Last week before school starts

Behold the now-obligatory (but smaller than usual) picture of my neck. The incision is healing, still a red line but nothing exciting about it anymore. Perhaps this can be the last picture, or the last for a while. In my disastrous tele-health appointment with my surgeon this week, he told me that the scar will continue to improve for about six months; then, after that, it is what it is, no more changes. I must remember to photograph my neck on January 23rd. 

The tele-health appointment was disastrous because I did not follow directions. They said to sign on at least 15 minutes early, which I did not do because I have had tele-health appointments with my regular doctor and they have gone fine. But of course every medical establishment has to use a different system. When I signed on, the software that UCHealth uses informed me that I would need to download the latest version of Chrome. I don't like Chrome. I use Firefox, or Microsoft Edge in a pinch. But Chrome was required, so I had to download it, and when I finally got it downloaded I had to sign in to the UCHealth website again and OF COURSE I didn't know my password because it's saved in Firefox. And so I had to tell it that I had forgotten my password and it texted me a code to use to reset my password, and my surgeon's nurse phoned me to ask where the heck I was, and finally, just as I managed to sign on to the appointment -- and saw that there was no one else there but me -- my surgeon phoned me and said I have another appointment in a few minutes, let's just do a phone call.

It was sad.

I managed to tell him a little about all the problems I've been having, but he kind of brushed them off -- because there wasn't any time to talk about them. He did put in an order to have my calcium checked, so I'll do that this week. I continue to be worried about that. I was very good about taking calcium this week, three and sometimes four times a day, but any time I missed a dose by a few hours I'd start to get shaky, which surely isn't good. Like right now -- I'm having kind of an odd Sunday, and I forgot all about calcium, so I just took my first dose a little while ago, at 2:30 pm -- and my hands are shaking so much it's hard to type. Sigh. I will persevere.

OK, I've now had two doses of calcium. Maybe I'm feeling better.

It feels like it's been a busy week, but I guess not that much actually happened. I did take the twins to a movie, finally -- there were very few choices, so we saw The Suicide Squad, which although extraordinarily violent was also a lot of fun. I liked it and so did they. Well, maybe Teen A more than Teen B. I loved Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. We also finally made it to the Flatirons Crossing mall on Saturday night -- that was disappointing, because we discovered that the candy store, toy store, Orange Julius, and Starbucks had all closed, more victims of the virus, I assume. But at least we went, ate at the food court, wandered around. In addition, we had various appointments scattered throughout the week. 

Still, I feel as though much of the week's busy-ness went on in my head. I'll try to explain.

First -- not really first, but it's a place to start -- the New Yorker arrived, as it does almost every week, and I glanced at it. There were a few things I wanted to read, but the main thought I had when I looked at it was, "Man, I've got to get caught up with New Yorkers!" So I went through the pile on the kitchen counter and I found David Sedaris' nice piece on his father's last days, in the August 9th issue. I was struck by his comment about what life is like since Biden was elected. No longer do we all have "second jobs" monitoring everything Trump does:

When the new president speaks, I feel the way I do on a plane when the pilot announces that after reaching our cruising altitude he will head due north, or take a left at Lake Erie. You don't need to tell me about your job, I always think. Just, you know, do it.

I do try to read the New York Times every day anyway, just so I can do well on the weekly quiz on Fridays, but the urgency isn't there. Something terrible could have happened, I remind myself, but another part of me says, yeah, it's OK, Biden will handle it reasonably well and you can find out about it later.

Then I picked up the July 26th issue and looked at it -- I'd started to read it at some point, because I'd seen the cartoon about Maui, but I obviously hadn't gotten very far, because here was a profile I hadn't seen of Ishmael Reed. He's an author I know by reputation more than by actually reading him, but I thought it was nice he's still alive and in the New Yorker, so I started reading the profile. His most famous book, Mumbo Jumbo, has been vaguely on my "to-read" list for years, and after reading this profile I'm more interested, because I learned that it is "a detective novel set in Jazz Age Harlem" -- so now I want to know if it has anything to do with my favorite novel from the Harlem Renaissance, The Conjure-Man Dies. Anyway, I'm reading along, and there was the line I'd been looking for, though I didn't know it:

...He followed "Necromancers" with the launch of The Yardbird Reader, a magazine he ran with the late poet Al Young...

The late poet Al Young. Oh, no.

The late poet Al Young was my writing teacher. For exactly one quarter, my last quarter at UC Berkeley, the spring of 1982, and I've never forgotten him. How could I? He was such a wonderful guy. I loved his writing -- I own some of his books, though not, I see, anything very recent. He was, is, and will always be on a short list of people I admire and adore. The world was a better place with him in it. And now he's gone. In fact, has been gone since April, when he died at the age of 81 (and before that was disabled from a stroke he suffered in 2019, which means he probably spent all of 2020 isolated in a nursing home, and oh, I don't want to think about it). I always put his birthday on my calendar each year -- his birthday was the same as my Uncle Bob's, May 31st -- and this year I celebrated it not knowing he was gone. How could I have missed his obituary? It was in the New York Times, which I still read every day. Obviously not very closely.

I don't know why I even care that much. He was 81, he wasn't going to live forever. But I felt the way you do when you find out an old friend or family member has died -- I'm never going to see them again, I had things I wanted to say to them that I can never say now. 

I ran into Al Young exactly once after that 1982 class ended. It was 1988, I was living in Menlo Park but about to move to Michigan to start graduate school. I ran into him somewhere in Palo Alto, I think California Avenue. Anyway, he recognized and remembered me, which is pretty amazing. He asked me if I was writing and I said a little bit but not much. He encouraged me to write more. I suppose that's what writing teachers do, encourage their students to write. I told him I was headed for Ann Arbor and he was interested because he had attended UofM. He told me not to let them turn me into an academic writer. Am I making that up? Did he really say that? I don't know. Anyway, I followed his advice, whether or not he actually gave it.

And that's it. I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen him since 1988. But apparently I wanted to see him again, wanted to talk to him about something. I'm not sure about what. Too late now.

The singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith died this week, that's another artist who has been important to me. I have some of her CDs -- I love Once in a Very Blue Moon and Other Voices, Other Rooms. I associate her with a few different friends who also liked her, or didn't, including an old boyfriend who introduced me to her. I thought about contacting him through LinkedIn, but decided against it. It's been too weird dealing with the old boyfriend who contacted me.

But I never met Nanci Griffith in real life, and I didn't have anything I needed to say to her. I just registered, sadly, that she was gone -- not very old, either, only 68. Seven years older than me, exactly -- her birthday was July 6th, the day after mine.

Someone else who was born on July 6th was Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist, who was also on my mind a lot this week because I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna, for my book group. I don't love Barbara Kingsolver, but I was very interested to read this book, because it was partly about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and I do love Frida Kahlo -- despite how cliched it is to love her now. I loved Frida Kahlo when I was in COLLEGE, 40 years ago, when it was hard to find prints of her pictures. I had a print of this picture, "Me and My Parrots," because that was pretty much the only one I could find in the local poster shop. What I wanted was a copy of "What the Water Gave Me," which is one of her most famous pictures, but it wasn't available.

I gave this print away at some point -- we didn't have room for it and I decided I didn't need to keep it. Maybe I sold it at a garage sale. I don't remember. I just know I don't have it anymore.

Anyway, back to The Lacuna. I don't really recommend the book, because it is 507 pages long and could easily have been half that. It would have been so much better! Barbara Kingsolver really needed an editor for this one, but I think she's probably too famous now to take any guff from editors who try to make her throw out all her long-windedness, so, oh well. But I did enjoy the parts about Frida. Kingsolver even says, in the extra material in the back of the book, that she didn't intend to write about Frida originally, but Frida kept pushing her way in. You can see that, in the book -- whenever Frida shows up, the book perks up. Unfortunately, she's missing from much of the second half.

My book group was supposed to meet tomorrow, but there's been a flurry of messages back and forth today about rescheduling. Nobody's finished the book but me. Karen noted that she's also "not sure I'll finish," which means she isn't enjoying it. I get it. I had to make one of my little notes where I divide the book's pages among a series of days, i.e., Monday: read pp. 1-40; Tuesday: read pp. 41-80, etc., to force myself to read it. (I just made myself a similar schedule for the biography of Grant that I plan to begin reading tonight.) And in the end I got on a roll and just powered through, so I finished Friday night, two days early.

While slogging through The Lacuna, I also started reading another book, Right After the Weather by Carol Anshaw, and how I happened to do that is a story in itself. On Wednesday afternoon, Teen B and I went to get him a pre-Picture Day haircut (Picture Day is this coming week, on Tuesday), and afterwards we went to Dollar Tree, which is a few storefronts away. I hadn't been in a dollar store in years, and I was fascinated by it. I bought a fake Barbie outfit, we found some miniature bottles of sparkling cider (came back three days later and bought more), and then I saw a messy display of books. "What are these weird books?" I asked. And then I saw this one. I didn't recognize the title, only the author, Carol Anshaw. She's a good writer. I read her novel Seven Moves a long time ago, liked it a lot, and then more recently, Carry The One, didn't like it as much but still liked it. In the back of my mind I planned to read her other books eventually, probably get them from the library. This book was published in 2019, so obviously her newest. And here it was at a dollar store. I felt terrible for Anshaw. The original price was on the book -- $27. It was at the dollar store so I paid $1 for it. A nice clean hardback. So sad.

Anyway, I started reading Right After the Weather as soon as I got home and then began using it as a carrot to get The Lacuna finished: you can read a few chapters of the Anshaw book when you finish your daily dose of Kingsolver. When I read the last page of The Lacuna on Friday night I made myself turn off my light and go to sleep, because it was late, but as soon as I woke up on Saturday morning I went back to Right After the Weather. And, weirdly, there was a connection. Frida Kahlo makes an appearance in two places, which I think are meant to be connected, although it isn't made explicit: someone dresses up as her for Halloween and the main character helps her best friend repaint her kitchen to mimic Kahlo's, later in the book. 

I would recommend the Anshaw book: it isn't perfect, kind of slow in the beginning and with an odd ending, but the middle is compelling, and the book as a whole is very thoughtful. I will probably stew over it for a while -- it raises many interesting questions. One funny thing: it's set in late 2016/early 2017, in other words, when Trump was elected and took office, and that reminded me of the Sedaris quote above, about how nice it is now not to have to pay such close attention to the news. I thought Anshaw's characters paid too little attention, but I realize that she didn't want to overwhelm the novel with politics (Kingsolver, on the other hand, is always happy to let that happen). Oh, but there's one amusing line near the end of the Anshaw book, as the main character tries to think of ways to avoid going to Scotland with her girlfriend who she doesn't really like that much:

She doesn't know what to hope for. A bittersweet breakup in April? A quarantine put on all the Hebrides, Inner and Outer, on account of some species-jumping sheep pathogen?

The book was published in 2019 and of course at the end of that year came that species-jumping virus we all know and love.

There was another bit in the book that stuck with me, although I doubt it was supposed to hit me the way it did. It's spoken by one of the bad guys in the book, talking about the older woman he lives with.

There are levels, a lot of people don't see that. You can live around here and still have self-respect, work a job. Have a good lawsuit going. But there are also people out here existing on a lower level. They no longer make any food. They eat tamales cold from the can. Or dinner can be Hershey's Kisses...

How people "make food" is actually a theme in the book, though it took me a while to see it. The main character's paranoid ex-husband who lives with her orders weird things to eat from Amazon, gets frozen dinners delivered and heats them up. Another character (the one she doesn't want to go to Scotland with) buys those meal kits. And the main character's ex-but-still-way-too-much-involved-girlfriend is a chef.

Anyway, the reason that quote resonated for me is that I have almost stopped making food. I am not sure when I last made dinner. First I was recovering from surgery, and then it was too hot to turn on the oven. I don't know what my excuse was for not cooking on the stovetop. I'm still feeding the twins, don't get me wrong, but I'm not making dinner. One thing we've eaten a lot of recently is ham & cheese sandwiches: oat bread, mayo, pre-sliced honey ham, pre-sliced havarti cheese. Teen B likes his bread toasted; Teen A, untoasted. The last two days I made them scrambled eggs for lunch. Teen B likes his with cheese; Teen A, without. Tonight they had sandwiches for brunch and microwaved chicken nuggets for dinner. Teen B likes his nuggets with barbecue sauce; Teen A, Thousand Island dressing. Oh, and in between those two "meals" they had a smoothie (frozen banana, frozen strawberries, frozen raspberries, frozen peaches, vanilla ice cream, orange juice, iced tea, milk, all whizzed together in the blender -- quite a tasty combo, I had some too). We've also been eating out a lot. Friday night we went to Chili's; Saturday night it was the food court at the mall.

I have been swearing -- to them, to myself -- that this will all change when school starts, i.e., in four days. I hope this is true. I don't want to be someone who never makes food, even though I so desperately hate to cook. And besides, they haven't been eating any vegetables (except what gets snuck into their restaurant meals). It's so sad -- I buy veggies at the grocery store, put them in the crisper, and then later transfer them to the compost bin. No chewing and swallowing interrupts that cycle. This is all going to stop. In four days. We'll see.

Well, this is a plenty long post, so I will stop here and go for a walk. I still need to eat something approximating dinner (maybe a sandwich?) and take my third calcium dose. Tomorrow, Monday, we don't have anything planned (since the book group is postponed), but we should do something. We still haven't gone swimming -- maybe that? Tuesday we have to go to school to turn in forms and get their pictures taken. Wednesday I have to go in for a blood test, and Thursday they start back to school. Their schedules were posted Friday. It's really happening. They'll have to wear masks, but they'll be in the building, with seven periods (not three at a time, like horrible last year).

And I'll be all alone in the house for seven hours a day. More than that, closer to eight hours, because of the time it takes to ride the bus and walk home from the new distant bus stop. What will I do with all that time? I hope I'll use it to write, and work on the files, and plan and cook dinner each night. We shall see.