Sat - August 11, 2007
The Five-Year Plan
1972-2007, divided by
five
Not as famous as The Brown
Sisters, nor as consistent as The Arrow of
Time, but my humble effort predates
them both.
Posted at 08:03 PM
Sun - July 8, 2007
Think I’m gonna be sad...
although she never drove me mad,
she’s going away
Cancer appears to be dancing all around me this
past year, and lately it’s doing a fandango on an old sweetheart—we
watched the television coverage of Nixon’s re-election together, and she
said "If there was justice in the world he'd be struck by lightning right about
now." If there was justice in the world V would not be dreadfully ill this
summer. A parent apart, I have never endured the death of anyone I loved, and
this gathering tragedy still does not seem quite real to me: denial trumps and
muffles emotion somehow. It is as though sorrow hangs frozen and suspended on
the steep slope of the near future, poised to roar down upon me—upon all
of us who have loved her—in an avalanche of grief.
Posted at 06:40 PM
Mon - November 20, 2006
Thu - September 28, 2006
Peggy, we hardly knew ye
Chronicle of a grief unforeseen: Cue
"Fire and Rain"
Pictured above is Peggy Adams, a friend of my youth. I saw her last a few days before my twentieth birthday, stopping in at her home in Arcata CA, a small college town on California's remote northern coast. We spoke once or twice by telephone after that, the last time in 1990, when Nick and I attempted to lure her to our graduating cohort's 20-year reunion. She was in San Diego then, and begged off: she had a romantic tryst in Manhattan scheduled for the same weekend. We were unable to provide a persuasive alternative, and although that was the best of the reunions I've attended since graduation, I can't say that it would have been the better path for her.
And yet, and yet. I'd long taken it for granted that one day we'd get together to reminisce about auld times. A recent inquiry from Nick set me a-Googling without much hope ("Peggy Adams" yielded almost 36,000 hits), but to my surprise, and then dismay, the relevant entry appeared on the first screen. Alas, it was what amounted to an obituary: a piece marking her death in September 2002 of a brain tumor.
This is a tardy and inadequate tribute. I knew her in high school; she was whip-smart, funny, and cute as a bug. I will not say that a month has not gone by since then that I haven't thought of her, but she has probably flickered into my attention at least once in a quarter.
That beautiful, witty mind, all gone. As Nick said last night, rather mournfully, "I didn't feel a disturbance in the Force four years ago." Nor, of course, did I. I wish to god, though, that I hadn't trusted to chance these latter years to make contact again.
She was very fine. Four years after her death my grief is fresh.
Posted at 07:55 PM
Mon - April 24, 2006
Monday Niece Blogging
Suddenly realizing that nephews &
nieces are not an indefinitely renewable resource...
Had my youngest niece to visit earlier in the month, and found her company delightful. Looking forward to taking her elder brother hiking this summer in the company of Trailboss Bob, AKA Deathmarch Williams. Cherished niece and indulgent uncle are pictured here at the Chabot Planetarium in Oakland. A good time was had by all.
Posted at 09:57 PM
Sat - October 22, 2005
I return
They call it, what...“The triumph
of hope over experience”...? Yes, that’s it.
And why not? I return, hitched again, from a
Mexican honeymoon. Pix here.
Posted at 04:56 PM
Wed - July 6, 2005
Born under a bad star
Coincidence? Yeah, but
still...
On this date many years ago, a Saturday, it was,
I flickered into consciousness from sleep as—ah, Nabokov described it in a
similar context in
Ada—"the
tiger of happiness fairly leaped into being." I woke up, entwined and ungarbed,
with a young woman whom I'd been stalking (as she would likely put it today) for
over a quarter of my young life. I don't think that the morning assembly of
reality has ever rocketed up such a vertical gradient of joy, and I'm astonished
looking back that my nose didn't bleed. It all ended badly about a dozen years
later, and while I don't hold any truck with astrology (we Leos aren't that
credulous), I have to scratch my head at the thought that this radiant morning
was also G.W. Bush's twenty-eighth birthday. Clearly doom and grief were in the
air, all unnoticed then...
Posted at 07:15 PM
Fri - May 20, 2005
A false alarm
Sinner in the hands of a friendly
HMO
I should preface this account by mentioning that
when it comes to health issues I’m your basic old-school ignore-the
symptom-and-it-will-go-away kinda guy, and that this approach has largely worked
for me these many decades past. It also dovetails nicely with kindly young Dr.
Sphinx, my "personal physician" at the Oakland CaesarCare* Hospital, whose
approach seems to be "ignore the patient and he will go away." Dr. Sphinx
appears to feel that she’s letting down the side if I remain on the
premises for more than three minutes, and over the years I’ve taken the
message, and try not to linger where I’m not wanted.
So there I was earlier this month, lashed to my workstation, massaging a dreary Powerpoint that I didn’t particularly want to work on so that a manager who didn’t want to deliver it could bore to tears an audience that didn’t want to see it, when a small invisible man, or perhaps a large invisible child, stood on my chest. This was not particularly alarming, because the same thing has happened at odd intervals—every few months or so—for the past three or four years. I was a bit nonplussed the first time it happened, but when the symptoms went away after five minutes I concluded that it was pretty small beans for a cardiac episode, shrugged, and went about my business. This time the sensation (not unlike inadvertently swallowing a large bolus of air, producing the impression of an intractable mass lodged just beneath the sternum) persisted for much longer than usual. Googling "heart attack" and "symptoms" alarmed me a bit, particularly since past episodes (though not this one) had been accompanied by an ache in the left arm, and at the 25-minute mark I caved and called the legendary CaesarCare Advice Nurse for reassurance. The CCAN heard me out and urged me to find the nearest emergency room (I had suggested that I might take the subway back to Oakland). Then she changed her mind and insisted that I call 911. I promised to do this and rang off.
I had no intention of calling 911, which seemed an absolutely lurid course of action [insert low-bandwidth QuickTime movie of RC on gurney as San Francisco paramedic pounds on his, RC’s, bare chest screaming "No! No, goddammit! Stay with me, you son of a bitch!"], but I was starting to get a little spooked at this point even though, about 35 minutes after the onset, the pressure was beginning to abate. "What harm could it do to have this checked?" thought I. "A couple of hours at the clinic, the rest of the day off, a nice tall frosty to unwind once I get home..."
I explained the situation to the Big Dog’s gopher, who owes me many a favor, and she kindly provided me with a car and driver and instructions to take me to CaesarCare’s San Francisco facility. I thought it a bit odd when the driver got on the freeway, but assumed he was taking a roundabout route to avoid downtown traffic, and established only belatedly that he was absentmindedly taking me to the South San Francisco CaesarCare (South SF is a separate municipality), his own accustomed hospital.
I’ve got to say that over the years I’ve gone to the Oakland CaesarCare and to a couple of suburban CaesarCares, and that the clientele in these latter sylvan settings seem to suffer from less dramatic complaints, whereas in gritty Oakland one tends to share the waiting room with members whose medical conditions appear to involve Second Amendment issues. When I said the magic words “chest pains” I was whisked away into the ward with only a brief pause for paperwork (HMO Type: "You say this occurred at work ?" RC: "Well yes, but not in the sense of 'workplace injury,' of course." HMOT [grinning wolfishly]: "How little you know."), tipped onto a bed, stripped to the waist and wired up like a telephone switchboard to a battery of recondite chirping and warbling instruments. This was about noon, and there I remained, oh my brothers and only friends, for full six hundred and forty minutes, far from home but, it must be said, well attended by two shifts of brisk, friendly and reasonably attentive medical personnel. Many of them, it is true, addressed me with the bright condescension one might use in speaking to a simpleton or a child, but this appears to be part of the package in much of the developed world ("Why is it when you lose your health the entire medical profession takes it as axiomatic you've also lost your mind?" laments Michael Gambon in Dennis Potter’s masterpiece The Singing Detective), and I found it preferable to Dr. Sphinx’s chilly get-lost professionalism. For much of the day I was left alone behind my arras, with periodic interruptions for tests and suchlike. Fortunately I had my little satellite radio with me (no reception, but with five hours of stored "Bob Edwards Show" programming on it) and 200-odd unread pages of Hadrian VII (quite possibly the best novel about the papacy by a certifiably paranoid repressed homosexual English ex-seminarian published between 1900 and 1910) to spare me the horror of my own company (I really must get my amazon.com referral arrangement up and running).
Four EKGs. Four drawings of blood to look for the enzymatic debris of a cardiac calamity. A chest x-ray (did you know that x-rays have gone digital? Oh). The polite refusal, at about six o’clock, to allow me to disconnect the assorted clip-one wires that attached me to the monitoring apparatus (I gather that interruption of the signals would have been misinterpreted as a cessation of vital signs, causing klaxons to sound, emergency generators to kick on and the ceiling sprinklers to engage) so that I could go in search of a urinal, providing instead a vessel about the size and shape of a plastic bottle of Penn State thirtyweight, except that this one was somewhat disconcertingly formed of what appeared to be heavy-gauge cardboard. A microwaved meal, no worse than airline food ("But a lot costlier, I’ll bet," quipped Lina later). A full half hour’s consultation, halfway through the ordeal, with a physician who opined that the symptoms as described were also consistent with some known side effects of my old friend the gastric reflux yadayada. A certain amount of begging and grovelling before the swing shift at last reluctantly consented to release me at the close of the last round of tests. A bandage malfunction as I got dressed, spraying improbable volumes of blood around my clothing (dark trousers, white shirt) so that I looked rather worse coming out than I had going in. Total cost to me: zip. Total cost to employer if, as I suspect, they attempt to ding the organization under worker’s comp: I shudder to think. Bottom line: heart does not look unsound; a "treadmill test" conducted a few days later was passed with flying colors.
I feel rather guilty about taking up a bed for half a day, and if I had it to do over again I’d as soon have skipped calling the advice nurse in the first place, but it’s reassuring in retrospect to know that the past few years of twinges apparently haven’t presaged my early death from a massive coronary, as in nervous moments I had permitted myself now and again to wonder, and the level of TLC CaesarCare members receive out in the hinterlands is a revelation. Fortunately urban life has its other compensations.
*CaesarCare, the well-known HMO
So there I was earlier this month, lashed to my workstation, massaging a dreary Powerpoint that I didn’t particularly want to work on so that a manager who didn’t want to deliver it could bore to tears an audience that didn’t want to see it, when a small invisible man, or perhaps a large invisible child, stood on my chest. This was not particularly alarming, because the same thing has happened at odd intervals—every few months or so—for the past three or four years. I was a bit nonplussed the first time it happened, but when the symptoms went away after five minutes I concluded that it was pretty small beans for a cardiac episode, shrugged, and went about my business. This time the sensation (not unlike inadvertently swallowing a large bolus of air, producing the impression of an intractable mass lodged just beneath the sternum) persisted for much longer than usual. Googling "heart attack" and "symptoms" alarmed me a bit, particularly since past episodes (though not this one) had been accompanied by an ache in the left arm, and at the 25-minute mark I caved and called the legendary CaesarCare Advice Nurse for reassurance. The CCAN heard me out and urged me to find the nearest emergency room (I had suggested that I might take the subway back to Oakland). Then she changed her mind and insisted that I call 911. I promised to do this and rang off.
I had no intention of calling 911, which seemed an absolutely lurid course of action [insert low-bandwidth QuickTime movie of RC on gurney as San Francisco paramedic pounds on his, RC’s, bare chest screaming "No! No, goddammit! Stay with me, you son of a bitch!"], but I was starting to get a little spooked at this point even though, about 35 minutes after the onset, the pressure was beginning to abate. "What harm could it do to have this checked?" thought I. "A couple of hours at the clinic, the rest of the day off, a nice tall frosty to unwind once I get home..."
I explained the situation to the Big Dog’s gopher, who owes me many a favor, and she kindly provided me with a car and driver and instructions to take me to CaesarCare’s San Francisco facility. I thought it a bit odd when the driver got on the freeway, but assumed he was taking a roundabout route to avoid downtown traffic, and established only belatedly that he was absentmindedly taking me to the South San Francisco CaesarCare (South SF is a separate municipality), his own accustomed hospital.
I’ve got to say that over the years I’ve gone to the Oakland CaesarCare and to a couple of suburban CaesarCares, and that the clientele in these latter sylvan settings seem to suffer from less dramatic complaints, whereas in gritty Oakland one tends to share the waiting room with members whose medical conditions appear to involve Second Amendment issues. When I said the magic words “chest pains” I was whisked away into the ward with only a brief pause for paperwork (HMO Type: "You say this occurred at work ?" RC: "Well yes, but not in the sense of 'workplace injury,' of course." HMOT [grinning wolfishly]: "How little you know."), tipped onto a bed, stripped to the waist and wired up like a telephone switchboard to a battery of recondite chirping and warbling instruments. This was about noon, and there I remained, oh my brothers and only friends, for full six hundred and forty minutes, far from home but, it must be said, well attended by two shifts of brisk, friendly and reasonably attentive medical personnel. Many of them, it is true, addressed me with the bright condescension one might use in speaking to a simpleton or a child, but this appears to be part of the package in much of the developed world ("Why is it when you lose your health the entire medical profession takes it as axiomatic you've also lost your mind?" laments Michael Gambon in Dennis Potter’s masterpiece The Singing Detective), and I found it preferable to Dr. Sphinx’s chilly get-lost professionalism. For much of the day I was left alone behind my arras, with periodic interruptions for tests and suchlike. Fortunately I had my little satellite radio with me (no reception, but with five hours of stored "Bob Edwards Show" programming on it) and 200-odd unread pages of Hadrian VII (quite possibly the best novel about the papacy by a certifiably paranoid repressed homosexual English ex-seminarian published between 1900 and 1910) to spare me the horror of my own company (I really must get my amazon.com referral arrangement up and running).
Four EKGs. Four drawings of blood to look for the enzymatic debris of a cardiac calamity. A chest x-ray (did you know that x-rays have gone digital? Oh). The polite refusal, at about six o’clock, to allow me to disconnect the assorted clip-one wires that attached me to the monitoring apparatus (I gather that interruption of the signals would have been misinterpreted as a cessation of vital signs, causing klaxons to sound, emergency generators to kick on and the ceiling sprinklers to engage) so that I could go in search of a urinal, providing instead a vessel about the size and shape of a plastic bottle of Penn State thirtyweight, except that this one was somewhat disconcertingly formed of what appeared to be heavy-gauge cardboard. A microwaved meal, no worse than airline food ("But a lot costlier, I’ll bet," quipped Lina later). A full half hour’s consultation, halfway through the ordeal, with a physician who opined that the symptoms as described were also consistent with some known side effects of my old friend the gastric reflux yadayada. A certain amount of begging and grovelling before the swing shift at last reluctantly consented to release me at the close of the last round of tests. A bandage malfunction as I got dressed, spraying improbable volumes of blood around my clothing (dark trousers, white shirt) so that I looked rather worse coming out than I had going in. Total cost to me: zip. Total cost to employer if, as I suspect, they attempt to ding the organization under worker’s comp: I shudder to think. Bottom line: heart does not look unsound; a "treadmill test" conducted a few days later was passed with flying colors.
I feel rather guilty about taking up a bed for half a day, and if I had it to do over again I’d as soon have skipped calling the advice nurse in the first place, but it’s reassuring in retrospect to know that the past few years of twinges apparently haven’t presaged my early death from a massive coronary, as in nervous moments I had permitted myself now and again to wonder, and the level of TLC CaesarCare members receive out in the hinterlands is a revelation. Fortunately urban life has its other compensations.
*CaesarCare, the well-known HMO
Posted at 05:15 PM
Tue - March 29, 2005
Recovered!
The moving sphincter, having shit, moves
on...
One has not been absent from these precincts
lately out of apathy, but out of infirmity: a moderate case of suspected
salmonella laid me very, very low for a fortnight. Today I feel recovered, and
very pleased to be there. Carry on.
Posted at 06:55 PM
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Published On: Aug 11, 2007 08:03 PM
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Published On: Aug 11, 2007 08:03 PM