Rejected

 

            People often ask me how I come up with so many different subjects for my blog. Actually, nobody has ever asked me that, but they may have been thinking it.

 

            As part of the process, I usually consider several possibilities before choosing one, and as I write, I may swerve onto another subject. But there are some subjects that I simply consider and reject. Here are a few:

 

·      What do wealthy people look like? How can you tell? We actually had a conversation with a waitress on this subject, and she had plenty of ideas. So did we – but I don’t want to write about it because it would lead me to stereotyping, which I deplore. But you might want to come up with a few features on your own, without my help.

 

·      What stupid things have I done in my life? I have actually covered a lot of ground on this subject, so there is no need for a separate post.

 

·      President Trump? I believe that people read my stuff as an escape from current politics, and I apologize for even mentioning his name.

 

·      My sore knee? No, I don’t have a sore knee, but I don’t want the blog to be where an old guy describes aches and pains. Yes, we need support, and there is nothing wrong with asking for it. But I like Kim’s example – stoically soldiering through her pain and fatigue to look after me and our home.

 

·      Sex

 

·      Computer problems? These seem to be consuming a lot of my time, and probably yours, so the last thing you want to do is read about them.

 

·      The tongue: How amazing it is, if you stop to think about it. Perhaps this is best kept private.

 

·      Kids these days. I have a coaster that reads, “When I was your age, I had to walk 10 feet through shag carpet to change the TV channel.” We have probably heard enough of these. On the other hand, it might be fun to imagine kids confronting our old technology. Phone booth? Pencil sharpener? Conversation?

 

·      This one? Probably should have . . ..

 

 

Paper Copies

            Kim has encouraged me to start a new project: making paper copies of all my blog entries and poems. I bought a set of folders with thousands of plastic sleeves where I can insert the pages. I’ve mainly concentrated on the weekly blog pages, and I have now done up through 2023.

 

            Why am I doing this? For one thing, I have become increasingly aware of how things sometimes just disappear off of my computer. The Host of my blog recently changed hands, and for a while I could not find it, and now I can no longer get photos into my posts. I’m sure it can be done, but I don’t know how to do it. And if, for some reason I fail to make my monthly autopay to my blog host, I think the whole blog – years of weekly posts – will be gone. What a loss to civilization! But wait – I have these hard copies, so all is saved (unless we have a fire).

 

            The process has been enjoyable. I have not reread any of my precious blog entries through, but seeing them and reading a few patches reminds me of the pleasure of writing them. I’m glad I enjoy them, but I am not vain enough to imagine anyone else wanting to read them, except perhaps family members with a lot of time on their hands. 

 

            The poems are another matter. I just re-read and typed a few love poems I wrote to Kim in 1994, and I was impressed – not by the quality of the poems, which could use some editing, but by the open emotionalism that today I find difficult. Here’s a sample, written in 1994:

 

            Cloud  Moon  Sun  Star

 

            You shift like a cloud

            making all the greens

            here on my earth

            modulate. Golds

            deepen, then dazzle.

 

            You are my moon,

            whose unseen gravity

            pulls me to high tide.

            I measure time by

            your face—silver, gold,

            haloed in mist. You

            call out night creatures.

 

            Serene life source.

            But your sunstorms

            burst into solar winds

            to collide with belts

            of radiant air. Your

            art is our home’s

            aurora borealis.

 

            Sometimes I star gaze

            from a safe distance.

            Surrounded by your

            daily rose beauties,

            I need the comfort

            of invisibility to help

            me reach across space

            and draw you near.

 

These will be fun to explore.

 

            I suppose that a big appeal of saving these writings is an attempt to leave my mark on the world – the kind of thing you think about when you get old. Kim has kept things – articles of clothing, pieces of jewelry, some old photographs and letters – that connect her to her father, grandparents, and other parts of her family history. These things are a way these people live on. And Kim has made her own mark on the world – through her artwork, but perhaps even more, through the homes we have designed and built, and then left behind to enrich the world – the Bark House, the Riverwood house in Ypsilanti, the Paynes Prairie house in Florida, and a significant remodel of our Craftsman Bungalow in Saline, Michigan. These homes are mainly Kim’s work, and the world is a better place because of them.

 

            I leave the world my writings. I don’t think providing amusement is a path to immortality, but that’s what I have. And the paper can always be recycled.

 

 

 

Locked Out

            Kim and I were working at our new condo in the former mental hospital – cleaning, getting the bedding right after our movers apparently delivered the wrong beds, arranging kitchen stuff that we will rearrange once the closet is converted into a pantry. Kim called me and said she was locked out of our bedroom. There was nobody in the bedroom, and no key or keyhole to get it open.

 

            A quick inspection revealed that there is a button about the size of my fingernail on the outside of the doorknob, and it had been pushed in, locking the door. It probably happened when one of us left the room and closed the door. We checked the doorknob on the other bedroom and saw there is a lock button on the inside, to lock the door, but also a lock button on the outside of the knob. Why you would want to lock the door with nobody inside and no way to get in was beyond my limited thinking. The bathroom had a similar lock-out button. We were smart enough to test these buttons with the doors open so we could turn the knob from inside the room, freeing the lock.

 

            But we still were locked out of our bedroom. We are on the third floor, so climbing in a window was out of the question.

 

            The outside doorknob has a small hole – about large enough to insert a straightened paper clip or a small finishing nail. We found a nail, which I inserted in the hole and started twisting and wiggling. After about a minute, I heard and felt a click, the button released to its unlocked position, and I opened the door. Good for me!

 

            Why someone would design or install such a lock is beyond me. I will file the incident under “Unnecessary Inconveniences,” right next to my struggles with small purchases, wrapped in plastic, that it takes a razor blade (or a hammer) to open – most recently: a new toothbrush.

 

            On the other hand, it felt so good to hear and feel that rewarding “click” as, for the first time in my life, I jimmied open a lock. I’d never been much of a MacGyver, but I was for the rest of the day.

Cool

 

            I remember, vaguely, that when I was about twelve years old I wanted to be “cool.” The word is a bit slippery to define, but in my case, I used it to refer to an alternative to the really popular classmates – football players, cheerleaders, etc. (My brother pretty much ruled that venue – one of the “Cool Guys.”) No, I came up with an alternative version: outside-the-mainstream “coolness.” My version included my ambition to succeed in three cool roles:

 

Hockey Goalie. To this day, I don’t know why I aspired to that role, especially since this was before face masks. I was a goaltender in high school and then at Amherst College, and I was somewhat successful, even though I often felt like an imposter. There was stress. My college roommates described some of my nightmares, and years later, in a dream I made a kick save that landed me on the floor next to my bed – to Kim’s puzzled amusement. Maybe it was the mask I finally got – it made me both anonymous and distinctive. When wearing the mask, I was someone else, and that was cool. I was both visible and invisible, and not fully human.

 

Jazz Drummer. I listened to a lot of jazz, mostly on the radio and my dad’s Dixieland albums, and I was always impressed by the jazz drummers – who drove the band and made things happen. So, I somehow talked my parents into getting me drum lessons. I was never very good, never in a group in high school other than the Marching Band. But when I went to college I lied at an audition and said I had played in a band, and since I was the only drummer who showed up, I got the job. Fortunately, we had some real musicians. Our group played a mix of jazz standards and early rock music. I did learn to play cool Brazilian bossa nova, and I had one gig with a blind guitar player who thought I was Black. (Cool!) When I moved to Ann Arbor to teach high school, I played with a group that was, like my college combo, good enough to hide my weaknesses. We played at a restaurant/bar on Thursday nights, and I count those gigs as some of the happiest moments of my life. I was semi-invisible, my goal being to make the other guys in the band sound better, deflecting attention from me. The only problem with the gig was that the late Thursday nights made teaching on Friday morning rather difficult. Something like: “Here’s an essay topic for you to write. While you are writing, I’ll just rest my head on my desk.” What is really cool is that I can say I was a rock and jazz drummer without having to demonstrate.

 

Poet. Not sure how this goal was planted. Maybe it was a consequence of some early reading of Walt Whitman and William Blake. (Thank you, Mr. Hayes – my English teacher.) What was cool about this role was that it was (and is) something different – not the daily me who takes out the trash and pays the electric bill. I wrote very little poetry while in high school and none while in college. When I started teaching, a colleague, Andy Carrigan, and I would exchange poems regularly – many of them written at faculty meetings. I self-published two books of poetry and did a few readings in Ann Arbor. I enjoyed identifying as a poet. And in the poems I would create a voice, a persona who is not-really-me, who is sensitive and open with his feelings, unlike my Real Self whose lid is screwed on pretty tight. “Poet” is another cool mask.

 

            What do all three of these have in common? Masks. It’s cool to create a new identity (though this may be a sign of mental illness). But I’m cool with that.

 

            Kim asked me what mask I am wearing now. Geezer with old jokes and stories? Husband?

Find My Phone

 

This is the kind of thing that happens when you get old:

 

            It was Kim’s phone, actually, that got lost. This happens fairly often, largely because her clothes typically don’t have any pockets, and as she moves around our house, going from floor to floor, it sometimes gets left behind. When we leave home, she has her phone in her purse – no problem finding it.

 

            When it’s lost in our home, it’s usually no big deal. We check the likely places (kitchen counter, table on the porch, next to her computer, table by the couch, art room, laundry room counter where she recharges). And if that doesn’t work, I call her on my phone and the ringing leads us to hers.

 

            But last week was different. We had stayed up until almost midnight, and I had just gotten into bed when Kim announced that she could not find her phone. None of our usual phone-finding methods worked. We included a pat-down of the pockets of any clothes we had worn that day and the day before. When I call her number with no response, it usually means either 1) she left it in the car, or 2) the battery died. So, I put on some pants over my pajamas and ventured out into the night air to the garage. Not there. So, we spent about an hour going from room to room, looking between and under the couch pillows, in the bathroom next to the toilet. Nada. I went out and checked the car again. Nope. I recalled that I have a tendency to put things away in the wrong place – especially when I am drying dishes – so I checked every kitchen drawer and every shelf in the pantry.

 

            We then tried to remember the last time we had seen or used the phone. We had taken a brief walk on the beach that afternoon, and we were sure she did not have it then. Kim recalled asking me to carry her phone, but I’m not sure when she asked me – my memory of the asking was not clear. That day, after going to the beach we had gone to a garden center, and we paid for the plants with Kim’s credit card – which she usually carries tucked into her phone case, but she had given her card to me because SHE KNEW SHE WOULD NOT HAVE HER PHONE WITH HER! (Confused? Think how we felt!) She also remembered that she had shown me a photo she had taken the day before – a robin that had built her nest in a bike basket on the porch outside our condo. We were here at the Bark House when she showed me the photo, which meant that we had not left it in the condo the day before, so we did not have to drive there to look for it.

 

            So, at some time around 2 a.m., we went to sleep – sort of. I got up once to check the tubs where we keep gloves and hats in the front hall closet.

 

            The next day we repeated most of the steps that we had tried the day before. I came back to the house after checking the car for the third time, and Kim announced “Found it!” Where? She had put it inside an old cigar box (future home of tv remotes in the condo) because she always uses the bannister when going up or down the stairs, and she wanted to carry phone and box at the same time, so she put the phone in the box, went downstairs, and promptly got busy doing something else.

 

            I was, of course, delighted. Not only did we find Kim’s phone, but it was also clearly not my fault that we lost it.

 

            I should note that I continue to look for Kim’s phone, even though it’s not lost. I catch myself glancing at the random shelf or compartment in the car, expecting, maybe, to catch a glimpse of Kim’s phone. Who knows what I might find that I didn’t even know was lost?

 

            So much fun to be old! So many adventures!

 

Mulch

            I like mulch. A few days ago, a truckload was dumped on the large blue tarpaulin on a corner of our gravel driveway. It was actually a “half-truckload,” which I had ordered not knowing how big the truck was. I think the Nursery mentioned how many cubic yards made up a half-truckload (5), but that would not have been much help, even if I were paying attention.

 

            So, there it was – a small mountain of shredded bark and wood, staring at me accusingly, as if to say, “Your job is clear.”

 

            And that’s one of the things I like about mulch: my job is clear: Use a pitchfork to load it into my wheelbarrow, haul it to one of the open areas without flowers, dump it, and then spread it around with an iron rake. Then go back to the mulch pile and do it again. And again. And again. My goal: Use up the pile. It’s a great collaboration between pitchfork, wheelbarrow and rake, all orchestrated by me.

 

            When in the areas near our plants, I lift large handfuls out of the wheelbarrow to sprinkle onto the bare areas between plants, or toss with freedom and care. I might do a bit of weeding as I work, provided it’s one of the three species of weed that Kim has trained me – not entirely successfully – to identify. She joins in to do quite a bit of the garden mulch spreading, as she is worried when I get too close to valuable plants.

 

            What do we get when we are done? It’s a beautiful brown setting for our trees and flowers, an organic version of a well-framed picture. And what’s more, the mulch frame covers the ugly or boring stretches of our yard – areas that some people would fill with grass.

             It’s a setting that says “nature” in a way that a perfect grassy lawn cannot. I like being in nature Up North. And I confess to a bit of pride in my ability to do the physical labor. Kim has placed most of the plants, but I moved most of the mulch. And unlike my experience shoveling snow, if and when I keel over, I will have a soft place  to land.

            And no, we did not quite distribute all of the mulch – a small pile still calls to us in a way that only slightly admonishes. I like the way it reminds me how big the pile was a few days ago.

 

If Only . . .

 

            I recall reading years ago an article about the three major causes of stress. I do not, however, recall what those three causes are, so, instead, I will try to identify the chief causes of my current stress.

 

            Primary, of course, is a death in our family. The grief is intensified when it is your son or daughter, and in Scott’s case, there are lingering questions about the cause of death that stir anger into our grief load. On top of that, we are digging deep in order to support each other. So much of what the brain does is taken up with grief, or with speculating, “If only I had . . .,” that our thinking is often slow and confused – even more than we had been experiencing due to normal aging.

 

            Kim has realized that one way to lessen that grief-stress is to keep busy, and living here in the Bark House gives us – especially Kim – plenty of tasks inside the house and out to distract her from thoughts of her son.

 

            Another cause of stress, of course, is moving. As I write this the movers have hauled to the condo a couple of beds and a few pieces of furniture, and we have hauled many boxes containing kitchen stuff, bathroom stuff, and fabric samples as we try to decide fabrics for the couch and chairs we are ordering. All of the packing duties fell on Kim, with my main job being hauling stuff out to the car and then up to the condo. The drive from Bark House to the asylum takes about an hour, and this week we are making the round trip four times, with some medical appointments mixed in with furniture delivery and meetings with decorators.

 

            I have taken on two major technical responsibilities, and they should be simple, but I tend to use my down time to worry, and these are what I worry about. First, we had two beds delivered by the movers, but I fear that some parts of the bed frames are missing. So, we have a guy coming to help put them together, and I hope any missing parts can be easily found. For example, I noticed that the full sized bedframe was missing all the nuts needed to attach the side rails, but I found eight of the right side in my little jar of nuts and bolts. I’m hopeful that the new queen-sized bedframe, still in the box, will be fully equipped. Getting those beds assembled is a big deal, for it means we can sleep there and, with a few food purchases, spend the night there. Seeing them lying there unassembled makes me feel incompetent.

 

            My second major responsibility is to get the television and internet up and running. We have a television but no way to attach it to the wall. We see a lot of wires and cables heading toward the small hole over the fireplace where the television will go. This week I went to Best Buy to get the mounting frame and make an appointment go have someone from the Geek Squad come hook everything up. I have been a Best Buy member for years, and when I renewed this year I thought I was told that home service calls would be free. Nope. When Best Buy is done hooking up the television, I will call to ask Spectrum to visit our condo to sell or rent me some stuff so the right signals go to the right devices. I have to trust that these geeks know what they are doing and not ripping me off. I just want my Netflix and the evening news, and I long for a good distracting series to absorb my grieving time.

 

            Our third cause of stress must be the noticing of our entirely routine decline due to age. I’m in good physical health, though my memory lapses are troubling. (Kim and I decided that when we can’t remember a word, often a name, we find a neutral word to substitute for the forgotten word until the carrousel comes around and delivers the right word. (I would tell you what our replacement word is, but I forgot it.)). I get angry when I forget stuff, and Kim has to talk or laugh me out of it. Again, grief takes up a lot of brain space, so some stuff has to be crowded out or drowned out. Moving into a former mental institution helps with the humor and Google tells me that electroshock therapy is more benign than it used to be.

 

            So, that’s how it is.