Tiger's Apology: Par for the Course?

I sat down to watch the Tiger Woods news conference with a massive dose of both skepticism and contempt. I’d already made up my mind that his apology was going to be a ridiculous horse and pony show timed to sneer at Accenture for dropping his endorsement deal and designed to be the venue for the proclamation that he is returning to golf. Integrity, you see, is sort of like virginity: once you've lost it, it's gone for good, even though you keep the package it came in.

I laughed at Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue last evening. He said, “Tiger won’t be taking questions from the press at the news conference. I think it would be fun, though, to watch him take questions from his wife.”

You see, I’ve been in Elin Woods’ shoes. I’ve been to Family Week in rehab, where the patient makes amends for the bad behavior and the family expresses its support for the recovering addict. So I was watching very closely for clues as to whether or not I believe Tiger is sincere and is going about the recovery process in the right way. After what I’ve been through, believe me, I can smell a rat.

I have to say, I was impressed by his apology for several reasons.

First, he’s returning to rehab, although I suspect he won’t be going back to the facility in Mississippi where he spent those 45 days. After my husband completed his initial stay in rehab (at the place where, incidentally, the expert at Tiger’s Mississippi center used to be on staff), they strongly advised him to check into another place in Los Angeles for two more weeks. It was, I suppose, a sort-of halfway house. He went, unwillingly, but he got kicked out within a few days. The fact that Tiger is continuing therapy and is willing to say that he’s putting his career on hold to focus on his recovery, to me, is a very positive sign.

Secondly, he took full responsibility for his actions and refused to blame anyone else. He stuck up for his wife and made it clear that it is his bad behavior that has caused all the problems in their marriage. That’s huge. In contrast, my husband blamed me. He had a list of things I had done wrong that caused him to seek out the arms (and other parts) of other women. Now, I’m not for one second saying that I was or am blameless. In fact, I wasn’t and still am not. But I know this for goddamn sure – if you’re in rehab and can come up with even a smidgen of blame for any other person as the reason you’re an addict, then the dollars you’re spending on that expensive rehab are doing you as much good as the “mom” jeans did for Jessica Simpson’s figure. We can only change when we stop giving other people the power in our lives. If Tiger truly does blame no one but himself, he’s on the right track.

Next, he doesn’t know when he’ll return to golf. The fact that Tiger Woods has no plans to play the Master’s or Pebble Beach means he’s not trying to hurry though rehab and recovery to check them off his list and placate his wife, sponsors, and fans before getting back to his career. To me, it means the therapists are getting through to him. He’s willing to submit to the process rather than arrogantly and defiantly saying he’s been through rehab and everything’s fine now.

The final thing that made me think this apology might be genuine was his mention of getting back to his spiritual foundation. I realize that most of my readers are not Buddhists and might scoff at its teachings on sin and redemption. But when it comes to dealing with addiction, I don’t believe it matters which spiritual practice you follow – it’s following a spiritual practice that makes the difference. And as Tiger pointed out, “Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint.” Learning to control his impulses is the whole point of his rehab, right?

Addiction has been wisely defined for me as a lack of intimacy with one’s soul. I don’t know if Tiger has reconnected with his soul. And I don’t know if the tears in his eyes were genuine. His wife said it best, that his apology will ultimately not be in words but in how he lives. So we’ll have to wait and see if it’s real. What impresses me is the simple fact that he seems to be acting so very differently than my husband acted during and after rehab.

For the first time in my life, I actually find myself betting on and rooting for Tiger Woods.

A Lot of Huffing and Puffing (and Blowing)

A common urban legend has it that men think about sex every seven seconds. And if that statistic were actually true, one might reasonably argue that all men are sex addicts. Although that myth has been debunked, it brought to mind a college literature professor I once had.

A friend had warned me about this particular professor, saying, “The man makes everything about sex.”

Given that much of literature does actually have sexual overtones (and undertones, highlights, lowlights, and the occasional weave), I assumed that the professor was merely pointing out the obvious sexual references in modern literature and that my friend, a biology major, simply didn’t understand how prevalent it was.

I was wrong.

The professor really did make everything about sex. I mean, in the space of two minutes, the man could turn “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into graphic porn. His lectures made it sound like sex makes the world go ‘round. Sadly, from the looks of him, it was a slow rotation.

One day, we were reading T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in class. Not surprisingly, he began by talking about the sensuality of the poem, quoting the line, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” This is what he said: “Can you just see and feel and taste the sensuousness of the peach? The juice dripping down your chin and running down your arm after you bite into the flesh of the peach?”

There was a collective gulp in the room. Thirty sets of eyes widened, and then we all ducked our heads in embarrassment.

Then we came to this part of the poem:

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.


“What is the word picture here?” he asked the class. Duh. It’s a cat. But a big dumb jock in the back of class said, “Sex?”

So I can see where the “experts” might come to the conclusion that men think about sex every seven seconds. It’s not a big stretch to guess what topic is most on their minds.

But what about women? What do we think about when we’re not cutting gum out of a toddler’s hair or teaching a maniacal teenage girl to drive?

For me, it’s hair.

I swear I was a woolly mammoth in a previous life. The time I met Jon Bon Jovi and he came out of his dressing room with a pissed-off look on his face? It wasn’t because someone woke him up to go meet a fan. No, he took one look at me and my daughter and saw two chicks with more hair than he has, and it rocked his world.

Now, I’m not complaining about how much hair is on my head. I’m grateful, actually. But the fact that I blow out a hairdryer every six months plus the Great Hairdryer Debacle of 1979 and the Wedding Cake Disaster of 1984 means I have hair nightmares.

In the summer of 1979, I was at a teenage camp in Hollywood, Florida. The building was a former luxury hotel that had been built in the 1930s, and I’m pretty sure the wiring had never been updated. I was innocently drying my hair when the lights went dim. There was a pop and a flash, and my hair dryer started smoking. Then the lights went out completely. I set the hairdryer down and walked out of the bathroom. The hotel room was dark. And so was the hallway.

Basically, I knocked out power to three floors of that ancient hotel because my hairdryer overheated. And for the rest of the week, no one -- not one of my so-called friends – would lend me a hairdryer.

The Wedding Cake incident was worse. I was serving cake at a teacher’s wedding reception the summer after I graduated from high school. When I bent over to slice into the Groom’s Cake, my hair fell into a burning candle and caught on fire. I wasn’t hurt, but the scent of burning hair can actually ruin a wedding reception.

Much of my thoughts are about keeping my hair out of my eyes (and away from burning things) and how long I can go without washing it. And when I do wash it, I must schedule enough time to dry it, including several rest periods for the dryer during the process so that I don’t set off the eleven smoke alarms that were installed in my home by the paranoid previous owners.

And the problem is only getting worse the older I get. Josh, my hairdresser of fifteen years, said to me the other day while he was drying my hair, “You know, I think you have more hair now than you did when I met you.”

He’s right. I have more hair on my head AND on my entire body. In fact, my face is now covered with a fine blonde peach fuzz that makes it nearly impossible to wear makeup. I complained about it to the girl who does my facials.

“Why don’t you just shave it?” Chris asked.

Huh? Girls don’t shave their faces. I don’t need a five-o’clock shadow. Now that would really piss off Jon Bon Jovi.

“No, girls don’t have the hormones that would make it look like they had a beard,” Chris insisted. “A lot of my clients do it.”

I'm thinking about it – every seven seconds, in fact. But I'm afraid people will see me walking around with tiny toilet paper booboo blotters stuck to my face. If I decide to do it, will I ever actually admit to shaving my face?

Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.

Screwing with Forgiveness

Although I’m not in the habit of replying to comments by those too lily-livered to reveal their identity, a comment regarding my “Open Letter to Elin” must be addressed.

Anonymous wrote: “Yeah, Screw forgiveness. That’s just some 2000 year old ancient concept anyway.”

The English major in me is screaming that I cannot overlook the glaring punctuation errors in your post. But since we’re on the topic of forgiveness, I’m going to completely and utterly forgive you for those errors.

See, according to my dictionary, to “forgive” is to “stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake. And I’m not feeling the least bit angry or resentful because you don’t know how to correctly punctuate a sentence.

Now, your reference to a “2,000-year-old concept” leads me to believe that you are a Christian and that you believe Jesus Christ, who was born just over 2,000 years ago, is the author of forgiveness by becoming a sacrifice for our sins. But if you’ll check your concordance, you’ll find that the word “forgive” and all the derivations of it are used more in the Old Testament than in the New. So, at least for Christians, it’s more like a 6,000-year-old concept. Again, I forgive you for the error.

I also find your opening sentence interesting: “Screw forgiveness.” Were you using the word “screw” as a verb or a noun? I’m assuming from the rest of your comment that you meant it to be used as a verb, much like the way I would say on this 24-degree day, “Screw this cold. I’m going to Key West for a few days.” In other words, you are saying my advice to Elin about getting out of that marriage is my way of ignoring God’s command to forgive others the way He forgave us.

Are you implying that Elin and every other woman married to a serial cheater should just stick around and hope her husband doesn’t give her herpes, AIDS, syphilis, or the run-of-the-mill skank crud? Really? Is that what you’re saying?

Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe you intended for “screw” to be a noun, implying that we need to invent a whole new brand of forgiveness, one called “Screw Forgiveness.” I kind of like that. Finding out your spouse is cheating is such a horribly heart-wrenching experience that it really takes a lot more effort to stop feeing angry or resentful toward the offender than, say, someone dents your car. “Screw Forgiveness” could define a whole new level of forgiveness.

All our quibbling about semantics aside, I think our real issue goes back to the definition of forgiveness. While the dictionary's first definition of forgiveness is to “stop feeling angry or resentful,” the second is, simply, “to pardon someone.” The word “pardon,” of course, means to “release from punishment.”

I can do the first kind of forgiveness. In fact, I must, and not just because God says to. I have to do it for my own mental health. But releasing someone from punishment, negating the consequences of the offending action? Only God can do that. And for me to try doing God’s job isn’t forgiveness. It’s stupidity.

A child whose parents unfailingly shield him from the consequences for his actions, incidentally, often grows up to be a full-blown narcissist. And go check every sex addiction treatment center in the country. I’d be willing to bet they’re all full of narcissists.

Another erroneous belief about forgiveness is the idea that forgiving and forgetting are synonymous. Three years ago, I visited Notre Dame. On the back side of that magnificent old cathedral, out in the garden, is a memorial to the French citizens who were taken away during the Holocaust and never returned. In blood red letters are the words Pardonner mais ne jamais oublier. The translation: forgive but never forget. Those words helped me sort out my feelings about forgiveness.

I’m passionate about pointing out these errant concepts of forgiveness because I struggled with the issue for years. I forgave my husband when he confessed his first affair. I forgave when he went back to the girl the next week. After that, there were more women. The simple truth is that my “forgiveness” didn’t help a single person on this planet. It just let him believe he could keep getting away with it. It actually made things worse.

You tell me, which affair should be the final straw for Elin? The first mistress, or the thirteenth, or whichever number we’re up to in the skank count? I’m all about Elin forgiving if we’re talking about her learning to stop resenting her husband, but screw the notion of forgiveness as pardoning forgetfulness. The whole point of my post was that he’s probably not going to change. She needs to save herself and her children from any more heartbreak so that she can begin the process of forgiveness.

Yes, forgiveness is a grand (and ancient) concept. But I don’t believe it’s possible to fully forgive until you’ve removed yourself from the offensive situation. And for that reason alone, I would encourage her to leave.

Screw stupidity.

An Open Letter to Elin Woods . . .

Oh, girl, what a mess you find yourself in.

I don’t have all the facts, but here’s what I think happened. You met a handsome, charming, very wealthy and very famous athlete, and he asked you out. For some reason, you turned him down at first. He continued to pursue you, and the whole world started screaming in your ear: Are you crazy? He’s Tiger-freakin’-Woods, the greatest golfer of all time!”

You couldn’t put a label on it, that feeling that something wasn’t quite right, so you ignored your gut and went out with him. And then, when he asked you to marry him, you asked him, probably over and over, what it was – that something – that was making you hesitate.

“I’m the greatest golfer of all time, quite possibly, and I’m handsome and charming and fabulously wealthy, and perfect. Nothing is wrong, sweetheart,” he said. “Now please marry me.”

So you married him and had two children with him, all the time thinking how silly you were to doubt him. Anyway, since you loved him so much, your love could fix everything. But still, something was bothering you.

And then there was a rumor. Or maybe two. But he laughed it off, saying that people always want to take down greatness. He probably said, “People are always looking for dirt. It’s a tabloid world, and we’re famous. Ignore them. Just keep being gorgeous and fabulous, but don’t ever mention to anyone that something is bothering you. Keep your mouth shut and your makeup on at all times.”

So you did. You ignored the rumors and the feeling that something was wrong. Until the day you found out the truth and couldn’t ignore it any longer: Tiger is a bad apple. And all your hoping and wishing and praying and loving couldn’t make him a peach.

A few years ago, my sister and her husband noticed that one of their toilets wasn’t working properly. Sometimes it flushed, and sometimes it didn’t. Their children were young and newly potty trained, so the possibilities were endless. The Barbie doll torso on the floor of Faith’s closet? Her head and lower extremities could have been the potty clogger. Hell, it could have been anything, perhaps even the puppy who had “run away.”

Kevin used a plunger. He used a pipe snake. Every time, the problem would resolve itself for a day or so, but in the end it always came back. This went on for weeks: the toilet worked sometimes, but just as often, it was clogged horribly. Finally, he took the entire toilet out of the bathroom, turned it upside down, took it apart somehow, and found the culprit -- an apple with several bites out of it. A child had apparently been eating an apple on the potty, dropped it, probably shrugged, and flushed.

See, dear Elin, an apple is the most natural thing in the world, a nearly perfect food. But in some circumstances, it’s a huge problem. Tiger may be the greatest golfer in the world, but being a great athlete has never made anyone a good spouse or even a good person.

I’ve learned not to ignore that gut feeling that something isn’t quite right about a person or a situation. I believe it’s God’s way of telling you to walk away, or at the very least, go beneath the surface and dig deep until you discover what’s making you uneasy. Quite often, the cause of your uneasiness is that a person is not what they claim to be. It’s a lack of integrity that’s at the core of every bad apple and also what, according to the proverb, “spoils the whole bunch.”

But you already ignored that nagging little voice, and you know what I’m saying is true. How does that help you now? You’re probably hoping to save the marriage for the sake of your kids. You want to give him a chance to turn things around. I hate to say it, but all the expensive rehab in the world isn’t going to coax an apple out of a toilet or reverse the damage that has already been done to your marriage. And please pardon the obvious pun, but a Tiger never changes his stripes. Despite what he and his therapists are telling you, I’m betting that your gut is still telling you that things aren’t right.

And although I’ve learned not to ignore the feeling that all is not right, I’m still not sure what the proper term is for it.

I just call it a “crapple.”

Mine's Bigger than Reggie's

At the beginning of the end of my marriage, my husband and I took a trip to the Bahamas with several other couples. Sixteen friends at the Atlantis Resort, lying around the pool drinking Dirty Bananas during the day and spending our evenings enjoying a long dinner followed by a little gambling, drinking, and dancing.

What? You’ve never had a Dirty Banana? Shut up! It’s a banana daiquiri with Kahlua poured over the top, and, all sexual metaphors about cheating husbands and Dirty Bananas aside, it’s enough to make you not care about a husband’s dalliances for a good thirty minutes.

I’d had big hopes for the trip. Most of the people in our group were friends from church, and I was hoping that my husband would re-connect with some of them and, as a result, return to church. It was also our first time away from the children since he’d been in rehab, and I thought that maybe some time together in a romantic spot surrounded by couples who loved each other might help us rekindle the love we’d lost.

That same week, the Atlantis was hosting a large celebrity golf tournament. Ten minutes after we checked in, someone in our party spotted Wayne Gretzky. Later that afternoon, another friend reported seeing Michael Jordan in the casino. At dinner that evening, one of the girls told us she had been in line behind Kid Rock at the waterslide. Pamela Anderson was on display in the pool area the whole week, although she wasn’t wearing her red Baywatch swimsuit.

We were literally in Paradise Island surrounded by famous people, eating fabulous meals, and competing to see who could be the biggest lazyass of all. It was shaping up to be the trip I’d hoped for.

Well, it was until halfway through the week. My husband staggered into our hotel room in the middle of the night and woke me up to tell me that he’d just disclosed to several of my girlfriends that he’d been having an affair.

And I should be grateful, according to his drunken reasoning, because now no one would ask questions when I filed for a divorce.

Humiliated and enraged, I got up and packed my bag. I called Delta and found out the next flight to Atlanta was at nine. I booked it and decided I’d rather wait at the airport than risk seeing anyone I knew, certain the story had already spread to everyone else in our group. My husband was sleeping with the lower third of his body hanging off of the bed. I kicked his leg on my way out of the room and said, “I’m leaving. I hope you’re happy, jackass.”

On my way down to the lobby, the elevator stopped, and an older black man who looked very familiar to me stepped in.

I said hello, and he nodded a greeting. Then he pointed at my bag, a soft-sided brown Samsonite on wheels, and said, “That’s a big suitcase.”

“Yeah, the ticket agents always tell me it’s one of the bigger ones they’ve seen,” I laughed.

He didn’t laugh with me. “It’s too big,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said that bag is too big. You can’t even lift it.”

“Yes, I can,” I said. “I lifted it off the luggage rack in my room three minutes ago.”

He ignored me and continued: “I have my own plane, and if you showed up to fly with me carrying that bag, I’d tell you it’s you or the bag,” he said.

The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and Mr. October, Reggie Jackson, exited the elevator ahead of me. After four days in Atlantis, I had finally seen my first celebrity.

I’ve often wondered what the man saw when he looked at me. I’d been crying, and I hadn’t bothered to shower. I was a sad, sad girl, so horribly discombobulated by the fight with my husband that I might have misunderstood the man. Perhaps he wasn’t talking about my actual suitcase. Maybe he was referring to the baggage I was hauling around, a load I continued to carry for years, until the day I decided I was tired of defining myself through the lens of infidelity and a failed marriage.

Nah. He was talking about the Samsonite. So as a public service announcement, friends, please know that in the event you’re ever invited to fly on Reggie Jackson’s plane that he owns, pack lightly. That lardass has to save room for an ego the size of my suitcase.

On the other hand, it would be awfully fun to show up with a bag bearing a luggage tag that reads “Mine is bigger than Reggie Jackson’s.”

Pat Robertson Voodoo Doll, Anyone?

My sister’s family spent Halloween 2008 in St. Augustine for a couple of reasons: she had tickets to the Neil Diamond concert in Jacksonville, and her husband went to the Georgia-Florida game. My sister is a Neil Diamond-head, something her husband simply cannot understand; and he’d prefer to have a wad of tobacco in his mouth rather than a Milk Dud, something I cannot comprehend.

Early on Halloween day, my parents walked the beach with the twins. They came upon a dead pufferfish, and my mother called the girls over to see it. She told them that the fish is deadly poisonous but that it can be eaten if prepared properly. In fact, chefs in Japan train for years to learn how to cut the poisonous parts of the fish out so the fish can be safely eaten.
Then, in a nod to Halloween, she kicked at the dead fish and said something like, “Some voodoo doctors use the poison in these fish to make zombies. Do you know what zombies are?”

As the children stood around her wide-eyed, she continued, “Zombies are people whose brains are dead but their bodies are still alive. Bad people give them the poison so they can make them do anything they tell them to.”

Nothing else was said about zombies or pufferfish for the rest of the day. After dinner, the kids put on their costumes, and Mom donned a witch’s hat and wig, along with the requisite green-putty mole on her chin. We spent a couple of hours cruising the neighborhood in the golf cart collecting buckets of candy.

Mom was a little exhausted from all the excitement that night, and she had the beginnings of a rash on her face that would later turn into what looked like angry welts. She took herself to bed, leaving the wig, hat, and green mole on the coffee table (one of the kids later mistook the putty mole for a green Skittle). By contrast, the children, hyped up on six pounds of processed sugar each, were extremely difficult to put to bed. Especially Faith, who absolutely refused to fall asleep.

The next morning, Mom felt worse. In fact, she was unable to get out of bed.

Several years before, she had been given a bone density test, and it revealed that she, a pale-faced tiny woman of northern European descent, had osteoporosis and was, indeed, experiencing bone loss. Her doctor prescribed Actonel. After taking it for several months, she began suffering from debilitating arthritis. She stopped taking the Actonel and went on a detox diet, but it still took her almost three years to feel better.

To this day, if she doesn’t eat exactly right, or if she’s under stress, her joints begin to ache. And it’s terribly unfair, but a few days with four young children constitutes stress, and so when my sister and her family visit, Mom often spends a day or so recovering after they leave. This time, a couple of bite-size Snickers combined with an evening of watching Neil Diamond in his stretch satin followed by one watching little Joe in stretch-Spiderman, and, well, you get the picture.

Mom stayed in bed while my sister, my father, and I took the four children to Disney the next day. After a full day in the park, the kids should have been exhausted (the adults certainly were). But again that night, Faith fought sleep.

The next morning, Mom wasn’t better. In fact, she was unable to get out of bed to even kiss the kids goodbye.

My sister and her husband piled the kids, their bags, their bicycles, and their buckets of candy into the minivan and drove home. My sister called me that evening to report that, for the third night in a row, she couldn’t get Faith to sleep. She said Faith had been unusually quiet the entire day and was still refusing to go to bed. When she asked Faith what was wrong, the child burst into tears. Grace had to tell her mother what was wrong with her sister.

Grace hesitantly explained about the dead pufferfish and how Grammy had told them it was so poisonous it could kill people and that bad people used it to turn others into zombies. Then the girls said, “Grammy touched the fish, and she started to turn into a zombie. We’re afraid it will happen to us.”

My sister said, “What do I tell them? They’re afraid to go to sleep.”

I said, “Tell them it was Halloween and Grammy just made up that story because you’re supposed to scare little kids on Halloween.”

So that’s what she told the twins, and it backfired. They were furious with their Grammy for lying to them. And then my Mom was upset that the girls thought she’d lied to them. Everything she’d told them was true, she insisted.

I looked it all up – blowfish, pufferfish, and zombies. Of course, it’s true that pufferfish, also known as blowfish or fugu, contain lethal amounts of a poison called tetrodotoxin in their internal organs, especially the liver. Apprentice chefs in Japan train for two to three years in fugu preparation before taking a test that includes a written examination followed by a test of preparing the fish and actually eating it themselves. Only thirty percent of the applicants actually pass the test.

Pufferfish poison apparently causes paralysis, and the victims are usually completely conscious until they die from asphyxiation. Some fully-conscious victims have been presumed dead and have awakened just before being cremated, so now, in parts of Japan, fugu victims aren’t buried for three days in order to give the body time to begin decomposing. If there is no decomposition, the victim is still alive – sort of a “zombie.”

The Wikipedia article on pufferfish goes on to say, “The pufferfish is also reported to be one of the main ingredients used in voodoo to turn people into zombies.”

Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, wrote two books during the 1980s that asserted zombies could be created by introducing two toxins into the bloodstream. Based on his investigations of voodoo practices in Haiti, Wade claimed that tetrodotoxin, the poison found in pufferfish, when mixed with a dissociative drug, could induce a death-like state during which the victim could be controlled by the voodoo sorcerer, also known as a bokor.

Mom got her information from a television documentary that further explained how the bokors controlled their victims. According to the show, after the victims ingested the voodoo concoction, they would be so completely paralyzed as to appear dead. They would be buried, but the bokor would go back to the grave later and dig them up. The poison would wear off so that they could move again, but the lack of oxygen during the time they were buried would have caused sufficient brain damage to render them mentally incompetent. Grateful to the person who dug them out of the earth, they wouldn’t know better but to obey their voodoo sorcerer’s commands.

I wonder how long before the people of Haiti hear what Pat Robertson said about the earthquake being God's judgment on them and begin making Pat Robertson voodoo dolls. They could sell those suckers on E-bay and raise enough money to rebuild Port-au-Prince.

What's That in Dog Years?

I have a friend who owned an English mastiff named Max who almost made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. Unfortunately, the 300-pound dog died before he could be verified as the biggest dog in the world.

Max was so big, in fact, that when he was diagnosed with cancer, my friend had to drive him to Auburn University’s equine veterinary center for his radiation treatments. Max was too big for the canine machines.

My friend was proud of her almost-world record holder. I wasn't so impressed, though. I have three potential record holders.

Dachshunds, apparently, live longer than any other breed. The oldest dog in the world last year, for example, was a 21-year-old dachshund named Chanel. Then there's Otto, a 21-year-old dachshund in England, was listed as the world's oldest dog this past October by The Guinness Book of Records.

My former in-laws had a dachshund named Brandy, an outside dog with an addiction to heavily chlorinated pool water. She was well into her twenties when she died.

I think dachshunds could save the federal government a gazillion dollars every year on geriatric research and longevity studies. Hell, if you want to live a long time, just act like a dachshund.

Dachshunds pace themselves. They laze about all day long, preferably in a nice sunny spot. But those siestas are broken up with 30-40 barking windsprints every day. Barking windsprints are not scheduled exercise to be obsessed about, either. They are spontaneous expenditures of energy precipitated by the appearance UPS guys, squirrels, or garbage trucks. The dachshund exercise prescription for humans: sleep 20-22 hours every day, and run like hell yelling wildly at your children the other 2-4 hours.

Secondly, those crazy dogs might possibly have the most highly developed immune systems of any species on the planet. Copperhead bites, for instance, can kill us humans. But dachshunds react to a poisonous snake bite by blowing up like Rosie O'Donnell at a Ho-Ho buffett. They're back to normal and ready to harass mail carriers by the next business day. The reason their stellar immune response works so well is because it’s tested and fine tuned daily. I caught one of my dogs rubbing her face on a mouse corpse this morning. She was building antibodies to combat the bubonic plague, I suppose.

Finally, dachshund personalities are a fine mixture of not giving a rat’s ass combined with enough self-confidence to propel them, as Buzz Lightyear would say, “To infinity and beyond.” In other words, they don’t give a shit what you think about them, and they’re going to do what makes them and only them happy. We should all live that way.

It's not like I need any of their life-lengthening tips, though. Upon the advice of a financial planner, I took the quiz on the website livingto100.com, which asks a multitude of questions and then predicts how long you'll live, barring Darwin Awards winners or unfortunate situations like being on an airplane with a crotch bomber.

The first time I took the quiz, three years ago, the result was that I’m going to live to 97. My kids went white when I told them. I said it while taking my daily dose of vitamins, and Hunter actually said to me, “Mom, back away from the antioxidants.” So I decided it would be okay to ratchet my healthy lifestyle down just a hair. I quit drinking pool water and replaced it with more alcohol. I now brazenly neglect to wear sunscreen on overcast days. After throwing caution to the wind, I took the quiz again last night, and now it seems I’m going to live to 99.

Maybe I’ll outlive my dachshunds.