This is a story that does not yet have an ending.
A little over a year ago, I moved back home. Yeah, I was part of the financial crush that hurt a lot of people, but the reason I was needed was much more simple than that: my mother was dying. She was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in the fall of 2010, and it spread throughout the rest of her body in due order. When I arrived last fall, she was still ambulatory, but that was a story that has since concluded.
She has deteriorated in regular intervals this year. To say it has had a profound effect on me would be an understatement. Everything that I have done over the past twelve months has been affected by her developing condition.
The first order of business, as I reported in my commentary a year ago, was to move my parents out of the house our family had lived in for thirty years. The specter of her decreased mobility was present even then. She couldn't walk up the stairs without terrifying those who witnessed her, and as such was the motivating factor for the move. Falls seemed imminent each time. At that point, they had not become a regular feature of her life. This would change early in 2014.
When they began, they almost seemed harmless. She was never seriously injured in any of them, unless you count the number of times her head struck the floor. The day we had to have emergency services help us get her back up, we couldn't imagine, my father and I, that our evening would only grow worse when we got back home, after she was reoriented and evaluated at the hospital. She couldn't climb the stairs to the house. She had no power in her legs. We struggled to help her. I won't go into further details, but suffice to say at one point she became dead weight and lost all cognizance. In some ways this was a mercy. I looked into her face and saw someone I didn't recognize.
Last year I said I'd already experienced the worst moment of this whole ordeal, and I still stand by that statement, but it seems more hollow from this vantage point. My sister's father-in-law helped us install a ramp. She went from using a cane to a walker to what's called a transfer seat but by all appearances is basically a wheelchair, in rapid succession. We started receiving assistance in the home. It was only a matter of time before we could no longer adequately care for her in this manner. A few weeks back she was moved into a nursing facility.
I have no idea how or when the story ends. We visit twice a day, and she has good days and bad days. Our victories are counted in what she has managed to eat. She is barely communicative at this point. There are flashes of the person we knew, and then there are times when all she can say is a series of numbers, and then when all she can do is open her eyes long enough to acknowledge us. Sometimes her voice is only a whisper.
Thanksgiving was spent with her. We ate with her, and other residents, in the dining room. Christmas, hopefully, will be better. She says the only gift she wants is coffee. Actually, that has been the most pleasant thing to come from the past year, discovering how such a simple thing can so reliably give her at least one happy thought.
I hope you understand if I don't tell you the ending.
Showing posts with label Life in Parentheses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life in Parentheses. Show all posts
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Sunday, December 29, 2013
#659. My Year in Parentheses
In the fall of 2011, my life kind of went to hell.
I mention this now because in some ways, all of that came to a head in 2013, and I'm hoping was resolved or at least began to be resolved.
The whole chain of Borders bookstores closed that fall, if you remember. I finished my five-year journey with the company as it concluded its liquidation process. At the time it was an exhilarating experience, but at the end of it I was also without a job. I spent the rest of that year unemployed and looking for work. When I finally got a new job, it was in a hell of a different stripe entirely. (Call centers are patently criminal affairs. They prey on stupidity. If I were ever able to convince the United States, or any other country, to regulate businesses the way they regulate other things, this is where I would start, not, ironically, the asshole practices that gave us the Great Recession.) I lost that job within six months and went back on unemployment.
(Unemployment, by the way, is both a terrific blessing and a terrible curse. You have the whole day to yourself, basically, but you also feel a pounding pressure to once more contribute to society so that you can make money. I get why we have money. Money makes the world turn round. I also see the real possibility that we could one day turn that ridiculous institution on its head. I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a human being.)
I spent a year working for Walmart. Yeah. So that happened. Then I came back home. I mean that literally. I went full-circle all the way around. I even went back to work for L.L.Bean.
Let's rewind the clock again. It's now the fall of 2010, a full year earlier than the period at the start of this reflection. My mom has just been diagnosed with cancer. I've never written about this, but it has been dominating a significant portion of my life for three years now. The worst days I've had in this period weren't on the unemployment line or a really bad job, or the financial crisis that led to the decision to move back home, but a week in the fall of 2010 when my mother for all intents and purposes looked like she had already lost her fight.
We need to rewind again. The worst day I ever had at a hospital was some twenty years earlier still, when my mother's father was in his final days. I cried more nakedly that day than I had before or have since. I was all of ten years old, but knew it was incredibly serious when I saw that even my grandfather's distinctive pencil-thin mustache was gone. (I'll never forgive the mortician who completely botched putting it back on him, because he was given a full mustache in death, and that was a rank insult.)
My mother spent the week in an induced sleep, and that was the worst way to visit her, at the start of her battle with cancer. To me, who sees connections in everything, it looked like the end, right there at the beginning.
I'm not looking for your sympathy, by the way. I don't want a single comment in that regard. This is my battle. If you're not busy supporting all of mankind every single day, even the people you lightly despise, you are not much of a human. I hate to put that so nakedly, but there you are. I'm not looking for popularity based on a morbid fascination. I'm not looking to inspire you. I'm a weak person trying to be strong, and I fail constantly. I'm not being humble. I'm not putting on an act. Maybe I'm being this honest, in a reflection I've been planning for months, because that's the mood I'm in as I finally write it. I live with the constant awareness of my failures.
She got better, of course, thankfully by the end of that week, just before I had to head back to my then-home in Colorado.
And although there were a lot of emotional developments along the way, she kept getting better, despite all the prognoses she received. As far as her doctors were concerned, she should be dead by now. We gathered the whole family for her 70th birthday in February of 2012 with the express belief that it might be the last happy memory she'd ever have. We're headed toward the two-year anniversary of that reunion.
Earlier this year I began making daily phone calls to her. I always tried to make weekly phone calls previous to that, but I decided that wasn't good enough, that she deserved more than that as she tried to fill time she now had in abundance. This sometimes had the effect of forcing her to think about the very thing that had come to dominate her existence, which gave her true mortal fear, which sometimes only made it worse. I tried to get better, stressing positives rather than negatives. You can only go so far with that.
And I could only do so much. Even now I can only do so much.
My life continued, of course. My money stretched thin. I never made much working for Borders. They don't pay you well to sell books, mostly because even though a lot of the Internet or at least the corners I know best would seem to contradict this, books are hardly the most popular mode of entertainment we have in the 21st century. They probably come in after the Internet itself, even though the things we have to promote the Internet today have also gone out of their way to promote books all over again, to inadequate effect as far as I'm concerned.
Money stretched very thin indeed while I was unemployed. They paid worse for unemployment than for selling books. As you may or may not have gleamed reading my thoughts and experiences for however long you have, I love popular culture. I spend more money on it, or certainly have in the past, than I've made promoting it. This is a a bad financial combination. When I had my terrible job, I was making a good amount of money, and when I was working at Walmart I made a bad amount of money. Eventually I couldn't outrun my bills anymore. I was in dire straits this past summer.
I was also in the midst of a bed bug infestation. (I will never ever again listen to the term "don't let the bed bugs bite" with any trace of good humor.) I spent the last six years or so living in the same apartment with the same habits, and yet was blamed for the infestation, even though it became apparent later that it had come from someone else. I was never given an apology. My whole world was turned upside down all over again. And I was already in the midst of knowing I needed a drastic change. And so that was the definitive turning point in my decision to move back home.
It took bed bugs to make me do the right thing, both by my own finances and by my mother. I feel pretty ashamed about that, by the way.
My parents had been trying to sell the family house for two years. They finally succeeded in the fall. (Change is appropriate for this season.) When I got back I was immediately thrust into the blitzkrieg of clearing out a house that had accumulated nearly thirty years worth of living in it. We didn't make the deadline. We pushed on with some much-appreciated help from some of my father's co-workers. It was accomplished.
(That was the culmination of a whole journey I did write about, which is part of a whole different running theme in my life, my relationship with my sister, the one I lived with or near for the better part of the last decade, a relationship I greatly value and which greatly affected the course of my life over that period, to the degree that I cannot properly express here. Suffice to say, but the most visible aspect of this relationship has been evident in my writings, and that for me is one way to define how important something is to me.)
I feel like a failure all the time. I never quite fit in. I'm always the odd man out. My thought process is always operating at a different wavelength than those around me. I've seldom known what to do about that. Often, it's made me angry. This is how I process it, and it's healthy and unhealthy at the same time.
When I approach my own mother like that, though, it just doesn't seem okay. She's not herself anymore. She's doing far better than she has any right to be doing, and the cancer itself doesn't seem to be doing anything at this point, but she's on the business end of her mortal coil. That much seems evident. It scares me greatly. Her mind is slipping. I've learned that this is a stage in a person's life that brings into sharp focus everything they always were. The more you retreat to protect yourself, the more you become yourself. I try not to judge my mother in this regard. But I am struggling more and more with how to deal with this. She demands a great deal of patience. She exhausts herself in apologies. She's in constant conflict with herself. She doesn't know how she fits in with the world anymore. And I don't know how to help her with that.
(Still, I beg you, do not reply with sympathy. You may not even believe in prayer, but when you wish well on all humanity, which I believe all good humanity does as a matter of instinct, that's what you're doing. Christians have this particular belief that prayers for specific individuals can act as an intercession. In some cases this is relevant, but I believe in the sense that positive leads to positive. Otherwise what happens is what is supposed to happen. We only experience the world linearly. Everything that will ever happen has already happened. You can't change that, because you will have already. It's the basic paradox of life. It's the mystery that makes it so hard to deal with difficult experiences.)
2013 has been a year of transition. I've struggled more than in any other year of my life to find my way. I've struggled to find out where I fit in with the rest of the world. Even here, in my blogging adventures, I've struggled. Anyone who's read me regularly will know that.
I consider a good day one in which I'm not actively fighting any battles, or when I've managed to say or write something that makes sense of this crazy life. I consider my writing a way of processing my experiences. If I sometimes seem condescending to the writing of others, it's because I cannot comprehend how they can take it so lightly when it means so much to me. I write as I read, and I read as someone who finds his best connection with humanity in the words of others. I devote myself to popular culture because of this connection. It's my one real tether to the world. This becomes more important when my mother, my first and best tether, begins to slip away. I'm not looking to escape. I'm looking to find my way.
In the end, we're all a very small part of a very big world. Sometimes we feel smaller. Sometimes our basic survival instinct of arrogance makes us feel bigger. My parentheses are my arrogance. I tell myself all the things I never hear anyone else say. (Again, again, please don't tell me anything like that now. I would consider the best response to this reflection to be no response at all. This is my arrogance. This is my pride. An isolated individual needs to tell himself a lot of things. What he doesn't need is the appearance of something that he keenly feels every day as an absence that has come to define and inform his entire existence.)
That's my life at the end of this year. I'm hoping for better next year. Conceivably, as it has been conceivable since the fall of 2010, the worst will finally happen in one key element of this tapestry. I'm not afraid of death. I'm more afraid of life. I'm afraid of watching it, experiencing it, slip away. I'm a coward. It was bravery and selfishness that brought me back home, a naked financial need. I find myself inadequate to the task of providing my mother with the comfort she desperately needs, the unconditional understanding she craves. I thought it would be easier. I thought, as I thought when I began making the phone calls, that my presence alone would reassure her. This is not the case. Nothing is ever that simple. My battle is the fight of my mother's life, a war that already has a conclusion, just waiting to happen. It feels bad just knowing that I sometimes thought the worst of this year was money. What I was feeling in my worst days, my mother has felt for three years on a completely different scale.
I'm only now beginning to fully appreciate that. My challenge for the new year isn't to fight her battle for her, but to overcome my own limitations. I can't say how that'll go. I can only hope for the best.
One final time, because I absolutely mean it, none of this was meant to provoke anything but a clearing of my own conscience, a reckoning with a period of my life that in some ways has come to an end, and in others is just beginning. We define a lot of our lives by time. When time becomes a precious commodity we feel it most keenly. Sometimes I feel as if I'm stealing time from myself. I'm not even sure which aspects of my life I'm stealing the time from, or if that's my whole life. I call this the year of parentheses because that's exactly how it felt. It was a reckoning. I hope I've learned something from it. The new job is the same as an old job I had at the start of the millennium, but it's also completely different now than it was then. That's one way I know I've changed. I hope for the better.
I mention this now because in some ways, all of that came to a head in 2013, and I'm hoping was resolved or at least began to be resolved.
The whole chain of Borders bookstores closed that fall, if you remember. I finished my five-year journey with the company as it concluded its liquidation process. At the time it was an exhilarating experience, but at the end of it I was also without a job. I spent the rest of that year unemployed and looking for work. When I finally got a new job, it was in a hell of a different stripe entirely. (Call centers are patently criminal affairs. They prey on stupidity. If I were ever able to convince the United States, or any other country, to regulate businesses the way they regulate other things, this is where I would start, not, ironically, the asshole practices that gave us the Great Recession.) I lost that job within six months and went back on unemployment.
(Unemployment, by the way, is both a terrific blessing and a terrible curse. You have the whole day to yourself, basically, but you also feel a pounding pressure to once more contribute to society so that you can make money. I get why we have money. Money makes the world turn round. I also see the real possibility that we could one day turn that ridiculous institution on its head. I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a human being.)
I spent a year working for Walmart. Yeah. So that happened. Then I came back home. I mean that literally. I went full-circle all the way around. I even went back to work for L.L.Bean.
Let's rewind the clock again. It's now the fall of 2010, a full year earlier than the period at the start of this reflection. My mom has just been diagnosed with cancer. I've never written about this, but it has been dominating a significant portion of my life for three years now. The worst days I've had in this period weren't on the unemployment line or a really bad job, or the financial crisis that led to the decision to move back home, but a week in the fall of 2010 when my mother for all intents and purposes looked like she had already lost her fight.
We need to rewind again. The worst day I ever had at a hospital was some twenty years earlier still, when my mother's father was in his final days. I cried more nakedly that day than I had before or have since. I was all of ten years old, but knew it was incredibly serious when I saw that even my grandfather's distinctive pencil-thin mustache was gone. (I'll never forgive the mortician who completely botched putting it back on him, because he was given a full mustache in death, and that was a rank insult.)
My mother spent the week in an induced sleep, and that was the worst way to visit her, at the start of her battle with cancer. To me, who sees connections in everything, it looked like the end, right there at the beginning.
I'm not looking for your sympathy, by the way. I don't want a single comment in that regard. This is my battle. If you're not busy supporting all of mankind every single day, even the people you lightly despise, you are not much of a human. I hate to put that so nakedly, but there you are. I'm not looking for popularity based on a morbid fascination. I'm not looking to inspire you. I'm a weak person trying to be strong, and I fail constantly. I'm not being humble. I'm not putting on an act. Maybe I'm being this honest, in a reflection I've been planning for months, because that's the mood I'm in as I finally write it. I live with the constant awareness of my failures.
She got better, of course, thankfully by the end of that week, just before I had to head back to my then-home in Colorado.
And although there were a lot of emotional developments along the way, she kept getting better, despite all the prognoses she received. As far as her doctors were concerned, she should be dead by now. We gathered the whole family for her 70th birthday in February of 2012 with the express belief that it might be the last happy memory she'd ever have. We're headed toward the two-year anniversary of that reunion.
Earlier this year I began making daily phone calls to her. I always tried to make weekly phone calls previous to that, but I decided that wasn't good enough, that she deserved more than that as she tried to fill time she now had in abundance. This sometimes had the effect of forcing her to think about the very thing that had come to dominate her existence, which gave her true mortal fear, which sometimes only made it worse. I tried to get better, stressing positives rather than negatives. You can only go so far with that.
And I could only do so much. Even now I can only do so much.
My life continued, of course. My money stretched thin. I never made much working for Borders. They don't pay you well to sell books, mostly because even though a lot of the Internet or at least the corners I know best would seem to contradict this, books are hardly the most popular mode of entertainment we have in the 21st century. They probably come in after the Internet itself, even though the things we have to promote the Internet today have also gone out of their way to promote books all over again, to inadequate effect as far as I'm concerned.
Money stretched very thin indeed while I was unemployed. They paid worse for unemployment than for selling books. As you may or may not have gleamed reading my thoughts and experiences for however long you have, I love popular culture. I spend more money on it, or certainly have in the past, than I've made promoting it. This is a a bad financial combination. When I had my terrible job, I was making a good amount of money, and when I was working at Walmart I made a bad amount of money. Eventually I couldn't outrun my bills anymore. I was in dire straits this past summer.
I was also in the midst of a bed bug infestation. (I will never ever again listen to the term "don't let the bed bugs bite" with any trace of good humor.) I spent the last six years or so living in the same apartment with the same habits, and yet was blamed for the infestation, even though it became apparent later that it had come from someone else. I was never given an apology. My whole world was turned upside down all over again. And I was already in the midst of knowing I needed a drastic change. And so that was the definitive turning point in my decision to move back home.
It took bed bugs to make me do the right thing, both by my own finances and by my mother. I feel pretty ashamed about that, by the way.
My parents had been trying to sell the family house for two years. They finally succeeded in the fall. (Change is appropriate for this season.) When I got back I was immediately thrust into the blitzkrieg of clearing out a house that had accumulated nearly thirty years worth of living in it. We didn't make the deadline. We pushed on with some much-appreciated help from some of my father's co-workers. It was accomplished.
(That was the culmination of a whole journey I did write about, which is part of a whole different running theme in my life, my relationship with my sister, the one I lived with or near for the better part of the last decade, a relationship I greatly value and which greatly affected the course of my life over that period, to the degree that I cannot properly express here. Suffice to say, but the most visible aspect of this relationship has been evident in my writings, and that for me is one way to define how important something is to me.)
I feel like a failure all the time. I never quite fit in. I'm always the odd man out. My thought process is always operating at a different wavelength than those around me. I've seldom known what to do about that. Often, it's made me angry. This is how I process it, and it's healthy and unhealthy at the same time.
When I approach my own mother like that, though, it just doesn't seem okay. She's not herself anymore. She's doing far better than she has any right to be doing, and the cancer itself doesn't seem to be doing anything at this point, but she's on the business end of her mortal coil. That much seems evident. It scares me greatly. Her mind is slipping. I've learned that this is a stage in a person's life that brings into sharp focus everything they always were. The more you retreat to protect yourself, the more you become yourself. I try not to judge my mother in this regard. But I am struggling more and more with how to deal with this. She demands a great deal of patience. She exhausts herself in apologies. She's in constant conflict with herself. She doesn't know how she fits in with the world anymore. And I don't know how to help her with that.
(Still, I beg you, do not reply with sympathy. You may not even believe in prayer, but when you wish well on all humanity, which I believe all good humanity does as a matter of instinct, that's what you're doing. Christians have this particular belief that prayers for specific individuals can act as an intercession. In some cases this is relevant, but I believe in the sense that positive leads to positive. Otherwise what happens is what is supposed to happen. We only experience the world linearly. Everything that will ever happen has already happened. You can't change that, because you will have already. It's the basic paradox of life. It's the mystery that makes it so hard to deal with difficult experiences.)
2013 has been a year of transition. I've struggled more than in any other year of my life to find my way. I've struggled to find out where I fit in with the rest of the world. Even here, in my blogging adventures, I've struggled. Anyone who's read me regularly will know that.
I consider a good day one in which I'm not actively fighting any battles, or when I've managed to say or write something that makes sense of this crazy life. I consider my writing a way of processing my experiences. If I sometimes seem condescending to the writing of others, it's because I cannot comprehend how they can take it so lightly when it means so much to me. I write as I read, and I read as someone who finds his best connection with humanity in the words of others. I devote myself to popular culture because of this connection. It's my one real tether to the world. This becomes more important when my mother, my first and best tether, begins to slip away. I'm not looking to escape. I'm looking to find my way.
In the end, we're all a very small part of a very big world. Sometimes we feel smaller. Sometimes our basic survival instinct of arrogance makes us feel bigger. My parentheses are my arrogance. I tell myself all the things I never hear anyone else say. (Again, again, please don't tell me anything like that now. I would consider the best response to this reflection to be no response at all. This is my arrogance. This is my pride. An isolated individual needs to tell himself a lot of things. What he doesn't need is the appearance of something that he keenly feels every day as an absence that has come to define and inform his entire existence.)
That's my life at the end of this year. I'm hoping for better next year. Conceivably, as it has been conceivable since the fall of 2010, the worst will finally happen in one key element of this tapestry. I'm not afraid of death. I'm more afraid of life. I'm afraid of watching it, experiencing it, slip away. I'm a coward. It was bravery and selfishness that brought me back home, a naked financial need. I find myself inadequate to the task of providing my mother with the comfort she desperately needs, the unconditional understanding she craves. I thought it would be easier. I thought, as I thought when I began making the phone calls, that my presence alone would reassure her. This is not the case. Nothing is ever that simple. My battle is the fight of my mother's life, a war that already has a conclusion, just waiting to happen. It feels bad just knowing that I sometimes thought the worst of this year was money. What I was feeling in my worst days, my mother has felt for three years on a completely different scale.
I'm only now beginning to fully appreciate that. My challenge for the new year isn't to fight her battle for her, but to overcome my own limitations. I can't say how that'll go. I can only hope for the best.
One final time, because I absolutely mean it, none of this was meant to provoke anything but a clearing of my own conscience, a reckoning with a period of my life that in some ways has come to an end, and in others is just beginning. We define a lot of our lives by time. When time becomes a precious commodity we feel it most keenly. Sometimes I feel as if I'm stealing time from myself. I'm not even sure which aspects of my life I'm stealing the time from, or if that's my whole life. I call this the year of parentheses because that's exactly how it felt. It was a reckoning. I hope I've learned something from it. The new job is the same as an old job I had at the start of the millennium, but it's also completely different now than it was then. That's one way I know I've changed. I hope for the better.
Friday, September 13, 2013
#602. Slightly More from Road Tripping
(Aside from some edits to the original piece that I will hopefully make to look less cosmetically pathetic, here are thoughts inexplicably left out, including a really obvious bit.)
My nerdy windmill obsession is derived, of course, from Don Quixote. I explained to my sister all about "tilting at windmills," and the two layers of the famous scene featuring the would-be knight and the topic of that day. Good stuff.
I didn't mention a single dog! And there were lots!
The first and foremost was Jack. Jack is a goofy German short-haired pointer. He's pretty awesome (although he can sometimes be a handful, and by "sometimes" I mean nearly all the time he is awake). He made the whole trip with us.
In Stoutland there were a few more dogs! I had a chance to reunite with Jill, a wonderful little beagle (not lost in a transporter accident by Scotty) who loves to kiss kiss kiss (and lap-snuggle), and Chewy, a black Lab who was a wee puppy when I last saw him. Not so small anymore! And slightly less bitey! When he was small he had the habit of taking his name very literally, and he took to this talent very liberally. Now in mature mode, he does that only playfully, and I imagine he's great fun to have around on a regular basis, very companionable.
Jilly Bean!
(That's our nickname for her!)
(Chewy doesn't require anything more.)
There were a few more dogs, including Fiona (a running mate of Chewy's) and a neighbor's dog who spends more time there than at home.
But for a time, I was in doggy heaven. Now with more goats!
My nerdy windmill obsession is derived, of course, from Don Quixote. I explained to my sister all about "tilting at windmills," and the two layers of the famous scene featuring the would-be knight and the topic of that day. Good stuff.
I didn't mention a single dog! And there were lots!
The first and foremost was Jack. Jack is a goofy German short-haired pointer. He's pretty awesome (although he can sometimes be a handful, and by "sometimes" I mean nearly all the time he is awake). He made the whole trip with us.
In Stoutland there were a few more dogs! I had a chance to reunite with Jill, a wonderful little beagle (not lost in a transporter accident by Scotty) who loves to kiss kiss kiss (and lap-snuggle), and Chewy, a black Lab who was a wee puppy when I last saw him. Not so small anymore! And slightly less bitey! When he was small he had the habit of taking his name very literally, and he took to this talent very liberally. Now in mature mode, he does that only playfully, and I imagine he's great fun to have around on a regular basis, very companionable.
Jilly Bean!
(That's our nickname for her!)
(Chewy doesn't require anything more.)
There were a few more dogs, including Fiona (a running mate of Chewy's) and a neighbor's dog who spends more time there than at home.
But for a time, I was in doggy heaven. Now with more goats!
Thursday, September 12, 2013
#601. Road Tripping
(Before we begin, I should acknowledge that the road trip couldn't have happened without a very long prelude. Things happened, items were consolidated, other journeys came to an end, and I ate some cake that was technically meant for someone else's going away party but pretended it was meant for me.)
Then we came to the beginning.
Day 1 (8/30/13, a Friday)
This was the day I left Colorado Springs behind. I originally arrived there on 10/31/07, arriving on Jet Boo, I mean Jet Blue (Boo is the name of the Best Cat in the World, but the airline had jokingly renamed itself for Halloween that year, or perhaps every year?). This time it was a departure in a car, my sister's Etta, I mean Jetta (the "j" fell off at some point), following her husband's convoy of truck-pulling-5th-wheel-pulling-small-trailer.
It did not take long, surprisingly, to leave the Rocky Mountains behind. I used to call them the Ladies (a twist on one of the early Dave Barry touches in the Starcatchers books). Some days I thought I appreciated them enough, others I took them for granted. They were a fantastic backdrop.
We reached Kansas soon enough (we left somewhere around 10:30, and were there by the afternoon). For years I heard incredulous tales of Flat Kansas. I wrote a whole poem about Flat Kansas in the early days of this blog because of this. But the truth is, it's not so flat. More like Wavy Kansas. But it's really not much more boring than anything else we saw on the trip. It may be that we managed to see all the most generic gigantic open...tracks of land in America (but I don't want that!). I don't know.
We saw plenty of oil derricks (but very few Oil Derek Lowes, much less Oil Can Boyds) on this stretch. Saw a few dust devils, the last of them the most spectacular. I saw buffalo. And cows! Lots of cows! (And signs repeatedly advertising the freakish five-legged steer of someone's dubious livestock collection!)
(By the way, Dubious Livestock would make a great name for a rock band.)
And corn. And windmills! I explained to my sister the nerdy significance windmills have for me. To her, they're boring, especially as they become more ubiquitous in this particular region. They occupy whole windmill fields. They're like a mechanical plague! Beware the windmill apocalypse!
She also said how impressive they are when you see them in pieces. Not because my sister revels in blowing them up. It's because you don't appreciate how big they are until you see their component parts up-close. And it's true. One blade looks like a whale's fin. Ahoy! Avast! There be blubber in Kansas!
Day 2 (8/31/13, a Saturday)
We arrived at our first destination, the home of my sister's in-laws, her husband's folks. This was in Stoutland, in Camden County (Earl was nowhere to be found, alas), just outside Lebanon, Kansas.
Before this, however, we drove through one of the few signs of active civilization on the drive, Lawrence, KS, home of Kansas University. We were too early for a lot of college babes, alas.
We started counting FedEx double trailers (the highest count came Day 7, I believe, some 90 of them). You can go crazy on a road trip.
We passed the Lake of the Ozarks.
And we arrived in Stoutland. Here I was introduced to the goats George and Ginger, and for expediency's sake (and not much exaggeration) we'll say that this was my primary amusement for Days 3 and 4, which were all spent there.
Goats are awesome!
Day 5 (9/3/13, a Tuesday)
We passed the Mark Twain National Forest. I had no idea he was so closely associated with dry land. (And dry enough that at least in my late home territory of Colorado Springs the summer was once again festooned with news of raging fires in just such a setting, but with far fewer iconic writers associated with it, apart from myself.)
We also passed the Mississippi River, which for some reason is not known as the Mark Twain River.
We reached Tennessee! We saw lots of corn!
We passed signs denoting many historical attractions (either in TN or elsewhere, including landmarks for dead presidents like Eisenhower and Truman, because apparently the years following WWII were a good time to have been born in this part of the country and having the hope to attain the highest seat of office). Anyway, there was also Shiloh, famous for the site of a famous battle in the Civil War. There was the Tennessee River. And Nashville. (Now with more glow-in-the-dark pyramid action!)
Day 6 (9/4/13, a Wednesday)
We reached another Lebanon. But still not the actual Lebanon. (Although it's always funny to see places named after more famous destinations that are clearly not in that geographic location. Think Pluto [Not a Planet Anymore], but located somewhere that has banjo music.)
Anyway, we reached Virginia, our target state! The Appalachian Mountains! Tobacco fields! Apparently, the Misty Mountain (nowhere near Middle Earth). We visited a Wilco (not the band), which featured Stuckey's (but not Stuckeybowl, much less featuring a practicing lawyer named Ed [but not the talking horse]). (The day before we stopped at a Casey's and enjoyed a much-ballyhooed fried steak sandwich, which was good, especially with my trademark toppings of banana peppers and honey mustard dressing.)
Day 7 (9/5/13, a Thursday)
We passed through Crozet, Virginia, one of several area locations famous in the Rita Mae Brown cat mystery books. This pleased my sister's mother-in-law to no end.
Everyone obsessed over the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
And we arrived in Williamsburg, our initial destination in VA. Williamsburg is part of the Historic Triangle tourist trap in the area, which also boasts Jamestown and Yorktown (and now Bootown). You should know plenty about Jamestown (John Smith, Pocahontas, Colin Farrell). Yorktown is the site of the end of the American Revolution (besides the tailgate in Hamilton's backyard). Williamsburg is...really old.
Day 8 (9/6/13, a Friday)
We reached our temporary permanent destination in the Anvil campground. I would have made more references to Jim Neidhart, Bret Hart's tag team partner in the Hart Foundation, but sometimes a joke only you get isn't really worth it. But I kept thinking it the whole time we were there anyway.
Day 9 (9/7/13, a Saturday)
I took my first independent excursion of the trip, to a used bookstore, where I found Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy and a Jerome Charyn mystery featuring Isaac Sidel (the latter of which is nearly impossible to do in an actual bookstore). I was sorely tempted to buy both of them, but I'm just coming off a period where I eliminated a considerable percentage of my things, including many books. It's hard to jump into buying more. But I really wanted to. Ackroyd is a favorite. He's the measuring stick I hold to judge every bookstore. If he's in it, it's a good bookstore. Charyn, he's another favorite, and he's even more scarce. And as I've suggested, the Isaac Sidel books are especially scarce. And I have yet to read any of them. I really should have gotten them both. (And readers of this blog with some memory know how I also obsess over Troy. Seems like the whole of 2011 was devoted to it.)
Day 10 (9/8/13, a Sunday)
My birthday. We hit spots in Jamestown and Yorktown, but avoided being too touristy.
Day 11 (9/9/13, a Monday)
Reached actual final destination at Langley FamCamp. (The whole point of the road trip was to relocate my sister from the Air Force Academy to Langley AFB; I piggybacked for a relocation of my own.) I took my second independent excursion of the trip, running across a graveyard and memorial to the Battle of Big Bethel, which was apparently the first fight of the Civil War. And I dangled my feet at the end of a small dock.
Day 12 (9/10/13, a Tuesday)
This was the end for me. Two fairly brief plane rides finally landed me in Maine, which is where I am and will be for the foreseeable future. Yay!
And yesterday was 9/11. For the first half dozen years or so after it, I wrote a poem in commemoration. After I lost some of them to a computer crash, I guess I kind of fell out of the habit, or at least the original fervor. But here goes, for the day after:
When the World Came Tumbling In
we will never forget
a day like none other,
when the world came tumbling in
mad scrambling
and recriminations,
when the world came tumbling in
the heroes and the villains
and the flags waving,
when the world came tumbling in
it's hard to remember
except in images,
when the world came tumbling in
what do we say
except that it happened,
when the world came tumbling in?
Then we came to the beginning.
Day 1 (8/30/13, a Friday)
This was the day I left Colorado Springs behind. I originally arrived there on 10/31/07, arriving on Jet Boo, I mean Jet Blue (Boo is the name of the Best Cat in the World, but the airline had jokingly renamed itself for Halloween that year, or perhaps every year?). This time it was a departure in a car, my sister's Etta, I mean Jetta (the "j" fell off at some point), following her husband's convoy of truck-pulling-5th-wheel-pulling-small-trailer.
It did not take long, surprisingly, to leave the Rocky Mountains behind. I used to call them the Ladies (a twist on one of the early Dave Barry touches in the Starcatchers books). Some days I thought I appreciated them enough, others I took them for granted. They were a fantastic backdrop.
We reached Kansas soon enough (we left somewhere around 10:30, and were there by the afternoon). For years I heard incredulous tales of Flat Kansas. I wrote a whole poem about Flat Kansas in the early days of this blog because of this. But the truth is, it's not so flat. More like Wavy Kansas. But it's really not much more boring than anything else we saw on the trip. It may be that we managed to see all the most generic gigantic open...tracks of land in America (but I don't want that!). I don't know.
We saw plenty of oil derricks (but very few Oil Derek Lowes, much less Oil Can Boyds) on this stretch. Saw a few dust devils, the last of them the most spectacular. I saw buffalo. And cows! Lots of cows! (And signs repeatedly advertising the freakish five-legged steer of someone's dubious livestock collection!)
(By the way, Dubious Livestock would make a great name for a rock band.)
And corn. And windmills! I explained to my sister the nerdy significance windmills have for me. To her, they're boring, especially as they become more ubiquitous in this particular region. They occupy whole windmill fields. They're like a mechanical plague! Beware the windmill apocalypse!
She also said how impressive they are when you see them in pieces. Not because my sister revels in blowing them up. It's because you don't appreciate how big they are until you see their component parts up-close. And it's true. One blade looks like a whale's fin. Ahoy! Avast! There be blubber in Kansas!
Day 2 (8/31/13, a Saturday)
We arrived at our first destination, the home of my sister's in-laws, her husband's folks. This was in Stoutland, in Camden County (Earl was nowhere to be found, alas), just outside Lebanon, Kansas.
Before this, however, we drove through one of the few signs of active civilization on the drive, Lawrence, KS, home of Kansas University. We were too early for a lot of college babes, alas.
We started counting FedEx double trailers (the highest count came Day 7, I believe, some 90 of them). You can go crazy on a road trip.
We passed the Lake of the Ozarks.
And we arrived in Stoutland. Here I was introduced to the goats George and Ginger, and for expediency's sake (and not much exaggeration) we'll say that this was my primary amusement for Days 3 and 4, which were all spent there.
Goats are awesome!
Day 5 (9/3/13, a Tuesday)
We passed the Mark Twain National Forest. I had no idea he was so closely associated with dry land. (And dry enough that at least in my late home territory of Colorado Springs the summer was once again festooned with news of raging fires in just such a setting, but with far fewer iconic writers associated with it, apart from myself.)
We also passed the Mississippi River, which for some reason is not known as the Mark Twain River.
We reached Tennessee! We saw lots of corn!
We passed signs denoting many historical attractions (either in TN or elsewhere, including landmarks for dead presidents like Eisenhower and Truman, because apparently the years following WWII were a good time to have been born in this part of the country and having the hope to attain the highest seat of office). Anyway, there was also Shiloh, famous for the site of a famous battle in the Civil War. There was the Tennessee River. And Nashville. (Now with more glow-in-the-dark pyramid action!)
Day 6 (9/4/13, a Wednesday)
We reached another Lebanon. But still not the actual Lebanon. (Although it's always funny to see places named after more famous destinations that are clearly not in that geographic location. Think Pluto [Not a Planet Anymore], but located somewhere that has banjo music.)
Anyway, we reached Virginia, our target state! The Appalachian Mountains! Tobacco fields! Apparently, the Misty Mountain (nowhere near Middle Earth). We visited a Wilco (not the band), which featured Stuckey's (but not Stuckeybowl, much less featuring a practicing lawyer named Ed [but not the talking horse]). (The day before we stopped at a Casey's and enjoyed a much-ballyhooed fried steak sandwich, which was good, especially with my trademark toppings of banana peppers and honey mustard dressing.)
Day 7 (9/5/13, a Thursday)
We passed through Crozet, Virginia, one of several area locations famous in the Rita Mae Brown cat mystery books. This pleased my sister's mother-in-law to no end.
Everyone obsessed over the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
And we arrived in Williamsburg, our initial destination in VA. Williamsburg is part of the Historic Triangle tourist trap in the area, which also boasts Jamestown and Yorktown (and now Bootown). You should know plenty about Jamestown (John Smith, Pocahontas, Colin Farrell). Yorktown is the site of the end of the American Revolution (besides the tailgate in Hamilton's backyard). Williamsburg is...really old.
Day 8 (9/6/13, a Friday)
We reached our temporary permanent destination in the Anvil campground. I would have made more references to Jim Neidhart, Bret Hart's tag team partner in the Hart Foundation, but sometimes a joke only you get isn't really worth it. But I kept thinking it the whole time we were there anyway.
Day 9 (9/7/13, a Saturday)
I took my first independent excursion of the trip, to a used bookstore, where I found Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy and a Jerome Charyn mystery featuring Isaac Sidel (the latter of which is nearly impossible to do in an actual bookstore). I was sorely tempted to buy both of them, but I'm just coming off a period where I eliminated a considerable percentage of my things, including many books. It's hard to jump into buying more. But I really wanted to. Ackroyd is a favorite. He's the measuring stick I hold to judge every bookstore. If he's in it, it's a good bookstore. Charyn, he's another favorite, and he's even more scarce. And as I've suggested, the Isaac Sidel books are especially scarce. And I have yet to read any of them. I really should have gotten them both. (And readers of this blog with some memory know how I also obsess over Troy. Seems like the whole of 2011 was devoted to it.)
Day 10 (9/8/13, a Sunday)
My birthday. We hit spots in Jamestown and Yorktown, but avoided being too touristy.
Day 11 (9/9/13, a Monday)
Reached actual final destination at Langley FamCamp. (The whole point of the road trip was to relocate my sister from the Air Force Academy to Langley AFB; I piggybacked for a relocation of my own.) I took my second independent excursion of the trip, running across a graveyard and memorial to the Battle of Big Bethel, which was apparently the first fight of the Civil War. And I dangled my feet at the end of a small dock.
Day 12 (9/10/13, a Tuesday)
This was the end for me. Two fairly brief plane rides finally landed me in Maine, which is where I am and will be for the foreseeable future. Yay!
And yesterday was 9/11. For the first half dozen years or so after it, I wrote a poem in commemoration. After I lost some of them to a computer crash, I guess I kind of fell out of the habit, or at least the original fervor. But here goes, for the day after:
When the World Came Tumbling In
we will never forget
a day like none other,
when the world came tumbling in
mad scrambling
and recriminations,
when the world came tumbling in
the heroes and the villains
and the flags waving,
when the world came tumbling in
it's hard to remember
except in images,
when the world came tumbling in
what do we say
except that it happened,
when the world came tumbling in?
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