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Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

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Ah the holidays. It doesn’t matter the decade, the age or the location, but I get that bluesy feeling that’s best summed up by The Animals or Nina Simone.

But oh, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Of course, it’s all self-inflicted anxiety. One year maybe I’ll just not give two shits about whether the gifts I get are well-matched and well-received. Maybe I’ll just receive all gifts at face value and not morn the lack of connection.

(Truth be told, that’s one minor complaint at the end. There’s only one thing I received that I thought, “Really?” since it seemed so cookie cutter and impersonal.)

This year, though, was a new chapter. M. and I celebrated at home and hosted. California menu, no snow, fresh produce, avoiding travel all pluses all around.

I have to admit, I have more fun with M.’s family and Chinese New Year. Although, he points out that could be because many don’t speak English, the only language I do. I guess being misunderstood ain’t so bad, if it’s done in Chinese.

It’s all relative

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If I had anything like a soul, I might put fingers to keyboard and write a list of all the things for which I should be grateful. It’s the day before Thanksgiving after all.

But, soulless I remain, so instead I will write about people in sufficient generalities to not attract specific ire.

First, my absolutely first world, privileged, fat, dumb and happy problems. Here I sit in the soft bath of sunlight streaming through a skylight in a state of the art, certified green and excessively comfortable office building. Free Wi-Fi. Free Diet Coke. And, in fact, a free, whole, family-sized pumpkin pie beside me.

Yet, I do not feel free. I have to wait for a ride.

So, my inner whiner is thinking “Oh, poor, pitiful, me. However, shall I survive in a luxurious office, closed now for the holiday, waiting to be transported home?” Moreover, I’m not sure how I can carry my holiday groceries and my free pie to the car, once my ride does come.

It’s a thought that someone who not only saw these images in real life but took the pictures while looking at them with my own eyeballs shouldn’t actually think.

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Ultimately, I will have my soft, white flanks seated upon the rich, puffed fabric of my relatively new car. I will envision if tomorrow’s dinner should have a wee panache of gourmet or just old-school holiday cooking.

If waiting for a ride is the worst of my life, I guess I do have reason to be grateful. (Not to mention, when I see the cliffs and the ocean of our chosen town, I will forget when I lived close enough to work to bike it.)

All of the above is not what I am writing about. Well, it is. I just did. Only it was an accident.

Instead, I’m writing about sweet, sweet irony and confusion of this life. The relativity that gives this post it’s title, and my theory of relativity is what makes the world go around and around. I suppose Einstein thought the same thing about his.

Every day in my universe, I have to interact with a person who makes me kind of crazy. It’s the special kind of crazy that hits that never grew up from junior high, don’t want to get picked on any more, why is life so hard adolescent scab that never quite healed.

Her gift is one of narrow vision. She’s one of those lucky people who go through life with myopia thinking their field of vision is the ultimate truth. For example, she has her own calculus for all things normal. My in-box, often filled with receipts and other non-paperclipped, letter-sized documents is NOT normal. My clothes elicit a mix of good-natured joshing with full-on criticism and laughter.

Among her offhanded remarks that hit the sullen teenage corner of my lizard brain are consistent and fairly frequent criticisms of all things on the internet but most especially any creation of content. The reader might note — these words are on the web, and I created the content.

Facebook — Silly. (Oh, and even better, Facebook causes divorce. I bet they said that about telephones when they were invented.) ‘Blogs — doesn’t read, nothing there. (I guess in any of them?) Self revelation of any kind in public — self-serving or worse mentally unstable. Smart phones — waste of money. Twitter — unknown. Comments on websites — Stupid. (OK, I might give her that one.)

Maybe I just get cranky, because she also has a lot to say about my Diet Coke and candy fixes. Probably a chemical reaction from my reliance on the richness of preservatives in my diet.

Early on up there, before I started complaining, I mentioned the irony. The irony is that today I heard about the person in her life who criticizes what she does and her choices. I’d give the examples, but, hey now, I’m avoiding the specific.

Probably worth saying my disclaimer — for the purposes of drama I made up all the shit above, not just how the words are strung together but what they are meant to mean.

So, here’s what I learned. Even the most critical people, the ones that go around opining on the right and wrong of life’s minutia. The puritans who pee on your candy and Diet Coke parade. The ones who cannot not share the negative comments and thoughts that leap into their brains. Even those folks suffer criticism.

Maybe, just maybe, the secret will be if we could all stop tell other people what to do. Of course, as I write that I am telling each and everyone one whose tired and wary eyes may fall upon this page what the fuck to do — Let it go. Stop judging and criticizing and offering stuff up to the universe that doesn’t construct anything.

Except for the extreme right wing. As far as I’m concerned, there’s always open season on those morons.

I suppose it could be an allegory

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20121119-235805.jpgHours by the sea. The surf pounding in giant cascades of pure energy. Seals frolicking. A woman, a pole, a snare, some squid and the certainty that crabs just want a free lunch.

Smarter than a lowly crustacean I may be, but they knew to avoid my trap. Well, except for one poor lady crab, bursting with eggs. She, my only victim, caught and released to ensure those eggs get their own fighting chance.

Goddamnit. I just wanted a crab dinner.

If I were Hemingway, the adventure would be ripe with meaning. The failure would speak of the human condition. The agony of hours wasted would chronicle the holes in one life.

Me, I got nothing. And, I didn’t get a crab dinner.

In this week’s episode

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There’s a line in the movie “Auntie Mame” that always resonated with me. If I remember correctly, it’s “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

I was obsessing about that line for the better part of the week after my Spanish lesson.

First, probably makes sense to explain the Spanish lesson part. I work in a place that among its benefits is some dough to pay for edumacation. Like many a place, on account of the IRS not minding, I’m offered for them to pay for me to get me get my learn on. Only thing is, you can’t just learn anything, so I opted away from belly dancing (IRS no likes) and into language (everybody likes lingual ed, right?).

Besides, they say that old people learning shite like languages helps to ward off the old dementia. We’ll see.

So I take one-on-one conversational Spanish. Miguel comes by and for an hour and a half listens to me butcher his native tongue while awkwardly trying to utter something akin to a coherent sentence. Mostly I fumble around for adjectives, destroy verb tenses and using what feeble few words I know to describe something kind of like, but not really, communicating.

Miguel. Él es muy paciente. Soy un tonto, pero lo intento.

Believe it or not, I actually learned the word “tonto” on Wednesday. It’s not “friendly Indian guide,” like the Lone Ranger might think. It’s idiot or fool.

I was trying to explain to Miguel, again with my infinitesimal Spanish vocabulary, what it meant to be kooky or quirky. We whipped out our phones and language apps and tried to figure out the equivalent expression. We failed. But, I did learn that the Three Stooges are the “Los Tres Chiflados.”

In this week’s episode of my Spanish class, I tried to tell Miguel about our fiesta de el psíquico, where Felix the psychic medium came to our house and gave readings to our friends for a modest fee.

We chatted about talking with the spirit world and psychics. I learned that Miguel believes los muertos no hablan. I gotta agree. I don’t really know whether the dearly departed are up for chats while we drink red wine and/or tea. Wouldn’t once you are dead you would kind of figure, hey, no more mundane chit chat for me?

I learned that Miguel believes in demons, and it could be they, the bad’uns that Felix is actually chatting up. It’s a mysterious thing this existence and life and death and all.

But, I also learned that Miguel kind of thinks I’m nuts. Or maybe he admires me. Nah, probably thinks I’m nuts, which brings me back to Auntie Mame, and the banquet and starving.

In the movie, and in the musicals too — by the way, it’s a toss up between Angela Lansbury and Rosalind Russell as better Mames, sorry Lucy, I love you, but not the same league — Mame is an eccentric “free spirit.” It ain’t always pretty, there are bankruptcies and pregnancies and pissing off people, but she has fun.

I think Miguel thinks I’m like Mame, only I’m almost certain it probably wasn’t a big cultural touchstone in his native Ecuador. So, he doesn’t know that he thinks I’m like Mame.

Maybe I am.

We chatted some more in a mix of Spanish and a little bit of English to get a point across, and he tells me that every lesson he is surprised what I’ve been doing. In his words (and gestures), most people do kind of the same thing all of the time or maybe stick to a few things. For me, and for M., though, the cluster of activities seems to be a bit wider than most.

His example: this week I told him about la fiesta de el psíquico and awhile back it was how both M. and I became ministers in order to marry our friends. And, there is my renewed vigor, as a new season is upon us, for crabbing. And, writing. And, comedy. And, then there is the actual real job.

I gather my list is eclectic.

Of course, old Miguel is one to hablar. He’s a Spanish tutor. But, he’s really a math teacher. His math students are reformed parolees. He also spends some free time writing short stories. Incredibly short, I think he keeps them to 100 words. He read me one and made me try to sort out the meaning as a Spanish lesson. It was about a crab (see above interests).

But, I wonder, why not spend weekends on adventures? Why not try everything? Why shuffle alone in the expected course?

In my head, life’s a reality TV show, and I want to see what’s going coming up in next week’s episode. I want to make sure the team of writers that live in M.’s and my heads comes up with interesting new adventures. I want to order a la carte so I can try a little of this and a little of that and then get seconds on what I like.

How else will I ever find anything I like, if I don’t try everything else?

On a side, definitely tangential but possibly relevant, note, I think this philosophy drives a constant source of amusement in my life, and in M.’s. Apparently, we don’t act our age. To a lot of people that’s admirable, to quite a few it’s puzzling, and to still more it’s evidence we are childish or some how naughty. Near as I can tell, pushing 50 is meant to be a rather serious affair, somewhere between an IRS audit and a trip to the morgue.

I very much risk dying a dilettante. But, by all that is holy, I’d rather have grabbed a plate for the banquet then gone hungry.

If Nixon could have an enemies list, why can’t I?

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I’ve written about it before, and if I weren’t too lazy, I could find it and link it. It is my mother’s knack for sorting the good eggs from the bad’ns.

This skill has been on my mind, because in today’s universe, or maybe it’s the California-tinged corner of the universe where I now reside, I’m not sure that’s considered a skill anymore. Somehow, it seems, it’s not politically correct or otherwise not cricket to call a person who whiles away their days behaving in a douchey manner a douchebag.

It used to be that if you called someone who stole your lunch money, called you names, pulled your hair or otherwise fucked you up in the schoolyard, a jerk and said you didn’t like him, you’d be an astute observer of human behavior. Now, there are bullying programs to try to reach the behavior and educate the assholes to stop being assholes.

The good guys, the victims, they are exhorted to not be judgmental, to examine their own behaviors, to show compassion and help teach the wayward fuckwads.

Yeah, here’s another idea, can’t I just tell you to fuck off and leave me alone?

Probably not hard to surmise that even as I approach half a century and think about how I want to live the waning minutes I have left, I still want to call a bully out for his horseshit. (By the way, my iPad just spellchecked that last word with an option of horses-hit. Trying using that in a sentence.)

Back to my mom, Pat. She was in many many many ways extraordinarily shy and/or reserved. She ate cold steak rather than “cause a scene” and send poorly prepared food back at a restaurant.

I witnessed her getting taken advantage of by the more sly and calculating and assertive in the world. For years at the school where she taught, a cadre of politically well-connected and outspoken teachers ruled the hallways. The rest of the teachers had extra bus and lunch room duty and no chance for any of the work that might garner extra pay. The power elite kept those gigs to themselves.

Over the years, she lost pooled sick time to slackers, while she herself literally never took a day of leave. OK, there was the one day, when my brother had appendicitis in Moscow, but that was only on account of the time difference for the frantic phone calls with our Russian-speaking family dentist to the embassy.

But, all at the same time, she was outspoken about injustice and bullshit when it was pervasive and hurt others. No underdog could have a stronger advocate in their corner to stare down anything from serious evil (like testifying in court for a student scheduling and physically abused) to petty misdemeanor.

In the latter category, I think she won this battle, but the memory is hazy.

For a school awards banquet one night, she was one of the teachers on the set up and decoration committee of parents and teachers. A couple of local moms, wanting to gussy up the auditorium had a brilliant idea — beautiful fresh flowers arranged in sprays and bouquets around the area. The source of the posies was none other than the neighboring cemetery. Their rationale, and by god it was the definition of rationalizing bad behavior, they wouldn’t be missed since the funeral was over and people had gone home.

Not being down with grave robbing and desecration and just general shittiness, I think old Pat succeeded in shaming them to put every stem back where it came from, in the dark.

Ironically, I wrote all of the above the day before M. was an invited speaker at a local high school tech club. In a swanky auditorium at the swanky community center in the swanky town, it appeared that the students had done everything themselves — from professional looking brochures, queuing up all A/V in advance and executing it behind the speakers and behind the scenes, and getting snacks catered by a local restaurant. At the end, they presented M. with a gift, a lovely orchid that was clearly alive, thriving and not stolen from a graveyard.

Anyway, I wish we could go back to the days of not pretending that we are all on the same page. Some people are not bothering to use facts when they argue factually. Some people like to blame and finger point. And some people are just fucking assholes, and we should be allowed, nay encouraged, to call them out.

Big asshole (Karl Rove) or small (line cutters and annoying colleagues), I know who you are and I’m not above calling a spade a spade.

I don’t know who you are, but I just might hate you

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I got called out for not writing anything political in politically charged year, a politically charged month. Fair enough, I am mad as hell, and I know full well that I live in a bubble that shelters me from morons.

The obvious target of my hatred right now are the so-called undecided voters. But, like some of what is implied here in this article from The Week, I’m not sure that they exist. All of the focus groups and idiots getting their 15 seconds of fame on the news channels are probably just happy to wave at the cameras. Maybe a chunk of them won’t even bother to get off their fat asses and get to a polling place on Election Day, when they aren’t guaranteed any camera time.

Nope, I think my anger is mostly at the real, live, breathing, pearl-clutching, hyperventilating ladies of the GOP. I say “ladies,” because I hate that word and everything my women’s studies reading ever taught me about the coded meaning of it. Sit like a lady, act like a lady, be quiet like a lady, allow yourself to get stomped on like a lady. For a few women, the language sadly still fits.

Here’s the thing, my sisters, you folks out there rocking a cootch not a dick between your legs, this shit is real and Romney and Ryan do NOT have your back.

Abortion is a loaded term with all sorts of shit laid on it that has nothing to do with what it is. Normal women get abortions. In every layer of society, every historic period (and most certainly in prehistory), always and forever in mankind, just like there has always been sex and hookups, there have been unwanted pregnancies. Here’s some factual information from actual research: http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/women_who.html.

By all means, be against it in your own life. Help yourself, help your family, help your friends, help anyone you can work out what is best for them. Always remember, always, that the only way to really be able to do the right thing and make the right choices for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for whoever matters to you, is in a society where you are goddamned allowed to make a choice. And, in a society that recognizes your rights and supports your choices.

When weasels like Paul Ryan are about your business, when they want to put their noses in your uterus, and they really do want that, you have lost that choice. Keep weasels out of your vaginas, my sisters. It’s the right thing to do.

Oh, and while I’m ranting about weasels like Ryan, if you are a woman or a human being who doesn’t despise women (or children for that matter), you really should look up the bill he supported, the Sanctity of Human Life Act.

If life starts the moment of fertilization, that warm little instance when the sheets are still damp or the petri dish is still in the scientists hands, and we have laws weighing in on that instance, a lot of crazy shit happens in our modern world. Tagg Romney gets locked up for the criminal he is for participating in in vitro fertilization. Yup, we got contraband grandkids for Mitt and Ann.

And, any of us who have messed in the voodoo that is birth control pills, even if you did it to control migraines, acne, anemia or all sorts of hormonal things, you be committing a crime. A lot of pills work by giving the fertilized egg no place to call home and settle.

A real life thing that happened to me, which made me realize there are folks out there who truly don’t see eye-to-eye on this one. In my world of earning a living, I have to answer a phone from our company website. Where I work is involved in some huge human issues, and one of them involves women and health. That phone number on our webpage is a honeypot for attracting people with time to talk about the one issue that blows their skirts up; my job is pretty much only to answer the phone with respect.

So, an older, female, not unkind voice greets me on the line. Dare I say, a voice past the childbearing years. I am informed that the owner of the voice has read our website with great interest and in depth. It’s wonderful that we are doing good works around the world and helping poor people. I hear it in her voice, the wind up, the setting a snare, baiting the trap, she’s made calls before. She is kindly setting me up for what her real agenda is. Did I know that where I work is helping to kill babies?

The upshot was, as I good-naturedly took the hits knowing that there could be no victory in arguing against someone so strong in her convictions, she truly and absolutely believed distributing contraception is baby killing. She explained to me in detail how some contraception is a form of abortion, and it needs to be stopped.

At the end of the day this woman, who know doubt has a life and smiles gently and laughs with family and friends over sweetened iced tea and a good Sunday dinner, probably is not a monster. She wants to help babies and the world. I’m sure she wants to do right and good.

However, the rhetoric has gotten out of hand. The heat, the lies from cynical bastards who don’t really care about people, who themselves quell their best “Christian” impulses with back room deals guaranteeing good money for their investments, have taken hold.

They don’t want to protect Catholic women working at a Catholic university, as they claim because her religion is being attacked. They want to fight universal health care, because it cuts into the profit margin of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

They don’t hate the birth control pill, because they so love the potential souls that never become babies. They hate it, because free women, able to make their own decisions on family planning, are an economic force with a voice, who will shake their status quo.

If they really cared about babies, if they really cared about women, if they really wanted equality, if they really wanted to help women in any way, they would support universal health care. Instead of vitriolic protests with photos of fetuses, hyped rhetoric and downright lies, they would support daycare centers, good, practical sexual education, preventive health care, women’s shelters, stronger laws and prosecution against human trafficking, domestic violence and child abuse.

If they supported women, the GOP would shut up their own kind, people like Rush Limbaugh. They would make sure their daughters grow up more like Libby Dole, giving them education, support and strength. They’d help get the word out that there are so many more choices beyond 16 and Pregnant, Teen Momor Honey-fucking-Boo Boo.

If you are a woman, vote. Vote for the people who have your back. Vote for the people who think you can make decisions for yourselves, and don’t try to construct a world where forced counseling and vaginal ultrasounds are for your own good.

Vote for the people who just might make a difference with equal pay. Or don’t need binders to know that there are qualified women.

Obama/Biden, ladies. Obama/Biden.

Clearing a blockage

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In the distant haze of a distant past, there is a very fuzzy memory. It is of a little girl named Tamara or Teresa or Tammy or Tatyana (well maybe not Tatyana, as I didn't grow up in Moscow). Let's call her Terry.

Terry somewhere in the years of elementary school and junior high branded herself a poet and marketed hard. In what could be my largely inaccurate memory, she read a poem at every assembly the schools ever had. Her crowning achievement was an award and inclusion in a scholastic something or other meant to reward young Byrons and Yeatses in utero.

What I also remember of Terry was that the poems were bad. Or given that my literary criticism skills at the age of 10 match my literary criticism skills today, that is, non-existent, maybe she was OK for a kid. However, seat upon auditorium seat of us children squirmed and groaned in unison. Even those friends of Terry's in the crowd found the poetry excruciating.

To this day, I fear being Terry.

When I perform stand up comedy, write, even ask a question at a meeting, my inner critic sweats giant pulsing rivers of flopsweat. Thankfully, it's invisible flop sweat of the mind, an internal anxiety, else I'd carry a towel and have to have suits fashioned of terry cloth.

I thought of Terry when talking to a professional person who is charged with helping to make me a better professional person. She checks in with me on my professional goals, and I try earnestly, vigorously to absorb and enact the rather practical, but perhaps a tad touchy feely, advice and actions she provides. Coach she is and kindly is paid to listen.

I told her about Terry. I also told her about an another voice I allowed into my writing head, who didn't belong there in the crowd of other voices. I may have made mention before of the dark noise I heard and credit for locking up my efforts to write for what's now years.

In a moment of a kind of intellectual enamor, I shared some writing with a member of the ivory-towered, ivy-covered halls. He, older, ostensibly wiser, definitely better educated had encouraged me, even as I was doing light editing, tech support and formatting for a tome he was writing on a Macintosh computer.

He kindly asked about my aspirations, somehow sensing my typing and word-processing skills maybe had other uses beyond office monkey. Naturally and happily, I shared what I had been up to creatively, eager to have someone ask. Nope, more than that, eager to have someone with a collegiate pedigree ask, like somehow, the words of the elites mean more or differently than the words of us plebeians.

In retrospect, where my brain should have gone was to the wise voices of my kind of people. Tony V., great Boston-based comedian, has (had?) a bit about Harvard. Not wrecking it too bad, the point of the bit is that they have the same books with the same words as everyone else, and everyone can access books; Harvard doesn't have a secret trove of information that is theirs alone.

In the end, the professor (actually he was a dean emeritus from a major powerhouse school) deemed my writing technically good and lively and funny. OK. On that we can possibly agree (on the days I'm not full of self-doubt and loathing).

However, he ultimately belittled me by asking the question possibly every person who ever feels like writing or creating or reaching beyond some kind of smaller purpose asks themselves – Why write? Why is it important? In his mind, and in the words that seeped from his mouth over Arnold Palmers at the Faculty Club for lunch, he decided I had enough working where I work, doing what I do to earn a paycheck, and shouldn't I think about that?

The question was posed as a value judgement on the status quo, which he deemed fine. Really, he held my gig as administrative support very high in both importance and my fortune in having it. In contrast, he asked me to consider the value of my writing and if it had any, and why I was not more satisfied with the status quo.

Sigh.

I thought about that conversation, as I had an entirely different sort of conversation about my writing with the woman who helps professionalize me. Again, I was asked what I wanted and why. This time, though, the point was to get me to chose and press for what I value. No judgment.

In the end, if I'm not Terry and just godawful, and if I just might have something to say that amuses another human, maybe that's enough.

;

When I’m 64 or more

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I help manage one of the worst company softball teams to ever don cleats (well that one guy) or drink a beer at a park after a game. Actually, right now we are in our winningest season, number 2 in the co-ed D League. I ought to thank Facebook, since one of our last wins were some sore losers associated with that bit of the interwebs, who showed up two women short of the required number and cried about their forfeit.

Still and all, we are not good in terms of softball. Some players are athletes, but not so much ever having played team sports. Runners and racquetball players, more like. Others aren't from one of your ball-playing countries, or more correctly the ball they know looks like this one:

The best thing about the team is the people, as the cliche would go. But, seriously, here it's not the awesomeness of people, it's the awesomeness of how surreal the collection is. Hands down, the most enthusiastic player is post-retirement age, like he's already essentially retired from two careers that by anyone's definition were top of the line, top of his field, moving and shaking all over the place. Although, he never will actually retire, I bet.
If I said what his past gigs were here, you could Google him the hell up and say to yourself, “What? He's your teammate?” You'd be like “Seriously, dee-rob, what the fucking fuckety fuck. Why is he hanging with riffraff like you?” You'd say that. I know it, even if you ain't never dropped no F-bomb or said riffraff in your life.
He's so enthusiastic that he regularly shames all us more regular, slacker company softball types into practice. The kind of practice that pisses off Allen Iverson, son.

We practiced. Yesterday, high noon, lunch time, middle of the day, straight up on the old sundial, the clear sky pounded 80-plus degree heat on our backs and faces.

The coach tossed a bag of balls at our waiting bats, and we all critiqued the swing and stance into the required poetry of solid contact. Then we switched up. I lobbed balls to the coach, and he simulated dingers and pop ups into the waiting hands of the fielders who mostly stopped the momentum of rolling balls by any means possible, trying to stave off an imaginary, error-caused triple and relay the ball into the infield.

“Mister, you have an water?” A woman passed with a ragged mop of a dog close behind. Despite the heat, we had none and admitted as much.

More of a pointer than a helper, I directed her to the nearby municipal park municipal bathroom. We got back down to the business of ball playing.

Minutes passed, and she came back into view from alongside the restroom facilities.

“Mister. Hey Mister, I think I need some help.”

A natural-born leader the coach trotted up to her, while I strolled with a little less purpose and the fielders mosied. “I think maybe I have sunstroke, or something,” the very pale and shaky-looking woman stammered, and just as I was walking up trusty cellphone at the ready, she was denying the need for 911.

She stallingly, unsure and worried not trusting her brain and recall, gave me the number of what she hoped was her husband's iPhone number, while explaining that he always had it with him and even stood in line for the latest one, no doubt in the first ever Apple store just up the street. I got his voicemail.

Right about then, I took a closer look. This woman wasn't young. She was well past getting an AARP card, definitely in the Medicare pool, and quite possibly had already eased into the “seniors ride for free zone.“

We sat her in the shade of a tree, the coach grabbed an empty plastic cup from his truck, a leftover from a recent post-game tailgate, filled it up with water, and she drank it down. The color started to return to her face, as we waited to hear back from her husband.

At that point, apparently deciding it wasn't life threatening, the coach and the enthusiast start smacking a few more balls out into the field. I hovered nervously, ready to dial 911, and hoping the woman's husband might actually call back.

At almost the top of the hour, we packed up our gear, and chivalrously the enthusiast who urged us onto the field that day, drove home the sun-addled woman and her hairball dog. The verdict by email a bit later, “she was OK, but she has a smelly dog.”

Many hours later her husband did call me back. Without thanks or worry to my message about his wife being sick, he had that puzzled greeting of the caller ID age “Um, ah, someone called me from this number and left a message.”

A brief explanation from me, and all I got was a “She must be fine, she's sleeping.”

I resisted the urge with every fiber and might to not reply, “Better check her pulse.”

 

Dawn of the kind of dead

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I have never been what you would call a morning person. In fact, I'm definitely more of a night crawler.

Most of the dawns I have seen in my life, I have seen on account of not making it to beddy by the night before. I've seen a few dawn's early light by virtue of not sleeping at all.

But, here I am today having snapped this photo after waking in the dark. Complacent, middle-aged me is trying a new thing. It's a new thing that circumstance has foisted on me, and goddamn it I am tired right now. I saw dawn by waking up and greeting it, not meeting it from the other side.

If things play out, I'll be experimenting with the old circadian rhythms. I'll be all up in the early to bed early to rise lifestyle. I'll undoubtedly fall asleep on the couch by 8 p.m., if not face down in my plate at the dinner table. Although, I've been known to fall asleep on the couch on a normal day.

If you see me writing more, it's because we are down to one car at the moment. Whilst saving the environment and carpooling, I am spending a bit of time thumb twiddling, as it were. M. has to get into work early. My place of employment is on his path south to that work. So, I get dropped off early and picked up late.

They say the elderly sometimes need less sleep. Maybe this month is the week I cross over and become one of the early rising elderly. Damn-it, I want my AARP card and movie discounts now.