Category: daily life

Yesterday I was stopped at a traffic light minding my own business, pretty much anyway.  My attention was caught temporarily by a car that was approaching fairly quickly behind me and I looked up into the rear-view mirror for a moment, just to be sure it stopped.  It did.   

It
is true that at times I can feel quite selfish.  When faced with the
prospect of giving up many of the concerts and musical events, of not attending
the summer film festivals and plays, I was sad and somewhat petulant.
 Although I always realized that I was quite lucky to have that life, I
had also come to accept it as a part of my definition my place in the
world.  Accepting that this may no
longer be a part of my life therefore has been difficult.

Now
I always knew that it would not go on forever.  But knowing something
intellectually and dealing with the reality is not necessarily the same thing.
 Still, over the course of the summer I have come to realize how much the
change in routine upsets G and how much more confused he grows when faced with
new situations or too much information. 

That
does not mean that I was not happy that we did indeed manage to make it to part
of the Bard Music Festival this past weekend. In fact, we actually did more
than I had anticipated. And G handled it pretty well.  I believe that listening to the music had a calming effect
that almost overcame the confusion.

Friday
night G surprised me by asking to attend the opening night dinner.  Now we have gone for years, but
previous experience has led me to believe that these events are a bit
overwhelming for G right now so I had planned a simple dinner at home.  Indeed the crowd of patrons, closely
pressed together in a small area for cocktails due to the downpour outdoors was
a bit much for G, but he seemed fairly content to stand in a corner with a
drink watching the hullabaloo from a safe distance.  Luckily he was stationed near the door to the kitchen so he
had access to all the tasty hors d’oeuvres that were making the rounds.  He even managed to muster up a
conversation with his neighbor during dinner, fortunately for us a fellow
physician, as his professional knowledge seems to be the one store he can
reliably call up.

The
concert was very good, mostly chamber music, all by Prokofiev.  G seemed to relax and enjoy the music,
although he had difficulty following the program.  Because the Bard programs are always long (often over 3
hours) we got home late for G and he went right to bed and slept several hours
before beginning his nightly perambulations and agitations.

Saturday
afternoon we went to another concert, this time in a smaller hall, which is
easier for George to navigate.  
I think he slept through various scattered bits, and generally our row
mates were pretty good about just trying to step around or over him as they
tried to get in and out of their seats.   He enjoyed the music very much and occasionally even
commented on how he liked this or that. 
Once again he would have trouble following the program, asking which
piece we had just listened to, or what was being currently performed.  And he would forget who the musicians
were during the brief moments between when they would leave the stage following
a performance and return to take a bow. 
He also had trouble identifying favorite musicians.  For example he has long liked Jeremy
Denk, whom we heard several times Friday and Saturday.  Each time he performed G would ask who
he was and say that he was wonderful and ask why he had never heard him play
before.

Many
of the pieces played on Saturday were by Prokofiev’s contemporaries and
teachers, and several of the pieces were interesting perhaps for appreciating
the atmosphere of the time.  The
Prokofiev pieces, as well as the Stravinsky piano works and the Glazunov string
quintet were fabulous.  I realize
that I was only vaguely aware of Prokofiev as a composer of chamber works, with
the exception of works for solo piano, a situation that needs to be corrected
as I was quite entranced by several works performed.

Sunday became a rather ambitious day for
us.  We attended the afternoon
concert, to which we were almost late because of torrential downpours.  We got into the concert hall, G made a
pit stop and then I was fretting as I was holding the door open while the usher
was trying to close it to start the concert and G would get distracted by
various bits or things that caught his eye as he crossed the lobby.  I felt if I abandoned my grip on the
door we would be shut out, but I was having trouble keeping G’s attention long enough
for him to cross the room.  We did
get to our seats just as the musicians took their seats.

That concert was interesting and lovely,
all woodwind and piano works with a few songs.  I love woodwinds, am particularly fond of the oboe, but have
decided that three hours is a bit too much woodwinds for me.

George enjoyed it enough that he wanted to
go to the evening concert, which really looked fascinating to me. The title of
the program was “The Cult of the Child” and there were many lovely and favored
works to be performed including Satie’s Gymonopedies,
Ravel’s Ma Mere l’oye, and
Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf .

We did not make it through the entire
concert.  In the first half we
heard the Gymonpedies, which were
absolutely lovely, and Poulenc’s  L’histoire de Babar, le petit elephant.  I adored “Babar”.  The piano played by Lucille Chung was
just wonderful and Michael York did the narration.  It was just charming and fun, bringing back memories of
reading Babar as a child, but was also full of wit and humor to listen to as an
adult. 

I had admittedly wanted to attend this
program, partly because I love many of the pieces, and partly because I wanted
to hear Michael York on whom I had a tremendous crush as a teenager.  I did meet him briefly at the dinner on
Friday night, and I knew he was narrating Peter and the Wolf on Sunday.  I had not read the program thoroughly
so was unaware of Babar, much to my surprise and joy since we did not stay for Peter.

Even though we left at the intermission, I was happy to have heard Babar, and
happy to have at least heard part of a concert I would have been sad to
miss.  The concert started at 5:30,
and it was 7 by the time we left at the end of intermission. The day was
already much to long for G.  Had we
stayed I am sure we would not have been out before 8:30 and would not have
eaten until after 9.  As it was G
was in bed by 9, exhausted, allowing me to catch up with the clutter around the
house and watch Mad Men undisturbed, itself a rare pleasure these days.

Few posts of late.  I seem inconsistent in my thoughts, and as usual, in times of mental and emotional unrest, I withdraw.  There has been busyness.  When my mind is in turmoil it calms me to straighten, rearrange, and re-organize the physical accoutrements of life, as if by providing structure in the surroundings I can also calm the inner beast.    Following this burst of restructuring usually comes a period of quiet.  I have been shutting down  and retreating into a world of fiction.  You will note that several volumes have been added to the books read listing, most of them fiction.

I don't know any more than I did before.  Life remains uncertain.  G was so much better following a heart valve replacement in March,  or so he seemed to me.  But now I don't know.  Things are not better now. Was I deceiving myself?  Were things actually better and is something new happening?  Have we only fixed one layer of decline only to find something else under the surface?  Or was this feeling of improvement just a little spark of Indian Summer in the long autumn of life?

Pardon the bad metaphors.

What I see is not encouraging.
    memory issues
    confusion
    poor judgment
    problems with choosing the right word
    problems walking, but they seem more neurological than physical

Is there an identifiable reason or cause?  Is there some kind of relief?

I am struggling to keep everything on an even keel as I also struggle to maintain some sense of my own life, my own interests, my own friends.

I don't know what is happening. I do know that I can't keep this part of my life that is beginning to overwhelm everything else locked up anymore, away from view.  For better or worse this struggle is becoming a part of who I am.

Sometimes it is just the littlest things that push us over the edge.

There I was at 3:30 on a normal day with its normal highlights and frustrations.  I had just left the post office and was crossing the street to the parking lot and my car.  On the right I had my purse over my wrist, my umbrella in my hand and the mail sandwiched between my arm and my coat.  On the left I was balancing a rather large package against my hip.

Midway across the street my umbrella gave up the ghost and collapsed around my head and shoulders, blocking my sight, wet nylon in my mouth, tines entangled in the front of my trench preventing me from easily extricating myself.  Meanwhile I daren’t drop the mail in the middle of the road. 

That was it.

When I got home G was in a tizzy about something but I just ignored him (it would not have been pretty otherwise) and made a cup of hot chocolate.  Reading David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day quickly lifted my spirits.  I hadn’t read Sedaris before,  I was laughing so hard I could hardly stay in my chair.

It was my favorite umbrella too, wouldn’t you know.

I have been out driving late the last three nights and I am being driven to distraction. 

When I was learning to drive, way back in the dark ages apparently, I was taught that one should turn off one’s bright headlights when oncoming cars approached, or when one came to close to another vehicle on the road.  I have always done this, and when someone forgot to turn off their lights, as I too have occasionally done, I would flash them, flipping my high beams on and off, with the expectation that another driver would do the same to me and I would respond, and that the person being flashed would reduce their beams in response.

But lately, more and more people drive with their brights on and do not turn them off.  I live in an area with a great many winding hilly roads without adequate street lamps.  High beams are often a great boon at night, especially as there is a lot of open countryside and a substantial deer population.  But what I am finding is that I dread driving at night because I am often blinded by some oncoming fool’s lights.  Not only do people drive with their high beams on all the time, they don’t turn them down when I flip my brights back at them.  And it is not jut the oncoming traffic.  Another driver was behind me going up to Rhinebeck tonight, following too closely, with his or her high beams on, practically blinding me from behind.  When I got to the wider part of the highway, I gratefully moved to the right hand lane and slowed down just to get this person from behind me and regain my vision before I got into the village itself.

Whatever happened to courteous driving?

And I would think this would go beyond courtesy.  If the driver of an oncoming car is blinded by your headlights he may not be able to see the road or may so be distracted that he swerves directly into the oncoming lights, not intentionally of course.  Has anyone correlated frequency of high beam usage with accident rates?

At some point during the fall we were told "December would be a real winter".  We had snow, snow that actually stayed on the ground for a couple of weeks granting us that fabled "white Christmas" which is actually fairly rare around here.  And then we were told it is basically over, that the rest of the winter will be warmer than average leading into a long cool spring.

Has winter come and gone?  Certainly the beginning of the year has been interesting enough.  2007 ended with 9 inches of snow.  2008 began with another 7 inches of snow.  Then we had a little cold front and on Thursday the temperatures dropped below zero.  I suppose if this is all there is to winter we have still met our average minimum temperature requirements for zone 6 (0 to -10) and so we could let winter rest peacefully.  I can’t say that I would mind if the rest of the winter were mild.

The ground was still frozen solid and covered in snow Saturday morning. By this afternoon large swaths of brown grass and semi-frozen mud have appeared.  Walking to the compost bin requires crossing a combination of hard slippery ice, slush, and wet marshy semi-frozen sodden ground.  Perhaps the muddy season is upon us.  Only time will tell.

It is amazing to me how bitter people get about their own choices in life. 

This morning I checked to a favorite blog to find a link to this article , which I find to be completely tasteless and uncalled-for.  It is not a review, it is just vituperative nastiness.  Yes there is such a thing as freedom of speech (although I am not sure how the persepctive differs in Great Britain as opposed to the United States), and yes we are all entitled to our opinions, and no I don’t believe we have to agree with everything and say everything is good, when it obviously isn’t, but I also keep hoping that we as humans would learn to keep our petty insecurities, resentments, and hates to ourselves.

In the blog in question, the author of the forthcoming book,  Jane Brocket doesn’t tell anyone how to live their lives, she simply shares some of the things that she loves and she does it artfully, gracefully, and with wit and charm.  That she doesn’t care to share the dirty dishwater with her readers is her choice, and we are better for it, as there is more than enough of that kind of thing surrounding us every day.

Although I had read an article about one of the studies on happiness  when Grace  pointed me to it, I never commented.  This was primarily because I was still in my catching-up phase and had not yet gotten up enough energy to resume writing; it was also because this article opens up a whole can of worms about expectations and socialization and what people want from life to which I was really not prepared to devote the necessary time and energy.  Yes, the article I read does seem to imply that women have set their sights too high, and I would argue that  some men might be happier to have relinquished some unpleasant tasks because women have let them do it. Generally society still has a lot of growing pains to get through before we become truly enlightened, if that is even possible. 

But articles like Liz Hunt’s remind me men aren’t the only ones who might need an attitude readjustment.

My neck has been stiff since yesterday – could be a crick, could be the old cervical disk acting up – They tend to start out with a similar discomfort, but I am suspecting it is the cervical disk. I have done some gently exercises for a crick but they don’t make much difference and it seems to be getting worse. Not much to do about it, I had surgery once, I am fused from T1 on down so there is not much more to do, and it is not at this point chronic or unbearable. I am just having trouble keeping my head upright. Of course it is better if I hold my right arm over my head, but that is not a particularly practical position either, although it does help for sleep. With gentle exercise, perhaps a little traction and time all will get better.

I really can’t complain as it hasn’t bothered me all that much of late. But I have to admit that having my own car back has been a godsend. Yesterday I took it in for a new brake light, dropped it off while taking G to chemo with the idea of picking it up later. Ends up I also needed some work on the front end, the right outer tie rod end was going bad so they kept it until this morning. I had planned on running errands in G’s car anyway but it was terrible. I couldn’t bend my neck to get my head in and out of the door, the alignment of the windows is different and I couldn’t turn enough to see out the right side and I couldn’t get the side-view mirror adjusted so I didn’t have to turn to see what was in the next lane. The head rest pressed right on my T1-C7-C6 area and it was quite uncomfortable. Most cars are angled too far forward for me at the headrest so this is not unusual, but by the time I got home I was done for the day.

Biggest annoyance now is that G is grumbling that “he” never had to replace a tie rod end on any car (hard to believe) and if I have it is only because I am a terrible and reckless driver. No matter that there are 85000 miles on the car (it is still a baby). I had to replace them on my old car too, and I am sure he must have, probably more than once, as his old car had over 200k on it before he got the new (2001) car and he doesn’t have enough mileage on this car to have needed to do it yet. Meanwhile he is making me miserable. Just wait…..it is bound to happen, but I shall refrain from taunting him about what a terrible driver he is.

While I was out in the yard this morning (yes I am finally gardening) a cricket must have crawled up my pants leg. I didn’t notice it right away. I thought I felt something at my knee when I came in, shook my leg and it went away and I decided I was being paranoid after yesterday’s experience with the bug running across the McCall’s pattern book at JoAnn Fabrics (sorry I was too grossed out to tell you about that). Then later I felt something at my hip. Well those pants came down very fast and there was the cricket. Yuck. I am still a little skittish.

Well it is hot out now, and my shoulders and neck are sore so it is time to rest. I would like to sew but I am not sure I am up to that yet, or using the iron. I have a cold soup chilling in the refrigerator for lunch with Chicken and Apple sausages. If I am not better later it might be time to rig up the old cervical traction device.

“Despite his title, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; a cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn’t understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife’s body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.

The Secretary of the Interior knew, of course, that there was a brain in his head and that the human brain was Nature’s most magnificent creation. It never occurred to the Secretary of the Interior to wonder why, if the brain, with its webs and cords and stems and ridges and fissures, with its glands and nodes and nerves and lobes and fluids, with its capacity to perceive and analyze and refine and edit and store, with its talent for orchestrating emotions ranging from eye-rolling ecstasy to loose-bowel fear, with its appetite for input and its generosity with output; it never occurred to the Secretary to wonder why the brain, if it is as awesomely magnificent as it purports to be, why the brain would waste its time hanging around inside a head such as his.”

• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins , pp 295-296

More quotes from fiction. Nothing earth shaking, but don’t we all know people like this? I certainly know people like this.

Of course I probably spend too much time plumbing the depths and not enough looking at the surfaces. The surfaces catch me by surprise far too often and I would rather retreat back into my own head.

I can’t say there has been much reading here, obviously I am still slowly making my way through the same book. G came home from the hospital last night and although he is tired and sore and not yet fully up to snuff it is so nice to have him home. Even disturbed sleep, together in our own bed, with interruptions every hour was a relief and I experienced the best sleep I have had in over a week.

Meanwhile, slowly catching up, puttering, and just generally getting through life.

What a relief.