The Quiet Room

In the quiet room there is the sound of the oxygen pump and Mark mistakes it for the pattern of Eddy's breathing and worries it is slowing down. We stand around Eddy's bed and pet him, his chest and legs, and his head. Occasionally Mark pets his cheek. At first we don't know what to say and the nurses are there swabbing out his mouth and turning him in the bed and then realizing they need to change his gown that is wet with sweat they ask us to step out and we do. In the common area there is a dog lingering between the water dispenser and an open office and a man comes out and goes in and the dog changes from bored to attentive and then back to bored. People wheel by in wheelchairs wearing socks with grippy pads. Some people sit listening to music, some people just stare. A woman I saw crying at one of the many dining tables one day is today folding clothes, over and over. We go back into the quiet room and continue our petting and stroking and quiet weeping. We talk over Eddy and to Eddy and around Eddy and eventually we put on music and we all sit down and forget about Eddy and then we take turns looking over at him. From where I am sitting I can see his pulse in his neck expanding and contracting against the white white pillow. The lights are low in the quiet room and the decor makes it seem like you are in a cottage at the beach, in Greece. If you were on morphine this would all be believable. You could easily tune out the pumping sound of the oxygen and the sound of the fan and all the sounds coming from the front desk of this vast building filled with other afflicted humans who can no longer care for themselves. You could focus instead on the voices of the people you loved most in this world even if you had no ability to understand what anyone was saying, the pumping sound might register as waves lapping on a distant shore. No one asks questions about how long it will be until we arrive at the place we are all going and the day passes and we come and go from the quiet room, and later in the evening after we have all gone home, Eddy dies. And that is where we are now. This is the day that we knew was coming but we didn't know how and we didn't know when and yet here we are doing exactly what we knew we would need to do.

Long vs Short

The trouble with writing longer posts is that they take time which seems always to be in short supply. Shorter posts are like taking my pulse on any given day and if this blog is what I think it is, a record, then maybe there should be both types. Long thoughtful posts and short quippy ones. I won't sacrifice one for the other. What I worry about of course is that I will discover that I am only interesting in short bursts and when I have time to think about things more thoroughly the results will be akin to eating butterless day old toast. I suppose this is a risk I have to take. At any rate I am being a good girl and reading my book and knitting and going for walks and I have been dreaming like crazy and not waking up suddenly and suspecting I am dead. So that's something, and you heard it here first and it was efficient.

Grocery Store Confessional

I got into one of those random conversations with a near stranger in the local Trader Joe's that got me thinking as I walked away. The cashier was speaking to the customer on line ahead of me. The cashier was confessing her lack of attendance at the gym where the customer worked. I piped up and said I have to admit I have never had a gym membership. It's true I am not a gym person, I go occasionally but not religiously like some, I prefer my long rather meditative walks. The cashier cocked her head and said well you're lucky, you're naturally slim. I scoffed at this a bit and it got me thinking.

I am tall, at over 6 feet, I am 60% leg. I weigh between 182 and 190lbs depending on what season I am in. I do not consider myself slim, in fact I most often see myself as slightly pudgy. In reality I am not fat. I have a round belly but my arms and legs are long and fairly free of fat. I have a flat ass, I can't sit on hard chairs without my it hurting. I recognize that my perception of myself may not accurately reflect my physical reality but maybe that's a good thing. Honestly I try not to think about my body as I find my size sort of freaky.

I am not going to confess an eating disorder here, I don't have one. What I am realizing though is that I don't see food as convenient entertainment, I see it as a necessity and it's preparation an artful practice that is orderly and logical and subject to much control. I am not a faddist. I am trying to maintain a healthy body and I have strict beliefs about how to do that. I have that quote on my fridge and the fridges I frequent, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants". I think before I put things in my mouth and there are many things I simply won't eat any longer. I buy whole foods, meat, cheeses, grains, fruits and vegetables. I have fewer and fewer presto fallback foods. I still get that feeling of wanting something naughty like a doughnut or cake, I generally want the bready or the doughy but if I can just think about it awhile in a rational way I can usually easily dissuade myself from the craving.

Consequently I think a lot about food and what I should eat to keep my intake well balanced and interesting. I have the big picture in my head of what I have generally been eating and what I have eaten on any given day. I carry the macro and the micro view around with me, always weighing the findings. Have I had enough beans or grains, enough cold water fish, too much dairy, too much salt, not enough protein? At the moment I am attempting to train myself away from white flour and sugar which when I went at it hard core before Christmas yielded a 5lb weight loss which was a pleasant side effect. More importantly I noticed that my general anxiety was much less severe because my blood sugar levels were more constant, this is what truly motivates me, a feeling of calm.

I have been accused of being controlling and it's probably true but in a world where we have so little control over most things I feel okay about controlling how I am feeling through diet and exercise. I am less concerned about how I look since my view is fairly distorted anyway it's hard to gauge. If I feel good hopefully I look all right and if my 501's fit me that's ideal. It's funny to realize that others make these assumptions about a person's body. If only that cashier knew that I spend my day weighing and considering what to eat making sure never to have too much, denying myself all sorts of things in the name of physical and emotional enlightenment.

Reading and Writing

My main resolution this year is to read more, a lot more. This will mean fewer meaningless blog posts and much less facebooking (thank christ). I bought a Kindle Fire and among the books I have on it is the title shown above. It's a brick of a book so lends itself well to a digital format. I am well into it and find myself reading late into the night and early in the morning. My mind is trained on the story and the time passes without being distracted by my own random thoughts. It feels great I have to say. It's like learning to breath underwater for extended periods and then before you know it you have developed gills and you stop coming to the surface at all. This is what I want, total immersion.

FYI, my goal for this blog is to write less frequent longer posts. I have to develop my ability to write in a more sustained way and develop an idea fully rather than just flit around here and there. Stay tuned.

Coming in 2012

Am hoping to lend a hand with some set design/construction for this project this Spring. My first foray into the world of theater and set design. Please pledge if you can, every little bit helps.

In conclusion

The three of us, Tofino 2011

Christmas eve, the year is winding down. We're watching videos from the first years Mark and I were together, almost a decade now, I am overwhelmed by the complicated feelings of what is now past and what must lay ahead. Pearl was little, my parents looked younger, my property looked more wild. Time marches on, so do I. Am thinking about the year ahead now and what I would like to accomplish or at least inch myself toward. More writing, less slacking. Better eating, more moving around. More reading, more learning, greater understanding. More time with those I love, less time worrying about the things I have no control over. Maybe some surfing, certainly more walking and bike riding, better knitting, more complicated sewing, greater ease.

2011 was fine. I met some goals, wrote more words, raised and butchered the chickens, let a few things go, welcomed a new life. It was all good, another year filled with good memories, small trips. It's an extraordinary life this and I have learned to be kind to myself and those around me, so I will continue to do as I have done and move incrementally toward the person I want to be.

Cheers to you and yours. See you on the flipside.

Saturday with the folks

I guess it's in the air. Everyone's parents are getting old, failing and decrepit. Our roles as parents and children are crossing over one another at the dividing line. We make suggestions and come up with solutions, shouting them from where we stand, our minds and bodies still keeping pace, mostly. Saturdays we visit Eddy first, now in care, it's depressing. We stay a shamefully short amount of time, but how long can you sit watching someone sleep? We move west to the city and see my dad, now 84 and his wife. My parents I say and pause, my mother is dead. My stepmother, now my only female parent has Alzheimers or some other dementia-like disease, and my father are the parents of record. They are one unit, bound tighter now that she is dependent on him entirely and he is more dependent on us, our open arms, palms raised up offering help with anything, everything. We eat lunch with them, bake cookies, clean up here and there. We are jovial and encouraging, helping her with the words she can no longer connect with, seeing that he is not becoming overwhelmed with this new position of care giving he has been thrust into. After a time we go outside with him discreetly and discuss things that need to be discussed while the dogs pull and sniff around the block that surrounds the house, circumnavigating the island of their despair. On the way home we stop to see Mark's mother who is the best off of all of them fiercely independent still and able to mother us a little which feels like a relief because we are not ready to cut loose that generational buffer between us and our own eventual demise. At night I dream again and again of my mother and relive her illness, she is well and then not well and then dead again and I forget how it happened but I am grateful she comes to visit me and I suppose it will be this way with all of them and then me and on and on.

Gift Ideas

I shamelessly encourage you to visit my Etsy site. Enjoy!