Enough Said? But then again...

The old cat is terminal. ($48, office visit + antibiotic to stave off infection, delay the inevitable).

I hit some unidentified metal object on the highway which cracked my bumper, pierced the grill, dented and pushed back the A/C condenser ($500 deductible).

Discovered a flat tire leaving work on my late night (Free @ Les Schwab, remove nail, patch tire).

Fall Semester began ($1924, tuition for 6 credits--Child Abuse & Neglect, Methods in Behavioral Research, textbooks purchased/paid for last month).

The gist? It's been ONE expensive, crappy week. I wanna take my marbles and go home.

=====

It's a late August night and the sounds of Hawaiian music are blowing up from the river. This town, out of the blue, decided it was time to acknowledge its Hawaiian roots...Homework is calling my name. So's e-mail that I promised weeks ago. So's a ukulele melody carried on the breeze. The only call I'll answer, likely, is that of sleep.

Stress has left me a little addled. I had the house to myself (sort of) and thought I might actually COOK, for real. I was whipping up some yogurt tahini sauce, a recipe I hadn't tried...thought, hmmm, it's not bad, but kind of ODD. Didn't dawn on me even then that the Plain Yogurt I thought I'd bought--I always buy--was not plain, but Vanilla. I didn't let it crush me...thought about it, yes, but then put my shoes on, went down to the store, the only one in town, the one that calls itself the shopping center. Little town. And half the town seems to be milling in front of the dairy section. My patience did not pay off...they have yogurt, but no plain yogurt. Isn't plain always an option?

My head feels as though it's been packed in fiberglass insulation.

I visited the ORG this evening specifically to pack up my corner of the pond, paddle off for good, I've no time to play, make no time to do anything more than snapshots, write only research papers and essays for class...but recent modifications meant things to see on the welcome page... Somewhere between some kid spewing cinnamon and lukku cairi's Axl Rose I was laughing out loud and I really, really needed that. And then there's other new toys...

Time's wasting away, though, and I must produce something commensurate with that passage.

An odd meeting with the past

Last night, doing my between-semesters catch-up in cleaning and organizing, I ran across some handwriting that I recognized as mine. Two pages hidden toward the back of a lab book I'd used for a biology class in 1993. The script was familiar, but the words were not--a disconcerting meeting with myself in the past, my current self embarrassed that I didn't recognize me at first:

C: What do you do to prepare for something like that?

G: Emotionally, physically, what do you do...

"It was like a big piece of wood falling on me. It knocked me flat."
Woman sits on the couch in a hotel room. Death creeps from under the bed.

G: So the best thing to do is pick up the pieces. Do what you have to. Do without. Do with this. Anyway, that's the way it is.

===

G: What time is it?

C: 8:30, Saturday night.

G: Okay. I go home tomorrow. Do I take the morning bus?

C: No, I go with you. I have a car--it will only take a half hour.

G: So that's the way it is.

==

"I hope you take warning from this and be very careful when you can't drive. Be prepared."

C: You drove a lot longer than many people. You were fortunate.

G: I was, but he was brutal.

C: Was he...

G: I drove a little way. "Stop." Through and through. Shed a lot of tears and drove the rest of the way to get home. Turned in my car. And I will never forgive. They don't even say sorry. "You can't drive anymore." Just like that. I was too slow, so careful, too slow answering. And I thought I was so well-prepared, that'd I'd sail right through it. It was just facts. Nothing's ever hit me so hard. I'll never get over it.

G: Anyway, I say, be prepared at some time in your life. No matter how good you are, it can slap you right across the face--wham!

G: What's going to happen to Glenn when he can't drive? He's got Kenny, but he's lost his independence.

G: Where do I go from here? That's the rhetoric. No matter where I am, that's the rhetoric.

Mouth constantly trembles. Minear's (sp) syndrome.

G: Well, I let one tear go, so I'll call it a day.

G: Find my way home. I have no idea how I get home.

C: I take you home. And every step of the way, I tell you where we are.

G: I guess that's how it is.


It took a while but I remember now. A February weekend, in a rented cabin at Kalaloch, on the NW Washington coast, about a half hour drive from Forks, my birthplace, childhood home, where all my dearest relatives lived (but no more). My great grandfather had died that year, 93 years old, and his wife survived him, but her mind was going. My mom had the idea of taking her for the weekend at the beach, and it was me, my mom, stepdad, great grandmother Netty. She was probably nearing 90 herself, though she never divulged her age. We thought she'd fail quickly after her husband died--they were very close, spent nearly all of their 63 years of marriage working, traveling, constant companions. She went on to live another 6 years, although by the end, she was not recognizing anyone anymore. She still worried about her son, Glenn, and she outlived him by a few years (He died in '95, age 71).

My chicken scratch notes recorded a conversation between C (my mother) and G (her grandmother). Netty had lost her driver's license a few years before and it had been a huge blow for someone so independent. At the time of this interview, she had moments of clarity, and she recognized what was happening to her mind. It was heartbreaking to see. I think she took some sort of comfort in remembering and railing over the loss of her independence--it was a break between wondering where she was and how she was going to get home, and watching other memories twist and disappear. The driving test and the indignity of it were still very, very clear.

I don't remember writing this down. I remember her eating yogurt. I remember it was gray and stormy at the beach. I remember bald eagles perched in the wind-sculpted trees on the cliffs...

Kubrick Retrospective

This begins tomorrow night and continues through the month. I'm hoping to work my way down there for at least a couple shows. How cool would it be to see Dr Strangelove on the big screen? Twelve films will be be shown, in no particular order, it appears. My choices would be, aside from Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and, perhaps, The Shining, which has always scared the hell out of me but hit theaters when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Red rum...