extradition attempt has yet been made, since a public trial could be very embarrassing for the U. S. If a trial compromises U. S, national security, as I’m sure they’d claim, the stronger legal precedent is actually in favor of not pressing the Assange case whether he’s guilty or not.

The third reason why Julian Assange isn’t being brought to trial is because the whole episode hasn’t been all bad for the U. S., at least as far as it has gone so far. The cables released have been of modest import and, while embarrassing, have also shown a generally responsible and active U. S. diplomatic corps that’s more-or-less on the job.

No diplomatic sexting so far.

It’s not bad enough to get any diplomats sent home but it is enough to get America’s opponents to sit up in their chairs, which is actually good.

Finally there is Assange’s threat of dumping his entire 1.3-gig document stash on the Net from a dozen or more locations simultaneously, which the U. S. does not want, nor can it technically defend against. You can bet that bac- channel negotiations are ongoing concerning that stash, possibly through the news agencies that are involved. Assange is plenty powerful in this, going toe-to-toe with governments — heady stuff for a geek.

Many people think that security breaches of this sort will lead to a crackdown on free speech over the Internet. Certainly there will be bluster about that, but look at the U. S. government’s initial administrative response — telling the military and government employees they can no longer carry USB flash drives. How hopeless is that? Very. It’s a ban that is almost impossible to enforce. First there is the broad issue of what even constitutes a flash drive. Most smartphones certainly qualify, yet the new regs reportedly make no mention of them.

Bluetooth devices don’t even need to be attached. Nor does the Sheevaplug media server in our minivan, which synchronizes automatically with our home network over WiFI from the driveway. While Shrek is what’s being transferred to our parking lot, who is to say it couldn’t be sensitive e-mails or documents?

This is a problem that is difficult to defend, especially retroactively. We’ll see more documents that shouldn’t be secret made secret even if the excuse is to hide the real stuff in a haystack, which isn’t good policy. We’ll see stricter penalties and maybe even attempts to make data self-destructing, which is a clever idea unless, of course, it backfires.

The fact is that times have changed and we as a nation can probably take one of two practical positions. Like my Mom recommends, if we can’t find anything nice to say we shouldn’t say (or record) anything at all. Or (this is my personal preference) we as a nation can say, “Screw it. We’re the super-power, remember? ”

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Google Labs has this new lexical research tool you may have read about called a Book Ngram Viewer, which allows you to peek inside five million books published between the 15th century and 2008 to see how many discussed antigravity and when:

Semiconductors:

Michael Jackson:

And good old-fashioned fornicating:

But most important of all, since this is simply a new form of Googling we’re talking about, we can look up ourselves:

Obviously, as my young and lovely wife frequently says, my best days are behind me, while fornicating seems to be more popular than ever.

But wait, there’s more!  Since these are books we’re talking about and books take time to publish, or used to, my literary popularity probably peaked earlier, in say 2001.

And if you look really closely at the numbers on the y-axis you’ll see something truly amazing.  Fornicating is not only on the rise, it is eight times as popular as I am.  Antigravity is 1.2 times as popular as fornicating, which is either senseless or a really amazing bit of news.  Michael Jackson is four times more popular than fornicating (38 times more popular than me).  And semiconductors — semiconductors — while they have been in decline since 1990 (fully 12 years before my career hit the skids) were at their peak 7.5 times as popular as Michael Jackson, 30 times more popular than fornicating, and 240 times as popular as me.  There’s simply something wrong about that one.

Now talk among yourselves.

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My son Channing, the grinning eight year-old to the left, has too much homework. He attends one of the best schools in the state and they send him home every night with what the teachers say is one hour of homework but it looks like two hours to me. And since Channing would really rather be fishing or terrorizing his little brothers those two hours regularly turn into three hours or more. This is not only too much homework, it hurts rather than helps. It seems indicative of an educational system that’s out of control.

Several years ago I gave a speech about technology to the Texas Library Association’s big annual meeting. After the speech I was talking with a pair of elementary school librarians. Channing was back then just going off to pre-school so homework was the last thing on my mind but they brought it up. “The best thing you can do for your kids,” they said, “is to not allow them to do homework until the third grade.”

I wish I had followed their advice. I wish I had taken a firm stance and told the school not to expect any homework because it wouldn’t be coming, at least not for a couple years. You can do that, you know. But of course I wimped-out.

American education, perhaps because of the No Child Left Behind Act, has become a testing nightmare. Metrics are everything and much of the curriculum is now intended not to educate but rather to pass the damned tests. It is precisely analogous to what I discovered thirty years ago investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, where reactor operators were trained to pass the operator test, not to actually operate the reactor. When things went wrong — when they went beyond the scripted scenarios — the operators had no idea what was happening inside that containment. Channing’s curriculum, too, tends to be 100 miles wide and an inch deep.

We’re being told our kids lack critical thinking skills, yet this curriculum doesn’t seem to teach those skills, at least not that I have seen.

Worse still, most of the homework is busywork. It teaches nothing. Worst of all, our child-centric culture has parents digging-in with their kids to do that homework, wasting all of our time and ultimately pitting adult against adult as surrogates for their exhausted kids.

What’s wrong with this picture? Everything.

When I was Channing’s age, 50 years ago, my parents’ attitude was one of benign neglect. They were busy doing whatever parents did back then (drinking and smoking cigarettes, mainly), but it sure didn’t include helping me with my homework. Somehow my siblings and I survived just fine. Yet today we’re supposedly faced with plummeting test scores and surging dropout rates despite whole generations of parents slaving away every night on homework. What gives?

Well one thing that gives is something I learned during my many years experiencing droughts in California: public officials don’t like good news, seeing it as un-motivating. If we had a dry year it was bad, they’d explain, because there wouldn’t be enough snowmelt, the reservoirs would be down but, most importantly, the forests and grasslands would be tinder-dry, increasing the danger of forest and wild fires. But if we had the occasional rainy year their line changed. Now the reservoirs were full (though that could change in a moment so don’t take any extra showers) but the extra snowmelt meant extra forest and grassland growth creating more combustible material making forest and wild fires even more likely. No matter what happened it was bad according to these guys because they didn’t want to ever give up the chance to preach down to us.  They were determined to remove whatever joy there was in life.

Same thing in education. We aren’t as good as we used to be and that’s going to have a major impact on, well, everything. So the answer is always more resources, more testing, more consultants.  Oh but no more art or music — those are too expensive.

Frankly I’m not sure any longer exactly what is the truth. Things might be getting better or worse, I don’t know. But I know I don’t generally trust the idiots who are telling me what to worry about.

We’re falling behind, we’re told. Our college populations are declining and our test scores are slipping. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

General Motors, having over the last half dozen years shed more than 200,000 skilled workers, this week offered buy-outs to thousands more. If we’re in such trouble in terms of educating our people, how can GM afford to do that? Robots, we’re told. Robots will build your Camaro.

What we’re talking about here is educating the masses, not keeping Silicon Valley globally competitive. The distinction between those two concepts is lost on a lot of folks but I have been pointing out for the last 20 years that most of the top technical work comes from an incredibly small number of people. Xerox PARC changed the world, remember, in 3-4 years with fewer than 100 people, defining back in 1973 pretty much our computing world of today. The Bob Metcalfes and John Warnocks aren’t affected by any of this educational policy BS. They’d rise to the top in any culture or any time. The Metcalfes and Warnocks of today are already hard at work, not stuck behind some standardized test that’s keeping them from their destinies.

No, it’s the intellectual middle class — you and me — we’re talking about. Wait, that’s not true: you are really smart, so that means just me we’re talking about, and my goofy sons. How do we optimize our educational system to encourage normal kids to achieve greatness?

Not through all this God-damned homework.

German students have plenty of homework, too, and they go to school an average of 220 days per year to our 183. German kids go to school on Saturday. (Not since the 1980s, commenters from Germany report, below.  I went six days as a schoolboy in England, and that apparently ended for the most part in the 80′s too) That should prove the point, right? Because nobody is saying the Germans are falling behind. Heck, they are the economic powerhouse of Europe.

But wait a minute. School in Germany starts at 8AM and ends each day at noon 1PM. Even the high schools follow that schedule. German schools don’t serve lunch because the kids have all gone home, I suppose to do their homework. But if you get home at 12:30 1:30 there is plenty of time for homework, eh?

Channing will spend this year 1,372 hours in school not counting basketball practice or chess club while the average German third-grader will spend 880 1100 hours in school.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. I don’t know if we are really falling behind or not, since it isn’t clear who I can even trust to tell the truth. Are we in a drought or a flood, who knows? All I know for sure is whatever the true situation, we aren’t supposed to feel good about it, no way.

I also know who are my heroes in this story — those Texas librarians.

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Readers have been writing to me lately about my annual predictions column, a vestige of my days at PBS.  While I’m reluctant to do it, that annual exercise is apparently very popular.  And the quality of reader comments lately suggests we could get quite a good discussion going.  So I’m going to do it.  But, just like Dora the Explorer says, I need your help.  If you have any predictions to share for 2011, please send them to me by e-mail (bob@cringely.com) and I’ll include the better ones in that column, giving credit where credit is due so we can both take the heat when we’re wrong.

Remember it’s important to not only predict what will happen but why.  Understanding is our goal here and context is critical to that.

Switching gears, the death of Gilmore last week touched a lot of people — far too many for me to reply personally to each.  Thanks for your support.  We still have Roscoe, Gilmore’s brother, who is in good health. And Roscoe has lately been talking to me about adopting a pug.  We’ll see…

Here’s Gilmore and Fallon, my four year-old, taken less than a month ago.  Gilmore was Fallon’s best friend:

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There’s a global electronic battle going on, we’re told, between those who support Wikileaks and those who oppose it. Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa are under attack for refusing to process contributions to Wikileaks, their web sites periodically unavailable because of a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by thousands of zombie PCs all over the world.  Nothing about this makes any sense to me. It’s stupid.

The so-called cyber war (more of a cyber rumble, really — one posse against another) is stupid because neither side can win as they are playing it and neither can lose. Pain can be inflicted, but mainly on innocent bystanders, rather than combatants. And those who caused the war have, for the most part, no idea what they have actually done.

At this point some partisan on either side might start throwing words about like treason, but I think that is inappropriate for many reasons.  What it is is embarrassing for the U.S. and other governments.  It is inconvenient. It is awkward. But from what I have read so far nothing that has been released goes past those words.

Now look on the other side.  Julian Assange is an idiot when it comes to how he, as a would-be world figure, should behave in his private life.  He, more than anyone else on Earth, should know there is no privacy, nor should he expect any.

Now to the structure of this current brouhaha between Wikileaks, the Department of State, and the collateral damage it has caused.  For the most part, State has handled this all wrong.  Retribution is not a smart move here, nor does State have much, if any, power.  There are limits to what most governments can do in cases like this. U.S. law prohibits what’s called prior restraint, for example. If I publish something libelous you can sue me for damages after it is published but you can’t sue me to prevent publication. This assumes, of course, that all things can be worked out in a court of law, including putting back into his pants the reputation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Not likely.

Nor is it any more likely that asking Mastercard, Paypal, and Visa to stop processing Wikileaks payments will prevent Assange from publishing further. Wikileaks isn’t Cuba or Iran that governments are trying to blockade, it is a few people and a few web servers, that’s all. Sending-in the 8th Air Force to take-out Wikileaks won’t do anything because a single donor could easily support the whole operation. Heck, a garage sale could support Wikileaks.  Kim Jung-Il could fund it from his designer sunglasses budget alone.

So the State Department mandated actions of these financial companies are really an expression of U.S. Government anger. It is Patriot Act bluster that is inappropriate and unwise in a case where terrorism is not the issue. Bin Laden may be laughing his ass off in Afghanistan or Pakistan but Wikileaks is not a terrorist enterprise.

These aren’t viable efforts to coerce or undermine Wikileaks in any way. If anything it helps Wikileaks.

And while we’re being so upset, what has been the effect so far of this DDoS attack?  From what I heard this morning, it was only the main web sites and some customer service portals that were having problems. DDoS attacks are well know and understood. The funds transfer networks of these companies were completely unaffected.  Touring the USS Alabama, you’ll notice large food stores on the outside of the ship.  The less critical parts of the ship are more exposed and the critical areas are very well protected.  Hit the USS Alabama with a shell and you’ll destroy a lot of potatoes.  It is my understanding these DDoS attacks have mainly messed up Mastercard’s potatoes.

The question that isn’t being asked here is whether there is in fact any way for governments to control Wikileaks and what would that way be? I think there are techniques that could be used to effect such control. Want a demonstration? Just get Wikileaks to do what I firmly believe it never will: release 250,000 secret documents from Israel.

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My good friend Ralph called this morning. “You are writing more than usual and responding more to comments, what’s wrong?” he asked. Ralph knows me too well. Gilmore the dog is sick.

Nine year-old Gilmore, whom some of you may recall from a column years ago about taking him (telepathically, no less) to the pet psychic, has canine autoimmune hemolytic anemia. His immune system is attacking Gilmore’s blood cells, which is fairly common in older dogs and occurs for no particular reason. We’re treating the condition with steroids and it is improving slowly (the survival rate is about 70 percent). But for the foreseeable future Gilmore and I are roommates, sleeping together downstairs. He is drinking like crazy (me too — that’s another story) and needs to go outside every hour or so around the clock. Someone has to give Gilmore his 18 pills per day, too, a couple of which can only be handled with rubber gloves. That rubber glove guy would be me.

So Gilmore sleeps and I type while we both wait to see if he survives. I’ve done this before: 30 years ago my charge was Gwen, a secretary in my department at Stanford who was dying of cancer and had nobody else with whom to spend the last two months of her life. I was finishing a book at home anyway so how hard could it be? Hard.

That experience affected my view of life and death. By the time Gwen was almost gone the only people who were prepared for the final event were she and I. Almost nobody came to visit, though her memorial service was packed. I prefer to spend my time with the living.

And so Gilmore and I sit here writing.

Gilmore and his brother Roscoe were literally stolen from an abusive home in California. We got Roscoe first and Gilmore a year later but they are from the same litter.  Roscoe is named for Roscoe Turner, a famous race pilot from the 1930s. I gave Mary Alyce the choice of using the name Roscoe for a dog or a son and she chose the dog. Roscoe (the pilot) was sponsored by the Gilmore Oil Company, makers of Red Lion motor oil. Turner flew with a lion cub he named Gilmore. The lion was fitted with its own parachute at the insistence of the ASPCA, or so the story goes. So when the chance came to steal from the House of Horror Roscoe’s litter mate, it only made sense to name him Gilmore.

When he came to us at age 15 months Gilmore weighed 43 pounds. Ten days ago he weighed 100. This morning he weighed 90.

We sit together on the floor a lot. I tried to show him YouTube videos of other dogs but he doesn’t care. What Gilmore really wants to do is walk down to the lake and drink dirty water, something he never did before a few days ago. He seems to prefer it. The steroids have heated him up so he prefers the outdoors, too, except his legs don’t work as well as they used to do.

Roscoe is stoic, but then he’s a Lab (Gilmore is too). They play it as it lies.  The kids don’t like any of it, but what is there to do? So we all eat dinner on the floor and talk about old times.