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| | "Turn it up, I LOVE this song!" | | | | Wednesday, November 11, 2009 (6:06 PM) | | SillyLeslie asked me yesterday for a list of my favorite artists and songs (I don't ask her why anymore, 'cause it usually means there's something good in it for me), which sent me to my excessive CD collection with notebook in hand. After I filled two pages with tiny notes and was about to start a third, I realized how MUCH info it was, and it got me wondering if it wouldn't be impossible to edit it down to what my very favorite of all of these songs were. I've never tried to force this issue before. Never needed to.
I didn't know how to begin narrowing that down. What're the criteria? There are literally thousands of songs that would make me blurt, "Turn it up. I LOVE this song, it's one of my favorites!" Still, there are some songs I love (Stairway to Heaven, Hey Jude, What's Going On) that if I never hear them again in my life, it will be okay. Oh I'd miss them, but my soul wouldn't starve without them.
What, then, are the songs that I will want to listen to always? I began a list of songs that I have never gotten tired of, even after listening to some of them for more than 30 years. The acid-test for favorite status is that I know I could hear each of these songs every day for the rest of my life, and never tire of them.
1. Clocks, Emmylou Harris
2. Landslide, Fleetwood Mac
3. How Can I Tell You, Cat Stevens
4. Stewart's Coat, Rickie Lee Jones
5. Feel Your Love, Neil Young
6. Susie Q, Creedence Clearwater Revival
7. 2,000 Miles, The Pretenders
8. You Can Close Your Eyes, James Taylor
9. La La Means I Love You, The Delfonics
10. Turn, Turn, Turn, The Byrds
This is not necessarily in the order of how much I love each of these songs, with the exception of the first one. Clocks, written by Emmylou Harris, is one of the most beautiful songs (perhaps THE most beautiful) I've ever heard. I fell in love with Emmylou the first time I heard that incredible voice that is a cross between a cowgirl and an angel on what most of her fans still mistakenly believe was her first album, Pieces of the Sky. But when I learned soon afterwards that there was an even earlier album called Gliding Bird, I searched for it like Indiana Jones pursuing the Lost Ark.
It was a poorly recorded album of mostly mediocre songs, and poor Emmylou sounded more cowgirl than angel on it, and over the decades she has steadfastly refused to allow it to be reissued on CD. But Clocks--that was more than pure angel, that was pure heaven.
Yes, I know, I know--if you're a true-blue Emmylou fan like I am, then you know that she included an alternate version of Clocks on her Songbird box set. It's wonderful, but not the same. And so until I finally stop procrastinating and learn how to convert analog recordings to digital, I must keep my ancient turntable just so that I can have this song with me for the rest of my life. The necessity to keep obsolete audio equipment surely defines the difference between a song that inspires "Turn it up!" and one that qualifies as all-time favorite. | | | 24 Views | 4  Thumbs Up | 3 Comments |  |
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| | Flophousepoodle, and The Easiest Recognizable Social Divide | | | Monday, January 26, 2009 (6:39 PM)
(I'm feeling like I'm putting some teeth into this.) | | Last July on LV, Flophousepoodle posted a video called Failure Smorgasbord. Someone left her the following comment: “U need a dental job.”
At the time I cringed when I read that comment, being as I feel great affection for FHP, and I wondered how she would react when she read it. How do you react to a comment that’s intended to hurt? She gave one of the best comebacks I’ve ever read because it was full of humor and humility and it underscored the meanness of the commenter:
“I guess I should thank you for stopping there. I need many things.”
The next day Flophouse wrote a blog about teeth in which she wrote that teeth are “the easiest recognizable social divide.”
I realized this truth about teeth some time ago and ever since, I have felt like something of a poser—because I have naturally perfect teeth. You can disguise your social class with education, attire, and accent, but you cannot disguise the appearance that comes only from being born to parents who can afford thousands of dollars worth of orthodonture for you.
I come from a long line of sharecroppers and factory workers. I am the only member of my family who graduated from high school and then achieved the pipe dream of college. When I was a kid, the adults in my family could not watch TV without commenting on the teeth of TV and movie stars, an obsession I didn’t understand then. I never got to visit a dentist until I was eleven years old, and then it was to have two cavities filled. The only cavities I ever had and probably ever will have, it seems.
My next dental visit came when I was 21 and I got a job with dental coverage. This is when I learned that I have perfect teeth. The dentist asked how long I’d had braces. I told him I never had them, and about my one previous dental appointment. “Amazing!” he said. Then he called in his assistants to look at my mouth as he measured every tooth in my head and the distance between them. “Every tooth is perfectly shaped, and you have an alignment of upper and lower bite and a straightness in your teeth that is more perfect than anything I’ve seen in a textbook!” he told me. Gosh. It made me feel kinda special to be a medical oddity, one who wasn’t deformed.
There are a lot of benefits to having good teeth, an absence of pain being a wonderful one. But being able to attend functions with people of higher social strata than myself, undetected as the working-class poser that I am, has no doubt enabled me to progress in my academic work environment. I never underestimate the social value of this freebie nature has given me.
Still… there is an old putdown joke that goes “when God was handing out good looks, you musta been standing at the back of the line!” In comments made on FHP’s videos, and in comments others have made to me about her, I have heard her compared in beauty at various times to Emma Thompson, Jodie Foster, Toni Collette, and Diana Rigg. On that imaginary day of the beauty handouts, I imagine Flophouse far in line ahead of me. In fact, when I finally get to meet God, he says, “Jeez, I’m just plumb all out of almost everything. All out of ice-blue eyes, high cheekbones, Roman noses, porcelain skin, full lips. But I’ve got a set of perfect teeth here…”
I sigh. “Okay. If that’s all ya got, I’ll take ‘em.” | | | | 75 Views | 14 Thumbs Up | 7 Comments | |
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| | Be of good cheer. | | | Thursday, December 25, 2008 (5:55 PM)
(I'm feeling contagious.) | | The fourth in a trilogy. (Yes, I get the irony.)
In one of the hardest periods of my life, I was jobless, flat broke, and unable to make my rent. I have a good friend in my life, Carolyn, who has always been like a surrogate mother to me. Over the 35 years that I have known her, she routinely reiterates the offer to help me if I am ever in trouble. When I told her then what kind of trouble I was in, I received a check from her two days later. It was a thousand dollars, which sustained me until I found my next job.
She told me that she would only regret having loaned me money if an inability to pay it back caused me to drift away out of embarrassment. I was indeed embarrassed that it took me so long to pay her back, but my shame could never keep me from being a part of her life.
I eventually paid Carolyn back in full, but it’s impossible to receive a gesture of help like that without also receiving a full measure of humility. Carolyn’s rescue made me resolve to follow her example. If I ever found myself in a position to pay that gesture forward, I told myself I would do it.
Three years ago, the universe blessed me with that opportunity. I have a good friend from my art school days who is self-employed as a web designer, a tough business since the dot-com bust. During a routine catch-up call, I asked her how things were going. Things were not good. She hadn’t had a job in a while. She had little food in the apartment, and her rent was due in three days. Her savings and her credit card were tapped. She didn’t know what she was going to do. I could hear the desperation in her voice, and yet she didn’t ask me for help.
I did a quick mental assessment of the repercussions of loaning her a month’s rent and grocery money. I could easily afford it, but she is dear to me, and I could not easily afford her friendship. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” said Shakespeare, for damn good reason. My bond with this friend is not the same kind of bond I have with Carolyn. I didn’t think it would survive the monkey wrench of a personal loan thrown into it. But what was more important—keeping a friend from eviction, or keeping a friend?
I sent her a check, and I made it as clear as I could that I was only loaning money on the condition that the loan never be an issue between us. If she could pay it back someday, great, and if not, there were no strings. She promised me that she would accept it under those conditions.
But having been in her position, I know it ain’t easy. Before the loan, we used to do one or two landscape-drawing field trips each year. Since then we’ve had only broken dates. We used to call each other several times a year. Not very many calls since then, though. The worst sign of the drift is this: I did not receive a Christmas card from her this year. She always makes hand-printed Christmas cards, and I treasure them.
I got a wild hair to make my Christmas cards this year at the last minute. I made them from a linocut. I’m good at a lot of things, but linocuts aren't one of ‘em, so I don’t know what I was thinkin’. I will be kind to myself and say they were imperfect, but I sent them anyway. Except that I balked a little at sending one to my art friend. She excels in woodcuts and I was embarrassed. But since I hadn’t heard from her, it seemed extremely important that I keep this Christmas link, the only one left between us.
When I got home from work on Christmas Eve, I had a message from her on my answering machine. “I got your card,” she said. “I was in a total funk until today. But I got your card, and now I’m not. I’ll be home all evening. Call me.” Which I did. Our friendship has survived the monkey wrench.
Another friend emailed me last night: “I don't understand why contentedness isn't contagious, being bummed out seems to be.” I responded to her that all moods are contagious.
So don’t be in a funk. Be of good cheer. It’s catching.
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| | A Christmas Care Package | | | Wednesday, December 24, 2008 (8:59 AM)
(I'm feeling better) | | In response to my last two blogs, I was inspired to rethink my angst about gift giving by the comments of 30andOut, Tahllulah, and ScribblersSanctuary, who relish the opportunity to give at Christmas unencumbered by the anxieties I feel. Ken even sees his gifts as extensions of himself. I like that “gift as extension of self” philosophy. I’m going to try that philosophy on next year and see if it fits me.
About ten years ago, I let a financial advice guru convince me that if I wanted to make progress towards financial health, then giving had to become a part of my investment plan. As it turned out, I think it was very good advice because I have prospered ever since I started making charity a part of my monthly budget. I recommend it to anyone who ever says, “What goes around, comes around.”
I started doing this at a time when I could scarcely afford to do so. My jobs back then were low paying, I had a lot of debt from my student years, and I worried about money all of the time. I think of those times as my Top Ramen Days.
I indulged myself in those years with a daily treat that gave me one small thing to look forward to: I bought a cup of coffee at a nearby bakeshop. There was always a panhandler in front of the shop; sometimes I gave them the change from my dollar, and sometimes not.
My reasons for giving to panhandlers are always inconsistent. I don’t really think it’s an effective form of helping. I think that institutions that feed and shelter the poor do a much better job of serving them than my nickel-and-dime endowments, so I don’t often give to spare-changers. Instead I write checks to food banks.
But sometimes I give change simply because I feel ashamed not to. There was one panhandler near the bakeshop who piqued my curiosity. She held up a sign at the busy intersection I passed on my way home. Her name was Laurie. She had a black lab that she found as a stray who was always with her. She seemed pretty together to me, never drunk or high, and she didn’t seem crazy. She had been pretty once before the sun and wind did a number on her face. I wondered what brought someone like her to the street, but I never got the chance to talk to her in depth. Unlike the other panhandlers near the bakeshop who were poor but not homeless, I think Laurie was indeed homeless—she always had baggage stashed nearby.
We had a bitter winter one December—by Bay Area standards anyway. An artic cold front took the lives of several street people that year. I worried about Laurie when I saw her. I thought about the check I was going to write to the food bank that month and I wondered if any of it would trickle down to her. A lot of homeless people have dogs. I called the food bank and asked them if they accepted donations of pet food. They said no, they passed those donations on to animal shelters. I think that’s what gave me the idea for Laurie’s care package.
The food bank didn’t get a check from me that Christmas. Instead I gave a lot of thought to what I would need if I were suddenly put out of my house, and then I went on a shopping spree for those items. Lotion for face and hands in cold weather is a must. Guessing at Laurie’s sizes, I bought socks and underwear and gloves. A bar of soap, maxi pads, deodorant, and baby wipes. A toothbrush and toothpaste. A bunch of fresh fruit, nuts, and non-perishable food. Lots of kibble. I had a pocket knife that I’d received from a Secret Santa. It was a good knife, but I already had a better one, so I gift-wrapped it in a new bandana. I was ready for my mission.
I gave Laurie the bags the next evening on my way home. She was ecstatic and she hugged me, and I immediately felt ashamed of myself for worrying about lice. As I drove away and watched her in my rear-view mirror, I saw another fellow join her from the bushes. She handed him an orange. I was moved that someone who had even less than I did took an opportunity to share when she had something to give.
When I saw Laurie again a couple of weeks later, she waved my car over. She was wearing the gloves from my care package, and she pulled down the waist of her pants to show me that she was wearing the underwear too. She shouted, “Hey thanks for this pocket knife! This is the best—I use it every day!”
This is a troubling time of year for me. I have strong feelings of guilt and sadness associated with exchanging gifts, and those feelings often overpower the fun that should be inherent in giving to others. Most of the stuff I gave Laurie was pretty meager, and yet it was the one time I gave something that left me thinking, Finally, I managed to get someone the right thing.
And dang, it was fun. | | | | 90 Views | 14 Thumbs Up | 7 Comments | |
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| | The Rejection of the Gift Horse | | | Thursday, December 18, 2008 (6:17 PM)
(I'm feeling remorseful) | | Until I was five, people could be divided into two categories: grownups and children. But at five, I became aware that there were actually three groups: grownups, little kids, and big kids. I was a little kid. Chris W. who lived down the street was eleven—a big kid. Chris was the only big kid in my neighborhood who paid attention to me. In return, I adored him.
In the autumn before I turned six, Chris had his garage fully occupied with two construction projects. He was building go-carts for an upcoming neighborhood race. He had already built his first one, and having realized all the ways he could have made it better, he started working on an improved model. Anytime I saw Chris doing stuff, I wanted to be around him. He never treated me like I was a pest though. Sometimes when he saw me outside, he would ask me if I wanted to come to the garage and be his helper. He would ask me to hold a hammer or hand him jars of screws, and he always made a big deal out of what a good helper I was. One time when I’d “helped” him for an entire Saturday, he paid me fifteen cents for my labor. Fifteen cents was a fortune, the equivalent of birthday money. Another time he paid me with a Coke that I didn’t have to share with anybody.
One day when I wasn’t there, Chris had an accident with something flammable. His right leg was seriously burned and he spent a day in the hospital. When he came home, he had to cut the leg off a pair of pants so that clothing wouldn’t come into contact with his burns. Although I realize now that they were only second-degree burns, I was shocked and sickened by the appearance of his burned skin. “You don’t have to hang around if you don’t want,” he said, “or if you do, you don’t have to look at me. I understand.” I stared at his leg for a long time until I got used to it, and then I went back to my important work of holding the hammer.
Over the weeks, I watched the second go-cart take shape. The first go-cart had a seat constructed over a primitive wooden chassis and the front wheels were steered with ropes. It was a clumsy design. The second car had a more elevated seat and the distance between the seat and the wheels was shorter, so that the wheels could be steered with the feet, a vast ergonomic improvement. Best of all, the front wheels had a big housing over them, so that the feet and legs of the driver would have some protection in the event of a crash. The final step was painting it, and here Chris made me feel as though my help was invaluable.
The go-cart was finished in November. On the morning of my sixth birthday, Chris knocked on our front door and told my father he had something special for me. I was very excited about the prospect of an unexpected present. When I came to the door, Chris stood back and made a Vanna White flourish towards the newly constructed go-cart parked by the porch as he said, “It’s for you! All this time, I was making it for you.” I don’t know what I was hoping it would be, but I was disappointed that it was the go-cart.
I said, “But I don’t want it, Chris.” He said, “You don't? But you said it was so neat.” I said, “I did think it was neat, for you. But it’s a boy’s toy. I don’t want a go-cart.” My father asked me in a stern tone, “Are you sure about that? Chris went to an awful lot of trouble to make this for you.” I said I was sure. My father turned to Chris and said, “I don’t know what to say, Chris. I’m sorry about this.” Chris said it was okay and he left—looking sad, I thought.
As soon as Chris was out of earshot, my father slammed the door and said, “I’m mighty disappointed in you, young lady. You should have taken the go-cart whether you wanted it or not and pretended to be happy about it.” “But why take something I don’t want?” I asked. He said, “Because that’s what you do when someone gives you a present. It’s rude not to accept it, and it hurts peoples’ feelings when you don’t. You just hurt Chris’s feelings pretty bad.”
This devastated me. I knew what hurt feelings felt like. And now I’d made Chris feel that way. I cried, but my father wasn’t sympathetic. “Now you know” he said, and he walked away, pissed.
Huntington’s Disease ran in Chris’s family, and I have a strong feeling in my gut that Chris is no longer in this world. I wish that he were because I would love to thank him now for the go-cart, and even more for all the hours he spent with me, making me feel like I was somebody important. I guess all children learn the etiquette surrounding gifts somehow, hopefully without making my stupendous blunder. It was one of the most painful lessons I ever learned. I would give anything now not to have learned it at Chris’s expense. | | | | 92 Views | 12 Thumbs Up | 6 Comments | |
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| | The Best Gift EVER! | | | Tuesday, December 16, 2008 (9:02 PM)
(I'm feeling gloomy) | | The best gift I ever received was a talking toy chimpanzee called Chester O'Chimp. He was manufactured by Mattel in 1964, but I felt certain that Santa's elves would have no trouble making an excellent knock-off. Chester was about the size of a baby chimp, and when you pulled a string on his back, his rubber lips moved while he said any one of a dozen wise cracks. Santa really came through for me that year, big time. I loved Chester for a solid two or three years. I have not received any kind of gift since then that made me so exquisitely happy, and I cannot imagine that I ever will.
I have been asking friends this two-part question lately: What was the best gift you ever received? Without fail, every one of them has answered about something they received for Christmas in childhood: a bike, a Big Wheel, a BB gun, a skateboard. The follow-up question was this: If you received a Lexus for Christmas this year, would it top the joy you felt when you got that bike, that BB gun, etc?
And the answer to that has also been consistent: a flat "no."
These inquiries were inspired by recent TV ads for Lexus. Few things would cause me so much stress at Christmas as receiving an item as grandiose as a car. For many people, myself included, the holidays are a depressing time. These ads have caused me to question why I feel such a lack of enthusiasm for gift giving. Why were presents such a source of delight for me when I was a child, while now they steal my joy and make me see giving as a chore?
I think the joy-stealer of Christmas gift giving is this: The custom isn’t really about giving, it’s about exchanging. For children, especially for tikes of the believe-in-Santa age, gift giving is not a reciprocal obligation. Gifts are given to young children with no expectation that they must return the gesture. To young children, presents simply come to them like the bounty of the universe, no questions asked. But when children become old enough to participate in the reciprocal aspect of giving, it gets painfully complicated. What kind of gift someone gives to another at Christmas is weighted and twisted with all kinds of implications that often don't have a damn thing to do with love or charity or generosity, but have everything to do with social class, the income of both parties, the status of the relationship, social obligations, and big heaping doses of guilt.
No matter how much people might argue that these considerations don't matter to them as recipients, most of us feel the onerous responsibility to give just the right thing. We all know that a gift should be equal to or perhaps greater in value than what we received from the giver last year. The size and value of the gift says something about the status of your relationship, so you must be careful that your gift doesn't say too much, too little, or something altogether inappropriate about your feelings. Generic or non-personal gifts can reveal how little you know or pay attention to the receiver and can cause hurt feelings. Some gifts must reflect your class or your station, especially gifts between work colleagues. And the only thing worse than giving someone the wrong thing is getting caught unprepared and empty-handed when you receive a gift from someone to whom you hadn’t planned on giving a gift.
How different this is from other gift-giving occasions, like birthdays, that don't involve an exchange. The tradition of Christmas gift-giving was inspired, after all, by gifts that travelers brought to celebrate the birth of a child, a child who did not have to fret about being empty-handed and whether he had time to sneak out to Target while his guests were having coffee. It's so much more joyful to give or receive a gift without expectation of return. No gift is without strings, but if gifts can be received without being entangled in a Jacob's ladder of binding obligation, it sure is a step back to that time when I could hug Chester in my arms and be happy because getting him meant that Santa loved me.
All through the holiday season I feel a pervading sadness. Instead of the joy I'm supposed to feel about giving, I instead have doubt that I met all the obligations implied by the bows and the giftwrap. And that is why a Lexus could never top the joy I felt in receiving a stuffed toy animal.
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| | Pink Flamingo Funeral | | | | Monday, October 27, 2008 (10:20 AM) | | When my sister and I were kids, we used to play a mean trick on my brother. When he slept, he was dead to the world, as the saying goes, and when he slept late in the morning or took a nap on the couch, we used to sneak up on him with a Flair felt pen and draw a moustache and beard on him while he slept. We took many photographs of ourselves doing this. To this day, I still chuckle out loud when I come across one of them. I suppose it was the equivalent of drunken college kids shaving the eyebrows off their passed out buddies.
I admit that Peacenik and I have a sense of humor that most people find distasteful. I prefer to call it irreverent. For my mother’s funeral 20 years ago, my mother had requested that two of her favorite songs of renewal be played. One was Cat Steven’s “Morning Has Broken.” Unfortunately, the tape that we had provided to the funeral director wouldn’t play, and we experienced a frantic moment when a planned event goes awry. Did we have another selection we could substitute at the last minute? I suggested out loud that Dr. Demento’s “Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun” was available. My sister and I got a great laugh out of it. No one else thinks we’re funny.
At my brother’s funeral last week, a large bouquet of flowers rested on his coffin. The bouquet was topped with a stuffed pink flamingo. Seeing it made me recall that my brother’s son had sent me a photograph of my brother a couple of years ago. My brother was sitting with his beautiful white German shepherd in a room where both were surrounded with pink flamingos of every size and material. I later asked my brother about them on the phone but he changed the subject.
So I asked my nephew what the pink flamingo was about. “Torment,” he said succinctly. “Explain,” I ordered with equal succinctness. My nephew: “For years he’s been bitching about the pink flamingos in the neighbor’s yard. So for years, just to torment him, he’s been getting pink flamingos from us on birthdays and Christmases. The one on his coffin is Mom’s parting shot.”
My brother could always take a joke at his own expense. He would have approved.
But Tina, my sister’s old friend who sat in the second row behind us, did not approve when I passed the explanation on to her. “I think that’s the most horrible thing a person could do at a funeral,” she said to me. “Oh, believe me, it’s not the most horrible,” I said. Then she looked at me and said, “Oh you’re right. I’m sure you and your sister could come up with worse!”
Open casket funerals are weird to me. I’ve been to three of them now. The deceased doesn’t really look deceased, nor do they look like they’re eternally “sleeping,” as my brother’s pastor suggested we think of my brother. They look like wax museum sculptures, and they feel as cold and hard as wood. I looked at my brother and I could not keep my mind off all I had learned from watching “Six Feet Under,” a show whose tone of humor was drawn from my very soul. I knew my brother’s eyelids and lips had been glued closed, and a concealed wire probably kept his arms together so that his hands would stay on his chest in a pose of eternal rest. The funeral director had left his scruffy after-chemo beard and moustache intact.
Otherwise, I would have gotten out a Flair pen. | | | | 105 Views | 14 Thumbs Up | 7 Comments | |
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| | Jägermeister | | | Saturday, October 18, 2008 (5:42 PM)
(I'm feeling nostalgic) | |
Taking a cue from Count2a1000, this is another silly blog for SillyLeslie to cheer her up.
When I went back to college in the early 90s to finish my education, the music of choice among my younger peers was Seattle grunge and their drink of choice was Jägermeister. I got introduced to Jägermeister myself right after I graduated. I won free tickets to a concert from a San Francisco radio station and took a couple of friends. It would have been nice to get some kind of buzz that night but I was poor. The Warfield Theater has a bar near the balcony where my friends and I were sitting. I only had four dollars--enough for one drink. "What kind of alcohol would get me the most buzzed on one drink?" I asked them. "JAGERMEISTER," they said in unison. They were right. The Jäger did its trick, and it tasted.... well, you either love it or you hate it. I loved it.
A couple of years after that, I was still poor. I was working as a darkroom technician in a custom photography lab, making exhibition quality prints for artists and commercial photographers. It was very stressful work with deadlines that fell on the half hour, and the clientele was demanding and brought their emotions to bear when they were anything but ecstatic with my work. During that period of my life, I felt an intense need to decompress when I got home. I somehow made room in my tight budget to buy one bottle of Jägermeister at Trader Joe's each month. This afforded me with one, sometimes two Jäger shots on weeknights after work. It really took the edge off.
The problem with this was, Trader Joe's, which had the cheapest price on Jägermeister anywhere that I could find it, sold it only in a gift box that came with two little shot glasses. Which meant that every month, I would acquire two more little shot glasses that ended up in my cupboard. After just a year and a half of working at that job, I accumulated three DOZEN little Jäger shot glasses. I didn't know what to do with them. I couldn't give them away, and drinking glasses are not recyclable. It kills me to put a usable item in the trash.
So I stopped buying Jägermeister when I had no more room to store the shot glasses. Besides, I found out eventually that sipping chamomile tea while listening to the Red House Painters does the same trick for me anyway.
A couple of years ago, I had kind of a nostalgic yen to have some Jägermeister again. I was buying a bottle at the cash register at Trader Joe's. The young cashier held up the bottle like she was examing the label of a good wine. She said, "Ah, Jägermeister! I threw back more bottles of this during my college days than I care to remember..."
Then she gave me my total as she was putting the bottle in the bag with my other groceries, and she added, "...but unfortunately, those little shot glasses tell the whole story." | | | | 124 Views | 20 Thumbs Up | 11 Comments | |
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| | The Waiting | | | Friday, October 10, 2008 (12:50 PM)
(I'm feeling suspended in time.) | | My first experience with waiting, true waiting, that vigilant, marking of time while waiting for the inevitable, was this: I am thirteen years old, fidgeting with my sister in a doctor’s waiting room, waiting for our parents to come out of the examination room with our younger brother, who is nine. It was a late afternoon appointment, but now the office is closed for the day, it is dark outside, long past dinnertime. An office cleaner comes in to empty wastebaskets and tidy. As she wipes a counter, she looks at me and says, “Still waiting, honey?” I say yes. She says, “Waiting is good. It teaches you patience.” I’ve been visiting this office every day lately, watching this woman with her dust rag.
My brother had finished a season of Little League baseball not long before this appointment. He wasn’t a good player, and his playing became worse as the season progressed. He mentioned that his leg hurt after the games, and in his final game, he limped around the outfield. A couple of doctors at Kaiser saw him and dismissed his condition as “growing pains.” Then one Saturday morning, my brother got up early to watch cartoons. Hours later, my mother told him it was time to get off the couch, get dressed, and go out to play. He said, “I can’t get up. I can’t move my legs.”
My parents wasted no time in high-tailing him to a specialist in children’s orthopedics. After a consultation with the doctor, my brother was placed in a wheelchair and taken to some other floor of the building for x-rays. Then we waited some more until the doctor called him and my parents back for another consultation. It was lengthy. My sister and I heard crying. We knew it was bad. And it was taking forever for them to come out of that room as it got later and darker. I was trying to read a book about evolution, but I couldn’t read. I kept staring at an illustration of the physical progress of humankind from some kind of small ape to something larger, more erect, and presumably smarter. I could make sense of nothing but the ticking of the clock.
My brother was diagnosed that evening with a serious but treatable childhood bone disease. He would have to wear an uncomfortable brace for some years to come, but his leg and hip would heal and he would be able to walk again eventually, which he did. Until recently, anyway.
He can still walk, but not very far now. Since he stopped his cancer treatment, he hasn’t left his house. He is so emaciated, he tells me, that there is no comfortable position for him, and he needs to shift from sitting to lying to sitting again every ten minutes or so. One lung is occluded, and every breath hurts, but there is a moment without pain between each breath when he has relief. “But other than that,” he tells me, “I feel pretty good. I can’t complain.” I always laugh out loud at the irony of it. He knows I crave hearing him say that, even though we both know it is a lie.
So I spend a lot of time back in that waiting room these days. The world outside my head revolves around me, but in a recess of my mind it is 1970 and I am staring at line drawings of hominids and watching a woman polishing a counter. I am waiting for The Call, the call that, statistics say, will come in the middle of the night, and that will tell me The Waiting is over. Waiting for that call, watching the second hand leave a noiseless interval between each tick, an interval between breaths when my brother doesn’t hurt, is not teaching me patience. It never has. | | | | 104 Views | 12 Thumbs Up | 6 Comments | |
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| | My Contacts | | | Sunday, September 28, 2008 (10:23 PM)
(I'm feeling responsible.) | | At the suggestion of LVbianSynic (Syd), in response to her vlog of September 28, 2008 entitled "Katsknoll and Chig," I am posting some contacts here who will be able to provide information to other LVdians about my wellbeing should a lengthy amount of time pass since my last log-in.
Peacenik (my sister)
SillyLeslie (my good friend)
ArtGirl86 also knows how to track me down.
With kind appreciation to anyone who would notice my absence,
Robin | | | | 123 Views | 8 Thumbs Up | 4 Comments | |
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