clickmom

apple stealing time

The day is here.  For me the day I officially pack it up and leave utopia for (blech) new town is the day summer is over.  Since school starts in a few days we are heading to new town today.

I've been doing that 5+ mile hike with sweet pea the past few weeks and I feel like it has been good for me, especially since the majority of the first 3 miles is up hill.  I've been pushing myself to do it in a more HIIT training style and I noticed two things 1. I am sweating more, which according to me is a sign of health and 2. I can go faster and farther during the up hill intensity climbs and 3. My ass muscles are indicating that they have awakened from a 5 year (can't believe how many years since I worked out at the posh club) slumber.  I fully plan on continuing this type of training on a treadmill once we return to (blech) new town, and also I have really been enjoying swimming this summer and I am going to force myself to at least try swimming laps in the Y pool.  One of the lame excuses I had for not swimming at the Y was the idiocy of the Y locker room and I noticed in the one week I went back right before all hell broke loose and the husband was hospitalized in May was that they got larger lockers and reorganized the locker room.  So my lame excuse is now even more lame.

During these 5+ mile walks I take a long route up hill to a state park, loop around the relatively level paved path in the state park and then take a short cut back down the hill to the lake on unpaved roads.  Sometimes I bump into a few regulars at the state park and today I bumped into the two friendly older guys who were taking photos of something in a tree.  It was a porcupine!!  I was so excited, especially since I have only ever seen a living porcupine in the kid section at the bronx zoo and have seen dead ones on the road, but that doesn't count.  It looked right at me and I saw it's long yellow beaver fangs and said "Wow, I have seen enough!"  But totally awesome.  For the record, it was apple tree which I am assuming to mean that apples are getting close enough to ripe for porcupines to eat and I am already thinking about stealing apples from my neighbor's tree in (blech) new town.  At least there is one thing to look forward to.....

looking elsewhere

I remembered that I had a little waterproof digital point and shoot and I managed to dig it out half way through the summer.  I've been swimming around the property borders taking photos. I've been photographing this place for the entire summer, this is one of the things I have going on.  It's like when you are in a really glorious moment and you close your eyes for a minute and try to etch that moment in to your head so that the memory will be there forever.  I can remember times I was so completely overwhelmed with love for the kids and I would do just that. I can not today describe the moment, only that feeling of the deepest love possible. Part of me still can not believe that this dream is going to be over. To this day I can not explain my love for this place, but it has nothing to do with the over the top house the husband built to replace the crumbling toxic mold house that was here when we bought it.  To be honest, I'd be happy as a clam living here all summer in a little camper.  Maybe not so much in the coldest parts of the winter, but all summer it would suit me just fine.  But I am telling myself that one day I will find another place that will be as wonderful and I will feel as at peace in that place and it will not come with the stress of not being able to afford it!  

Yup.  That's the dream.

In the mean time today is my last day here for this summer, maybe my last.  Oh utopia, I will miss you and what I imagined you had to offer me.  Hopefully I will find you somewhere else.

 

strange relief

Only a few more days until I ship this party back to new town for the school year.  Normally I am feeling a huge sense of dread and a desire to cling to every remnant of summer.  Not this summer though. If I had a scrap book of summers this one would go down as the saddest summer ever.  Every other day I spend a great deal of effort trying to shake the tragedy off.  I'm thinking that the husband being in total denial is making everything harder on me than it has to be but it's the only way (not my choice) I'm going through this crisis, so I really can't say for sure.  I asked him some questions because I looked up what to put in an obituary and he got furious.  In some ways it was refreshing because this brain disease has made him this entirely neutral person in general and that is not the person he has been- ever.  But for about 10 good years before being overtaken by general apathy he was the angriest of men.  Now he'll give me this utterly uncharacteristic goofy smile like the whole world is amusing to him and what I want to do is scream "What have to done to my husband? Where is the real husband??" but what I actually do is be a total bitch because I do not know how to be married to a man who isn't angry all of the time.  I used to joke that he had two emotions, downright angry and mildly irritated.  My truth is that they are the only way I know him and at this point anything else terrifies me for many reasons, not the least of which he could die if long drawn out miserable death and I'm left to pick up all the pieces for the kids.

But who am I kidding about "kids."  Matt is gone gone gone, doesn't even send out a text saying he is still alive. Luckily we can tell he is still alive because as gone as he is he is still using Daddy's credit card. (Grumble)  And Evan would love to be gone as soon as possible, then it's just a blink of an eye and Josh will be gone too.  Will I be alone by then or a slave to a totally incapacitated person who barely resembles the dude I married?  Who knows?  

The other day we went to see a movie because I just wanted to get out of the house and that is about all the husband can do these days. The husband started to sing along with the movie soundtrack three different times.  Guys, the dude not only doesn't ever sing but normally doesn't even respond to music. I never even knew he knew the words to songs.  It was crazy. Also, a little embarrassing.  Luckily it was a Tuesday and there were only a few other couples in the theater.

In the mean time, while I appear to be mostly sitting around observing him sleeping on the couch I am actually in a deep state of thought over photography and I feel like I have had a kind of breakthrough about my work and more importantly which work speaks to people.  I live in this safety zone of taking beautiful photos that do not really reflect anything deep and personal.  Even though a photo is technically well done and attractive doesn't have the extra oomph it needs to transcend being that one dimensional (figuratively) image.  I am having trouble explaining it, but there is a another quality, which is intimate and personal that goes into really good work, and I feel like that is not so much of a vague abstract surface thought for me but that I have finally understood what it takes in my deeper consciousness.  I know it sounds like I spent a weekend taking hallucinogenics and tripping in a hut in a south american rain forest to expand my consciousness but trust me, I haven't left New England it's just that my mind is going all the time while the body sits here trapped in the house with you know who. 

James

Oh my good.  I walked sweet pea up to the dam this morning for a dam walk and the irresponsible attack akita owner drove past us just as we got to the top of the dam.  Without even looking directly at her I did not cross over towards the dam and instead headed towards the crumbling bridge to stroll the closed off street on the other side of the bridge.  I was fuming for a while, which somehow made me sad and nostalgic and I started to think about the kids I had in my class the very first year I taught school.  This kids are totally grown now, they're probably in their late 30's and I would love to just get a report on a them. I don't want anything from the kids (now adults) I would like to know they grew up okay.

This morning I was thinking about a boy named James.  He was a big lug of a kid, pleasant enough, had no academic skills, could barely understand a word anyone said and clearly needed to be in a special ed class.  He was one of about 4 or 5 kids in his family and the only kid in the family not in special ed.  His mom really had her hopes pinned on poor James, maybe he was just the sweetest one, but there was no way this kid was going to make it in the general ed population.  James was in my third grade class and he didn't know the alphabet.  I think he had already been held over twice so holding him back was not an option. I knew James hated going down to lunch and used to let him come to the classroom for some extra help.  One day I realized that James could not differentiate between rhyming letters, like B C D or E or A J and K and I asked "James, can't you hear the difference in their names?"  And then James told me he had some kind of problem with fluid in his ears, which his mother was supposed to take him to the doctor to get them drained and never did, so mostly he could not hear me.  

I went and got a sign language book and James finally, at age 11, learned the alphabet by signing the letters.  The poor kid was so proud of himself that one day he walked me to the bus stop so we could keep signing the alphabet.  At the bus stop there was always this tiny shriveled looking older guy who appeared to be homeless except he had a broom and would be sweeping the sidewalk outside the bodega which was right there behind the bus stop.  The sweeping old guy stopped and observed James and me signing and singing the alphabet and he exclaimed something along the lines of "My son knows the alphabet!  I never did get that down!"  I was shocked that this was Big baby faced James' father.  He looked like he could be his great grandfather.  As far as I knew there was no father on the scene.  James didn't even acknowledge the guy.  It was weird.

Anyway, now that James knew the alphabet I figured I could unlock even more for him and I was so very excited. I'm pretty sure that James was excited too.  I was ready to spend every lunch hour with this kid and looking forward to bringing him closer to speed. ( I had reasonable expectations)  Then, not long after James' big breakthrough, one day when I was absent, James showed up at school with a switch blade razor thing that his older no good brother had given him. It turns out that James had been involved in some kind of long standing argument with a kid who would have been James' classmate if James had been in the special ed class where he belonged.  At some point during lunch time recess in the school yard James pulled out the blade and tried to slice this kid's face open. Luckily for the kid he turned his head just in the nick of time and James only sliced open the hood of his jacket.

When I came back to school the next day I got an angry reception in the office where they showed me the sliced open hood. No one had ever mentioned any problem at lunch time to me, so I told them so, and also pointed out how I could not have possibly known about the weapon from my bed at home.  

I never saw James again.  He was declared a threat the other kids and banned from the school.  

something bigger

Have you ever had a thought that seems like an incredible life mystery solving breakthrough and then 8 hours later when trying to review that diamond of a thought think to yourself "HUH??"  In case I'm the only one with his tendency I will share with you what that process is like.

This morning when I was taking sweet pea for a heart healthy 5 mile hike (2.5 up a mountain and 2.5 down the mountain) I was thinking about my big plan before the summer to do a photo series where I only looked up.  Pre-summer and pre-husband health disaster it seemed to make so much sense to look up.  I don't even know why because looking up translates to hopefulness, positivity and good things coming down the pike and even before the hospitalization/diagnose fiasco things were far from "looking up."  Either way, I got up to utopia in drips and drabs between all the doctor appointments and I simply could not bring myself to look up. I mean, it's as if my head no longer tilts backwards. So, I did the opposite and created photos looking down, or out- and in the end the photos I made this summer had nothing to do with direction and everything to do with feelings and that is always the parameter you want to work in as an artist anyway.  From time to time I'd think about looking up but I could never actually bring myself not to simply look up but to look up and really see what there was to see long enough to determine if what I saw in the sky was my emotional truth.  (Yeah, I'm going whole hog artist this days.)  Then it hit me like a strike of lightning.  The whole disaster for the husband spun out of control when the doctors saw that he could not look up- literally, his eyeballs could not move upwards. That is when they ordered the MRI and gave him the PSP diagnosis. Then while walking down a gravelly slope I checked to make sure that my own eyeballs went up (and down-because that's actually more important) and ended up doing an unintentional lung when my foot slipped on some of the down hill road gravel so I had to focus on carefully putting one foot in front of the other instead of being lost in my own little photo world.

This afternoon, after seeing some inspirational clouds I fetched my camera and settled down on the dock to look up. Well, actually, looking up is easy when you're lying on a lounger. It's more like looking forward when your head is already horizontal. Then the sentry came by asking to swim off our dock and I told her about my stupendous revelation about my own inability to lookup and looking up being the beginning of all the husband's problems and she just gave me a blank stare. Now, in fairness to both my ego and the sentry, she did manage to somehow lose both of her hearing aids, so you know, maybe she heard maybe she didn't, but in the end the whole thing sounded less like solving the space time continuum than it did while I was heading down the mountain and also like I need to think more about something bigger, like feeding the hungry or solving the problem of domestic violence.  

That's how it goes folks.  Welcome to my world.

wink wink

There have been rowdy kids on the lake today and right now they're (drunkenly) singing Silent Night.  I'm always down for a good christmas carol off season.  I actually prefer them during the summer.  Earlier today they had a dog out on their boat with them.  The dog's name was Liam and he kept jumping in the water and swimming off so I heard them calling "LIAM!  LIAM! LIAM!!" and it made me think of Boops' kid (named Liam) and how I wish Evan and he had stayed friends even though Boops was in a relationship where she had to choose between friends and boyfriend and opted for the boyfriend.  It was so high school.  Pfffft.

Anyways, I was thinking today about this time (before kids) when I lived in manhattan and I used to take our dogs to a school yard every evening to play ball and socialize.  There was an older guy there with a big fat (could barely walk) Irish setter named MacDuff.  MacDuff was so fat because the owner's sister, who happened to be a nun at a nearby convent (I kid you not!) fed MacDuff milky way bars.  (I kid you not)  MacDuff sure loved those milky way bars.  I think I was thinking about them because the whole barely mobile fat dog/candy bar/nun thing was just so something you'd find in a bizarre novel or cable television show or something.  Also, since finishing up my MFA I'm always thinking about the characters I meet and if they are as visually interesting as they might be on paper.  I wish I could check in and see of this man and his nun sister were still around.  The good news is that the vet found out about the milky way bars and made the owner put a stop to it and MacDuff slimmed down.  He wasn't the brightest dog, and I will never forget the day he found and played keep away with a completely flattened dehydrated rat behind some trash bags in the church yard we had to hang out in after the police started chasing us out of the school yard. Those were some good times. wink wink.  

I miss my friends from the woods today. As much as I normally LOVE summer and never want fall (and school) to come this year I am finding some comfort in the thought of getting back into a routine where I spend more time on my own. I've been feeling just a wee bit trapped in the house these days.

Today though, I left the house super early and drove the 2.5 hours to stepford just to see the old chiro.  Sometimes I need it that bad.  The whole way down I grumbled to myself about how ridiculous it was to go that far for an adjustment and then when I was chatting with the secretary about the husband she told me that her brother in law had died from PSP.  Can you believe it?  I was so happy to find a regular person who had some real life experience with the disease.  Now at least I think I know why the doctors are telling me that the husband "does not present" like he has PSP.  The secretary said that the first signs in her BIL were slurred speech and falling.  But not falling in the dizziness way the husband falls, falling in a sudden surprise quickly go down way.  Also, the husband is not slurring, which was an early symptom for the BIL of the secretary.

Then on the way home I had a nice long chat with the goddess and every time I do talk with her I just feel so good after.  I think if I had to be stuck in a cell with one person for the rest of my life it might be her because we think so much alike we can really practically read each other's minds.  Also, because she makes me feel like a good person.  She is very validating.  Isn't that really what we all need?  Validation? 

hate is a real drain

Hmmm.  I see that earlier in the summer I neglected to tell you that sweet pea was terrorized by an Akita.  I was hiking down the side of the mountain when the Akita ran up to me with the owner far behind and calling out something I couldn't hear.  The humongous dog paused at me, took a glance and then barreled into sweet pea, rolling her onto the ground.  She dog screamed (blood curdling sound- like no other) and tried to run behind trees to hide but the Akita kept pouncing her.  Finally she ran past me and I was able to grab the trailing leash of the Akita as he ran past.  Then the attack Akita's owner finally made her way down the hill, glanced at sweet pea and said "Medium sized female, figures"  still shaking from all the dog screaming and confused at her observation I asked "Your dog has problems with females?" and she responded "Oh no, if it was a male dog there would be blood.'"

What the mother fucking fuck???  This is a place where people take their dogs for hikes!! 

It took hours of my heart to stop beating like crazy.  

Anyway, as if I don't have twenty other things (underestimate) to spend my life worrying about I now spend every morning hike worrying about bumping into the attack killer blood thirsty akita and his completely irresponsible owner.  Once I saw her car parked at the very same woods and waited in mine until she emerged and left.  Once I turned around and left when I saw her at the dam.  Lately I have been going other places just to not bump into them.  And this morning I was somewhere where I just started going in an attempt to not bump into them and she strolled in.  Sweet pea barked once, I saw who it was and quickly grabbed sweet pea's collar and pulled her against my leg, fully prepared to punch that nasty blood thirsty attack akita in the face if it came anywhere near her.  I called to the woman and said "It is completely irresponsible of you to bring a vicious dog you can not control to places where there might be other dogs!" She called back "Control your own dog." which made no sense at all since sweet pea was against my leg and quietly sitting on my left hiking boot when she said that.  I hate them both.

I also hate that the owner has a handicap permit hanging from her windshield.  Rumor has it that at some point the dog pulled over and she broke a leg.  Everyone knows about the vicious akita.  But my feeling is that if she is able to hike down a mountain she can walk the parking lot into the grocery store, right? I hate people who fake being handicapped for better parking spots.

Except in this summer of sadness I barely have the energy to hate someone.  Hate is a real drain.  

 

hiked

The forecast today was for thunderstorms so I got up and out fairly early with sweet pea.  Now, I am still struggling with feeling down and getting the results of the latest round of tests (a PET scan and a DaT scan didn't help) yesterday didn't help since they still haven't committed to a diagnosis.  Now they are thinking probably not a Parkinsonian disease (except can not rule it out) but perhaps a vascular neurodegenerative disease or early onset alzheimer's.  In the end IT ALL SUCKS.  Needless to say I tossed and turned all night having anxiety dreams, one of which involved sweet pea relieving herself in a card board box.  I have no idea what that means.  

Anyway, so after a restless night of tossing and turning I dragged myself out for what I told myself was going to be a quick walk with sweet pea.  Then sweet pea tugged me in the direction of the dam where I usually like to hike around but this summer the army corps of engineers have taken it over and doing some repair work up there and there are keep out signs all over the place.  So instead of exploring up there on the dam we took off over the broken bridge and hiked up our way up the closed off streets to the top of the mountain where there is a state park.  We took a very quick spin around the state park because it had started to rain and then we came back down the mountain on a shorter route over an unpaved road.  It was a really good hike, sweet pea got to roam leashless, and in the end my phone thinks I walked nearly 5 miles, climbed 18 flights of stairs and took 13,444 steps along the way.  I am recognizing the need for some strenuous exercise during this stressful period I am in and can not see the light at the end of tunnel for.  I feel so much better now than I did when I shuffled half heartedly out of the house this morning.

It probably doesn't hurt that the skies turned black and it pouring outside.  I'm waiting for the good thunder and lightning storms to begin.  I am half poised to dash to the porch where I can stay dry and enjoy the show.  Now that it is almost 11 AM it would not be so scandalous if I enjoyed the show with a cocktail, right?  I wish I had some bloody mary mix.  I better put that on my shopping list for tomorrow.

 

even a small broken bone

In my life in general I would really like to be present, but this summer I feel as if I am floating through in a dream on a dream cloud.  Don't get me wrong, I have my moments when I am as low as I can be but what I am feeling is NOT ENGAGED.  I talk to people, I feel but there is also a veil of numb around me at all times.

In some ways I'm thinking "thank good for the numb!"  Maybe that's why people think I'm being "so strong" when the last thing I feel like is "strong."  I would more describe my current state of mind as heavy on the internal whining, unrealistic fantasies of running away (as if I could ever actually run away!! that fantasy is more like my comedy relief because really, I am the last one to shirk a responsibility) and overwhelming desire to hide under the blankets.

The summer after mom died I binge watched Nip Tuck.  This summer I am binge watching Wentworth.  Luckily for me it is four seasons long and I just started a couple of weeks ago.  I try not to watch more than 3 episodes a day just because I know how let down I am going to be when I watch the last episode. It's good to have something to do that I can do sitting on my butt while the husband sleeps what ever is left of his life away.

Today I am feeling angry.  I am angry because he doesn't even try to do anything.  He doesn't try to be actually engaged he doesn't try to make himself move.  He gave up a long time ago, but at least he had that one important thing: work.  And work gave him purpose.  I hardly think that solving 5 easy level sudoku games a day is purpose.  Also, you can not hold me responsible if I punch that iPad into his face after staring at the back of it for hours at a time.  The whole punching thing is just a ploy to get him to express an emotion- even anger would be welcome at this point.  He has two tests next week (both scans) that I am hopeful we will get us some answers.  Throw me a bone universe!!  At least give me a couple of realistic guesses about what the hell is going on in the great expansive void which used to be his intelligence and personality.