kvetching up

The Brothers Grimm fairy tales are a master class in horror. Evil and terrible outcomes emerge in every page turn from the original tales. I read them for the first time when Leiney was a baby and I bought an old hardback edition at Goodwill. I had no idea how truly discombobulating they were, how shitty it would have been to live in a world where monsters and many of the heroes alike were murderous. I read stories like Snow White, Snow White and Rose Red, Rumpelstiltskin, The Fisherman and his wife, to the kids. Was that child abuse? Or was it, more likely, setting them up to better understand the world we live in today?  As a kid, I was so grateful not to have lived through the atrocities committed by the Nazis, to have missed Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the annihilation of indigenous peoples, naked imperialism and colonialism, the second-class status that women had been relegated to, DDT and the draft, among other things. Then, I grew up. I watched Reagan and the country asc...

Mornings, Saturday mornings especially, are my favorite time of day after pitch darkness. Fresh news to listen to and read, a cacophony of birdsong--almost a gentle fury--drowns out even the highway noise at 5 a.m., and the sense that Willow and I are alone in the world. It all makes for the perfect start to many days.  This morning Willow had me up after 3. After crating her last night and ignoring her protestations of lockdown, her anxiety turned way, way down. By this morning the only remnants of the drugging are the intermittent shaking of her head--making her ears flap loudly on the sides of her head, and the more than occasional obsession with her bottom. She has been to the vet 2x in the last two weeks, so I am certain she doesn't have mites in her ears or some urinary tract infection, but I am fairly certain we are going back to the vet this week to make sure the behaviors aren't evidence of illness.  I gave Willow a treat at about 3:15 a. m., when I woke to her whimpe...

8:09 AM  Willow the Pillow I'm early. I'm almost always early. Its the worst when you know you don't want to be early, but can't help leaving so that you can get there early. The vet said get here at 8:15. I hate late, so here I am. Willow hates the vet's office and knows we have arrived. She is making her discontent clear; her whinging understandable given her first contact with the vet's office in a year was last week, which consisted of shot after shot. She wasn't behind on her vaccines, in fact she was on schedule, but she had a shitload to get and got them she did. So, now I am afraid of getting her out of the car, for fear she will drag me at 20 miles per hour away from here.  8:58 AM  Back home. Work is as crazy as ever. I am hating this being alone without Willow--this is the first time since we have had her where she isn't home with me or out on a walk. Wild.  Willow has been groomed precisely twice in her life. The first groom, done by a mobil...

  A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.” ― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart   The tree on the right side of the fence --Did it fall of its own weight? Abby came home night before last, her plane arriving around 1 a.m. I was so ecstatic in anticipation on Thursday that my joy spilled over so much at work that people noticed. On the drive to and from the airport, a slushy rain was falling. I was fairly convinced that would be the extent of it. I hate snow and the cold, if you didn't know, so  I was relieved that this was all coming to an end. I woke up to this beautiful mess yesterday. The plum trees in the foreground had bloomed this week and had been absolutely gorgeous. I presume that two of the three won't fruit this year--which is fine. I  am certain the third one, the tree on the right side of the fence and closest to t...

Entry 1 Excruciating pain wakes me up at zero dark whatever. My right knee is throbbing, it's range of motion reduced to that of statuary. Oh, I can move it, but if I do, hellzapoppin'. It is so stiff, the pain so terrible, regardless of  how I reposition myself, it feels like a vice was tightening around the joint. No matter if I prop it up, lay on my side, or whistle Dixie, the knee aches.  I wasn't going back to sleep, although I wanted to and I tried desperately.  The dog heard me stir.  Mind you, it was the middle of the night. She came in wanting me to get up and play with her or  to give her a snack. I convinced the gratitude beastie to lay down and roll onto her back and I rubbed her belly, racking my brain on what to do. My range of motion--or should I say my pain tolerance, sat at about 1 percent, and that hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. But I had to get up. So, ceasing the belly runs, I lifted my legs up off the bed, swung my hips around toward the edge o...

Entry 1 In 2015, when Leiney first showed signs of depression, our world was rocked. The suffering she was going through was painful to watch and experience. I was just about that age when I went through my first bout of clinical depression, so I could feel her pain. At the time our kid fell ill, I was struck by how many tools Jenny had in her toolbox to help Leiney. She knew who to call to do intervention. We pulled together as a team to help Leiney, but Jenny, because of her profession and job, knew what to do, and who to call and got Leiney the professional services she needed. I remember spending days with Leiney, taking time off work and caring for her, snuggling with her on the couch, and watching television. We watched Deadpool on our big leather couch together--her first R-rated movie.  What strikes me about these memories is how hard Jenny and I worked as a team. I always was the one who stayed home with Leiney those many days she was too sick to go to school. There was a ...

Entry 1 I got just under 4 miles in this morning on the treadmill. My right knee is acting up, but I adjusted as well as I could. Willow chose to stay in the garage with me, which is new and also quite welcome. Yesterday, I noticed how much she loves to cuddle Abby. While she rarely likes to be too far from me, she just isn't cuddly with me. I think I was developing a complex. As if she read my mind, she came upstairs last night and laid down next to me for better than an hour. Then, just to prove how wrong I was, she laid down across my lap, like a lap seat belt. I would have kicked the big galoot off, but it was so sweet I just reveled in it. Then, for the next several hours she did her punchy paw thing. I have determined she has a case of nerves post fireworks. I closed my windows in the master bath and bedroom, and she calmed down and slept on the master bath's cool floor for the first time in months. 

 Entry 1 The Bar In Which My Father Drank Himself To Death In 1969. Years ago I knew a woman who was around my age of 22 or so. She was in love with her professor, but apparently there were no strings at the time. I was fascinated by this woman, so foreign to this working class boy. She had gone to Boston Latin, and Bard College, her parents were two very famous and influential Marxist philospophers when that kind of thing still meant something. They summered in the south of France. She got almost all her clothes from J. Crew, a company of which I hadn't heard of before.  As I recall, she liked me AND was very into the woman I was dating at the time (her roommate, who liked women but not her), despite her love for the geriatric professor of poetry. I took this woman out for a beer once or twice. I recall telling her my dream was to grow my hair long, get my college degree and drink at the Blue Moon Tavern (whether I meant it or not, isn't material). We were walking to the Blu...

Entry 1 5:50 a.m. After fighting to get my sugars up last night? I most likely went overboard with feeding my face. Today, the goal is to be in range of the target goal for much of the day. I did awaken at 1:15 a.m. and ate a very ripe peach, this after my dinner. While my numbers never breached 200, still, they hovered around that level for a long time. If you read this journal back when Jenny was being treated, you know how much I loved to slice and dice the data. This new cgm software--btw I switched from the reader to my phone for scanning, does it for me. For reasons I don't quite understand, blood glucose often goes up during one's sleep. Mine was crashing back to normal levels, right up to the point I ate that peach. That much is apparent from the graph adjacent to these words. I sit each morning and drink my coffee. Earlier this summer or late spring, Willow was rousing me between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m. She would jimp into bed and hit me with her left paw until I stirred. S...

Last night's sanctuary .   Entry 1 Sitting outside cardiac rehab. I picked Abby up after 1 last night from light rail. When I got home, Willow was glued to me, but unable to sleep and so I couldn't close my eyes. Around 2 I fell asleep. At 3:00 Willow decided she needed outside time. This early morning rising has been going on for a couple weeks. When we came back inside she thought it was snack & play time. I decided it was sleep time. Unlike at 2, she respected this. All of this to say I am exhausted. The scale this morning said I have GAINED .8 lbs. Time to go run it off. I'd like to brag and say I work out harder than any of my cohort, but they all appear to be 10-15 years older than me. I feel love Kramer bragging he is the top of the kid's karate class. Entry 2 Weirdly, the cardiac rehab team neither helped me start my workout, nor did they check on me and adjust it or take my blood pressure during my workout. Apparently,  no one had me on their list. Go figur...

Leiney's graduation from Central at T-Mobile Park was lovely. The vast majority of her classmates were immigrants from Asia, South Asia and predominantly Muslim African countries. At Western, she was the only person of color in her cohort at Fairhaven. It made it difficult discussing issues of race, which she did in seminar routinely very uncomfortable for her, with kids who were considering the idea for the first time, as a rule. Fuck, even if you don't get it, I do. This is especially true after being surrounded by all the brown and black folk at the graduation. So, bully for her. She hears from UW Bothell soon. Fingers crossed. Abby couldn't come to graduation, she was stage managing Romeo and Juliet at Center School, it was the day before opening night and Juliet called off with an infection post-wisdom tooth extraction. She met us afterwards at 13 Coins for dinner. The wait was 25 minutes, the kids didn't want to wait, so we went to look for food elsewhere. Ivar...

 Entry 1    9:05 a.m. Random Thoughts Grief does funny things to your mind. I can't keep things straight.Yesterday, for instance, I turned the water on in one of the master bathroom sinks and forgot about it and it ran for two hours until Leiney discovered it while retrieving Willow from my room. Fortunately, the drain wasn't stopped. If that wasn't bad enough, I went to take Willow out yesterday afternoon, and opened the door before putting her leash on, something that CANNOT happen. I spent 45 minutes cursing her, cursing myself, and cursing my fucked up distraction, trying to get her back in the yard, back in the house, and ultimately into her crate. I was wearing my slippers when I made the mistake, and slipped in a pile of freshly laid dog droppings as I went to chase her. About 15 minutes in, it started to rain. Buddy, who I can use to lure her back sometimes, would not come when I called him, and ran back in the house when I dragged him out by his collar. It w...

Entry 1    1:42 a.m. I was sitting alone late tonight watching a show that had a man on it who was a recent widow and was struggling. I began to sob. Buddy, sitting next to me, continued snoring.  Willow jumped up from across the sectional and hurried to me. She licked the tears off of my cheeks, put her paw on my leg, then my shoulder, and slightly whined. She looked at me with eyes full of empathy. It was just what I needed. Entry 2     6:28 a.m. A mutual friend of Jenny and mine, a fellow MDA camp counselor, stopped by to see me yesterday morning. Jenny has multiple factions or clusters of friends, and this friend is part of a group of 4 women that would meet every few months for dinner. We both have known this group of women since we were kids in the mid-80s. This cluster knew about el pinché, and had definitely been told all sorts of terrible untruths about me for a long time, per Jenny's distortion campaign. I don't know when it started, but I suspect...

 Entry 1.    9:19 a.m. Shelly believed that when passionate love dies, you move on and find anew that passion from someone else. He was in his 20s, obviously. I would probably have made the same claim at that age had I been brash enough, believing that we deserve to permanently have such intoxication as that feeling you Willow, as I write . get when you are with a new lover. I am not in my 20s, they may as well be as far as the dark side of the moon now. Passion has it's place, even now, and even if only in short glints. But there is for me, the understanding and appreciation now for the aged scotch, the fermented grape and the steady bough of a long standing oak tree that I didn't appreciate in my more impetuous, less thoughtful days. Longevity has it's place. There is something more tender and profound in a lasting love, of a marriage fired by adversity and struggle that still carries on decade after decade. I look at the love of my friends Aimee and Robb or Eachean and...

 Entry 1     10:00 a.m. I'm back at work. 600+ emails waiting for me. I am unable to even fathom how to get through the slog.  Nevertheless, here I am. Jenny spent Saturday recovering from chemotherapy. She was moody, sad and angry all day. Resentful, as she often is, understandably so, that others aren't suffering as she is. What is the opposite of schadenfreude? Her step mother Lora and daughter Marissa came over to say hello, having driven up from Portland to pick up Lora's son Alex, who splits his time between Portugal and London--his husband is a very successful lawyer in London. He came to see Jenny and see his mother. The last time we saw Alex, we were having breakfast with him at a restaurant on Mercer Island. Jenny's dad and stepmom had met us first, and Alex came just as they were leaving. We spent our time talking about how terrible Mick looked and that we thought he would die soon. He passed a week or two later.  Abby, 2008. Yesterday, Vale...

 Entry 1     3:25 p.m. The rest of the weekend was uneventful. Both guests are gone. Amy left in the morning, Peter at night. Peter and I made dinner, which we ate at the table, with the kids even. Jenny had sausage, risotto and brussel sprouts. Jenny threw it all up, immediately after Peter left, as we were pulling away from Alaska departures. She won't give up. She did manage, one day out of the last week, not yakking up solid food. Last night took chutzpah though. It wasn't a small amount. I can't imagine the frustration with not being able to eat solid food. However, truth be told, I had a hard time driving as she was violently ill.  We carry emesis bags I purchased online last year-maybe a couple gross. We are running very low now, I think.  Wow.  Jenny woke up this morning a wreck. It took my repeated visits in between meetings for her to rise. I kept stopping in, between taking the dogs out several times, feeding them, the 8 a.m. arrival of...

 Entry 1    8:10 a.m. Sometimes it's eerie, looking out into our yard. Sometimes it is eerie living inside the house. Here is to hoping the two don't decide to coordinate, or worse, compete for which is the creepiest. The fog really does add to the horror show flavor.  Jenny is asleep. Peter, her friend from NYC, is putting dishes away in the kitchen. Amy is upstairs, presumably still sleeping. They have taken care of all the household duties since arriving. Given my level of exhaustion, and adding to that the bout of insomnia I had the night before, I am grateful. Jenny tried and failed to keep solids down yesterday. Where I have failed to convince her to stop trying for now, her friends convinced her with very little argument. Also, she has given up the concept of driving herself around--which will last at least until they leave tomorrow. I am debating whether to accompany them today on whatever small outing they embark upon, or to go out on my own.

 Entry 1.    3:45 a.m. How crazy am I? Awake at 3:45 a.m. unable to sleep. I just binged Killing Eve. I have been awake nearly 24 hours, thinking about how my therapist was lamenting my living in the long emergency. It really has been taxing.  I am not crating los perros locos. This will be the first time Willow has slept out of her box. I should chase sleep.

Entry 1.    11:32 a.m. Willow gave me a wild ride this morning at 7:00, trying to bum rush a neighbor getting into his car. I know her very well now, and had hold of her fur faster than she could react, and soon after grabbed her harness.  In the kerfuffle of wrangling her, I dropped my phone in the grass. I didn't know this at the time, but only realized in an hour later. The best part about that is my phone lay in the grass where I dropped it as the rain fell-it had been falling all morning, why stop on my phone's account?  I put it in rice, at Jenny's suggestion. Jenny left with Moni for chemo about the same time I tried to dry out my phone.  I went to work and forgot about my personal cell. Just after 10, my work cell rings, it's Jenny on the phone, calling to tell me her blood pressure 70/30 was so low they were transferring her to the ER.  Moni took Jenny here, but left to go to an appt around 10. Jeanne, Jenny's escort home, was cancelled.  I a...

Entry 1.    1:32 a m. Jenny and Jeanne speaking in hushed whispers yesterday, discussing (health permitting), a foray to see el pinché. I was in the office upstairs as they sat in the living room. They had no idea I could hear them, although why I don't know. They are children of the 80s . What am I to make of this? It gets better--not in the Dan Savage manner--but in the "if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all" way.  The organizers of the "babysitters" as Jenny refers to them, has Jennifer Murray slated to come over our house tomorrow today to care for Jenny.  I hadn't bothered to read the schedule, why would I? Other than Jenny's sisters and my sister Jane, anyone else coming over will likely not be welcomed with open arms by me.  I won't make a scene, I don't think.  But I am rather near the end of my tether with these accommodating friends.