Spring New Shoulder Moon
Kate had break through pain yesterday and nausea that they couldn’t control well. So, she’s still at Ortho Colorado. Plenty uncomfortable, but problems that seem, at least to me, manageable. Unpleasant sequelae from the meds and the cutting. I imagine she’ll come home today. Still convinced this was the right thing and that her care has been very good.
A strange sense of exhilaration with all the changes occasioned by Kate’s surgery. I find myself whistling on the way into the hospital, generally feeling good. It’s as if the additional load is something I needed. Weird, eh?
As also happens in these situations, often enough to be predictable, a lapse in the daily routine led to Gertie consuming a substantial number of Kate’s thc edibles. My fault. Gertie is, right now, pretty stoned. We had a similar incident with Kepler a couple of months ago and he slid down the stairs, looking confused. Apparently all mammals have a cannabinoid system and cannibis receptors. Gertie seems very unhappy, I imagine because her left leg makes her unsteady to begin with and the mary jane? Adds to it.
Beth Evergreen has reached out to us in several ways. Individual members have offered to bring food or otherwise help. Leah, the executive director, called, wanting to know if we needed anything. Several folks from our mussar group responded to my e-mail on Thursday with love and concern. For both of us. A thought that keeps going through my mind: beloved community. Christian churches aspire to this, Beth Evergreen achieves it. I’m proud to be a member of the congregation.
One other thing I noticed. Both Kate and I were worried about her dying during surgery. Why? Well, it happens. Rarely, but it happens. Jeff Glantz, a member of Beth Evergreen, had a successful operation to remove a malignant brain tumor, then four days after surgery, he died. This was a couple of weeks ago. Jeff’s situation was on our minds, too.
I mention this because neither of us owned up to this concern until the surgery was over. By not talking about it before, by letting the death taboo keep it hidden, we lost a chance to console each other, to go a little deeper into our relationship.
As one of Dr. Agronin’s youngest informants said, even when physical decline and losses restrict one’s options, there remains the capacity to appreciate and approach each day with a sense of purpose. “It’s all about how you frame what you have,” she told him.
Hopefully, our children, the millennials among them, will look at us and come to that phase of their lives with a different image. My hope is that they will see that aging is the accumulation of years, not a time of diminished hope and diffuse fear, but life continuing. If that image can become dominant, it will look like the diverse approaches people have to their first and second phases. In other words the third phase will have as many distinct trajectories as there are people who enter it. It will not be dormancy, or a pause before dying, but life itself.
I like Robert Hill’s definition of positive aging: (It’s) “affected by disease and disability, but not contingent upon avoiding it.” Rather, it is “a state of mind that is positive, optimistic, courageous, and able to adapt and cope in flexible ways with life’s changes.” 
Not only in children, I think. Resilience can allow us to accept the changes of the aging body without losing hold of the power of our own lives. With a resilient personality even ALS will not cause us to stop growing. Just look at Stephen Hawking.
In a bit of nostalgia for me all the seats in the place were taken up by residents from a group home for the developmentally disabled. A young man with a plastic helmet to protect against seizures, another autistic young man davening and crying out, and four Down’s Syndrome young women. When I worked with the developmentally disabled, which I did from 1974 to 1980, taking clients out to places like the laundromat was a pleasant diversion, teaching independent living skills and being away from the residence.
My physical was, at least so far (before lab results), unremarkable. Dull is my favorite medical term. Boring. Nothing happening here. My ekg was like last years. My blood pressure is low enough that Dr. Gidday wondered if I was over medicated. No, I said, I want to keep it low. All those strokes in the family of origin. O2 saturation fine, as it always is when I descend 3,600 feet to her office. Knee? Fine. Other knee? Surprisingly fine. Prostate? Still gone. PSA’s good. No hernia. Lungs and heart sound good. Still upright and moving.
It is the tao of springtime reminding us that winter passes, too, as will all the difficulties; and, that even in the midst of a tough season, underneath is the movement of life itself, struggling to emerge, to take back the moment. All we need to do is follow its cues.
Mentioned 
Sometimes. Well. So, the washer failed first, on Thursday. Then, a day or so later, the dishwasher. 1 Stop appliance, the folks who do Samsung repairs up here, only have two days in Conifer, Monday and Wednesday. Monday was full, so Wednesday. That’s the day before Kate’s surgery.
Made corned beef and cabbage for dinner last night. Erin go bragh! When I decided to write novels, now long ago, Kate suggested I find an area that I could relate to. I chose my Celtic heritage, both Welsh and Irish. It is a fertile realm, filled with gods and goddesses, fairies and banshees, this world and the other world. Not so deep into it right now with one exception, the Great Wheel.
Its sumi-e material material, though, was feeble compared to the hole in wall (by comparison), Red Herring. Meiningers’ selection of brushes were all cheap, beginner’s brushes. They did have a couple of Yasumoto inks that I bought, an Ultra Black and a Black Gold. I also picked up an Olfa knife to cut paper, from the kraft roll that came last week and from the rolls of rice paper I bought from Red Herring and Blue Heron, an online sumi-e store.
The last letters of the Hebrew alphabet now have renderings in sumi-e, lying on my table ready for quotes and the chop. A member of Beth Evergreen last night referred to me as an artist. Oh. I thought he said audience. Artist is not a word I’ve ever associated with myself so my brain heard something else. A revealing moment. How others see us is not always, perhaps often, not the way we see ourselves.