The Journey For Us

Recently I’ve been policing my self talk. I don’t mean the kind of thing where you run yourself down with thoughts like, “Don’t eat that, fat ass,” (although that may not necessarily be a bad one), but more the stuff you’ll say in your mind that good manners or social strictures prevent you from saying aloud.

Come on. You know you do it. The stray racial epithet when a person of distinguishable descent cuts you off in traffic. The spoken pleasantry backed by the mental slap. (Trust me. In the south when we say, “Bless her heart,” we mean something entirely different.) Or perhaps the inner expression of frustration and annoyance against the outer expression of patience.

That last one is what trips me up. I’m at a place in my life where I wear many hats and there are not enough hours in the day. I live with someone who has severe short-term memory loss. That necessitates multiple explanations of the same topic often within minutes of one another. That, coupled with her excruciating physical slowness, is a challenge for me as I try to run my own life and my own thoughts at a much higher rate.

I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter if you’re saying it aloud or in your mind, you’re still saying it, and the saying of it colors your perceptions and attitudes. The result is that next time it’s easier to be bigoted, insulting, or impatient. Ultimately, you’ll reach the point where you feel justified in saying what you’ve been thinking, and no good will come of that.

There’s a reason we value the privacy of our own minds, but they aren’t a playground to let our poorer selves run totally amuck. Just as I’ve tried to school myself to say “thank you,” I now say to my inner voice at least a dozen times a day, “Don’t say that!”

I cannot strive to do better in my daily life if I do not make an effort to improve my daily thoughts, because to live well in one and poorly in the other is hypocrisy.

There’s no secret that I like little pocketable gadgets. My cell phones have been increasing in complexity since my first Motorola Razr with a camera. There were two of those before I made the leap to a BlackBerry Pearl. When it committed suicide, I went with a Blackberry Curve 8320. Armed with a full QWERTY keyboard and unlimited texting, my life changed.

I’m not being facetious. With the other phones I sent and received about 500 text messages a month. I’ve now surpassed 3000 and am climbing to 4000. These numbers are helped by the fact that I am on both Twitter and Facebook, and so receive notifications and do some posting by text, which is often faster than using a dedicated phone application.

But the real change is that people I truly care about, but who live far away, have also embraced the texting phenomenon. Now I am in daily touch with them, and that connection enriches my life immeasurably. Just this past weekend a friend of mine who now runs her family’s ranch sent me an MMS message with a photo of the first calf she ever pulled. (She’s also sent me more than one picture of rattlesnakes that met their demise at the end of her 30/30.)

I’ve spent the high school football season “going” to West Texas games in stadiums I remember well — all via text — with a friend with whom I reconnected on Facebook, 30 years after the last time we saw one another. That has not only rekindled our acquaintance, but resulted in a joint project that we’re both enjoying and hope will be profitable within a few months.

As I’ve said before, because my housemate is virtually housebound, so am I. The Internet, and now a lively stream of text messages, constitute my social life. While some people are put off by what they see as cold, impersonal technology, I am warmed by the very same venues.

The lesson I’ve learned from this experience is that when connections are meaningful to you, you can find a way to keep them alive. More often than not, small expressions make a large impact. A text message contains roughly 160 characters. Most are far shorter. But at just the moment when you need it, “U hav 2 hang n there. Luv u,” carries more eloquence than the most finely crafted sonnet.

My housemate’s stroke robbed her of her sense of time. Recently, she’s become obsessed with the memory of something that happened seven and a half years ago, but to her, it’s always “yesterday.” The memory involves the gift of two coats to two people who have drifted out of her life. She has no need for the coats, which are furs, and far too much time has passed to ask for them back.

Over a period of several weeks, I’ve tried to discover the source of the obsession, which she finally, inadvertently, revealed a couple of days ago. “I was trying to buy their friendship,” she said angrily.

Realizing that her wrath was self-directed, I steered us into safer waters while privately pondering the import of the admission. Under normal circumstances, she would never have disclosed her true motivation for making the gifts. Brain damage, however, does not make for normal circumstances.

I’m sorry to say that I have seen my friend spend money — to the point of imperiling her own financial security — in an effort to gain what she should have received freely and with no strings attached.

It took me some time to understand why. This woman’s parents were frugal to the point of being miserly. I knew them in their old age, when their ridiculous economies acquired the charm of eccentricity. I have seen her father, for instance, open one can of soda and fill six juice glasses to serve guests. It’s amusing to see a man of 90 do that, but what hell it must have been to experience as a child.

Consequently, my housemate came to equate the spending of money as an act of love, opening herself up to be used by “friends” and family alike. Now I have to stop her from giving things away for the same reason. It’s been a bone of some contention with us until the matter of the coats came up. Now I go into her room in the morning and find notes she’s scribbled in the night. “Don’t let me give anything else away!”

I don’t know how many of these connections and realizations she’s puzzled out. One day she’s fine, the next deeply disturbed. And, I’m left to wonder if the scar at the heart of the matter is the one left by her stroke, or the one created by her raising. I’m inclined to think the latter.

A few days before his death, her father apologized to her for accusing her of cheating at cards when she was ten-years-old. “I knew you weren’t cheating,” he said, almost sixty years after the fact. “I don’t know why I did that.” Perhaps his pride would only let him apologize for the trivial, rather than face the greater, deeper mistakes he’d made as a parent. She forgave him, and they were on good and peaceful terms when he died.

Now, only ten years younger than he was then, I think she’s having her own, “I don’t know why I did that” revelations and experiencing myriad emotions as a result. In this instance, however, she needs to forgive herself, a tougher chore even than working up the courage to apologize to someone else.

But, what makes me the most sad for her, is that in concentrating on what she could not buy, she’s blinding herself to all the she has received and continues to receive with no price tags attached.

Every fall we are fortunate enough to watch this tree in our driveway turn a vibrant yellow, a color to which no photograph can do justice. I offer it to you today, however, as a counterpoint to “black” Friday — but remember, the “black” refers to profitability for merchants, which will be an important economic indicator for the rest of us. So let’s think positively for those crazy shoppers out there!

For several years now I’ve tried to school myself to say, “Thank you.” Not as a matter of automatic courtesy, but as a cultivation of an overall welcoming of gratitude into my life. When a parking spot opens up in a driving rain or just most any time that any thing works out in a positive way, I try to pause for the required couple of seconds and say, “Thanks.”

It doesn’t matter who or what you think is hearing the expression. What matters is the pause, and the acknowledgment. Being grateful is life’s counterweight to all the negative emotions through which we wade on a daily basis and none of us pauses enough in the rat race to take a breath of awareness.

Today, on this specially mandated holiday when we stuff ourselves with too much food, too much football, and too much family, I am pausing to be thankful that after many months of lethargy and a daily war against bitterness, I am suddenly gifted with an abundance of potential.

None of the old problems have gone away, but new projects have begun, new avenues have opened up, and with diligence and perseverance, I can now see possible improvement in the not-so-distant future. If it were all fixed at once, I’d be naturally suspicious; but a slow, progressive lifting of a dark veil? That feels right.

Every day for seven and a half years I’ve had to cut the sheets of the morning newspaper in half because my housemate cannot handle the broadsheets with her stroke-crippled left hand and arm. It’s ridiculous and petty of me to resent the chore, but I do.

It’s a little like a stand-up routine I watched recently where the comedian was talking about how small things become magnified when you have to live with someone. She said at meals that she started looking at her husband thinking, “Every damn time we eat he has to chew. I don’t remember him having to chew when we were dating.”

They eventually divorced. And then she came out. But I digress.

The routine was really funny, and entirely too true. Nothing puts small habits and inconveniences under a microscope like living in close proximity, especially when a degree of that proximity is forced. My housemate will declare long and loud her desire to live alone, but that simply is not possible. I, too, would prefer to be a loner, but this is what life has handed me and this is what I’m dealing with.

And so . . .

I have noise canceling headphones and white noise mp3s when I just can’t stand the blaring television on more minute.

I tweet and Facebook and surf on the BlackBerry in the evenings and pretend to pay attention to our 56,849th viewing of some Law & Order re-run.

I make sure there’s always a “condiment” on the table because all food, even that swimming in gravy or bathed in butter is “dry.”

And the list goes on and on and on. There are the fantasies too . . .

Taking a hammer to the intercom and beating it into a senseless pile of shattered circuit boards so I never have to hear that insidious chirp at 3 a.m. again.

Spending a whole weekend in my pajamas eating frozen food out of boxes and watching endless hours of bad cable with the annoying captions turned off and the thunderous volume turned down.

And never, never again under any circumstances discussing someone else’s bowel habits. The ultimate in “too much information.”

What I have learned is that these small potholes on the road to truly dealing with someone like my housemate with patience and forbearance are instructions in personal insulation. Many years ago, while watching a re-run of the mini-series “Shogun,” I was struck by one particular scene.

The hero (Richard Chamberlain, I think) had climbed into a bath tub, only to have a lovely Japanese woman come into the room. She quietly disrobed and climbed into the tub with him. He was embarrassed; she was not and explained that on the crowded islands they called home, her people had developed a personal sense of privacy that transcended their surroundings.

Frankly, that has become a personal quest of mine, to create a quiet, internal space, apart from daily resentments and annoyances that must be dealt with and will not go away during this phase of my life. On those days when I succeed, everything in the house runs more smoothly.

Eckhart Tolle was completely correct when he wrote, “What you resist, persists.” (Or as the Borg of the Star Trek universe put it, “Resistance is futile.”)

You see, I could not cut the paper up every day, but then I’d have to listen to my housemate complain and I wouldn’t like that either. Resisting the act makes it a dreaded chore. Just doing it, makes it the thing that precedes turning on the coffee pot — a nothing.

“Down at the heels” is an old-fashioned expression for something that is shabby or for someone who is poor. A few days ago at the grocery store, I saw a living, vivid expression of how that idiom developed.

He was an old man, his face covered with spiky, white stubble that stood in sharp contrast with dark, suspicious, even hostile eyes. Skin cancers dotted his temples and his spine had long since twisted into a painful, hunched curve.

But what I noticed first were his boots. They’d been fancy, go-to-town footwear once upon a time, old-fashioned Western boots with sharp, pointed toes and high, slanted riding heels. Exactly the kind I like to wear.

In their current state, however, the heels of his boots were so worn down that the old man was virtually wearing flats. I don’t imagine there was even half an inch left.

Those boots may have been a testament to poverty or cantankerousness — or a little of both — but I found the sight heartbreaking at first. It wasn’t so much a matter of there being anything shameful in sporting worn-out footwear, it was more that I could see what a high-stepper the old boy had been in his day.

A man doesn’t buy boots like that in the first place unless he’s making something of a statement. I couldn’t see the tops, but I know there was fancy stitching there, itself undoubtedly worn but still gaudy and colorful. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of boot tops like that in my life, normally kept hidden under starched jeans.

And then the old boy looked me straight in the eye, a hot, fierce gaze that didn’t flinch. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. He hated being old. He hated being as worn down as those boot heels, but he wasn’t about to give up that reminder of younger days. I didn’t smile, on instinct, but instead gave him a tight nod. He responded in kind, and shuffled down the aisle ahead of me.

As I watched him move away, I thought about how I’m not much of one to throw something away because it’s a little frayed either. And Lord knows I hang on — to lots of things — ideas, scraps, old letters, routines. I don’t turn loose of much gracefully now. What in the world will I be like when I’m his age?

Looking at that brief encounter in retrospect, it seems to me that what really matters is how I’ll see myself when that time comes. Will I look at myself and see someone who’s down at the heels and wearing out? Judging by that old man, no. He may have hated being old, but in his own self-image, hunched posture and cancer-riddled skin aside, that old boy was still a high-stepper.

There are worse things to be as the end is closer than the beginning.

Last May, I got the wind knocked out of me in a hard way. My income dropped 50% over night and within just a few weeks my beloved pet’s cancer returned. The three months until he passed in August were among the hardest of my life.

In the aftermath, a depressed, sluggish lethargy seized my being. I’d like to tell you it’s all gone, but it’s not. I would liken my current feeling to having pulled my boots out of the mud, but I’m still having to deal with all the sticky, clinging clumps. In fact, that situation and my efforts to recover from it are part of what led me to resurrect this blog project that has been languishing for many months on my laptop.

In my current situation as a full-time caregiver to an elderly friend, I am often compelled to deal with someone else’s anger. An accusation that is frequently hurled in my face is, “You’re always right.” If it wouldn’t just agitate the situation more, I’d laugh. Always right? What a joke! Smoke and mirrors and running a good bluff? Those are the mainstay strategies of my existence.

This period of my life has taught me that momentum is a fragile thing. Western religion admonishes us to “fight the good fight.” Do you know how hard that is about the third time you’ve taken a metaphorical fist to the face? Fighting the good fight is bloody and it hurts. Some days “winning” just means you’re still standing at the end of the day.

But if that alone is your only accomplishment, revel in it. Being engaged in the business of living, even at its toughest, is far preferable to the alternative.

Manipulation can take many forms, overt and covert. In my living situation I am often forced to deal with a script that has been written for me. If I do not enter the room on cue, with the expression appropriate to the expected emotion, and mouth the anticipated lines, I have “failed” and all too often we go downhill from there.

My elderly housemate likes to go on at some length about how she can’t do anything right. Never mind that a great deal of the daily snarls around here could be handled by something as simple as communication. When she refuses to do that, and consequently does not get what she wants or needs, it’s difficult to put the blame on anyone but her, since I have not perfected the ability to read minds.

In my more detached moments it’s been interesting to watch her aging progress, since I was also privy to her mother’s behavior in the final years of her life. Somewhat to my horror, I have seen my friend do essentially everything she swore she’d never do, because the behavior in her mother was so maddening.

All kidding aside, I counsel myself almost daily to take away personal lessons from this caregiving experience about my own behavior and actions in years to come. One thing in particular that my friend always railed against in her younger, healthier years was this business of writing another person’s script. Now, she writes so many, I’m half tempted to nominate her for an Academy Award.

“Writing the other guy’s script” simply means placing expectations for behavior or performance on another person and being disappointed or angry when that person . . . well, acts like a person and exercises free will, doing or saying something other than what you would have them do. For the next six weeks or so, all our emotional landscapes will be littered with these interpersonal land mines. There’s no single time of the year more fraught with unfair expectations than the holidays.

It isn’t as simple as giving a gift and not having it received as you would have liked. We have expectations about who will be where, when, doing what with whom. “If we go to your parents’ this year, my Mom will be hurt, especially since we’re thinking about having our own Thanksgiving here and we can’t invite them all because we have no place to put them, and if we ask the parents, we have to ask Uncle Charlie and Aunt Ethel . . .”

And so the headache goes, spiraling down into deeper, more explosive snarls of Should, Could, Would, Must, and Ought. They along with Guilt, Anger and Frustration are the eight Alternate Reindeer of the Holiday Apocalypse. (Disappointment with his little red nose aglow leads the pack on foggy Christmas eves.)

Maybe the best gift to anyone in your life this season could be a suspension of the tendency to set unfair expectations and a resolution to enjoy the festivities, regardless of how the logistics work out — and the permission to let others do the same.

When I sold my condo and moved in to become a full-time caregiver for my elderly friend, most of my books were either sold or packed in boxes and stacked in my storage unit. One case of favorites came with me and I vowed to read only what I could borrow from the library and friends or low cost ebooks. When the Amazon Kindle appeared on the market, I used an unexpected tax refund to buy one and since then have become an unabashed searcher for cheap and free reads.

After reading a reasonably entertaining mystery, “Whiskey Sour,” by J.A. Konrath, I paid $1.99 for another of his books, “Origin,” about a secret government operation holding Satan, or at the very least a major demon, prisoner underground in the desert. Though plagued by some holes, I found the plot satisfying enough that by the end of the story, I was avidly reading to find out what would happen next.

At the end of the book, I discovered that “Origin” has never been officially “published,” but has appeared only as an ebook on the author’s site and in the Amazon Kindle store, having been rejected two or three times by conventional presses. A cheap price isn’t enough to drive a book’s sales in the Kindle community. This is a good read, but one that is, in all honesty, a reject.

A reject that has been sold to 2,000 readers and counting.

Not a runaway bestseller, but by ballpark estimation, it’s made $4,000+ for its author and gained a good reputation that has, undoubtedly, led to the purchase of other of Konrath’s books. Not too shabby for a work that supposedly didn’t make the grade.

This discovery came at roughly the same time three television programs I enjoyed were cancelled: “Defying Gravity,” “Eastwick,” and “Dollhouse.” Of the three, “Dollhouse,” by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly” creator Joss Whedon was truly gritty and cutting edge, featuring the talented young star Eliza Dushku and a host of Whedon veterans as well as some “Battlestar Galactic” alums.

But, like many worthy efforts before them — the post-apocalyptic “Jericho” comes to mind — the network drones pulled the plug not because the programs lacked merit, but because their profit potential fell below the required level for survival. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the networks are in the business of making money, but I am left to wonder if any of these programs could have survived and thrived with a different audience that lives its life online where Konrath’s “Origin” found a healthy niche or where little 8 minute web-only episodes of “The Guild” have a cult-like following.

The whole question points to the transitional era in which we are living and the degree to which some embrace change and some do not. I grew up in a world of three channels and a grainy PBS signal. Now, I can watch YouTube videos on my phone. The publishing and broadcast network fiefdoms continue to work on an industrial age, factory model in a world where the Internet fits in your pocket.

That’s a world where the conventional definitions of success and failure are being constantly revised and with them how we evaluate our own individual performance. Is it just me, or does “Origin” — the story of a reject — speak volumes about the potential power of personal initiative?