Or more specifically, the communication between states and municipalities. And given America’s obsession with “homeland security” it’s a problem that makes me wonder what’s going on.

I relocated back to my home state of South Carolina last fall. A few weeks back, I received a delinquent property tax bill for my car. The bill came from the City of Richmond.

Trouble is, I transferred my tag and title back to South Carolina last October. So they’ve had nine months to learn that piece of information, not to mention the fact that I no longer live at the address they sent the bill. I called them, explained the situation, and they said they’d have someone call me back. No one ever did.

I considered the matter a “done deal,” but now I’m not so sure, after I received a new piece of mail tonight. Continue reading “Something’s Wrong with Richmond”

No, I’m not saying goodbye to blogging. I’m talking about goodbyes in the workplace. I’ve reached that “final week” in which every day has its own set of “last times.”

Yesterday was my “last Monday” at WXXX. This will be my “last Tuesday.” This week, probably Friday, I’ll edit my “last topical promo,” and by Wednesday or so, I’ll have edited my “last image promo.” Friday evening, I’ll send an email message, “my last email message,” just to tell everyone how much I’ve enjoyed working with them, and that will be perfectly sincere.

Some of my co-workers — you know, I can’t even force myself to seriously adopt “cow-orkers” the way AOL’s Joe used to do — have been good-naturedly referring to me as “short-timer.”

A few friends are meeting me for lunch or dinner at various points along the way this week. Last night I had dinner with an old friend from another station in town who I used to work with back in South Carolina. Today, I’m having lunch with another old friend who works at a different station here in town now. Later this week, my department is taking me to lunch to celebrate. And this weekend, a bunch of folk from the station are getting together for a “farewell dinner.”

(No, that’s not the norm.)

It has been my experience that with most offices, when someone leaves, everyone wants to gather at the local watering hole — and in Richmond there are plenty — and toast the departing with drink. (Not so much with song, these days, but extra drink instead.) It is sometimes the case that people who show up to get smashed say goodbye don’t even know the person all that well; they’re just there because they’re hoping they can become so drunk that they’ll fall all over themselves just join in on the good-natured fun.

But that’s not me.

I’m told that a lot of co-workers will be attending, and that surprises me a little. Not in a false modesty kind of way, but in a sort of surprised, “wow, they’re actually sorry to see me go?” kind of way.

They might ask me to say a few words, which would be unfortunate because it would take time away from eating. Still, I’m trying to come up with something profound. So far, this post is as much as I’ve come up with, but I’ll keep working on it.

While I keep packing.

Imagine the possibilities! What writer who likes horror stories wouldn’t want to live in a home like this? I suspect that a house like this might not get many visitors on Halloween night just out of the scary factor; on the other hand, I’m sure there are those Halloween enthusiasts who’d flock to it for the same reason!

I found this house, quite unexpectedly, right outside the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

This beautiful Queen Anne was built in 1894 as a replacement for the original Superintendent’s house. The original cost to build it was just $4,000! The home had, unfortunately, fallen into a state of disrepair and was actually slated to be torn down until the Historic Richmond Foundation stepped in. They found a buyer who would restore the home and it has since been converted into apartment homes.

This week, John Scalzi’s Weekend Assignment is all about the place you call home:

What is the most interesting thing about where you live? “Thing” in this case would be a famous landmark, a famous current celebrity or historical personage from your home town or county, a notable celebration or sports event — basically, anything that makes where you’re from interesting an unique.Extra Credit: Are there any books that feature your home town (or someplace nearby) in any way?

Well, my regular readers will probably already know that one of the most interesting places I’ve found in Richmond is Maymont, a 100-acre estate left to the city upon the death of its last-surviving owner in the 1920s.

Here’s the grand house:

But there are lots more things to see there on the estate, including an Italian Garden, a Japanese Garden, and a wildlife exhibit with live animals.

As for books about Richmond, Patricia Cornwell’s early Kay Scarpetta novels were set in Richmond.

It’s an interesting place…both Maymont and the city it is a part of.

I drove to Maymont this morning to work on the latest Round Robin Photo Challenge: Summer Gardens.

Maymont is a 100-acre estate with two separate gardens: the Italian Garden, which is pictured here, and a Japanese Garden that is closer to the James River. The Italian Garden is a popular location for local weddings, and as soon as I rounded the corner to approach them, I was immediately met with one of the richest, sweetest smell of roses I’ve experienced in a long time.

I’ll post more pictures from Maymont’s gardens in the next few days, but I wanted to make sure I made the deadline, so enjoy this one!

If the story of his life is really a measure of the man who lived it, we should all be sorry that we never got the chance to know Fred Clark of Richmond, Virginia. Fred died from injuries suffered in a car accident back on June 18th. But just this past Sunday, readers of the Richmond Times-Dispatch got an amusing introduction to the dearly departed through his obituary, which has since received worldwide attention.

This little story began around Christmas, when Clark, who was perfectly healthy at the time, decided to pen his own obituary. He jumped right into the fire, mocking the many obituaries that refer to “courageous battles,” and wrote of himself, “He had a life long love affair with bacon, butter, cigars and bourbon.”

You can read the obituary, as it appeared in the newspaper, here.

Clark anticipated that he would die of disease, which meant that the obituary had to be edited slightly by his family to mention the car accident. Otherwise, it ran pretty much the way the man himself wanted. And since then, the emails haven’t stopped coming to Clark’s family. The Times-Dispatch reports that more than 500 have posted condolences at the newspaper’s website. Some have promised to “have a drink in his honor or light up that expensive cigar they’d been saving.”

One of his son’s joked that his father took pleasure in making light of things most people don’t joke about. And in doing so, he gave the world one final gift of laughter.

Thanks, Fred. You’ll be missed.

I was supposed to post these yesterday as part of the latest Round Robin Photo Challenge, but a long, meeting-filled day at work was just enough to make me forget.

In any case, these were taken this past weekend, when I took my parents to Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens here in Richmond. My mom feels that her hair was a mess on that particular outing, and has made it clear that I am to show no one the photos that I snapped of them, so I’ll stick to three samples of flowers that I spotted as we toured the gardens.

Of the three, this next one is my favorite. Although I like the vibrant reds, both the color and the flower itself seemed so delicate in person that I wanted to try to capture it and show that these particular blossoms seem to be fairly solitary:

This one was snapped inside the conservatory:

I’m no botanist, so if you are curious about what kind of flowers they are, I am unfortunately not able to give you that information. I can say, however, that these are a very, very small sampling of the things to see at Ginter, and if you’re ever in the area, you should definitely stop by.

This is the memorial erected in memory of Civil War soldiers at Hollywood Cemetary in Richmond. It stands 90 feet high and was build in 1869 to honor more than 18,000 Confederate soldiers who were lost. Union soldiers are also buried here.

Engraved in a stone on the side pictured are the words, “Numini et Patriae Asto,” which, translated, means “They stood for God and their country,” a poignant postscript to the defeat they gave their lives to prevent.

Today, May 25th, is National Missing Children’s Day. The event is designed to bring awareness to the need to increase protection of children.

This week here in Richmond, an 18-year-old went missing Monday night. Chip Ellis has been described by his friends and family as a caring, dependable young man. A good kid. After returning some DVDs to a local library in Midlothian, Virginia, he vanished. For the past three days, his friends have been circulating hundreds of fliers hoping to encourage anyone who might have seen something that could help in the search to call police.

Late today, Ellis’s car was found in a wooded area near a dead end road. WTVR-TV and WWBT-TV are reporting that police have found the body of a young man inside the car, but that police have not positively identified the victim. Those close to the young man are still hoping for a miracle.

If you are a parent, I hope you’ll visit the official National Missing Children’s Day page at the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Anyone may sign up for wireless AMBER Alert notifications at their site, and you can also contribute to the organization by purchasing Amber Alert stamps, available this month, from the Postal Service.

AMBER Alerts are named after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, a bright little girl who was kidnapped and brutally murdered while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Texas in 1996. AMBER stands for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.” Bloggers can obtain an Amber Alert ticker for their blogs at CodeAmber.org.

This week’s Round Robin Photo Challenge is “Holy.” I took a trip a few months ago out to Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetary, a cemetary that dates back to the middle of the 19th century.

Many of the monuments feature elaborate designs, which suggest that many of those laid to rest there had lots of money. Indeed, the cemetary is the final resting place of U.S. presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, Civil War General J.E.B. Stuart, and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

There are many depictions of angels throughout the park. I think this one, which sits atop a family’s crypt, is one of my favorites.

It’s an incredible place to walk around and reflect on life, death and rebirth. If you’re ever in Virginia’s capital, and you’re interested in historic places, Hollywood cemetary is definitely a destination to consider.

I just spent the weekend at Ravencon 2006, a convention for writers and fans of science fiction, fantasy and horror held here in Richmond.

For a first-time convention, I thought that things went remarkably well. I remarked to Michael Pederson, the convention chair and publisher of Nth Degree, that it certainly didn’t feel like it was the first one.

One of the highlights for me was receiving some feedback on the hook of a short story from novelist Terry Brooks. (The feedback was positive, which was a bonus!)

The nice thing I enjoy about writing conventions like this is the opportunity to interact with people who have fought the good fight and have ended up with their name in print the right way. One can read over and over again what you should or shouldn’t do, which varies greatly depending on who you ask. But I like to be able to sit down with writers who’ve been published and find out what they did, and to hear the stories of things that went wrong, which often get left out of “success stories.”

I’ll have some posts in the coming weeks about some of the topics discussed. I hope you’ll find them as interesting as I did.

Making the right decision isn’t always easy. Sometimes, the right thing to do isn’t always the choice that’s wrapped in pretty paper with bright ribbons, or the one decorated with flashing lights that spell out the words, “Pick Me!”

Sometimes, the right thing to do is the thing that just seems so wrong.

How many times have all of us looked at someone else’s decision and said, “I could have told them that wouldn’t work out.” I’m sure we’ve all done it more times than we can count.

The people who made the decision to euthanize the Maymont Bears are under a lot of criticism because of their decision. It was a decision that no one wanted to make, but in the end, the only decision they could make.

I’m an animal lover. But just because I like animals does not mean that I don’t like people or that I think that animals are more important than people. To make such an assumption would be both unfair and unreasonable.

In fact, it’s for the safety of the child, not the animals, that this decision, as painful as it was, turned out to be the correct one.

The Patrick’s Place Poll gave voters two choices: either euthanize the bears and perform the rabies test, or give the child the rabies preventative treatment. Ninety-two percent of voters supported quarrantining the bears and giving the child the rabies treatment.

What really happened seems to have been a third option.

If the child had been receiving the treatment, then euthanizing the bears would definitely seem like an unreasonable extreme. But the child didn’t receive the shots, based on what we know from the multiple accounts. The child’s mom said she told health officials that she was willing to let her child have the shots. But according to the Mayor’s Report on what happened, on the day of the big meeting to decide the bears’ fate, the mother called the health department expert and allegedly told her that she “wished to obtain additional information about the rabies vaccine (to determine whether she would give it to her child)” and said she’d follow-up by noon that day.

Regardless of which account you believe, one fact seems to be consistent in both of them: by Thursday, the fifth day since the bite had happened, the child had received no shots. Time was quickly running out, since the shortest-known human rabies incubation period is only nine days.

No matter how much anger one has for the situation itself, no one can really believe that the child deserved to get rabies. You can’t allow a child to come down with a 100% fatal illness just to teach some kind of lesson. And you can’t take a gamble with a child’s life when there’s no way to know for sure how long the incubation period in the animals might be.

No matter how “low risk” bears have been shown to be when it comes to rabies, the bears shared their habitat with red foxes, which have a higher risk and it was always possible that a raccoon could have gotten inside their habitat and bitten the bear only a day or so earlier: there was no guarantee, no matter what the odds might have been, that the child was going to be safe without either the treatment or the confirmation that the bears weren’t rabid. The fact that the medical experts had to face was that the bears could have been rabid.

It was a tough decision for the health experts, no doubt. But this was the right decision — and really, the only decision — based on the situation they faced.

That doesn’t make it an easy decision, and I’m sure if we’d been witness to that meeting, we’d have quickly discovered that it was not the decision anyone was happy to make.

Doing what’s right isn’t always easy. Sometimes, it’s not even appreciated.

The mother of the child bitten by a bear at Maymont told her story to the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week. The story, which refers to the woman only as “Julia,” answers a few questions, and at the same time, leaves a few new ones unanswered.

The biting incident occurred at around 3:30pm on Saturday, Feb. 18th. The paper carries her account of what happened:

“They were sharing an apple while walking behind the 2-acre bear habitat about 3 p.m., she said, when she turned her head for a few seconds.When she turned back around, her son had cleared the habitat’s preliminary barrier, a 4-foot wooden slat fence, and was standing outside the 10-foot chain-link fence, she said. One of the bears was sitting just on the other side.

“The bear was sitting there quiet and calm,” Julia said. “The bear was not acting aggressive in any way.”

Her son reached his hand through the fence in order to pet the bear, not feed it, she says, and did so before she could reach him.

She saw that his hand was bleeding, took one of the shirts she was wearing and wrapped it up, then carried him to her vehicle and drove him immediately to St. Mary’s hospital, where doctors cleaned out the wound and administered antibiotics.

She says she is sure that they must have mentioned rabies, but doesn’t specifically recall any such mention. Doctors asked how the bite had happened, and when she mentioned the bears, they notified the City Health Department.

Here’s where my first question comes in: why wouldn’t she go to a Maymont official first? It’s a safe bet that Maymont could have administered immediate first aid, since they have to be prepared for accidents involving their own animal keepers. They’d have been aware of the situation from the start, and could have called an ambulance to take the child to the hospital while he was already getting medical attention!

By 8pm that night, when she got home, she had received a message from the Health Department, but no one answered when she called back. She didn’t get an answer on Sunday, either. Monday, February 20th was President’s Day, a holiday.

She talked to health officials on Tuesday, but the first time the rabies process was explained to her was on Wednesday.

Another question: what did health officials talk to her about on Tuesday? We’re talking about a wild animal. She’s sure that that doctors at St. Mary’s must have mentioned rabies on Saturday, yet it wasn’t explained to her until four days after that?

And incidentally, the rabies treatment protocol has the victim receiving the first shot to protect him from rabies on “Day Zero,” the day of the bite. The second of five shots is supposed to be administered on the third day, which would have been Tuesday. So why is she getting her “first explanation” of the procedure on Wednesday?

On Thursday morning, a panel of 14 medical and wildlife experts met to determine how to handle the situation. After hours of deliberations, it was concluded that testing the bears for rabies was the only sure way to guarantee the child’s safety. At lunchtime on Thursday, the woman called the Health Department to tell them that she wanted her child to undergo the rabies treatment, and was told that the bears had already been put down.

If the city was certain enough of a risk of rabies that it went along with euthanizing the bears, why was starting the child on shots even an option on the fifth day, by which he should have already received two shots? The whole premise of putting the bears down to test them for rabies involved keeping the child safe, a motive I completely respect. But part of keeping the child safe, even a bigger part than the postmortem test, would have been giving the child the treatment as a precaution beginning the day the bite happened. Why wouldn’t the doctors not want the child to begin the treatment — to be safe — immediately? Why wouldn’t the doctors have immediately insisted on the need for such a precaution? The mother shouldn’t have been left with any doubt on Saturday about what needed to be done.

And there’s something else that doesn’t add up here. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that it gave local health authorities two options: either put the child on the rabies preventative shots, or test the bears to rule out rabies. Only one was necessary. So if the health department believed the child was going to get the shots or was already receiving them, putting the bears down wouldn’t have been necessary at all.

I called the local health department myself and asked them about possible rabies exposure. They tell me that the average incubation period is between three to eight weeks. There have been cases in which the incubation period has been as short as nine days. The location of the bite, in terms of how far it is from the brain, is a factor. The severity of the bite is a factor. The amount of virus to which the person is exposed is a factor. And the age and size of the victim is also a factor.

In a case like this, a four year old could potentially complete the full incubation period faster than an adult.

So let’s take the facts that have now been established and put them together. The boy was bitten on Saturday, which is “Day Zero.” Tuesday, “Day Three,” is the first day that the mother was able to get in touch with the health department. According to what she says, no one explained the procedure in dealing with rabies exposure to her until Wednesday, “Day Four,” by which time her son should have already received the first two shots. She called around lunch time on Thursday, “Day Five,” to let the health department know that she would agree to the shots, and by then, the meeting had taken place and the bears were already put down.

There’s a major breakdown in communication somewhere. It’s inconceivable to me that Wednesday would have been the first time anyone would have taken the time to explain what is involved in the rabies preventative treatment. It’s also inconceivable to me that at that point, she was even given the chance to think it over and let them know the following day.

At that point, what was there to think over? If she, by her own words, was willing to let her son undergo the shot regimen, why wasn’t that clear on Wednesday? Why wasn’t it clear on Tuesday? Why wasn’t it clear on the same Saturday that the bite occurred?

On Friday, test results came back negative for rabies, and Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder called for an investigation into how the incident was handled and whether negligence charges should be filed against the parent, whose attorney adds:

“Everyone has to live with it and accept it and not point fingers. If this is negligence on her part, then 80 percent of mothers and fathers in Richmond better take notice.”

Funny, but I always thought that pointing fingers is at least part of a lawyer’s job! I do believe that this was an accident. I think that this is one of those situations where a child didn’t realize how dangerous a situation he was in, and a parent who didn’t realize that her child had momentarily slipped away.

But what if a zookeeper had looked away for “a few seconds” and allowed a bear to slip out of its habitat, and the bear reached a child. Does anyone honestly believe no lawyers would be leaping through fire for the chance to point fingers in court? Can you picture any attorney just shaking his head and saying, “We just must live with it and accept it.”

As for the 80% figure her lawyer quoted, I hope 100% of parents take notice. If it only takes “a couple of seconds” for a child to scale one fence, battle through shrubbery to reach a chain link fence and stick his hand through to pet a bear, what else could a child do — like run out into a busy street without looking both ways, for example — in “a couple of seconds” while a parent isn’t watching?

The sad fact of life is that at times, we all lose sight of what we’re doing, we’re not careful every second. We’re not perfect. But look at the price that has to be paid for that imperfection, and look at how much is at risk when we sit back and say, “these things happen.”

I feel sorry for the child because in trying to pet a bear at an age that left him too young to really understand the danger, he unknowingly and unintentionally caused their deaths. What’s worse, he had to find out that they were dead because of that act.

When you consider the sadness and guilt he has to live with — even though he certainly didn’t intend to cause any harm at all — it somehow seems a little insincere to shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh, well, these things happen.”

I don’t think for a moment that either the parent or the child intended to cause this outcome. I’m sure there was no intention for the child to get bitten to start with. As others have pointed out, given the strength, size and unpredictability of bears, the fact that he only came away with a small puncture wound means that he was extraordinarily fortunate.

It could have been much worse for the child; it couldn’t have been any worse for the bears. And it was all because of an accident that could have been prevented.

As for the bears, they were first buried at an area landfill. That decision, which added salt to many people’s wounds in this situation, was made before the rabies test results were received. They have since been exhumed, and cremated, thanks to the donated services of a local pet crematory, and they will be interred at Maymont Park following a special memorial service this Saturday.

More than 300 mourners gathered at noon today to say their tearful goodbye to two black bears who delighted visitors to Maymont Park for a decade. The bears were euthanized this week after one of them bit a child. The child and a parent had breached a wooden fence to enter a restricted area in an apparent attempt to feed the bears an apple.

The event was organized by a local woman who loved the bears and Maymont Park, and who wanted to do something to honor the bears’ existence. A few Maymont veterinarians to whom the bears were members of their family fought back tears of their own as they addressed the crowd about the events of the past week.

The community has been expressing its outrage over the decision to put the bears down so that rabies tests could be performed. Brain tissue is required to test for rabies, which requires that the animal be killed: both bears tested negative for the virus.

Visitors this afternoon talked about watching the bears frolick in the sunshine and expressed their shock and dismay about the decision, which was made following several hours of deliberation among 14 experts including doctors, veterinarians, public health and wildlife officials from the state, the City of Richmond and Maymont itself.

Some brought stuffed animals — mostly teddy bears — and left them at a display wall outside the bear habitat. One person brought a jumbo-sized Winnie the Pooh.

Others brought flowers, even favorite photos of the two bears. Children who had visited the bears with their parents brought homemade cards and drawings.

Others, children and adults alike, signed large posters and cards with messages like, “We’ll miss you.” They talked with each other about their memories of visiting the bears with their families over the years.

Still others came to take in the scene of the empty exhibit, their sadness too deep to express with anything other than silent tears.

Mixed in with that sadness and shock is anger. Anger that’s directed at the unidentified parent that apparently put the child in harm’s way despite two signs on the very fence from which the child reached through that read, “WILD ANIMALS ARE DANGEROUS. DO NOT FEED.” Anger that’s directed towards the officials who made the decision to euthanize the bears rather than simply making the child undergo the standard rabies vaccination. And anger at this morning’s revelation that the remains of the bears were buried in an area landfill rather than on the park grounds.

(The burial was done before the test results were known, and because Maymont Park is city property, the bears could not have been buried there because of public health concerns if either animal had tested positive. Also, Maymont did not own the bears: they were merely licensed to display them by Virginia’s Game and Inland Fisheries Department.)

Richmond Mayor (and former Virginia Governor) Doug Wilder has promised a full investigation of what he has called “one of the most reprehensible as well as senseless things to have occurred.” He also said that the city would investigate whether the parent — whom officials refuse to name — might face any criminal charges, including negligence and trespassing.

“The Maymont facility is to attract kids to have an appreciation for wildlife…to show how animals are our friends,” Wilder said at a Friday afternoon press conference. “And this is how we reward our friends.”

As the investigation continues, I hope that the public won’t take their frustrations out on Maymont: it is clear from talking to the various workers at Maymont that that the entire staff is devastated by the situation, as much, if not more so than the many visitors to whom the bears brought such joy.

(All photos, except the shot of the two bears, taken by the author.)

Don’t forget to take the sidebar poll: How would you have handled the incident?

A quick blog jog on entries referencing the Maymont Bears that were euthanized after one of them bit a four-year-old boy who had breached a safety gate reveals that most people seem to be siding with the bears over the child.

Should the bears have been euthanized so that rabies tests should have been performed? The problem with isolating the bears in quarrantine, which is likely what would have happened if a stray dog had bitten the child, is that dogs would show symptoms in a shorter time. (I believe the typical quarrantine is twelve days.) No one is sure exactly how long a rabid bear would take to show obvious symptoms, but 45 days or more has been suggested; in that amount of time, the child, if he had been exposed, would likely have been deathly ill unless he received the rabies treatment.

The treatment, incidentally, isn’t as bad as it used to be. My mom tells me that when she was little, her mother made her and her siblings take the shots when a possibly-rabid animal had entered their yard. Back then, it was a series of shots administered into the abdomen. It was a painful procedure, to say the least.

Today, the treatment involves five shots administered in the arm, on the day of exposure, the third day, the seventh day, the fourteenth day, and the 28th day. The shot allows the body to quickly prepare antibodies that fight the rabies virus.

The sidebar poll has been changed to ask what you would do in this situation. Would you make the child take the shots or would you have performed the test on the bears?