Kicking and Screaming into Acceptance

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous has a very famous section that all 12-steppers know: "...for acceptance is the solution to all my problems". It means letting go of trying to control people, places and things, and it's a very good idea.

The idea, however, is under trial by fire, as it were, and while I'm kicking and screaming against getting sick with another depression, I'm also sad and scared by how much has careened out of -- well, I never pretended to have control, so maybe the word is out of its customary places in my life.

I need to list what's making me wring my hands.

• I turned in the revision of my book ten weeks ago. I know that it's going through a legal vetting but I finally begged my agent yesterday to try to shake five words of reaction to the work itself from my editor. She duly emailed my editor and said I'd be expecting her call yesterday or today. No call. Do they hate it? Is it too hot for the ledgal department to permit publication? Is it going to be canceled? How much revision will I need to do of the last round? I'm feeling hurt and angry that my editor can't take three minutes to email, "Some good work here. I'll be in touch soon with more specific comments" or "I have some major problems with what you've done which we'll need to discuss in depth". I can't count on any part of it -- the timing, the revisions, the money, the commitment. Worse, all this belies faith in my work and in the praise my editor shared with me before the revision was done.
• My sister-in-law was maybe going to come out to take author photos of me. My brother said in an email last week that she was checking into flight. No word. I'm feeling frustrated and confused about how to proceed and angry that if she comes, I'll be put on the spot to clean and prepare for a guest. I'm confused as well about whether to book another photographer or simply use my PFT photo.
• My mother is home with my father. He reports she is getting stronger but also that she's had some bad breathing attacks (she has congestive heart failure). They've been sleeping in their recliners because it's too hard for Mom to lie down and/or because she's not breathing well. Of course, my father is being run ragged and no one is particularly worried about what this is doing to his 93-year-old health. I feel guilty for not being there; scared of the inevitable; angry that I have to deal with this and angry that they aren't going into assisted living up in Montana ASAP.
• I never know when I'll be paid by certain clients. My funds are low. It make me angry because they'd sure as shit say something if they were failed to be paid. And I'm scared because with extra expenses of nursing and moving, I can't ask my parents for help.
• One of my favorite dog's owner just told me he and his wife are putting their apartment on the market and will move to Westchester. I'm sad because I'll miss her desperately and scared about income. Nor do I know when this will happen.
  
• I abstain from sugar and then I give into it. I eat at night when I can't sleep -- I'm powerless over sleep, too -- and because I feel both as though I need consolation for the faults of the day and because I deserve the punishment. I can't count on myself and my sponsor is out of the country for the next month, so I can't count on her either. This makes me furious.
  
• My concentration is shot. I can remember one thing at a time, can't read, can't focus on anything that asks me to step out of myself.

Helplessness. I am besieged. Even the editing project I have, which I struggle to concentrate on, is in a state that I feel helpless to do more that point out the flaws, with little idea how to really fix it.

What are the common threads that threaten my peace of mind? Anger, frustration, fear, estrangement from myself and from the parents I've relied on for 52 years, hurt, lack of faith, loneliness.

I feel as though I've built my house on the tide line and the foundation keeps sliding further out to sea. But each day I get up, more often than not feeling vile from the food of the day before, and suck up the hope that I'll get something done or run into serendipity or that somebody will recognize that I simply, fucking exist.

Event Horizon

Radiating from my parents' bedroom is a series -- a long series -- of lectures on astronomy. For three days I've been moving through a drift of phrases -- quarks, supernovas, quasars, MCDI -- some of which makes sense and a lot doesn't. I haven't stopped to watch the lectures with my father because it's an eight-part series and I arrived somewhere around Disc 5. Still, all this cosmology has come to characterize my personal time here so far, and I am now standing as close to the event horizon -- that threshhold at which matter gets sucked into a black hole from which it cannot escape -- as is possible while defying the siren song of gravity.


Time moves so s-l-o-w-l-y here. An hour feels like three. Dad is immersed in relativity but not so much his relatives. Conversation is limited to astronomy, my mother's medical condition, when my brother last called (always within the hour), what to have for dinner. Right now he's taking a break from "the afterglow of the big bang by making the filling for a strawbery-rhubarb pie.


Great.


I've had enormous support and prayer in this endeavor of visiting Unlimited Food Land so I feel, for you and for me, that I need to check in and say I haven't had sugar or flour but it's getting dicey.

One other thing besides my knowledge of how many people are rooting for my abstinence that I have to remember is how Mom brightened when I walked into her room on Thursday wearing a white tank top (I NEVER wear sleeveless clothes but I figure what the hell) and a white capris: a bit of my Other Body's figure is beginning to come back and it made her really happy. She told Jim I'd "slimmed down a lot" when she talked to him yesterday. In a way, I resent winning aproval for losing weight but I don't think this is the time to quibble over my worth according to body size and I, too, of course, am happy to be wearing sunnier, more form fitting clothes. I had more confidence when I talked to Dr. Kidney because I wasn't a lump that could allow him to presume me stupid or lacking control when I walked out to the nurses' station and cornered him. It's an entirely weird thing, this morphing and its two-sided blade of pleasure-giving and confidence on one edge, and privacy and...I've always been me on the other. Sort this out for me, if you can. I'm confused even as I'm going to have to go out and show my father how to make pie crust with the new Cuisineart.


I'm not used to not moving my body. Each day I ask if we can go swimming and Dad tables it for another day. The heat and the lanscape are not inviting for walks. I came out with a pile of articles I tore out of New Yorkers before throwing that magazines away and my head is swimming with trains to Tibet, the physiology of laughter, monocular vision, the New Jersey container ports, Facebook ten months after it started...


Will I or won't I have pie?


Nights are awful. My father becomes loquacious on the six mathematical equations used to measure the distance of stars, or on my mother's rapidly deteriorating mental faculties. Then im calls and wants information I can't give him yet. Dad stays up late and I wait for a double dose of Klonopin to take over, which it only seems to do the next morning when I pull myself from sleep.


I've at least managed to install a wireless router so Jim and I can continue to work while we're here, and we're going to be here a lot. But I feel like I'm in lockdown prison ward and pie sounds like an escape.


My mother has, it was finally determined, fractured her pelvis and upper femur, none of which requires casting or immobility. When she was aken to hospital, her kidneys were barely functioning, her blood pressure was dangerously low, she had fluid in her lungs and her electrolytes were wacked, so she was in cardio for several days. The nephrologist was dismissive of her chances of ever coming home again and got downright caustic when he learned my father is blind. "Resthome?" I asked and he gave a short laugh and said, "Please. We call them `managed care units' here."


The social worker in charge of making transfers from the hospital to rehab had to argue with Dr. Kidney to have Mom admitted. That was Thursday and she'd gotten her very first shot of morphine in her entire 87 years an hour before we got there. Yesterday, Friday, she had no idea she'd been moved to rehab. I asked what her PT and OT sessions had consisted of; she had no memory of three hours spent in therapy. My brother called in the middle of the visit; 15 minutes later Dad asked what Jim had to say and she couldn't remember (although why should she? I repeat myself to him because I can't remember what I said and because there is nothing TO say there's nothing worth remembering). It's going to take time to assess all this and part of her OT is cognitive functioning.

But God it's sad and scary to see, and it's an inevitable state to which she is moving, whether it's this time or not.


Dad misses her but is furious she put herself in harm's way and fell, furious that she's seen her internist the day before and her BP wasn't investigated or the fluid rattle of her lungs pursued. He complains that when he offers to share a lecture series on something like the origins of Judaism, she prefers to watch Dr. Phil. I don't think, given his nature, he has any other way to emote except through anger. All Mom wants is for "my husband to warm my hands" and I have no idea what Dad wants, besides rhubarb-strawberry pie and not to be scared any more.


I want to go swimming, not eat between meals and to cry.


That's the news from Desert Woebegone. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

The Best I Can Do

I was just commenting over at "Dear Ethel" that I don't think the originators of Thanksgiving and Christmas would find it in the least bizarre that their heirs would be grouchy. The Pilgrims were a miserable lot & hungry as hell. The Indians were scared of the white intruders. Mary was not gracefully praying over the manger & Joseph was probably bedded down in the straw with both God & the Mother of God in order to generate some badly needed body heat.

All these folks -- who were grimy, cold, hungry, frightened & physically exhausted, as well as thankful & in awe -- were probably pretty crabby.

So I'm advocating the OK-ness of wishing people a Grumpy Holiday Season. Personally, I'm going to concentrate on doing the best I can, enjoying what I can & avoiding talking too much about myself for fear of breaking into tears.

Hence: one pretty bad photo of the Empire State Building in autumnal colors. My amazement at the roses that are still hanging on. Curling up with whatever dogs I have on hand & watching their trusting sleep.

Thanksgiving was a near-tragedy in errors. I spilled pureed sweet potatoes all over the oven & couldn't clean the mess up sufficiently to avoid an hour of smoke. On my way to bed that night, I smashed & broke a toe (another toe; again). I took three things to Thanksgiving dinner & felt like I was catering the whole meal for twenty people. My life has gotten so small over the last five years that I'm easily overwhelmed. I 1) have to respect that, & 2) have to work on it.

Getting Daisy, a crate, luggage & myself to Newark for a 6.30 a.m. flight should challenge my hide-in-a-shell mentality.

I had five dogs to take care of that day as well. One of them lives about a mile from where we had dinner. Too full, having drunk a number of glasses of wine, exhausted, I walked three dogs down to DUMBO & left my keys in Henry's door. I didn't realize this until Chance, Daisy & I got back to the Heights. No. Way. I saw a light on in my building. No one answered. We turned around & got the doorman at Chance's house to let us in & bunked down there & picked up the keys in the morning.

Pressure. Thursday Daisy & I move to Molly's house for three nights & four days. I leave for Arizona on the 18th for three weeks. I've wrapped all the presents I have on hand & will mail them by the end of the week. A little compulsive, Frances?

Yes & yes. I should be getting editorial notes this week & will have a little over two months to revise my manuscript in a publishing atmosphere of canceled contracts & retrenchment. I'm scared. I have a lot of work to do. I have to get as much Christmas done in advance as possible. It would be a wonderful thing if I opened the box of cards at my feet & started them tonight, but I still have Italian greyhounds to feed as well as myself.

I would like to not eat sugar tonight.

I deserve to not eat sugar tonight. I wrapped those presents, having hand-picked them. Some of them are inspired. I did laundry this weekend & swept the kitchen floor after cooking before putting down the clean kitchen rug. I put all the summer linens away. I've done the dishes & taken a bath. Surely I've done Enough to merit going to sleep easily, without the aid of sugar?

I can't be a size six for my parents this Christmas, which would be their favorite present. But I could lose six pounds.

But oh Lord, the oblivion! I love the oblivion!

Angry Advent, everyone!

We Shall Not Regret the Past...

nor wish to shut the door on it.

To any 12-step program member, this sentence is burned on our brains. My response to it is, "Oh, really???" Just as my response to the Promises of recovery is, when read aloud, "Do we think these are extravagant promises?" and everyone answers "We think not!" I either keep my mouth shut or say out loud, "Hell, yes!"

My past has caught up with me in recent months. It has been heartening to know that some bridges didn't burn down completely, that others were never erected but always had the potential to build, but they ALL send me whizzing through time to 1972 - 1984. I've been through one of the worst depressions I've had in a very long time.

I can tell how bad it was because it's slowly -- s-l-o-w-l-y -- lifting. I've actually told four people about it and three of them offered understanding &and faith. My mother, who last week was on my ass about insurance and retirement, said, "You're a strong person, Francie. You've weathered a lot when a lot of people would have given up." That felt validating. Admitting it is a first step. Realizing yesterday that Daisy is my anchor to having to get through it was a second step to crawling up. Having a fierce crying jag that has been building for weeks was good.

It's all been made worse, of course, by losing my abstinence & then getting off sugar again. Yesterday was Day Three & I was jittery and hyper-emotional.

Which was a good time to have something like a six-hour conversation with a friend I haven't spoken to in, um, like 20 years.

One afternoon when I was an undergraduate at the University of Montana, she stopped and asked if I was Francie Kuffel. I am sure I said coldly, "Yes." Undeterred, she introduced herself. I knew her brother from high school. That's all either of us can remember but it began a sporadic friendship for about ten years that was both acutely painful for what and who she was and what and who I wasn't.

One of the things she did that made me break down crying as we talked was fall in love with my hair. Age has done things to my hair. It's more red than black now. It's straight after being naturally curly. But I have glorious hair and she would sit me down in a chair in the back yard and trim it and brush it and gush over it.

It was the first time in my life I felt feminine. It would, in retrospect, be another 20 years, until I lost weight, that I felt feminine again.

All through the early chapters of PFT when I lament about the life obesity prohibited me from having is imbued with C. She was an adventuress. In fact, she googled me when she and her cousin got to reminiscing about showing up at my door at 5 a.m. to haul me off to Mount Lolo to watch an eclipse of the sun. I didn't go but I packed them off with chocolate cake for their adventure.

How fucking perfect. What a microcosmic look at my entire life. No I won't go but I'll send you off with cake. I'll provide but not participate.

I don't happen to remember this episode but it burns with all the toxin of my M.O. in life, all the things I didn't do.

It turned out, however, in the course of the conversation, that I said some perspicacious things about her that she found to be among the nicest things anyone has ever said about her. At that same time, I listened to her success and the aspects of her thick fruitcake of a life & felt I'd never lived or achieved anything at all.

There have been two other old friends who've touched my email lately. One I have yet to seriously deal with, the other I exchange witticisms with on Facebook, but by the skin of my teeth. She was brilliant in high school and is still an elfin character. I was thinking of her when I told my mom today that I'm SO tired of battling depression & food -- so, so, so, so weary of it. Had anyone noticed, which no one did in Missoula, Montana, in 1973, that this 14-year-old kid was drowning, I could have been so much more. Instead, the consensus, of course, was that I needed to lose weight.

I need fucking drugs, man, and the second I graduated from high school I asked for a shrink, which was pretty self-preserving as I entered my Suicide Years. But regrets have been flowing through me like another set of white cells. The men I couldn't have. The travel I didn't do. The sexiness I did not feel. Reed College, my dream school, far above my pathetic grades. C still visits her favorite teacher and asked if I was fond of her. I laughed. I had what I now know was a nervous breakdown my senior year and was out of school for three weeks. "It's just as well," said-teacher said when she asked if anyone knew what happened to me, "she doesn't belong in school."

She was an English teacher.

So, no, I'm not fond of that teacher.

Depression is like this, OK? I've been feeling on the verge of tears for weeks. It built. I self-medicated and was excessively tired. I played computer games and brooded and hated myself for not doing something constructive. The crisis, like scarlet fever, came yesterday: the fever broke enough for me to feel my feelings, to cry for not going to Reed College or playing the Poetry Game in graduate school, to look at Daisy and realize I was alive because I have to BE with this animal. To realize I had not been admitting for a while that I didn't want to be alive: the battles against myself are so so exhausting. To tell my first, beloved shrink that I'm in a Bad Place, and my friend D., and my friend J., who completely got it and didn't act as though I was insane when I asked in a small voice if she thinks Daisy loves me. To actually tell my mother what I've been going through and have her respond sympathetically.

Depression is like this: I published a book that cracked open an experience many women share that led to a cyberspace community of sharing. Maybe I saved -- or salved -- some lives. Now I'm getting ready to edit a book about the shame of regaining weight in an effort to tell these woman it's OK. It's OK to gain weight, it's what we're unfortunately wired for. And whatever battle we chose with regards to our weight -- diets, exercise, acceptance, surgery, depression -- they're all OK to. Because it's a war between self and self, society and self, and we Americans haven't won any wars lately. It's OK to love our success and to deeply revere and respect our failure and to celebrate every day that we stick to whatever option we have decided to fight for and with in this battle. Hell, let's celebrate every hour.

And then depression is like this: telling myself all that doesn't make me believe it. I'm still the young fat woman standing at the front door with chocolate cake wrapped in tinfoil, sending my friends off to have fun, have an adventure, drive 9,000 feet up closer to the sun while I went back to bed.

I hope to God I said no because I was writing a paper on Troilus and Cressida that day or had an Italian test coming up. I hope I was reading Proust at 3 pages an hour. And I'm grateful C and I found each other and that maybe I can make up for lost time in some small way.

Say a prayer for me, friends. I'm working hard to climb back up to the daylight. One day I'd like to be close to a tricky sun.

Me

I'm going to sound very whiny in this post, so if you're a critic of that tone or that tendency in me, go away.

I was talking to one of Us last night and saying there's not much "me" in my days lately. Everyone I know is in terrific emotional and/or physical pain and I've become the listener and, in some cases, adviser or advocate for my friends and family.

It may have started when my dog Roger moved away. That was also about the time my mother, who has chronic congestive heart failure, was rushed to the hospital for three days to treat fluid in her lungs. My blessed brother Jim handled that crisis and flew down the day she got out of the hospital and stayed long enough to get everybody settled and for my father to have the first symptoms of shingles.

They asked Jim if we could take turns going to see them for a few days every two - three months, so I'm going out for their birthdays in mid-October & for Christmas. Jim will get to do the spring cleaning.

It was also about the time I learned my former sponsee, whom you may remember from PFT as "Pam," whom I gave my fat clothes to, has been back and forth between the hospital and nursing home since early April after everything that could go wrong with a hip replacement went wrong: raging infections, two strokes, a breakdown in health care, severe depression. Her health care agent, the person who is in charge of making decisions when she can't and advocating when she can't (and she can't: she's on so much morphine and in so much pain, she can barely remember her own name, let alone remember to ask why she has shooting pains in her left foot), lives in Michigan and can only do so much from so far away.

It became quickly apparent that she needs someone at hand to chase down doctors, go over medical records, get physical therapy for her partially paralyzed left arm going. It also became quickly apparent that person was going to be me.

This means I have to tightly organize my days. Get and drop off dogs on time, bathe in mid-day, have food ready for dinner, be braced to race over to Cobble Hill to talk to people. & I've become a pretty disorganized person who seems also to be on call for other people's problems. If it's not time I spend for and on Pam, it is, therefore, guilt. Which is also exhausting.

Mix in one of those 90-minute apocalyptic phone conversations in which two people lay their cards on the table and leave rattled but as up-in-the-air as they were before, the observation that one of my dogs was peaky -- losing weight, lethargic, drooly -- taking her to the vet and finding out she does, in fact, have Lyme Disease (my first thoughts were reprehensible: 1. thank God that HUGE amount of money I signed on their credit card came up with something, 2. I'm proud of myself for noticing she wasn't well when there were no overt symptoms), and finding two women from my Missoula past through Facebook and touching on old feelings...

You have someone who has been severely depressed, in and out of sugar, incredibly, seemingly incurably tired.

I'm getting a cold now, which doesn't in the least surprise me except for the question of how I could get one with so little human contact. I may well have dug into my own system to find a little teeny weak virus to exploit for the purposes of shutting down further -- shutting down even on the pain that I have allowed myself to feel.

I talked about this last night and ended up in the sugar. Writing about it will either do the same or begin to shake off some of the load that's been so heavy I don't want to talk about it. We all know that depression and food are the Catch-22 of all Catch-22's. I know that I can shake out of my depression a lot faster by getting out of the food and that I cannot entirely shake it if I'm in the food.

So it's Day One. I can't take my germs to the nursing home (how convenient) and I discussed with one of Us last night how, when we're really depressed, brushing our teeth or taking a shower counts for a lot. I think I can brush my teeth today. I have written a blog, which seemed beyond me.

Now I need to learn how to build rooms for other people's pain and lock the doors on them until I need or must get into them.

Jiggety-jig

In the last month, I have spent five nights in my own home. My latest foray was to The Land of No Irony, also known as Sun City, AZ. Actually, the town may have an Irony Store now, but it was too hot to find out.

One week of 110-degree days, my parents' very small lives, reading and sleeping and eating. I zoomed through a badly written but interesting book, Paws and Effect: The Healing Powers of Dogs, which my mother is now enjoying, Pride and Prejudice and The Starter Marriage. I slept for most of 36 hours. I filled their freezers with homemade cookies and found one of my father's long lost friends...in the Denver Post obituaries. I lopped off all my hair. My friend, A, said this morning that it's one shade away from overalls and flannel shirts and motorcycles boots.

It was awful but useful in sorting out some of the unmanageability challenge.

Here's the deal: Everything in my life is a mountain. Forty-eight hours ago, I wanted/needed:

1. to be a good daughter -- helpful, entertaining, loving, companionable
2. to pack
3. to work on two editing projects
4. to answer hundreds (I'm not kidding) emails
5. to be in touch with old friends I've not spoken to in months or years
6. to work on my novel
7. to work on the tablecloth I've been embroidering since the 1970's
8. to sort photographs and unpack boxes for my parents
9. to help my father make pasties
10. to tape record my parents' stories
11. to blog
12. to read blogs
13. to return phone calls
14. to rewrite my addresses in my Filofax
15. to work on a guest blog for a major fashion magazine
    

And a few other things.

All of the above was in my power (or in my suitcase) to do. Instead, I started reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while I ate cookies.

When I got up yesterday morning, I was disgusted with my food and still shuddering from the hair stylist trying to show me that back of my hair (I saw my profile as she turned me around and slammed the mirror down). I had a six thousand page book to add to my backpack that was already heavy with my laptop. I had done very few of the items above, except to chop vegetables and make pasty dough in the Cuisineart for my father, and [too often] grudgingly chat with my parents.

All of that stuff remains, as well as the last of the unpacking to finish, dogs to take care of, laundry that needs to be done, cleaning, getting to meetings, buying groceries and cooking, trade in my Montana driver's license for a New York license, get out of jury duty, and read a spate of books I need to read for my novel.

What got in the way? Laziness or exhaustion. Wanting to tune out my real life, the one in which my parents are feeble and my shoulders and right hand are yacked out from dogs pulling and the obligation to write.

These are fine reasons for not embroidering or writing chapter two except that I went there with Good Intentions. The best way to obliterate Good Intentions is to binge on flour and sugar.

My bowels are a mess, I'm looking at a seatbelt extender in ten or twenty more pounds, I'm NOT looking at myself, I have a mountain of self-loathing side-by-side with my mountains of flesh and my mountains of food.

That's three mountains I have to climb before or simultaneously with getting myself to the DMV or the washing machine. It was an opportunity lost to find out exactly who immigrated from Lvov in the 1880's. I'm still at one chapter when I'd like to finish this book by Labor Day.

Those are the mountains behind the mountains.

The Black Beast and the Red Demon are at war over the turf of me today. I should be calling writing this blog & getting to the bank a success.

But the fur is flying and the hills are alive...

Floundering

I guess the word "flounder" relates to the fish thrashing at the end of the hook or caught in the net, gasping, its wide flat body flailing against reality. But honestly, look at that fish: its face seems upside down...

Which is how I'm feeling.

Lots of sugar.

23 hours abstinent.

Hung-over not only from sugar but weeks of stress & not having the emotional reserve to, say, reply to some emails that spoke to my heart. Flipping through ideas for the Next Project like flimsy rollodex cards. Still doing my Sunday in the Park with George obsession because now I have the soundtrack.

I was weeping through it yesterday as I huddled in bed & was struck by the bit near the end in which the grandson of Seurat realizes & is pushed to realize by the ghost of his grandmother to "move on". Just move. Go. Take a step, any step except backwards. Somehow that retrieved an idea from past ideas that I did nothing with at the time. I don't know what to do with it yet but I will say it involves Jane Austen & that I know I'll have to make jokes about that.

I have little to say as you can see from the transparency of this entry but I feel like reaching, albeit blindly, out. Here are four weird things that annoy me in an amusing way:

1. The technogeek who set up my internet home page as "SearchSave.com". Type in any collective noun -- "love" or "understanding" -- and here are three of the first four results:

"Shop and compare great deals on Understanding and millions of other products."
"Find the Best Deals. Shop for Understanding now."
"We've sorted through the top Understanding sites for you. Quick look ups made easy."

Oh, Lord.

2. Gmail. I'm using it because my normal internet email is wonked but I'm coming to really loathe it. It snoops in the contents of messages & throws a column of supposedly related ads at me. A recent email concerned a couple of writers' retreats & the ads are:

"Chicago Loft Apartments"
"The Lofts at Perkins Row"
"Sky View Parc"
"Luxury USC Living"

They should change the name to BigBrothermail.com

3. Open the lid of an Enenmann's apple strudel box & this is part of what you can read:

"Whether the occasion is dessert, snacking or a breakfast treat, you will find there is an Entenmann's product just right for anytime. Try one today and choose your favorite!"

Ummm... Why put this INSIDE??? Isn't it redundant? "Dessert, snacking or breakfast" are NOT the same as "anytime". I myself have had Entenmann's as my starter and entree, and always as medication.

4. Three cars parked in a row outside the bank this morning. A Hybrid first, then a Jeep, then a car service Town Car idling as the driver waited for his passenger. It was Henry Ford's descent into hell.

Back from the Land of Weak Irony

It's Day Three of getting off Christmas Sugar and Day Three of Daisy's and my return to Brooklyn from Arizona. I'm not going to apologize for breaking my abstinence but I will say that I feel like shit in the wake of it. I wasn't walking and being back in business with the dogs is hard on my thighs and shoulders. I'm hungry every two hours as my body readjusts. I won't mention my digestion. And yet it feels heavenly after three weeks of that heavy sodden ghastly mulch I was living in. When I'm In The Sugar, there's no sense of "this will be better when". When I get out of it, I know the first seventy-two hours will be hard and the first ten days dangerous and touchy. So I'm countin' days.

It may sound very strange, then, that I will be thinking about thinking about moving to the Land of Nothing when the Book is done. My mother is ailing and my father is blind. They are scared for each other and scared for themselves. They need me and I want to be there to walk them as gently and intelligently through their end time as I can.

There are pro's and con's to this. I realized how much I miss being treated as though I am not responsible for how much the Safeway clerk, cable guy or waiter hates his or her job. People are friendly, smiling, helpful, accommodating. When the Schwann's delivery man brought in food, he stocked the freezers for my parents, roughed up Daisy, said hello in the most jolly way to my parents and breezed on out in the time it would have taken for a New York City or TriState deliveryman to diss his customers for having paid for his services.

I want to collect my stuff and live with it before I, too, face my end times. My china and furniture are spread out between Montana and Oregon and the things I have in the Bat Cave can't be seen OR appreciated for the crunch of space here. It would be nice to have a full size refrigerator and a microwave and fuses that don't blow when I run my hair dryer.

On the other hand, Arizona is as white bread as any place I've ever seen and the last place on earth I'd pick to live. I find the consumption of gasoline, land, and water distasteful. There are no mailboxes on the streets. There are no people on the streets. There is no recycling beyond newspapers. The houses all look the same and even the city offices are in strip malls.

Like my digestion, I won't go into the lack of greenery and the summer heat.

And then there is being home. I took Daisy out five minutes after getting back and five minutes later we ran into Boomer. At seven the next morning we bumped into Steven, Jonathan, Susan, and Daisy's friend, Chance. The dogs were incredibly happy to see me and I laugh at how I drag myself out on Monday morning to be met with, "FRANCES! IS IT CHRISTMAS? YOU'RE HERE -- IT MUST BE CHRISTMAS! DON'T YOU JUST LOVE MONDAY MORNINGS WHEN WE GET TOGETHER AGAIN!?"

The chances of knowing one's neighbors are slim in the Land of Weak Irony. You may only chat once a year, as you're setting up your inflatable snowman in the front yard for Christmas.

But then I arrive at Newark and find that Daisy's crate had been secured with those police ties. "You want those cut?" the clerk asked.

No, I wanted to say. I carry sharp scissors in my carry-on bag.

"Please," I answered.

So she did -- all but one, meaning I had to interrupt politely, collect glares and clerkly suspicion while I cut the last tie off in order to break the crate down. This is what is considered "service" in the TriState area.

And then again, I talked to one of my dog's humans yesterday evening and we laughed about the dogs until we were on the verge of tears. I ran into a friend this morning and laughed about dogs (it's a theme, OK?) until I hawked up a loogie. I cracked another of my dog's humans up at noon. People get me here. People make me laugh here. My acquaintances are, intellectually if not financially, my peers. We're all fulsome Democrats. There are books in our homes and dreams of hilly forests in our citified hearts.

But a gym would be cheaper in Arizona and some of the year I could take Daisy to the lake.

Back and forth. What I do know is that my dream when I finish this book is to rent a car and drive away. I want to visit every important person from my past and make peace with it. I'll take a miss on three or ten people I actively...well, hate, but I'd like to reinstall friendships, colleagueships, sisterships, auntships and cousinships while seeing how they have fared and shaped their lives in the last twenty or thirty years.

It would seem my parents' end times are shaping how I'm thinking about my own initial descent down the slope.