Home again, home again, jiggety jig

Yes, we're finally home. And while I can say that I am honestly grateful that my two boys had a fantastic vacation in every way, thanks to my family, I can just as honestly say that it was possibly the worst vacation I've ever had in my life. And the weird and wonderful thing that it did, by being so horrific, is that I feel renewed, now, to be at home. A fresh start! A new attitude! I know I sound a bit mad, but it's true -- at least in this moment, this series of moments and hours and hopefully, days.

I needed a vacation; I needed a break and I got neither.

What I did get when I landed in Los Angeles is chills when I felt the air outside the airport, warmth in my body when The Husband beamed at us as he helped us to the car, giggles when our dog Valentine peed on the floor when she saw us. The piles of mail were neatly stacked; The Husband had some good news about The Mistress; Mirtha, the goddess, had cleaned our house to such an extent that it almost sparkled. I blinked in thankfulness at its sweetness -- this home of ours -- I marveled at the lemon tree transplanted from a pot to the garden; I ate steak and macaroni and cheese and drank some kind of sparkly red wine; I watched all three episodes of Friday Night Lights that I'd missed when I was gone, under a blanket, in an un-air-conditioned house.

Oh, my.

And then David, my dear old friend sent me this LINK and I knew it was a SIGN.

Thank you, Jenn

Kindness


Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and send you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for.
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.


- Naomi Shihab Nye

What I'm not doing while on vacation is

going to the aquarium in Atlanta, which my boys did with my father. Henry took this fantastic photo of a seahorse -- my very favorite sea animal. It was almost as good as being there.

So weird and mysterious, like they're from another universe altogether.

Sophie is recovering from her bad fall but has had a fever for a few days, off and on. It's unrelated to the accident, and I think she's just run-down. I continue to languish like some sort of nineteenth century convalescent confined to bed (not mine), reading books, murmuring sweet things to my children and feeling wilted in the unrelenting heat.  I wish I were as thin as those tubercular poets were, though. Ha.
I feel as if I've drifted into and out of consciousness these past three weeks, the boredom punctuated by moments of crisis that sharpen me, but only momentarily. Then it's back to some strange planet. Speaking of strange planets, the proliferation of political billboards out here in Georgia and South Carolina highways far outnumbers those in southern California. I drove from South Carolina yesterday and saw this fine one:

GOD IS NOT A SOCIALIST!

Right underneath this informative message was this:

BILLBOARDSAGAINSTOBAMA.COM

I'd like to say that I roll my eyes and condescendingly think those people are stupid or ridiculous or whatever. But I feel a tinge of fear. I feel unwelcome. I even yearn for Hollywood's simple billboards touting bad movies and sleazy reality shows. 

We leave for Los Angeles on Wednesday and I'm about as excited as those miners were who set out West, looking for gold.

Beyond the Cherry on Top

Shall I shock you or do you want it gently?

I'm a shocker, I think.

Last night, our last in Hilton Head, at around 10:30 pm, Sophie propelled herself up and off the king-size bed where I have basically been lying with her for over two weeks, while she seized and slept. On the way down, she smashed her head in two different spots on the iron bedside table while I watched helplessly, trying to break her fall.

I was alone in the house with just the boys, so I screamed loudly for Henry who was on the other side of the house, in bed. He came running and when he saw the scene, he asked what he could do. I told him to get my phone and to get a towel filled with ice. I said these things as I tried to stanch the bleeding, all the while cursing under my breath as I looked for the gash. When I got the phone, I called my cousin who lives down the road and she came over quickly. We both deliberated on whether the two cuts were worthy of a 911 call or should we just go to the hospital. We decided on the hospital, and took Sophie there where she was cleaned up and her wounds stapled and butterflied.

Ironically, she had no seizure, before or after and is fine today, banged up and bruised and patched together but fine.

At the small hospital, I sat in a state of shock, I think. When the triage nurse asked me to come into the small office, I rolled Sophie in and answered his questions. He had never heard of the drugs that Sophie is on for her seizures and was clearly miffed when I told him that she was not vaccinated since she began seizing one week after her initial vaccinations at two months old. This happens regularly and I don't care at this point. I usually just stare the person in the eyes and if they push the point, I ask them whether they would sign a form testifying to the complete safety of the vaccine given and that it wouldn't cause my daughter (or son) to seize. But that's beside the point...

A man walked up to the window and the triage nurse turned in his swivel chair away from me and toward the new patient. He was evidently both receptionist and triage person that late on a Saturday night.

Are you here to see a doctor? he asked the man.

I thought to myself, why else would he be here? And then I amused myself by silently imagining the triage nurse asking the next patient what can I get for you this evening? or can I get you a drink? He swiveled back toward me and asked a few more questions, and the another person came to the window with one hand cupped over his right ear. He said to the nurse through the window I can't hear you but I know exactly what's wrong. I have wax impacted in my ear. If someone's eyes rolling back in their heads made a sound, the triage nurse's eyes, as he turned back to me, might have rattled. Good Lord, I thought, he couldn't have waited until Monday morning to have his ears cleaned out?


I had a nice chat with Yolanda, the cheerful nurse who cleaned Sophie's gashes and chattered away. The doctor, when he came in told me his name and credentials, and I said something inane about the seventies show Emergency, which I loved. Don't ask me how or why this came up, but the doctor proceeded to tell me that it was that show that inspired him to become an EMT and he was just tickled that I knew it. He told us that he could stitch Sophie up but we'd have to wait over an hour and he thought that the placement of the cuts warranted staples, anyway. We agreed to that, and he pulled out a staple gun and did the job.

And that was that. We were given our discharge papers and drove home, crawled into bed near 2:00 am and went to sleep.


It's always good to be diverted during times of crisis, and I'm especially skilled, apparently, at being focused like a laser on the matter at hand but still capable of observing the tiniest thing. And it's those tiny things that keep me from going completely mad.

Tell your story, a writing mentor once told me, take notes and tell your story.

Vacation Quote of the Day

Oliver:

Oh, HERE they are, Mom! My underwear! I've been wearing the same underwear all week!

Saturday

The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people. --But at a certain point he feels a lack. He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.
-- Anne Carson

The tension of the last two weeks built up like the heat and humidity of the days, threw out its light jagged and blinding, incessant and tiresome, then broke in a rumble and downpour of steady and washing away.

what happens when you don't wash your hair for one week but swim in a pool and the ocean all day long

While Sophie slept

the white birds swooped into the trees

the giant beetle nose-dived into the pool, clicked and drowned

the alligator slid through the water, eyes dimmed and fathomless

brown pine needles drifted down

the breeze lifted the heated grasses

a fish jumped in an impossible arc

while Sophie slept.

Girl in a nest - day 15

light recedes, but it's there

Restraint

This business of blogging is strange to me. As the audience grows, the community widens, the bonds are made and some are broken. This is my 794th post, actually, and I love the whole thing, but I'm feeling constrained and, to be honest, restrained. There's the flinch of embarrassment of revelation, the intimacy that might be illusory balanced by the perception that all of us are connected in a way that is near to revolutionary. The restraint, I think, is due on the one hand to my particular personality -- a desire to meet expectation, to live up to ideals -- those placed upon me and those that I place upon myself.

This vacation I'm on, for instance, absolutely sucks.

There, I've said it. I've held it back for almost two weeks. I've held it back because I don't want to sound complaining. I don't want anyone to tell me that I need a tranquilizer (someone actually said that to me). I don't want to watch Sophie seize over and over again, not because she has somehow gotten worse the last two weeks but because I erroneously brought her here and she is having the worst -- and I mean the worst -- time adjusting to everything from the time change to the godawful heat and humidity and east coast thunderstorm/heat lighting barometric pressure thing. She has not been able to walk freely around like she can do at home because it isn't safe here. She has slept horribly for the most part, and I've had to sleep with her every single night, and I hate sleeping with her. I desperately need a break, a real vacation and I'm not getting one any time soon.

I feel like I'm losing, if not completely lost, my spiritual center.

So there.

But I'm a good girl, really. So here's what I'm grateful for:

My husband's week here and his attentiveness to her and her needs.
My sons' joy in being here.
My parents' concern and support. They love me, I know.
My parents' beautiful house that they open up each year to the extended family's crazy shenanigans.
The gorgeous view behind my parents' house, the water snaking up into the distance, live oaks with moss hanging down, white birds in flight.
My dear friends, Cara and Audrey, who have arrived with their children and are hanging out with me, and I mean hanging out because Sophie can't go anywhere or do anything and neither can I.
The fact that I only have one week left to endure and then I get to go home to beautiful, mild, sunny Los Angeles, my politically liberal people, Sophie's comfortable adaptive room and my own bed.
All of you.

Someone tell me something funny.

When Grandma and Pop Pop leave the beach house and go home

(nothing was broken, and Sophie actually enjoyed the bouncing --)

Of course

Those of us with children with special needs and those of us with disease ourselves are probably more prone to looking for signs and symbols in casual events. I know that I am, and from the emails and comments I get on this blog, I know that many of you out there are as well.

I have just finished the novel Tinkers by Paul Harding, a slim and beautiful piece of fiction that won the Pulitzer Prize this year. I don't even want to think about the fact that the book is the first novel published by Mr. Harding, because as much as I'm impressed, overwhelmed even, I'm also madly jealous. Mr. Harding completely deserves the accolades, though, as I found the book beautifully written and deeply moving. The book is short and in often dream-like prose, describes the life and thoughts of a man named George Washington Crosby as he lies dying, an old man with his family surrounding him. Here's the beautiful opening passage:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accomodate everyone. The torrents of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.

As George hallucinates, we are led backward in time to his childhood and introduced to his hardscrabble life growing up with a taciturn mother, a "simple" brother and two sisters. We are introduced to the voice of his father who suffers -- and here's the OF COURSE moment for me -- from epilepsy. This epilepsy and the terrible seizures his father endures, when a broom stick is shoved into his mouth so that "his tongue will not be bitten off" define George's life. Ignorant of the disorder and advised by the family physican, George's mother decides to admit her husband to an insane asylum, but when he discovers that this will be his fate, the father, the tinker of the title, runs away from his family and takes a new name. I won't disclose any more but urge you to read this beautiful book if you love Faulknerian prose and intensity.

That one of the main characters had epilepsy was obviously moving to me and shed more light on the history of the disorder. It furthered my understanding of the unique horror of seizures but also reinforced my feeling that despite the incredible advances we've made in treating seizures and educating the culture about them, there is still a darkness to epilepsy that is almost primitive, dramatic enough to make for compelling narrative and rich character study. I'm not sure if there isn't almost a romanticizing of the disorder, but I'm certain that mystery and drama is inherent in epilepsy anyway, and it's part of the reason why I just can't seem to "accept" or be at ease when my own daughter has seizures. My own writing has only begun to parse this out, and after reading this novel, I am galvanized to keep at it, trying to unlock the door that leads down the path and through the dark to another door and perhaps, even, light beyond.

Sunday Rapture

     Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

-- from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets