Senior moments, with good news

Rocking and rolling on the tram

     Last week Judy had medical tests at Oregon Health and  Sciences University Hospital.  Without being asked, a genius scheduler rearranged times so that Judy  could have two unrelated appointments back to back.  We took the aerial tram to the hospital, where Judy  was in familiar territory from the days when she worked on the development of the drug Gleevic.   I was fighting my usual hospital panic.

OHSU, the land of dread

      Judy had a CT scan to determine how much more of her lungs have been scarred by pulmonary fibrosis.   Thanks to OHSU's efficient system of  electronic medical records, she had the results the very next day.  There has been no substantial progression of the disease since it was first diagnosed in December of 2010.  When you get old, no progress can be the very best of news.

Happy day

    I made it to Medicare with relief.  Although I have always had health insurance, the spectre of medical bankruptcy  has  long lurked somewhere around the edges of my  insecurities.  So many friends have their lives shadowed  by the  need to provide for adequate health care.  It reminds me of the early days of the draft for the Vietnam War, when people's decisions about  marriage or  graduate school or  defense jobs or  alternate service were colored by the dictates of the Selective Service. We lost 55,000  Americans during the long Vietnam War; the deaths of 45,000 Americans every year are associated with not having health insurance.   Everybody should have Medicare.

Best present ever

      A package arrived from Illinois for my birthday.  My fine grandsons Jack, age 8, Charlie age 6, and Sam, age 3, sent me a scroll they had made entitled 65 Things We Love About Grandma.   Jack printed in small, precise letters  things like,  #18 She made Daddy, #38 She taught us how to walk on stilts, #63 She tells fun Billy Bob and Raymond Rob stories.  Charlie printed every fifth entry: #15 She sings nice songs, #40 She is smart and, from this middle child, #30 She always has time for me.   Sammy contributed #2 She is cute, and #29 I love her because I kiss her.   

    

Curt Hanson

          In Oregon, people over the age of 55 who take the AARP's Driver Safety course can receive a discount on their auto insurance premiums for three years.  GEICO informed us that it was time to take the course again.  It is a 6-hour classroom session aimed at having older drivers think about when it's time to retire from driving.  (Men outlive their driving ability by six years, and women by ten, says the AARP.)  For this, our third go around with the course, Judy and I looked up our last instructor.  Curt Hanson is a retired sheriff's deputy who is also a Shakespearean actor.  He is still getting royalties from a part  he played in the movie Goonies, ca. 1985.   He looks a little like my cousin Deke.  If anybody can make 6 hours of drivers' ed bearable, it is Curt.  Nevertheless, as I told my friend Sheila one morning while we were walking, "You know you're old when you become a follower of your AARP driving instructor."
       Sheila didn't miss a beat.  She said, "Next stop, Branson, Missouri."
       I don't think so.
    

Trouble in Addu City

Addu Atoll
Hithadoo top left, Gan bottom left

     The Dynamo project has been shut down 6 weeks early because of police and mob violence in Addu Atoll.  Courtney has brought her three students  home.   She is trying to determine when it will be safe to send the radar engineers back to  in Hithadoo in order to shut down and ship the Smart-R radar truck back to the United States.
    In 2008 the people of the Maldives installed their first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, affectionately known as Anni.  He replaced the dictator Maumoon  Gayoom, who had ruled the country for thirty years.   On February 7 Nasheed was deposed in a coup by some parts of the military and the police, backed by Gayoom's party.  Nasheed was taken away at gunpoint; reports are that he was beaten. The same night, insurgents took over the national TV station.  Vandals broke into the National Museum and destroyed Buddhist  treasures from the Maldives' pre-Islamic past.    Nasheed's former vice president  became president, and  has appointed many of Gayoom's men to key positions

Courtney and student David inside Smart-R

    The following Friday after prayers, Nasheed led a march through Male with thousands of supporters.  Many women participated in what was supposed to be a peaceful protest.  Police and soldiers attacked the marchers viciously. The head of Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) was taken to the  intensive care unit of the local hospital.  He  was then placed temporarily on a no-fly list to prevent him from leaving the country to get medical care in Sri Lanka or India.

Guard station on spit with Smart-R

      In Addu City, the second largest city in the country and a stronghold of support for the Nasheed's MDP party, mobs reacted by  burning down the police stations in Gan, Feydhoo, Maradhoo, and Hithadoo.  They torched the  police training facility in Hithadoo along with the courthouses in Hithadoo and Maradhoo. They burned police vehicles and tossed them into the ocean.  In response, police arrested the entire city council of Addu City.   The mayor is in hiding.  There are many reports of police  dragging MDP party members out of their houses, beating  them and spraying  their eyes with pepper spray before arresting them.  Because the police stations have been burned, prisoners are held on Coast Guard boats in the harbor at Gan.

Volunteers painting wall of courthouse
preparing for SAARC Summit

     It is hard to describe how close together everything is on these narrow, crowded islands.  The burned courthouse in Hithadoo is on same street as Maxine's preschool. We passed the police training academy everyday on the way to the spit where Courtney's radar is parked.  We watched young police recruits practice water rescues on the beach off the spit.  From  Smart-R   we could see the police station, now burned to the ground.
        The police station at Gan is just past the mosque  next to Equator Village, where Courtney's students and the other Western scientists were living.  It is  a half a mile from the airport where  tourists land and then are whisked away by speedboat  to their isolated luxury resorts.
        One evening last week Courtney's students  headed in their car from Equator Village to a restaurant in Feydhoo. In order to get to the restaurant, they had to pass the police station and cross a causeway onto the next island.  A crowd was  throwing stones at the Gan police station, situated right at the entrance to the causeway.  They stopped throwing stones  and told the students to turn their car back.  As the students returned to Equator Village, they could see the stones begin to fly again.  Later the police station was burned to the ground.

Tash playing cards with Maxine

      We have not heard from Tash, the rowing and swimming instructor who is now the only Westerner living in Hithadhoo.  She works for the Ministry of Education in a government building just off the Link Road, and gets around by bicycle.  Nor have we heard anything from Nasreena and her family.  They have no links to politics or to the government that I know of, so I hope they are lying low.  Marian, the British nutritionist, is back in England for a few months.  She has not heard anything from her large adopted Maldivian family on Feydhoo.  Marian had 4000 children's books stored in the Maradhoo courthouse ready for the children's library she had hoped to create on the island.  The books were destroyed when the courthouse was burned.

Jamal with African Grey parrot

Musa

     Jamal, our guardian angel in the Maldives, went with Courtney's  students late at night when the violence began to help them shut down and secure the radar.  Jamal  had been a political prisoner along with Mohamed Nasheed during the reign of Gayoom.  He has 8 brothers, including Musa, the grocer on Hithadoo.  They are all in business.  Musa, for instance, depends entirely on airplanes to bring the groceries he sells in the Multi Market.  If the airlines are disrupted or controlled by hostile people, he is out of business.   Jamal has reported to Courtney that he and his family are all right.  .
       Jamal's two sons, who are  in their early twenties, work at government jobs at Gan airport--one as a weather technician and one as a security screener. When we visited Jamal's house, the son asked me , "What is democracy like in your country?  We have only had it here for three years."  I hemmed and hawed, not wanting to show cynicism.  At the time I was still feeling a little foolish because I had paid the front office at Equator Village almost $25 to fax my ballot to the Clackamas County elections office for our November special election.  How protected we are.

Life these days

More fun than Maybelle Carter

      Judy had a solo autoharp gig on Saturday.  Her teacher volunteered Judy for this performance about a month ago.  Judy's jamming buddy Donna, who has played background music on the piano for many events,  helped her  choose appropriate tunes. Judy practiced ferociously until she noticed, three days before the event, that her autoharp had developed a squeal.  She borrowed Donna's much better instrument to use in the performance. However, the chord layout on Donna's harp was different, and during practice sessions  I heard words I have seldom  heard come out of Judy's mouth. "**!!%%!!  Where is her C 7th?" Then came the all-important step of choosing what to wear.  By Saturday morning Judy was ready for the stage.

Better than a day job

     She played for 2 hours  at a busy wine tasting at the Korkage, a wine shop on the other side of the  Willamette River. It was fine, mellow music for a bright, busy afternoon.  Judy's teacher Fuey (given name: Freelene) was there, and Donna, and our neighbors Janet and Robert. Judy was a shining hit.   There was money in the tip jar, and the shop owners  asked her to come back.  Now that Judy's inner ham has made an appearance, there will be no living with her.

New look

    Last week Joan came back for an afternoon and helped us transform  our den.  We took Judy's old Navajo rug off the wall and put it on the floor.   We removed the Formica kitchen table full of computer parts and paper and replaced it with a sedate bookcase.  Joan tamed the tangle of wires that had been under the table and hid them behind the curtain.  Now a good room is better.

Back rub

Janet and Robert

     We went next door to eat and watch the Super Bowl at Janet and Robert's house. Janet sent Robert over to borrow rice, and then we carried our fruit salad and baguette over the pavers that Robert had installed between our houses to make a path. We settled in to a family Sunday afternoon.  Janet made Caesar salad while Robert grilled marinated flank steak.  Their daughter Kelli whipped egg whites for a lemon meringue pie.  Judy  collated flyers about the 2012 Seattle Autoharp Week while we watched the game.   Judy's best canine friend Arnold got his back rubbed  by the feet of Kelli's husband Randy while Randy laughed and hooted at the commercials.

Kelli and Randy

Kelli's pie

      I was bewildered by the commercials. What do people see in those flashing, crashing special effects? I don't understand the lure of spectacle, either, and  the half-time show gave me the creeps.  It  reminded me of the  Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 propaganda film"Triumph of the Will"  that my political science professor in college was so eager for us to see.
     Kelli went into the office to do her taxes, and I began stuffing Judy's flyers into envelopes.  Janet asked, "What does it mean when they get a first down?" and confessed that she never watched football games.    We saw a few great plays and then went home, happy from good times with good neighbors.