Quotidian Update 71 x 10 to the fifth power.2.ai

Seven years ago I brought Bear home to meet Dusty T. Dog and Mindy. Dusty wasn’t sure, Mindy was good with it, and I was doubtful. I had never known a Great Pyrenees — which we thought Bear was though mixed with something. I asked people here on WP for advice and talked to people. What would an older lady do with a 150 pound dog? How was that going to work? Of course, Bear didn’t grow up to be 150 pounds of white fluff, only 70 and it’s worked amazingly well. My life would have been diminished greatly without that big white dog.

She surprises me every day. A couple days ago we took a short evening walk in the hood. When it was time to turn back I said, “Let’s go home,” and she turned around. We got to our gate, Bear stopped and nudged the latch with her nose. That might not seem like much but we very very very very seldom go out the front door and front gate. If I get ice out of the freezer and she wants a cube she looks at the tray and then at me and at the tray again. If she wants another rawhide pencil and I don’t have any, I can say, “I don’t have any more, Bear,” and I swear she shrugs. I get up in the morning and go to the kitchen to make coffee. She sits on her haunches and wraps her forelegs around my legs in a hug. If I want her to walk beside me where I can keep her under some control (not much; she’s immense and powerful) I tell her, “Stay with me, Bear,” and she does. I don’t bark “Heel!” I just ask. She understands and is amenable 95% of the time and if she isn’t, she has a reason. I can teach Teddy to do things — he loves that — but I never taught Bear anything except “sit” and “down.” Every other thing she’s learned she’s learned from observation. Everyone has a good dog (which is the first wonder of the world ❤️) and she is mine. Well, one of them.

What have I learned from her? A lot of things, but one of them is not to worry about the appearance of my back yard. Now Bear is seven and I am 70 and WTF???

I spent a whole day yesterday framing a painting. It was probably the most difficult framing project I’ve undertaken and I’m not totally satisfied with it, but it’s probably as good as it’s going to get.

Rio Grande in Late Fall

This painting is difficult to photograph. It looks “like” itself in a photo but it doesn’t have the power the painting itself actually has. Most people first look at the painting and think it is a lake and the orange band marks the bank of the shore, but it’s all water. The motion of water in a river is very complicated even moreso when the river isn’t in spring rush but in late autumn low flow. It’s interesting to watch. Anything under the surface — boulders, sticks, weeds — can shift the current a little bit for a moment. The water nearer the viewer is actually flowing more evenly and slowly; the water above the orange line is deeper and faster. It is also reflecting the colors of the trees and bushes along the far bank where the trees are. In the foreground you can see the water flowing back on itself a little bit. Whatever way a particular bit of water is “facing” will be reflected for the moment. This was really fun to paint. I started with the dark blue (lapis ultramarine) and did that part of the painting with my fingers. 💙

I skipped the hearings last night. I’m just kind of done for now. NOW I want something to happen. I don’t know what, but something. Snow?

Good Grief Charlie Brown

Yesterday I spent a little time looking for a trip. I’ve been — with a couple short jaunts up to Colorado Springs — in the San Luis Valley for the past three years. Yeah. One reason, of course, has been Covid. The other money. Boarding dogs isn’t cheap. A lot of people choose not to have pets because they want the freedom to travel. I guess I’ve done the converse.

In the process of looking for a trip, I did, of course, find a couple. Then I read the fine print and some of it concerned me. Even thought they are well-organized group tours for “seniors,” they have this:

Tour pacing & mobility

• You will walk for at least 2 hours daily across moderately uneven terrain, including paved roads and unpaved trails, with some hills and stairs.
• Travelers should be healthy enough to participate in all included walks without assistance. Adding optional excursions may increase the total amount of walking on your tour.
• You should feel comfortable managing your own baggage at times, as well as getting in and out of boats and ferries.
• Go Ahead Tours and the Tour Director who accompanies your group are unable to provide special, individual mobility assistance to travelers on tour. The responsibility of the Tour Director is to ensure the group as a whole enjoys a relaxing and informative journey, and he or she cannot be relied upon to provide ongoing, individualized assistance to any one traveler.
• If you have any mobility concerns or physical restrictions, please contact our Customer Experience Team.
  

I thought about this for a while. Well, I’m still thinking about it. My walking problems aren’t a matter of endurance. I can’t define exactly what they are. I think it’s the reality that artificial joints just don’t work like the joints we’re born with and yeah, I have a messed up knee which adds to awkwardness when I’m tired. Getting in and out of a tour bus wouldn’t be easy for me. Walking on uneven terrain? That’s fine.

When my first hip went south almost 20 years ago now, I grieved that loss as if it were a person because it was a person. The person was me, the person I’d always been, the person through whose eyes I saw the world. The abilities taken for granted (and enjoyed by this person!) defined a big part of my identity. “I’m not sure who I am, but I can go four miles in an hour in the mountains.” Nothing else worked. My romances didn’t work. I never got tenure so I worked as a lecturer at three schools, one of which, true, gave me three year contracts. No big publisher wanted my books or stories but dammit! I could go four miles an hour in the mountains. And then, suddenly — it was pretty sudden — I was doing 12 miles with a kid from one of my classes, a collegiate athlete, a body-builder who hiked with me every weekend for his aerobic training — and I was in excruciating pain several times, and had to stop. “I don’t know what’s going on,” I said to him.

“It’s OK. We all get injured.” He sat down on a log and took a drink from his water bottle. “Stretch for a while. We can rest.”

I put a hand out to balance beside a tree and did a few hamstring stretches until I felt better, a little loser in my hip joint. Back in those days, I got massages regularly and my masseuse had noticed there was no space in my hip joint. She diagnosed it a year before it began to hurt and three years before my (incompetent) doc sent me for a hip X-ray.

All my life until then — from childhood — if something went wrong at home, at school, anywhere, I could go for a good run and regain my balance. All that running led to my being a very fast young girl, and my coach wanted to send me to Olympic Training Camp when I was 13 or 14.

Running was my ONE thing, and suddenly it was gone forever.

We think of grief as the emotion we feel when we lose people (and animals) we care about, but we can also grieve parts of ourselves, abilities, independence, beauty, potential. I don’t know that we “recover” from grief; I think we just learn to live with the loss. There’s a lot of stuff about “recovery” and the “lessons we learn” all that — yesterday I read in one of the little literary anthologies published in the Valley every spring how humans learn from pain. The story — an anecdote about losing a beloved dog — said that animals don’t have this ability (I disagree…) and it’s the ability humans have to learn from pain that makes grief redemptive. I’m not sure grief is exactly “redemptive,” but continuing one’s life after a major loss is definitely another fucking growth opportunity.

As a positive person (positive meaning concerned with the possible) I looked around for help in redefining myself and existence without the ONE THING I could do. Direction was everywhere. Like the night I got the X-ray results (finally) in 2006 I leashed my sainted Lily T. Wolf and we went out in the darkness to walk up the road. The road that passed my house in Descanso, California, didn’t have much traffic, especially at night, so it was a quiet walk. The stars shone in the moonless sky. At the end of the road was a pasture with several red horses. As we approached their fence I heard them all move toward me. I walked over to the fence and found five soft horse noses reaching for me. I’d walked down this road many times and the horses had never lifted their heads.

I stroked their noses and any other parts of their heads and necks I could reach. They leaned over the fence to touch noses with Lily. As I walked along the fence, they followed me. In the next pasture, the horses there did the same thing. I must have petted ten horses that night.

The next day, on my way home from school, I bought a big bag of carrots and returned to the horses. They all gathered at the fence and I noticed that ALL of them were old, arthritic, with swollen joints. Many walked slowly favoring a sore leg. One horse couldn’t chew the carrot so I chewed it for her and gave it to her on the palm of my hand. I stayed with the horses for a long time and cried. A few months later the horses were gone. Glue? Dog food? I don’t know, but for me the time they spent with me had been a miracle.

I am 100% convinced they knew everything that was going on inside my heart and saw me as a fellow traveler.

I decided then that everything I would need to cope with this major loss of self would appear somehow. I just had to be open to it. I was about to enter a new world with a yet undiscovered self.

When you get a hip prosthesis the advertising promises all kinds of things. You see guys skiing moguls on them, running on them, all kinds of things which are indeed possible. But there is the question the ads don’t tell you about which is, “Should you?” The answer there is that depends on how often you are willing to go under the knife. One of the things I’ve learned from this is that the surgery is nothing. You’re knocked out. Rehab is long, and, though it’s rewarding because the pain is gone, there are always ancillary annoyances like kicking opioid pain killers and picking up your life where it was before. After my second hip (I have prostheses in both hips) I got cross country skis which proved to be the ONE true compensation for not running, but I don’t have any friends who X-country ski so I’m limited where I can go. I’m willing to go anywhere by myself, but I’m also not foolish. I know I can get hurt or stuck or godnose, so… Anyway, I don’t know anyone who wants to do it as much as I do. It’s always something. Like no snow…. Grrrrrrr…

I haven’t gotten over the loss. I doubt I ever will and reading “fine print” like that I read last night about mobility? The bottom line is I’m still walking and I have a big white dog who understands me and a little black dog who is the realization of joie de vivre when we’re out there doing whatever it is we do on that gravel road in the magnificent light, surrounded by mountains.

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The featured photo is the pasture and two of the red horses. You can see how one of them is standing (back horse) with her leg lifted off the ground. The mountain is Cuyamaca Peak. The photo is taken from the exact spot where Lily and I spent time with the red horses. The hills behind the horses burned in the Cedar Fire a couple years before I took this photo.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2022/04/10/rdp-sunday-grief/

Two Years and It Still Works!

Two years ago about now I was getting a bleary-eyed view of the “theater” in which my hip would be replaced. It was amazing. Star Trekky, beautiful. They were putting tubes into me and onto me and chatting. “What do you think? That’s the operating table.”

“THAT???”

It wasn’t a table at all. It was more like a comfy-vice that would hold me in the ideal position for Dr. Ed to work his hip-replacement magic while making it easy for the anesthetist to keep me under. I loved my doctor. In another reality, we would have been friends.

When I woke up, I was in a recovery room and Lois, my friend, was there — I think. In some respects this is fuzzier in my mind than is the actual surgery. I can’t explain that, other than to say I think we know what’s going on even when we’re anesthetized. We just don’t feel the pain. I have a distinct memory of it going well, laughter and a faint memory of the sound of a bone saw. But, I could be confusing this with some episode of House.

The whole thing was pretty great, actually. Afterward was challenging for a while, but here I am today. Sure, I walk with a limp and am somewhat lopsided, but it’s not Dr. Ed’s fault.

When I was wheeled into my room I was met by a tiny version of Polar Bear Yeti T. Dog whom I dubbed “Little Bear” and soon Little Bear had a dragon I named Francis (after the hospital) to keep her company. I do not know what it is about these effigies of animals that delights humans, but they made me feel better.

The nurses in the orthopedic wing were amazing. Apparently they liked me because they sent me a card with notes thanking me for being so easy to help and fun to be around. “I wish every patient were like you.” Seriously? NOT hurting any more should put EVERYONE in a good mood. One of the best things about joint replacement surgery is that immediately after your joint doesn’t hurt any more.

For the past two years — since the surgery — I — who usually wakes up between 8 and 8:30 — on May 7 I wake up at 5:30 ready to go. I suppose it’s some kind of physical commemoration of that day.

~~~

I promised my Scarlet Emperor Bean, Li Ho, the opportunity to share one of his poems. I think this is a good moment for that. It’s a different kind of poem than that written by his contemporaries, Li Bai and Tu Fu. This poem struck me really hard when I first read it back in my 20s when I knew I was a writer but I didn’t know what I had to say or would have to say. At that time I just wrote. I “raged at the wall” as I “carved my questions to Heaven.” The final image is still, to me, a profound paradox. Without the wall, there would be nothing on which to carve the questions and yet the wall is a barrier.

Don’t Go Out of that Door

Heaven is dark
Earth is secret,
The nine-headed monster eats our souls,
Frosts and snows snap our bones.
Incited dogs snarl, sniff around us,
And lick their paws, partial to the smell of the virtuous,
‘Till the end of all afflictions, when God sends his chariot to fetch us,
And the sword starred with jewels and the yoke of yellow gold.

I straddle my horse, but there is no way back,
On the lake which swamped Li-yang the waves are huge as mountains

Deadly dragons stare at me, jostle the metal wheels,
Lions and chimaeras spit from slavering mouths.
Pao Chiao parted the ferns and forever closed his eyes,
Yen Hui at twenty-nine was white at the temples;
Not that Yen Hui had thinning blood,
Nor that Pao Chiao had offended heaven.
Heaven dreaded the time when teeth would rend and gnaw them,
For this and no other reason made it so.

Plain though it is, I fear that still you doubt me.
Witness the man who raged at the wall as he carved his questions to Heaven!

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/rdp-thursday-limp/

Another Small Step

Today I took Bear out for a ramble where we’ve been going lately — along one side of the golf course, along the main ditch, into the Big Empty. To one side nice houses and yards; to the other an empty field beloved by deer. I’ve seen this thing before. If anything EVER happens to make Monte Vista a place where people want to live, the field will be gone, but meantime it’s a borderland between town and farm.

We got to our turnaround point (a mile) and turned around. We’d gone only a few yard when a large black dog came barreling through the neighborhood to the wire fence along the ditch bank. There was nothing to keep him on “his” side, so we turned around. This meant going home ‘the long way.’

Most important, the long way isn’t a lot longer than our original plan, just 2/3 of a mile or so. I just have our walks timed so I can do other things (like langlauf) if I want to. We walked along a small ditch on a muddy path to a familiar road where we’ve often walked to watch the deer hang out under the tank cars. Neither the tank cars nor the deer are there.

When we were done, I had taken the longest walk I’ve taken in years. The big deal about it is that it was no big deal. I didn’t even think about the distance. Nothing hurt. We walked through snow, mud and on nice dirt pathways. It is the first time in a long, long, long time that walking has been easy, has been transportation, has been a way out of a bad situation. It also didn’t take a lot longer than the walk I’d set out to do.

The featured photo is from about a year ago, Dusty, me, Bear and my cane walking on part of the route I walked today. I notice (besides no cane) my recently operated left leg is longer now, closer to the length of my right leg than it was before my surgery.

I know this doesn’t seem like much of a story, but if you’ve had a joint go bad and you’ve had it replaced, there are (I think) stages in recovery and I think I just crossed another one, an important one. It bodes well for the coming summer, I think, and I’m happy.

That Time of Year

Today I took down my 2018 calendar and put up my 2019 calendar. I’m ready for a new year. Before I tossed the old calendar into my recycling bin, I looked through it to see the main events.

At the end of March, my sweet Australian Shepherd, Mindy T. Dog, suffered a severe stroke and I had to have her put down. It was difficult to feel sad because she was suffering incredibly. She was a miraculous creature who had the magical ability to make people feel better just by looking at her. She moved out here with me from California and loved every bit of the journey and her new home.

• 

  Dusty and Mindy head out to Colorado

• 

  Mindy getting to know Colorado

• 

  Mindy’s beautiful smile

The main event of the year was my hip replacement surgery. Most of the year was made up of activities leading to and away from that moment — physical therapy, slow, painful dog walks and rides on the Bike-to-Nowhere.

I tracked distance and calories on my wall calendar most of the year. Not because I cared so much about either, but because I wanted to see that I was getting somewhere. On the calendar are the days after my surgery when I walked in the neighborhood with my walker and then with my cane.

Lois came down to get me and take me to Colorado Springs then spent 10 days making sure I was “viable” 😀

The dogs were kenneled because there was no way I could take them on walks with me. I missed them, but I knew they were being loved and I could visit them.

Bear and Dusty being loved on by Lori on my first visit to them after my surgery.

I’ve recently realized (duh!) that I don’t have to track all this on my calendar or do the math. I’ve used a couple of apps for years to track my walks, but a couple weeks ago, I realized I can use one for my bike rides, too, so now it all goes on Map My Walk. I still need to see that I’m getting somewhere, even when there isn’t anywhere to go, really, but it doesn’t matter. Just GOING without pain is absolutely wonderful. Walking without thinking about it is absolutely wonderful. Parking FAR from the front door of the store is absolutely wonderful. Regaining my balance without fear of falling, absolutely wonderful.

December, 2018

I’ve written often about the hip replacement because I know that a lot of people in my age group (I call that 50 to 80, since I had my first hip surgery when I was 54 and my neighbor had his two years ago at 83) might be looking at a similar procedure. I’m grateful for the help, care and moral support I received from my friends here in Colorado, in Italy and online. I’m exceedingly grateful for my doctor’s skill and sense of humor.

Bionic me. On the left, facing, my hip resurfacing prosthesis from 2006. On the right, facing, my hip replacement from 2018.

In October, my surgeon pronounced that I had no restrictions on anything I wanted to do. “Run up a mountain. Maybe I’ll see you on the slopes.” I do not remember ever being more unequivocally happy.

One of the high points, besides the surgery (actually, almost everything was related to the surgery) was my first mountain hike since I came back to Colorado nearly five years ago. My friend Elizabeth and I headed up to hike the Middle Frisco Creek Trail, but missed the trail head. It was no big deal. The three forks of this creek run parallel and we didn’t go far. We hiked on the fourth anniversary of my moving into my house in Monte Vista.

Wrong trail but really who cares…

At this point, I’m no longer rehabbing but just getting ready for whatever athletic adventures await me. I’ll be 67 a week from New Year’s Eve (tomorrow!) but somehow I don’t care. I’m waiting for more snow to see if I can still X-country ski. I’m hoping I’ll be able to downhill ski at least once if only on the bunny slopes of Wolf Creek with my friend Lois in March. These are things I’ve loved forever, missed during my life in California, and hope I can have again, even just a little bit.

Behind all of this physical rehab were two books — The Price and Fledging. The Price is for sale on Amazon, and Fledging is a private project.

I think 2018 was a pretty amazing year.

Ski!!!

Through this whole thing — moving back to Colorado and having hip surgery — there’s been one thing glowing in the back of my mind.

Can I ski?

In my 3 month appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, the doc said, “No restrictions. Maybe I’ll see you on the slopes. Where will you ski?”

There’s only one rational answer to that, “Where there’s snow.”

Wolf Creek, the closest ski area to Monte Vista, is 1 hour away on THIS side of Wolf Creek pass. It offers classes for people over 50. I’m going to do the March class, thinking there will be more snow (we get most of our snow in March) and the days will be longer.

That’ll also give me time to practice my moves and practice getting up from a fall. I figure if I can improve those things, I’ll be in good shape for this BIG moment.

I love skiing more than anything, and I haven’t been downhill skiing since I went with a Swiss student to Big Bear in California sometime in 1991. It was horrible. It was my first experience skiing on ice, and I went backwards down the hill from the chair lift. Very embarrassing. Anyway, during the afternoon when the ice had turned to something resembling snow, I got a lesson. He was a ski instructor, and it was a great lesson full of useful things that I have never had the chance to try out a second time.

All I need are pants and goggles… 😀

Walking Update — Mule Deer and My New Buff

Yesterday after I rode the Bike To Nowhere, Bear and I headed out for a ramble. I kind of wanted to see the horse that I call “My” horse because she’s so big and so friendly. She’s about a mile away, across the golf course, across the driving range, past where the burnt house once stood, beyond some pastures. You get the idea. When she sees me, she runs to the fence to get as close to me as she can. I wanted to go all the way to her paddock (which I cannot do with Dusty because of his barking) and maybe give her an apple. Dusty was pretty stove up after our last walk together and needed a day off.

So out we went, just Bear and me.

Cesar Milan is right in saying if you want to bond with your dog, walk with it. 

I have been walking and hiking with dogs since I got my first one, Truffleupagus of Song and Story, in 1987. For years and years walking with them in a wild place was always a suspension of normal human life. These were soul-lifting walks into a world where dog and human shared an experience that wasn’t all dog and wasn’t all human. I always felt it was one of the things that drew dogs and humans together eons ago. It’s hunting, it’s non-verbal communication, and neither dog nor human is in charge. It’s a partnership.

Not every dog I’ve lived with has been suited to this relationship. Dusty isn’t. He just likes to go for a walk. The huskies (most of them) were not. They were passionate about the Husky Agenda and didn’t notice the human beside them, except Ariel who was Husky with a smidgeon of wolf. She and I shared a very deep rapport on the trail. Molly was also great partner, though she did not share everything with me. I’ve sensed that Bear would be a great partner in this way, but, as long as I’ve had her, I haven’t been up to the partnership. I’d even begun to doubt if it was real. Maybe it was a fantasy I’d fabricated to explain having fun with my dogs on a trail.

But yesterday, it happened. All it took was for me to feel well enough that I was no longer conscious of my body. For a long time it hurt to walk. Then I was aware that it no longer hurt. I couldn’t focus on what was outside very easily.

Yesterday I never thought about how I walked. It was my first truly free day on a trail since late 2004/early 2005. Really. I didn’t know this was about to happen when I set out; I didn’t expect it.

I got to share it with my wonderful big white dog whose gifts are immense. We took off and there we were, confidently striding across the world toward the big empty.

She spotted the deer — a young buck calmly walking along the railroad track. Bear alerted me without barking or making any sound. She just let me know he was there. Not all dog breeds are gifted with great eyesight, but the Akbash is. They are a composite of breeds assembled hundreds maybe thousands of years ago in Turkey. One of their components is a Sight Hound, like an Afghan dog or Greyhound. Bear just stopped, stood still and watched. I immediately looked where my dog was looking, just as she had told me to

As soon as she knew I saw the deer, she was ready to go get him (with me) but she didn’t. She looked at me, “How are we going to do this, Human?”

I whispered, “Bear, sit.” She sat. “Just watch,” I whispered. She watched, rapt, ready. I’m sure she wondered when we were going to go get him, but she didn’t make a sound.

When he took off (calmly, slowly) by going under the train car, she stood as if she were saying, “Hey, Martha, what?” 

When I said, “You’re perfect, Bear,” and hugged her she understood. 

I can’t explain the connection clearly. I don’t think it’s a word thing, but I’m sure others have experienced it. You see it with working dogs all the time, Aussies and Border Collies working with their people to keep a flock of sheep in line. 

• 

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And now for the product plug…

Trying to combat the effects of cold air on my lungs, I’ve been heading out with a scarf wrapped around my mouth. OK, mostly, effective but it doesn’t stay put or tied or… Then Xenia, in Scotland, whose blog is Whippet Wisdom mentioned a thing called a “Buff” that she wears when it’s cold. I checked into this thing called “Buff” and bought one.

I just got back from a Dusty and Bear walk, heading north, which is always cold this time of year, walking in my own shade. I wore my new Buff today. It was GREAT. Because it can get to -20 F here, I got the extreme one, fleece on one side and microfiber on the other. It matches both my jackets which is pretty amazing since one is red and one is purple. It contorts into numerous functional shapes and the one I bought is made from two plastic bottles. I love it.

Hip Replacement Come Back — 5 Months Later

 

I’m getting a great deal on one of the best elliptical trainers there is. I can’t wait! It will help me achieve “no restrictions,” and I’m very happy about it. It was advertised on the community facebook garage sale page more than a week ago at an incredible price. The price was more than fair, but even that was too much for me so I sighed, “Oh well,” and gave up on the idea.

I never expected NO ONE but me would want it.

Comebacks can be slow — I don’t think mine has been particularly slow. Fast or slow — it depends on how far a person has to go.

I have a ways to go still, but I can walk at a decent clip now and swing my leg over my bike. There are lots of other things I can do — very small, daily life things — that I haven’t been able to do for a long, long time. Some so long that I forgot about them and then, BAM suddenly, the abilities had come back.

There are some things, though…

For years I’ve walked slowly. I still took my dogs out into nature, and in our slow rambles, I began experiencing a different walk and a different, slower world. It was sweet, and the beauty of nature and the events taking place — wind, a random bird, the sky — were as effective as meds in relieving my physical pain. Back in the day, I rushed through the world, still saw it, but was proud of my physical prowess, my ability to cover 12 mountain miles in 3 hours. Stuff like that. I don’t think that mentality will make a comeback, not because I don’t think I”ll be able, but because, well…

Here’s the kicker.

I’m nearly 70. What that literally means is I’m closer to the last scene than I was at 40 (presumably — though we never know. My dad died at 45.). I don’t want a rushed goodbye to this place. I want one that is slow and lingering, that pays attention to clouds, birds, wind, and trees. I want to savor all of it as I learned to do during the — I’d say decade — of pain and awkwardness.  Maybe that was the point.

“Look, Sweet Cheeks, you’re missing something here, like the main idea. I’m going to slow you down until you get it.”

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/wednesday-rdp-comeback/

“No Restrictions!!”

I’m in Colorado Springs. It’s my 3 month or something visit to my orthorpedic surgeon, Dr. Szuszczewiz. Maybe six month. Time has lost meaning.

Beautiful drive over La Veta Pass, uneventful drive the rest of the way, arrived at my friend’s house a little early, drove to the doc. On the way I heard my anthem, “Running Up that Hill” by Kate Bush.

He took three X-rays, one in a position I thought I wasn’t supposed to take. I waited for him in a cold little room wearing a pair of PT shorts (PT — Physical Therapy). He arrived, came in, said, “Go run up that mountain. Go ski. Where are you going to ski?”

“Where there’s snow.”

Colorado girl.

I’m so happy. In my initial exam he said, “You might be able to run, I think so, but no skiing.” Today, “No restrictions. Maybe I’ll see you on the slopes.”

I don’t have words, I’m beyond happy.

Titans

Where I live, you can find yourself in heart-to-heart talks with perfect strangers pretty easily. Today it was at the supermarket. The woman behind the counter was talking to the woman in front of me about how quickly time passes and how did they get old? I arrived at my turn and said, “Don’t even talk about it.”

“Right?” she said. “I feel thirty.”

“I know,” I said. “My mom used to say that all the time. I shoulda’ listened.” I paused, and gave my mom a thought, “Never mind. Maybe not.”

“I don’t FEEL different,” she said. “That’s the thing.”

“I have two titanium hips,” I said. “I know how old I am.”

“Does the surgery work? Do you really feel better?”

“I can’t even describe how much better it is.” I felt tears starting, but I’m trying to be less weepy on this subject. “It’s amazing.”

“Both my hips hurt,” she said. “It’s arthritis, right?”

“Probably,” I said. “I got it early. I used to be a runner.” I don’t think I’ve used the term “used to be” in that context before, but now I’m OK with it.

“I have runner’s knee,” said the bag boy, a kid about 17 with a tiny gold stud in one nostril. Very cute, very innocent. “I have water under my knee cap.”

“Take care of your knee,” I said.

“I’m trying to.”

I paid my $$$ and left.

Yesterday I was thinking about the book review I wrote and the times that my former professor mentioned William Butler Yeats in the book. Yeats wrote about old age in a way that I understood in my twenties but see even better now. I don’t agree that I’m a “tattered coat upon a stick” and that schoolchildren laugh at me. At worst, I don’t exist in the eyes of younger people, but even that, I’ve learned, is kind of up to me.

And I don’t care that much.

It’s disability that’s my fear and nemesis.

As I walked out of City Market I thought of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poem Dr. Richardson referenced in his book. I thought of my titanium hips and the future they have afforded me. I thought of the golden bird upon the bough… here

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

And I thought it uncanny that I am partly metal now, not hammered gold, but something less expensive and more durable, safer for its purpose, stainless steel, titanium, chromium, cobalt or some combination of these.

I’m so grateful.

• Fun Titanium Facts
• The word titanium originated from the Greek Mythological Titans, the first sons of Earth.
• Titanium alloys are used in situations where lightweight strength and ability to withstand temperature extremes are required.
• The metal is frequently used for components which must be exposed to seawater.
• The complex process of converting titanium ore into metal has only been commercially viable for a little more than 50 years.