Midsommar Kate’s Moon
Jon’s work on the benches for our dining room shows his continuing growth in woodworking. I’ll post pictures when he’s done, but the panels he’s building are cabinet maker good. That’s a pretty high skill level and he’s self taught after an apprenticeship with Dave Schlegel, a renovation contractor in Minneapolis many years ago.
The grandkids were up last night. Ruth’s excited about middle school, “I won’t be in the same classroom all day.” Jon, “That’s good for your teachers.” Ruth, “That’s good for me.” She’s a sweet kid. Gabe wants to be a sweet kid, too, but some misfiring neurons keep pushing him toward ornery. Maybe as the divorce settles and they move into Jon’s new house, achieve a new normal, he’ll come back toward center. But, maybe not.
Kate’s doing a lot of self care. She’s eating more, trying to get her weight up, an irony lost on neither of us. She does facial saunas, sinus clearing saline, pays attention to the development of thrush and knocks it back. Yesterday was her third or fourth infusion of Remicade for her r.a. Her rheumatologist gave her a drug for her dry mouth, a saliva stimulator. She uses the oxygen concentrator at night and sometimes at naps. Its humidifier has been a big help. None of these aggravations are fatal, but they do rob her of energy and sleep, of time, of resilience. Hard. But, she’s a strong, smart woman and able to develop a solid care plan for herself.
In my world I’m rediscovering my love affair with writing novels and my resistance to writing non-fiction. I reread Jennie’s Dead, maybe ten to twelve thousand words. Got excited about entering that universe, finishing it. This one’s about magic, straight up. I’m still going to continue research and general work on reimagining through Samhain, seeing if, as I said the other day on Ancientrailsgreatwheel, I get renewed energy for it in the fall. I am, however, going to look at a few other project fragments and pick one to flesh out, probably Jennie’s Dead, but there are a couple more. I miss the discovery and joy of creativity I experience while writing novels.
Since the visit with my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Peace, I’ve ramped up my workouts, now aiming for 10,000 steps on the days I don’t do the resistance work, 7,000 on those days. So far, I’m hitting those marks. The new resistance work is good, sufficiently good that I’m considering extending my work with On the Move Fitness so that I can get a new workout every six weeks or so. Keeps things mixed up and I have a tendency to get into a rut with workouts I design myself. Also, my form gets out of whack, or was never in whack to begin with.
We’re grieving. Kate visited her rheumatologist yesterday. She has both Sjogren’s Syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis. Eric told her that patients with Sjogren’s struggle in the arid west since it’s a disease that creates dryness in the mouth and the eyes. The low humidity here exaggerates and reinforces those symptoms. In addition both Sjogren’s and r.a. (rheumatoid arthritis) can sap energy, cause joint stiffness and generally make life difficult. “This is the new normal,” Kate said.
Life is different now and will remain that way, that’s what we’re grieving. We had hoped there would be some medicine, some procedure, some magic that would put these insults behind us, but no.
If you’re an alcoholic like I am, you learn early in treatment that the geographical escape won’t work. Wherever you go, there you are is the saying. It’s true that the addictive part of my personality follows me from place to place as well as through time. Even so, this move to Colorado has awakened me to an unexpected benefit of leaving a place, especially ones invested with a lot of meaning.
While it’s true, in the wherever you go there you are sense, that these memories and social roles, the feeling of a continuous self that lived outside Nevis, in Irvine Park, worked at the God Box on Franklin Avenue remain, they are no longer a thick web in which I move and live and have my being, they no longer reinforce themselves on a daily, minute by minute basis. And so their impact fades.
This is obvious, yes, but its effect is not. This unexperienced territory leaves open the possibility of new aspects of the self emerging triggered by new relationships, new roles, new physical anchors for memories. Evergreen, for example, now plays a central part in our weekly life. We go over there for Beth Evergreen. We go there to eat. Jon and the grandkids are going there to play in the lake this morning.
Organ recital: Kate does not have throat cancer. Didn’t know that was what Dr. James Chain, an ENT, was thinking until he eliminated the idea yesterday. Nothing quite like dodging the metaphorical bullet you didn’t even hear fired. Her sense of smell, adumbrated, and her sense of taste, flattened, however, may not return. Tough for weight loss. If food doesn’t taste-bad or good, it’s not appealing. We’re working right now to figure out what she can taste so we can emphasize them in our menu choices and cooking.
In other health news an x-ray of my left knee (total knee prosthetic imaging) raised a question. On Monday I see Dr. Peace, my orthopedic surgeon, for a follow up. Kate thinks and I hope he will say nothing’s wrong. I will use the time to ask again about how much I can challenge the knee. Can I, for example, kneel? It’s painful now, yes, but does it actually harm the prosthetic? Is hiking up a mountain trail too stressful for it? Why do I still have pain seven and a half months after surgery? Are my high intensity workouts too much? I don’t want to be too cautious, neither do I want to be cavalier.
Kabbalah. It’s trying to pry off the empiricist covering I’ve put on my world. I say trying because I’m a skeptic at heart, a doubter, a critic, an analyst yet also, and just as deeply, a poet, a lover of myth and fantasy, a dreamer.
Rabbi Akiva says that nothing in nature is less miraculous than the rarest exception. This means, for example, that the water in the Red Sea (or, Reed Sea) is as miraculous as its parting. Or, for that matter, the Hebrew slaves pouring across it are, too.
It is anxiety. I believe it infested my life in two early stages. The first was polio, a young boy’s physical experience of our human finitude. It happened once; it could happen again. The second was the death of my mother when I was 17. It happened once, to Mom. It will happen to me and could happen quickly.
The wrong part is that it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to worry about it, fear it, be anxious about it. It is. Or, rather, will be. Maybe in the next ten minutes, maybe in the next ten years, maybe longer. I know this by reason, have known it for a long, long time, but I have not been able to displace the irrational fear in spite of that knowledge. That’s why I say reason can take me up to the wall, but not past it.
Yet, increasingly I find myself wanting a way through this. I can sense, and here kabbalah is playing a critical alchemical role, a different world, a better world now hidden from me. I can peek through the vines at times, can see the secret garden beyond. It’s this wall that holds up the substrata, keeps it from being ground other parts of my Self. This wall has its roots sunk deep into this tectonic plate, is a barrier to its movement. But I can feel the vines withering, their complicity in the substrata’s effect on my psyche weakening.
Back to exercising yesterday. Yeah! Still a bit foggy in the am and my energy level remains subdued. Might be a summer slump occasioned by the heat or I might need a vacation. It’s been a stressful time period since December 1st, when I had the total knee replacement. That in itself was plenty but Jon’s divorce and Kate’s health tripled down on our resilience. It’s pretty good, I think, but the challenges this last few months were severe.
It’s been an odd week. I felt physically down for three days, not awful, as I said below, but enough to make me stop exercising (very unusual) and thinking was hard, maybe not unusual in itself (I mean, thinking can be hard, after all.) but in its persistence and its type, sort of a muddy feeling in my mind that made the thought of mental exertion seem too much effort. When, for example, I had to consider e-mails to three new Muslim contacts for our first Evergreen Forum event in the fall, I set them aside. Same thing with fixing some ongoing computer issues, none remarkable in themselves.
The hearing world (or, better, the not hearing world) in which I live. I’ve not written about this before, at least I don’t recall it if I have. It’s a profound disability, but invisible, often even to me. I’ll explain.
This was an early and extreme instance of a situation I encounter daily. Since I don’t hear anything from my left, if some noise happens over there, for me it’s as if it doesn’t exist. And even now, over 30 year later, I still forget. I am much more cautious about crossing streets, fear will do that, but in other situations, the absence of noise is, of course, just that. It means even if it’s there, I don’t know it. Basic epistemology. If I can’t hear it, it doesn’t enter my world. What’s the sound of one person speaking to me, if I don’t know it? Silence.