The Furious Spinner

Middle of the night. I can hear the train in the distance. And our hepa fan in the nearer distance. Mario is upstairs asleep. He is over his cold, knock wood, and is sleeping soundly. Me, I'm up. Been a lot sleepless lately. Or sleepless a lot. Middle of the night musings mix up my syntax.

I learned today I should be getting copies of Mercy, Unbound soon from my publisher. That'll be nice. Mario and I talked about which book I might do next. It's hard to think of something else when I'm so cozily ensconced in Church of the Old Mermaids. I feel like I could write about these people forever. That rarely happens with me. I usually tell a story and I'm ready to move on. I may be ready to move on once I finish the rewrite.

I had hopes that things would settle down in my world. Now I'm wondering if life is just a series of crises where you grab onto the moments of peace and hunker down, like nomads in a desert oasis. (Best I can do at 2:00 a.m.) Last week my mom was in the hospital. After a bout with pneumonia etc. she began to deteriorate. Since I had two friends unexpectedly die within days of each other I went into action mode along with my sibs as we encouraged and prodded my father to kick the doctor into gear to find out what was wrong with Mom. He was recovering from pneumonia himself and I can only imagine how exhausting the whole experience was. My mother is 77 years old and had a heart valve replacement last year. They needed to figure out YESTERDAY where the infection was. My father contemplated airlifting her back to Michigan but held off on this when the doc in Scottsdale finally consented to putting her in the hospital. They never figured out what exactly was wrong with her but after several days of fluids and potassium treatments and a multitude of tests, she got better and she was able to go home.

The day after my mom got home, we learned Mario's brother has cancer. It's very treatable, and I'm sure he'll be fine but what a strain on him and his wife, children, and my dear mother in law. I asked a friend if this was what our lives were going to be now: Just one sickness after another. I hope not.

Today I went to Vancouver for my second post-op appointment. In a couple of weeks I'll go for my pre-op and then my op. I'm saying all this because I like saying op. Op, op, op. I think I'm punchy. An hour before the appointment, I took a Tylenol. Two actually. I didn't want to, but it was better than the painkiller I had to take before my last post-op appointment. That pain pill was the worst thing of my entire operatic (or operational) experience. First it made me dizzy. Then sleepy. Then very sick to my stomach. I told you this already, didn't I? It also affected my memory.(Or is it effect? I used to know the difference between those words without thinking. Lately I'm confusing them again. Don't you hate that? It's like the words past and passed. For some reason, I'm always mixing them up. I'll write, "She passed by the house." Then I'll wonder, is it "she past by the house." Now right this minute I'm thinking how could I ever confuse those two? It's so obvious which is right and which is wrong. This from someone who taught college English. Thus you can see why I adore good copyeditors.)

Anyway, I'm babbling. After I got so sick with the painkiller, I said to the doc, "Can't I please just take Tylenol next time if I have to take anything at all?" She agreed, since the painkiller was mostly acetaminophen with just a hint, a modicum, a dizzying puking bit of perc. I don't think I needed either one. It's very strange to take any kind of pain pill period and then to take one before I'm in pain is very bizarre.

Today we drove an hour to get to the doc's. She saw me almost immediately. I like that about her. She held a piece of gauze over my nose and then shot a mist of numbing agent up my nostril. She asked me to hold the gauze just below my nose while she stuck a long lighted instrument up my nose. At least I think it's got a light. I always close my eyes. I don't really need to see that long thing as it comes toward me. Don’t need to imagine it going up my nose. While she did this, I felt a bit of pressure but nothing seriously uncomfortable and nothing painful.

Today she said, "Oh, that one hanging there is like a ripe cherry ready to be plucked." I said, "Okay, doc, go get your scissors. I'm ready to go." She laughed. She said it looked like I was healing nicely, and she saw no reason we couldn't go ahead. She was sorry I was going to have to wait so long. I told her I had tried to bribe the scheduler to no avail. The whole visit with her took about five minutes, tops. We were in the doc's office a total of twenty minutes, and that included check-in time. Not bad.

After the visit, we drove to Portland and did errands. We stopped at the Tao of Tea for dal and rice. (I just mistakenly wrote the Tao of Death. Wonder what that means? Sounds like something Dave would say.) Then we went grocery shopping. Spent an obscene amount of money on food. Partly because it’s my b-day on Saturday and we’re having a small par-tay. We’re using my birthday (Hilaria Day) as an excuse for friend, food, and film.

Okay. Now that I’ve given you a summary of my day, I think I should say something profound so that you don’t get to the end of this and think, “There goes ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back.”

I can’t think of anything profound. Can anyone ever think of something profound? Or does profundity just smack us up side the head and say, “You there! Listen up. I gots something to say.” Maybe not. Tonight I do seem to fixated on how things just happen, seemingly out of the blue. Bad things. Good things. It’s easier on us if we can learn to go with the flow. (And watch out for waterfalls as Sister Sophia Mermaid says.) We need to find happiness and joy where we can. Today I stood in the grocery store talking with a woman about bowls. We both confessed our love of bowls. (You wait, I’ll write a story or book about bowls one of these days.) I searched for the words to explain my love of bowls. I said (quite profoundly, I might add) that bowls were just so, well, round. That's why I liked them. Round and deep. Ah well.

My best bet now is to go to sleep.

The words of Mary Oliver keep bouncing around in my head: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” When I search on the net to find a link for this poem, I discover another poem of hers that I love, Blackwater Woods. It is a reminder I need to hear tonight. Thirty days after Dave died, I think I almost feel his tug at my sleeve (or on my keyboard), urging me to this poem.

Oliver writes, "To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

It’s time for me to try and sleep again.

‘nite, Spinners. ‘nite, Dave.

Labels: Mercy Unbound, Old Mermaids, sleep, surgery

5 comments

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.