Dropping the Baggage

The first time I saw him he was on stage, playing guitar in a band that was opening for the Violent Femmes at Endicott College, mid-nineties. I don't remember a thing about it. I attended a dizzying rash of shows in the mid-nineties that ended with an after-hours party at Lupo's, drinking Coke although the beer was free and chatting with members of Superchunk, and the next day wanting to get drunk so badly I literally cried. I had stopped drinking in 1993, and no cool music scene was going to drag me back into that Hell again, so I laid off of shows for a long, long time after that. The band who opened for the Femmes? I don't remember a thing about them, but I don't much remember how the Femmes were, either.

The next I saw him was 2004, and my first thought was "this is the sexiest man I have ever seen in my life."

You may not agree. "Too skinny," you may say. I say, "Bring it on."

Also, there is something about his eyes.

I didn't actually meet him until 2008. We knew of each other a little bit by then, but didn't actually know each other. In 2008 I was in the middle of a long hiatus from anything resembling romance. I was burnt out and beaten down, and he had a girlfriend anyway, so it seemed like it would be safe and fun to let myself have a huge crush on him and not do anything about it. Except the more I got to know him--in bits and pieces, over months--the more I wanted to do something about it. I wrestled with that and wrestled with that, and just when I thought, "would one innocent coffee date be so wrong??" he told me, "I'm moving down to Florida in two weeks," and that nailed it. It was not to be. "Let's have coffee, then," I said, and we did, and I got to know him even more. He never mentioned the girlfriend (and hadn't in months). He hugged me goodbye. We did not exchange contact info.

He was in Florida for over a year.

I ran into him in early 2010, and we had a pleasant chat. He was single but I was seeing somebody by then, somebody I liked quite well, so I didn't press for anything. I still felt that pull, though; that I could not deny. Well, whatever...he WAS a good guy, anyway. "Could I look you up on Facebook?" I asked, and he said yes.

"How are you?" I messaged once or twice. Doing okay, working hard, nothing special. Happy to be back in Massachusetts.

I didn't hear anything from him for a long time, then he popped up on my Facebook this past October, so I messaged a friendly hello. Why not, right? He was a good guy. I liked him. It's nice to say hi. I hoped he's doing well, and so forth.

He replied. I replied. Then he asked me out on a date.

It felt like I was suddenly in a John Hughes movie, "Sixteen Candles" or something: I was overjoyed. I was ecstatic! I didn't care where we went or what we did or even if he had suddenly turned dull and obnoxious in the three years since I pined for him like I was thirteen years old and he was a rock star (which he wasn't, the band was long gone, and he worked a trade. He was an art school graduate, though, and how hot is that? To this chick, pretty much very). We were going on a date, and he had asked me. It was the most promising thing that had happened to me romantically since...since who knew when. Maybe ever?

That is how it finally started.

My daughter was turning twelve in December and I had, incredibly, agreed to throw a dance party for forty in our house. I hate parties in general, and hosting them specifically, and was acutely aware that forty tweens jumping up and down to "Sexy and I Know It" would not be easy to contend with. My reasoning was, "she's the most social creature on the planet, this daughter of mine, daughter of one of the more solitary creatures on the planet, me; in a year or two these kids will all be sneaking off into bedrooms or lighting joints on my back porch, so best to ease into this now rather than get thrown into it then, when the shock will kill me."

We blacklit the dining room, cleared it of furniture, and pasted up flourescent and glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls and ceiling. She talked me into dropping $30 on a strobe light at Spencer's. The stereo shelf system was her birthday present from me. I bought a dozen bottles of soda and a vegetable platter, and tween-proofed my house (it's a clumsy age, always knocking things over) while working two jobs (training for my new one at a different hospice, while working almost full-time as a per diem at my old one) and trying to get some sort of a grip on Christmas.

He calls me almost every day. He's had dinner with us and even hung around to watch "Glee"(and hated it), and tries to smoke as little as his addicted brain will allow him when he's with us. "I don't like the thought of being a bad example," he told me. "Oh, don't worry, gatekeeping is my job," I said. "I know, but still," he replied.

"Uh, I've got to ask you," I said on the phone about a week ago. "She's got this party going on, and it would be stupid for me to be the only grown-up, but I don't know any of the parents well. I think it would be best to have a guy around, anyway. Crowd control. So could you...?"

"I really don't want to...wow...I don't really know what to do with kids. A dance party!"

"A glow-in-the-dark dance party. About forty kids." He laughed and said again, "I really don't want to...but I'll think about it."

He won't do it, I thought. I almost hope he says no, I thought. We can be just friends and I can give up all these other ideas I keep getting about "more", and I was silly to think like that anyway. When was the last time a man went out of his way for me? If he did I'd probably get all jammed up about it. I've got all this relationship baggage, all this emotional baggage, and it's going to get messy and ridiculous. We both have other things going on anyway; I'm in job flux, driving a rental car, and setting things up to go back to school to eventually become a Nurse Practitioner, and he's trying to run a business and straighten out some old, old, old issues that keep tripping him up. We should keep this friendly. He'll say no. Why would he ever say yes?

I stopped by his place to say hi on the way home from work while the kids had dinner with their father, and he smiled and said, "Well, I decided I'll help you out at the party."

Instantly I was suffused with joy. Instantly. "You will?" I cried and threw my arms around him.

He laughed, "Yeah, and thank my friend for that. He keeps teasing me non-stop calling me 'the chaperone', but he said, 'dude, if you don't do it she'll never forgive you,' and I realized he was probably right!"

I laughed. I laughed and laughed and buried my face in his arm. I didn't protest.

I am starting to understand something about relationships I have never understood before.

The party went about as well as you could imagine it could--other than one of the boys getting a flesh wound on his cheek when the kids lost their minds throwing glowstick bracelets (you can see how Lord of the Flies could come to pass, easily), and having to herd them back indoors from time to time, they played "Sexy and I Know It" about five times, ate seven pizzas, and texted my daughter the next day that her party was "epic!"

"I wouldn't call it 'epic'," he told me on the phone today. "But it wasn't that bad! I guess it was epic if you're twelve."

"You helped a lot. I would have lost my mind doing that alone."

He didn't protest. "I'll call you tomorrow. Next week will be busy with work, but I want to see you. I'm looking forward to seeing you again."

"Me too."

I have this picture in my head. I've been carrying around all this baggage forever. It comes with me into every relationship I've ever had, and takes up a lot of room. I wear a knapsack tricked out like I'm going to spend a week hiking the Brooks Range, and have an unweildy Samsonite suitcase in each hand complete with sturdy locks I've lost the keys to.

I can put them down. I see him walking toward me and smiling, smiling because he's very happy to see me and I smile at him because I feel the same way. We are both used to walking alone, but since we've met each other, we no longer need to. Can it really be that simple? I can put down my bags and freely take his hand and walk beside him. Later I'll describe the contents to him, the mess and the disappointments and the hurts, but it doesn't have to drag me down anymore. Or us.

I know that there is a point in life where all the difficulty can be walked beyond, to a place where it is happiness to just breathe in and out. Life is life, but that place exists, I know because I've been there, and often too. Long, happy relationships seem to work the same way--past the struggle and the difficulty is the simple fact of "we are together, and I am happy with you."

Is it really that simple?

(This is an unfolding story. I will let you know how it goes.)

In Which I Up And Quit My Job Without A New One Waiting For Me

I saw my Tarot card reader in August (I'll defend my position on that sometime), and he said, "It looks like a job change is happening...into something entirely new."

"Noooooo," I said confidently. Yeah, my job has been a source of tremendous satisfaction but also the biggest source of raw stress than any job I have ever held, ever, but I made PEACE WITH THAT (dammit!!) after hitting a wall with it last autumn. Not going anywhere, nope, not me!

"Hmmm," he said. He's a good Tarot card reader, he doesn't waste my time. "Whatever it is, it is good. A good change. You are in a time of change anyway, and your energy is attracting positive changes in all areas...not negative ones at all."

So we went on to talk about that, which was nice. When I got readings from him five, six, and seven years ago, it was always, "You are in a challenging time right now...sorry...things are going to be tough for a while," and he was correct then, too (boy, was he).

A month later I was driving to see my next patient, a patient I liked a lot, a visit I did not dread, but I had felt a knot of anger tugging at me all day and I couldn't undo it. Usually I could breathe and smile and let it go, but that day it knotted up tighter and tighter and I couldn't even find the threads. It was midafternoon then, and I had been struggling all day, and it seemed so inappropriate somehow to be going to visit Mary with this anger balled up inside of me. It had nothing to do with her, and nothing to do with the work of hospice.

Just as I was turning down the street to her house, I felt the snap.

"I have had enough," I said to myself (or my self said to me), and I let out a breath.

Time to leave the job.

I think (maybe) I envy people who find jobs they can stick with for years on end. The closest I've been to that was my seven years working with the mentally retarded at the State institution. When it was time to leave that job, I fought that knowledge until what happened was, I got sick, pounding, dreary headaches as soon as I walked through the door, and they would not lift until my shift was done. It took constant physical discomfort to drive me out of there. Otherwise, I would have stayed on until the Governor personally kicked me out. I had loved that job.

I love this job, too. Don't force me to explain why I have to go...it's not that simple. It still took me two more weeks to actually put my notice in, and I am not yet done with completing what must be the longest notice ever (it's ended up being six weeks, mostly because of an unexpected personal issue I had to deal with in the middle of it, costing me money and energy, so they granted me an extension).

I get two opposite reactions, which are: 1) "Do you have a job yet??", with alarm; and, 2) "Hey! Good for you!!", with a grin. It is totally unpredictable who is going to give me what reaction.

My patient Mary has been the most encouraging of all my patients. She and I have a warm and affectionate relationship, and she is a woman who is quite particular about who is allowed to enter her sphere of existence. "I just know you are going to find something good," she told me. "I will be honest, I will miss you...but I can't be selfish, and I know wherever you go, you will be of tremendous help to people. You should be happy with whatever you do. The work you do is so hard!"

Sometimes I forget that.

Coinkydink, Part III

Yep, it's happened to me, too. I think of somebody I generally never think of--suddenly and for no reason I can fathom--and within twenty-four hours they call or are in the car behind me at a traffic light or otherwise swim into view. I get impressions about jobs, too--things like "sure, management does appear to be crazy, but you must take this job, it will benefit you" and "it looks fine on the surface, but watch your back if you can't run for the hills right now". My impressions start at the interview and crystalize sharply the first time I'm officially staff in the milieu I'll be working in, and they are always, and I mean always, correct. As I'm a nurse, and most of us nurses cycle through jobs in a few years' time as a matter of course, this inner gauge is very useful to me.

Intuitive impressions are not the same as wild coincidences, but I put them in the same category, loosely, for they seem to come from a grid that intersects the one I live on (planet Earth, three-dimentional, too much time spent drinking coffee and thinking deep thoughts about nothing) but are not at all from the grid that I live on.

Thinking of my friend Patty from the Berkshires after many months of no contact or thought of her at all, and wondering, "She really liked that guy Dan...but he married someone else and moved to Brooklyn...or was it Queens?...what ever happened with that?", and having her call me the next day saying, "I was thinking about you! It's been so long! Guess what...remember Dan? Well, his marriage didn't work out...he moved back...we are seeing each other again...I'm so happy!", is not terribly life-changing or profound, but...it does make me take note. (They are now married, living in Brooklyn--or is it Queens?--and she is still very happy.)

Sometimes something useful happens that goes way beyond my "red light", "green light" psychic impressions or the entertaining parlor-trick type of coincidence I'm used to. Sometimes the Universe mashes my face right into it. It is curious...funny...very human of me how I then go on with things as if nothing extremely weird didn't just happen. (I've never seen a ghost or a UFO, but I think that falls into that category, as well--loosely.)

The story...my job has been completely insanely busy lately ("balls to the wall" as the saying goes, which never gives me an attactive visual of the male who says it), and we are all getting a little edgy with each other. That isn't good at all. My workplace has a culture that doesn't know what the fuck to do with conflict. We are hospice people! We are nuturing, empathetic, accomodating...we don't do bitchy too well. Things can get convoluted very fast if someone is having a rough day and can't voice it so everyone else can cluster around supportively, offering self-care tips and Kleenex.

I was having a bitchy day at work and I didn't want to talk about it. I wanted to keep on being short, surly, and unapproachable. That had gotten me in trouble in the past so I'd learned to amend my behavior in general (I keep telling people "I'm really not a nice person, you know," but they don't want to believe me), but lately work was just over the top, and I was effin tired of the high road. Plus, the social worker I work with had asked me to do something for her before she took a few days off, and I was indignant that she even asked--couldn't she see I was really, really super-crazy busy over here?--and I wanted to keep the indignation going now that she was back. (Somehow, righteous anger feels like a power surge...forgetting that power surges result in blown fuses and the lights going out, but never mind.)

She noticed. She didn't call me on it, but it was clear, she noticed. I ducked out of the office and hit the road to see patients, still energized by extreme annoyance...and a patient called me, overwhelmed, in tears, upset because the social worker had told her the insurance company situation was still messed up and the patient needed to call so-and-so and do such-and-such..."Why do I need to do that? Can't somebody else do that? Don't I have enough going on?", and I reassured her, "We'll take care of it."

The next day I didn't feel so bitchy. (Time passes, and nonsense floats away.) I saw that I had to talk to the social worker about the trouble with the patient and her insurance and her being overwhelmed, but everything between us was so clouded up with issues and irritations that all I wanted to do was avoid her until we could act normal toward each other again. Truthfully, I didn't care (as in "WAH! I DON'T CARE!!") that things between us were strained at the moment, and I didn't want to try to correct them, but on the phone that afternoon as I talked to a dear friend and colleague about it, he said, "You have to talk to her."

"Noooooo. I can't. It'll blow over. But I have to mention how the patient is upset, and I don't know how to say it without it looking fraught. Gawd, I hate conflict...!"

"I know you do, especially these days with all of that going on recently with your ex...but you have to talk with her, straighten this out!"

 I was walking through my neighborhood as we talked, on my way to get my son from his best friend's house, where he had spent the day while I worked. I thought to myself fiercely, "I don't want conflict. I am not in the mood for TALKS. I want this to go away. I'm sorry for being such a rat yesterday, and I am more sorry that I can't get away with being a rat without having to have TALKS about it!"

At the friend's house, the father was the one who was home with the kids. My son and his son have been buddies for two years, and they fit together like gloves--two of the nicest boys you could ever hope to meet. I liked the parents very much--they were good people, down-to-earth, relaxed, and friendly. The father said to me, "He was great, as always, no trouble at all...hey, I've been meaning to ask, do you work with someone named so-and-so?"

"So-and-so" being an uncommon last name, and the last name of the social worker I work with. Who happened to be on my mind at that very moment, so...

"Uh, yeah, I do, in fact, she's on my team...how do you...?"

"I took a class from her [she teaches at the college on the side] years and years ago, she wouldn't remember me, but I remember she worked hospice...she is so nice!"

I blinked, feeling guilty. She is truly a very, very nice person, I admit.

"She is the nicest, nicest person I think I ever met! She taught some wellness course or something...she really stuck out in my mind. The nicest person!"

I agreed, gathered up my son, and we walked home in the warm late summer sun. Okay, I was given this. Clearly I was given this, as a little bit of a jab in the ribs to wake me up, but also as a useful gift I could pass on.

The next day I called her first thing.

She began, "The patient is so upset with me! I feel so bad! Everything has been so frantic at work, and those days off I took, well, I could have stayed away much longer, easily, it's been so stressed out around here...I feel so bad!"

The patient had told her at the time how upset she was, so I didn't have to bring it up, which was a relief. We talked about the issue and made a plan, and when we were done I said, "Hey...I've got a heartwarming gift for you," and told her about what a former student of hers had to say about her.

"Really? Oh, wow, I have tears in my eyes! Thank you so much!" (We really are constantly thanking each other for every lttle thing over here in Hospiceland. It is not such an annoying thing after all, I guess.)

"No problem, glad to pass it on. We all need an extra uplift these days."

And the last of the rancor drifted off into the ether, no longer of any use whatsoever.

I e-mailed my friend and colleague about it right away. "You have some powerful medicine, girl!!!" he e-mailed back. "That was a fucking ANSWERED PRAYER, is what that was," I replied.

Work is still a madhouse ("a hospice, a madhouse?" you are thinking, worriedly, but no fear. Lots of admissions, too few nurses. No botched diagnoses or medication screw-ups. All is well), but the social worker and I are riding it out gracefully...which means, of course, "to be full of grace".

(Carl Jung, the guy who came up with "synchronicity". You know, as in...it's more than a coincidence.)

Coinkydink, Part II

I have the Eye of Horus tattooed on my right wrist. My one other tattoo is on my left shoulder blade and is of a small spider in a small spider web, and I got that in a roadside establishment in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1990 (where the bikers can get "L-O-V-E" and "H-A-T-E" tattooed on their knuckles if they haven't gotten around to doing so in prison), and I am fond of explaining that tattoo with a "It's the only spider I want on my body", which I think may work, because I never wake up with spider bites.

The Eye of Horus tattoo happened about as impulsively as a tattoo can happen without alcohol involved; I was in San Francisco April 1992 for a week by myself, and woke up in the hotel one morning with the thought, "I want an Egyptian eye tattooed on my right wrist"--and by that afternoon, it was done. I didn't even know what the symbol really meant, only that I wanted it and that I was happy to have it. The design was thick and solid, not fine and scrolly like many Egyptian eye designs can be, and I'm left-handed so my right wrist made sense--as if it could do the watching, while my left hand did the doing--and all I thought about it was, "It's there to keep me honest."

Later I found that when the curly bit under the eye goes in one direction it's the Eye of Ra, and in the other direction it's the Eye of Horus, and Horus is the Falcon God and there is a myth tied in with Osiris and him being raised from the dead by Isis, and so on and so forth, but I can never remember any of that. All I know is I still like it, the ink has held up beautifully, and I have never covered it up with a wide watchband as a nurse manager told me I would end up having to do, "nursing being a very conservative profession." (Since then we have had nurses with pink hair and nose rings, so times they are a-changin'.)

People always ask me, "What does it mean?", and I am always at a loss. I usually default the question with a weak "Oh, I just like it", and the next question is "Did it hurt?", and I say, "Yes, along the bone, there, but it's not right at the bend of the wrist, so it wasn't too bad, not like the back of the neck...I hear that REALLY hurts." This is a conversation that has been repeated countless times through the years.

A few weeks ago my friend and colleague Jerry asked me, out of the blue, "What does your tattoo mean?" Jerry is a dear friend, and our conversations get deeper and more cosmic than conversations generally go in life, so I tried to answer his question, but could not. "To keep me honest" had been the starting point all those years ago, but my tattoo meant different things to me than that, and the eye was never one of reproach or judgement. I didn't talk to it (that would be rather psychotic, eh?), I didn't get an otherworldly vibe from it, I didn't even think of it as "a tattoo"...those were what other people had, with their colorful sleeves and the initials of dead loved ones embedded in roses. Mine was part of me, like a fanciful looking birthmark.

I babbled a bit about the Falcon God, and the rebirth of Osiris, and blah-blah, and then I said, "I don't know. I just woke up one day in San Francisco and wanted it, so I got it. I just liked it...and I still do."

It bothered me that I had no answer to that very reasonable question about a symbol I had permanently etched on my body. Why couldn't I answer that? What did it really mean?

It so happened that April of 1992 marked the start of what was the worst year of my life. I returned home from that trip and jumped immediately onto a runaway train of drama, danger, mental torment, and bad, bad choices far beyond what I had ever dabbled in before. That sickening ride ended with a whimper in March of 1993. One dreary morning, looking out my window in a sort of freeze-frame of activity, the thought came to me, "There must be another way," and just like that I was off the crazy train, never to return.. Life has been life since then, for sure, but it has never been so dark and ugly as that particular year.

The day after Jerry asked me, "What does your tattoo mean?" my bosses sent me to a nursing home to do an admission. I was at the nurse's station copying meds and various tidbits of information from the chart, when the charge nurse on the floor--who was very friendly and chatty toward me, not at all like the typical nursing home charge nurse who finds us hospice nurses to be superfluous pains in the asses--said, "What is your tattoo? Is that the Eye of Horus?"

"Yes, it is," I said in surprise.

"What did you get it for?" she asked, looking at me keenly.

"Um, I don't know, it's pretty old, actually. 1992. I just liked it, and the ink has held up really well..."

"That's a sign of protection, you know."

I was shocked. With all the explanations I had heard, and all the images of it I had seen on this and that piece of jewlery at the New Age stores in my city (and my city is a Mecca of New Age stores, by the way), and knowing that a very typical place to get a Eye of Horus tattoo is on the back, I had never realized that it symbolized protection.

"It is?"

"Oh, yes! People carry it for protection, the gods keeping an eye out for you. It's interesting that you have it on your wrist...tell me, did it hurt?"

I have meant to tell Jerry, "Here's the answer to your question...your question, and mine!", but work has been too busy and I forgot. Maybe he'll read this instead.

a link:  http://www.squidoo.com/the-eye-of-ra-tattoo

the Eye of Horus on the back of the neck (ouch, better her than me)(and mine looks WAY better):

Coinkydink, Part I

There is a friend of mine--we'll call him Jim--who has been avoiding me for months, and I can't say that I blame him. Whenever our paths cross, some mildly weird stuff starts to unfold, absolutely meant to kick his ass.

We were low-key e-mail buddies who had not seen each other since high school and really never knew each other until Facebook. One day he posted about the movie Wings of Desire, which is one of my favorites of all time but had forgotten about--in brief, it's about angels watching over the citizens of Berlin in 1987, before the Wall came down, and one of the angels falls in love with a beautiful, lonely trapeze artist who wears angel wings for her performances and has a liking for the music of Nick Cave--and the next day while in Five Guys with the kids waiting for our food, thinking of the movie and how I must get the DVD and watch it, I looked up and there was Jim, twenty-five years older than when I saw him last, smiling in recognition.

Jim said the whole thing was odd--he had been watching the movie the other day, after just purchasing the Criterion DVD realease, and the next day found out that Rowland S. Howard--one of the musicians featured in the film, along with Nick Cave (and one of the several painfully skinny guys playing guitar with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths)--had died.

 There was some vague talk about having coffee sometime, which didn't materialize before the next coincidence came up. I had just finished reading a novel by Chuck Klosterman and right away thought of Jim--Jim being deeply into music of all kinds, and Klosterman having made his living writing about music, sort of the American equivilent of Nick Hornby--so I e-mailed him, "Hey, check this author out," and he replied that he would. The next day (repeat: THE NEXT DAY), he visited the books-for-sale table at the library, just for something to do, and there on the top of the heap was one of the nonfiction, cultural commentary, music-focused books by Chuck Klosterman.

Jim e-mailed me about this in wonderment, and we both agreed it was some sort of sign. Jim had been professionally stuck for years, working in the far, retail-centered fringes of the music industry his whole adult life, with a little mix-DJing thrown in there now and then but nothing that had lead to anywhere. He wanted this year to be the year of change, but didn't know what to do or how to go about doing it.

I happened to notice that Nick Cave was coming to town, playing a show at the House of Blues with his side project Grinderman. I got tickets for me and Jim, and we had coffee at Atomic Cafe in Beverly one sunny fall afternoon a month or so before the show, and talked about where we were in life and where we would like to be. Jim suggested we then get some lunch somewhere, so we left the cafe and ended up across the street at a nice little joint called Wrapture that sells excellent wraps, salads, and that sort of thing. Jim talked about his DJing, and some mixes he'd come up with, and how he had a copy of one in his car and would give it to me before we parted, which made me happy, for his taste is vast and eclectic. There was a pause in our conversation, and Jim said suddenly, "Wait. Wait. The music they're playing. I know this," and he got up and spoke to the guy behind the counter, and returned to where we were sitting with an incredulous smile.

"The music they are playing is a mix CD I made a few years ago. I can't believe it," he said.

"What?!" I exclaimed. "Did they see you come in and then put it on?"

"No, they had no idea. I just about never come in here, they didn't realize it was me until I said something."

"Wow...the Universe is trying to get your attention, I think."

"Yeah, no shit! My mind is completely blown!"

The Grinderman show was short but intense, completely worth paying the babysitter for. Nick Cave was looking not too much like the guy singing "From Her to Eternity" in Wings of Desire anymore, but he hadn't lost a trick. Jim and I had a great time.

I e-mailed him, "We should be each other's ass-kickers! Isn't it obvious? There are things I want to do but drag my feet, and you too...we can be each other's 'Life Coaches'. Whaddaya think?"

"Sounds perfect!" Jim wrote back, and I pretty much have never heard from him again. He's still on Facebook, and he still has the same cruddy job, and he is still posting beautiful music nobody has never heard of but should...

...and the Universe is still patiently waiting for him.

(Jim is passionately into Icelandic musicians. I don't have the savvy to put all the little lines and squigglies above the letters to type her name properly, but below is the song "Innundir Skinni" by Olof Arnalds. I have zero clue what it's about, not knowing one tiny little whit of Icelandic, but it soothes, and the video is simply gorgeous. I have the CD, and generally can't tolerate listening to it in city traffic during my workdays--much too incongruous with my surroundings--but I had it repeating as I drove around Provincetown last April. It went very well with the quietness of the dunes. (See my "Provincetown" post for details of the peace I found on that solitary, overnight trip I took in mid-April before the tourists had descended on that part of the world.))

Life Management Skills

The one time I've been arrested I didn't see it coming. I was driving a barely mobile VW bug that an old boyfriend had lent me out of pity and got pulled over for the expired rejection sticker. (Driving decrepit vehicles passed on to me by others was a strong theme through my twenties, ending notably with a red 1976 AMC Hornet that sported a long white shoelace for tying shut the driver's side door.) The police officer took my information and ran it through, and when he returned to my car, surprised the hell out of me by asking me to step out as there was a warrant out for my arrest.

"What? There is?" I said. "How can that be? What for?"

He cuffed my hands behind my back, and it was a rather frightening feeling. "I don't know what for, all I know is that it's out of Barnstable County," he said, and it took only a second for realization to dawn.

"Ooooooh," I said. "Okay. I know what it is."

Whatever shabby car it was I owned in 1988 got impounded for being unregistered and uninsured as me and a few others were speeding it down the highway to the Cape. Friends of my boyfriend were renting a house in Cotuit and I was happy to let him and some others drive us all down there after we'd seen a show that night at the Channel. I didn't give my car's illegal status a thought, but after we'd been left at the side of the road somewhere around the Bourne Bridge at 2am, my car gone elsewhere on the back of a tow truck, it occured to me that the Law took it very, very seriously.

I did get my car out of hock the next day, but I never did go to court to get the other half of the business settled. I didn't know I had to. I never got a notice in the mail. I don't know what mailing address the Law had been given, but it was likely I was no longer living there, because I moved constantly in those days, and wasn't too up on change-of-address forms or keeping in touch with former roommates. I was always moving on, making a clean slate, leaving the trouble behind. That particular trouble found me, however...five years later, but there I was.

I was let go on my own recognizance, of course, and was obligated to appear at court in Barnstable the next morning at 9am, which was 88 miles from where I currently lived and the car I was driving was not actually safe enough to even leave the driveway. I had a problem.

I've had a lot of problems in my life.

Simple things do not come easy to me. I've had to learn, slowly and painfully, how to ask people to help me with stuff. For a long, long time, I could never ask people to help me with stuff. That impounded car on the Cape? while the car's paperwork was in my apartment in Boston, as was my checkbook? I hitchhiked home. Alone. It never occured to me to ask any other soul on this planet, including my boyfriend, to help me out with that. I waved his quizzical protests away with an air of self-sufficient confidence and walked to the highway the next morning and stuck my thumb out. The first ride was a hippie dude who gave me a string of brown and orange beads "for good luck", which I have to this day, in fact can see from where I type this, hanging on my wall. The second ride was a very friendly middle-aged man who let me off at the traffic circle, then asked, "Can I take a peek?", pointing at my shirt front. "No," I told him, knowing better than to be shocked, and he waved goodbye with a smile. The last ride was a seafood truck taking a load of shellfish up to Boston. He shook his head at me. "You know a girl hitchhiking alone is dangerous, right?", and drove me right to my door.

I solved problems that kind of way--the stupid, hard, occasionally dangerous way--for a long, long time.

Another thing I've had to learn about is how to create comfort. For years, I didn't have a proper winter coat. I had a $10 wool men's overcoat from the thrift shop, and it was so battered when I got it that holes popped out of it almost instantly, and it was lined with nothing but silk--no more protection from the weather than a freakishly long sports jacket--but I had that thing until it smelled too bad to wear anymore. Then I had a black cloth overcoat, which was even worse, because it wasn't warm even the slightest. My boots leaked so I wore bread bags on my feet, just like my mom had us do when we were little and went to go play in the snow. I had to be physically taken to L.L.Bean when I was 29 to get proper winter footwear.

I had one serrated steak knife that I used for all my kitchen knife needs, including slicing watermelon. I had yard sale dishes in colors nobody could tolerate, and told myself it was funky and punk-rock. I slept on a futon on the floor. None of my curtains matched, that is, when I had curtains. I cut my hair myself, or buzzed it with clippers, and I still feel a little out of place when I'm in a hair salon, being so rarely in one for such a long time.

I didn't know how to live. I didn't know how a happy, peaceful, well-lived life should look, even though I had examples all around me; I was at A, I saw people living happily over at B, and I didn't know how to get there.

We each, on our own, have to learn our own way...how to get there...but we can't do it without help.

I can't, anyway, and I get the feeling that it's purposely set up to be to be this way, it just took me a while to realize it.

I ended up renting a car to take the trip to the Barnstable County courthouse, and it took having to rent a car again a few months later to ask for an extension, but the fine was paid.

The last car I've owned was a 2002 Dodge Intrepid, and although the gas mileage wasn't impressive, it was the most fun driving I've ever had in a car of mine, and the kids loved how spacious the backseat was. Now I drive a company car, a 2010 Honda Accord, and yeah, I'd buy one, but truth? I'd love to get something more sporty.

My favorite winter jacket is a weathered brown leather lined with faux sheepskin, warm as toast, a Christmas gift two years ago. When I wear it I feel like the most attractive female in the room. I like that feeling. I didn't get it much in the past.

And yeah, yeah, okay, I"ll admit it...my winter boots are still the L.L.Bean ones I was forced to buy over 16 years ago. They leak. Last year I used bread bags, and you know? Instead of bumming me out, it made me smile. Things have changed a lot for me, inside and out.

This year I'm getting new boots. I promise.

Thoughts About Love

I've been single for almost seven years now. I didn't think it was even possible to go this long without love and not get all squirrely and miserable about it, but I know now that I could probably go the distance, if it came to that, and be content.

I used to read romances when I was a teenager, especially in my early teens when the bodice-rippers read like soft-core porn. The bestsellers had fewer "heaving bosoms" and "steely thighs clad in tight buckskin", but they had their moments (being bestsellers, after all), and I would skip ahead to the scenes when they got down to it, and then go back and read the whole book.

Forbidden Love was a huge theme in the bestsellers. Sometimes the heroine was married to someone else, sometimes a jerk but more often a really nice guy. She loved her husband and he loved her, but this other great Love of her Life would keep popping up, resulting in angst and secret love children and all sorts of mess. It made for a good read, but struck me as being pretty stupid overall. Even as a young teenager, I would think, "Why don't they just get together or move on? Don't you outgrow this stuff eventually?"

I figured that I was way too smart for that nonsense.

I married a guy who seemed to be a nice guy, but was no Great Love. It was a Moderate, But Pleasant Love. Maybe it could have grown into something deeper than that, but instead it took another direction entirely, and we parted after a little less than ten years, emotional strangers. When I see him (because I have to, we have two children), it seems impossible that we were ever together at all.

When I think of Great Love I think of three men I've known. I don't know how this measures up to other women--maybe they have known more, or less, or none, or just the one, like the heroines in the bestsellers--and I can't say exactly what it is that sets them apart from the other men I've known, quite a few who were really, really great guys, but something does. The first man was gay, but he couldn't acknowledge that at first, so we plunged into a very intense, romantic, heady friendship that probably only those under twenty-one with artsy pretentions can experience (as we were). We've lived 3,000 miles apart for the past twenty years, but still have a bond that runs deeper than many old friends do.

The second was married, and that is that. Married, or in any way attached, men do not spark interest in me, in fact, they generally dampen it right out of existence. He was the disorienting and upsetting exception. He and I are not friends, as that could not work. It is peculiar that we can't be friends--I am extremely comfortable with being buddies with guys, but again, he was not just some nice guy who I liked a lot, and I really couldn't tell you why.

Am I a pragmatist at heart? For with both these men, rather than longing for them with a passion that time could not abate, I have long since "moved on".

Then, there is the third man. He is not gay, and he is not married, but for his own reasons, was not available, and still isn't. Maybe that will change, or maybe it never will.

Presumably, those bestsellers do so well because the women who read them daydream about romance. They want passion and excitement, and enjoy feeling it vicariously through a book. I wonder if most of those women are like me, though...have met the guy, felt those feelings, and knew it wouldn't work, so chose the better road...

...and go read trashy novels to appreciate what a disaster it would have been if they hadn't let go of that One, Great Love.

I am content to be single, but I do dream of love. You know--the kind of love where I can go to bed with my socks on, and he doesn't notice because he's too busy flicking through the DVR. That kind of love. The kind I didn't read about when I was thirteen.




(Below is a clip from the miniseries from the book The Thorn Birds. Nothing says "forbidden love" like having a lifelong crush on a priest, having his love child, and pretending it's your husband's...it makes the rest of us look fabulously wise and savvy in comparison. Richard Chamberlain was darn cute back then...too bad he's gay, huh?)

Music in the Car

Driving down Route 93 into Somerville to do my first death pronouncement on a patient who was mine and who I was fond of, and fond of the family, and personally sad about, but glad for their release from sickness and decline...

...early in the day, and the commuter traffic heavy, so I put in a CD a friend had burned for me and that I had not yet taken the time to listen to...

...music in my car always helps.



(This is, of course, the first song, called "Sleeping Lessons", on that CD my friend burned, The Shins album Wincing the Night Away. A little bit of a crazy synchronicity, that...)

An Update

http://curlytop-upstairs.blogspot.com/2011/04/when-will-you-be-back.html

She died April 28, 2011 in her home, surrounded by her family.

He died June 27, 2011, in a nursing home, at 3:30am, having been visited the night before by a niece who drove non-stop from the Midwest to see him.

They both died peacefully.

The Kind of Mom I Am, Or: Bruins Hockey

I grew up with my dad watching the Bruins on Channel 38, yelling, "SCORE!! Woooohoo!!" whenever they got a goal. It seemed to happen a lot just as I was drifting off to sleep, and his shout would pierce through walls and wake me up. It was always and constantly Bobby Orr--either him or Phil Esposito. My father took us to Red Sox games at Fenway--presumably it did not cost a week's paycheck back then--which overcame me with tedium at least by the seventh-inning stretch--but to a Bruins game only once, when my sister and I were in high school and had serious crushes on the rookie Mike Krushelnyski. (They played the Hartford Whalers and hammered them.)

My kids don't care about sports, especially sports on TV. I think if someone gave my daughter a catcher's mitt and put her in the outfield, she would spend her time there fiddling on her cellphone sending texts to the bullpen. Neither child can skate, or wants to. My son is starting to enjoy basketball, and plays it for fun at the Boys and Girls Club after school, but he doesn't exactly have a killer competitive edge about it.

They had no idea that their mom cared about hockey until I started to watch the playoffs this year. We don't get many TV stations at home here, so I could only watch the games televised on NBC. By the time the Bruins were up against the Lightening for the Eastern Conference title, I was into it enough to listen on the radio to the games I couldn't watch, and my kids thought I was nuts.

"Mom! Why are you suddenly OBSESSED with hockey?!!"

"Shhhhhh!! I'm listening. Go brush your teeth."

Sports on the radio is very cozy. It reminds me of the happy days of childhood, with adults relaxing and chatting and laughing, the game (baseball, of course) coming through a transistor radio parked on a picnic table.

My daughter would not join me in front of the TV, preferring music and texting and makeup application in her room. My son watched some while he played with his action figures on the couch. "Mommy, this is boring. Can we watch Modern Family?"

"Nope. For once I'm watching what I want to watch, and that's hockey."

And then the whine. "But Mommy, it's sooo boring! You are obsessed with hockey, and it's boring to me!", mimicking his sister.

"Put your toys down and watch it! Hockey isn't a game you can just sort of pay attention to, like baseball or football. It's fast, like basketball, you have to watch it every second! The whole game can change in a flash!"

Their father hates sports, and if they are ever to appreciate them, it is totally up to me. "Anyway," I told my son, "you're a guy. You have to know sports! How are you ever going to start conversations with other guys? The beginning of any conversation between guys is, "Dude, didja see The Game last night?" Don't you know that?"

My son laughed in protest, but did watch a little hockey, and almost got it.

The Bruins won the Eastern Conference and made it to the Finals against the Vancouver Canucks, who I quickly grew to hate. I would have hated them anyway, of course, but the vicious hit on Nathan Horton early in Game Three (which I missed, as I was herding children into pajamas and wasn't able to hear the radio from the next room) cemented it and made it an obligation that the Bruins MUST WIN THE STANLEY CUP. It was down to the memory of my father, too--dead ten years, huge hockey fan, Bobby Orr leading the pre-game rally at the Garden in Boston for Game Four. Playoff superstitions started to beckon at me...okay, I was not capable of growing a playoff beard, obviously, but since they seemed to win the games I could only hear on the radio, maybe I should just listen to the games on the radio?? (It wasn't just me, it was called the "NBC Curse".)



Sanity won out. I wanted to watch those games.

They won Game Six and I had watched it happen, so it was with a sense of okayness that I settled in for Game Seven. This was it; an away game, at Vancouver, which had all been won by Vancouver so far; the series tied 3-3; this was it.

"Don't either of you ask me for anything motherlike after the puck drops at 8! After that, you are ON YOUR OWN!!"

My daughter rolled her eyes and went to her room to do whatever it is she does in there. My son settled in on the couch with me. "You can watch the first period, but then it's bed," I told him.

"Okay, Mommy."

When the Bruins scored the first goal, there in the first period, I think everybody knew. You could feel the wind being sucked right out of Vancouver. It seemed to be the very Will of God. I was so happy it was ridiculous. I yelled "Woooohoo!!" loud enough to make my dad proud. Even my son was happy.

The rest of the game was mostly a lot of icing being heaped on the cake. Vancouver didn't score anything. I felt a little lonely in my jubilance, so I texted my friend John. My daughter wandered out of her room and lay on the loveseat to watch. John texted, "History is being made and your son is sleeping through it??" The mom in me protested, "but it's a school night!" John texted, "You will never be able to live it down if he misses this!"

"Hey, sweetie, wake up," I said, and shook him a little, then finally scooped him up and carried him into the livingroom. He never did really wake up, as much as I tried, even when the buzzer sounded and it was over--Bruins 4, Vancouver 0-- and me and the TV were cheering again. After the players had finished carrying the Cup around the ice and that annoying guy from Channel 7 was trying to power-on the interviews, I put him back in bed, and woke my sleeping daughter and sent her to bed, too.

The next morning my son said, "I missed it!"

I was ready. "No, you didn't! I tried to wake you up--you were a little awake--you were right in front of the TV!"

"But I don't remember!"

"It doesn't matter anyway, because you saw the winning goal, and that's all that matters."

"I did?"

"Yes! That first goal in the first period! Patrice Bergeron! Vancouver never scored, so the first goal was the winning goal! The other goals were only extra."

"Yeah...and my SISTER didn't see it!"

"That's right, she didn't, she was in her room."

His sister interjected, "But I saw the END, and he was sleeping!"

And so it went.

The day passed, and so did their interest, and when I said later on, "I think I want a t-shirt," they both commented on "how obsessed mom is". The season is over anyway.

I'm considering adding Versus onto my TV tier for the fall. Do you think the kids will watch with me?

My Ole Depressed Self

A century or so hence, people are bound to find it amusing that we ever thought a "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor" would actually do something to depression. I suppose PET scans and drug research studies are a step up from those many, many centuries of thinking melancholy was caused by "too much black bile in the spleen"--treated by eating warm, moist foods (essentially a lot of salad, weirdly enough), listening to music and watching plays (will medical insurance pay for that? Please??), and lots of rest and idleness (which is pretty much all I can do when I'm depressed anyway, but it is torture, not leisure, unfortunately). Oh yes, and by bloodletting--the cure-all--which is a nice analogy for what you have to go through to affect any kind of deep psychic change, I'd say.

After a month of finally taking Zoloft, something completely unexpected happened to me. For the first time ever in my post-pubescent life, my chattering head stopped with the endless critiques and backstories and became clear. I truly had forgotten that my head could ever be that still. It was the opposite of my past experiences with chemical substances that affected the mind--those had all softened the edges to a blurry halo that kept my thoughts from cutting me up, but also kept them from being of any use to me at all. That was not what I wanted from life, or from myself. I wanted balance. I wanted clarity. I wanted to just be able to function okay, to get right down to it.

I have never had the kind of depression where you get locked up for a few weeks, or you end up unemployed living in your parents' basement, or you find yourself writing a poignant memoir about it decades later, although I do have a long-standing adoration for literature about mental illness. I've probably read them all. I did my high school sophomore year poetry report on--wait for it--Sylvia Plath. When I am depressed I reread them and find them empathetic and soothing. I reread my favorite books from childhood, too, when I'm in that state--the Little House books, Strawberry Girl, the Melendy family stories.

The kind of depression I had had me limping along on good days, and almost completely inert on the bad ones. I had a particularly nasty stretch of one that lasted from June 1997 until March 1998 when it seemed to vanish overnight and for no particular reason (much like the grasshopper swarm did in On the Banks of Plum Creek). It took every bit of energy I could find to show up for work in that time. Once I was working I could do the task in front of me adequately, in a detached, automatonic way, but right as I left the building to go home, I had nothing left. I was a balloon with no more air. The energy-suck of depression was horrible to me, and coupled with a head that wouldn't stop muttering doomsday prayers over and over, it became my personal definition of Hell.

I have spent many, many hours laying on my couch or in my bed, unable to eat or sleep, worried about all the oxygen I was taking up by the fact of my living, and certain that I would never feel differently again.

It changed. It didn't change because of the Zoloft, either--the Zoloft was actually the last stone in the series of steps that led me out of the hole. I got married and had a baby, most of all. My quality of life and my mood was a concern to me before, and I had been working pretty hard at them, but after being presented with the gift of my daughter, they became of urgent and primary significance. I had a wonderful and very effective therapist who told me, "Whatever issues we don't deal with in our own lives we pass on to our kids," and I still hang on to that. It still lights a fire under my ass when I want to give up and be a wreck.

I started Zoloft when I was toward the end of my pregnancy with my son and had shown up at the obstetrician's crying again. She had an eye on the possibility of postpartum depression and wanted to nip the cycle in the bud, even though I was skittish about taking anything with a baby growing in me. I decided to just trust her, so I took the three week "starter pack" and then got the prescription filled.

There is a lot of talk in the media now about how SSRIs work no better than placebos, and work not at all for people with serious, incapacitating depressions (the psychotic kind, the lock-you-up kind, the kind I have not quite gotten to). The treatment of mental illness is a near total crapshoot, anyway. I worked on a psychiatric unit for a couple of years, and the thing that really surprised me about it was how it was mostly just a safe space for someone to sleep off the side effects of the meds. (I've tended to think that about hospitals overall anyway, even the medical side--"How exactly do people start to heal here, again?"--so it is no mystery how I've ended up doing home care.) People got better there, though. People even had epiphanies about themselves and their lives. Healing can be found anywhere, and it is more a question of open-mindedness and willingness than anything else, I think.

Those crossroads moments come, and the choice is ours, as difficult and scary as it usually is.

That isn't the end of the story. I took Zoloft for about a year, then stopped, and then started up again in July 2005. Strangely, the worst depressions I have had (of which there are three) all started in the summertime, and July has always been a difficult month for me. I have read that Seasonal Affective Disorder is usually a wintertime affliction but a few of us weirdos get it in the summer, and maybe that is all it is...I really don't know. All I know is, I stopped taking Zoloft in August 2007, when I was feeling low and considering having the dose increased from 50mg to 100mg, but got all contrary with myself and stopped taking it altogether instead. The low feeling passed when the weather started to cool, and to my amazement...it has never returned. I was steeling myself for the dark cloud in May 2008, but the weeks went on, the summer got hot and thundery (we had storms almost every afternoon that year--Thor forgot he wasn't in Florida), and my energy level kept in balance and my head held steady. They have remained so since. This is the fourth summer in a row I have not had a trace of depression, and I am still chemical-free.

I can't descibe how wonderous that is.

Don't ask me what happened. I don't know what happened. I did take up daily meditation in 2005, but fell away from it in 2009 and have not quite been able to get back. I read somewhere obscure and unstudied that daily meditation, after being practiced over three years, can permanantly rewire your brain. Could it be that simple? Maybe. I don't know. My diet is as crappy as it has ever been, I'll tell you--no big helpings of warm, moist salads for this girl, at least, not often enough--so there is no reason there why the black bile would be dispelled. What's more, the summer of 2007 is when I started working as a hospice nurse. When people ask me, "Don't you find this work depressing?", I can honestly, and a little ironically, say, "No, I don't...not at all."

Maybe SSRIs do work--maybe Zoloft reminded my brain "this is how you do it, now get to work", and my brain finally caught on. And maybe after all those years of emotional and psychological bloodletting, the toxins purged and my head regained balance so the flow of energy could resume. I can get off the couch and do things I want to do, and what's more, I can enjoy them.

I don't know what happened...but I hope it stays this way for the rest of my life.

It's July 2nd. I'm going to play in my garden now.

Applied Theology 101

It is almost 11 p.m. Eastern Time, and Judgement Day is obviously not getting underway. There is a bit of a volcanic eruption/earthquakey thing going on in Iceland, but it being Iceland and all, that is not really a big deal. Other than the Bruins losing to the Bolts in game 4 of the Eastern Conference playoffs, and Animal Kingdom not quite able to overtake Shakleford in the Preakness Stakes (and Big Papi scoring his 300th home run for the Red Sox over at Fenway Park), nothing of any importance seems to be going down today.

It baffles me, deeply and sincerely baffles me, that anybody ever could believe that because some self-styled preacher with a radio show in California says the End Times are coming May 21, 2011, that they really are. I saw the billboard proclaiming it on Route 107 as I drove into Revere one day, and mostly wondered who the guy was all hunched over in a fearful, yet reverent position, silhouetted against a full, blazing sun; was he one of the faithful, or was it a stock photo someone chose out of a file? Was he startled to be all mixed up in this, his figure plastered up and down highways all over the world?

I had a patient who was Pentecostal, and her husband was the pastor of their church. She died an arduous death, one I would not wish on anybody (I still wonder if I could have done something more...anything more...to have eased her suffering). She was young, and their daughter was not yet out of her teens. I took a large chunk of time off in the middle of my work day to attend the funeral, and besides all the "praise Jesus!!" and "amen!!" that was going on, what struck me most was her daughter and how happy she was. She was beaming, smiling at all of us, from the pulpit, declaring, "she is Home! My mom is Home at last!" Her eyes shone, but not from a shimmer of tears. They shone with joy, and pride, and pure love.

I thought...yes, but your mother is dead. That faithful servant of Jesus you are talking about may be someplace wonderful right now, but the woman who was your mother is gone, gone, gone.

My father always said, "Religion is a crutch."  He ditched his religion right around the time I was born, and it was a heavy religion he got rid of, a strain of Baptist that was less overpowering than the Pentecostals, but not by much. He shed it with a vehemence that never abated. He invited the Jehovah's Witnesses into the house to debate Scripture with them, essentially turning the tables and witnessing to them . My mother was a garden-variety, indifferent atheist, but my father took it on like the born-again convert he was.

"Religion is a crutch!" As I got older, I started to think, "...but if you have a broken leg, you're kinda stupid not to use one."

The first time I prayed I was about eight, and it was for no reason in particular. I was reading the Little House books (I was an early and precocious reader), and Mary and Laura would say a prayer at bedtime: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." It sounded pretty morbid to me, but it was the only prayer I had heard of, so I started to recite it to myself at night, on the sly, in the mutest of whispers, my clasped hands hidden under the blankets (to actually kneel beside the bed would have risked exposure). It got so I became quite superstitious about saying it, and if I forgot, I would be overcome by dread the following day--which was a decent enough introduction into what religion can be if taken too far in a certain direction, which it often is.

I did eventually give up this small prayerful part of my life, with no ill effects. The desire to be connected to some kind of God has never left me, though. It seems to be something my rational brain has no use for, which makes it tough for me to believe in any theistic religions except as nice cognitive-behavioral guides for effective living, because my rational brain has a very strong say in what goes on in my life. Thank my parents for that.

There is that something else that calls me, though. I will never be sure if it ever called my father; he died ten years ago, athesist to the end--but a few days after he died, for about a week, I felt as if he were very close to me. In my mind's eye I could see him as he looked when I was a girl, with a full head of hair and his beard, shaking his head at me in a rueful way and laughing, "You were right! All the time, you were right!", and I could hear myself replying, "Dad, I told you so. I told you so." Then the feeling of him, and his face in my mind, just went away.

Was that wishful thinking--or was it something else? My dad knew that I had developed some sort of faith in some sort of God, but we didn't much discuss it. "How can intelligent people believe in God!" he exclaimed one day, and I simply didn't answer, and the conversation moved on. Afterlife? Well, how do I know? How could anybody know?

He was sick with brain cancer for a very long time before he died. It messed up his thought processes, and conversations with him often became painfully scattered and irrational. He had a lot of fear around his illness, and the fear never much left him. It took away his brain, the very thing he held most dear, and the irony of that was not lost on me at all.

I have always been well aware of what a strange, scary, unpredictable world this is. Smarts, and even a big heart, won't always get me through. Maybe God is a crutch, even the God I believe in who doesn't give a shit about dogma or the hereafter or whether or not I pray, but I have come to believe that I need one.

I cried when my father died, and I miss him more rather than less as the years go by (as I have since had my son, and my children are growing, and I wish he could be here for it all). I can look that square in the eye, and I can feel how lousy that is and all the questions and contradictions it brings up in me about this world and this life.

I also have the feeling that something bigger is going on. Something far too big to understand. Something that comes to me at times like after my dad died, when his face would appear in my head like something not quite out of a dream. Something I see over and over again in my hospice work--just the sheer timing of events can be striking, completely uncanny. I don't need an End Times theology, and I don't need to focus on the next world to kill the pain I find in this one. I just need the occasional reminder that God is there, and God is good, and I have all I seem to need to go on...upright, strong, with two feet and a crutch (for when I stumble, and believe me, I will).

Provincetown

This photo of Race Point Beach was taken by Tom and Maggie, not me. Gotta start carrying a good camera instead of pilfering from the internet, I suppose.

I went to Provincetown for a night by myself back in April. I almost didn't, because I couldn't afford it, but I had been longing for such a night away for years and years, and something told me it was time.

April is a wet, chilly month in New England, and the grasses were not yet as green as those in Tom and Maggie's picture. It was too early in the year for vacationers, and the day I drove down was supposed to be full of rain. As I left town, making my way past King's Beach, the waves were huge and choppy, breaking spectacularly over the seawall, but before I even hit the tunnel that hugs Boston and heads to the South Shore, the dark clouds broke up and I could turn the wipers off.

Three hours later I was in Provincetown. I sat in my car in the parking lot of the inn where I was staying, eating a lunch of olives, crackers, and cheese that I had packed up back home. The wind was whipping in all directions but the sky had remained blue, and it was surprisingly warm. I put my hair back in an elastic and walked a bit toward the breakwater. On a better day I could walk it out to Long Point, which curls into Cape Cod Bay, but not that day, the wind was too fierce.

In the other direction was the road to Herring Cove Beach. Not far along it was a barricade; it was closed to both cars and foot traffic. It had been a particularly tough winter, and the road was not yet cleared of brush and sand. I got in my car and headed for the other side of the penninsula, the ocean side, and Race Point Beach.

I love the quiet on the very tip of the Cape. I love having ocean hugging close on three sides. It feels fragile and remote. I often wonder how living in a place like this would change me, city-dweller that I am, so used to things being solid and overwrought.

The parking lot was mostly empty. Some college-aged kids were playing touch football on the beach, and couples were walking their dogs. Curiously, the wind was nothing more than a light breeze there, although Race Point faces the open Atlantic. I started up the beach in the direction of Race Point Light, the very tip of the Cape.

I followed other people's footprints for a while, then past where they had turned to go back and the footprints disappeared. The dunes curved gently to my left. The ocean glittered widely to my right, somewhat choppy. It took a while, but after almost an hour, I started to notice the puffs of mist here and there over the dashes of foam. By the time I could see the lighthouse rising up over the dunes, I knew I was seeing whales out there, and quite a few of them, too.

The wind was fierce again when I rounded the bend and could see marshes and Herring Cove spread out before me; a couple of women sat on the sand with their dogs. I had seen no one else for almost an hour, and didn't care to see them, or them me, as they didn't acknowledge me at all (which makes Provincetown sort of funny...some people smile and say hello as you pass, and some ignore you like it's Boston). I turned and headed back.

The sun was warm. It was dipping lower down the sky as it was getting close to four, but the slices of clouds managed to stay out of the way. Flocks of birds dotted the wet sand at the water's edge. I kept my path as close to the dunes as the feds permitted (there are markers along them to keep people out), not wanting to disturb them. The whales weren't breaching, but I could sometimes spot the tip of a tail or the edge of a back as they came up to spout. Birds circled the air wherever there was a whale (that's one way to spot them--a crowd of birds over a choppy piece of ocean).

It was an amazing stroke of luck...whales, birds, sand, sun, and quiet solitude.

The rest of my night away was pleasant and restful--an excellent dinner at the renowned Lobster Pot, a little shopping for salt water taffy and whatnot on Commercial Street the next day, and a meandering drive home along the coast (Truro Light, the both quaint and opulent town of Chatham, and so on)--but the unexpected two hours on Race Point Beach was why I came.

It made all the reasons why I needed it fall away.

I discovered only the other day that what I had been seeing was an unusually large number of right whales congregated in the waters off of Cape Cod. There are only 473 North Atlantic right whales in existence. 201 were counted in Cape Cod waters off of Provincetown on April 20th (here's the link: http://www.coastalstudies.org/whats-new/4-20-11.htm , which I can't make any prettier because a kitten got on the keyboard and killed my plus-sign key).

My bank account was screaming "don't go", but my gut feeling was insisting "GO", in that firm and inarguable way it has with insisting things. My gut feeling does not lie (which will be the subject of another post someday, I am very sure). Thank you, gut feeling (although my bank account didn't lie, either, and I'm still a little behind, but I'm used to that sort of thing anyway)...

Thank you, whales.

(You can see the top left corner where Race Point Light is, Race Point Beach along the top left, Herring Cove Beach down the left side, and the hook of sand down the bottom where Long Point is, into Cape Cod Bay. This view is south-north, not north-south.)

Ariel view of a North Atlantic right whale--

Match-dot-com

I figured I needed to throw some sort of vibe out into the universe, and I was told about OkCupid back in spring 2009. It took just one "you bitch" e-mail from a man who looked (in his pictures) like a gnome to drive me out of there. My ignoring his first unsavory e-mail had unleashed some old baggage for him, plainly. I suppose I wish him luck, or the proper dose of medication.

Getting onto Match was a similar affair--old friend, "give it a try! It's fun!", and blah-de-blah. Yeah, okay. Well, it was not QUITE as bad...I met one man, anyway, who I am still friends with two years later. I exchanged some nice e-mails with a couple of non-contenders, and had coffee with another guy who used to be a bouncer at the Channel in the eighties, which earned him huge points for "cool".

Last summer I tried OkCupid again. It's free, first of all, and it encourages all kinds of social connections, not just romance (and not just hook-ups, either, since I can read your mind), and it has lots of entertaining, smart, goofy quizzes and does an actual percentage-type match thing when you answer questions and they run your responses through their system. (It was started up by a bunch of math geeks from MIT.) The whole tone of the place is "irreverent", and that is me, at least as far as dating sites go.

My pictures were much better this time, and the Gnome did not resurface. I got more traffic than I had with any of my other two attempts at online dating. None of it interested me. I met one guy from the town next door, and truthfully, I should have (and probably did) meet him decades ago, since he was in the music scene and we knew a lot of the same people. I went to a punk show he promoted in October, and saw a good friend of his that I had dated once when I was nineteen (and had only the very faintest memory of....nineteen and twenty were the Hangover Years, pretty much). This guy had gone on to front a band that was playing at the show, and played it well, I may add--more points for "cool" (for the nineteen year old me, anyway), and the show was enormously fun, but still no romance to be found.

I couldn't take to the online thing. I felt like I was flipping through a catalog, and one that was way more Cabela's than Victoria's Secret. I felt some sort of obligation, though...to make some "effort"...to "get out there"..."look around a little!"

Maybe putting a flyer up on the corkboard in the laundromat would work better, and result in a substantial connection, not all this promotional angling?

This one guy was a "97% match" for me, the site tauted. His pictures were attractive, but he had the same facial expression in all of them--a tight-lipped, constrained smile and a hard blank stare. That didn't look too good...and his profile was very lengthy, but that could mean he was just a word-fiend like me; no problem. I e-mailed him a friendly greeting, and he responded within minutes. That never happens. I waited a day (acting just as manipulative and self-promotional as everybody else) and and sent my response the next evening. He again responded within minutes. I was starting to catch on, so I asked him, "So...have you been in many relationships?" His reply mapped them out in detail--in terms of his age at the time, how long they lasted, and the spaces in between--and thus I discovered that my "97% match" had never had a long term relationship (more than three months) ever in his life (fifty years old), and no relationships at all since his early thirties.

Well, gak.

So here I am, just as single as when I started, although richer in having two more male friends, although one is not currently speaking to me (he's like that, on one hand, and really wants to find "love", on the other, which is not with me, but I think we will cross paths again. After all, we know SO many of the same people!), and the other I am pretty much in love with--but don't tell him, he doesn't want to hear it. We are certainly friends, though, and I like that fine as it is, actually.

Internet dating...I don't have the heart for it. I know that a true knight has to slog through a lot of hostile territory to get to the Holy Grail, but my days of being a warrior for love have ended.

That doesn't mean I'm done with love. It just means that I have noticed where my heart resides, by seeing clearly where it does not...and I would rather be in that warm, soulful, expansive place than set off looking, again, for people who can excite my neurons but leave my heart untouched. And yeah, they are legion.

 I don't mind. Here is where I will quote you some Rumi, as no discussion of love is complete without him...

                                  A thousand half-loves
                                  must be forsaken to take
                                  one whole heart home.

(translation by Coleman Barks, Rumi: The Book of Love, copyright 2003.)

How I Got Into This Nursing Racket, Anyway

I had been waiting tables for a few years, and badly. Whatever it is you need to be an engaging and tipable waitress, I don’t possess. I had shirked going to a four-year college (although my excellent high school transcript could have sent me to a good one) and had dabbled and failed at a little community college (I stopped showing up). I was at a crossroads time of my life, just turned twenty-one, and saw an ad in the newspaper for a direct-care human service job at a state institution for the mentally retarded. I had a black mohawk and was fifteen minutes late for the interview—but the job being what it was, I was hired anyway.

That job set the direction for the rest of my life.

They were all in wheelchairs. They couldn’t talk. Some of them had seizures, small ones like tic-like twitches and blinks, and others had full-blown grand mals. The diapers were cloth ones—the adult sized pampers were only used for when they left the dormitory to take the van to their day programs. The day programs were to stimulate them, engage them in some way, but I only saw them back in the dorm. It was my job to bathe them—everybody was bathed every night—and feed them, and put them to bed. Every two hours diapers were checked and changed if needed. They were repositioned out of their wheelchairs onto vinyl wedges or mats on the floor. The beds were in large rooms, like wards, and arranged against partitions.

By "they", I don't mean “they”. At first it was the most frightening thing I had undertaken in my life, far and away—a human being, fully grown, who didn’t look or act like anyone normal, and who didn’t seem to live by any rules I could readily understand. The first time I was by myself, undressing and bathing a nonverbal adult who couldn’t even make sustained eye contact with me, I was a mess. I could only break it down to a mechanical task, like doing the dishes, separate from the person I was caring for. After a few days it was better--I would smile, and chatter, and try to be as quick as possible so they wouldn't get too cold. They started to become people to me.

One of my co-workers was an older woman who had been there a few years. She was a bland person, a stickler for routine who often got on my nerves, but what I remember about her most was her telling me early on, "When I started here, I would go home every night and cry over these poor kids and how sad it is that they are like this...I don't know why God makes people suffer this way. I try to do what I can to make things nice for them."

I was startled when she told me that. I didn't go home and cry; I didn't feel sorry for them at all. The only time I saw pain on their faces was when, for instance, little Sadie was having one of those awful runs of seizures that would jerk her body so badly she would start to cry, like the two-year-old she mostly was; that was hard to witness. She was my favorite...rather, one of my favorites. She had a freckled, homely face, and would smile and laugh when I hugged her. Feeding her was a chore; she drank all her meals and would not eat any other way, and often would shake her head from side to side and most of the drink would spill down her bib.

I got immune, more or less, to any fluid or substance that would come out of a person's body. I got the best upper body strength of my life, hauling six-foot tall men out of their wheelchairs onto the raised porcelain slabs we lay them on to bathe. (This was before mechanical lifters, and before gloves, too, if you must know.) I took to bringing my boombox in and playing The Cure, or 10,000 Maniacs, or whatever else I was into before I was told not to by the supervisors (I was a young twenty-one, more like fifteen in many ways). For this work, my take-home pay was $225 a week.

I loved that job.

A couple of years later, when the state was paying for me to go to nursing school and giving me full-time pay (that $225) for part-time work (but nursing school was 7:30am until 3pm, except clinical days, which were 6:45am until 2pm, Monday through Friday, for eleven months for an LPN diploma), my hands-down absolute favorite man was moving out--on his way to a newly-formed group home in the community, which were quickly becoming more common. He was the first of our residents to go to one. I got permission from his family to take him out for an evening before he left.

Johnny was no taller than me, couldn't talk, but he could walk and rarely wet through his underwear. He wore a huge football helmet because he banged his head when he was frustrated. I took it off the minute we got to my car. He wouldn't need it with me, and he didn't. I strapped him in, and we drove off, first to my favorite local Italian family restaurant. I cut up his spaghetti into small pieces and he ate it with a spoon, grinning hugely. He was difficult to read, as all of the residents were--how is life experienced when your body is thirty, but your brain is still somewhere around three, or four, and has been for decades? After dinner we went to a playground, and he climbed the ladder up the slide in a lumbering, slow, cautious manner. I wasn't sure if he was enjoying himself or not; back at the dorm, he spent most of his time sitting cross-legged on the couch, making faces, and occasionally laughing at nothing I could see.

One reason why I liked Johnny so much is he giggled wonderfully when tickled, and gave the best hugs in the world. I think that is reason enough to like somebody--anybody, really.

I saw him once more after he had been living in the group home for a while; his parents took him to a Christmas party being held for the residents. I rushed up to him and beamed, and he squinted up his eyes and grinned at me with his mouth wide open. His mother said, "He is so happy, he is doing so well there...he doesn't bang his head at all anymore, and he doesn't have to wear that helmet!" He still had a receding hairline, of course, but his hair was thicker and combed neatly. "Oh, I am so glad to hear that," I said.

There was one night I was working late, doing an overtime, and while making rounds at midnight it hit me--where I was and who these people were hit me in a way it never had before. I suddenly felt profoundly sad. The blank eyes, the wet diapers, the one-sided conversations seemed to strip all meaning from what I was doing. "Why are these people alive?" I thought. The feeling hung with me for the rest of the long night.

The next day I was back at three in the afternoon for my shift, almost apprehensive when I unlocked the heavy door and let myself in, but I needn't have worried. The feeling was completely gone. The stark, institutional wards seemed full of life, even merriment. I knew each face, and many of them had become dear.

All us employees knew the backstories of the residents. Some of the stories were tragic, and for reasons sometimes within God's control (if you believe that sort of thing), but more often from within the control of man.

People make mistakes. Things can go wrong. Pregnancy, childbirth, home environment...

But none of that was present in those dormitories. None of that mattered, day to day. Were their lives harder than mine? Did they suffer? Was the simple fact of their existence a tragedy?

Well...is the fact of anybody's existence a tragedy? Or do we just live a life, and enjoy the hugs and the laughter and the people who take the time to take care of us?

Does anything matter more than that?



 

Guy Friends

So I am again seeing the guy I was seeing for a year and a half and then broke it off with, but it isn't what you're thinking. We really are friends.

"He only wants you around for one thing," I was told by a so-called friend soon after. "I'm a guy, too, and I know about these things."

Oh, yeah?--so that's why you are talking to me, buddy?

"If you think it's friendship, you're in denial."

Well, gosh, I know what friendship looks like...a real friend is that rare person you can tell the truth to. That doesn't come around every day, don't I know it.

My father was a talker. He wasn't an emoter, but he liked to think, and he liked to discuss. He particularly liked theology. Raised a Bible-quoting Baptist, he met my mother when they were in their late teens, and by the time I was born (before either of them turned twenty) she'd turned him atheist, merely by listening to his beliefs and replying, "You really believe that stuff?"

My grandmother tried to repair the situation by whisking me off to overnights that culminated in a trip to church on Sunday morning; when I was returned home, my father sat me on the couch for a debriefing. I was six or seven at the time this went on.

"You know, there is no God," he said. I nodded. "You know that all that stuff your grandmother told you is made-up stories," he went on. I agreed. (I particularly didn't like it when my grandmother had informed me "if you made a mistake printing the Bible, you would go to Hell because it was a holy book and had to be perfect!" I thought that was horribly unfair and an odd thing to bring up to a kid. My grandmother was a little whacky, as my father well knew.)

My mother was the quiet and reclusive one. She wasn't the type to have girlfriends over for coffee and chat in the afternoons. She still isn't, and neither am I.

I remember one sunny fall day we were all driving home from the apple orchard, and my father said to my mother, "When I throw this apple core out the window, where do you think it will hit?", and the two of them, only high school graduates, started a discussion about angles and velocity that lasted several apple cores out the car window and most of the way home.

I always had guys as friends. I was unassuming, like my mom, and easy to talk to, like my dad, and boys talked to me like friends. I never had a boyfriend until I was almost seventeen, and that was an overwhelming experience involving lots of hurt feelings and obsessive feelings and the tiny, immature beginnings of a capacity for passion--all too much for a sixteen-year-old, by far. My next boyfriend worked out better--a sweet guy to pal around with, someone I could never have fallen in love with but enjoyed pretending to, and when I broke up with him he was sad and called me hopefully for a long time afterward.

My first boyfriend and I developed an annoying and irresistible pattern of getting together for a few weeks every few years when we were both in between relationships, getting on each other's nerves and quarreling, and then parting ways in an offended furor. We did that for over a decade, believe it or not.

I have been single since my husband moved out in late 2004. A few men have bought me dinner over the years, and that has been nice for sure, but what I really crave is an ear to listen and some sound advice and a laugh or two. In recent months, with this big turmoil going on with me and my ex-husband, the people who have been the most rock-solid for me have been two men. One is a guy I work with who has become a real friend--the kind of friendship that works both ways--and he gives me hugs, and is quite amused and understanding when I start to squirm. The emotive thing will always be a mildly alien area for me, I think.

The other was the guy I was seeing for a year and a half. He was a physics major in college, and I'm sure he could solve my parents' apple core problem in about ten seconds. After two weeks of me cutting things off, I e-mailed him again. I considered it carefully first, but there is always the element of the unknown...is this one burned out? Can we really be friends?

I went to see him last Thursday. It had been three months since we had seen each other. I told him what had been happening with the ex and we ordered takeout. With the Discovery Channel in the background, we talked about other stuff, made each other laugh, ate the food,  played some footsie and fell asleep.

I hear that best friends make the best marriages. That's all I'm saying about me and committed relationships. I don't know if that's anyplace I can get to, but I do know that I'll take one good friend over a boyfriend any day...and it sure does help that I know how to be good friends with guys.

"When Will You Be Back?"

I was down on the floor, entertaining a two-year-old, while her mother helped my patient onto the commode beside us. My patient was the grandmother. We were in one of the bedrooms, the one with the most comfortable bed and the TV. My patient cried and wailed with each shuffling step, but her daughter was unfazed, so I decided to let them do what they were doing--this was their life, not mine, I was a visitor here--and keep my focus on the child. She was playing with a toy truck, and had it drive up and down her mother's leg until her mother batted it away with her hand. I thought of blowing up a glove balloon, but decided that she was too young and might chew it.

The misery in the room was a very basic kind of misery, the kind caused by physical suffering. I felt how huge it was, and how the child with the truck and her matter-of-fact mother took some of the heft out of it. It can be easy to relieve suffering. The first and hardest part is not shutting down in the face of it.

My patient hadn't slept in two days from the pain. Nobody had called me, because they didn't think of it--I was coming Tuesday, right? They would see me Tuesday. I tell patients and families all the time, "You call any time day or night, we can help you," but so many people are so used to getting by on their own that they don't understand what that means. I walked through the door, and saw a woman with a gaunt, shadowed face, her eyes gleaming with pain, and crying. I felt the horror of it (and hers was an especially terrible cancer, with tumors actually starting to push up from under her skin on her torso, and leg, and back; her insides were so full of tumors, there was no more room for them to grow), and felt the battleax nurse in me get annoyed, too-- "This was avoidable, people! What were you all thinking??"--and also felt how great the need was for somebody to steer this ship away from the shoals. Well, I could do that, and I did.

The thing is, I get to leave. I write out instructions, we discuss the plan, I reassure, I stress the importance of calling if there is a problem, but then I get to pick up my nursing bag and walk out the door. I have to make sure that I have left them with more than bottles of pills and written schedules; I have to be sure that I have given them some nameless something that can help them get through the hours before the next nursing visit. I don't choose to identify what that something is. With each person, it's a little different.

I offered the services of the social worker, and the chaplain, and the home health aide, and tried my best to get them to accept one other discipline in their home other than the nurse (because I know how much it helps--they didn't, couldn't), but they turned all of it down. "All we need is you," they told me,"we trust you."

I have another cancer patient two towns over. He once weighed 300 pounds, mostly muscle, 6 feet tall, and photos of him from years ago startle me, because it could not possibly be the same man, save the sparkle in his eyes. He's now about 145. He used to train horses; he's from horse country, out around Kentucky, and never married. "I couldn't, living that kind of life, I travelled all the time and worked from 5am to midnight. Not that I didn't have lady friends through the years!"

I pulled up a chair, and we talked. I've been seeing him for three months now; he hates the pain, so whenever it starts getting ahead of the medication, he tells me, and we adjust it. He was amazed that the pain meds we used on him worked so well--he'd been taking MS Contin from the oncologist and it hadn't done much. A lot of our talks initially were about how wonderous life had become without being plagued with pain all the time. A full night's sleep was next to heaven. He was able to go for walks again, and was happy to be able to get the the grocery store and get his shopping done without having to have anybody help him.

As time went on, he started telling me stories of his boyhood in the Kentucky hills in the forties. "Do you wish you could go back there? Would you if you could?" I asked, and he answered with a slow smile, "Naw, I'm done with that place. I'm content here."

He told me about his travels, and life on the road, and being poor. One day he was wearing a T-shirt with a decal of wolves on it, and he said, "Somebody saw this today and thought that I was an animal lover!" I laughed and said, "C'mon, I bet you're wearing that because it was fifty cents at the flea market and it fit you." "You are absolutely right!" he grinned.

He's a charming but solitary man. He has pictures of the Virgin Mary on his walls, "just in case," he says, but I don't believe him. He's an atheist, and was never a Catholic. I'll bet there is some other reason that he just hasn't told me yet.

He started to fall off about a month ago, and gave me a worry--sleeping all the time, no more walks, the pain in a new place--but then righted himself and had a few weeks of feeling better. Than this week I went to see him and his face, always pale, was gray around his eyes and cheekbones, and his eyes were dull and troubled. "What's wrong?" I asked, and we talked about it. It wasn't so much the pain and the breathing problems as the weakness and the futility of it all. "I know I won't get any better, but I want to. I don't like this."

"I wish I had a magic nursing wand," I told him,"and could take it all away from you."

"So do I."

"Yeah. But I can't. All I can do is see you on Wednesday. And Friday, too. I'll keep a close eye on you. How's that?"

"Yeah, I think I need it."

I stood up to get my stethescope from my nursing bag, and he said suddenly, "You are beautiful."

I didn't know how to respond at first. "Well, I'm having a really good hair day," I answered, and he gave me a grin. The gentle sparkle in his eyes was back, if only for the moment.

He is a man who takes it as it comes, and rolls with it, and looks for the humor in everything. He also takes life very seriously. He's like me in that way.

And I'm his nurse. I'll be back at the end of the week.