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| from the calendar card project |
20140324 Walking Home from R'dale
Monday, Mach 24, 2014, 5:44 PM I am walking home from R'dale, later than I had intend. I was looking for missing pieces of Taming Uncle Beast, because I know I've written more than I've been able to find, and with the death of various computer, It's possible that it could be permanently gone, but more likely some versions are on various thumbs and external hard drives. Some of the thumbs have also died.
It's cold out and there is still snow and ice and parts of the walking are difficult and the sidewalks are uneven and broken in places and my fingers are freezing.
No matter how many times I do it, it always seems weird to walk home by starting out in the opposite direction and I am always pleased when I actually turn toward home. Man, it is cold. I put on my turtle fur ear band zip my coat to the tippy top and am still cold. I have just crossed Moross and am headed for Canyon and need to remember to go by CVS to get y prescription.
Now that I am actually headed toward home (approaching Marquette school and Balduck Park just beyond that), I am going to stop at Balduck and drop off more nuts for the squirrels, this time walnuts.
I dump the walnuts over the fence. It's colder than it was last time, when the snow was all slushy--now it's frozen solid. I exchange a few words about he weather with a black man getting out of his SUV and heading into his house. I pass the magnolia tree that I photograph every year. No sign of life, of course.
There were flocks of starlings on the lawn at R'dale when we arrived.
So I was looking for missing bits from Taming Uncle Beast and found Missing bits of the Herpetologist, which what I was working most recently before that, looking for bits. Frozen fingers!
There are funny jags in the sidewalk in several places where there were trees, long ago, but the trees have died and disappeared and the sidewalk juts crazily back and forth for no apparent reason.
Sometimes, I think that I am like that. I leap this way and that for for reasons that seem totally opaque, but are the results of growing around something that no longer exists in my life, but still affects me.
Invisible Trees.
A lot of quacking comes from someone’s backyard. They must have ducks?
6:26 PM I got my prescription and a. leaded down Mack toward Moran and home. I pass the jagged fork. They do not have a menu posted. Who'd want to eat a place called the jagged fork? I am curious as to what they serve.
I watch a cop pull over a jeep, a red jeep. Keith would be pleased that his stereotyping might be working.
Tuesday, Mach 25, 2014, 5 PM, I am walking home from Rolandale again. It was so cold when I first started that I didn't even try to write and instead, walk2ed as fast as I could trying to warm up and succeeded so well that now I am all sweatified! It snowed off an on all day, collected an inch, the sun came out, melted some of the snow and then it snowed again. Etc. It is windy and cold and must be right around freezing, as the sun melts the snow, but otherwise, it collects.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014, 5:30 PM I am out walking, walking toward the sun in hopes of absorbing some ot its warmth, because it is cold out. It snowed again today.
Thursday, March 27, 2014, 12:58 PM, I am in Brian Power's waiting room and he has just told me he’d be with me in one second. Keith, or my brother Robert, or Graham probably would have said by now that his one second was up. Outside it is raining, snowing and sleeting. I hear voices. I wonder i
2:13 PM I am at Pier Park now, but it's snowing. There are sheets of ice floating in the ater performing plate tetonics and mountain-building. It's hard to write when it's snowing.
I didn't bring cameras, except for the ones that live in my pocket, and I didn't think I'd take any pictures, but I did attempt some of some dead fish (bait?) I guess they're minnow and since I only saw them in one area, my guess is that the ice fisherman dumped or spilled them accidetally or intentionally.
There is only one ice fisherman here, the old man with sled that turns into a tent.
I put up a lot of ducks, including mergansers and other more exotic (as in not mallards) ducks, whose names I used to know in the olden days. Fingers too cold to write.
Friday, March 28, 2014, 4:37 PM, I am out walking from Rolandale while the plants are being watered. That is, while the African Violets are soaking. I forgot that it had warmed up. It's been so bitterly cold. So I dressed warmly and am now too hot. Took off my hat, partly unzipped my jacket. But it's going to get cold again tomorrow etc, or colder anyway.
I had a little set to with Keith, and if he hadn't come down when he did, I would have driven myself over here, but he came down and drove me.
The disturbance was over the time when he abandoned me, when all I had to do was shovel 2 shovels full of snow and put the shovel away and he drove off and said he be back later and I said when and he said 5 minutes and five minutes went by and 7 and ten and he didn't come, so I started walking, because I'd been standing outside waiting and was all sweatified from shoveling and my fibro in my hips was really really bad and standing hurts than walking, so I started walking. I thought he could pick me up and instead, he got all angry and drove by and left me to walk all the way home.
To say that I felt abandoned at that point would truly be an understatement.
And it was NOT the only time it happened, only the worst time.
I just told him he "had no clue" which I believe, or he wouldn't think I was making a mountain of a molehill. He's trying to make the Great Plains out of the Sierra Nevadas!
Of course, my issues with abandonment go way back and have nothing to do with him, but his response to my needs was way out of line.
Of course, that's MY opinion, not his. He probably thinks MY response was way out of line, but he wasn't inside my skin to know how much pain I was in (it was really bad!) nor was he inside my emotions to know how much it hurt me, both physically and emotionally, for him to drive by and leave me to walk all the way home, when I was already exhausted and in so much pain.
And he says to me, "Once!" holding up one finger. If he killed me only once, would that make it Okay?
Which is what prompted me to say, "You have no clue!" If he had a clue, if he could have experienced my pain, he would not have abandoned me unless he was really a terrible person. Since I don't think he's a terrible person, generally speaking, I can only assume he had no clue about my suffering even though I've told him many times that it hurts me to stand when my fibro is bad and he said FIVE MINUTES! Which was a lie. Or a serious misjudgment. He almost always underestimates how long things will take.
When he brought it up, the whole thing came roaring back in a huge wave of pain and angst, and I had to leave, because I began to cry, it hurt so much. The memory was very painful.
This is not to say that I think Keith was being abusive. I don't. I think he was tired and cranky, underestimated the time it would take him to whatever he was doing (getting gas? or bread? Or corned beef?) and then when he came back for me, and waited and I didn't come out, that exacerbated his annoyance. I don't think he understood (had a clue) how I felt physically, because, if he did understand and drove by and left me, I would definitely want a divorce. I would consider that grounds for a divorce.
Now, if he brings it up again, he will say something cutting and sarcastic, like "are you going to punish me for that forever?" (in a horrible voice) when what I am trying to do is protect myself from pain and abandonment. I don't understand how it hurts him to drive me over and drop me off instead of picking me up, but maybe I should just drive myself, since for reason, it seems to be an issue for him.
I trace my abandonment issues back to the time Peter left me with strangers in San Diego and went off with Colin. But my guess is that it goes back further than that.
I think some bad chemical was released in my body when Keith held up one finger. It was a rush, a bad rush, I could feel it moving though my body. I do not know how to counteract it or cleanse it with good feelings or make it go away.
5:06 PM I have dumped the African violets and am on my way home. My left hip hurts. If I cannot get over this upset, I may have trouble sleeping tonight. of course, I always have trouble sleeping.
Keith often forgets about my hip pain. I'll be standing there and he starts telling me something. I might be on my way to get the bran or have stopped to look at a bird. I don't want to be rude to him, so I stand and listen, and he goes on and on and on and on while the pain gets worse and worse. Just last night he did that when I had stood to go get my bran from the microwave. I finally sat back down. He doesn't care if te bran gets cold. Or rather, he just is oblivious to the fact that it's getting cold. And it's not that I am not interested in what has to say, but if he'd just stop long enough for me to get the bran, I could sit and listen in comfort instead of standing there in pain.
I know he doesn't do it on purpose. Like I said, he has no clue.
Sometimes, I wish I lived alone again. But mostly being loved and cared for is worth the aggravation.
I walk over a long stretch of humpy and very slippery ice I hate walking on ice.
Saturday, March 29, 2014, 4:47 PM I am walking toward Village from CVS. I turned off my watch at the corner of Mack and Moran at a light and forgot to turn it on when the light changed. I had to push it 3 times to stop it, so I may have tried to start it and it failed to start or I may have forgotten. Or, it may not have been at that corner, so I don't really know how long I've been walking. Dangareenies. It also could have been at warren, I suppose? But I don't think so.
The watch said 8:51 at Pharmacy at CVS so I am timing the walk back to the corner where I THINK I failed to start it or it failed to start. The reason I don't know is that I do it so often, and often just by habit that it's difficult to remember back to a specific incident. But the watch has been failing regularly and so have I. I was up all night. I didn't sleep until after 4:45 and then only briefly. OK, I am at that corner, and it says 17:31. That's about 8.5 minutes, so if I add that back in, I now have walked 26 minutes.
5:17 PM, 1well, I accidentally zeroed out my watch. But luckily, I recorded my estimate, as now I am headed for home with a full backpack of food.
A woman comes toward me with a dog who is not on a leash, so I put the Psion awake and make as if if to run. But the dog, a big pale blond Golden retriever, totally ignores me. Well-trained, I guess.
Here comes Keith.
5:53 PM The groceries are put away and I raked for 7 minutes and 21 seconds, which was enough to do the first serious pass of the section of the lawn between the sidewalk and the road, which may not sound like much, and it isn't, but I didn't get much sleep last night and I'm tried and if I do a little every day, I'll eventually finish.
Keith is "lounging" on couch. I know this because I asked him what he was doing and he told me. I am walking to get the last little bit of my required in.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 7:49 AM I am at Dr. Ferrara's office. Today I am having facial surgery for basal cell carcinoma. He didn't get it all the first time, so he is going to take a layer off at a time and send it to the hospital for analysis and then take another layer off and so on until he gets layer with no cancerous cells. Hope I still have a face left when he's done. Then, either later today or another day, he has to also do the other spot.
He's starting with the lower, bigger one, the one on my smile line and under the CPAP mask.
Last night, I took some Ambien at 8:30 and we went to bed at 9:06 (early for us) and I rubbed on Sarna) and Keith rubber my feet with Eucerin. And I did go off to sleep. However, in spite of the Ambien, I woke up a number of times. (The first two times I took Ambien, after a long long break away from it, I slept through the whole night, but not last night. I did get up and pee. At one point, I asked myself, "Why am I awake?" I decided that I must be worried. Worried about today.
I was awake when K's alarm went off.
However, I did go back to sleep, and was asleep when my alarm went off.
So, the doctor told me to come in "Before eight" to have my face numbed, but, it won't be before eight for long. ;-(
Things like this annoy me.. My whole evening last night and morning this morning was arranged around getting me here before 8
8:04I am in the "large" operation theater (not the small examining room I was in last time. It's not huge, but 3 to 4 times bigger than the other room and with bright lights and a large skylight.
8:07 AM He came in and was about to give me a shot when I reminded him that he had told me to come in before 78 for numbing cream, and he seemed slightly annoyed--he was all ready to start. So he put on numbing cream and I have to wait 15 minutes.
Now I am breaking into a sweat.
8:26 AM, Well, the 15 minutes has come and gone and no doctor. He's probably gotten busy with someone else. 8:27 it's 20 minutes, now. I should have just let him give me the shots and get it over with. I read a chapter in A Northern Light. I brought that and the pochade box with water color stuff and the Psion.
Soon, I will have to pee, though I forgot, my hurry, to have Psion dose with water.
Laying here isn't very comfy either. I’ve been laying on a chair, table thing, kind of like a dentist's chair.
4:39 PM I am out walking. It's my third walk of the day. My face is bandaged. The sun is shining on it; I hope it's not making more cancer.
There was a delay in getting the results for the test, but I finally got a call saying that the margins were clear and I didn't have to go back. I was so relieved. YAY!
I've been being cranky and mean to Keith, I guess I am still angry with him for wanting ME to call HIS friend Dale about a Local 58 event (HIS union) when I was on pins and needles waiting for a call from the nurse about whether I had to go back and have my face operated on.
I feel guilty for snapping at him and had to get out of the house before I took his head right off. I told him he was an asshole and a jerk And he had suggested that he photograph the cards I'd asked him to photograph the day before yesterday (and that wanted to get i the mail), but I was so angry at him that I went up and his the cards and left a sign saying "never mind". Now I will have to photograph them myself. I am such an ass, but I can't seem to let go of my fury. I was trying to let it go when he revved it up again.
And I made corned beef to try to make him happy because likes it and I finished up the last batch of it when he left a bunch of hunk on the counter and I didn't have the energy to move it. So I feel guilty about that and the guiltier I feel, the angrier I am at him for making me feel so guilty!
I've walked farther than I meant to because there was woman about talking to someone in a car and the person in the car was about to drive away, and the woman, who is nice and friendly but never stops talking would start talking to me and I'd never get away from her and I need to go home and take the corned beef out to rest and put the cabbage in the pot.
I forgot the Psion and had to go back for it in my first attempt to walk.
The reason I went back for it is that I wanted to work on my story, but I was so upset that I've been ranting instead of working.
My cheek hurts a little, but not as much as it did when he was jabbing me with the needle. However, I feel wounded inside, as if I felt all that cutting in spite of the anesthetic. I guess I am a big, mean wimp.
7:15 I'm so cranky I can hardly stand being inside my own skin. Suddenly, it occurs to me that it might be the potato chips I ate because I was so tense and nervous and also feeling angry at Keith. I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but sugary foods, or high glycemic foods like potatoes, tend to make me feel angry and tense. And we had potatoes for dinner, too. I keep being tested for diabetes and the tests come back negative, but I think I have a serious problem with sugar and potatoes and that could explain this sense of rage I am feeling. I haven't felt his bad for a while.
Keith is driving me to R'dale to water the plants and check on the seedlings. And download the Psion.
* * * * Taming Uncle Beast
There are no happy endings. In the end, we all die. Everyone we love must die. If this were a short story instead of a piece of memoir (otherwise known as an English assignment), the story of finding Beast would end with all of singing like happy children. If this were a novel instead of memoir, and the story of finding Beast were a chapter, it would end with cliff-hanger. Maybe I would unzip the tent and Beast wouldn't be there.
My real life, though, is nothing like a sit-com with a happy ending, nothing like a fairy tale with a happily ever after.
There are no happy endings, but there can be happy conclusions of sorts.
We laughed and we cried and I introduced Trey to Beast and Beast to Trey. We cooked a can of Spaghetti Os on the little backpacking stove and split it three ways and then Trey said he needed to go into civilization and tell his folks where he was. I asked if they had emails and he said yes, and I got out the iPad mini with its 4G and Trey emailed is parents to say he was safe.
I wasn't sure exactly how safe he was, or any of us were, for that matter, but then Trey asked Beast if he could come with us. I expected a quick refusal, but Beast sighed and said OK, if they could figure out how to take the canoe alone with messing up the raft. They decided to worry about it in the morning.
"Aren't your parents going to worry about you?" I asked.
"Nah," he said. He asked for iPad back and I got it back out of its triple Ziploc bags and he emailed them again to say he was going on a raft trip down the river.
Then the issue was where Trey would sleep. He hadn't brought a sleeping bag, and the tent was barely big enough for Beast and me. Beast had an extra blanket, and Trey crawled in and squeezed in on the far side of Beast, so that Beast was between us. We were squished pretty tight and it was a warm night, but there was no sleeping outside because of mosquitoes. Amigo slept in the "vestibule," which is what the North Face people call the tiny annex of the little tent. We sometimes put our gear in there, if it looks like rain.
Beast went to sleep first. He always snorts kind of like a pig several times when he first falls asleep, then he sighs with a long almost whistling outbreath, and then starts breathing regularly. His whole body turns to jelly. He's skinny and strong, but when he sleeps, it's as if his body is made of jello.
Then, Trey went to sleep. He let out a long breath, a little like one of Beast’s, and then breathed almost silently, but with a long slow rhythm.
I rarely fall asleep as fast as Beast does. But I lay awake longer than usual, reviewing the events of the day.
Then I thought about was how it bothered me that Beast continued to call Killer Killer, even though he was no longer mean. I always insist on calling him Amigo. Or course, Killer was Beast's dog, not mine, and he has a right to call him anything he wishes.
But it really bothers me.
It bothers me because I want to honor the dog that Amigo has become, not the dog he used to be when the army abused him. But what about Beast? How had we started calling him Beast?
I think I started it. He was being so beastly, when I had babysit for him, when he first got back from Iraq. I realized that I was now trying to "whisper" Beast back to being Jake, like I "whispered" Killer into being Amigo. That had taken a long time. But I had started calling him Amigo before he got friendly. What did Marin call it? "Acting as if." I was acting as if Killer was already Amigo.
And what I was trying to do with Beast was the same thing. I was modeling my behavior with him pretty much after taming Amigo. So maybe I should stop calling Beast Beast and call him Jake again, my sweet Jake, once little Jakey who used to sing to me.
So I decided right then and there to resume calling Jake Jake. Interestingly, even though I'd referred to Jake as Beast to Trey when we were along, I introduced him as Farley Jacob Latham, otherwise known as Jake. So Trey has been obliquely instructed to call him Jake. I suppose it's silly of me to think that would make any difference in Jake's behavior, but maybe it will make a difference in mine. And maybe that might indirectly affect Beast Jake. (I keep writing Beast, darn it!)
Feeling a little more hopeful, I drifted off to sleep and woke up what seemed like only a minute later to thunderous noise and quaking. My first though was an earthquake and then thunderstorm, but instead, it was something on the raft and Amigo trying to destroy the tent to get to it.
Jake and Trey began flailing around trying to sit up in the cramped space and some whacked me in the face and I let out a yelp. Amigo's barks turned to growls.
"Where's the beer?" came a huge bellow from outside.
Jake unzipped the inner zipper and grabbed Amigo. "Killer, NO!" he said, and holding Amigo's collar, he unzipped the outer zipper.
In the dim, predawn light, I saw a hairy giant of a man who looked bigger than all four of us, that's including Amigo, put together.
"I left it right outside the tent," Jake said, sounding puzzled. Then he growled, sounding very much like Amigo. "Tiny?" he asked, in a low, ominous voice.
"Was that your beer sir?" Trey asked, his voice higher than normal.
"Rrrrarhr!" said the man. I thought he was going to beat his chest like a gorilla.
"Where's my beer?"
"I'll get it for you, sir," Trey said, and I stared at him in disbelief. With the beer deep under the river, how was he going to do that?
* * * *
Trey took off his pants. It was getting lighter, and I could see things I was embarrassed to see. But he didn't seem worried about my seeing him naked from the waist down.
Then, without comment or ceremony, he dove into the inlet and swam for the river.
He swam strongly, doing the crawl, which I am not good at. I do the Tiny-Lee-Latham side stroke. I can swim a long ways. I could swim across the whole river, even though it is very wide here, if some big boat didn't run me down, but it would take so long that I'd probably end up ten miles downriver. But I'd get there.
Trey swims faster and stronger than I do. A lot faster and a lot stronger.
He swam out of the inlet into the river proper and suddenly, he bobbed up and disappeared. He was gone so long I started hyperventilating. (*) I had been holding my breath without realizing it. I always thought I was good at holding my breath. One time, in science class, we had to blow into an inverted gallon jug that had its mouth underwater to test our lung capacity, and mine was the highest in the class. I was really proud of that and kind of strutted around thinking how great I was.
But I ran out of air and got scared for Trey.
And he didn't come.
And he didn't come.
And he didn't come.
*
(*)is that a good vocabulary word, Mrs. Dietrich? It's one of Mrs. Winsome's words, you know the gym teacher? She's the only one I know who uses it.
* * * *
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