Category Archives: Health

Living on the Edge (14)

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Sunday morning my fingers do their weird, anxious thing. I am lying in bed. I’ve been dozing off and on, aware once at dawn and then again at seven, but I don’t surface until late, maybe eight o’clock. I stretch, the epitome of luxurious awakening, and my arms are over my head when I hear this odd sound and stop to listen. It is my fingers moving, making little scratchy sounds, fingernails against the sheet. This is my fourth weekend off, I calculate, make a point of emphasizing to myself. And so my fourth cherished Sunday when I can sink into the quiet of my neighborhood later in the day. I sit on the patio and let myself write. But it is not yet enough, not yet perhaps a long enough string of days, not enough to stop the restless circling of my fingertips. I am too quick to run out of patience with the cats, too quick to snap or yell at them. I do it with humans, too, but I am more subtle. I am not wild and loud like when I was young–sometimes people don’t even know I’ve snapped at them by my reckoning. But I feel it inside, this stingy tightness, this prickly impatience that has no true base in the moment but screams instead to that other angry person years ago who stole things from me. I am a person wound too tight. It is not the first time. Some days I am afraid I won’t know how to fix it, won’t find a way to be less anxious again. It wasn’t that long ago, I think.

Even as I write a part of me knows I will figure it out. I will find a way back to who I want to be. I wrote about this before and laughed when I read it later. I guess it was a kind of Freudian slip. “I want to find my way back,” I wrote, “to the woman who would drink her first cup of teach in the courtyard garden,” and let herself lean back in the chair, warm ceramic cup cradled in both hands, solid heat nestled against her sternum. The first cup of “teach,” indeed. How funny. I want to find my way back to the woman who knew how to stop like that every morning, the woman that knew how to drop down into her peace. I don’t want to be the woman whose mind in wrestling with work, teaching or otherwise, thoughts that assault that first hour of the day. Worse yet, sometimes I am the person whose first cup of tea sits forgotten beside me on the table, cold because I am too focused on the computer in my lap.  I want to find my way back to that other woman who knew how to stop or at least pause every morning.  And then a kinder voice emerges–a small miracle–and I remind myself I have already come a long way. “Voy a llegar,” I say, and I laugh in the now dark. I am going to arrive.

Too Hard on Yourself? (9)

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My friend’s voice on the phone is quiet. “I wonder if you might be too hard on yourself?” she says. I’ve just admitted my recent sloth and debauchery, my recurring impossible transition from the end of the academic year to the summer. Her voice is all whispery and kind, as though I am a horse who might spook, the words an answer to prayer, I think later. (I have asked for gentle lessons.) I know I am too hard on myself. I gauge my efforts harshly, often fall short. But something in her voice makes me think my friend is talking instead about what I ask of myself, what gets put on the list to work toward to begin with. How do we decide where to aim? How do we know if we’re asking too much of ourselves? I plan to take it slow, this putting back on of my list of expectations. I want to let myself slip into it like a well worn sweater, or soft shoes, nicely broken in. But I am thinking I may not want to don the list again in its entirety. Maybe I will cut off the sleeves, wear new orange socks. Maybe I’ll just go to Stein Mart and poke around a bit.

Writing Prompt (7)

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Write about what stirs you. What stirs me? I like making big pots of soup. I stir them with a wooden spoon. But when I want to taste them I dig a big metal soupspoon out of the drawer. The texture and the flavor of the wood interfere. I like stirring soup. It stirs me to smell it, to imagine sitting down to a big bowl of it, the hot ceramic cradled against my belly when I lean back on the couch or the bed, my kitchen towel napkin draped across my torso as though I’m preparing to eat lobster. What stirs me? Taste, color, texture, the exquisite beauty of our natural world, the craggy rocks on our mountains on a clear day that make you want to rub your hand across them, feel the ragged edges of the ridge. I am stirred by little things. My father gave me this, I think. I can be stirred to awe, stirred to pity, stirred to anger, excitement, gratitude. I am stirred when people take the time to reassure me, stirred by their kindness in that act, their generosity. I am stirred by injustice, by empathy. I’ve always rooted for the underdog. I hated the roadrunner cartoons when I was a little girl. I always felt bad for the coyote.

Not Off Kilter (4)

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One year ago today was a Monday, the first true day I counted for living in our new old trailer home. We moved on Saturday, and Sunday I spent hours at Avenida Ortega, cleaning, digging up palm starts, making piles, the last odds and ends of our life there. I remember sitting outside in the courtyard on Monday morning, surrounded by most of my belongings. The palo verde was the only life here then besides me and the cats. I caught movement to my right. A verdin with his wash of yellow landed in the tree. I remember thinking it was a good omen. I felt off kilter. Our first night, I walked out to the street to smoke a cigarette. I was determined not to bring that here, not to begin that way in our new home. When I came back, I’d locked myself out. I tried to break in but couldn’t. I hunted around the piles of things, managed to find the phone book, called a locksmith. Then I sat in the moonlight on one of the bar stools and waited. The courtyard was filled with eery mountains of things, ghostlike in the half light. I wasn’t afraid. I dozed off, jerked awake again. The cats must have thought I was crazy. Why didn’t I come to bed? Today instead of phantom towers, the courtyard has three trees in big pots, two bougainvillea and a honeysuckle in the earth. Today, I have a house key hidden. Today, I do yoga underneath the stars. I lie on the mat and look up at the outlines of blossoms on the palo verde, silhouettes against the dark sky. I’m not off kilter anymore. But the cats still think I’m crazy.

The Layers of You (3)

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Today I can feel myself getting better. I hope I can sleep tonight. I don’t think I’ve had the stomach flu since I was a child. I have a hard time believing it now, even after three nights of little sleep. And being who I am, I can’t help but wonder. Why did I get sick? How did I catch it? I think of the blackberries I bought at the farmer’s market. They looked dark and succulent. I was disappointed when I pulled them out of the narrow cardboard flat where they nestled with the two baskets of strawberries. What a gyp, I thought, seeing how shallow their container was, a third of the depth of the box, if that. I ate one unwashed. It was sour. They were all sour. But did I allow in that snatch of thought, that maybe they were unclean? Is that why I got sick, because I didn’t banish the thought? Is that how I got sick, from someone with this crummy flu packing blackberries? Or was I vulnerable because of my intense day of writing last week with Laurie, over six hours of writing and reading our work, and the stunning voicemail waiting for me when I got home that evening? Or even better, did I get sick to somehow mark my transition to the next thing? My spring break felt like a passage in itself, this accidental holiday filled with big days. Semana Santa. Passover. The lunar eclipse. April 18th. Then our big writing day embedded in the heart of it. Was having the flu a way to mark the changes, the ending of my big week, to begin again anew? A cleansing, both the figurative and the literal, the universe’s odd sense of humor? Because there is something unmistakable about recovering from even so brief an illness. A sense of returning to yourself, the adding on of layers that were stripped away, until you feel like yourself again but not quite the same, as though the layers were placed back at different angles, or as if they stretched or shrank in the peeling off process. Today I wriggle in my new skin. I hope tomorrow I wake up fully me.

Sunday Air (51)

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close-up of a sunflower in sunlight

I roll over on the bed, extend my arms out, flex my hands. It’s Sunday morning, and I relish lounging in bed, indulging in that sweet place between sleeping and wakefulness, soft dreamy half thoughts floating through me. I stretch again, spread my fingers wide. When I arch my back, I see the tiny crescent of the waning moon framed in the clerestory window. I love to see the moon in daylight, and this feels like the perfect beginning. I get out of bed, and I see the sun has already reached the courtyard. The two tallest of the volunteer sunflowers are alive in their namesake’s light. My movement at the window startles doves from the ground. More doves take flight when I open the door, and Boo charges out. I remember it’s the one day of grace from the construction site across our little road. I scurry back inside to do what I revel in doing once each week—I open the louvered windows at the front of the house. The Sunday quiet is the only thing that enters. I stand for long moments looking out the open window in the gentle air.

The Woman in the Waiting Room (50)

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I am not so naive or so bigoted to believe all doctors are assholes or all nurses are saints. I know both groups have their fair share of both. But when my stepfather was in the hospital, it was the doctors who were the challenge and the nurses who helped to get us through. It was the nurses and the other family members of patients on the floor. There is something that happens between strangers sitting together in a room when each of you faces losing a loved one. I remember sitting in the little alcove on the eastern side of the oncology floor in the Newport Beach hospital. And I remember a short blonde-haired woman whose husband was dying. I remember seeing recognition when our eyes would meet across the small space. I think we came to love each other a little bit sitting in that room together.

I was sitting there one afternoon, slouched against the blue fabric chairs, when I heard her voice and looked up. She was standing in the hallway, head tilted up toward the oncologist. “You want to understand?” his voice now, loud against the white tiles. “Then you go back ten years,” he growled at her, “and go to medical school.” I don’t remember what came next, only the way the bottom fell out of me for her in that terrible moment. I knew it had already been almost impossible to remain upright, to keep limbs and torso stitched together, and here she was bludgeoned now by his mean, defensive arrogance. I wanted to scream at him on her behalf. I may very well have gone after him, spoken my mind. I was 24 and had a habit of doing so. But I hope I went to her instead. I hope I offered comfort when she needed it. And I hope my eyes spoke those same volumes to hers whenever we met in the alcove or passed each other in the hallway. Brave, kind stranger—que le vaya bien.