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).
This isn't me. It's Night Windows by Edward Hopper.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Provincetown
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--
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
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.)
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.)
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
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?
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?
Friday, April 15, 2011
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.
"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.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
"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.
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.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Pasttimes and Obsessions
I am a quasi-anti-social, non-hobbyist, non-active type person. Left to myself--which happens regularly--I do nothing. Doing nothing is bliss. I don't do nothing in a mindful, meditative way, either. I just wander around the house in my bathrobe, drinking coffee and staring out the window. I probably look like an advertisement for antidepressants, except that I am content.
Am I a big loser because of this trait? Maybe so. Don't list me under the Movers & Shakers that you know. Am I boring? I rarely get bored, but then, nobody can get up into my head like I can, so yes, being around me is dull as sticks.
My brain is not necessarily a rich and exciting landscape. I do get one illuminating thought after another sometimes and think, "Oooo, I need to write this down, I am brilliant!", and then I write them down and find that they are the usual commonplace banalities only dressed up all sparkly when they are dancing in my head and not coming out of somebody else's mouth. Yep--my mind is mostly a continuous loop of hackneyed big-budget movies that think they are deep (much like American Beauty).
With all this mental activity going on, and so little to engage me in the real world, I guess that would make me prone to picking up obsessions. Fortunately my "down-time" comes in small increments, and my day-to-day life is busy enough to keep me out of serious trouble. I do get little obsessions, though. I don't know where they come from or why, but here are the two most recent:
1) Horse racing. The other day was my birthday (yeah, yeah, another one, whatever) and to treat myself I watched Secretariat. It's by Disney, so that gives you an idea of how slick and watered-down the movie is, and my kids said, "Ew, horse racing," and didn't want to watch it, so they had dinner out with their father and I watched it by myself. (If that underscores some sort of disarray of my priorities so be it--it was MY birthday, dammit.) It was actually a pretty good movie--Diane Lane and John Malkovich made the overt Disney emotional manipulation almost enjoyable--but it set off my latent horse racing obsession. I had to watch all the real Secretariat races on YouTube, and would have started in on Sea Biscuit and Seattle Slew if it wasn't that the kids were home and it was getting late. I don't know what it is. The only trip I want to take is to Saratoga. It's not a gambling thing, either, because I'm one of those people who is karmically destined to work my ass off for a living and I know it. (I'm trying to adjust that, though.)
2) Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera. Okay, what the hell is up with that? I can't watch any of his other movies--300? The Ugly Truth? Oh, please. But pair him up with Andrew Lloyd Webber! Who knew the guy could sing? I need to stay away from Andrew Lloyd Webber scores--I had a major Jesus Christ Superstar obsession fifteen years ago around Eastertime, which is probably as close to a conversion to Christianity that I'll ever get (and I mean that seriously, I finally "GOT" the whole dying-on-the-cross thing, but that's a story for another day). When Gerry flaps his black cape around in a few of the scenes, I can remind myself that it's just a silly movie, but then at the end of "The Point of No Return" when he sings, "anywhere you go let me go too..." with such despair and longing, I am SO sunk. In the depths of this obsession, I found that he has had his New York City apartment featured in Architectural Digest. I tried to figure out whether or not this showed depth of character, then brought myself up short--he's an ACTOR, for crying out loud, WHO CARES!! An actor with an oddly shaped mouth! What the hell!
A few winters ago, I spent every night watching episodes of Sex and the City and eating buffalo chicken with blue cheese dressing, but that was more of a self-soothing experience than an obsession. With obsessions, my head comes off of my body and I float around in the stratosphere in a little bubble. It is unpleasant to come back down to Earth. What is it that I see way up there, precisely?
No harm done. I won't be watching The Bounty Hunter, either.
Ahhhh, Gerry:
Am I a big loser because of this trait? Maybe so. Don't list me under the Movers & Shakers that you know. Am I boring? I rarely get bored, but then, nobody can get up into my head like I can, so yes, being around me is dull as sticks.
My brain is not necessarily a rich and exciting landscape. I do get one illuminating thought after another sometimes and think, "Oooo, I need to write this down, I am brilliant!", and then I write them down and find that they are the usual commonplace banalities only dressed up all sparkly when they are dancing in my head and not coming out of somebody else's mouth. Yep--my mind is mostly a continuous loop of hackneyed big-budget movies that think they are deep (much like American Beauty).
With all this mental activity going on, and so little to engage me in the real world, I guess that would make me prone to picking up obsessions. Fortunately my "down-time" comes in small increments, and my day-to-day life is busy enough to keep me out of serious trouble. I do get little obsessions, though. I don't know where they come from or why, but here are the two most recent:
1) Horse racing. The other day was my birthday (yeah, yeah, another one, whatever) and to treat myself I watched Secretariat. It's by Disney, so that gives you an idea of how slick and watered-down the movie is, and my kids said, "Ew, horse racing," and didn't want to watch it, so they had dinner out with their father and I watched it by myself. (If that underscores some sort of disarray of my priorities so be it--it was MY birthday, dammit.) It was actually a pretty good movie--Diane Lane and John Malkovich made the overt Disney emotional manipulation almost enjoyable--but it set off my latent horse racing obsession. I had to watch all the real Secretariat races on YouTube, and would have started in on Sea Biscuit and Seattle Slew if it wasn't that the kids were home and it was getting late. I don't know what it is. The only trip I want to take is to Saratoga. It's not a gambling thing, either, because I'm one of those people who is karmically destined to work my ass off for a living and I know it. (I'm trying to adjust that, though.)
2) Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera. Okay, what the hell is up with that? I can't watch any of his other movies--300? The Ugly Truth? Oh, please. But pair him up with Andrew Lloyd Webber! Who knew the guy could sing? I need to stay away from Andrew Lloyd Webber scores--I had a major Jesus Christ Superstar obsession fifteen years ago around Eastertime, which is probably as close to a conversion to Christianity that I'll ever get (and I mean that seriously, I finally "GOT" the whole dying-on-the-cross thing, but that's a story for another day). When Gerry flaps his black cape around in a few of the scenes, I can remind myself that it's just a silly movie, but then at the end of "The Point of No Return" when he sings, "anywhere you go let me go too..." with such despair and longing, I am SO sunk. In the depths of this obsession, I found that he has had his New York City apartment featured in Architectural Digest. I tried to figure out whether or not this showed depth of character, then brought myself up short--he's an ACTOR, for crying out loud, WHO CARES!! An actor with an oddly shaped mouth! What the hell!
A few winters ago, I spent every night watching episodes of Sex and the City and eating buffalo chicken with blue cheese dressing, but that was more of a self-soothing experience than an obsession. With obsessions, my head comes off of my body and I float around in the stratosphere in a little bubble. It is unpleasant to come back down to Earth. What is it that I see way up there, precisely?
No harm done. I won't be watching The Bounty Hunter, either.
Ahhhh, Gerry:
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