How to put together a plan of action when you can't get out of your chair

Vicodin and Percocet make me itch, so I asked surgeon Mark for something else. He prescribed Norco, but the druggist objected that Norco is the same thing as Vicodin only stronger. I next got a prescription for Demerol.

Because I’m a practical man and because I had a bottle of Percocet left over from the second of my three surgeries last year, I decided that, if I could survive the itching, I’d finish off the Percocet before I started on the Demerol. To accomplish this noble ambition, I take a Benadryl every time I take a Percocet, and this has gotten me by passably well. My scalp about drives me crazy, but at least I’ve avoided the total body itching. I was curious about the Demerol though, so I took some at church last week. I thought I was handling it tolerably well until I came home and nearly fainted on the pot. I still don’t know what that was about.

Yesterday, I needed a nap, but I was hurting too bad to sleep, so I took some more Demerol before I sat in my recliner (the pain is much worse now than it was last week, which means that it is way too intense to even think about sleeping in bed). Well, I didn’t go to sleep, and I didn’t go to sleep, and I didn’t go to sleep, so I eventually found it necessary to advise myself as follows: “Snowbrush, my handsome and charming young man, you’re obviously not going to sleep, so I would advise you to get up and make yourself useful.”

I immediately saw the wisdom in this excellent counsel, so I ordered my body to lean forward and stand in the same punctilious way it has always done, but it declined my command without so much as a, “Thank you, but no.” I kept resolving to get up, and my body kept ignoring me, and each time this happened, the prospect of getting up anytime in the foreseeable future appeared a little more fantastic until it seemed about as feasible as flying out the door and laying an egg on the roof.

I finally said to myself, “Well, I can go one of two ways. One way would be to freak-out. If I freak, I’ll probably start thrashing around (if I can even do that) until such time as I fall on my face and possibly rip my tendon in two. The second way would be to lower my ambition to that of simply enjoying my drug trip until such time as Conductor Demerol puts me off his train.” Being a child of the ‘60s and having seen from inside my head what a bad trip looks like, I naturally chose option number two. Only there wasn’t much to enjoy since the trip was neither especially bad nor especially good. It was just….well, it was what it was, which was basically sitting shit-faced in a chair for three hours.

I kept trying to at least think different thoughts (so as to not totally waste my time), but I found that I stayed stuck in the same groove. I can best compare the feeling to an intellectual “Ground Hog Day,” that being a movie about a day that repeats endlessly, only nobody realizes it except for one person. In this case, I was that person, but what good did it do me? I was stuck; stuck like glue; stuck like stink on a bloated corpse; stuck like fluff on a baby bunny.

I think there might be some wisdom in thinking of chronic pain as like a bad drug trip. If you throw all the energy in your emotional arsenal into defeating it, it will catch that energy and throw it right back at you twice as hard. This means that the only way to deal with the problem is to stay loose. So, with that in mind, let us pray,

May the Lord bless us and keep us. May the Lord shine his fatherly countenance upon us and keep us loose, now and forevermore. Amen.

Household Gods

I have often thought that I would like to have a home altar, but two things work against it. One is that I have never been able to clarify what its purpose would be. The other is that I am a decorative minimalist. Things, even things I treasure, weigh on me. If you are possessed of a collector mentality, you will not understand this. Peggy does not understand this because even Peggy—who could not tell you if Barack Obama is a Democrat or a Republican, and who holds religion in the same low esteem that she holds politics—has a shrine in her room. She didn’t build it to be a shrine but, for reasons unknown even to her, she calls it her “Rabbit Shrine.”

I too have a rabbit, three in fact. Two are stuffed ones from childhood Easter baskets, and one of those still bears the stitches sewn by my mother after my dog made a determined effort to disembowel it. The third is in the form of a thirty-five cent candle that I saw in a junk shop while on a long drive through the countryside.

My attraction was instant and intense. I felt as if I had known Miss Bunny all my life but, as I said, I am not a collector. Because I am not a collector, I did not buy her that day, and so I had to drive over a hundred miles to buy her the next day. I mentioned that the store was a junk store, but I failed to say that it was, by country standards, a large and extremely junky junk store, and I misremembered what part of the store Miss Bunny was in. Luckily, I arrived six hours before closing.

It was some time before I could even theorize about why I felt that I had always known Miss Bunny. The bunny in the Little Golden Book that I got for my fifth birthday in 1954 is obviously a very different bunny, but you will also note the similarities.

Eugene has many stores that sell gods and goddesses (“idols made by hands” as I once called them) for home altars, but I feel no special affinity for any of them. I sometimes wish I did, but I don’t. People once thought they represented real entities—and some still do—but they are not real to me. They are often interesting, and sometimes beautiful, but they are not real; they do not demand my obeisance from across ten blocks much less a hundred miles. Even though Miss Bunny spends most of her life in the hall closet, she is still my chief goddess because she puts me in touch with the innocence and gentleness that lives within me, and that I have often tried to bury beneath a manly floor of concrete.

Here is another of my deities.

I wrote the following on the day I bought her:

January 25, 1987
Eugene, Oregon

I saw the print at the 5th Street Market a couple of months ago and fell in love with it but didn't want to pay $55. It was still there yesterday, so I got it for $25! Yippee! It reminds me of Peggy when she’s asleep, and of a storybook character from my childhood, and of a part of myself that few are allowed to see—the part that is vulnerable and innocent. I see many art objects that I like, but few that I love enough to bring home and look at everyday for years. I am absolutely ecstatic.

I can scarcely believe that 22 years have passed since I bought my squirrel. If I survive another 22 years, I will be 82. Peggy asked this morning if I ever think about how near death I am, even at best. Yes, all the time. The old tell the young that they too will someday realize how fleeting life is, but the young never quite believe them. It is not just my death that I grieve but the fate of all those things—like my bunnies—that I cherish and that no one else would be likely to appreciate. Then again, I own a jar of sand. The caption reads:

SAND FROM THE
PACIFIC OCEAN
FRI. JULY 25, 1952

And this is what I wrote in my journal the day I bought it:

June 8, 1989
Richfield, Minnesota

We went to an estate sale where I found a molasses jar full of sand that someone had collected on a long ago vacation. I didn’t want it, but worried that no one else would either, and that it would end up in a landfill. I went back the last day of the sale hoping it wouldn’t be there, but it was, and I paid twelve cents for it. Someone had treasured it for decades, and I felt that I validated the good in them by preserving it.

Maybe someday I will have an altar. I will place upon it my storybook, my candle, my squirrel print, a vase of yellow daffodils, my molasses jar filled with sand, a picture of Peggy, and maybe one of me when I was a child. What else…I’ve always liked the painting of Jesus knocking at the door….

You see, it’s easier to start than to know when to stop. Even if I just limited myself to those symbols with which I resonate most powerfully, I could fill a room. But since I am a decorative minimalist, all those things would feel like a heavy weight on my chest, and I would eventually have to get rid of them. A prayer just entered my mind:

God save me.
“From what, my child?”
I don’t know.

God lead me.
“To where, my child?”
I have no idea.

God preserve me,
“Why, my child?”
Because despite my failures,
I am worthy.

Have you seen Blackbeard's gold hidden in this here cave?

If your idea of a good time is dropping a roll of toilet paper down the john and repeatedly trying to flush it, then you should just love narcotics because that’s what they do to the human excretory system. How can a person even want to get high on something that makes him constipated? It just ain’t dignified. Besides, pills are for sick people.

I thought I had stopped them yesterday (two days after surgery), but pain woke me up in the wee hours this morning, so I took first one Percocet and, when that didn’t work, another. I called the physician’s assistant today, and, to my great surprise, she said that most people take narcotics day and night for several weeks after shoulder surgery. She also said that patients tend to migrate from their beds to their recliners.

I was in such pain last fall that the only relief I could find was in a recliner that Peggy bought with her inheritance from her grandmother (and even then I could only stay halfway comfortable for a few minutes at a time). Now that I’m having to sleep with my lower arm sticking straight up into the air, maybe I will have to move back to Granny's recliner.

Peggy took a week off to stay with me, and I don’t know what I will do when she goes back to work—or when she leaves on her two trips in April. It’s not just the practical help; it’s having someone to keep me company now that there isn’t much I can do with myself. I can’t lift anything; I can’t take my arm out of my sling; I can’t even turn my palm up. If I break any of these rules, I risk pulling the stitches out, and that would leave me worse off than I was before the surgery. This is a state of affairs that will have to last for at least 42 days. The worst part is knowing that, no matter how careful I am, the stitches might come out anyway.

I’m enclosing some pictures of myself in my get-up. The black thing is my sling, and it comes with a thick pad that holds it several inches away from my body. The blue thing is a bladder that I have to fill with ice water several times a day. I wear the sling and the bladder all the time. The cooler is what the ice water stays in. I don’t always carry it in my hand as if I’m so stoned on narcotics that I think I’m in a cave holding a lantern.

You will note that I look like an axe murderer who is trying to pass himself off as a friendly sort of regular guy. That is because Peggy made me smile. If Peggy didn't make me smile, I would look quite handsome, but Peggy hates me and wants me to look ridiculous, so every time she takes my picture, she insists that I smile. I always say that I don’t want to smile, but she makes funny faces and silly noises until I do, and it is then that she takes my picture. People with cameras have been doing this shit to me for sixty years, and I hope they all fall down the shaft of the mine that I’m exploring with my lantern.

The hand-carved bowl on the wall was my Granny’s dough bowl that she received as a wedding gift on Sand Mountain in Alabama in 1896. It's made of the wood of the Tulip Tree. At a little under 200 feet, the Tulip Tree is the largest tree in the eastern U.S. and is the state tree of Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. It also grows where planted here in the Willamette Valley. I’ll enclose a photo of its leaves and flowers.

Title to come later

I took two Demerol tablets and went to church today, my arm in its sling and the sling under Walt’s extra large pile jacket. My midriff insisted upon exposing itself from time to time, but I could neither get my arm through a shirt nor keep my sweatpants high enough to stay covered. Fortunately—for me anyway—I am not a modest person.

We discussed prayer. “If God is all powerful, all knowing, and perfect in every virtue, is it conceivable that he would cure someone of cancer or bring an end to a war because he was prayed to, but would not do so otherwise?” I asked. Most seemed to think so, but either they didn’t understand the dilemma I posed, or they had no answer for it. In any event, it was not addressed. A few expressed faith in prayer as a means of healing, but I reflected (to myself) that, despite the prayers of millions, many a pope has died well ahead of those who lacked such an advantage.

I told the class that I think of prayer as an opening of my heart as well as a meditation upon, and a dedication to, my highest values, but it was a definition that appeared to fall short in the eyes of many if not all, and I despaired of offering anything more to the discussion. Sometimes, I go to church and contribute greatly; other times, many people—including myself—seem to think I would have done better had I stayed home.

The question of teaching children about prayer was also touched upon. For the first time in decades, I remembered being too young to take communion at church, so I would pray and serve myself Welch’s Grape Juice and Premium Saltines at home. When I was ten, my family moved into town, and I built a wooden altar under a wisteria arbor. I set our big old family Bible upon my altar, preached to the neighborhood kids, and served them communion. My mother fretted over what God would think, but a preacher told her that God wouldn't object. It was about this time that a Negro deacon who worked with my father said that the Lord had his hand upon me, and that I would become “a great man of God” someday. His name was Truly Westbrook, and I felt sorry for him because he had to put up with endless profanity from my father.

Maybe I expressed myself badly today. I meant no disrespect, yet I must confess that I am often at a loss to understand people’s religious beliefs. They often appear, to me, to echo Tertullian’s statement about the Christian faith:

“…it is wholly credible, because it is unsound…
…it is certain, because it is impossible.”

In short: Credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurd.