The Last Good Day Of The Year

 

Last day

It's the last day of the year, and I've gotten up relatively early and made myself a cup of Irish Breakfast Tea. I'm not really a tea drinker. It seems to have arrived with the new kitchen floor. The birth of civilization. When it was a torn and filthy vinyl sheet, Thunderbird was the beverage most apropos. 

I'm thankful for this year's home improvements. Thankful, also, for getting out of management in a soulless and sick health care delivery system. Grateful for several experiences that shined a light on my life and my history and inspired some long overdue changes. I'm grateful for my family, its health and its resilience. I'm grateful for a couple of distant voices who I think of as friends. 

Thankful and grateful but not attached. I won't walk the tracks this year behind a long-gone train. I can let it go. Thank you and goodbye, good year. 

The other day, while my car was up on the lift being operated on, I took a walk into the large fenced in area that once contained Rutland Heights State Hospital. It was closed for good back in the early 1990's  and the buildings were all torn down sometime in the interim. There are plans in effect to build a "lifestyle community" there now. One man was working on a bulldozer packing and leveling dirt into a buildable surface. The only thing remaining of the old state hospital was a rusted metal flag pole. 

There were a number of giant haunted oaks; a sinister-seeming, man-made pond; an upended wishing well made of stones imbedded in concrete; and a pile of broken sewage pipes installed in the late 1800's. The hospital had originally been a rural tuberculosis sanatorium in which a great deal of academic research was conducted. It was repurposed in the 1960's when TB had calmed down and new maladies had arisen to badger the people. Part of it became a hospital for the treatment of alcoholics. My father entered that program as a patient, following a family intervention involving my mother and both sets of parents, a few days before Christmas in 1972. He died there that very same night. He was thirty years old. I was six. Since it's been kind of a year of perceived spiritual growth for me, I wondered if I might be able to sense his presence while walking in there. 

I couldn't feel you there. Could you feel me? You know, I've still got a lot of questions. Six year olds don't really get satisfactory answers. Did you suffer? Were you afraid? Did you think about us? Was there time for feeling and thinking and remembering? 

My mother said she'd found a little blood in the sheets at home after you'd gone. A nurse friend of mine speculated that maybe it was esophageal varices. You were very thin and jaundiced. I'd been told you died of cirrhosis which is something that blows a lot of peoples' minds on account of your youth. To be completely honest, I've often wondered if you killed yourself there. If you did, I'm not mad about it now. I've always imagined you suffering something no one else knew or understood. Alone. That's the part that hurts most to imagine. 

Anyway, we have this weird town of Rutland in common. You came here, unplanned, without your young family, to die. I came here, unplanned, with my young family, to live. In the last twenty-five years, I've never really thought about that.

Dinner plans

Wow, I did a lot of sleeping last night. Might have been related to the two mezcal margaritas I had for dinner along with some barilla tacos. 

My car was finished by about 3:30 PM after having two tires and a snapped tie rod replaced and the wheels realigned (to the extent that it's still possible). Well, I've got two new front tires to face the winter with, if it ever decides to come to Massachusetts. No snow or ice here yet. That car has traveled 413,000 miles with me so far though. The fenders are rusted out and covered in gorilla tape, the bumpers are cracked, the roof is dented in, the arthritic door hinges make strange sounds as they open and close, the motor runs on just two cylinders and burns so much oil I no longer have to get it changed. It won't pass inspection anymore. The mechanic, as he was charging me $536, told me I ought to write a letter to Hyundai. None of them go that far, he said. 

I drove over to the next town to obtain a signature on a Health Care Savings Account form that will enable reimbursement of the six hundred dollars I paid out of pocket for two pairs of glasses. One of them has  what was described as three-stage progressive lenses. The top part of the lense is for distance, the middle is for looking at computer screens, and the bottom is for reading. If I can master them, it will save me having to constantly take them off and put them on based on the vision demands thrust upon me at any given moment. The optometrist was suffering a barrage of hiccups but she signed the form without question.

The Mexican place was next door. It was a little early for dinner, but I figured it wouldn't be crowded. I sat  at one of the corners of the three-sided square bar. There weren't too many people there. I started with a beer. A man came in, calculated a safe and appropriate distance from me, and selected a stool leaving two unoccupied between us. My initial reaction to him was one of mild dislike. A woman came in and joined him. I liked her better. Something about her face. I'd guess they were both in their forties, but I'm getting less accurate with those estimates as I age. Probably has something to do with not wanting to acknowledge the growing distance between us. 

Anyway, I mention this because I kept finding myself staring at the woman. They were far enough away, and the place was sufficiently noisy that I could not hear their conversation, but something held my interest. She was attentive to him. Her eyes seemed to leave him only when she was taking a bite of her salad or a sip of her drink. His back was to me while she was facing in my direction. There was something delicate and exquisite about the bone structure of her face. She noticed me staring more than once and her response was completely neutral. Mostly, I got that way because I'd start thinking and drift off not realizing that I'd left my eyes on her. I was thinking that no one is going to look at me the way she is looking at him anymore. I noticed her caressing his thigh and I liked the man even less. It had not been difficult in my day dream to imagine myself replacing him until I realized that my dreaming was more delusion than possibility. I sat there confused and disoriented for a few minutes, probably still staring. 

There was a man sitting beside me to my left now. 

Any big plans for New Year's Eve? he asked. I realized he was talking to me. 

Not my kind of holiday, I replied. 

Mine either, he said. Just stay home and order Chinese.

How about you? I asked him absently.

Just staying home and ordering Chinese, he said.

I was still watching her. She was looking at him steadily now trying to reassure or convince him of something, I thought. Her red nails were tracing along his thigh a little faster. I experienced a sudden flash of memory. This guy's incredibly unlikeable face staring at the woman I was with from across the bar and the heavy steak knife I had in my hand. 

I thought it was probably a good time to leave. And so, I did.

Fucking Friday

Fucking Friday. 

I had a day off work today so I made a list of concrete objectives I woke up prepared to achieve. I got a little distracted, as I tend to do, and left the house later than planned forgoing an early morning walk in the rain. About five minutes after leaving the house, while wearing a brand new pair of glasses with an updated prescription I'd never driven with before, I got a little too close to where the white line usually is on the right side of the road and dropped my passenger side wheels about 12 inches in the ditch. I pulled out of it but could already feel damage and, sure as shit, in less than a minute, my right front tire had gone flat. I pulled into an elementary school parking lot, knew I didn't have a spare, so called AAA for a tow. There's a garage about a mile from there so I called them in the meantime and ordered a couple of tires. An hour and a half later, the tow truck arrived. I got my car towed to the garage without further incident. The man said he'd call me when it was ready and nonverbally sent me a message to buzz off in the meantime. 

I walked up the hill to a diner in the center of town where I ate biscuits and gravy with eggs over easy and coffee. She had Fox News blaring on the television which made me forget pretty quickly how good the food was. The poisonous backdrop and soundtrack of rural America. They were talking about illegal immigrants. About how they're here to get comfortable living in the tender care of our Democrat led government. About how their presence here enriches the cartels and takes money out of my white, tax paying, pocket. It was a round table discussion intended to sound spontaneous, but all the well rehearsed, endlessly repeated talking points were driven home over and over. How are we so fucking stupid?

I paid the bill and went to a Dunkin' Donuts close by to kill time and to write in my journal. Two women were talking at a nearby table. One of them was getting the short end of the stick in a divorce from a doctor and she was contemplating whether or not to rat him out for prescribing whatever his "patients" wanted. I judged all parties involved harshly, without mercy, and renounced the world yet again. Just then, about ten hyperactive kids from a local residential treatment center came in with an ineffectual staff person and made me wish I'd never left the house today. Solitude becomes taxing, but this thing among people is not any better. I've forgotten how to be. 

Morning report

Listening to the rain this morning and trying to resist the negation. The rivers of New England have been high all year. I wonder where the water will go each time it rains again. Be thankful it's not coming in under the door. We're on the edge of January and it feels like April. I greet the plant who lives with me. Yes, granted, it's not by choice, but it hasn't yet opted for self-murder like the others did. I'm no good with bamboo. I found this one a few Christmases ago sitting in a three inch pot at a CVS pharmacy. We caught each other's eye. I took it home. I gave it the only South facing window in the house - the one that gets the most sun. Eventually, I transplanted it into an eight-inch pot and it took off. It's tall and healthy now. I speak to it often and it seems to improve the quality of the air in that room. I need to walk today or tonight or tomorrow. Feeling a little confined here with my green friend.

While you can

One of those scenarios in which you're asked what advice you'd give to a young person just starting out. Today I'd say, "Young Person, your future will feature no shortage of heartache, heartbreak, hardship, sickness, struggle, loss, grief, and untold other varieties of tragedy. And it all ends with your death. So here's the thing you need to learn to recognize. Learn to recognize when you're not suffering these conditions and seize the fleeting opportunity to celebrate that fact fully. Live as well as you can while you can. Don't manufacture unnecessary suffering." That's what I'd say.  Just chill, maybe. 

Neither hot or cold really

It was a regular work-from-home day - chasing insurance authorizations and conducting crisis evaluations via telehealth. An overflowing Emergency Department. People who held out through the holidays are now collapsing. Between calls, I lift some dumbbells; take out the trash; clean up the kitchen; check the basement for usable primer, spackle, rollers and trays. Most of what was liquid when I bought it years ago has solidified. I'm planning a small painting project. Goldfinch yellow, I'm thinking, for the hallway. Something bright. I need to attach a doorbell to the wires sticking out of the wall, put a cover over the bare light bulbs, and when was the last time anyone changed the batteries in the smoke detector? I aim to apply for an updated passport this week too. 

Salvage

Christmas. Today, I'll have dinner with my brother, his wife, their three daughters, my sister, and my mother. I'll bring a shrimp wheel and wine. I got to spend yesterday with my kids and my daughter's boyfriend. I should say, I got to enjoy yesterday with them. There's truly something to be said for slowing down and being fully present. There have been many changes during this last year. Some of them were difficult. None of them do I regret. I heard Silent Night on the car radio on the way home alone last night. I was thinking of the people I love. It was the first time I'd heard that song this Christmas season. And I felt as though I'd actually heard it properly.

Eve

7 AM and the light is slowly rising. I've got laundry to do. It's Christmas Eve. Linking up with the kids today to exchange gifts, have dinner, maybe catch a movie. By working from home, avoiding most media, and not interacting with many people this season, I've managed to sidestep the sickened saturation with the commercial aspects of Christmas I normally experience by now. As a result, there's little, if any, anxiety attached to the day. Hallelujah. 

So as not to sink

To linger in bed after waking beside someone you love in a particular way can be heavenly. No matter how long that person stays there with you, it's not long enough. How rare a thing that is. 

To linger in bed after waking alone feels different. It can be a relaxed and comfortable experience to be sure, but there's always this feeling that what belongs there is absent. The best you can do, I have found, is to adjust the volume control on that feeling. Maybe it's best not to linger too long. 

Getting the kitchen floor fixed seems to have freed something up. Energy. Flow. Life. Like removing a dam from a river or a grape from an obstructed airway. It's a trickle though not a torrent. Don't get too crazy. My blood is moving within my body though, and I'm breathing again. A parallel process is taking place inside my house. 

The spice cabinet. I threw out the curry powder that was best used 20 years ago. The ten year old green tea bags. A small bottle of Tabasco, never opened, that expired in 2017. And then the OTC medications, all expired for just as long. I pour one thousand pills out of plastic containers into a plastic bag and got it out of my house. I notice the partially painted walls and remember the sensation of dropping dead before the work was completed. How long ago was that?

Perceived

This morning I realized I live just about 10,000 steps from the farm I grew up on. I walked there earlier while my watch was apparently counting my footsteps. It was colder than I expected, but the walking warmed me. I always new it was geographically close, but there were obstacles and impediments between there and where I lay my remembering head that made it seem more distant than it actually is. I'm glad to say that some of those have been removed before it grew too late for it to matter.

Pretty darn okay

They returned and finished up the grout today. I now have a serviceable kitchen and that feels pretty good. I don't really feel that great myself, and the longest night of the year has descended upon us, but I do have to admit that a couple of things have gone my way lately. There's not much to complain about right now. Go to sleep now and don't worry about the rest of it. 

Renovation

Jose and his protege arrived this morning at around 9:30. By 5:00, they'd installed the kitchen floor and placed all the backsplash tiles. Tomorrow they'll return to grout it. I can't say I've ever really been house proud but, as of today, I can say I'm no longer house ashamed. Thank you, men. 

And thank you, Lady. 

Current events

Jose's coming tomorrow to fix my torn and filthy kitchen floor. I haven't had a single guest in this house for the last seven years. The kitchen floor isn't the only reason for that but, after tomorrow, there will be one less. 

Lately I've been housebound mostly - letting my hair grow, not shaving my chin, not talking to people, not watching television, not listening to the radio. I have been scrolling some and reading the headlines on my browser's home page. I feel like whenever I leave the house now, I should be purifying myself first, making myself clean, because when I go out there I am offering myself up for murder. One of these days it will be my turn. Always put on clean underwear before you go out, they warned me.

Task

Unsticking myself in some aspects of life. I've been looking at this unsightly problem for years now in a state of paralysis. Today, I took a step toward it and found that I can afford to have it remedied by the end of the week. Be concrete, damn it. 

Echo

I was just remembering how there was a period of time when I could feel your thoughts and emotions shifting when we were apart. It was almost like hearing a distant echo. I knew whose voice it was, but couldn't quite make out the words. This sensation would fill me with joy or with terror. I'd either start to fly or I'd plummet from a great height. The core issue of loss was activated. The loss of love. As a result, falling in love knowingly is a sort of suicide pact. And after the inevitable loss, the ending of the relationship, comes grief and a sort of inner devastation. You live in memories not in life. You love in memory in the close and constant proximity of grief. After a while you cannot distinguish between the two and you come to believe grief is the one you love. Because you are in love with grief now, you can't find your way back to actual love. Real love with a real person flows in both directions. This is something you should try to keep in mind. 

Hike

It's heavy work carrying my body, my boots, a thirty-five pound backpack and this leaden head over roots and rocks and slippery leaves, but it helps clear my mind and circulate my chemistry.

Erase

A point of reference. A rallying point, an X marked on a map, a set of coordinates - the place to which you will return or hope to arrive at some future time. There has been, will be, something waiting for you there. 

A photograph of someone kept in your wallet, in a locket, on your phone, or preserved carefully in your mind's eye may serve a similar purpose. 

But who are you without these things? What will you do when there is no one waiting for you anywhere? Where will you go when no place represented on any map has meaning to you?

I dreamed of walking up over the top of a mountain at night. Once over the crest, I could see the glow of a campfire against the rock walls below. I knew that in a few minutes I would emerge from solitary darkness into a community of light. It was just a glimpse, but it felt like coming home. A sacred beautiful feeling. That was a long time ago.

Recommendation

After you've made the transition from speaking out of your mouth to others to speaking mostly in your head to yourself and you find yourself wanting to communicate something to someone else, I'd really recommend saying whatever it is you've got to say out loud first, to yourself, before you say it out loud to that certain someone else or you might find yourself coming off as a little nuts.

Pitfallen

I realize, at some point, you might have to fabricate something to look forward to. I've also almost realized that there's actually plenty to do. I'm just procrastinating on doing much of it. Time to focus more on doing concrete tasks, and less on feeling, remembering, and, let's face it, wallowing. Wallowing is not so different from basking. Each activity has its own particular delights.

Frank sounds like a wise guy trying to be cute when compared to this version of the song. I give you...Tony Bennett.

 

Sinatra's Birthday

 

Dream

Twin faces in a mirror looking out at me as though I were the mere reflection. Two different faces in nearly identical dress. Neither face was mine.

Nashoba

The representative haled from Oregon so she wasn't familiar with the Native American names which are so much a part of the geography of New England. The names still remain, only rarely considered.

After a few

Alcohol. A disinhibitor, social lubricant, and alibi for over-the-top verbal pronouncements and behavior. Opening the windows and letting the pent up air flow both out and in. I remember when and ache. Tonight, a warm wind is blowing, feeling like it's early May, here and now, in December, with all that Spring-time lonesome hope and remote possibility. A night for desperate lovers. And holiness.

Shane MacGowan

 

Scattershot

 If I could focus, I tell you, I'd be a dangerous man. Half the day has already slipped away during which I thought about scheduling an eye exam and getting new glasses after my sole pair disintegrated yesterday but got side tracked into transferring all the dirty dishes from the sink and counters into the dishwasher and running it during which I remembered the 800 page Russel Banks novel in my laundry basket that I took from the shelf of my favorite 1970's era laundromat yesterday and that led to making coffee and reading (this is book number eight that I'm reading simultaneously) and reheating my coffee several times while reading and texting my sons who are both busy today then re-reading the last page of what I had just read but couldn't remember during which time I started imagining the Adirondacks and walking in and writing about the mountains and then realized it's a nice day and I should get outside while wondering where I left my passport application which I started filling out over a year ago. Then I sat down to write this in the hopes of getting it out of my system. 

Later, I walked for a couple of hours. Quietly, through the brown wood under gray skies on a carpet of dead leaves. Occasionally, I'd feel a single silky strand of a spider's web strung like a high tripwire across the trail. I brought some ticks home too. December's not as cold as it used to be here. The woods did me a lot of good. Quiet, except for the infrequent sound of birds - chickadees, a woodpecker sounding the alarm, a single honk from a Canada goose - and the brook's water gurgling over stones and logs. I stopped several times to listen and to feel. Rejuvenation. I began with a plan to walk a certain path but found myself deviating each time another one revealed itself. One could say I seem lost, but I don't think so. I know quite well where I am. It's where I want to go.

Errand Day

I'm taking some time out to boil a shirt in water and vinegar right now. I'm quite sure I've never boiled a shirt in vinegar-water before, and I'm enjoying the process. It's a mock turtleneck I earned running the Marine Corps. Marathon about 20 years ago in bad shoes with an injured IT band. It was my first Marathon, and my hair was still dark then. There were something like 30,000 runners in that race through Washington DC and many thousands of spectators cheering along the route. I didn't know enough about running marathons to know that runners often write their names on their race bibs so the spectators can cheer them on. I got into the race by raising a small amount of money for St. Jude's Children's Hospital. In return, they gave me a singlet with their name on it which I wore in the race. "Go, Saint Jude!" people were yelling at me. After a while, limping and suffering, I internalized that identify. I began blessing people, laying hands upon them, as I ran by. Saint Jude is the patron saint of the lost cause and the hopeless case. He's always been close to my heart for that reason. It takes a stimulus of some kind to make a person take up distance running. Sometimes it's to keep from drowning.

Perspective

One of those doldrum kind of days. A kind of internal dullness - bleak and drowsy. This morning was cold, down in the teens, and kind of invigorating for a moment. My mother told me she's realizing how much we need contact with other people. She's only about half way through her quarantine and not enjoying it at all. Of course, that led me to wonder what the matter is with me. I avoid people mostly. Small doses, for me, work better. I'm prone to overdose in situations that seem to be pleasantly social for others. About once a decade I meet someone I wish I could spend more time with. I'm about due. 

On Target

If I could play it on piano, I wouldn't have to try to find the words. And I'm sure it would sound nicer. 

This morning, there was a little magic out there. I earned access to it by staying in the house on the verge of lonesome for a long time and by righting a tipped-over shopping cart in the Target parking lot. Karma going my way, shopping for my mother at 8:15 AM, not many other shoppers, upbeat Christmas music piped in overhead. I haven't overdosed on it this year because I live predominantly in solitary confinement, so it was kind of refreshing. I discovered an African woman dancing in the toothpaste aisle. Caught you, I said. We laughed quietly. Merry Christmas to you, I said. She smiled wide and a smile began inside me too. I felt warmer. 

A few minutes later, when I was picking through candy cane shaped plastic tubes filled with M&M's, a song played. Something like, "I'm Wearing My Stretchy Pants". The first new holiday season song I've heard in years that was any good. My inner smile grew a little brighter. 

And then as I was leaving, I saw a group of developmentally disabled young adults paired up with staff people learning how to grocery shop. One girl looked at me over her shoulder. She'd taken control of the shopping cart and had all the mischief and light in her eyes of a teenage girl about to take a convertible out for a spin for the first time. My smile spread outward and onto my face. 

Outside, light snow flurries were starting to fall. I took a deep breath in.

Quarantine

She said the meals, which she normally enjoys very much, don't taste like anything now that she has to eat them quarantined in her room. The company she normally keeps has a lot to do with her enjoyment. She said she had a moment of insight into how it would feel to be in a nursing home. Alone in a room all the time, no friends, no conversation. Wait a minute, she said. That's how you live. 

Back again

Remdesivir. Three upcoming trips to the hospital this week. Covid isn't vanquished and it's no joke when you're 80. 

Undigested

She'd worked very hard for months to prepare her body and self for a competition. Her dedication and discipline were absolute. And it paid off, she made it happen. She won. She was elated when the announcer called her name. I was too, cheering for her from the audience. I remember her running off the stage and jumping into the arms of her coach, wrapping her arms and legs around him. This funny thing happened just then. I was still cheering and applauding, only now from farther away.

Thought blocking

The way your own brain can torment you with spontaneous horror stories. I've had a rash of them arise recently. I tried not to flinch when they did. Let them come, look at them, and let them go. Don't feed them any of your energy. Still, you can't help but fear that just acknowledging their momentary presence is enough to make them manifest in the world.

Testing

Then comes the set back. Equanimity. I'm practicing.