Getting A Grip On Things

For a woman with a generously endowed midsection isn’t it peculiar that I am shortchanged in the tummy settling department? For instance just the smell of liver cooking half a block away sends me hurtling to the nearest flushing facility. Likewise a generous wift of cigar smoke is enough to make me puke. I grew up one of those kids with terrible car sickness. “Daddy, go STRAIGHT, I’d wail.” In my teens I got coaxed to ride a roller coaster. Wrong choice. Turning bilious green my friends swore never to suggest that disaster again.

So this week has brought unfair gastronomical challenges, unfair because what is wrong with me is respiratory.

Five days ago, by x-ray, I was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. I suspect I’ve been harboring the virus since before Christmas as I’ve been dragging around like an old rubber galosh. I thought it was just sloth. Rounds of prednisone for allergy and then a magic antibiotic for “a bug” gave temporary relief. Alas, relapse was on my agenda.
Making a sour face I rejected my doc’s hospital proposal. That’s where people really get sick these days, right? In retrospect an i-v might be a gift. Science has provided the perfect antidote. The problem is the new antibiotic comes with a digestion challenge.
Even though I live in the city limits I am still on a septic tank. This week my sturdy old tank in the rose garden has had its work cut out for it as I explore various strategies for keeping down the pills. They are supposed to be taken on a full tummy. My appetite is nil but I try. The current strategy goes like this: eat a bowl of anything, trying not to cough between bites, stand tall, swallow a quarter of a pill with a full glass of water, walk erect for six minutes. Opening the sliding glass doors to the deck do 25 toe raises humming America the Beautiful, all the while waving both arms in the air to distract the contortions going on in my mid section. Open my jammie top to the elements to get in more air. Ignore Kodi’s looks of skepticism and keep one eye peeled for the police helicopter patrol. Return to the kitchen table doing either the polka or the schottische. Still standing tall, march in place while stuffing down four more tablespoons of whatever. After twenty minutes of keeping the pill down I know I have it made. Repeat whole process four times a day. I’m getting pretty proficient at this at last but I may loose my sanity.

Life, Death and Jewels

Shortly before Christmas Lee’s cousin Patricia fell on the black ice in front of their home in Lodi, cracking her head severely. As she staggered to the bathroom to stop the bleeding, she insisted over and over, “I can take care of this.” Alas, she was bleeding from the front, middle, and back of her brain.
Following a helicopter ride to UCDavis, it was determined it was not something anyone could take care of. Pat’s last words were so much like the way she lived her entire life.

Of course I don’t know the whole story, but it bears repeating in order to understand the context of Patricia’s life. The story, as I heard it, follows: Verne, Lee’s dad, was about 14, living in the family home in Emeryville where his cantankerous father eked out a living truck farming. I once saw the two story frame farm house, but it has now been demolished.
On this day Grandfather Lee was so mad at the plow horse’s behavior he beat it to death, his son, Verne, observing. Seconds after the horse fell down dead so did his father. A stroke of anger no doubt took him.
Altogether Mother Lee bore 21 children in that big house, only ten living to adulthood. The youngest, her favorite, she named Jewel. “Mother’s Precious Jewel” as he came to be known, grew to a handsome adult, with an outgoing personality. I suspect he was spoiled. Her adoration of him was so significant that some of his siblings and later on their spouses felt resentful.
Jewel married a beautiful woman who turned out to be unfaithful. Following an affair with another family member (don’t all families have scandals?) she attempted suicide, but the attempt failed and left her emotionally and physically disabled, or as they said in those days, “never the same.” Patricia stepped up to the plate, and became the mother to her younger brother. Ever afterward her main goal in life was first of all to be a good mother, a goal she accomplished with incredible success.
What is fascinating to me is that Pat and Paul’s four adult children walk such different paths in life and yet all were adored as if each were named Jewel. Considering her roots, how is it that Pat came to be the special mother that she was? I suspect the ten grandchildren who stood on the stage of Montclair Presbyterian last Saturday singing in unison for their grandmother will follow in the same footsteps, each being celebrated for their uniqueness. I am blessed to have them in my life.

Funny Bucket List Story

Two weeks ago I mentioned bucket lists and my lack thereof. Its almost the middle of the new year and I still score zero on both resolutions and bucket list items. So I've been interviewing friends and decided Sue and Jeanne's story was simply too funny not to share.

I'm lucky to have visited Alaska on vacation once, but it was a very warm summer. Imagine! It happened to be 90 when we hit Fairbanks. Sue and Jeanne's experience was the polar opposite. Changing planes at SeaTac, they had packed a Thanksgiving Day picnic lunch to eat in the airport lounge with their friends Leslie and Renee. So far so good. Of course it was totally black out when they arrived in Fairbanks. Still they were able to rent a Ford Expedition and locate their digs, a lodge called Taste of Alaska, which they hold in high esteem. Venturing out the next day to find the Northern Lights they were quickly pulled over by a police car. It seems they had their headlights on high. Trooper Rick warned them and asked where they were going anyway. Clearly these old ladies were bewildered but intent on something.

When they said they were driving all over looking for the aurorea borealis he suggested politely they look out their rear window. A rainbow sky was right there. Chagrined, they turned the car around and followed his instructions to a nice turn out spot. The sky was ablaze. In the excitement they jumped out, leaving the motor running but locking the doors. One passenger only had on a sweater but one of the party had a cell phone. The 9-1-1 operator hardly believed them that it was an emergency but eventually agreed to send help. In a few minutes who comes driving up but Ranger Rick. He shook his head and then bundled them up with blankets in his own patrol car while they waited for the locksmith. It was a dramatic beginning to wonderful adventure.

Nature And the Russians Have the Upper Hand

Winter skies from my hilltop, as this one two nights ago, implode my senses. They are the jewels which make living in this old house a fair trade-off. They give me visual orgasms. In the last moments before sinking behind the hills San Francisco Bay takes on all the colors spread in the canopy above it. Yet I've never painted even one of them. I think I feel inadequate to the task. Nature has the upper hand. Instead I paint people and old buildings and sunflowers. Musing on this picture I realized it is the same color pallette as many of my sunflower watercolors. How curious.

Yesterday I chatted with my very Russian pilates teacher, Yulia, about the fact that we have Peter the Great to thank for our crops of sunflowers even though the seeds came from America, the Indians having long cultivated it. I had heard this on NPR driving to the gym. Seems sunflower oil was not on the forbidden list of oils during Lent in the Russian Orthodox church and so the clever Russians hybridized the plant to satisfy their palettes and produce the lovely oil which is today used all over the world. Virtually all American potato chips are now fried in sunflower oil.

Introspective

Though it is late afternoon a cream of mushroom soup fog still cuddles me as I contemplate the almost end of another year. Earlier today as I was denuding the weathered manzanita branch of the miniature ornaments displayed each year to give a semblance of Christmas spirit (for its still hard to be joyful without my life partner to share the task) I felt a welcome tingle of pleasure fingering the memorabilia. It was a feeling of both surprise and tenderness. A number of the objects had been Lee’s folks. Three of the special ones were White House Christmas replicas given to me by Lee’s great niece Julie and family from Virginia with whom we shared Christmas brunch again this year. Some of the ornaments were favored objects in my therapy office sand tray, thus infused with multiple memories, magical and transformative. Does that mean that time has softened my sharp edges of loss? I surely hope so. A surprise stopped my introspection. In the bottom of the plastic crate in yellowed tissue appeared the spectacles shown above. It eludes me where they came from, but they must be at least a hundred years old. The frames are incredibly fragile; thin wire, rusted in places. The lens are intact but the glass is so amber and shattered it looks like ice on a melting mud puddle. For the photo I placed them on a bible I was given at age 12. It opened randomly to the book of John. The bible is not quite 70, but it was the oldest prop I could find around. The set up rather pleases me. Perhaps I will paint it some day, or maybe I will put the thought on my bucket list. Tee Hee.

Lately a number of my friends have been talking about doing things on their bucket lists. How funny, for they are all younger than I. For instance, Catherine and Mary went to New York to see the Thanksgiving Macy’s Day parade because it was on Catherine’s bucket list. And my friends Sue and Jeanne spent part of the holidays flying to Fairbanks to see the northern lights because it was on Sue’s bucket list. My painting teacher Sandy is going to Guatemala in the spring to paint because its part of her bucket list. I’m afraid I can’t think of a thing I’m aching to do that I haven’t already done. Of course I'm a little jealous of my friend Arlene who saw a bald eagle in her back yard last week, but that's not something one could plan for. In retrospect, I do know my grey garden bucket I use for weeds has a big hole in it. Likewise the bottom of the yellow bucket I use to gather Kodi’s turds is dangerously thin. Perhaps the message is I should concentrate on the precariousness of the here and now rather than the promise of the future.

Christmas Conflict

Ho ho ho. Its almost Christmas Eve and I will spend the day shopping and preparing brunch for Lee's family visiting from Virginia for breakfast on Christmas morn. It will be fun for I do not usually plan to feed three sturdy men with hairy chested appetites.

Its an adjustment in expectations. I hope I get it right this year! Meanwhile I'm sharing an early childhood Christmas conflict of a different sort.

Christmas morning rather than the preceding eve was when we celebrated in my house. Santa was supposed to come after we two children went to bed, bringing the tree, gifts, etc., and restoring himself with the chocolate cake and milk I carefully placed by the fireplace. I remember coveting the cake. It had delicious crackly white frosting. I think all this was my mother’s English tradition, for my Dad grew up so poor they probably did not celebrate at all.

Daddy would jingle bells in the yard outside our window to add to the guise. Mother would stay up most of the night wrapping gifts and decorating the tree and in her usual style irrigating her vocal cords with whatever booze was available so that in the morning the living room looked like a magic show with twinkling lights and piles of packages. This meant that she would not drag out of bed until nine or so, usually hung over, and my sister and I would have to wait quietly in the dining room in agony of anticipation. Our ugly long brown socks which fastened with garters would be hanging by a clothes pin from the fire screen stuffed with tangerines and mixed nuts including one called nigger toes. I had no idea what that meant and I doubt my parents did either, though of course I wince now at the racial slur.

The big problem for me however was I knew there was no Santa. I was reading by age four and had spotted a Time magazine on the hall table with the cover story titled “Should We Tell Children There Is No Santa?” I remember feeling both smug and relieved to have that one settled. Then followed the burden of pretense. The last thing I wished to do was disappoint my parents and this farce seemed so important to them. I was very good at pretense but still it was a struggle for I had been taught that honesty was the greatest of all virtues. I remember having to sit on Santa’s lap at the Bon Marche in downtown Seattle and feeling like vomiting as I recited what I wanted. “Have you been good all year?” he’d ask. Of course I’d been good, but wasn’t I being bad by pretending and denying the truth? It was so confusing.

As I’ve looked at what’s happening in Congress this week I wonder if some of those elected officials aren’t experiencing that same struggle I did as a child: how to be honest and yet compelled out of loyalty to keep up the farce. I wish them resolution, relief from the conflict, and peace.

Its surely the right time of year.

All Things Electrical

This was the week that all things electrical tested my emotional stability. I longed for the serenity of Bali and wondered about chucking civilization for a quiet island retreat (complete with maid and food service and twice daily massages of course).

For a while I’ve noticed that two of the four burners on my electric cooktop are kaput and the replacement parts are no longer made so last night I ordered a new one, but in the logic of design the new one is ½ shorter and ½ inch deeper than my counter cutout, so I had to buy a kit to fill in the cracks. Drat. I hope it works.

Chris my usually invisible kitchen contractor appeared late Tuesday afternoon and started the ceiling lighting redo. He left at 9 leaving the fixtures hanging precariously by long cords and promising to be back in the morning. Ha! There they hang tickling my ear lobes with every passage and giving me the shakes.

The same day my living room tv reported “no signal”. Meanwhile some connection has been severed on my IMAC, new in February, so the mouse batteries wear out every few days. Or not? Maybe the machine just thinks they are worn out. Apple sent me a new mouse on warranty but the new mouse seems to have scrambled the cordless keyboard so now it won’t connect. Therefore they are sending a new keyboard as well. I wish someone would send me new body parts on warranty! I could use a new knee as well as a new waist line. So a nice direct tv service man just came and informed me my receiver was completely dead. I don’t know if he was referring to my brain cells or my libido but I can assure you that pretty much nothing works on all cylinders around here. Anyway, the tv now has many new parts and a new dish (again onwarranty) and boxes and cords. It also has an annoying blue light when on. The patient service man informed me that I could even get my horoscope on the menu. So after he left I looked for today for my sign and got this:

A burden is eased and the relief you feel about this will bring a surge of self-control. Does this mean I will stop hitting the ice cream when the next thing crashes? Certainly hope not.