Where were they?

I know what $100 will buy when I am in dire straits, but I have no idea of the worth of my friends, and to have them betray me makes those straits even more dire. I would therefore offer that, although both are desirable, money is preferable to friendship.
Ah, but money doesn’t care about you. It can’t put its arms around you or bring you gifts.

No, but my friends might not do these things either. It is also true that most of the things we need don’t care about us. The food we eat, the air we breathe, our winter clothes, our snug homes; these things don’t even know we exist. I’m not saying that friendship is worthless; I’m just saying that it’s a mistake to rely upon it.

Agreed, you might not be able to rely upon them to be there for you exactly when you need them and exactly in the way you need them; but why not be appreciative for what they do give?

Just because my friends don’t give me everything I need doesn’t necessarily make what they do give meaningless, but look at it this way. If you fall into a pit and someone brings you flowers instead of a ladder, what have they accomplished? I’ll tell you: they’ve given themselves the gift of feeling good about themselves, and I think this is the real motive behind a lot of charity. Otherwise, people would not ignore the expressed needs of the supposed objects of their generosity.

After surgery on my right shoulder, Shirley, a supposedly good friend who is also a neighbor and who had gone walking with me almost every week for two decades, wouldn’t walk with me at all despite my request that she help by taking charge of one of one of the dogs (the blind one that walks on my right). She didn’t give a reason, but she was training to walk a half marathon, so I assumed that maybe her feet hurt, or maybe she didn’t feel the need for the short non-aerobic walks to which I was limited. She did, however, bring me a potted plant that I was unable to set out. Am I not grateful? Well, not very. My friend of 23 years chose to ignore my request for help without offering an explanation, but for reasons that I had to guess and that appeared trivial.

I think you misuse your friends when you expect them to do things that you could afford to pay someone to do.

Yes, I could pay someone to walk the dogs, and I could get my own exercise by walking alongside my employee, and I could get my social needs met by talking with my employee as we walked, but I want friendship to mean more than having someone to go to a movie with at everyone’s convenience. I want friendship to offer a survival advantage. I want to care for and protect my friends, and I want my friends to care for and protect me, and this experience has taught me that I can’t even depend upon people who have been my friends for a quarter of a century to do the very thing that they have often done with me for fun and exercise.

My friends have literally spent less time with me than usual. Maybe I reminded them too much of their own mortality, but in any event, they acted like I was contagious. For example, Peggy happened to be home today, so she went walking with the dogs and me, and we ran into Kurt near the library. He said he had to run because he and Jackie were going walking in the South Hills. This meant that they had to drive past my house, yet despite my request that they go walking with me, they didn’t invite me. Why? People who I hardly knew have done more for me more than people I trusted.

I also want my friendships to have depth. If my “friends” don’t care enough to help me in even minor ways, how am I to respond when they ask how I’m doing? Am I to open my heart, or am I to assume that they are just making conversation? I worked hard before my surgery so that everything I could do for myself in advance, I did do for myself in advance. It is simply not in me to ask people to do for me that which I would not do for them.

Maybe you chose your friends unwisely, or maybe they didn’t consider your surgery to be that serious.

I think I did choose unwisely, but how could I have known? They said they loved me. They stayed in my life for years. I didn’t see them betraying other people. Well, come to think of it, I did sometimes see one of them betray other people, but since he was also capable of being unusually generous, I overlooked these betrayals, not completely but somewhat.

As for not considering my surgery serious, it wasn’t serious in terms of life and death, but it was serious in terms of disability and emotional trauma, and I tried to make that clear. There comes a point when I no longer see the point in talking to people. For example, when Shirley asks me now how I am (which she only does as part of a larger conversation), I see no point in telling her. My feelings are deep and personal, and not to be shared alongside news about the weather with someone who I don’t think really cares. I had three surgeries last year, and will have at least two this year, so maybe some people have come to take bad health as a given in my life, and therefore of little note. This means that they might not have taken my surgery seriously, but that’s one hell of a disconnect, and I don’t know what to do about it.

My challenge is to somehow avoid becoming that which I hate, namely a self-absorbed person who keeps his distance—who is incapable of being more than a friendly acquaintance. One of the most charming and seemingly loving people I ever knew was also a person who equated being needed with being trapped, and who often ended friendships overnight and without explanation. She was like an elaborate movie set that looked like a mansion on the outside but was empty inside, and I don’t want to be like that. Yet, how could I find it in my heart to respond lovingly if one of these people who failed me should now become ill or injured?

I know that I sometimes fail people. For example, I receive gifts slightly more than I give them, and I remember other people’s birthdays somewhat less than they remember mine. The truth is that I don’t much value gifts. I personally don’t want anything, and I don’t usually have a clue what someone else might want. But I do try to be there when people are in distress. To me, that’s the core of friendship, and things like remembering birthdays are an option. Maybe other people feel differently, and think I’m a piss poor friend for not remembering their birthdays. Instead of, “Do unto others as your would have them do unto you,” a better proverb might be, “Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”

I am trying to keep an open heart here, but the fact is that 43 days after surgery, I’m in more pain than ever, and I’m worried about my future. It’s not a good time for me to show love. Today, I can barely be civil.

"The many men so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things lived on; and so did I."

When the pain started, I couldn’t sleep on my right side. After awhile, I couldn’t sleep on my left side either. Then, I couldn’t sleep on my back. Sleeping on my stomach was out because I use a sleep apnea mask, so I moved to a recliner. My shoulders hurt too much even there to sleep unless I put pillows under my elbows, and that didn’t help a lot. Three and half years have passed during which the pain has been better at times and worse at times, but mostly worse.

I saw the doctor Tuesday—39 days after surgery on my right shoulder—and he said the pain I’m having could be caused by a couple of things, either of which will require a second surgery on my right shoulder before I have surgery on my left shoulder. He ordered an MRI, which I had yesterday. People get MRIs and CT scans mixed up, but the difference is that the first kind of image is made with magnets and the second with radiation. For an MRI, you lie on a little trolley and are rolled into a long, narrow, and extremely noisy tube. I can best liken the noise to a whole lot of people rhythmically banging pieces of scrap iron together in a junkyard.

Yesterday, I knew that it would hurt a lot to lie on my back for a half hour with my shoulder in something resembling a vice, so I took two Norcos (the narcotic equivalent of three Vicodin). When the technician first positioned me, I couldn’t even begin the handle the pain, so he spent several minutes cushioning my shoulder. Peggy had helped me change clothes for the procedure, and the tech gave her a magazine and told her she could sit in the MRI room with me.

I knew that if I moved, I would have to stay in the machine even longer, and that if I moved too much, I would have to come back again, yet I despaired of holding out. I tried to count each four-minute series so I would have an idea how many more I had to endure, but I lost count. Then, I tried to relive memories of happy events in my life because I had heard that some prisoners of war survive torture that way, but I couldn’t come up with many memories or hold onto the few I did. I even tried counting the seconds, both as a way to distract myself from the pain and to know how much longer each series would last. One-one thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand and so on. But I had no idea how closely my counting coincided with the passage of time. I suspected that I was way slow.

The technician could talk to me over a microphone, and he started telling me that I needed to lie still. I thought I was lying still, but I tried even harder. My arm stopped obeying me any too well, and I was afraid I would lose control of it completely. Meanwhile, the roof of the tube hovered three inches above my face, and the metallic pounding of the machine blocked out the classical music in my headphones. I didn’t scream, cry, vomit, faint, or thrash about; so to Peggy, who was unable to see anything but my feet sticking out of the tube, I must have looked okay.

I thought of the months of torture that people were subjected to at Guantanamo Bay Prison, and I wondered what kind of lame-ass torturers needed months, rather than minutes, to break a man.

I remembered being told in church when I was a kid that hell was infinitely painful and lasted forever, but that the loved ones of people who were in hell were still able to experience unlimited happiness in heaven even though they knew what was going on down below.

I didn’t think I could bear it if the pain got worse, but I also knew that I could tell the technician to stop. This made me wonder about people who are in even worse pain, and for a much longer time, but can’t stop it. I’ve heard that they pass out, but what happens when they wake up and the pain is still there?

Years ago, I saw a documentary about Devil’s Island, the place where the French used to send criminals. In that documentary, a man was on his back, being manacled to a wooden bench for the night. He was in obvious pain, sobbing and pleading with the guard, for what I didn’t know; maybe to make the manacles looser. He was a little man, and he looked so pathetic that the image has stayed with me for years, although he was only on the screen for seconds. I think of him a lot when I’m hurting, because he had no drugs, and his guards had no mercy.

Another thing that went through my mind yesterday was that I couldn’t imagine anyone not killing themselves if such pain was all that lay ahead of them. I should think that even people who believe that God sends you to hell if you kill yourself would still kill themselves and take their chances. I should think they would even beg for a gun.

Later, I tried to tell Peggy how bad it had been, but words failed me, and I worried that she would think I was a wimp. Pain is a very private world. Sometimes, I feel like I’m no longer in this world (at least this world as I’ve known it), but have stepped into some other world.

For as long as I live, I will never forget the pain of my MRIs last year, and yesterday was even worse. I know it was worse because, last year, the technician complimented me on lying still. This year, the technician became annoyed. He didn’t say he was annoyed—he even acted like he was sympathetic—but I think he was annoyed.

Sometimes, I write about how bad things are for me, but what I don’t write about is how much I respect myself for how well I am handling it. Part of what keeps me going is that I have settled my mind on the idea that I am facing a year of pain and disability, but that, if I can hold out, I should be in good shape this time next year. If I’m not, I’ll deal with it then. For now, I need to believe that things will get better.

Some of the people who read my blog have cancers that will probably kill them. Another woman, Cali, has a disease that’s six words long, but which means that the nerves all over her body are screwed up, and that she is in permanent pain, and might get worse. Others are in pain from bad backs, rheumatoid arthritis, and so forth. These people hold me in their hearts with compassion. Maybe it’s true of people who suffer a lot that they are more loving toward those who are suffering less, than are people who haven’t known much suffering. Sometimes, such people tell me that I speak for them when I write about pain, not because I hurt as much, but because I describe it better. Still, I doubt that many of us feel understood by those who are closet to us. It’s like war in that you have to go there to have a clue.

I tend to think in terms of how bad things would have to be before I killed myself. I have already endured a lot, and this makes me think that I’m a lot stronger than I gave myself credit for. I have been depressed for much of my life, but for the most part now, I am not particularly depressed. I think this is because I regard my condition as so frightening that I don’t have the luxury of indulging myself in too much negativity. I get negative, of course, but I bounce back faster than I did when I was emotionally depressed but physically healthy.

I’m sure there are those who think what I might have once thought, that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, my main complaint is shoulder pain, and how bad could that be? Everyone has had sore shoulders, so when they try to imagine how I feel, they probably picture it as simply a bad case of sore shoulders. Peggy sometimes expresses the wish that she might feel my pain for a short time in order to know what it is like. I wish she could too, because even a few minutes of it would give her some idea.

Something else that comforts me is my knowledge that, throughout the millennia, most people who have suffered as I suffer had no hope for anything but more pain. And what of those who, despite the pain, had to work hard physically to survive? I have no idea how they could bear it, but knowing even a little of what their lives were like makes me better able to face my life, that and the fact that I have a doctor whom I like and trust.

Mark is big. Maybe in his upper thirties. A serious bodybuilder. Strong but gentle. He takes his time with me. He listens. I went through three other doctors to find him, and I would not be coping nearly so well without him—or his assistant, Laura, who is so prompt to call back when I need something.

What I would really like would be to compartmentalize my suffering so that I could still have a more or less normal life, but I’ve found this to be exceedingly difficult because I can’t do so most of the things I would normally do. It’s like my life is on hold, and getting beyond that is a struggle against which I’m not making much progress.

Rainbows everywhere

I just got caught up on answering responses from past entries, so if you wrote to me and didn't hear back, or didn't find a response when you checked back, you will probably find one now. A lot of you put a great deal of thought and love into writing to me, and it is very much in my heart to reciprocate.

Please know that I appreciate you. Especially now that things are so challenging for me physically, you are my guiding rainbow. I have always found purpose through the work that I could do with my body, and now I can't even dust furniture. You have no idea--well, a lot of you probably do--how hard that is, or how much your support means to me.

I judge my life - Part 2 - Go down Moses

My 17-day career in the Air Force being over (see April 20), Peggy and I returned to Mississippi where I got a job as a fifth grade teacher in Brookhaven, my hometown. The year was 1973, and Fannie Mullins had been a segregated black school until a few years earlier, so it was in Little Egypt a part of town that few white people had previously visited. The neighborhood was poor, and the streets were narrow and lacked curbs or sidewalks.

The principal (Dow) and three of the other teachers (Tillman, Brown, and Goodwin) were black men, making me the only white male. They greeted me coolly, but without hostility. Goodwin even invited me to go fishing one afternoon. I didn’t fish, but then I didn’t figure that the invitation was really about fishing anyway. I figured it was really about seeing whether I was openly bigoted. When I passed the test, no other invitations were offered. The truth was that the other men at Fannie Mullins didn’t want to socialize with me anymore than I wanted to socialize with them. We simply didn’t have much in common.

People from outside the South tend to see everything that happens there in terms of race, but things aren’t that simple because, in the modern South, cultural differences are probably more important than racial ones. Let me give you an example that might sound familiar. Compare an ordinary black church to an ordinary white church of the same denomination. The dress, the music, and the preaching style are quite different, but are these racial differences, cultural differences or a combination? How would you even know?

I’ve been to scores of teachers’ meetings during which the white teachers sat together on one side of the auditorium, and the black teachers on the other. Sometimes, a teacher might cross over, and I was never aware that anyone had a problem with it; but the fact is that the white teachers weren’t excluding the black teachers (or vice versa), but that everyone was exercising his freedom to sit where he pleased. Maybe this is hard for white people from other places to accept because they know very few black people, and the black people they do know fit into the dominant white culture. But Mississippi is roughly half black (more in places), and this enables two distinct cultures to exist side by side.

The other men at Fannie Mullins wore ties and sometimes sports coats if not full suits; I didn’t. One day, Mr. Dow ordered me to at least wear a tie, so I starting wearing a clip-on to work, only to take it off as soon as I got to my room, and not put it on again until I took my class to lunch. He gave me grief about this from time to time, but I hated ties; I didn’t see the sense in them; and I sure as hell wasn’t go to wear one in a Mississippi school that didn’t have air conditioning.

The third year I taught, a new roof was put on the flat school building, and the tar for the project was melted right outside my window over a period of weeks. This created such a smoky stench that I had to keep the windows shut, and between the smoke and the 100 degree plus temperatures, conditions were almost unbearable. No one learned in my classroom; they simply survived. When I complained, Mr. Dow said that he had ordered the cooker to be placed outside my room because I was a man, implying, I suppose, that this made me better qualified to suffer. I didn’t think it prudent to mention that there were other men he could have chosen, but we got into a bit of a row anyway. One thing led to another, and he ended up giving me hell about the tie issue. “Why can’t you just follow my orders like the other men?” he asked. I said it was because I wasn’t afraid of him like the other men (Dow was big and gruff). The other men had hardly confided in me, so I couldn’t be sure that this was true, but I was pleased to see that it very nearly made him apoplectic.

I finished my third year as a teacher in 1976. I had wanted to grow a beard for months, but put it off until summer. I was actually naïve enough to think my beard wouldn’t be a problem when school started back in late August. My reasoning was that three of the four remaining men (Goodwin had died) had moustaches, and so I wasn’t introducing facial hair, I was simply extending its range. I went to the school a few days before classes started to get my room set-up, and in less than five minutes Mr. Dow was on the intercom ordering me to his office. I knew from experience that this boded no good.

“Snow,” he said (of course he really used my other name), “I see that you grew a beard over the summer, and I want you to know that it looks mighty fine, but I’m assuming you’ll be shaving it off before school starts.”

“No, sir, I hadn’t planned to.”

“Well, I just don’t know if Mr. Trammel [the area superintendent] will let you teach looking like that.”

“Well, sir, I don’t intend to shave.”

I went back to my room and waited to see what would happen next. A few minutes later, he summoned me back to his office, and said that Mr. Brumfield wanted me to call his secretary and make an appointment to see him. Mr. Brumfield was the assistant superintendent. Both he and Mr. Trammel had been working their way up the career ladder when I was a kid, and this meant that they both had occasion to spank me from time to time for fighting.

Mr. Brumfield had no better luck getting me to shave than had Mr. Dow, so he passed me along to Mr. Trammel who found me equally recalcitrant. As my superiors saw it, their main weapon was to threaten my advancement into an administrative position. Little did they know—and scarcely could they believe—that I didn’t want to advance. They then threatened to take away my students and leave me in an empty classroom all year. The image of being paid to sit around and read sounded as appealing as it did unlikely, so I offered no protest about that either. Finally, they said that I was a disappointment to them, an embarrassment to the Brookhaven Municipal Separate School District, and intimated that I might be fired. This option was also appealing because I had by now talked to someone from the ACLU, and was pretty sure I would win if we went to court.

Why did they object to your beard?

Most white Southerners in 1976 associated beards with dope-smoking hippies (which wasn’t far off the mark in my case). I assumed that black people felt the same way, so I was surprised to learn that they associated beards, not with peaceful hippies, but with violent militants. Even so, no one in the administration ever admitted that he personally had an issue with my beard; they were simply concerned about what the community at large would think.

School started without anything more being done. I waited. Weeks passed. I finally realized that nothing was going to be done. My superiors would probably hate me and maybe even look for an excuse to get rid of me, but they had no doubt seen their lawyer and decided that it wouldn’t be cost effective to go to war over a beard.

Meanwhile, I struggled within myself over whether to shave in order to placate them. The consensus among people who I talked to was that the job was more important than the beard. Yet, I knew that if I shaved, I would become so resentful that I would probably quit the job anyway. I turned to nature, marijuana and Thoreau—all at the same time. Everyday after work, I would retreat to the woods with a joint and my compendium of Thoreau.

I saw a lot of Mr. Dow that year because he was forever on the intercom, summoning me to his office to give me hell about one thing or another. He even said that parents complained more about me than they did about all his other teachers combined. I doubted this because I had never been told of a single complaint in previous years and only one specific complaint after I grew my beard (someone objected to the relaxation exercises that I gave the kids on the grounds that they were un-Christian). Indeed, I had always been popular with students and parents so far as I was aware.

The year passed and contract renewal time came around again. I didn’t sign on for another year for various reasons. The hostility of my superiors was one of them, but just as important was a reason that makes no sense to most people. Contracts make me claustrophobic. Even though I had every intention of seeing the job through, the knowledge that I had to sign a paper promising to be in a certain place at a certain time on a certain day months and months in advance gave me the willies. Now that things were especially tense at work, the prospect of signing a contract weighed on me even more heavily.

Were you a good teacher?

Not especially. I liked the kids, and the kids liked me because I was creative in my teaching and my assignments, and because I made them laugh. The problem was that I didn’t take my responsibility seriously. I taught 150 kids a day, 30 at a time for 50 minutes at a time, and although I wanted to help the underachievers realize their potential—no one had helped me, and I failed three grades—I felt powerless to make a difference. And, as with every other job I ever had, I hated taking orders; I felt underpaid; and I thought I deserved a job better suited to my genius. Unfortunately, I never figured out exactly what job was better suited to my genius or even where my genius lay. I just knew that I had a sense of destiny, a feeling that I was meant for greatness, but I lacked any sense that I had to work for it. I believed that if I waited long enough, the universe would drop success into my lap.

Another major problem that I had was shyness. I simply couldn’t pull off speaking to groups of adults, and I was even afraid to speak to my students’ parents at open house nights or during conferences. I cannot overstate the severity of this problem. I can but report that I overcame it around my fiftieth year. If I had been able to overcome it decades sooner, it would have opened doors that were completely closed to me. For example, I might have gotten an advanced degree and become a professor.

If you were so shy, how were you able to stand up to people who opposed you?

I was also principled and stubborn. If I thought someone—or some group—was trying to run over me, I could find the strength to resist simply because I feared being unable to live with myself if I knuckled under. I remember but one occasion when I let someone intimidate me, and I tortured myself over it for many years.

I saw this same resistance in my father who was even shyer than I. His voice would break simply from trying to order food in a restaurant, but if he was mad enough, he could fill a football stadium with profanity. His problem was that his anger was consistently misplaced and misused. I have made a valiant effort to correct that in my own life, and as a result, I seldom lose my temper.

I was too immature to be a good teacher. Yet, if I were teaching today and the beard issue came up, I would struggle with it now just as I struggled with it then. Would I give in to the silly rules of silly men who valued conformity and public relations over freedom and education, or would I deprive my students of a good teacher—and I think I have it in me to be a good teacher? My choice is not immediately obvious. Here is what Thoreau wrote about his experience. At the time I taught, it mirrored my own.

“I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.”

The sorry-ass truth

I’m not feigning modesty when I say I’m a fake. That last piece; I didn’t feel that way when I posted it. I felt that way last week, but I only catch rare glimpses at rare moments of wisdom. Mostly, my life of late is pain, ennui, and resentment. Do you want to know what the two biggest things on my mind are right now—aside from my health issues? Number one, I’m wondering how the hell I’m going to keep up with all the bloggers who are following my blog now that there are so many of them. In the past, I followed the blog of every person who followed mine, but I can’t continue doing that. Yet, there is a big part of me that would like even more followers because more followers means more validation.

Number two, I don’t feel that there’s anyone I can really count upon. When I had my surgery, I figured, okay, I’ll be in a sling for six weeks, and unable to use my arm for at least another month. Peggy will be gone eleven days during that time, and she will be at work three days out of seven when she’s home. I therefore need to freeze lots of food, get the house and yard in really good shape, and do everything else that might need doing in the next three months. Due to my providence, I was left with very few things that I needed. Namely, cleaning the house, mowing the yard, and help walking the dogs. I assumed I could count on Peggy for the house and yard, but I figured I would need help with the dogs during the ten days she would be gone and the three days per week that she works. Who would help me? My friends, my Odd Fellow lodge, my Masonic lodge?

Here’s how it has played out. Only four Odd Fellows offered to help, and they are too old and feeble to walk the dogs with me. I’ve heard from two Masons, only one of whom asked what he could do. “You can help me walk the dogs. One of them is blind; I can’t use the shoulder that was operated on at all; my other shoulder hurts so much that I have to walk with my hand in my pocket; I’m afraid they will get tangled up and trip me; plus it would be hard for me to hold them while I pick up poop. I need you to hold one of them and to help with the poop.” “Well,” he said, “maybe the dogs will just have to hangout by the fire until you’re well again.”

So much for the Odd Fellows. So much for the Masons. Luckily, I have other friends.

For instance, my best friend of 22 years, Walt. Haven’t seen him. Not at all. I’ve called numerous times, but, alas, it was never at a convenient time, and he has stopped calling back.

My next best friend of 23 years, Shirley, who lives just around the block. I stopped calling her after the fifth time in a row that she turned me down. When I gave her a birthday gift yesterday, she was all smiles and hugs, but what they meant to her, I cannot say.

My third best friend of 14 years, Jackie. She came over twice, but now she’s busy knitting a sweater on her days off and can’t come at all.

After an appreciable outpouring of support during the week after surgery, I was apparently expected to be back to normal after two weeks at the latest.

So who has helped?

My neighbor, Ellie, and a couple who I hardly knew, Doug and Leslie. Ellie has called, walked the dogs with me, and has twice sent her son to mow the grass when Peggy didn’t have time. Doug and Leslie have literally come every time I called them, made arrangements to help days in advance, and even called to offer their help when they didn’t hear from me. They have brought me gifts, cooked me meals, taken me places, and walked the dogs more times than I can count. Two other new friends have helped some too.

I have heard it said that you don’t know who your friends are until you need them. Yet, I would not be at all surprised but what those people who have utterly failed me are oblivious to how I feel. I’m sure that, in their minds, I had an endless list of friends to call upon, so it really didn’t matter if they turned me down repeatedly. It was as if they said, “I’m really here for you, but just be sure that you only ask me to do those things that I really want to do anyway at the very time that I really want to do them.”

Or maybe they were like the Mason who offered to help but then decided that the kind of help I said Ineeded wasn’t really necessary. Yet, I had thought that walking the dogs with me was a very small thing to ask in terms of actual work (more a social event than a chore), yet a very great thing in terms of what I needed. I had done everything else in advance so as to avoid needless imposition.

My dilemma now is how to treat these people in the future when I no longer need them and, presumably, they will once again find my company desirable. In all honesty, I don’t want to see them, because it seems to me that I mistook spray painted plastic for 24-carat gold. How could I have been so stupid?

Peggy just left for her button convention in Portland. Because she’s a procrastinator, she spent most of the time since her return from Mississippi preparing button trays for a competition that she had known about for the last year. The only real time we've had together was a three hour walk in the woods the day after her return on April 12. Today, she promised to walk the dogs with me before she left, but she later decided she didn’t have time. She also promised to do some dusting, but she ran out of time for that also. I can’t do housework effectively with one hand, but I’m through living as if I were an animal who has no choice but to go hungry until someone decides to fill his bowl.

It is now 1:00 a.m. After I wrote the above, I took the dogs for a walk and cleaned two rooms, my thought being that I can finish the house in four days at that rate. I went to bed at 10:30, but the night has thus far been spent getting up every half hour to take more pills. My left shoulder—the one that didn’t have surgery—has been bothering me all along because it had to take over for my right shoulder, and cleaning house makes it hurt many times worse. Oddly enough, my right shoulder is now hurting even more than the left one. I tried to let it rest in its sling while I worked, but I was constantly running into things that I needed it for, just a little. After an ice bag, an Ambien, two Percocet, two Benadryl, and two Requip, I still can’t sleep. I literally don’t know how I am going to carry on without help.

I think that much can be said in favor of money over friends in times of trouble. If Peggy didn’t oppose it, I would have hired a maid, and that would have at least taken the house off my back, but, alas, she doesn’t want strangers coming around. She said she would clean it herself Sunday, and I know her intentions are good, but I also know that her best intentions often get snowed out. She will come home with scores of new buttons to be organized and carded, so the house could get postponed yet again. I simply can’t count on anything getting done unless I do it. If I re-injure the shoulder that was operated on in the process, I will be very sad indeed, but this waiting for people to help me is just so much degrading bullshit.

Pain

I couldn’t tolerate the Demerol (I think it would have killed me), and Vicodin, Percocet, and Norco all stop working long before I can take another dose. To feel such pain five weeks after surgery makes me think something must be wrong. That would mean a second operation on my right shoulder followed by the one on my left shoulder, followed, perhaps, by surgery on my left knee. This is clearly a time to find value in my life apart from what I can accomplish with my body.

This morning, someone asked how I was, and I said fine. Then I remembered that I spent last night—like every night—in a recliner, an ice pack on my shoulder, a toothguard in my mouth, a sleep apnea mask on my face, often awake, the pain like ice picks; and that my shoulders were still afire. I corrected myself, “Actually, I feel like shit, but I guess I’m getting used to it.” I had transcended the pain, at least for a while.

After a year of significant pain, I’ll tell you what I have learned, what the secret is to surviving it with dignity, at least some of the time. The secret is a heart that is open and loving. Anger is a deep and fiery pit. Self-pity is a black and clammy hole. Love is a cloud that floats above pain, and anger, and self-pity. Love even makes the world look different, almost numinous. I was reminded of this when I wrote about Peggy (April 20). I had forgotten how our marriage felt in the early days when the sweetness was almost unbearable. Writing brought it back. I became aglow with love, joy, and poignancy. I didn’t just feel the way I felt 37 years ago; I felt even happier because then there was uncertainty. I had wanted to get married quickly, before Peggy could change her mind.

Now, I don’t worry about losing her love. I worry about her getting sick or dying (fears I didn’t have when we were young), but I’ve grown confident in her love. Like my love for her, other feelings might crowd it out like weeds, but that is only on the surface; the big roots are still very much alive. Well, to be completely honest, I sometimes forget even this. There is a part of me that is ever empty, but that part has grown smaller over the years until it is now like an occasional pothole in a road that is mostly solid.

An ancient truism holds that it’s not the events of our lives that make us happy or unhappy but how we feel about those events. Thanks to chronic pain and disability, I am being forced to accept this at a deep level. Otherwise, I would become overwhelmed. Think of it this way. If chronic pain and disability have the power to make me miserable, then I have no choice but to be miserable. It is only when love makes all things—literally, all things—dance and shimmer before my eyes that I am able to rise above the pain; and even pain itself can appear numinous. When I love, I dance with creation. When I don’t love, I struggle, and as soon I think I have severed one Hydra’s head, five more appear. I can never overcome struggle through struggle. I can never make the world, or even my own body, the way I want it to be.

Early one morning when I was in my early thirties, I watched trees dance in the Louisiana Delta. I had smoked marijuana the night before and seen reptilian monsters in the darkness. They leaped out at me from a glass globe that contained a burning candle. Every time I turned the globe a little to escape one monster, another appeared. I would have walked away, but I was in a country place that was strange to me, and I had nowhere to walk to. The other people in the circle saw that I was struggling, but some I didn’t know, and the others I didn’t trust. They stared at me in silence and uncertainty.

The terror of having been a child who stuttered and who couldn’t pronounce three of the letters in his own name once again settled over me, and I couldn’t form words. I tried to smile, and I tried to raise my hand to wave them away, but I was as rigid as a statue. The dominant person in the group decided to pretend that nothing was amiss, and everyone followed his lead. Everyone that is but my drunken mother who, with cigarette held high, drawled, “Why, boy, I think that stuff has affected your brain.” Everyone laughed, confirming my belief that I was with people I couldn’t trust. Later, I somehow made it to bed where I was flooded by the most beautiful shapes and colors I had ever seen. They moved before my eyes in the darkness all night long like an endlessly changing kaleidoscope.

I got up early, and sat atop the cab of a truck to watch the sun rise beyond a row of ancient live oaks. As these trees awakened with the dawn, they began to pulsate. Their limbs waved gracefully as if to music, and the thought left me that I was a member of a species that was superior to other species. I became absorbed into the whole, life within life, matter within matter, energy within energy. It was among the most memorable experiences of my life. You might dismiss it by pointing out that I was in a suggestible, if not a psychotic, state and that what I saw was simply branches moved by the wind. You are right; I saw branches moved by the wind. But is it not conceivable that being emotionally raw and defenseless might have also made me open to a whole new facet of reality?

But there is only one reality.

Here is the way I see it. If you go to an astronomy website, you will find photos of the heavens that were made with different filters. One filter might show heat and cold. Another might show different kinds of radiation. Yet another might show the colors given off by a particular element. Now, which filter shows reality? I believe I saw truth on that morning long ago, but the truth that I saw was not the truth that I usually see. I was, as it were, looking at the world through a different filter.

Pain, I am learning, is like a drug trip. It can show me monsters if I emotionally resist its reality in my life, but if I relax before it (even though I continue to take practical steps to overcome it), there is the possibility that it might show me worlds of unimagined beauty. It might even take me to a place that surpasses anything I have previously known, a place of pure love and pure compassion, a place in which I can no longer be something, I can only BE.

Buena escritura - Buona scrittura - Bonne inscription - Numinosity

I can’t read good writing out loud and not cry. I try. Sometimes, I survive a few paragraphs—a very few paragraphs—but no more. I am saddened by this because I like to share meaningful passages with Peggy. Sometimes, I can’t even hold it together long enough to tell her what paragraphs I want her to read—paragraphs that I couldn’t possibly read to her. Instead, I point to them. Then when she reads them to me, I cry anyway. It’s all so embarrassing. She’s the woman; she’s supposed to be the one who cries.

And it’s not only sad or poignant words or beautiful descriptions of nature that make me cry; it can even be funny writing. The only requirement is that it be good. No, of course I don’t cry over my lawnmower manual. Yes, I know, technical writing can be good writing too (one would hope that it is) but good in another sense. What I am referring to is writing that is artistically good; writing that is the literary equivalent of a great painting or sculpture. Writing that flings the writer’s soul into the sky like water from a fountain.

I think there must be something strange about how my brain is wired that makes words so beautiful to me. They are beautiful even when alone, but when they are put together so that they soar, they take me with them, and I have no more control than if I were in a rocket ship leaving Cape Canaveral. It could be that the only way to stop the tears would be to kill whatever is inside me that makes words seem so unbearably alive, and I would not want it so. There are worse problems than to be moved by beauty.

The hard part is that my tears make me look weak, out of control. I will own up to the latter, but being exquisitely awake is no weakness. It is a kind of intelligence that few possess, and therefore few understand. I do not say this to boast, for surely you are aware that I never write but what I speak as honestly as I know how. Otherwise, what would be the point?