One month later

A month since I last wrote. As I recall, we were getting ready to go to Maine on vacation. It was a good vacation. David made a pair of beautiful oars for me; they have a little more final finishing work to go, but they are essentially done. I sailed and rowed 6 or 7 or maybe 8 different boats. It was mostly good just not to go to work for a whole week and to get "away". I will post a few photos here.





Since then, busy at work. Right before we left, Ella was diagnosed with what the vet thinks is a food allergy (of course, it was diagnosed the week AFTER I bought a 25 pound bag of her old food for $50). We've been feeding her a special canned food for diabetic dogs, followed by gradually introducing a mixture of a dry food brand that is a "limited ingredient diet". Over time, more of the dry and less of the canned food. Hopefully this works.

My grandsons continue to thrive. The older started 4-year old kindergarten, going to school 5 days a week. Cello just grows. I'll post a new photo if I can.



Since my previous post, an earthquake in Virginia, felt through New England (even i Canada I heard). The person sitting in the office next to my cube came running out of his office, "What was that? What was that? Did you feel it?" No. I didn't. Apparently I was deep into whatever work was on my computer. Also I had just come back from Maine where I spent the week on sail boats. Perhaps I thought the swaying was still in my head and heart.

Then came Irene. Luckily we were not personally affected - did not lose power or have flooding - as were so many others.

Then Tropical Storm Lee dumped 8-10 inches more water across the region.

This week another Republican "debate". New front runner Rick Perry says Social Security is a ponzi scheme. Romney tries to be witty and quick on his feet. Sort of like seeing some of those football players try to do the quickstep on Dancing with the (Ex) Stars. Michelle Bachman keeps talking like a wind-up Barbie Really Wants to go to the White House doll. Huntsman says a few interesting things - like suggesting science has a point. Same week, Obama's "jobs" speech. At least I didn't have to hear him say "win the future" again. The best news is that Congress has a 14% approval rating. The most recent poll showed that the vast majority of American people think EVERYONE in Congress should be kicked out. If only sentiments expressed in a poll could carry people through to elections and beyond.

Meanwhile, the heron is back at the pond - larger than ever, grey-green and beautiful. This morning standing in the shallows of the larger side of the pond, seeming to look down her long beak with some arrogance at the little brown ducks stirring the waters around her. Perhaps they stir up the fish, bringing breakfast her way.

I'm ready for fall.

But I'd rather have peace, kindness, justice and equality.

Wednesday night

No writing for some time - sorry.

Today Ella and I were able to go to the park - where we saw the heron, back after quite an absence - because I went into work late. I had an appointment with Dr. M, my regular check up. It went well. I told him - and it is true - that I feel great. I actually think over the last couple of months my ... I guess ... endurance ... has improved. The indication of it is that I do not feel the need to be in bed EVERY night by 8:30 or 9:00. I have actually stayed up until 10:00 and felt fine the next day. Imagine that. Anyway, another milestone. No more doctor appointments until October. The next thing is the October CT scan, followed by Dr. R. Then Dr. M again on December 1st.

Over the weekend, Ella and I made it to the park only one day - but we saw the muskrat, also absent for quite some time. It made me ask a question: Where did the muskrat in this small pond in an urban park come from? I mean the ducks, the Canada geese, the heron - they all fly in. Even the fox - who I haven't seen yet this year - presumably slinks from tree-lined property to tree-lined property to the park. But how does a MUSKRAT cross a city and get to the park? I know they "stock" ponds with fish sometimes. Is it possible they stocked this one with a muskrat?

That's my question for the day.

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life. Why? I received my first ever letter from my grandson. Very very very cool. Perhaps I'll scan it at work and post it here.

Peace.

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.

Sunday morning

Ella and I managed a walk in the park both this morning and yesterday morning, squeezed in between downpours and showers. It has rained for what feels like 40 days. The potted flowers and plants I put out on the back steps 2 weeks ago are so saturated that the latest rain just lays on top of the soil so the plants appear to be growing in 3 or 4 inches of water. I keep pouring it out. Rain keeps putting it back. Still we squeezed in walks both days during a period of non-rain, still damp, but not soaking.

I had thought this week would be the peak of the roses in the rose garden at the park, and perhaps it would have been if the ceaseless rain and accompanying wind had not beaten down the bushes creating what I admit is a lovely scattering of multi-colored and sweet smelling petals below the rows of rose bushes. Only the newly planted annuals in the annual garden seemed to be thriving; elsewhere the plants had a worn out, damp and distressed look. Good for the ducks and geese, however, who have been venturing from the pond into the various open fields of the park to graze, I presume on worms and insects driven out of the ground by the water to avoid drowning, only to be gobbled up by hungry fowl. No heron either yesterday or today. Perhaps she's seeking shelter under the tall pines on the little island in the middle of the north side of the pond.

Just spoke with my daughter who is on her way from Atlanta to Miami and from there back to Port au Prince. She expects to be in Haiti at least another 3-4 months. SOIL ran into abrupt and unexpected funding problems not too long before she came to the US 12 days ago, and that has changed the outlook for the organization and the environment for her job quite a bit. It's hard to accept that agile productive organizations like SOIL lose funding while big top-heavy inefficient NGOs earn a return on donors' moneys and spend on bureaucratic processes more than productive actions. Anyway... it's been good to know she was on the same continental land mass as I for the past 12 days, even if it didn't work out for me to see her. It's hard knowing she's being carried so far away, not just geographically, but in other ways, too. I keep her and her work in my heart.

I read some articles this past week from an on line edition of a recent special issue of Time magazine on cancer. One of the articles was on cancer charities. Really disturbing, but interesting. I learned there exist non-profit organizations whose mission is to check on other non-profit organizations/charities and how they use the donations they receive. What does that say about us human beings? Anyway, one thing I learned that was of note was that the Susan B Komen breast cancer organization that sponsored the Race for the Cure I wrote about last week is actually highly rated as a cancer research non-profit. That was good to know in light of some of the not-so-positive visceral feelings I'd experienced about the size and marketing-heavy aspects of the event. If it actually ends up significantly benefiting cancer related research, that's all to the good.

Shall we turn our eyes to the wider world? Chaos among the field of those running for, thinking about running for, denying they are running for and being watched to see whether they will ever run for the Republican presidential nomination. I heard an interesting discussion of Mitt Romney the other day, saying he is more of a technocrat pragmatist than an ideologue, and is having to bend himself into unnatural shapes to satisfy the Republican powers that be. And it was pointed out that if he won the nomination, instead of disavowing the Romney-care health plan in Mass, he might be able to use it to attract independent voters. He's very much like Obama, it was said. I agree with that. Pox on them all.

All this talk about "the economy," the "debt ceiling," "creating jobs," etc. etc. etc. It seems like no one that I'm reading in the mainstream media including on line - except possibly Paul Krugman - sees what I see when I look at the underlying conditions we face today. We don't just have a "recession" and some "unemployment" that can get "fixed" by "creating" jobs. We have bigger deeper issues; we sent the American, and to a large extent, the world economy in an untenable direction, permitting the financial markets to puff themselves up with artificial "growth" like a blow fish. Puffing up a blow fish doesn't make it a shark; it's still a puffed up blow fish. Now the air (albeit in my view not ALL the air) has been let out, and we're back to being what we were all along - a not very healthy, increasingly inequitable economy. How do you "create" jobs on top of that? We have 10% of our population in prison, for God's sake. Another 10% (in the narrowest definition) are unemployed. That's 20%. 1 in 5. And over the past 2-3 decades, our schools have sunk into and beyond mediocrity into disgrace. Kids leaving with degrees from many colleges are less well educated than kids with high school diplomas were 30 or 40 years ago. I see those college graduates in my job. Many can barely write a sentence. My guess is they are uneducated as far as history, geography, the arts and literature.

We won't be able to overcome in ANY president's 4- or even 8-year term what we (including me) people permitted to take place over the past 3 decades while we paid attention to other things.

And, for good measure, global warming approaches that tipping point - beyond which today's half-assed "solutions" fail to do anything whatsoever toward solving the problem.

I guess it's the non-stop rain that puts me in such a cheerful mood.

Perhaps the sun will come out, tomorrow.

Peace.

Saturday morning

After a rough 3-day work week - which just goes to show me that Big Mama, as we called my grandmother, knew what she was talking about when she said "Be careful what you ask for; you might get it." since I was so gung ho about having a 3-day work week - Ella and I went to the park this morning. Goslings. Fuzzy, creamy light brown, very very cute goslings. Hard to believe they grow into the great stately honking hulking Canada geese. We had a good walk. Cool morning, supposed to turn sunny and warmer later. No heron, no muskrat, and the Mallards' ducklings apparently haven't hatched yet.

Today is the Race for the Cure event to support breast cancer research fundraising. I signed up and solicited donations last year, and received a lot of support (thanks again to all). It was moving to participate, in part because I had finished chemo only 6 weeks before, my hair was just coming back in, there were so many other women who "looked like" me. At the same time, the whole thing was so ... corporate as in structured, programmed, choreographed, and massive. Also I had some sense of an odd elitism or at least silo-ism, as is, "this is a BREAST cancer event, BREAST cancer kills MORE women is a BIGGER threat than XXX cancer." No one said those words, there was just some sort of underlying thrum. As I said to some one this week, all I guess I was looking for was to hear the message that while breast cancer is a huge problem for women and women in CT in particular, ALL cancer is horrible and all cancer survivors and families and friends of all cancer survivors are welcome to join Race for the Cure (even if the $ raised goes to breast cancer research, in some ways that benefits ALL those dealing with cancer). But that message was missing.

At any rate, I did finally register this year, and thought about going, but have decided not to. I figure my registration fee is a donation. I wish the event well. Perhaps I will participate again in the future more fully.

Otherwise, looking forward to a quiet weekend. My daughter is in SF, visiting for 10-12 days from Haiti. Her organization, SOIL, is having funding difficulties. Too bad, because here is a small group of committed young people actually doing somethign needed in Haiti - assisting people in creating and learning how to manage ecologically friendly sanitation facilities - what can be more basic than sanitation? without sanitation, the quality of water is affected, disease is rampant, etc. - working on a really shoestring budget, living simply themselves right in the community (not in some NGO compound) - and they can't keep their funding, while across town, multi-million dollar NGO's employees are driven around in big gas-guzzling cars while donations sit in the bank. It's not right.

I heard an NPR story this morning about a new documentary just coming out about mining in West Virginia, strip mining or whatever they call the type of mining nowadays where they basically blast the top of mountains off. Unbelievable the details about how corporations have purchased the political process in the towns, counties and states involved.

Supreme Court decisions permit corporations to buy political elections.

Kids getting college degrees incur $100,000 + in college loans and start their careers as indentured servants.

One in 5 people in America has or will develop type 2 diabetes.

One in 5 people has no health insurance.

What's wrong with this picture?

It's a beautiful early June morning. There must be in the birds' songs outside my window, in the wisp of cloud passing overhead, in the sun striving toward the top of the day, hope for better times.

Peace.