What it's like right now....

Having a ruptured max muscle is strange. It isn't as painful as it sounds but I can do nothing that requires it--like get my leg in bed.

Everything takes three times as long and twice as much effort--like sitting down and standing up, walking (especially up and down stairs--but our front stair case has a great banister and with my cane I can do it) and never mind getting on and off a toilet! I know now why handicapped bathrooms have all those bars....

I noticed in the last days how my emotions devolve. At first I was frustrated and disappointed in myself for being so clumsy. Next came self-pity (which hangs around a bit). Then anger and rage at the whole thing. Then (still in this phase) strategising and optimism.

I am one of the most 'glass half full' folks you'll ever meet--so all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well. Optimism is my middle name.

I'm already making lists of what to ask the surgeon--real, practical things. And planning out how to map my 'space' during the first couple of weeks and coming up with ways I can 'be' that make it easier on Bern after the surgery (though it will very hard on her even though I behave as a 'perfect patient). I'll still be a patient! For more weeks that I want to think about yet. It's one day at a time time!

I'm going to focus on what this injury teaches me about myself. I already know this will be a long course in patience and focusing on the moment. Good could come of that.

I can also be guilt free about how much reading I do since I won't be doing much of any of the day to day tasks for a good while!

I joke about how "I'm so incompetent, Bern does most everything around the house." This will teach me how much I actually do--cooking every other dinner, handling trash and recycle, washing clothes, cleaning up after myself--since Bern will have to take that over for a time plus cater to me more than I like being catered too. By being helpless, I might come to realize what good things I do normally.

I will learn to deal with disappointment: I had just started (one session) teaching a course at UConn in Waterbury on "Reading the Gospels side-by-side" and I called today to cancel it. Big disappointment. Bern and I were also planning to see when in October Josh and Cathy and the girls would be up for a visit that now won't happen. And we would surely have gone to NYC to see Tim and Mimi and Ellie a time or two. I don't have a lot of disappointments in my life, so maybe this is a chance to be more aware of and compassionate toward those who do.

(See what I mean about 'glass half full"?)

 

I'm back...actually, I never left!

At 6:30 Saturday Morning, I was coming down our back stairs in near darkness. We were about to go to New Haven to meet John and Sherrie and catch the limo that would take us to Laguarda Airport and our flight to Myrtle Beach, SC where we'd rent a car and go to Oak Island, NC.

About a week before that day, Bela, our Puli began to refuse to go down the back staircase. It annoyed me no end that I'd have to walk to the front staircase and down then walk through the house again to the kitchen. It occurred to me this evening that he was trying to give me a warning.

I was two steps from the bottom when I turned to say something to Bern, who was in the kitchen, and missed the last step. I've done it before, but this time I landed so hard on my right foot that I blew out my right knee.

We called John and Sherry on the way to the ER to tell them we wouldn't make the flight.

The ER (I won't tell you which hospital because I plan to write a letter to their CEO tomorrow) Xrayed my knee, told me there was no 'permanent  damage', gave me a brace and a cane and recommended that I consider going to an orthopedist 'just in case'.

It hurt like hell, but Bern found a Sunday afternoon direct flight to Myrtle Beach from Newburg, NY that was quite cheap, one way (since we had return tickets to NYC). There were issues: how to retrieve our car from Newburg? Was I really ok to travel? But John was happy to come to Myrtle to get us and it was missing just one day. Besides (mostly from adrenaline, as I reflect) I seemed to feel so much better by Saturday evening. So we booked the flight and set off to Newburg on Sunday morning (about 95 miles away). We got on the plane on time and started to be pushed away from the gate when the little machine that pushes planes back broke and damaged the plane. We were assured a mechanic would clear the plane for takeoff...but no mechanic was on duty!!! They unloaded the plane after an hour, still assuring us they just wanted us more comfortable, and handed out free water and sodas. After several 'updates': the mechanic was called...the mechanic was on the way...the mechanic would be there soon, anyone leaving the security zone would not be let back in!--which took up another hour and a half.

Bern finally went to the spokesperson and said something like, 'you know this isn't going to happen. You're just waiting for people to get fed up and leave, so you don't have to compensate them!'

After a phone call up the line they admitted there would be no flight. We'd become friendly with some of the other passengers by that time and they practically cheered Bern.

They offered motel rooms and promised another flight the next day (usually flights to MB were only Sunday and Friday) but after all that my knee was feeling worse than it had the day it happened. So we came home.

Monday I called the Orthopedic Group that had fixed a broken arm for me and said I needed to see someone in the Hamden office that afternoon. I got a 2:15 appointment because I sounded so pitiful, but the truth was, my knee was better again, so I drove myself. Driving was actually more comfortable than riding and my ankle worked fine, though I had to lift my right leg into the car and scoot it to the pedals. That should have been a clue....

They did more X-rays and the doctor came in to tell me I had ruptured my left quad muscle, pulled it totally away from the knee and I would have to have surgery (now you know what my letter to the hospital CEO and ER chief is going to say!)

I'm not bad hobbling on my cane. And there isn't much pain (unless I bend my knee too much) but I have to lift my right foot into bed or onto a foot rest since the Quad muscle does that and it's torn away.

So, that's why I'm back blogging so soon.

I have other tales to tell about my leg--but that will be tomorrow. I'm going to bed (if Bern will lift my right leg up for me). I'm sure she will and Ill push it with my left foot to the middle of the bed....

Puli to Holiday Hill

When we board Bela, it's at Holiday Hill Pet Lodge in Wallingford. If you live in Connecticut and have a dog or cat, GO THERE!

It's family owned and run and they are great. Besides, our Vet, Dr. Matz, is on call for them.

It's 13.5 miles from our house and Bela barked the whole way in spite of the bread and peanut butter treats Bern made. He is a nightmare in the car. He is a nightmare all the time, really, but especially in the car.

He is so protective it drives us crazy. Knocking on our front door will get a 50 pound creature with really sharp teeth leaping up at the window in the door, snarling and acting really dangerous. Which he is.

The folks at Holiday Hill tell me he's a dream there. I saw him lick the young woman who took him away today. He doesn't lick me! She says he walks like a dream, never snaps, is friendly with other dogs....on and on....

It's like when your friends tell you how polite and kind your children are at their house!

I guess going to the pet lodge is a vacation for Bela. He doesn't have to be so aggressive to protect Bern and me. He can relax and just be sweet.

We're the problem for him!!! He has to guard us!!! There, he can chill out.

That's the way I'm thinking, anyway.

I'll be off-blog (is that a term?) until September 24th. But don't stop reading. There are over 1700 posts. Go peruse the past of the Castor Oil Tree. Lots on stuff to ponder.

Be typing again in a week.

Love is abject apology

Love Story, that Eric Seagel novel and movie, said--abjectly wrongly--'love is never saying you're sorry.'

Love is, in my mind, abject apology. Being in love is always admitting you're wrong and apologizing.

Just today, asked three times by a Washington Post reporter, if Donald Trump believed President Obama was born in the USA, Trump did not apologize for his 'birther' nonsense.

Trump is unable to say he's sorry for anything. He cannot apologize to anyone.

In my mind, that makes him incapable of love.

Really.

No kidding.

Do you want a President incapable of love?

Ponder that.

Oak Island

We're flying to Myrtle Beach on Saturday morning and will be on Oak Island, North Carolina by 2, just in time to check into our beach front house almost at the end of Long Beach.

I wish I could tell you how many times I've been there. It started in the late 1970's because Ted and Beje, two of my classmates at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria, knew about it and asked Bern and I to go. We went back with the kids as babies for as long as they would. We even threw in 'taking a friend', but at some point being on an island where nothing much is happening won't make it with teens.

Then 7 or 8 years ago, Mimi called to ask where we 'used to go in North Carolina' and she and
Tim went and when they got back she called to say "We're going every year and you guys are coming with us."

And we have--Labor Day week, for those years. John and Sherry go with us so we need 4 bedroom houses. We put it off two weeks just in case Tim and Mimi would feel good traveling with Ellie. They aren't ready to do that--but next year Ellie and Jack (Sherry's husband who will retire before them) will go with John and Mimi and Tim and Sherry and Bern and me.

There's really 'nothing' there. A water slide and miniature golf course, Food Lion, a couple of places to eat, a killer BBQ place, but not much.

I love it.

A South facing beach which means you aren't looking toward Europe but the Dominican Republic. Which also means the sun comes up on your left and sets on your right, never shining right at you.

You can go into Southport and get seafood off the boat--which we do a time or two.

Oak Island is one of the centers of population of Brown Pelicans. They fly up and down the beach all day in great numbers. Dolphins too--they show up most days.

So, if you look up from your book, you might just see Pelicans and Dolphins.

It is a place that is dear to my heart.

And, since my only connection to this blog is through my desktop computer--which, I won't be taking--the Castor Oil Tree will be silent for a week. But there are 1700 posts, for goodness sake, go back a few years and check them out.

I'll be here tomorrow and Friday, then away to a place I've been too maybe 20 times and that is so important to me I've left instructions that some of my ashes be scattered on Oak Island if I ever die....

West Virginia again...

Back on August 3 I wrote a post about a candidate for sheriff in Berkeley County, WV, who was arrested for heroine possession when he was found unresponsive in his home with a needle in his arm.

Well, another West Virginia law officer twist. A police officer in Wierton, the other side of the state from Berkeley County, has been fired for, get this, NOT shooting a man who had an unloaded gun!

The officer, Steven Mader, came to the home of R.J. Williams, who was waving a handgun and telling Officer Mader, "kill me, now!"

Mader deduced, rightly, Williams wanted 'suicide by cop' and was talking him down when another officer arrived and killed Williams with a shot to the head. Williams' gun was unloaded. Mader was right.

And now he--a trained Marine--has been fired for "endangering the life of another officer". If the gun wasn't loaded, no one was endangered.

Cops get blamed, rightly so, for using too much force.

Apparently, in Weirton,WV, they get fired for not using enough force.....

Go figure....

9/11 sermon

9/11/16 Sermon (St. Andrew’s, Northford)

 

   

        Fifteen years ago today, I was brushing my teeth, listening to Imus in the Morning on my clock radio. (I know, I know…I’m not an Imus kind of guy…I’m a Public Radio kind of guy…but he was, from time to time, dreadfully amusing--accent on 'dreadful'!)

        Imus said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center, so I went to our TV room, upstairs, and turned it on.

        Bern had left early for a dental appointment, so I was alone when the second plane hit the second tower. I had my toothbrush in my mouth and couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Suddenly I heard Bern’s pickup truck skid into the driveway outside in a way I’d never heard before. I listened to her tear open the front door and run up the steps calling my name as I watched, stunned and numb, as two skyscrapers burned.

        Bern ran into the TV room and said, horrified and breathless: “The kids…the kids!!!)

        Suddenly it occurred to me that both our children lived in Brooklyn, just across the river from the World Trade Center and I should be worried and terrified, not stunned and numb.

        It took a couple of hours to reach both Josh and Mimi. Mimi came up out of a subway near 890 Broadway and saw smoke in the sky. It was her first day of work at the American Ballet Theatre. We would talk with her as she walked back to Brooklyn.

        Josh was a law student living with a classmate who is now our daughter in law and mother of three of our granddaughters. He could see the twin towers from the street where they lived. Cathy Chen, his love, had taken a subway to Manhattan just a half-hour before. He was frantic. He couldn’t call her on her cell phone. Her train would have stopped at the World Trade Center exit.

        Josh stayed outside most of the day. Cathy got in touch as she walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and Josh called us. Mimi and Tim, her boyfriend and now husband and parents of our fourth granddaughter, found each other walking home over the Williamsburg Bridge.

        They were all safe. Praise God. But thousands weren’t.

        I went to St. John’s in Waterbury because I expected people might want to talk to someone about all this that was happening. Harriet and Sue, our office folks, and I were watching the news on Harriet’s computer—still total confusion and terror. We watched the buildings fall.

        My assistant at the time wasn’t watching with us. She was doing busy work and calling people about other things. I asked if she would come and watch with us.

        She told me this: “it’s just the chickens coming home to roost.”

        I let out a gasp and said, “you can’t say that Right Now. Maybe, years from now you can connect what our nation has done to this. But not now, not for years. Thousands are dead and dying. You can’t say that!”

        She ignored me and left a short time after. Our friendship and working relationship was over. She left St. John’s a few months later.

 

        But losing a friend and a colleague is nothing at all compared to the sons/daughters, wives/husbands/lovers, fathers/mothers, sisters/brothers lost that awful day. Nothing at all to that pain. Nothing at all.

 

        The pain of 9/11 is beyond calculation. It continues still, 15 years later. And it will never be healed. It may be ‘moved beyond’, but never ‘healed’. Never. Not ever.

 

        But we must not forget this: the lost sheep, the lost coin in today's gospel. We must not lose them.

        A great deal of irrational hatred was spawned by 9/11—hatred of good people, good Muslims, good Americans.

        In 2001, there was a mosque that met in the parish hall of St. John’s in Waterbury. We had shared much with them. We knew them well. We stood by them—they were the lost sheep, isolated by the hatred around them. They were the lost coin, branded because some, claiming to be of their faith, had created terror.

       

        Here is what I believe (and this is ‘just me talkin’) this painful anniversary calls upon you and me to do. We must love, not hate. We must embrace the stranger, not reject them. We must know the value of the ‘lost’ in our midst. We must never let pain turn to hate, fear turn to anger.

        All Americans were attacked that day, not just some of us.

        That is how we give honor to those who died, by refusing to be divided and set against each other.

        We must seek out and save those ‘lost’ because of irrational hatred. We must sweep the floor of those who would polarize and divide us.

        We must remember that we all arrived on these shores lost and rejected and celebrate how diverse we are as a people: racially, ethnically, culturally and spiritually.

        To truly move on from that awful day 15 years ago, we must embrace the diversity that truly makes us strong…that truly makes us One.

        To do less than that is to dishonor those who died that tragic day.

Amen.