Scribble Me This

I wrote a letter this morning.  No, not an email - an actual letter, on paper, with a pen.  My right hand is hurling insults at me for taxing long forgotten muscle fibers to scribe squiggly curly-queues across a blank sheet, but my mind loves how the sentences flow into the ink and onto the paper, effortlessly, elegantly, with a sweet scribbling sound - not the disjointed tappity-tap of uncertain keystrokes that are so easily mislaid and corrected.  Keyboard typing allows the brain to be much more impetuous and less disciplined.  Writing in cursive requires forethought and commitment to both structure and vocabulary.

Do they even teach cursive writing anymore?  Or are kids given instruction in proper thumb typing technique?  I don't recall the mechanics of learning most of the things that I have been taught, but I distinctly recall any subject with which I struggled (and by struggled, I mean I did not receive effusive praise).  My cursive writing was a struggle, and the feedback was most discouraging.  To this day, I cringe with shame each time I attempt to form the little hump between an o and an n or an m, and my lower case r's are always missing their horn.  Upper case K causes me great stress and I still have to pause to decide which direction to make the loop before each g, p, and q.

I recall just how modern I felt when I signed up for a typing class in Junior High School that used electric typewriters with built-in correction tape (which we weren't allowed to use.)  My typing was only marginally better than my cursive, but more than training my fingers, typing without the ability to edit on the fly trained my mind to form complete thoughts in advance of expressing them.  Unfortunately, this lesson remained ensconced in the neural clusters that control my fingers and did not bleed over into the portions of the brain responsible for speech - which still comes out raw and unedited.

My instinct is to feel nostalgic melancholy over the demise of cursive writing and typewriters, as if some elegant social more were being discarded willy-nilly.  As my mind tumble-dries the pros and cons of various methods of communication, some notion inevitably falls into a sentence that begins with "Kids these days..." and normally, I am happy press that idea into the creases.  I like to imagine a little scene, in which my grandchildren see me writing a letter.  They ooh and ahh over my cryptic alphabet and ask me to teach them the secret code, so they can have something to lord over their classmates who use voice recognition to write their essays in a stream of consciousness, only no one writes essays anymore, because expressing a supported opinion might offend someone. The modern essay is only 160 characters long.

Only, I don't have any children, so it is pretty unlikely that I will have any grandchildren, and even less likely that they would catch me writing a letter, because I would probably be teaching them to play Space Invaders...on my Xbox360.

The Presumption of Malfeasance

Earlier this year, I had occasion to spend a few hours in the waiting room of a hospital ER (everything is/was fine; the particulars are not relevant to this narrative).  My phone battery was dead, and not wanting to touch any infected magazines, I amused myself by people watching and eavesdropping.

A rough-cut bearded man with long gray hair wearing loose, greasy overalls approached the triage desk.  He explained that his wife was hurt, and that she had run out of her pain meds and called her doctors and they had said she could have more, so he was here to pick them up.  The ER nurse didn't even bother to roll her eyes - and I imagined this scene was well rehearsed on a daily, if not hourly basis.  She explained that he had to to go to the pharmacy, that prescriptions are not filled from the ER.  He was insistent and became quite agitated.  A doctor and a security guard eventually helped the man understand the difference between the ER and the Pharmacy, and he lumbered off to another building, but returned empty-handed and even more insistent.  I have since learned the term, Code Grey.

At no point did I hesitate to think that this man might be genuine, that he might simply be confused and overwhelmed by a complicated system in which he clearly does not walk often, nor gracefully.  I had no doubt that his wife had some sort of condition, and would eagerly concede that it involves some sort of pain, but I had absolute perfect faith in my assumption that this man was just trying to manipulate the legal drug trade to get another fix.

Yesterday, Kevin was on the receiving end of such emotional generosity, as he was turned away from 3 pharmacies who would not honor my prescription for narcotic pain-killers.  My imagination dressed him in greasy overalls as he explained that his wife was struck by a car in San Jose, but we live up here, and I have a broken leg, so can't make the drive down from Shingletown, all the while becoming increasingly agitated by the silent judgments being caste upon him by the pharmacists and physicians, whose greed and negligence created the problem in the first place.

Unfortunately, this lesson in karma is going to be lost, because the convenience of thinking the worst of people is irresistible.  It takes so much less imagination and emotional investment to drop to the lowest rung on the ladder of explanations. Dismissing a person as a junkie is quick, efficient, tidy, effortless. It takes more energy to imagine the complexity of a real-life situation, to consider the interplay of cause-and-effect over time that leads to addiction and disassociation.  To think like this requires empathy, and engaging with empathy puts one at risk for feeling unpleasant emotions.  And no one wants to do that...

Which is exactly why pain-killers are essential.

Chapter 49 - prologue

Thus far, my life can be divided into several well-defined chapters.  Most chapters are a consequence of choice.  They begin with deliberation, emotion, contemplation then a decision to take action - foolish or otherwise.  Such chapters unfold like adventures, the obstacles faced with willing anticipation.  Personal growth is the stated goal of these chapters.

Some chapters are a consequence of fate.  They begin with a crash-bang-boom out-of- nowhere gust of wind that sets life on a new trajectory in an unexpected instant.  Such chapters unfold like misfortunes, the tribulations begrudgingly overcome.  Personal growth is an inevitable outcome of these chapters.

Chapter 49 begins with a crash-bang-boom.  Literally.  On November 22nd, 2016, one day after my birthday, I was struck by a car while crossing the street at San Jose Airport.  My husband and I were returning from a highly emotional trip to Mexico, where we visited the crash-bang-boom staircase that launched a similar chapter 13 years ago.  Now, we can sit around and compare x-rays of the miraculous hardware that holds our respective leg-bones together.

It is usually quite obvious when the intentional chapters have concluded.  There is typically some sort of filing: you graduate and file for a diploma; or you file a change of address card as the moving van pulls away; or you file for unemployment because you got 'made redundant'. Again.  At any rate something happens that serves as a clear demarcation that the next chapter has begun.

With crash-bang-boom chapters, the endings are not always discernible.  Damage occurs in an instant, but healing is progressive, epic, often eternal.  You cannot file for a certificate of Completion of Grieving.  There is no ceremony to mark the moment you are 'over it', because that moment is fragile and fleeting and impermanent.  Even faded scars invoke the memory of pain and mended bones ache on cold rainy nights.  These chapters continue to write themselves indefinitely, a subtext that underlies the rest of the manuscript.

But Chapter 49 will have a distinct, unavoidable, expiration date of an ending.  Chapter 49 will be exactly 365 days.  Not that I expect to be 'over it', or back to 'normal', or fully 'healed', but because a far more daunting chapter begins at midnight on November 21st 2017.  I am not afraid to admit that I am afraid of what's to come.  And so I am going to take the time to savor this chapter, to indulge in myself, to invest in my body, to nourish my spirit, to gather courage, to build strength, to read, to write, and most of all, to dream.*



*and by that, I mean the kind of dreams where you imagine an amazing version of your self - like maybe you are successful novelist, living in a tower on a beach-front passion-fruit plantation -  not the kind of dreams where you are limping down the street wearing nothing but a wet towel and a homeless guy throws a giant meat fork at you...