Friday night

Too long, too long since I wrote. Right now it's the hottest day of the year here - supposed to have been 99 today - and the electricity is off in 1/2 my apartment. David couldn't get it back on with the circuit breakers in the basement. Both of the landlords are "out of town" and not very pro-active. I got home and we figured out that part of the problem is that when the electricians re-wired to install the circuit breakers vs fuse boxes, they apparently mislabeled our apartment and the one upstairs. So when David flipped the main breaker, it did nothing to our apartment but turned off the juice in the apartment upstairs for a second. Then we learned that we still have fuses inside the apartment. There's a 100 amp circuit breaker for the apartment int he basement, but there's a 20 and a 30 amp fuse in the apartment. The 20 amp fuse blew. It supports 2 bedrooms and 3/4 of the living room. Can't run 2 tiny air conditioners at the same time - it'll blow the fuses.

Maine sounds better and better. And not just for a week once a year.

I saw Dr. R this week for regular check-up. She was happy and said I "looked great". I feel good, but I think I just look like me. Which I guess means just normally healthy. She deals with people going through chemo etc and often with less hopeful prognoses than mine. It probably is nice to see a normally healthy person who used to be grayish green from chemo poisons and puffy from steroids and now looks ... normal. Glad to make her happy to see me. I'd like to keep her that way.

Meanwhile, a pox on the government of the United States of America. Every single member of Congress and the President should be ashamed of themselves. Where are all their mothers when we need them. They need time outs. They need to be sent to their beds without dinner. They need to be made to go pick a nice snappy switch and then get themselves a good whippin on their bad asses with it. I'm sure the volunteer whippers would be lining up for miles. Most of all every single damn one of them needs to be booted out of "office" and made to go dig some ditches. For a decade or so. Don't we need someone to scrub the rust off bridges and highway overpasses with Brillo pads for the next 50 years or so? Then there's cleaning limestone buildings in the nation's capitol with toothbrushes. We can keep them busy I think. And USEFUL for a change.

I hope Michelle Bachman gets the Republican nomination. I might vote for her. If things are going to go to hell in a hand basket, let's just go ahead and get there sooner rather than dragging out the suffering, and do so in a way that no one can deny. Then maybe we can start doing something about it.

Maybe.

Peace.

Out.

Saturday morning

Ella and I went to the park this morning, arriving about 5:50 am. (Ella seems to think it is her job - no, vocation - to ensure that I am awoken by no later than 5:30 am every day, week in, week out, fall, winter, spring and summer. Forget weekends, forget holidays, forget what time I made it to bed the night before. At 5:30, occasionally as early as 5:15 or as late as 5:45, I am ... nudged ... awake. Interestingly, since cancer, I have no desire really to "sleep in" (other than a physical need to get some minimum number of hours of sleep). It's as if the cancer experience awoke some physiological awareness in me that there are only so many days in a life, so many hours in a day, and sleep is sleep, a necessary part of life, but not "life" itself.

Anyway, we arrived at the park early and found many cars already there. Then we saw tents going up on the meadow by the rose garden. By the time we had walked the eastern loop, more cars, people wearing official vests, orange cones going up, signs indicating "Athlete Parking" over there, and "Volunteer Parking" over here. Some kind of road race, but not sure what. As a result, the wild life was pretty subdued, even the birds weren't seizing the opportunity to sing for a wider audience, but quieted. Oh, well.

I've been thinking about time, specifically about the span of 60 years. (Okay - I will be 61 in a few weeks, but "span of 60 years" is a neater figure to consider.) As a starting point, I've been considering the malleability of our sense of time, its relativity . How a trip to a new location appears to take a long time, while the return along a known path feels much quicker. You know how you read in the news periodically about scientists learning more about what happened in the first "nanosecond" after the Big Bang? Creation of matter, expansion in space, etc. In brief - a lot! So I've been considering a comparison between what happened in that compressed first nanosecond versus the 60 years thereafter. We're used to thinking about the history of the universe either in those tiny nanosecond chunks or in Carl Sagan's "billions and billions and billions..." of years, not in human lifespans. So I have lived 60 years (so far). What is 60 years? To me it is birth, a childhood, adolescence, youthful rebellion, marriage, children, divorce, single parenthood, spiritual exploration, career, grandchildren, cancer... To a child in so many countries today it is an extremely optimistic expected lifetime. To a fruit fly, it is tens of thousands of generations. To an albatross, a typical lifespan stretching over hundreds of thousands of miles of airborne travels, paired with the same mate.

In the west, how many of us treat our own life span as if a cicada, spending 99% of it unconscious, buried in whatever constitutes our form of the "ground" in which the cicada larva lays and waits for "life": fear, pride, jealousy, envy, indifference, greed - and then awakening at last and trying to cram actual "life" into the last moments it is ours?

Maybe the "slow food" movement should become the "slow life" movement. It might be why David rides bicycles, why H walks. I read this morning that Thoreau is said to have walked at least 3 hours every day. Imagine that. Imagine that today: 3 hours! And not 3 hours to "get somewhere". 3 hours of walking for the sake of walking. Of being while walking. Of noticing. Of paying attention.

To what do any of us pay attention for 3 hours in any given day? Work, maybe, although I doubt if we do so for 3 consecutive hours. More likely in spurts of 20 minutes, broken up by "multi-tasking" in some fashion, by having our attention diverted to something else. Anything else? Even movies, which used to be 90 minutes, don't usually run longer than 2-1/2 hours.

I think one thing I appreciate about T'ai Chi is that it is a slow process. Slow to learn and, learned, slow to practice.

What might happen if we were to start to pay attention? If we were to aim to pay attention in 3 hour periods? If we paid attention to a person we care about for 3 hours? A child. An elder. If we paid attention to a knotty problem - not worried about it, not vacillated between anxiety over it and avoiding it, but paid attention to it? What if we just took Thoreau's example and picked a day and a place and walked for 3 hours, paying attention to where we were?

What might happen?

Peace. In time.

Tuesday morning

(A photo of Ella at "camp" last week, where she seems to have had a good time)

It's been so long since I last posted here, I would not be surprised if anyone who had still been periodically checking in here to read this blog had given up, assuming I would not be back. Sorry; I'm back. I'll try to write a little more regularly, so that each post can be shorter.

Since last I wrote, I made my trip to Atlanta to meet my new grandson in person. I had a good visit, although my brother J was ill - appears to have had the flu - so I didn't get to spend as much time with him as I would have liked. The new baby - whom his older (and wiser) brother calls "Baby Cello" - is very sweet and seems to be a very good baby. S and M seem very relaxed, so much more so than with Cachao. Even I - going back almost 40 years for the first child and nearly 35 for the second - recall the utter fear of bringing home my first, and of every "first" experience with her - first bath, first taking outdoors, first leaving with a friend for a couple of hours, first doctor visit, first cold, etc. Cachao is very good with his little brother, considering the little guy is not a lot of "fun" yet. I spent most of my time with Cachao. We built towns out of Lincoln Logs, drew maps, played a little catch. It was a good visit. I'll post a photo or two.





I came back home and within a few days came down with a bad cold. I am sure I caught it on the flight on the way home. We were held on the runway for 2-1/2 hours while a storm cell passed over the Atlanta airport. That meant my "direct" flight took 5 hours instead of two and a half. Five hours of breathing the same air with a packed plane load of passengers. Luckily I had a lovely several days at home with David - who was also on vacation the same week as I - before the cold attacked me. We boarded Ella and went down to Mystic Seaport to attend the Wooden Boat Show on Saturday, had a lovely dinner sitting on a patio next to the Mystic River, spent the night at a cheap motel nearby, got up early and were kayaking by 8:30. We kayaked on the Mystic River at the Seaport. That was interesting. On Saturday we saw all of the visiting wooden boats from the shore; on Sunday we saw them all again from the water. It was a very lovely weekend. On the drive home Sunday night I felt the first scratchy throat signs of the cold, which hit me hard by Monday morning.

I managed to make it in to work every day, although I worked "short" days (just 8 hours), and by Thursday, turned the corner. And then - of course - David got the cold. He finally began to feel better yesterday.

One very nice surprise was that my daughter called me over the weekend. From Haiti. Imagine my surprise when an unknown phone number appeared on my cell phone and I answered it and it was C. She's doing okay. She moved out of SOIL's house into another small house almost across the street. It's thought-provoking to hear about it. She has no electricity except in the evening hours when it is turned on for the city as a whole. (To have it at other times you have to have a device that draws power when it is on and stores it in a battery from which it can be drawn at other times of the day). No power means no refrigerator. She had no gas when she moved in, but has since bought some propane so now she can make coffee and cook a little. But she has screens in the windows (no mosquitoes!) and privacy, and is still almost next door to where she works. She knows that she is living in luxury compared with hundreds of thousands of Haitians.

Ella and I have been to the park many mornings since I last wrote here, including this morning. Some days we have managed to get there very early; others, not so much. Today for instance, we arrived at 6:30 and today, as a work day, there were already many runners, walkers and joggers there. I have not seen the heron recently. Also the Canada Geese appear to be elsewhere. A lot of Mallards. Last week when we had so much rain, the Mallards were able to "swim" in "ponds" which formed on top of the the grassy meadows due to the saturated ground. Strange sight.

June was a lovely month of no medical appointments! I see Dr. R in about 2 weeks. Then I see Dr. M in early August before David and I go to Maine for our classes at the Wooden Boat School. Then September should be a DR-free month again. And then October - and another CT scan. Sometimes I find it difficult to believe that in October it will only be 2 years since my diagnosis and surgery, and it has only been 18 months since I ended treatment. It feels a life time ago. I feel healthy and good (although arthritic and old!).

I am sick already of the posturing of the elected politicians. I am thinking seriously of not voting, at least in any national election, again. Another subject, another day.

Peace.