Crossroads

Home oxygen set-up

     Judy has come to  a milestone that she didn't want to reach:  the doctors have suggested that she begin using oxygen with activity.  Oxygen is the one thing that medicine has to offer that will prolong her life, they say. They tell her pretend that it's a pill.  It will help. But Judy is dismayed.  "I think of it as a dividing line," she says.  And, "I didn't think this time would come so soon."
   The oxygen company delivered standard  tanks the day after the doctor prescribed oxygen.  Judy pulls the tanks, which last about one hour, behind her in a rolling duffel bag. She drags a tank behind her to use the oxygen when she goes to her ukulele lessons and when she walks at the mall. She uses it when she walks from the parked car to her destination. I think the oxygen makes her feel better and less tired, but she won't yet grant it that power.  She just quietly uses it, and doesn't complain about having a shadow.  When I tell about what  it was like to have toddler and not be able even to shift your weight, much less leave the room, without upsetting him, she makes no comment.

Elegba

    I learned from Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock about Elegba, the Yoruba  god of the crossroads.  Elegba has been called a divine trickster.  When you come to a crossroads, you must make and offering to him. The best offerings involve doing something silly.  Judy's offering at her crossroads was to go without oxygen on an airplane trip to Fresno.  She then stayed without oxygen in the foothills of the Sierras at a week-long  autoharp festival.
    Even for those of us on Medicare, long delays related to insurance put us in the position of doing risky things. Judy is supposed to get a portable oxygen concentrator, which lasts about 3 hours and can be used on an airplane.  The insurance company has not yet given the OK for the concentrator, so Judy  went on her trip without oxygen.   Thank goodness, her only scary time was when she was at an altitude of 6500 feet.

Makeshift portable oxygen

     Yesterday the doc called Judy to say he wants her to take a high dose of Prednisone for 6 weeks and then to taper off it.  There is a chance that taking the steroid will act as a shock treatment to stop the momentum of the scarring of her lungs, at least for a while.  The drug will weaken her immune system and make her more vulnerable to pneumonia and other infections, which are lethal threats to her compromised lungs.   Judy will have to take an antibiotic along with the steroid.
    I have heard that high doses of steroids make people irritable and aggressive. (Can I go live somewhere else for 6 weeks?) Judy anticipates that they will give her a voracious appetite, and is thinking of strategies to keep from gaining weight.   Both of us are saying, "Wait a minute!  What's with the high- level medical treatment?  It's just a little cough, shortness of breath, and fatigue, isn't it?"
   I think Elegba is laughing.
    
  
  

Bird songs and witches

Barred owlet

     I've been going on  birdsong walks early in the morning at Tryon Creek State Park. I'm  pleased to be able to distinguish a few calls and songs and connect them with the birds I can see in books.  I'm learning to spot birds and appreciate their fuzzy outlines; someday I will be adept at using binoculars. I like walking with  birders because they pause for long periods of time on the treks up the steep hills that lead from the creek bed.  The pauses allow me to get out of survival- breathing mode and enjoy being quiet in the woods.
    There is a raven's nest in Tryon Creek Park now.   Ravens have been gone from the Willamette Valley for almost 150 years, after having been wiped out by the settlers who objected to the threat to their crops.   (The predecessor to today's Christmas bird count was the Christmas bird kill.)  This week we heard the raven's call, and saw an adult fly into the nest.

Judy carved this raven mask

    We paused on the path near the barred owls' nest.  Sharp eyes spotted on owlet in a cedar sapling right near the path.  There were two adult owls and an older juvenile perched in a high, wide  semi-circle around the sapling, keeping an eye on junior.  The owlet was about 6 or 7 weeks old, and  close enough to the ground to be threatened by one of the big dogs that owners sometimes allow to run loose in the park. We stood and watched  for a long time.  As we left, our leader was exultant.  "Next stop, the nest of the ivory-billed woodpecker, " he joked.

Happy leader

Sentinel

     One summer  I helped a young friend with her newborn twins, mostly by holding the babies.  Their older brother, Julian was 6 years old.  He asked if I wanted to see  his fort.  We went into the back yard, duck under the fence, and crawled into a low cave of pine branches.  I couldn't sit or stand upright, but it was fragrant and cozy and special to Julian.  When it came time to leave, I was afraid that I couldn't bend enough to get back under the fence to get out.  But I did, and we stood still for a little while, waiting for me to be able to move. The wind was blowing the silver-leaf maples, rustling the leaves high above our heads. Julian  said, "Let's watch," the way  a kid would suggest "Let's play this game."  So I stood with a wise 6 -year -old and learned about  the game of watching.
     Years ago my friend Jeremy led a group of us on a trip to  his childhood home, Zimbabwe.  In preparation he sent recordings of the songs of some of the birds native to the country.  One of our first stops in Zimbabwe was at a bird sanctuary, where we gazed in wonder at the strange birds while Jeremy shared his knowledge of some of their traits.  I remember that exotic refuge these days as I tromp around in an environment that is so familiar to my eye.

Sentinel

     On the birdsong walk in Tryon Park, I was to be able to hear a Wilson's Warbler as he marked the perimeter of his territory.  He needed the right bugs, the right openness to sunlight, the right moisture, hoping to attract the right mate.  The bird's behavior is  so specific to one particular place in one particular forest, with its own history.   I remembered a woman at a talk on earth-based religions saying, "I am a different witch in Oregon than I was in Kansas.  The corn here needs different prayers."
Some birds fly high and some fly long, but the grounding  place has to be just right.

Hanging out with the beloveds

Donna tries out new knee

     We were in the bar of Huber's, the oldest restaurant in Portland,  celebrating Donna's new knee.   The outing was Fuey's idea. "I could have sent you flowers or a plant, " she said to Donna, "But I thought this would be much more fun. " The three autoharp players sipped their Spanish coffees, while I, the  designated driver, savored strawberries in lemonade.

Fuey

     Fuey told tales of fishing and smoking salmon in Alaska in the '70s.  "It was a blast, " she beamed,  "I didn't want to leave."  She talked about covering  the night shift in an 11-bed hospital, when so many nurses were gone for World War II. Fuey was only 16, but the  head nurse slept upstairs, and could be  called on  for any emergencies.   Fuey reflected on her mother's more circumscribed life in small California towns, an intellectual life filled with books and music but not much adventure. " I made a list once of all the things my mother didn't get to do."  She talked about how her parents treated her.  "It seemed like they thought the sun rose and set on me," she beamed.  And then she mused, "Sometimes I wonder how my younger sisters felt about it."
    Fuey is one of the people I think of as"the beloveds."  My sister Rose is like that, and my friend Nell.   They reflect a sense of having been cherished from birth, of feeling that sun and moon rising and setting on them throughout childhood.  It is wonderful to be around them, to dance in the happy circle they cast.

Nell tires out the ukulele

     Judy and I felt cherished when we went to dinner at Betsy and Les's. Betsy's gracious and perceptive welcome brings out the uniqueness in each of us. The conversation was rich, as always, even though we were fretfully aware that the second bomber in Boston was still at large, and that our young relatives there were living in a locked-down city.  We kept coming back to the question that nagged us--what makes a young man set a bomb in a crowd?      I am always fascinated to hear Les's perspective, and usually want to have more time trading ideas with him.  Sometimes he comes to our weekly coffees with Betsy, but those mornings are usually reserved for us girlfriends.

Dinner at Les and Bety's

     The meal would meet with the approval of the hippest Portlanders--comfort food,  expertly prepared,  using the best ingredients. In this case, brisket and kugel.  The view from Betsy's place is so fascinating that I kept interrupting the conversation  with,  "Oh, look at that!"  and "What is that building?"  It felt as rude as someone watching television during dinner, but I could barely help myself, and our old friends are indulgent.
    This time of year, the flowers are blooming for all of us.

Our lilacs

Adventures with Jell-O

Cutting tiny squares

  
    The church choir was having a talent show called "American Originals." Since the accompanying Jell-O  contest was my idea, I felt I had to compete.

Americana vest

      When is the last time you  made anything out of Jell-O?  I have only one old favorite, and it would be fine if I never tasted it again.  So I asked my sister Florrie for the recipe for Mom's famous Jell-O dessert.  She sent it, along with production notes and hints.
     I shopped carefully, reading the labels to avoid the newfangled sugar-free version.  On Friday I made 3 types of Jell-O, thinking about my grandmother in the 1930s in New York City. Gelatin was the first dish she taught her daughters how to make.  I was also remembering my grandfather in Annapolis, who called Jell-O "shivering Liz."

Shivering Liz

    On Saturday morning, Judy carefully cut the pans of cherry, grape, and lime Jell-O  into tiny squares, and pressed a graham-cracker crust into the bottom of a large Pyrex dish.  I whipped a pint of heavy cream, and folded the Jell-O squares into the cream.  The mixture filled the Pyrex pan almost to overflowing.
     Judy dressed in her finest Americana vest, which has genuine suede panels in the front.  It was at that point that I realized that Mom's Jell-O dessert was meant to be served immediately, not transported by car to a potluck.  Judy wore a washable jacket over her vest, and we placed a large towel on her lap.   Then  we set the dessert  on her lap.   We took off for  the church, 15 minutes away.

Salmon Jell-O

    "It's a good thing I took physics in high school," commented Judy, the pan in her lap overflowing with liquefying whipped cream and shivering Liz.  "You're going downhill now, so I raise my toes slightly.  Now you're turning left, so I raise my left knee."  I drove gently, remembering  the urban legends about driving instructors who required learners to drive with full glasses of champagne on the bench seats next to them.  I was laughing the whole way.

Americana Jell-O

    We made it without spilling to the church, where Mom's Jell-O dessert took its place among the many contest entries.  It made a good showing in the taste category, but it could not compete in the "most unusual" class.  That division was won by the fish-shaped salmon mold, which contained not only salmon but green olives and dilly beans.  The overall winner was  Pat's red,white and blue squares.  How did she do that?
  

Tourist season theater

This is a job Judy used to do

     I scored a plum job at the spring cleanup of  the library beach cottage in Manzanita.   We are supposed to clean for 6 hours, which is difficult for me to do in one day. I get creaky.  My usual strategy is to claim the stand-up jobs like washing windows and cleaning the pantry.  This year the organizers offered me a task that  is fitting for my status as  by far  the oldest cleaner.  I got to do the laundry.  
    Sue and I stripped the 11 beds of quilts and sheets and mattress pads and  bed skirts.  We took down the curtains and liners and took up the bath mats.  We emptied the trunks of the spare comforters, loaded everything into the Prius, and headed to the laundromat. It is a large, clean place with marigolds and Russian sage planted along the front walk.  Sue was relieved to see that we were the only ones there on a Saturday morning.  She knew we wanted to monopolize the machines.
    We propped the front door open to keep the place cool, and  filled all the tall  stainless steel washing machines with  our dirty linens.  Sue is much shorter than 5 feet tall, so she had to stand on tiptoe and stretch up  to pour the powdered soap into the slots on top of the machines.
     Four hours later we were still waiting for the heavy comforters to get completely dry.  We tried putting only one item into each huge dryer.  Sue cleaned every lint filters over and over again.  Still, there were damp spots.  I thought that the quilts would surely get dry outside in the sun and the coast wind.  I hauled chairs outside, and draped comforters over them.  Then I wheeled one of the carts outside with a quilt hanging from its upper rod.  I gave up on that idea when the comforters blew off the chairs and the cart started rolling across the parking lot.
    Just as I had returned the chairs  to their exact homes in front of the coffee table with magazines arranged in precise lines, a woman bustled in from a side door.  "This open door is making a wreck of my heat upstairs, "  she said, not looking at us, and she closed the front door.  The she proceeded to unlock a closet, get out a broom and dustpan, and start sweeping the floor in front of the first row of washing machines.

Runaway quilts

    "Soap all over the floor, there's soap all over the floor.  What did you do, pour it out?"  She kept on just loud enough for us to hear, but still not looking at us.  She swept all over the large room, including under our feet, talking all the time while, not looking at us.  Then she got out a mop and started mopping.  "This soap will never come up, and I just painted this floor, too."   The woman swept and mopped and muttered for almost 30 minutes.
    Sue explained that she couldn't reach the soap dispensers on top of the machine, that she looked for a broom but couldn't find one.
 "I lock them up, or  they steal them," was the reply, still with no eye contact.
     It was a fine piece of theater in Manzanita, Oregon, permanent population 601.   It  made me remember the bumper sticker that I have seen on cars at the coast, If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?

Unnatural acts

Herta

     I have long regarded exercise as an unnatural act. Walking is a normal human activity, but calisthenics?  Running?   I mean really, why should I choose, on purpose, to make my body think that a saber-toothed tiger is chasing me?  That can't be good.

41 machines in one room

      On the other hand, it's dismaying not to be able  carry the grandbabies around as much as I would like, or to be sore for days after 15 minutes of gardening. So last summer when my walking buddy Sheila proposed that I join her cardio and strength training class at the local gym, I agreed.
     We meet twice a week under the direction a our trainer Herta, who has heard all the jokes about her name.
      We start out in the cardio room. I was stunned to distraction  the first time I walked into the big, windowless  room.  There is a row of exercise bicycles and rowing machines, behind that a row of treadmills, behind that a row of things you step on , behind that a row of Nordic tracks, all facing the 5 televisions on the front wall.  Off to the side are contraptions that look like jungle gyms.  At 4 clock in the afternoon, there are purposeful, sweating  people pumping away on all the machines. Most of them are watching the TVs. Somehow they are able to ignore everybody else and concentrate.

How do I work this?

Equipment

     After we  warm up in the cardio room, we proceed into a training room full of weights and benches,  kettle bells and fitness balls and ropes and pulleys.  Herta plans sequences of exercises for triceps, biceps, core, quads, (oh, the vocabulary!), usually two minutes at a time.  Somehow she gets us going and keeps us going.  I call on my 1950s Catholic school training:  there is no individual option. You just do what the group does, and you believe.  Herta is spare with praise and encouragement, so last week when she cheered my progress to 7.5 -lb hand weights, ("No more 5s for Maggie!")  it was sweet.
     I no longer get confused in the cardio room.   I step onto the treadmill, the one machine I know how to work, and zone into my own little TV-watching bubble.  Then I hurry into the training room and  do whatever Herta tell us to.
  I've changed my mind about exercise.  When I see the old men  joking each other along on the machines, or the kids with Down syndrome in their karate uniforms, or the guy recovering from a stroke, or myself getting stronger, I think we are engaged in noble work.   We are all hoping to stay upright for a long, long time.
  

Silent Hallelujah

Mt. Hood at dusk

  When  John and Rose visited us on their way home from a camping trip,  they offered to help  us hang our new curtains.  Rose measured precisely, and John worked the drill and the screwdriver until the finished project almost met Rose's exacting eye.  All the while, we talked and laughed.  I was a little hoarse with laryngitis, but happy.

John hanging curtains

      No sooner had they  pulled out of the driveway to go home  than Judy turned to me and said, "Stop talking!" She explained patiently but firmly that people with laryngitis can damage their vocal cords by talking.  There was only a hint of glee in her eyes.

Our local florist

    For the next four days, I didn't talk at all. I cancelled two planned phone calls with  friends back east and skipped choir practice.  Sheila and I still went for long walks, and I could see that it was disconcerting to her to have me  not reply to any of her stories.  As soon as we came into the house for our coffee, I started scribbling notes, trying to make the talk in some way a dialog.
     It was no problem to do my errands without talking, and gratifying to be mute when a clerk called across the room, "May I help you?" I think that's rude.   I always resist shouting back, and wait for the clerk to come closer.  This one had to come all the way to my side, and read my handwriting.

Our cherry tree

Pieris (Andromeda) at front door

     I have kept silence for days at a time on religious retreats.  There, the purpose and intention of the silence was to quiet the mind. This time, I let  my busy mind roll on as usual, and just didn't talk.   I was never lonely, because so many people, near and far, living and dead, populate my  inner awareness.  "Jack, how's your belly?  Marie, you're going to be all right.  Ann got a new job, good for her.  Aunt Helen showed me how to dice onions this way.  And that Mary Jean's florist--still in business after twenty years.  When we got married, and they insisted that Judy get a boutonniere to match my corsage."  My usual mind was not quiet at all.

    It's been a month now, and I still cannot sing.   I missed singing the Hallelujah Chorus with the church choir on Easter, and all those rousing Easter hymns.  I tried a few notes, and then had to soothe my throat by sucking on a cough drops.

Judy in new gloves

    Judy and I celebrated spring by buying new garden gloves.  Then we drove around Mt Hood, and came home to  appreciate our blooming yard.