I’m Going to California

When I Come Back I’ll Be Tired

I’m going to California
When I come back, we’ll be married
What do you want me to bring you?
She answered:
A hat with a crooked crown,
A pair of high-heeled shoes…

Those are the opening lines to Kaleponi Hula by Bina Mossman, one of the great hula writers of the early 20th century, words which were forever imprinted into my memory by my junior high school gym teacher, Miss Karp, many years ago.

For reasons unknown to me and I am sure unknown to the dozens of other half-formed girls clad in white bloomers more befitting the 1930s, right down to the names we were forced to embroider over the breast pockets, we were required to learn this hula down to the last hand gesture in the confines of the basement gymnasium of Grover Cleveland Junior High School in Caldwell, N.J. To achieve the proper island spirit, we removed our regulation footwear and performed in our regulation athletic socks. The effect was dramatic, I am sure. I do not recall the Board of Education supplying grass skirts.

I do have a point, and I will get to it, but I intend to make you suffer through my story first.

Once we had sashayed through the hula for a few weeks, rather than moving on to basketball (which in those days was restricted to three dribbles before we were forced to pass the ball, and no crossing the center line—really!) we switched over to a unit on square dancing, all of which I have forgotten, except for one horrible day where we practiced a gigantic round of galloping around the gym with a partner, linked arm-in-arm in some sort of two-step pattern. I don’t recall who my partner was, but let’s call her Barbara, mostly because I had a very nice friend named Barbara who very well could be reading this, and why not bring a slight blush to her cheeks right now.

In this gymnasium there was some sort of semi-permanent metal contraption for doing chin-ups attached to the floor smack-dab at 90 degrees along one of the side walls, which they probably removed for the boys’ basketball games, but not for the silly girls’ gym classes, and we had to gallop/square dance around it at full speed in a long column. Miss Karp carefully blasted her whistle at us full throttle every time before we started to remind us about it, but once you got galloping and thumping, caution was thrown to the wind and I just plumb forgot about those guy wires holding up the contraption and cracked into it, spilling Barbara and me to the floor in a rather artless way, causing many full-throttled whistles and a large pile-up behind us. If the light is just right, I can still find the scar on my shin from the incident, and I believe I had “an excuse” from gym class for three days because of it.

Grover Cleveland Junior High School still stands in Caldwell, N.J., renamed today Grover Cleveland Middle School, its third name. It started out as Grover Cleveland High School, three-quarters of a mile from where the former president was born.

I’ve always been amused that I studied more about the hula than I did Grover Cleveland when I was in junior high, and that’s why I can recite those opening lines to Kaleponi Hula, while CF, who was born in Hawaii and graduated from high school in Hawaii, has never heard of it. (In her defense, she didn’t live there very much in between those two events.)

But the words came crashing back to me—and congratulations, you’ve read far enough to reach my point—because I’m going to California, and when I come back, I’ll be tired. (I’m already married.)

My whole family is going to California because (cue trumpets) (gee, we had snare drum and cymbals not too long ago. what’s going on?) (anyway, cue trumpets) NF’s baseball team WON THE STATE CHAMPIONSHIP!!!! Yes, they are the BEST 13-year-old Pony baseball team in Washington state! The way Pony Baseball works is you compete locally, then at district, regional, zone, and national levels. So his team has worked its way through local, district, and regional (undefeated!) levels, Washington being its own region. Thirteen western states make up the western zone, based in California. So it’s off to California for the Western Zone Championship starting July 21, with Washington vs. Hawaii, of all states, in Game #1 at 9 AM.

He is very excited, as you might imagine, because not only does he get to play baseball in a very cool way, he gets to go to California with a dozen of his best friends AND stay in a hotel WITH a pool AND get room service AND ignore his parents AND spend all of his money AND go to a major league ball game AND go to Disneyland where he knows his parents will never take him AND buy crappy food from vending machines AND tell the chaperones that we allow him to drink all the caffeine soda he wants AND generally have a great time. Without us. As he should.

CF and I, on the other hand, will find the cheapest flights we can, the cheapest hotel we can, the cheapest meals we can. Not from vending machines. We want NF to know that we are in the stands cheering for him, but we are spending all the dollars on him, not on us.

And that’s just fine. No matter how fancy or plain the hotel, no matter how quick or slow the trip, no matter how long we linger here or there, when we come back, I’ll be tired. Fact o’ life. Anytime I step out of my usual routine, I end up tired beyond belief.

I know I’ve written about this before, and you are probably, well, tired of hearing about it. But you are going to have to read another version of metaphors. Or you can quit here.

Here goes: Your plane leaves in 10 minutes. You’re at the bottom of a long, crowded escalator with a heavy suitcase, wearing a winter coat. It’s a “down” escalator. You need to go “up.” There’s no “up” escalator in sight. No staircase, no elevator, either. You have no choice except to plow into the people on the “down” escalator and fight your way to the top. Did I mention the pulsing lights and the Caroline Karp/Bina Mossman arrangement of Hawaiian favorite melodies playing on the loudspeaker system?

This is what the fatigue is like. It is without a doubt the worst part of this whole stroke/M.S. afterlife. But if you get to watch your son win a state championship, it’s worth it.

And this has been one long blog entry mostly about nothing to do with strokes or M.S. or anything but my old gym experiences and NF’s baseball experiences but we’ll get back to normalcy next week or thereabouts and I thank you for your indulgence this week. As you might imagine it has been a bit fuddling around here, what with winning a state championship and Peggy going home and everything.

P.S. Any of my junior high classmates are encouraged to join me in dancing the hula at 9 A.M. Pacific time to urge on NF’s team. He will be properly mortified.

Grover Cleveland Junior High School

Fried Brain To Go

“Can we stop at Panda Express?”

What a sweet, innocent voice. He dredges it up from the very bottom of his soul when he really wants something, something he is certain our tired bodies, exhausted by hours of work, or our tired wallets, exhausted by piles of bills, cannot handle.

It replaces his usual full-grown teenager I-know-everything why-are-you-so-stupid voice that every parent learns to love and interpret as evidence that their child is still alive and actively mocking them to all their friends.

We are headed home after yet another baseball game. CF is driving. She is more tired than usual, because her arm is still completely encased in bandages from her second surgery, making everything more difficult, not to mention painful, not to mention awkward, but she won’t let me drive, not to mention I can’t drive this car anyway, because it doesn’t have hand controls. She tells NF, our son, that we can’t stop at Panda Express because she is too tired to go in.

The injured paw

She’s the one who usually goes in to get food for him. She doesn’t like Chinese food, and I never get anything there, because they only have about eight selections, all with beef or chicken, neither of which I eat, so we only ever stop for something for NF, and he is either too shy or too lazy to go in by himself, I’m not sure which, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

And I feel sorry for him because he pulled a muscle and couldn’t play tonight, so CF and I engage in some secret hand gestures that resolve into me agreeing to run into Panda Express. This brings about a moment of tension in the car.

“Do you know what I want?” The sweet, innocent voice is gone. The slightly challenging, nearly bickering voice is back. It’s not a challenge to my knowledge of his culinary taste buds, but his snide acknowledgement that my mental capacity to remember anything as complicated as a take-out order from the car to the counter is a bit insulting these days.

“Should we write it down?” CF offers.

“No, no,” I insist, “I’ve got it, chow mein, with a double entrée of orange chicken. And a root beer.”

“Not the rice,” says NF. “The chow mein.”

“Yes,” I say, “the chow mein.”

“Two orange chicken,” he says.

“I know. Two orange chicken.” You’d think I was the child.

There’s a rather large party pandering the express, so I start to review the order in my mind. Chow mein, double orange chicken. Chowder mein, double chicken. Chowder chain, chowder chicken. Chicken chow chain double main trouble chicken.

No, wait. Oh, look, they have those rangoons tonight. Chow mein. Not rice. Chow mein. Ciao, Maine. A small town outside Bangor. That’s Bann-gore, not Bang-err, like they say in Washington. Washing-toon. Ran-goon. Chow moon.

O.K. Chow mein. Double truckle chuckle muckle tricking. No. Chuck mein. No. Chopped brain. No. Chow chain with double chicken orange brain. Close!

The pandering party is partly past posting its porder. The non-Asian server catches my eye and gives me one of those non-sympathetic sympathetic server “I’m sorry for the delay” looks that tells me she is late for her break and really has to go to the bathroom and plans to sprint away as soon as the pandering party lets her. Time for me to re-review the order I have completely forgotten and wish I had written down. I would go back to the car to ask, but the line behind me has snaked out the door like a Chinese New Year parade.

Crow train? Root blain?

Root beer! With a burst of triumph I remember the root beer, about which I had completely forgotten.

Chow mein. And root beer. Good.

A wave of my former self washes over me. I remember my own advice: when in doubt, read the documentation. What brilliance I once possessed! How often did I grouse about people who had all the information they needed to use their own equipment, their own software, at their own fingertips, but had to make phone calls, to call technical services in some far off land, hang on hold forever, just to be told to press this key or type this sequence. It drove me nuts.

And so I read the documentation. Panda Express very nicely posts step-by-step ordering instructions overhead in its restaurants: Step 1: choose your plate. Step 2: choose your entrée. Aha! Step 1: chow mein! Step 2: chick…chick…chick…all this chicken…chick…orange chicken—that’s it—two servings of it, I’m sure! And look! It’s my turn! And yes, there she goes! Off to her break!

Another server, soon to become my best friend, slips into her place, and I confidently rattle off, “Chow mein—”

“Is that for here or to go?”

I stare at her, dumbfounded, lost, mind completely blank, Timmy without Lassie, Dorothy without Toto.

“To go,” I finally croak in my post-stroke gargle of a voice.

She scoops a massive blob of brownish noodles into a Styrofoam container and smiles at me expectantly.

“And the entrée?”

Lassie come home, I think. What was that chicken again? I cast my eyes down the steam table.

“Chicken—orange.” Again the strangled voice. “Two.”

She gives me a weird little smile as if she deals with fried brain people all day long.

“And a root beer.” She hands me a cup at the register.

Having now been inside this express restaurant for a non-express amount of time, I step over to the soda dispenser and fill the cup with root beer, which, since this is me we’re talking about, is not root beer. It is slightly fizzy slightly flavored water. It is approximately the same shade as the chow mein. I return to my new best friend and croak that there is something wrong with the root beer.

“Oh, yes, I knew that,” she says. And off she goes to fix it, belatedly. I prevent some potential root beer lovers from facing disappointment before she returns; I don’t know if it’s my croaky voice that scares them away, the putrid mess in my cup, or what I tell them that does it, but they are saved from failure.

Back in the car, I hand the bag and cup to my son.

“Chow mein, double orange chicken,” I croak triumphantly, smirking ever so slightly.

“Where’s the straw? Where’s the fork?” he snarls ever so lovingly.

That sound you hear? Me deflating.

Ciao!

Driving Me Crazy

Here in Washington State, if your eyes roll back into your head and you twitch all over as if you have somehow plugged yourself into the high voltage switch where your electric dryer should go, you’re not supposed to drive for six months. They don’t send anybody out to check up on you to make sure, but they expect you to check in with your doctor before you get behind the wheel again.

They call it “being seizure free for six months,” and I am now officially well past that point. I have yet to drive the car down the driveway.

When I was trapped in the hospital wrapped in a burqa listening to Fox News All. The. Time., the thought of not driving for six months drove me out of my mind. Wait. Can I say that? My mind was not injured. It was my brain. So yes, I guess I can say it figuratively drove me out of my mind. I don’t want to conjure up any images of little slices of my brain flopping about the hospital without me.

Blackberries

Picking blackberries on a late summer afternoon at the beach with my sweetie. She loves them. I love to pick them because she loves to eat them. I love to feel the brambles brambling me because I know she will love to eat that juicy little orb just out of my reach. I love to find just the right one—just the right one—right over there—the one that thought it could escape me.

But you know, I think I’m done. My plastic bucket isn’t full, but I can hear the tide nibbling at the pebbly beach, and suddenly more than anything I want to sit in my little canvas chair and watch the water come and go. I mumble something towards my partner, about ten feet away, she mumbles something back, some cozy communication that we’ve perfected over nearly 30 years of sharing our lives, and I pick my way over the salty rocks and the drifted wood to our two chairs, set primly together in the afternoon sun.

My balance hasn’t been good for years, the result of multiple sclerosis that has its way with me as it pleases, but mostly I’ve been able to manage. My partner knows when to help, when to back off, so she stays in her own tangle of blackberries as I stumble just when I reach my chair.

Blackberries scatter between the chairs. I groan as I sink into mine and gather up nearly every one that has spilled. After all, I hadn’t even filled the bucket. I couldn’t shortchange my sweetheart any further.

She joins me a few minutes later.

“Did you drop your bucket?” she asks.

“Yes,” I tell her, “but I got most of them.”

She looks at me oddly.

It would be a month before I found out that in fact there were only a half dozen blackberries left in my bucket, that the rest were still scattered about, and that she sat next to me for a few minutes scooping the berries off the pebbles back into my basket without me noticing.

Much later that evening, she managed to get home and put them in the refrigerator. After she did, she turned the car around and drove right back to the hospital where she had left me, unconscious after a stroke and at least three seizures, after an ambulance crew had dragged me off the beach and, siren wailing, taken me to the local emergency room.

She would never eat a single one of those blackberries.