A morning with pain and love

Awakened by pain this morning - overdid it with the right shoulder last night.  It's okay now, and that got me thinking what "living in the moment" really is.  It means, at least in part, that we don't get gripped by our concepts.  For instance, Oh crap, woke up early hurting, this is going to be a lousy day.  Add to that preferences:  Don't want to hurt!  Reality is that you can only do so much about the body you have right now.  Another reality: pain is always moving and changing if you let it.  I put my heating-pad cape on, it helped.  Moving around loosened things up, too.

And here's another thing loosened this morning.  Got notified by my phone that my grandson had played on Words With Friends, from 50 miles away.  It was 8 a.m. and my idea of this morning was to get in the shower about now.  Then stretch and meditate, and so on.  But I love this new additional contact with him.  First thing he did was post me on chat, Tom played a 74 point word last night!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know, I wrote, pure evil.  Tom can't help being smart sometimes.

In case I momentarily forget, love is what matters, connection matters.  Not goals and schedules.  It's singing in the choir, it's tea with a comfortable friend, it's letting the cat lie on your shoulder for a while if she needs to.

An interesting thing about playing Words with Otto is that it's just fun to play, and I don't care if I win - and in fact, he just won one of our games by a hair (he always wants to play at least two at once).  Now, the other people I play with don't hesitate to beat me by multiple hundreds of points.  That tends to make a person nervous.  No, it doesn't.  My mind, it's my own reaction.  Maybe I should turn it around and say, Let's see if I can get Laurie to beat me by 500 points.  That's what I like, a goal I can reasonably meet.

Two pairs of shoes

Terms for Google to grab: affluence - women's shoes - Nike - choice - Zen - Red Box

This morning my right shoe felt funny. This is the same shoe I wore yesterday, the woefully overpriced Nike's the physical therapists encouraged me to get fitted for. Mostly the only shoes I wear now, except - uh-oh - last week I had used the black Avia's instead.

I do not have the kind of shoe dilemma I once had when I would be getting dressed to go to work or out to dinner, and so often didn't have quite the right shoe. Or did have the right shoe and it was boring or getting worn or scuffed. Now I have only the two pair, and it's sort of dumb luck that I even have the Avia's left over from my high-consumption days.

Right away I wondered whether I had transferred the heel lift from the Avia to today's Nike. I sat down, took the right shoe off, pryed out the custom orthotic: aha! There was no heel lift. Limp to the bedroom, me and the cat, where the Avia's sit primly against the wall. Yes, the heel lift was still in them. That's the kind of trouble you get in when you have more than one pair of shoes., I think. Then I realize that all over the world there are people who have no shoes! Then there are people who fashion sandals out of old rubber tires, and win marathons in them. Many of us here in America, where the TVs shout commercials about shoe organizers, can't imagine that life.

I don't have many shoes to organize these days, not much to choose from. This seems like a very good thing to me. When I look at the clothes in my closet, I often wish I had even less to choose from. When I am not going anywhere special I will wear the same old things day after day, well-worn yoga pants (nothing is as comfortable), a gray tee-shirt (I have several), and a flannel shirt. I am sadly leaving go of my old flannel shirt, a navy blue plaid with a pink stripe through it, because I've gone through the right elbow, just wore the fabric tissue thin. The new one, which I found at the thrift store, is breaking in nicely. Sometimes I consider becoming a Zen monk or nun in some official way that would entail shaving my head and wearing the same old robe day after day, but I feel it would make some of my friends nervous. I am already weird enough.

I am already weird. Comfort matters to me much more than how I might be evaluated by people I hardly know, people at church or in the checkout line or at the voting place I will go to later today. That's another thing people all over the world cannot count on - being able to vote without being shot, or put on a list. Having the vote count honestly. I know a woman who hates our country, and would tell you right away that we've had times and places where voting wasn't honest. Yes, okay. We're human. Maybe you can never get away from that. But it's the exception here.

I don't like the frontier land-grab aspect of this country either. All those damn shoes in a dusty organizer under the bed. Sometimes we're so selfish it's disgusting. But it's where I happen to live. I am happy to live in a time and place where I can be weird. Amazed to sit in a room that is just my room to play in, with a computer that tells me I am not spelling the word "weird" right, again; and fixes it for me.

But having All This means having choice. Too much choice - it's like too much food, another American problem, and one very few people have ever had in the course of history. In regard to choice, I find a new phenomenon called Red Box interesting. These tall red kiosks stand inside McDonald's and the grocery stores. They hold just a few DVD's of the most popular movies, 200 max. This compares to a service we use, Netflix, that has many thousands - too much choice, it becomes a problem. Part of the success of Red Box is that it offers so few choices, you can stop and push a button and shazam! you're out of there. It also costs only $1 for one night. (I don't know what the late charge is. I do know that returning DVD's on time is a chore I was not very good at, back when we used to get them from the library.)

I get up in the morning now and face very little choice in many ways, but it is consumer goods I am talking about today. Clothes. It is late fall here, and I almost certainly want to wear my new-old flannel shirt, and the only tee-shirt color it goes with is gray. Since it is sunny and not yet slushy and snowy, I will stick with the Nike's, which have a summer sort of mesh construction. Changing shoes means something goes wrong, like the heel lift, and there you are, wasting time writing a blog about it.

I often wonder what I do write about here. It seems to me all I have to offer is the truth of my life, and that is very simple. Until I hear from them, I don't know I am talking to friends in the Phillipines and Scotland and New Orleans and Portland and across town. Maybe I will hear from Helen, the teenager in South Africa who wrote me about my Princess story. Sometimes it truly seems like enough just to hear from people, to know I am read. That connecting feels very good. Feels like a spiritual matter. Some people say it's the only thing that counts.

Only connect

Today was a big day - my first visit to the kidney doctor since my labs - and my general health - went downhill. It was a satisfying visit; he cares about my comfort, and wants to keep me off dialysis as long as possible, so we are on the same page. On the other hand, he feels it is time to visit a vascular surgeon and get an access installed, so I am ready to go on dialysis whenever necessary - a moment that no one can predict. Sometimes you get more reality than you want.

Afterward Tom drove me to the lab to get a blood draw. Among other things, the kidney doc needs to verify my ferritin level so he can get some EPO shipped to me, to address the anemia that follows from kidney failure. EPO will give me more red blood cells, without which life is not worth living, or even possible.

It was a very good blood draw, an experienced tech with a sense of humor. I told her she should be doing musical comedy. We agreed, we'd all like to be paid for clowning around.

Coming out, I found the reception area empty except for one man, the sort of morbidly obese person you might see on TV but seldom out and about. He was leaning back in his chair catching his breath. I noticed that his gray hair was in a little pony tail, and he had a pleasant face. I smiled at him. In the back of my manicy brain was the thought that people usually look away from anybody with a disfigurement or handicap.

He smiled back, and surprised me by asking, "How are you doing?"

I was hobbling along, the neuropathy worse with every step. I try to concentrate on standing up straight and walking normally, but the pain in my feet and legs has a mind of its own.

"About as good as you," I replied, laughing. After all, there we were, getting blood draws in the hospital lab because we are both ill.

He laughed too. He had a nice laugh.

Slowly walking on out, I felt how warming it was, that moment of connection between strangers. Illness tends to isolate us. It's something to remember when someone is sick or dying. Sometimes we stall, we can't think of how to "help" someone. Speaking from my experience with cancer, deaths in the family, handicaps, I'd say, Don't try to "help." You can't heal us or find some magical way to make us happy. All you can do is give a little comfort or pleasure, and a sign that you have empathy. A heartfelt card is nice; a visit is great. The best gift is when someone is willing to be with you and acknowledge your truth without drama. Acknowledge that you are still a person; fat, crippled, dying, I am still me.

Here is the quote I took my title from today.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect...

--E.M. Forster, Howards End