The Journey For Us

For the past few weeks we’ve been grappling with a landscape lighting issue here at our tiny townhouse complex. The sticking point is a neighbor who is both mentally challenged and deaf. Her cable wire has now been cut twice and because she is accustomed to getting what she wants, when she wants it from her parents, she has thrown what I can only describe as a wall-eyed hissy fit.

Yesterday it really did get to be too much when the woman’s father harassed the 90-year-old HOA president almost to the point of tears. Logic and practicality are clearly on the side of the repair to the broader system, but these people will have none of it.

The father has recently been diagnosed with colon cancer and is in the opening stages of chemotherapy. The only thing that restrained me in dealing with him was the fact that a friend recently described to me her experiences with radiation and chemo, so I had a reference point for what can only be his inner emotional turmoil.

That being said, the man is killing himself. And I mean that literally. In failing to maintain a focus on his own health, and to find some peace of mind, he is setting up a situation for his body to betray him rather than to heal. Essentially, he’s created a family dynamic that could prove to be a critical component in the engine of his own destruction.

I have not hidden the fact that I am dealing with all the major issues of perimenopause. Every day I become increasingly aware of the mind/body connection. Invariably on a day when I have been stressed to the limit and have not had a chance to do whatever small things keep me “even,” I will have what I call a hormonal storm.

These incidents are difficult to explain to anyone who has not experienced them and frankly, men just can’t go there in terms of understanding. These are literally situations where chemicals flood your systems and, as Whoopi Goldberg says, “you lose your damn mind.”

I don’t have any answers about appropriately caring for the total package, but I will say that with middle-age has come an increasing awareness of a more systemic sense of self. As a younger woman, when I had hormonal issues of another kind, I felt at the mercy of my body. Now, I try to be more merciful to my body. I’m not good at it yet, but it’s a conscious work in progress.

Yesterday I was the recipient of a spontaneous act of generosity. After getting up at 4:30 to tackle various projects, I spent two hours just trying to coax my MacBook back to life. The machine’s problems started in October and the crash yesterday was a harbinger of worse to come. Consequently, I wrote a frustrated post over on Eclectic Mind about my equipment woes.

Before long I received an email. I won’t embarrass the sender with specific identification, but it was from a person who has read my meanderings for years. The offer made my jaw drop and ran something like this. “I have this six-month old laptop that’s barely been touched. It didn’t fit the needs of a project I was working on, but it’s a good little machine. If you want it, I’ll send it to you and you can do some writing for this site I’m working on in exchange.”

Want it? The offer was for a machine of much better quality than what I was going to be able to afford and was delivered so gracefully, with such an open spirit of “hey, I can help with that,” I accepted readily and I hope with all the gratitude I felt.

Frankly, in the last month, my gratitude column has filled up in a way my often-cynical brain is having trouble processing. While I’m working to embrace forward motion and new avenues, my poor housemate is virtually grabbing on my knees like a child who doesn’t want to be left with a babysitter. Yesterday a friend suggested that R. is most likely afraid I’ll take off and abandon her.

Truth be told? One of my greatest joys at all that is happening right now is that it will allow me to live here and do a better job for her and for myself. I hate it when we bicker and fight. There is no way that my having an outlet that channels off the frustration underlying those incidents can be a bad thing. Physically, I haven’t moved an inch; mentally is a different matter.

I have realized that because my housemate had chosen to be a recluse, she is most comfortable when I am one too. The fact that she’s feeling threatened by my association via email with friends who live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away makes no sense, but to her it is valid. One of the things she says to me often is, “But those people aren’t real. You can’t know them over a computer.”

How can you answer that in light of what happened to me yesterday? To suggest that real connections cannot be forged by remote means defies the imagination in light of the epistolary history of the world. A letter is a letter. We are simply graced with a means that allows delivery in seconds not days.

I am at my best when stringing words together on a page. The greatest fear I’ve always had in getting to know someone through correspondence is that when they meet me in person, I won’t measure up to my prose.

Today, when the package arrives from my generous friend, I intend to gently emphasize to R. that the sender and I would likely not recognize one another on the street and yet he extended a helping hand to me at a moment of real need with easy, open generosity. This place, this Internet; these words on the screen – they are not so unlike pen and ink scratching on paper.

Words, when honest, and hopefully well contrived, are all we have to convey who we are when barriers of distance cannot be overcome in any other way. He is not the only friend who knows me only by my words. How very, very impoverished my life would be without them all, these real people who come to me, God bless them, over this computer.

There is a strange juxtaposition of moods in this house. The happier I get with my work situation and my online life, the more unhappy my housemate seems to become. After the dramatic job shift in December, things have begun to arrange themselves well for me. I am being paid better wages to work on more interesting topics. Yes, the schedule is harder to manage and I’m back to arising in the dark hours of early morning. There is no regular paycheck that arrives on a given day, but more and more the word “better” is creeping into my thoughts.

I’ve struck up new online friendships with folks from my little town who, though a few years older, are wickedly bright, funny, and genuine. So few things change in our beloved ranching community of yore, that we can laugh about the same people and places, using nostalgia as a foundation to get to know one another better in the here and now. I cannot explain the comfort level that comes from “home folks,” I can only revel in its warmth and safety.

My housemate watches me smile at a message on my Blackberry or laugh outright, and she is both puzzled and unsettled by it. She doesn’t understand the technology, but she knows that somehow I have a life inside those machines and out on the landscape of cyberspace of which she isn’t a part. Can you understand me when I say I’m not trying to exclude her and yet that’s exactly what I’m trying to do?

Community is a peculiar thing. What I miss most about home is the very aspect of small town life that can be most maddening; the common knowledge, the familiarity — the never having to explain what you just said because everyone speaks the local vernacular. It’s being sure-footed about where and when to cuss, when to use “m’am” and “sir,” and how blue the joke can get before a coronary sets in. Religion and politics are set aside when human need intervenes.

Here in the city, when my housemate and I are out and about, it is rare for someone to open the door so I can push her wheelchair through unimpeded. I’ve become skilled at holding the door open with my backside while executing the maneuver solo. Shortly after R.’s stroke, my Aunt Elizabeth died. R. insisted on going to the funeral in Menard. At the cemetery, I took her wheelchair out of the trunk, put her in it, and turned to roll her over the curb and to the side of the grave.

Out of nowhere, two men in dark suits and western boots appeared. They said, “‘Scuse me, m’am,” effortlessly lifted R. and carried her as if she were seated in a sedan chair, gently placing her under the shade of the funeral tent. That was the only point in the day when tears came to my eyes. I was in a place where it wouldn’t have occurred to those men not to help a little old woman in a wheelchair.

As a caregiver, I frankly take my comforts where I can find them. Just yesterday I was discussing this in an email and wrote that I thought the hand of the Universe had a role in bringing me a source of support both old and new at just the time I seemed to need it most, at that point when I still had hold of the rope, but could surely use a knot to improve my grip. I don’t question. I’m just grateful.

My hiatus of several days from this blog can be explained by the simple and fortuitous fact that I’ve had plenty of work to do with good prospects for more to come. I need to work, not just due to the necessity of income. I do not do well when I don’t have something real to accomplish.

The longer the forced idleness goes on, the more surly my disposition becomes. Restlessness sets in, and with it wandering free-form paranoia. If there is a mishap, an episode of disastrous bad luck and ill fortune that can be imagined, I will imagine it.

Sleep deserts me. At night I lie awake staring at the ceiling, my thoughts swirling down black corridors. I’m perfectly aware of what I’m allowing my mind to do and I do it anyway. I know there are productive tasks I could be finishing, but money or the lack thereof haunts my every waking moment and disturbs my rest.

When I do have work, I find myself getting up long before the crack of dawn to get it done with no prodding from an alarm clock. I’ve learned to make use of those extra couple of hours, now spending my 45 minutes on the exercise bike as an active “coffee” break.

Somewhere along this circuitous path, a strong part of my identity has gotten wrapped up in “going to the office,” even if that office is an easy chair two feet from my bed and going online. In recent weeks my cyber life, thanks to a new Facebook group filled with old friends from the little town where I grew up, has become even more active and satisfying.

I find myself thinking about what’s going on in that plain of my existence as I go about the more mundane chores in this one. When a message comes in from a friend in San Antonio, San Angelo, California, or New Jersey, a path lights up on my mental map and I see a glowing thread connecting me to them.

Most probably some kind and well-educated soul would tell me it’s not healthy to think of the Internet as a place, but when you work there and socialize there, it’s hard not to. I wish I had the device the kids use on the SyFy series “Caprica,” little virtual reality glasses that let them step into their cyber-worlds.

This time around, through an idle period and back again, I realized that with work to do and a virtual community online, I function well in this caregiving existence. Let an aspect of my online life get off kilter, however, and I don’t do well. My life out here becomes clouded and unsettled.

At the same time, I also realized that I always wanted to be a writer and now I am one. I used to need to write to make money — I still do — but I finally am to the place where I need to write for the writing. In the midst of this shifting landscape, I need to work on better self direction and better self talk, but oddly, I’m coming to see my world as larger than it was a couple of weeks ago. And I’ve never even gotten out of my easy chair.

Last night at the Winter Olympics, Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer listened to his coach in the 10,000-meter race and changed lanes. Kramer is the world champion. He holds the record for the distance. He knows the event, but he listened to his coach.

His coach was wrong. The lane change was illegal, and Kramer lost the gold medal in the event to a disqualification that left him angry and in tears, flinging his glasses into the infield and demanding of his coach, Gerard Kemkers, “What did you do?!”

All involved have some pretty major speed skating DNA. Kramer’s father was a two-time Olympic speed skater and Kemkers won the bronze in the 5,000-meters in Calgary in 1988. He was understandably devasted, saying, “My world collapsed. This is a disaster. This is the worst moment in my career.” When the cameras panned to him last night, the man looked absolutely destroyed by his mistake.

Perhaps part of Kramer’s anger and frustration stemmed from an event four years ago when he fell during the team pursuit semifinals in Turin in 2006, leaving his team to claim only third place in the event.

The whole business is an interesting study in laying blame. There is no doubt, watching the video of the event, that Kramer blames Kemkers. In fact, he said so, “Usually, I don’t want to blame anyone else, I take responsibility as the skater on the ice. But this time I can’t do anything else.”

There is also the argument, however, that Kramer is far from inexperienced in the sport and should have known what he was doing. Speaking to this point he said, “I should have gone with my own thoughts, but I was brought into doubt.”

And therein lies the real culprit in any failed decision, doubt. In a split second, doubt outweighed experience and instinct and BOTH men made a bad decision — Kemker to call for a lane change and Kramer to do it. Sadly enough, however, I don’t see any evidence of forgiveness, on Kramer’s part for Kemker or on Kemker’s part for himself.

No doubt this intense emotionalism is due to the level and importance of the venue. But in the midst of all this talk about the “spirit” of the Olympics, what I would really have liked to see was Kramer shaking Kemker’s hand and saying, “What did WE do.”

This morning I had a successful moment of practicing what I preach. I awakened spontaneously at 5 a.m. and instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, I turned on the light and went to work. Consequently, I’ve had five productive hours and it’s only mid-morning.

In part, I know I was eager to look at and to start work on assignments from a new client, but I’m also aware that as I move closer to where I need to be with my client base, maximizing my time is more critical than ever.

The unique characteristics of my working environment are never far from my mind, nor is the fact that I haven’t always managed those factors to my best benefit or that of my housemate.

I literally lose work time to my housemate’s emotionally unstable reaction to whatever I’m doing. As I ponder hardware updates in the coming year, I keep thinking about those two or three hours I’m nailed to my chair “watching” TV with her.

Before the term multi-tasking even existed, I did it. I have never been good at just sitting in front of the television. The netbook has helped enormously in reclaiming evening productivity for me, but it hasn’t completely solved the problem, which has me continuing to ponder the bottom-of-the-line iPad.

So when my housemate declares, in an offended tone, “I never bother you,” it’s all I can do not to just laugh. While “bother” might not be the word I would chose, every aspect of my working life is directly affected by her wants or needs — perceived and real. If I’m not actively responding to her, I’m listening. Some small corner of my mind is always tuned in her direction, to the point that I often awake at night when she coughs.

Since I stay in a state of hyper-awareness, which is extremely tiring, I’m not as receptive as I should be to fits like the one she threw at 10 o’clock last night that led to me scrubbing out her bathroom sink, which had vaulted up her OCD radar screen. It’s gotten easier to just cave in and deal with those immediate obsessions, but I can’t lie and say I’m always cheerful or gracious about it.

Increasingly I’m trying to divest myself of my preconceptions about night and day, meal times, and the like. That’s hard for a person who loves routine as much as I do, but only by embracing fluidity can I hope to get all the focused hours I need. Consequently, this morning was a real triumph.

Deviations from the norm haven’t been a good idea around here for a couple of years now, but two examples yesterday and today have re-emphasized that for me.

Yesterday I had an online business meeting that ran past two hours. I was discussing the potential of working in greater depth with a writing client and we had a lot of ground to cover.

My housemate appeared to be fine with it, but ultimately called in a panic. My client was extremely gracious about bringing our discussion to an abrupt conclusion and I spent the rest of the evening trying to calm R. down.

In her mind, all my future interactions with this gentlemen would involve two-hour commitments and she was beside herself about how she would cope with that.

Today, her anxieties shifted to food. First, I gave her half-and-half instead of heavy whipping cream for her coffee. There was no sinister purpose. The store was simply out of the whipping cream.

I lost count of the number of times she complained that her coffee did not taste right and I responded with everything I said in the above paragraph. This continued well into the evening when she insisted the peas served for supper were "stringy."

The product is actually a pearled barley with carrots and snow peas included. While I acknowledge that fresh snow peas can have strings, these did not. In spite of this, R. sat at the table and methodically picked portions of half-masticated peas out of her mouth, building a disgusting pile on the edge of her plate.

Apparently at some point during the meal, my eyes fell on this pile and my face registered something less than approval. The next thing I know, she’s shrieking, "I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I can’t chew these awful vegetables."

Very calmly, I said. "You do not control either my facial expressions or my thoughts. I didn’t say a word. You’re looking for any hint of a slight and completely over-reacting. Now settle down."

Beyond being less than savory dinner table behavior, the business with the peas is emblematic of her consistent fault-finding. I am sick of it. Sick unto death of it, in fact. However, I didn’t say so and I refuse to be called to account for unspoken thoughts no matter how clearly betrayed by my expression.

Two things are clear to me after the last 36 hours. We have reached a point where absolute adherence to routine is more important than ever, as are repeated, spontaneous explanations on my point. And, we are set for another round of food-related acting out.

A good friend has passed along his incredibly tasty recipe for peanut butter. I’m going to make a batch in the next couple of days and keep it on hand. After eight years, I’m tired of these reindeer games. If she wants to act like a little kid about food, then she can eat little kid food.

A professor killing three colleagues in Alabama during a faculty meeting.

A software engineer / bass guitarist flying a plane into an IRS building in Austin.

A California man bulldozing his foreclosed home. (He never missed a payment, the bank just decided to seize the property anyway.)

The John Birch Society co-sponsoring a national meeting of conservatives — with far too many people thinking this is a good idea.

An accomplished young actress with Down’s Syndrome counseling Sarah Palin to get a sense of humor.

Al Haig suddenly looking like a bastion of governmental stability lost to the ages.

Oh, and the apology of a philandering athlete played repeatedly on every channel in the nation at all hours of the day.

Please, tell me how the last ten days could have been any stranger?

When I was about ten years old, I read a small article in one of our regional newspapers predicting the world would end the next day. In some distress, I took the item to my father. He read it, looked at me with that grin of his I miss so deeply, and said, “Well, Shorty, if it is going to end, there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?”

Papa could get ticked off about national and world affairs, but he had a peculiarly serene sense of perspective about them at the same time. I have always believed that was the by-product of spending two years of his life in North Africa and Italy getting shot at every day by German fighter planes. He often said he never expected to see his 21st birthday and everthing that came after was just gravy.

My maternal grandfather refused to discuss politics, a stance to which I try to adhere. As a respected leader in his community, people frequently asked for whom he had cast his vote. His standard answer was, “For the right man.” I have a pretty good idea that he didn’t vote for FDR, but in truth, Grandpa Babe took the answer to that question to the grave with him.

I wish I could talk to either of those two men today about the simmering anger and frustration that permeates our land. They both lived through the conservative backlash to the New Deal when the likes of Father Charles Coughlin filled the radio waves with anti-Semitic vitriol, even expressing sympathy and support for Hitler and the Nazis.

I suspect both my father and my grandfather would tell me our nation has survived such rhetoric and such times before. My grandfather was raised by a woman who never got over mourning the loss of her southern family’s fortunes in the Civil War. My father often repeated Depression-Era wisdom told to him by his grandfather, a simple woodworker with far too many children to feed.

Because I can do nothing about the track on which our country appears to be set, I pay attention to the road in front of me. I put my head down and do what needs to be done in my world. But what really disturbs me is that while I deplore the tactics of some of those folks I mentioned at the top of this post, there is also a part of me that understands.

Yesterday I witnessed a dysfunctional family in their full glory. We have a neighbor who is both deaf and mentally challenged. I do not know how I would handle the rearing of such a child, and I am not passing judgment. I will say that she was never taught sign language nor was she schooled in observing the social boundaries that so many people with her disabilities find difficult to comprehend.

As a result, she is an extremely unpleasant person to be around. She’s in her early 40s, and her parents do everything for her. She should not be attempting to live alone. This arrangement only came about when she threw a temper tantrum in the wake of her parents buying a home for her sister as a wedding gift.

At any rate, she is so spoiled, that when something does not go her way, she throws a fit until her father gets her what she wants. He has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. Her mother survived breast cancer last year. The fragile support structure that buoys up her questionable independence will not be able to hold much longer.

My phone rang about 7:30. It was the father, demanding to know what I had done to knock out his daughter’s cable. We are having a significant issue with the property’s backyard lighting, and I had shown a workman where key wires were buried. Apparently in the process, her cable line was nicked. But here’s the statement that drew me up short.

“You have to do something about this so she’ll stop calling over here and driving me crazy.”

There are so many things wrong with that, I don’t even begin to know where to start. Essentially, he and his wife created a monster and now, as their health is declining, they are dealing with the consequences of that creation.

Throughout the remainder of the day this man, less than two weeks after major surgery, was over here at least half a dozen times, at one point attempting to find the cut line himself. He apparently paid the cable company for an “emergency” repair, which he supervised at 7 o’clock last night by spotlight.

And, he could not resist the pleasure of calling the president of the homeowner’s association to report my guilt in the whole matter. As I’ve said in other venues, my hands never touched that shovel. I saw the wire come out of the ground, and I still find it difficult to believe it was damaged in the process.

For once, the HOA president was completely on my side and pointed out a pattern on the part of this whole family of shifting the blame for any and everything off their own shoulders and on to those of the nearest convenient recipient. They also expect everyone to coddle their daughter and dance to her tune as they have done for lo these many years.

At the end of the day, a sick man exhausted himself, the cable company made a tidy profit, blame was rightfully or wrongly dispensed, and the daughter learned nothing. In fact, her inappropriate behavior was only reinforced. When I looked her straight in the eye mid-afternoon and told her I did not have time to listen to her ravings, the expression on her face was one of complete incomprehension.

Clearly she is accustomed to taking center stage with her fits and having people jump to make her world right again. When something does happen to one or both of her folks, her world will come crashing down with an impact even greater than that experienced by any of us who have lost a parent.

It was ironic that this was the same day the world listened to Tiger Woods explain his all-to-late realization that the rules do still apply for him. He represents the other end of the spectrum. Neither great gifts nor deficits rewrite the basic rules of human interaction. The mechanics of life may differ, but decency and good manners remain the same.

I won’t lie. My own emotions throughout the day ran the gamut from annoyed to purely angry. But as the day closed, the most overwhelming reaction I had for the entire family was frankly one of pity. Some genies cannot be put back in the bottle and some spirits, for want of a restraining hand, cannot be repaired.

People who are constantly optimistic make me suspicious. Do they not own a television? Do they print money in their basement and get away with it? Do they just not want to admit the dark nights of the soul when they’re curled up under the stairs washing down M&Ms with vodka?

I’m not an optimistic person by nature, and after several years of not just waiting for our ship to come in, but of standing on the dock pulling on the mooring ropes of the Titanic, I wonder how much of the effort has amounted to cursing the ocean.

For as much as I make a conscious effort to learn something or to find one positive image or idea in each day, sometimes they’re just not there. My more religious friends counsel patience and faith. I like to tell them about how Martin Luther wrote theology.

Sitting on the can.

No, I’m not making that up. It was his favorite place to write his sermons and essays, and he was known, in more fervent (or blocked) moments, to hurl . . . available material . . . at the devil, whom he believed visited him frequently in the john.

It’s historically disconcerting to ponder the fact that a good dose of Metamucil could have replaced the Reformation with a completely different kind of movement.

My point, however, is that Luther wasn’t the sort to just placidly take what heaven or hell was throwing his way. He threw . . . stuff . . . back.

I often have the urge to hurl back in sheer, unadulterated, fed-up frustration and anger. At least Luther had images tangible to his own belief structure to serve as targets. I, like most people, deal with more inchoate, shifting demons.

My anger does, however, serve as my barometer. At least if I can still work up a head of steam, I care. I’m engaged. It’s the days when I can’t even get hacked off that give me pause to worry.

I’d like to be optimistic. I’d like to be patient and to have consistent faith, but apparently I was not designed that way.