This post is only partly edited
050907WP Wednesday, September 7?, 2005, 2:30 PM I am out on the first loop of my constitutional under a bright hot sun, and a partly cloudy sky. Lots of hazy white clouds. I am not exactly overjoyed, but I m happier than I was yesterday. Yesterday I was depressed and felt physically terrible. Today, I am a little more cheerful. I feel a LITTLE better. Physically. I'm not great. My back, especially the small of my back and sacroiliac, hurts. My hips hurt, too, but the pain is not as severe as yesterday. Not great, but better.
I am dashing off to the store to get salad fixings and ice-cream for Keith and Graham and cereal. Maybe I should skip the cereal for a few days. I don't know.
I don't know what caused the flare-up of pain. I also would like to somehow lose weight. Seems impossible. But I want to try. Again.
2:38 PM I am trying to hurry as fast as I can because Keith comes home around 3:00 and I want to grab a few things at the store and either beat him back or at least arrive very shortly after him, like before he is settled in. I like to be there to greet him and exchange pleasantries and hugs etc before he gets started on whatever activities he may start on.
In spite of all the clouds that are visible, hazy and thick, the sun seems to be hanging out in the small portion of sky that is clear.
Bad is in the eye of the beholder. Some people think people who don't water their lawns are bad because the lawns look brown and "ugly." I think people who do water their lawns are "bad" because they are wasting precious resources and interfering with the grass plant's natural tendency toward estivation.
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Thursday, September 8, 2005, 3:35 PM I am out on the first loop of my constitutional. I thought I was leaving in plenty of time, but the old man on the corner came out to talk to me and I didn’t want to be rude so I stopped to talk. He's very nice, friendly, and maybe a little lonely. I talked to him about his grass seed, the weather, the rain, the kids on their bikes, where I lived, who my fiancé was why I wasn’t married yet, and why I needed to get going and be home by 3:00. Only I may not be.
It is a grey day, and rain heavily earlier. The sky is completely grey, a mottled lumpy grey. It is a little cooler than it has been, cooler than yesterday. The yards are full of acorns and black squirrels collecting acorns. A truck with a huge vacuum cleaner is vacuuming a rug in someone's house.
My hips hurt.
Today, my hips hurt and I feel quite sad. I really did a bad thing. I wanted to taste Graham's Snickers ice-cream, but then I wasn't happy with a taste and had more. This is what I said to myself. I had had what I thought was a healthy day yesterday, and a healthy breakfast today, but I didn't feel well or sleep well last night not do I feel well today. I was sad and angry and I said to myself, what difference does it make if I eat healthy food if I feel terrible anyway? So I dished myself up some ice cream and put a little chocolate syrup on it.
I feel terrible. I mean physically terrible. I did anyway. But now I also feel bad and guilty and fearful that tomorrow I will feel even worse! That I will have the negative effects of dairy, chocolate and nuts, all of which I am allergic to, ON TOP of all the other symptoms I already have. I'll be a basket case, and just because I felt as if I deserved a little treat because I felt so rotten.
Stupid and self-destructive.
Aiee.
I walk past the watermelons and musk melons and peaches and plums and cabbages at the village market. Nothing tempts me, nothing looks good. Pretty, but not tempting or appealing to eat. Photogenic, but I don’t stop because I want to be home by 3:00 PM when Keith arrives and I was delayed talking to that nice white-haired friendly old man.
I was looking at the wrinkles in his forehead. He has expressions sort of like Keith's, only etched more deeply into his skin, puzzled looks and worried looks and the traces of old anger. He seemed gentle and sweet and perceptive. It makes me think of all those people who drowned or died in the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Tsunami victims. They all had lives; they had lovers and friends and family and lives, joys and sorrows just like ours. Only I'm walking down this sidewalk rapidly toward home with a stone in my sandal and a pain in my back and pains in my hips and hopes for better days to come and a touch of survivor’s guilt. I am sad that they all died, sad for them sad for their families, but if I am entirely honest, I am glad to be alive and glad it wasn't me or mine who died. Not that I want someone else to die INSTEAD of me. I want us all to live our lives.
A workman comes out of a house with tight curls and horn-rimmed glasses and a pile of tools in his hands. He opens a door of a van and begins piling tools in the back of the van. As I walk up, he looks toward me and smiles. He's about my age, short and a little stocky, reminds me of someone I know. He says, "Hi, how are you?" and I say, "Fine, how are you, and he says fine thanks," or something and I go on my way. I may never see that man again. He has a life. Like the people who died, and the ones who are now homeless. Each going about their day until they don't.
I want to keep on going about my day and I sort of wish there were something reasonable I could do to help. But what? I have no job, no income, and what little money I have I want to save for the future when I am old and have no source of income. Not that there's enough, but some must be better than none. Usually. So I am afraid to part with what little I have and I am in the middle of moving and have a child in school and have pain and fibro and even if I did go down there, what would I do? I feel as if I am just making excuses and that makes me feel guilty, but I really don't have any idea what to do. Usually people just want money.
Here comes Keith. I hear him coming. I walked 20 minutes. He's riding Tiger, my motorcycle. He makes a kissy face at me as he pulls in, and I make one at him.
I notice also the way his crotch is pressed against the curve of the seat as he pushes the bikes forward into the garage. This gives me a little thrill--I think he's so sexy! Ooh.
5:02 PM I am sitting out on the driveway. Keith is working on his BMW motorcycle which is all in pieces. I came out to help him. I had to hold things while he pounded them in order to flatten them. It was something from inside the gas tank and gasoline leaked onto my breast. I want to go change my clothes, but Keith still needs me.
5:44 PM I have been standing holding the motorcycle gas tank breathing gas fumes until my feet were killing me, tired, pins and needles. General pain. Keith has been struggling with some apparatus that goes inside the gas tank, a strainer, fuel filter and all these tubes and a gasket all very awkwardly arranged so it is nearly impossible to get in. The clamps are hard to undo and he had to undo them repeatedly. It was frustrating and difficult and smelly and I'm sure gas fumes are very bad for both of us to be breathing. But that's what we've been doing for an hour.
He did all that work and won't know until he puts it back together if it works. If it stops leaking gas, which is what it's been doing. I ma sitting in the driveway recovering from the pressure on my feet. He's gone in to call for pizza and wings. It's Thursday, the night we have pizza and wings.
It's a break for me from having to cook and they like pizza. I can't eat it, of course. With my cheese allergy. I get wings.
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7:44 PM I am back out in the driveway, this time with long pants on. Keith put some gas in the newly repaired tank and it did not leak out. This is a good first sign.
Andy is here. Keith is going to go fill up his tank with gar and then we will go out on the bikes
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050909 September 9, 2005, I am walking around the black on the first leg of my constitutional. I walk past the old mans house and look up to see if he's there. He is. I quickly look back down at PasadaB. Then I feel guilty. I am trying to avoid a conversation because I haven’t unloaded the dishwasher or done any of a million other things I wanted to do. I feel guilty because he is always alone and apparently lonely. I should stop and talk to him. Next time around, if he's out.
I watch a black squirrel run across the road. There seem to be more squirrels than usual. Probably because this year's crop of babies hasn't been culled by cars and predators yet. The street seems fairly quiet, though there are miscellaneous bangings, a plan flying over, a car backing out of a driveway, and so on. Then the mail truck zooms by. It's late today. The garbage is out on the street and partly collected. Each day I walk around there are slightly more newly fallen leaves than the day before. Not that many, still, just a scattering here and there, more in some places than others.
Someone has left a table on the very edge of the road, I assume for the trash. It is a table that in the old days, I would have picked up and found a use for. It is brown Formica. I bang it, it seems sturdy. But I walk off and leave it because my life is too cluttered already and no specific use comes to mind. A few houses father, there is a lot of screening in the can. Screening with about inch wide holes. I think of an aviary for Rocky, but where would we put it. I walk by and leave that, too. Not that I could easily carry it. I walk past marigolds and impatiens. I think how Keith called the old man on the corner a nice old "coot." I love Keith, but something about that phrasing offends me.
I am going to the store, and I am almost there.
A woman ahead of me keeps blocking my path, completely oblivious to me. I find it annoying. I finally walk way down an aisle and around to get ahead of her. She looks Indian (from India). It must be nice to have so much leisure.
Now I am home and need to put away the groceries and empty the dishwasher. I had planned on having meatloaf, but I bought fish, and I think we'll have that instead. And I bought spaghetti squash, so I think I will ask Keith to make spaghetti. Tomorrow.
Except I also bought a potato and butternut squash to go with the meatloaf, well, we’ll have both.
BUT, we don't have any small bottles of white wine for the fish!
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Monday, September 12, 2005, 9:10 AM I am out on my morning walk. Despite my reluctance to wake up and get up this morning, I have already seen Graham off, collected clothes and started a load of laundry, and talked to the old man on the corner for eleven minutes. We talked about the birds who ate all his grass seed and the new grass seed he planted and the dirt he covered it with to discourage the birds and the lady who came by and told him not to and the squirrels in his yard (and then two came) and danger of squirrels crossing the street and his laundry and mine (I told him how high my basket of laundry was this morning--I could hardly carry it down the stairs, it was so tall. I knocked things down and had to go collect them and put them back up. We talked about walking around the block and how long the block was. He told me if he gets around it once, he's lucky. He told me his son comes over and gets him and he works over there and helps out, other wise he’d do nothing except keep the house clean. He told me he has a pilot's license and used to have a plane and fly mostly when it wasn't busy. We talked about my motorcycle and he said maybe he should get one and drive it so he'd get hurt and go to the hospital and maybe then someone would come and visit him. He laughed when he said that, but I could tell he gets lonely. He also said his daughter is an editor of Better Homes and Gardens and lives in Brooklyn and visits only rarely. She writes about keeping house, he said, when I told him I wrote poems, stories and novels, this when we were talking about my little computer, PasadaB. Which is broken and unable to be repaired by Psion, they don't do it any more. WAHN!
He said he had been watching all the motorcycles and no one had stopped by and declared himself to be my husband. He laughed when he said this, quite heartily, as if making a wonderful joke. I guess either and I should stop by and talk to him. He said he liked my hair in braids (I haven’t showered or combed it out yet today), and that there are a lot of grey-hairs around. A woman walked by and entered our conversation briefly. He said, you, me and her, we are all grey-hairs. We talked about a lot of stuff in such a short time.
This reminds me of the conversation I had with Keith yesterday, about the steamboats going down the river to Bablo Island which was corrupted from some French words which I now forget. He said it had a long narrow spit formed by crud they had dredged up out of the river with a small concrete light house the end and that the gulls nest there and attack you if you go during nesting season. He said They put a merry-go-round there and then some rides like a small amusement park and people would take the steamboat from Detroit to Bablo Island and visit the amusement part and there was something else in a log cabin, I forget what, and that the used to go as a child and as recently as when his Neil and Sarah were small children and that riding the steamboats around the great lakes was a favorite pastime of people during the 20s and 30s. He describe the engine, which he said was in a hole that was open and you could look down and see the big pistons working and the steam pouring out and people running around with oil cans tending to it and that after a while, he used to walk around the Island instead of going to the amusement park and that is was down near Monroe near where we met TA and walked at Sterling State Park (which was not my favorite place!) Though OK)
The Psion is having issues. It keeps shutting itself down and doesn't want to save stuff which reminds me that Dead is still having major issues. I can't get on-line. And it takes more and more tries to boot up--I hope it doesn't kill the new $107 drive like it killed the old one. I wish I had stuff that worked.
I thought Keith's story about the steamships and Bablo (sp?) might make a good background location for a story. But maybe not, since I wasn’t involved and cannot remember the details of what Keith told me.
Keith didn't get his paper this morning before he left (it prolly hadn't arrived yet) because there it is on the steps. I bring it in and put it by the door. It took me almost 22 minutes to walk the block today! But I do feel somewhat better, tired and sleepy. And hungry, haven't eaten yet. Need to put laundry 1 in the dryer and laundry 2 in the washer.
2:10 PM I am out on my second constitutional circle of the block. I have started three loads of laundry, and one is in the dryer and one is dried and partly folded. I have written three character sketches for Frog Haven. One for Sissy, one for Paul, one for Garryd. I need to do some others. I have decided that the novel I most need to work on is that one, as it is the one closest to being done. I don't want to start serious writing and revisions until the desk is ready and the computers are set up. So, following Damn Good Novel's outline of how to proceed in order to finish a novel in a year, I am working on the character sketches. One would think that with the novel already written, I would not learn much by working on the character sketches, but in fact, I did learn something surprising to me, and that is that Sissy and Paul are very much alike in some ways in spite of being arch enemies of sorts at the beginning of the book. This arch enemy status does change, but not entirely. They join forces to fight an outside evil, but then return to enemy-hood afterwards. More or les. Of course, there is a newfound realization tat they are not entirely antagonistic. Will they ever be bosom buddies? No. Because they both want to be boss. They will also never be boyfriend and girlfriend or ever even consider it, but they will choose partners similar to each other in some ways. They grow to respect one another a little more. I'd like to make those changes more obvious in the novel.
The old man was not out in his yard when I walked by. I am both relived and slightly disappointed. I have a lot on my mind and I want to be home before 3 and I am only way to go shopping, but I would have enjoyed a BRIEF exchange of "pleasantries," though I am not fond of that term. I like learning about his life and also "being there for him, if only briefly, to relive for a moment his loneliness.
I will be at the store soon, and occupied with shopping, and then I will be walking home with groceries, so shortly, I will be unable to write any more.
The phone rang a few minutes ago, just before I left, and I guessed it was Keith calling to say he'd be working late, but it was a salesperson with a foreign accent and I wish we were on a national no-call list. Very annoying to waste time talking to sales people.
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