Category Archives: Stuff

Everything else

And so it goes into a new year, living a lie

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The year 2014 was one for the record books: Turned 50, got married and helped channel my new mother-in-law into the afterlife, or the abyss, or the whatever comes next, all in the span of seven days. What a week that was, I thought not much was going to top it.

Then, I got the word that my only hope for mobility would be spare metal and plastic parts. I lived through the first, and, if I can dream, only, major surgery of my life. I’m now limping around, albeit a healthier limp, on a full, manmade hip replacement. Let’s hope this version of the Depuy implant comes without complications, recalls and lawsuits.

So, into another year I go. Decades wiser (in theory), a bit more worn out, with the X-ray to prove it, and an old married lady.

But the real reason to write is to give up the grift. I’m living a scam life and need to come clean. (Perhaps apropos my faux life, I’m typing this post fueled by a whole crab lying in my belly with ginger snaps and a California Madera at my elbow. Like me, the Madera is like a Madeira, but since I’m not in Portugal, it ain’t the real deal.)

I’m coming clean. I’m less disabled now, when I’m California state-certified disabled, then I was before.

For a couple, maybe few years, I’ve been limping and in pain. A year ago July, I fell in a hotel tub and thought as I lay on the tile floor, “I hope my death is swift, as I don’t want my coworkers to watch an ambulance pull my bruised and naked self through the lobby.” I caught my breath, grabbed the counter and limped my way to bed.

Once an X-ray proved I was fucked up worse than just being out of shape, I occasionally used a walking stick. Mostly, I just pressed on, loping from side to side pretending I was Ratso Rizzo.

Incidentally, while limping and calling myself Ratso, only one friend got the joke. Of course, I muttered it through a tubercular, husking breath, like Dustin Hoffman.

I got used to my lope and my pain.

Now, I’m walking with a cane, because the surgeon and the physical therapist say “why not?” I can park in blue spaces and as long as I want at meters.

And, it’s all a fucking scam.

I’m supposed to exercise. My hip is superior to the arthritic, worn version it replaced. Quite arguably, this manufactured hip is better than the one that I’ve been sporting since birth. Stronger and better formed.

So me and my new hip are getting more sympathy and concern than I’ve ever experienced.

Juggling a glass of wine and a walking stick at the company holiday party gave me the glow of Tiny Tim on Christmas Day. I basked in care and well wishes. The sincere statements of concern and offers of chairs and assistance and encouragement came fast and furiously.

At the restaurant that fed me crab, an observant colleague stopped the hostess who had said she would seat us on the second floor to ensure I could navigate the stairs. At our local bar and grill the servers and the bartender cleared a space at a low table adjacent to the bar so I didn’t have to hop a bar stool.

Walking stick in hand, I cry out for kindness.

(Except for at malls. Apparently shopping puts people in a mood to pull dick moves to swerve around me and check me out of the way. I wanted to punch the guy who didn’t pull his toddler away from my cane, which the tike had just tried to rip out of my hands. By way of non-apology he explained his rugrat liked to grab things.)

But I’m fine, I’m finer than I was when the medical community had yet to label me as not fine.

I’m cheerily congratulated for standing upright on a titanium stick that is doubtless stronger than my old bones. I appreciate the gestures, and parking right in front of where I need to go is fucking sweet.

As you see me walking, know that my doctor wants me to bend, stretch and exercise more. But I won’t mind if you save me a comfy seat.

Arts or crafts

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I think there is one core part of my being that potentially makes me a truly shitty “writer.” I like to do too many things, most of which are not writing.

My fatal flaw is a wide streak of dilettante.

Dilettante has a shitty ring to it, of course, what with it’s negative connotations of shallowness and lack of ability. On a high self esteem day, I might argue that I can write the shit out of a sentence. Even on a weak day though I can claim knowledge of basic sentence structure and grammar.

Evidence? I just consciously re-wrote the sentence above to be TWO sentences. I know that kind of shit.

I consider writing an art. I aspire to be an artist.

My soul, however, values craft. I went to journalism school rather than a creative writing program for that one word. Craft. I may not have the soul of an artist.

I could blame my mother, Pat. Not in a Freudian way, although like all modern day people I can cite a whole lot of ways the woman from whom I emerged left her indelible marks. Turnabout is fair play, I left my mark when she had her fourth Cesarian.

My mother believed, truly believed, like a religion, like a creed, Pat believed in hobbies. She believed in crafts. My mother raised my sister and me to bake, to sew, to knit, to decoratively paint, to buy kits from stores like Michael’s and Joann’s Fabric, to try to make something. We were makers way before making was a thing, a phenomenon.

I made this website.

The first bathroom I ever saw with a sponged walls was not in a plush restaurant with warm terra cotta tones. It was our home bathroom the day Pat stripped the wall paper and tried something new.

Way, way, way back in the wayback machine of time, I didn’t know that people bought mittens at stores. I thought they had pointy tops and thumbs and came from four pointy knitting needles whose double-sides became stealth weapons of surprise when discovered between couch cushions. I thought that mittens were always made from variegated yarn. In hindsight, variegated yarn is the best defense (short of double-pointed needles) against children and a winter of multiple lost mittens.

Making things is so damn satisfying. After reading instructions and following a pattern or free-styling a new recipe, you have something. You have in your hand a tangible product of your toil.

The photo at the top is a knitted pig made in pieces from a hemp and cotton blend yarn and then stuffed and sewn together. I made it.

Satisfyingly, over a few episodes of binge watching the BBC’s Cumberbatch-tastic version of Sherlock, I had a cuddly toy.

(I kind of like Martin Freeman, as John Watson, a bit more than the admittedly heart- and other-throbbing Benedict Cumberbatch. Maybe it’s the frequent assumptions of his own gay attraction to the Cumberbatch. Or maybe it’s that his name is easier to pronounce.)

Writing is not as satisfying. I re-read stuff I have sweated, and I don’t see adorable stuffed pig. I see words that fail to say what I mean. I see editing and mistakes and just nothing.

I will re-read this post and thing “meh.”

I will pour blood from my fingertips in confession or joy, or maybe I will create some thought that hasn’t yet been created in the universe. It will sit never better than just OK in my heart.

In crafts, I can critique and think of small changes to make the next attempt better. In writing, in art, I am I own worst critic. I will allow a vague smile at the occasional turn of phrase.

At this point in my life, I have at least learned to take praise with a simple “thank you” rather than a full on assault suggesting that the utterer of said praise is an utter moron for liking what I produced. I’ve had times on stages or in front of crowds where I have thought to myself, fleetingly, “Yeah, I got this…”

Writing is lonely. I prefer to be physically alone in the house or at least in another room from people, including the one who agreed to marry me. I cannot watch TV and write. I cannot listen to the news, podcasts and some types of music. I cannot do it as easily as I can do so many other things, and I can’t do it with distractions and pop ups of computer notifications calling.

I distrust myself to ever do what I want in my heart to do well. With crafts, I can find forgiveness in small defects and see the larger whole.

In short, I need to get working on the teddy bear I’ve started with fuzzy baby blanket yarn. It’s variegated in various shades of brown. Let’s consider it an homage to Pat and the dozens of mittens made a long, long time ago.

Pat was a maker.

Happy birth control day

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There’s this thing that I know about from work. I’m breaking my almost a decade’s long avoidance of writing anything related to work. Although, the connection is, I hope, tangential enough with the good will outweighing my fear of big brother.

It should also be mentioned I now work at a place in which the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and even a group of women swapping stories about their abortions are all allies. I haven’t polished my resume to get those choice gigs at Hobby Lobby or the Catholic Diocese, despite my obvious qualifications.

So, far from my old job and the shadows of Boston, here I go.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has a thing going on to thank birth control. Like almost everyone with a uterus, it resonates, because I know the birds and the bees and that the stork doesn’t bring babies.

To be fair, I didn’t have real sex education in school as a kid, and my mother never really gave me the straight skinny, and my 50-year-old uterus the doctors assure me is probably not at risk of occupation. But, with my memory of things past, and a swell exhibit at Boston’s Science Museum that my aunt took me to somewhere during the 70s, I’m gonna try to hype the cause.

One of my head-scratchingest moments from my current place of employment was around a very committed and truly feminist leaning co-worker, who is also chockfull of Y chromosomes and gender privilege. He might be the most committed person I have ever met on the issue of choice among men, women, and all other currently recognized genders, bar none.

Still and all, he had never lived the life of a young woman and, I dare guess, probably didn’t go to the same types of parties I went to back in the day.

Statistics show the U.S. leads the developed world in teen pregnancies. So, our country is newsworthy across the Atlantic, including links to detailed explanations of our crazy foreign ways, like this one.

By the way, how fucking unfair is it that birth control is finally free right about when my pre-menopausal body is saying “whatever.” I could have used that extra cash flow some nights when beer money was low and CVS raised the price on contraceptive sponges.

Hell, when they went off the market, sponge-worthy was not just a Seinfeld episode.

Anyway, back to the point and the head scratching. My coworker couldn’t quite get over or understand that while teen pregnancy is definitely going in numbers, a good thing for our nation, unwanted pregnancies among 20-somethings remains at the top of the charts and rising.

For better or worse, I can understand it. I didn’t just see the movie, my friends and I, back a quarter of a century ago, were living it. Most of the time, everyone tried to do her level best to stay ahead of ovulation and use anything and everything they could. But, life, as John Lennon may not have been the first to say, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

Condoms break, people forget, passion and illicit substances trick your brain into magical thinking. Many of my friends and myself held each other and held each others’ hands on trips to clinics or the drug store to find out if a night of fun had resulted into cells dividing inside our young bodies.

Many of us were, as we would all sigh and say, “lucky.” Sometimes we weren’t. I know of both abortions and babies that were part of those years of our lives.

We fought about it, cried about it, and shared a lot of wine. I had a long, long feud over a friend’s crazy boyfriend and too many sleepless nights worrying over her drugs and reckless behavior within our small, shared apartment.

In one of life’s cosmic gifts, though, I ran into her literally one of my last days in Boston before moving across the country. We talked, laughed and left each other with a hug of reconciliation to each other and our former not always well-played youth.

Today, I feel fortunate. I was always ambivalent about my own suitability or ability for motherhood. It’s very complicated and would require a long-winded and long-winding explanation from my own childhood to now as to why I never had a child of my own.

Suffice it to say the man that I finally, truly felt like I could spend the rest of my life beside, the man I finally consented to marry, came into my life rather late in the game. Also suffice it to say, that I had the wherewithal to not imagine something better with a baby among the rogues gallery that had come before M.

Other friends have married, divorced, stayed single, had children, haven’t had children, recognized a non-heterosexual lean, earned advanced degrees, wrote books, acted in films, were celibate, became celibate, and survived. A great number, I think, are living their own sort of happily ever after.

I consider myself one such lucky woman. And, I am grateful I was born into a time in which I really could choose.

Handi-abled

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The man formerly known as M., who I now can legally call my husband, has found a silver lining in my post-surgery frailty. He’s positively giddy with the notion of my getting a handicapped parking placard for my car.

Turns out, per the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, the place that hacked out my bones and replaced them with man-made parts, I’m eligible for this little post-surgery perk until March of 2015. Wait, come to think of it, my bones were also manmade, assuming I am of the homo sapiens crew. Made by my human parents.

Anyway, I guess I’m not the woman I used to be.

Actually, October was quite the month in terms of my losing body parts. I also had my first tooth extraction — a wisdom tooth that had broken. Let the record show, up in until the year of 2014, I was in tact. Pristine. OK, not pristine but in possession of all of my components.

Ironically, the picture above was taken almost a year ago to the day — 11/13/2013. The subject matter was also largely painted by me. I took over from a coworker to obsessively ensure all of the space was filled in and the white wasn’t tinged blue or the blue white. We were volunteers painting the parking lot of a shelter.

And, one year later, I could park in that space. Almost. When I get my placard.

I’m not actually that interested in getting one. I am interested in parking however the hell I want. Of course. The best part is that meters become endless. The never-ending pasta bowl of staying however the hell long you want with the fist to the gods and meter maids who require quarters or checking your telephone app in time. I impetuously will tilt my head back and laugh at the freedom.

For the metered parking, I will rejoice. I may even do a surreptitious happy dance. It will be the dance internal, lest I don’t look needy enough, however.

The actual blue spaces, I may not ever touch those. I think karma dictates that I leave them alone for the people who cannot walk or are permanently up the handicap placard needing creek.

Plus, they scare me. For irrational feelings of superstitious dread, I fear them. The jinx potential is too high. You are inviting the universe for a good old smiting.

The rational fear is of do-gooding, well-meaning folk. Years ago I worked with an accountant with a bum heart named John. Since we were only in our 30s, if I remember right, he had received a heart transplant at a young age. His heart was now indeed many, many years his heart, so he had to have been young. (John’s prognosis, sadly, and it came true, was that he would not actually ever be old. But in the few years I knew him, he was using his borrowed time and even met the woman he would marry.)

He happily drove for any group getaway from the office. Not only did his meds keep him alive, they kept him from drinking, so he was the greatest of getaway drivers.

His meds also made him particularly hirsute. Thankfully, that’s not a side effect of a hip transplant.

The director of the office, John’s and my boss’s boss, not only enjoyed the occasional day drink (as well as the occasional day slap and tickle, but that’s another story), he also liked pizza from the source. The source to him was deep in the jungles of Boston’s North End.

If you are reading this from Massachusetts, no description of labyrinthian, narrow cobble-stoned streets are in order. For the rest, it’s roadwork straight out of the Revolutionary War without a lot of updates since the 1700s.

Parking is not to be had easily in the tiny and densely packed neighborhood. You could circle around Hanover and Prince and Union and other streets whose names I forget for days without a meter or legal space to be found. And woe be unto you, if you were to ever, ever, ever consider moving a lawn chair from a shoveled out spot in the dead of winter snow.

John’s service to pizza was incalculable, even by an accountant of his own caliber. We piled into his four-door, and he could smoothly go where no mere parking mortals could go.

But, it wasn’t all rainbow colored puppies living on liver-flavored lollipops.

John’s reason for the handicap plates was solidly internal. He had no outward sign of the transplant unless he walked around shirtless exposing railroad tracked scars all over his chest.

Without cane, crutches, chair, walker, a begging bowl or any of the acoutrement that signal “handicap,” he was a hairy dude stepping out of a well-parked sedan. More than once he was accosted on the street and assumed to be a well-bodied person illicitly borrowing their parents or grandparents or other unfortunate person’s car.

I think people have a clear mental picture of what handicapped is supposed to look like. They want their gimps gimpy, their limpers limpy, someone they can look at and create a sad narrative.

An accountant running errands before work, heart transplant or no, is too normal. He was shaken one morning by a presumably well-intentioned woman, and an accusation that escalated into a shouting match.

How much are you required to say, I wonder.

I think months from now, if I dangle the placard above my dashboard through March, I’ll find out. I can see myself in the streets of San Francisco, and it may not end well. I still have enough of Boston in me to imagine my future self telling someone to go fuck themselves, while debating whether or not to let them know my hip is not my own.

Lightening up

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Rather than navel (or hip) gazing, I thought I would try to write something interesting or funny. It may or may not work out.

There’s a creepy video making the rounds of social media today.

I would totally freak out and not have any idea what to do and likely get robbed. But that’s not funny, hence not the subject of this post. Instead, it reminded me of the night I actually did the same thing.

Years and years and years ago, when the planet was new, my hip was organic, and I had not reached the geriatric state in which I now find myself, I was younger and foolisher. I wasn’t actually young when all of the foolish in me happened, and I’d reckon there is foolish to come. But foolish I was and actively doing stand up comedy.

My favoritest place to be comedy-wise was the Walsh Brothers’ Great and Secret Show every Thursday at 10 p.m., conveniently located in my old neighborhood of Inman Square Cambridge. As a side note, in addition to being my most favorite place, it was also a place of butterflies in my stomach, insecurity and some not insignificant degree of anxiety.

But, what the hell, what didn’t kill me made me stronger. And, I got to hang out with two of the best guys I have ever met. People who I hope will be friends to the end. People with whom I have had rambling and brilliant conversations into twilight hours and ate pizza or chicken doner or guacamole depending upon the coast or continent.

Anyway, the scene is an empty urban street in front of an empty urban theater with yours truly between two urban brothers. Undoubtedly beer had been drunk.

Off to the side, a pothole or manhole or other kind of city street hole was surrounded by orange cones. A serendipitous ring of orange safety.

The street is called Cambridge Street, and it’s one of two or three main streets in the city of Cambridge that run through a large length of the city. It’s boulevard wide and mostly commercial with the occasional row of houses breaking up squares of shops. Cambridge Street is the heart of Inman Square.

It was probably David, but it could just as easily have been Chris, who pumped the beer in his veins to his gray matter, took in the orange cones and decided it was time for a roadblock. The three of us moved the orange cones perpendicular to Cambridge Street, straight up blocking all traffic.

It was cold but not unbearable, and a there was a bench nearby.

We giggled as cars approached from either direction. They would slow and then stop, assessing the situation and slowly turn around and head back from whence they came. We were laughing like loons.

Honestly, it was perhaps the only time in my life that I was a full on vandal. Part of my laughter was the liberation from my other self, the completely serious, maybe too serious, woman who by day managed grants and budgets for a large research center within a cancer hospital. My daytime colleagues would have simply been confused by my nighttime beahvior.

Actually, I have to confess. There was another transgression in my life. I was there when a group of elementary school kids surrounded the telephone pole kitty-cornered to my house and contemplated what would happen if the attached fire alarm was pulled. Someone pulled it.

I remember the door-to-door canvass by local law enforcement and the knock on our own door. I sort of remember my mother’s anger. But I cannot recall if I confessed then or ever.

Meanwhile on a dark bench with the Walsh Brothers, our laughing was interrupted. One man who approached the roadblock got out of his car to thoroughly scan the situation. His surveillance led him to lock eyes on a benchful of giggling knuckleheads.

Perhaps in August, when people sit on stoops or benches all over the city to catch whatever errant breeze might waft by, we may have gone unnotieced. But in late fall or early winter, coat weather, too late to be sitting upright on a city bench rather than lying asleep, hopefully inconspicuous and sadly homeless, we were our own beacon under the street lamp.

I wish videotaping on a cell phone was the ubiquitous thing it is now. He was literally hopping mad. Words couldn’t form around the idiocy of why we should do such a thing.

He strode into the street, moved enough cones to clear his path, and drove off into the night, no doubt with steam shooting from his ears. We walked in the opposite direction.

Changes, I guess

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In one of those crazy things that the planet drops on you so your tiny lizard prain can see magic and say “Ah ha. Meaning!” our yard is alive with multiple generations of Gulf Fritillary butterflies. They feast and live and die and transform on the passionflower plant.

Climbing a fence between our neighbors and us, the flowers have bloomed outside our bedroom since we moved here.

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Until this summer, they lived and bloomed relatively unmolested by the insect world apart from an occasional bee.

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Pow. Somewhere the word went out to a gadflying Gulf Fritillary, and she told two friends and like a hot night club, our yard was put on the map. They have been partying it up for months. If you give the lifecycle a month or so, we have grandparents, maybe great-grandparents, fathers, mothers, children, cousins and eggs for the next generation.

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It’s a cosmic hustle for someone lying back with metal and bone filling in for bone and tissue. I’ve swapped one pain for a new pain, and unremarkably it’s all a mind fuck of trying to decide if I made the right move. Does a caterpillar know when it sticks its bottom feet on a leaf, curls up and swaddles itself in silk to form a crusty brown shell what happens next?

Here’s what I know. Day by day I was ground down by pain that the medical establishment assures me was irreversible and severe osteoarthritis. Through genes or some injury I never knew or remembered or more likely some accident at birth, my left hip wore itself to a wingeing, painful state.

It was gradual enough that for a while I figured I had pulled a muscle or otherwise strained my disobedient body. Then, I figured that I was just an out of shape mess. A little weight loss and a lot of exercise and I’d at least be able to sit, stand or walk without twinging.

And then the pronounced limping started. It didn’t stop.

Exercising was brutally painful. But with the help of a stoic streak forged with the fire of a childhood where crying was weakness and shaking it off was sound medical advice, I perservered. Oh, and of course, over the counter pain and inflammation killers, mostly my favorite vitamin naproxen, flowed in my blood stream second only to natural-born cells.

The long and the short of it — it sucked. Livable, but not optimal. I think the day I just spontaneously tripped on air or a sunbeam and dropped in a heap on the floor of my boss’s office scared me the most.

The future meant only one thing. It would be complaining and lessening my sphere of travel to footsteps. It would be my mother. My whole life she had sore feet and legs and breathed sighs of resignation. The diagnosis, which may have come only through an obstetrician, the only doctor I know that she ever visited, was one word “arthritis.”

My back was X-rayed, and the arthritis word arose again. Degenerative arthritis of two discs in my, I now learned, curved spine.

Resigned I was, too, like my mother. But I exercised more. I lost some weight, I followed exercises outlined by a physical therapist. I played softball only ever making it to first base on an error and then calling in a runner to my place.

If my mother I would become… If my future was to be pain and grimacing with a simple stroll, I’d push it hard and convince myself I could muscle through anything. I had to dig deep and keep on moving.

But I was moving less and less. I managed to walk for distances when I could not allow myself to sit. The funeral parade of my mother-in-law was a slow and deliberate slog in tropical humid heat. My new family arrayed behind us, worrying my every footfall and my pale skin getting beaten down in the midday sun.

Cumulatively, even as I pushed, I could feel my world getting smaller as my achievable distances became shorter.

What had been day-to-day discomfort, became months, then years and growing pain. Doctors told me to keep losing weight and keep exercising.

I began to learn that the language of pain is a foreign tongue. I couldn’t find the right description to impress an array of MDs that there was something more.

Here’s where I’ll toss out a brief tangent on a soapbox — I am certain that the deck is stacked against women when it comes to health. Every doctor’s visit seemed to turn to conversations about snacking and fat and health risks.

Yeah, I get that. Although, I’ve been built like a fireplug for pretty much as long as I can remember. Solid, junk in the trunk, low to the ground and a 36C bra since an incredibly early puberty. Healthy and active and curvaceous.

I never really vary wildly from about the same weight, my cholesterol and sugar are fine and blood pressure normal to low. Apart from the creep of middle age, I couldn’t convince anyone that what was happening — falling more frequently, getting up, sitting down, sleeping, moving, walking with pain — was getting worse and not the least bit normal.

My conviction of pain sucking worse for women is based on not being taken seriously. Every time I described my pain I guess it didn’t sound dire enough.

I wanted to punch the very young nurse practitioner, visited ONLY to take a PAP smear, who went off on hidden calories, bad diets and how obesity makes you uncoordinated. She accused me of drinking sugared soda and eating fast food based on nothing, and certainly not based on the vagina she was hired to swab.

Another doctor, visited when I fell in a hotel shower and weeks later ached in spasm-y pain, talked only about my age and asked about signs of pre-menopause. Pain and advancing age were inextricably linked and both incurable, I gathered.

Statistically, and rather than my linking one place, just Google this fact — Women have more cases of osteoarthritis and ultimately get more hips and knees replaced. But, men, they get their hips and knees replaced YOUNGER. If you’re an 80-year-old women and having trouble tooling around the assisted living complex, boom, you can get a new hip in the time that they recharge your Rascal scooter.

Substitute in a penis and balls, and you’re rocking that new hip or knee in your 50s or 60s. You can become an upright middle-aged man ready to chase a mobile lifestyle again.

Due for a physical, I figured I’d give it another whirl to try to convince a stranger that I wasn’t just another fat, old lady whining.

I read the online bio of a Russian woman that instead of an MD was a DO, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. When I showed up in her exam room, she had me hop off the table and walk around the little room. It was a first.

Other doctors looked at my height, weight, age and asked questions as I sat on the exam table in socks and paper gown. They moved my leg for me, asked more questions, tapping answers into a computer screen.

This doctor walked alongside me and looked from the front, back and sides.

For the first time, someone mentioned my hip. Given my not ancient age, this doctor assumed hip bursitis and after years of complaints I had an order for a new X-ray. After the X-ray, she canceled the follow up appointment that would have happened with bursitis and sent me straight to a surgeon.

I wish I had a before and after set of X-rays or even just the X-rays that the surgeon and I went over together. It was a study of black and gray. My left hip looked cavernous next to my right with space between the bones joining up and no cartilage in sight. An ugly, dark space.

I didn’t deliberate long. The surgeon was so certain that I probably was born with a misshapen structure, he didn’t suggest surgery, he only asked when.

This could turn out to be my chrysalis, my future in another form. For as long as I can remember long walks have meant sore legs and feet in a way that other people tell me doesn’t happen to them.

Maybe I have a new fix. I’m learning how to walk again. I was a late walker in my baby years. I am relearning what I maybe didn’t quite get right at like 2 or 3 years old.

At 50 I might creep into a new phase.

And now I’m not myself anymore

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If it wasn’t some kind of movie plot and a deranged madman implant a stick or a snake or a robotic, futuristic control device that will have me goose stepping in locked formation, I’m now standing on something like the photo above. I took the bandages and tape off, and I have a serpentine gash puckering the cellulite in my thigh more than the usual pucker. Hard to say what’s in there.

I seem to be recovering OK. I had hopes that I would be one of the patients the surgeon chattered about who veritably waltzed out of the recovery room. But, I can’t fuckingdance, so no surprise that wasn’t me.

I did leave the hospital with all it’s sterile movie set tubes and monitors the second I could. One night of care taking and I was done.

My favorite part of the hospital was the intravenous drip of narcotics that would ooze more pain-killing goodness at the press of a button. I was watching the second hand wind down in 10 minute intervals when the device would reward me with a boost. Life should have such delivery systems on the daily.

But, alas, I discovered all of that sweet, sweet opiate had a price. My stomach felt like shit with saltine crackers and ginger ale being my only joy. And, that shit will bind up your colon like it’s never been blocked before.

More on that scatological burst in a second, but a side note on why I left the hospital with great haste.

Hospitals are for sick people. I think perhaps the best time to stay. would be in full on coma. Anything short of persistent vegetative state, and it is fucking annoying.

There are a thousand cliches and previously tread remarks. But, why the fuck why must it be 24-hour poking? Can’t they schedule the blood-drawing guy and the drug-dispensing and the ice pack change and the nutritionist to hit you up roughly around the same time? And why does anything have to happen pre-dawn?

I would have rather have died in my sleep, I think, then to be woken out of it to have every tube and whatnot checked whenever sleep did come.

Even though the nurse dithered nervously as to whether I was truly ready and whether I could take care of myself and whether I was really, really sure, when the physical therapist gave me the green light on going the bathroom alone, freedom was mine.

So, the bathroom is what gave me freedom, and it is the bathroom that will likely preclude me from developing an unhealthy bond with the bottle of Norco by my side.

Don’t get me wrong. Hydrocodone, she is a good friend at 3 a.m. when there is no pose or state of mind that will bring comfort. She swaddles you in the numbing goodness that tells the nerves that pain is not of you, not today.

Come the morning, though, the wonderful mistress who gave you comfort and relief has walked away with your wallet and your guts. Left behind is a growing pit of constipation that prunes, softeners and laxatives cannot conquer alone. They each must join a pitched battle for days on end.

I’ll take this away from the image of my personal pooing.

I am obsessed about constipation as a constant side effect of using opiates. Basically, for me it’s a different face on everything perceptively cool about drugs, drug culture, creativity and drug-induced muses.

Rock and roll heroes like Janis Joplin and Joey Ramone couldn’t shit. The notion of all of that soul and pouring out of emotion and capturing their respective raw movements in society and considering that price leaves me even more in awe.

I am a simple simple woman. If I am not comfortable in some basic, bestial ways, I cannot think let alone create. My soul is base. I like good plumbing too much to truly ever be a rebel.

Meanwhile, in 2014, we are all one connected by the internet. So, I could Google my obsession.

Through the computer age, I discovered bluelight.org. There is a whole world out there of people sharing the good, bad, funny, safe and crazy about the whole pharmacology of drugs. And holy shit, as it were, many are out there sharing forums of my own short-term obsession.

The next wave of futuristic drugs will be gentler on your stomach.

I am my mother, Act 2

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Caringtoday Somewhere, sometime, some place, maybe in the 1960s or 1970s, my mother was told she had arthritis. That is all I know.
She never had the balled up knuckles of rheumatoid arthritis, and she mostly complained that walking hurt. I think there may have been an X-ray, or maybe just a Marcus Welby-style MD probing her knees and hips and thighs and ankles and declaring that her joints were wearing down to nubs of bone against bone without the juicy lubrication of cartilage.

In other words, she probably had something similar to what today’s modern medicine has declared for me. The doctor’s email called it “severe osteoarthritis of the left hip.” I walk funny, and it hurts as I limp and lurch across the floor.

One could note that it absolutely a cosmic joke that I now have the mobility issues and pain with which Pat soldiered on for many years. She stubbornly got no medical help, popping NSAIDs sporadically and occasionally and begrudgingly using a cane she dug up from some closet and hacked at herself with a saw to whittle it to the right height.

In her final years, I accompanied her grocery shopping, where she maintained a death grip for stability on the handle of a grocery cart. Each year getting in and out of my car was an affront and an admonition to buy a better, more suitable model. Although, the yellow VW Beetle seemed to work OK.

We argued that she should see a doctor. They, the doctors, she said, told her there was no point, there was nothing they could do. A dubious claim, but maybe true in the 1960s. We argued over at least taking over the counter painkillers. For a while I convinced her to stay on a routine of taking Ibuprofen rather than waiting for the pain to get too bad for it to help. But, then, she would forget to eat while taking the pills and the upset stomach would outweigh the pain in her legs, and she would stop taking anything.

She did confide on a regular visit that she was afraid to drive, because the pain in her legs was weakening her ability to control them. I went along with the face-saving story that the car was itself not working correctly.

I was a nag, a scold, a worrier. I tried to help with solutions, like suggesting a walker, a horrifying prop that would scream to the world that she had become an old lady. I would bring over different brands of drugs and did constant reading up on what doses would be the most effective and how to take them. In the end, I would (mostly) allow her to complain of the pain without my comments and try to get her outside in the world to keep her muscles moving. I always let her steer the grocery cart.

So here I am. I am now admonishing myself, when I stubbornly decide to ignore the pain. Because of the years I trailed her grocery cart cum walker, I still use a basket or let M. steer the cart. I don’t like admitting that my walking has gotten pretty bad, rarely without at least a limp.

In turns I hide the pain or I complain, just as my mother before me.

But the medical establishment has shown me the picture of my hip, and it truly is not a healthy looking joint. My right hip shows up on film cheerily with a nice round femoral head curving into the acetabulum of my pelvis surrounded by desirable puffy white clouds of cartilage. The picture of my left hips is dull shades of gray and black shadows without spaces of white and with an uncomfortable looking angle. The surgeon tells me I may have been born this way — slightly off balance and prone to have the cartilage wear away in a grating gate.

Bad genes or congenital deformity or the gods laughing at those moments of impatience when I rushed my own mother along or had her out walking longer than was comfortable.

My future is plastic and titanium. The plan is a total hip arthroplasty, as the medical people say, or a total hip replacement in my world. They will saw off the bone at the top of my leg, and jam in a modern machine. It scares the shit out of me, at the same time I am intrigued by the cyborg dimension of it all and the prospect of walking pain free. The recovery sounds like a bitch, and I will not buy the fanny pack the medical guide suggestions for those dark days when I walk with a walker.

When I become better, stronger, faster, more metallic and unable to travel through airport security, I will not be my mother. Pat was not a robot.

Healthbase Zimmer Total Hip Replacement Implant Components

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I am my mother, Act 1

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I’m not sure, but I think one thing that was crazy about my relationship with my mother, Pat, besides calling her Pat far too frequently, was knowing a great deal about her trials, tribulations and occasional successes at work. Maybe other people write their parent’s job performance reviews?

Because of this knowledge, I know that I am as equally fucked up as her in a distinct way. As employees we are beloved and hated in crazy polar opposites, in melodramatic huge shifts. She had people who were Shakespearean ne’er-do-wells looking to score points with kings (or superintendents) off of Pat’s guileless and unprotected flanks. She championed the good and got hurt by the bad.

I knew of the love. She had friends who became my teachers. She had students who were my peers. They adored her (albeit weirdly brisk and aloof) warmth. They gushed about how great a teacher she was and how she had transformed lives with patience and care. She literally gave clothes and peanut butter sandwiches to those without them. If her version of history has any accuracy (she was not one for laser focus in her storytelling), she helped boost the career of a new teacher who was labeled by the aforementioned ne’er-do-wells as an odd duck who maybe shouldn’t be near kids. That teacher turned out to be one of the most memorable science teachers in our town, ultimately still remembered by her own grandchildren years after his initial hazing.

Pat had enemies, though. There were fellow teachers who hated her focus on old-school techniques that had proven successful and took draconian steps in enlisting administration to force her to conform to new education trends. Both her shyness and her quirky sense of humor made her colleagues uncomfortable, I gather, and they would relish opportunities to make fun of her. She was also for many years a sole representative of what is now a normal state, a single, working mom.

As an absolutely unwavering advocate for the children she taught, she also had a fair amount of complaints from parents. The saddest case was when she was brought into court to testify that a junior high student told her that something was wrong, and she and her friend the school nurse helped him get treatment for a sexually transmitted disease. She was devastated by the rock and a hard place of saving a kid from child abuse at home, but then helping the courts send him into the chaos and uncertainty of foster care.

On bus duty, she was thrown into a shouting match with a threatening dad, who resorted to dirty names, because she wouldn’t let his spawn off the bus. A fact of modern life with a prevalence of custody battles and other perils is that parents must notify schools if they are to change the routine or pick up their children outside of the prearranged plans. Pat took the name calling and the screaming unwilling to be bullied into sending a kid into the hands of a screaming maniac without knowing for sure if he was indeed dear old dad. At least in a calmer moment, he called to apologize.

So, right then, what the fuck is the point I am feebly making about myself?

I have enemies. Well, I don’t have enemies, since I’d have to give a bit more of a fuck to gin up the passion to hate certain people. But enemies have me. Some people just don’t dig the groove I be laying down.

My true exemplar of attracting the wrong kind of attention in the work place was, of course, the great employment drama of July 2004. July is now and forever a wonderful month of the sweet trumping the bitter. In 2004, I found out scientifically from a therapist that I am not a psychopath and essentially got a paid year off from office life, and now I live in a town that does July 4 like it’s 1970. Eventually, I even got to hear the end of my own story and of my vindication. Done in by a co-worker who wanted me done in, who himself was ultimately found out and done in. Karma is a good thing, and one of us now sells real estate.

But all of the above is history, and with the Grateful Dead coming up in iTunes while I sit in a surfer town down the coast from the city where hippies once ruled, I must be here now!

Modern day Silicon Valley is where I have had the privilege of meeting my first Californian-flavored antagonist. Better yet, I got to find out how hard she was gunning for me as she exited the door, moving away to a place in which our paths likely will never cross again. In the grand scheme of things, I weather the dark side much better now. Still and all, some people just don’t like me and what stands me apart from the crowd, they have the need to tell me.

Like my mother before me, I took it. I listened. I refused to assume the worst until the worst was done. Thankfully, and perhaps because of Pat’s and my own stories, over the past couple of years I never quite got sucked into the dark vortex. I mean for me I full on walked a path that Gandhi himself would have said “holy fuckballs, you are have saint-like patience.” OK, he probably would have said something wise in Hindi or Gujarati, and he might not have said holy fuckballs or made a saint reference, but he could have. (My computer spell checked that as duckbills. Oh ‘puter, you don’t know me.)

In the end, the final act, right before the credits rolled, I thought we had come to a late in the movie understanding, a cathartic understanding that bygones could and would be bygones. That life had moved on and there would be a golden sunset, as enemies hugged and forgot why they had ever fought.

I am an idiot.

The last scene was instead a monolog of vindictiveness. I was told that I am a manipulator extraordinaire, a genius of subterfuge, flatteringly the only person in a long and storied life and career who had ever acted unkindly or stabbed a back so deeply. I am clearly super human by the amount of credit for cruelty I was given. My favorite line, since it was one of those moments when someone is talking that you just have to not burst out in laughter lest you get cracked in the face, was the following bit of twisted logic:

I figured out who you are. You’re the kind of person who makes themselves indispensable, who really works hard to get management to like their work, and then you can do know wrong. You are indispensable and they trust you and you then use that to get to them and they listen. You used that against me.

So, wait, I almost blurted, you fucking hate me, because I’m competent?

For a little while I have sat with this tale and the criticisms lobbed that were lobbed at my head. I weighed it all and felt sad that a fellow human was clearly hurt and had misunderstood so much so completely. Chump that I am, I tried to explain myself while effusing out piles of empathy.

In the end, I told the story to someone who knows us both. Someone who is also one of the least dramatic or prone to hyperbole I know. The final word that hadn’t occurred to me about my situation, but that I had always considered whenever Pat was similarly embroiled, some humans are mean. Just mean, malevolent souls.

And, I happily walk away knowing, I am just not that mean.

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Rolling, rolling, rolling

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Back in the 70s, freedom had two wheels, a chain and pedals. Every day after school and all summer long, grab your bike and go.

My first bike was a pink Huffy, 3-speed road bike. I always have essentially hated pink, but I suppose my mother got a great deal on it. I had a love hate relationship with that bike.

My heart, my coveting, my lust was a Sting Ray with a sissy bar, banana seat, ape hanger handle bars. Maybe some handle bar tassles. My brothers, normal sized boys for their ages, they got those bikes. Orange or green, ready to do wheelies and burn rubber with coaster brakes.

I was a big girl, though, and even at 9 or 10 years old, I could straddle a small woman’s bike frame. I imagine Pat, my mother, also was hedging her investment. If I kept growing, a tiny girls bike could be crushed under my weight.

(Ironically, and looking back, I was big for a kid but I couldn’t have been that big. I’m a short grown up who has to have a small frame and/or crank the seat post low. Sigh.)

The pink Huffy was big and heavy compared to a Sting Ray, but he’ll if I didn’t ride it for miles and miles and miles and miles. In my gel-softened lens memory, it took me places in a hurry and on a hot summer’s day there was nothing quite like pedaling maniacally to a destination, like a friend’s house or the local park, and flinging yourself and your bike into the cool, green grass of the suburbs.

Of course, I have a distant memory of a lawn fling that landed on some dog shit and the subsequent furious rinsing out of my shirt in my friend’s bathroom sink. Life is a bittersweet ride.

The Huffy, though, perhaps because it was not the bike of my dreams and got tossed carelessly onto sidewalks and lawns, suffered an ignominious fate. Without a kickstand, I had dropped it flat on the side of a friend’s grass not noticing the wheels jutting onto the asphalt of the driveway. As we played nearby, her dad’s car ground the wheels under its tires and pulled the frame into a twisted mess.

I waked the pretzel home, crying in shame for my part in the massacre and sadness for the loss. In my head I tried to come up with something to say to soothe the yelling that would be unleashed in Pat. Yell she did, and the Huffy was out out in the trash.

It was a while before I got another bike, and shoe leather was my only transportation. On a bike you can cover ground quickly and work is like play. Walking, on the other hand, in the long streets of suburban neighbors is a death march that feels like hours and days gone.

Thinking back, I thought the reason I couldn’t get a new bike right away was punitive. Probably it wasn’t entirely. The household budget kept by my mother likely only allotted one bike per kid in a multi-year plan.

Finally, my day came, and I was presented with a completely awesome Raleigh sports 3-speed hub gear touring bike with a leather seat. That bike was completely a great bike, and I should have held onto it forever. It rode sweet and lasted for years. I’m not actually sure when it left my life.

I suspect it was a victim of Pat’s damp basement and the tides of changing technology and fashion.

When I was a kid, most bikes were fixed gear or 3-speed. Serious bike riders, people like my oldest brother who had a racing bike of whatever alloy was lightest and super thin, slick tires, had 10 speeds. Mere mortals pedaled around primitively, as derailleurs were pricey and rare.

By the 80s and 90s, that changed to every bike having many gears, different type of shifters, and normal people talking about gear ratios. Mountain bikes with knobby tires and forks and treads to handle any terrain were the bike to have. My Raleigh was a quaint old British gal not torqued up for life in the fast lane.

On my own, a young adult in the city, I needed a ride to cover miles when cars and public transportation were not on track. My Specialized Hardrock was a basic mountain bike with semi-slick tires for the urban jungle.

That red machine covered all manner of terrain from potholes to sandy ditches in every neighborhood of Cambridge and a good chunk of Boston. It was my commuter ride to more than one job, when I was relatively fit and the subway and busses too slow. It saved me hundreds in parking fees had I driven.

It was on that bike I was flipped over a car door, sprawled on Mass. Ave. directly in front of Harvard Law’s Pound Hall. It was also that bike that often took me to the Walsh Brothers Great and Secret Show.. And, it was the bike I has when I met the man who would become my husband, who cruised town almost exclusively on two wheels.

That awesome bit of freedoms was sold for the great move west. I’m sad I don’t have a picture.

I’m now on my third California bike. The Cannondale hybrid bought in San Jose, which gave me an extra radius to explore our new neighborhood, is gone and only dimly remembered. It may have been red. Or white. Or a color. It left my possession ironically.

I bought the bike when we were living in a sketchy neighborhood in a sketchy apartment, maintained by a sketchy landlord. The carport where I mostly kept it wasn’t the safest shelter, but it survived the mean streets.

Moving on up to an upscale suburb and a decent neighborhood, we moved to a nicer place. The lock was cut and it was gone.

M. and I both bought Giants. His is red and built for speed. Mine was green and built for commuting.

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A great ride broken in for commuting like none of my bikes before. The green machine now lives with a 13-year-old in Santa Cruz. I was misty as I said goodbye, but my old body couldn’t give the bike what she needs.

And, now the real point of all of this writing. I have come full circle.

I never had Jan Brady’s bike. I never had a two-wheeler built for looks and heading to California beaches. I couldn’t have in the 70s the Sting Ray bike I wanted.

This cruiser is my future and my past. Everything old is new again and I know that there are many miles to go.

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