Real Time

Lilly's sick today. She's on the couch across from me, saying random things while I pretend to be answering my email instead of working on my blog. I don't want my children to know about my blog. So far, no one is reading this at all, which is a strange sort of relief.
"Do you stilll write letters any more?" Lilly asks.
I pause, think. "No. I should though."
"Letters are more fun to get."
"That's true."
I used to write letters to all my friends.
"Are you liking your gift?" Lilly interrupts again, fingering it. Oh, yeah. Jay gave me a pink fleece jacket. Then he took me to meet his parents for the first time. Mixed signals.
"Why do you get stuck with men who give you stupid gifts?" She muses. "A basket is more romantic than a fleece."
Ayhan, my ex, an almost unbelievably beautiful Persian professional soccer player. famously gave me a wooden basket on my birthday that also folded into a trivet. I broke up with him. Not immediately.
"I don't know whether I like this book Fifth Business." Lilly says. Lilly got me the book for mybirthday, but pilfered it that night. "I think it's sexist."
"Why do you think that?"
"Well he says, 'I teach in an all boys school, which suits me fine. I never thought girls really profited by an education designed for men, by men.'"
"Does that make the book sexist or the character sexist?"
"Oh, okay." Lilly says. "It's hard though, because Dunny the's I, so you feel like he's the author."
"Well, the perspective will change in the other books."
"Oh, good. I mean, I like him, because he helps Mrs. Dempster so much when he's a kid, but now I'm not sure."
There's a pause. Then she says. "Am I bothering you?"
"No."
"This room is dreary."
"Really?" I look up, dismayed. We've put so much effort into making our basement "the pad" I really wanted it to be a place the kids could hang out in and make their own.
"No, just today. Hey, look at the way the venetian blinds are hanging--wouldn't that make a pretty wedding dress?" That's the difference. I look at the venetian blind hanging crooked on the window in the basement and think Look at that crappy broken blind. Why haven't I cleaned it or fixed it or gotten rid of it. That's just like me. Totally ineffecive. Christ and then I move on to thinking about the garage, or, God Forbid, the furnace room, but Lilly just looks at it and thinks it looks like a wedding dress. It's not reproaching her. And it does look like a wedding dress.
"Will you play pente with me later today?"
"Sure."
"Not now. You don't have to, now, but later?"
"Absolutely."
Lilly is the only person I know who can beat me at Pente.
"We need to get caller I.D." she says, presently. "We're the only people in the world who don't have caller i.d."
"Too expensive."
She sighs. "oh well, I guess it's a way of adding mystery to our lives."
I can hear the garbage truck outside of the house. Of course, I've forgotten yet again to take the garbage out. I have two options at this point: I can chase the garbage men down the street with the garbage or take it to my parents house tomorrow, which is on a different schedule. The garbage men think this is really funny when I do this, and they'll usually stop the truck, but sometimes they just keep going (only if it's a holiday crew, to be fair) I'm really nice to garbage men. For one, one of my best friends in town was a garbage man (he's worked his way up since then--not much---this is what can happen to jazz trombonists, so beware!) and for another, I got to experience Miami after Hurrican Andrew, when the garbage piled in the streets. Garbage men are much more important than you realize, so I always bake mine cookies at Christmas.
"Kaylie says that when she saw Seth's name on the caller i.d. and her mom picked up that she must have done something to Seth and his mom was calling to complain." She laughs.
Seth is a very popular boy at her school who normally doesn't have anything to do with Lilly or her friends, but whose mother called 2 nights ago to invite them to a party.
"Maybe he wants to branch out," I suggest.
"Maybe his mother is forcing him to invite us." I used to twirl baton with Seth's mother, so I think this is probably true.
"Oh," I say weakly. "Surely not..."
"Right." Lilly says. "I'm going upstairs. Don't forget about Pente." She sweeps the quilt around her and goes.
And that's my 1/2 hour. I'm going to go try to catch the garbage truck.

Redemption

Went to see The Darjeeling Ltd with Lilly tonight. It started on the24th, but it's been sold out until tonight. We went to the 5:15 show. Rushmore is my favorite movie. It's more than a favorite movie with me, actually. I've watched it over 200 times. I started watching after Xavier went away to fall apart. I have an old boyfriend who became an agent in Hollywood, and every year he used to me a big box full of all the tapes sent for people to review before the academy awards. It was a nice way to get free movies, as long as you didn't mind "Property of Paramount Pictures" popping up across the screen every 30 seconds or so. So after he left, I popped it in and watched it. And watched it again. And watched it again. Rushmore is more than a film to me: it's a fantasy family. It promises redemption on the only scale I want. I tried to get my kids into it, but switched it off when Lilly turned to me and said, "Mommy, what's a hand job?" Danger is everywhere. So after that I watched it by myself. I was working the night shift at the switchboard at the local sheriff's department at the time, so, on my off days, I would either go to Walmart and just wander around and buy things like gum or corduroy backed lap desks, or sit on the floor in my empty living room and watch Rushmore.
Rushmore is kind of a password, I've found, for a membership in secret rumpled club. I keep changing my mind about what it means. I don't trust people who don't like the movie, and loving it is a signal that our souls are in sync.
Darjeeling isn't Rushmore but it's pretty good. Owen Wilson seems so unhappy, though. Maybe he needs to become a nurse. I think everyone should be a nurse for at least 1 year. It should be like the army used to be.
Back at work, on our little twilight train, things are...kind of slow. It's a little funny, actually. My dad gave me Zero Limits for my birthday. My father kind of falls for everything that comes down the supernatural pike and buys me the book, and then I feel obliged to read it because, well, it came from my Dad. So, anyways, on my birthday, I read the first chapter of the book. In it this guy, Dr. Hew Len supposedly cures an entire mental ward of the criminally insane by going through their charts and taking their problems upon himself and saying "I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you." I just laughed. And then, for kicks, I looked at my patient list from the weekend, still stuck in the back pocket of my scrubs and I thought about each one of them and all their problems and did it. 18 patients.

So guess what. We only have 7 left. Blessed empty beds, clean with closed doors. Rooms free of pain.

Coincidence?

Baggins is suggesting we put tacks on the local interstate or we'll all be out of a job. Haha.

The sleeping girl, by the way, finally passed. Her mother came back, but refused to withdraw care. I'm not sure of the details, but I know the issue went all the way up to the ethics committee.

I love you. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Thank you.

All That Altruistic Stuff

Oh...back in the swim...slowly, slowly.

Went to work today, sort of.

Since I am now "management" I am now being trained how to do that.

This takes the form of management classes, and these are a little startling. For example, today our management coach told us that the reason we do everything we do is....The Bottom Line.

"If you want to get something done, and someone asks you why, the only reason you are doing anything is to address the bottom line. Harsh but true. The hospital is a business, and you are here to help that business prosper." To underscore this point, he had us all take a dollar bill out of our wallets and put it on the table in front of us and stare at it all through that section of the talk. "There are other reasons--serving your fellow man, altruistic stuff, whatever, but the basic reason you're here is to make money."

I pointed out that, since this was ostensibly a "university" hospital, there might be other motivators--like ummmm....service to others? Research? Advancing knowledge? That the university was comprised of professionals who have their own codes of ethics and their own governing and licensing boards and that my reasons for being a nurse only peripherally concerned money. I also said, very nicely, that, if he were going to be giving this talk to nurses, he might be more careful about being so dismissive about all that "altruistic stuff."

"If you're a patient," I said "and your life and your pain is in someone else's hands, you'd better hope your nurse is sincerely more interested in making stinky, pooping, out-of-it you comfortable and well than in the bottom line. Not to dismiss it, but maybe there's a better way to phrase that so you honor the reasons we're in this. I know health care isn't your background--so maybe you're used to a different crowd." I smiled.

The death smile, my children and my staff call it.

All that altruistic stuff.

Yeah, all that.

And here's what so great about the people I work with. Two of them were with me--Lois and Elizabeth. Elizabeth is my age, has 5 children, and a husband dying of leukemia. She's a sup on the night shift, Lois is her core. Elizabeth was the first person ever to treat me like I knew something. "You have a very good head on your shoulders," she said. No one had ever told me that. Acknowledgement and trust. Big gifts to receive so late. We didn't get along at first. Then one night she came over to me and said, "Ok Patton, I was driving home the other day and thinking about something you said and I was thinking 'what an idiot' but then all the sudden, I realized what you meant, and I just want you to know...I get you. I get it." And then everything was okay from then on.

So I sort of launch into this in class, and my two coworkers, instead of hiding their heads in their hands and pretending not to know me, nod and say, "yeah, that's right."

The only things that makes life worth living are the things that can't be measured in a bottom line. The only things that make my job worth doing aren't on the balance sheet. It's cliched but true.

No bottom line for sitting next to someone and holding their hand instead of restraining them, even though you could get more work done if you did. No bottom line for staying late and letting your staff vent--about patients, about other staff. No bottom line for being the one who sits with the parents after the docs have told them the news about their kid, no bottom line for doing the very basic work of loving your fellow man.

The rest of the class was good, so I guess it wasn't a total waste.

Oh, it's a tricky little swamp to navigate, this world, isn't it?

That's my 1/2 hour.

Dogs

I got a call at 5pm. "Is zees Mrs. Tonks?" Russian accent. Young man.
I start laughing. "Oh no!" he says "I am zo zorry, Mrs. Tonks, I mean Mrs. Patton--Tonks zat is the name of the ze dog."
The vet had called earlier in the day, to tell me things were not going so well and they weren't sure that Tonksie would walk, they had thought she was standing up, but in fact, her front legs are so strong she was just giving the impression of standing up. (How they got front and back confused makes me wonder). Why were they calling me again? Had something gone wrong?
"I am calling because, let me tell you, I am zo excited! I am out here in ze yard behind ze hospital, and who am I watching? I am watching the puppy, Mrs. Tonks. walking around and uuurinating."
"Oh, that's wonderful!" I'm so happy, I sit down.
"I just wanted to call you, Mrs. Tonks, and tell you that, since things were not so happy this morning. She is zo much better! I am zo happy!"
"Well, thank you, thank you very much."
"It's a good thing." There's a pause. "She is very cute."
"Yes, she is."
"If she had had a wheelchair, you know, she is one dog who could have done it. But it is much better she doesn't. So much spirit!"
He sounds like he's in love with her. Would that work? Not only would there be the interspecies hurdle--but the cultural differences--I don't know. She's a very engaging animal. I'll see if I can find a picture, then you can see for yourself.
"Okay, Mrs. Tonks. I just want you to know how good she is doing, I didn't want you to sleep thinking she was not better."

I repeat this to Jay at dinner. Wednesday nights the kids go to church and mom goes out to dinner. We're stuffing ourselves with masaman curry. My favorite
"I'm so glad," he says, "I was holding the dog on my lap in the car, waiting for you to get your purse and change shoes or whatever you were doing, and I thought about just quickly breaking its neck. I didn't think there was any hope for that dog at all."
"You were what?"
"Just kidding."
We just had to put Jay's dog down 3 weeks ago. She was the last of a pack of 4. Her name was Ladybug and she was 16 years old. She looked exactly like a fox. The last dog he put down, a year and a half ago created a big rift between us. His ex of 15 years came out to spend the weekend with her little girl,--the product of her new marriage to a local salsa instructor--because it was her dog, too and she wanted to be there to say goodbye. And afterwards, he broke up with me! Hmmm....you think they hooked up? I wonder...bastard. Maybe, maybe not. He sort of freaks out when anything gets too emotional. Like really freaks out. We've discussed alternatives to this: camping out, taking a break, talking about it, medication.
So I was nervous about Ladybug. It was her time. She had bedsores, which I'd ended up debriding over the summer--they'd healed up real nice, but she wasn't happy. She kept getting stuck places and she was deaf. Finally, he decided it was time to call the vet. We have this alcoholic vet in town who makes a living almost exclusively on this kind of thing. When he's not injecting dogs with barbituates he's down at the local bar, soused. He's a nice guy. Kind of ruined. Awfully young to be this screwed up. I mean, he can't possibly be done paying off his vet school loans. But the guy to call when your dog's dying.

So the night before we're going to put the bug down, we give her a steak. Which feels sort of creepy.
"Do you think we're doing the right thing?" Jay asks. "Do you think she's ready?"
"I don't know....I mean--you know her best, is she getting anything out of being alive?" I'm all for nursing dogs, and people, along. Just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean it doesn't enjoy life. I mean, when I'm creeping along, I'm sure there will be some things to stay alive for. Who can judge?
But the next morning, when I woke up, the dog was nowhere around. Jay called me, later in the morning, really shaken up. "I found her floating in the pond." he tells me. She knew. She took it into her own hands, paws "Can you come out here, please?"
When I got out there, he was packing his ice axes. He was covered with mud and his face looked terrible, all shrunken. "I'm going to climb Mt. Whitney. I don't know how long I'll be gone. Could you please feed the cats?"
So I did. There were some scary phone calls such as: "I think I may just chill out in Mexico for a month or two--I'll let you know" But he came back after 5 days.

And guess what, the vet student just called. "Mrs. Tonks! You can come get the puppy, she is doing zo well we zink she can go home."

Hooray.

That's my 1/2 hour. I'm going to go get my dog.

Redos

I miss the puppy.
Lilly is really distraught.
"I knew the second it happened I had done something really bad. I just wanted to redo that second, take that back. I said, "God, please let it happen to me, not the puppy. Have you ever felt that way?"
Oh, yeah. No one who gets past 21 doesn't know that feeling. That's the horrible part of growing up: you make a difference. Maybe not in the big sweeping ways you fantasize about when you are young (or older--our culture is in the grip of an almost psychotic communal celebrity fantasy), but what you say and do can have almost unimaginable consequences.
When I was in high school, I went through a brief period of time when I had no friends. Heather was getting into some stuff that made me pretty uncomfortable and I backed off. But then I had no one to talk to. I didn't like anyone around me. I mentioned this to my English teacher, and he said, "Lower your standards." This rang like a bell. I did, and almost from that afternoon on, I suddenly had people to hang out with.
I ran into him at Office Depot a few months after I moved back to town and reminded him of his advice. "Oh my God," he said. "I told you that? I told a 15 year old girl that?"
"yeah..."
He flushed, right up to his shiny bald head. "I was 40 years old, when I said that, and I was really going through some stuff. I felt like a failure. I was only thinking about myself--I just hated teaching..my marriage was rocky....Haley. I don't know what to say. That was the wrong thing to tell you, and I'm so sorry. What I should have said was this: If you're having a problem with something or someone there's probably a good reason for it and you should listen to yourself, even if it means being lonely and not having someone to eat lunch with. Hold out, because the right people, the right friends will find you. Can I have a redo?"
I just laughed. "No worries." I didn't tell him that the reason we were at Office Depot was to buy a new computer, because my fiance had relocated to a mental institution in Florida, and his best friend had driven up with a moving van to collect his stuff. "Why are we buying a computer?" Lilly had asked. She was 6. "Can't we use Xavier's? Does this mean Xavier's not coming back?" Should have held out.
So yes, Lilly. I want a redo. Anyone who says they have no regrets needs an MRI to assess frontal lobe damage. They probably have trouble with the date as well. I know that Lilly loves the puppy more than she loves anything on earth, ever. I know that the love and trust Lilly has trouble finding for people was not a problem ever with Tonks. I know that hurting Tonks was the last thing she would have ever done on purpose. But she was frustrated, and she was doing her homework and Tonks was probably jumping up on her and Lilly got up impatiently and thrust her downstairs--too hard, too fast.
This is what I told her:
"You know, Lilly, Tonks is going to be okay. It's going to take a lot of time and effort and love, but she's going to be okay again. That's what the vet says. And you've learned a lesson that takes some people a long time to learn, but one that every human does learn--carelessness and anger can have unimaginable repercussions. And I also think you really understand now how fragile life is."
Lilly's crying.
"It's okay, sweetie. You're going to make it up to Tonks, and Tonksie will still love you. She's going to be incapacitated for 6 weeks, and you'll get to do her physical therapy and make sure she takes her pills. It's okay. It's just life and you screwed up, but it isn't as bad as it could be and you understand something important and we still love you and you still have your dog."
We don't get redos. But we get love and forgiveness.
We get to have it, and we get to give it. Thank goodness.
My concept of zen doesn't exclude this. I think this is the gift of zen--redemption. By waking to who you are and where you are at this moment, with these smells, these people, this carpet, this past--you automatically forgive--yourself and others--and live for love. It is the only thing that can get us through. Otherwise, our "redos" would sink us like concrete shoes. Peace to all beings.

Pets

Today's my birthday.
It's been overshadowed by an emergency: my daughter's lhasa apso, Tonks, fell down the stairs and managed to herniate two disks. When I found her, she couldn't move her back legs. She was trying to walk on her front paws, and actually doing a pretty good job. It was horrible. Jay and I were on our way out of town. I came outside the house with her in my arms and Jay said, "Guess we're going to the vet." She had emergency surgery, which I had to pay half for up front. 1750 dollars. Right on the credit card I had finally cleared 3 months ago. I never get ahead. Lilly says it's her fault. Poor little dog.
At the doggie ER, I was sort of embarrassed. My dogs are fed and loved, but not particularly groomed. I have 4--3 strays and Tonks, who was purchased to make up for Lilly having no friends in 7th grade. In addition to that, we have a frog and two cats. Pebbles is a deeply psychologically damaged calico, and her son, Marlowe, is really wonderful and loving, but likes to stow away in the car. "Meow?" he'll finally say, 15 minutes into a trip. This is especially bad when it's 6:30am and I'm on my way to work.
"Trouble not the animals," Dostoyevsky said, "for they have the beginnings of souls. " They have more than that, I think.
"Do you think it matters?" I ask Jay, "that my dog looks so scruffy?"
"No," he says soothingly, "it's fine." It's sometimes hard to get a read on what Jay actually thinks of anything. 6 months later, he'll just drop that something irritated him. Since we're so much alike, the way I read Jay is that I figure out what I'm feeling about something, and it's usually the way he's feeling about it, too. But he'll never, never come right out and say it. Probably why he's been married 3 times.
We went to the city for a night. We were going to go rock climbing and camping, but it was freezing and drizzling, so we opted for the civilization experience. After a bottle of wine between us and 2 pints of guinness, we ended up in this strange place--the city museum. It's this labyrinthe of sculptured fantasy--twists and turns and dragons and tunnels and iron gardens, ladders and stairways, an airplane enmeshed in the structure. The gates were open, so we went in. I started climbing through it--it was magic. A dreamscape. Art that you see with your eyes and know with your body. Even freezing cold and wet, the thing kept blossoming in front of me. I wondered if we would be able to find our way back. Like being inside someone's head. Then Jay got nervous, so we came down and went back to the hotel, had some organic cheese doodles and chocolate and fell asleep.
That's my 1/2 hour--well--25 minutes this time.

Homecoming

It was homecoming yesterday. Nick was marching and had to be dropped off at the crack of dawn at school. Lilly and I went to watch him. We parked down by the mosque (I get such a kick out of our town having a mosque--minarets are usually not part of the skyline in America, unless you're in Las Vegas. The folks that run it have a little store there, and they have non virgin olive oil for around 8 bucks/gallon. I use it for deep frying catfish. I hate to brag, but since this is anonymous I think it's safe: I make the best fried catfish in America. And since I don't think they're eating too much deep fried catfish anywhere else on the planet, I think it might be safe to say I make the best fried catfish in the world. That's just my opinion. And my family's. And everyone who's ever eaten it.
So, back to homecoming. The mosque is about5 blocks from the parade route. I like to watch it on 9th street, because there's a coffee shop right there I can duck into. It was a beautiful day--just perfect. 55 degrees, blue blue cloudless skies the leaves just starting to go golden. Lilly came with me, with her camera. She's at this phase where she's looking down on the mass culture. I'm a little dismayed by this because what I know that she doesn't is that cynicism is coat you borrow at first that you can't then take off with any ease. I mean, cynicism, the real nasty life sapping stuff will hit and strangle every sunny day eventually--why start so early? But both my children don't know that yet--they just want to be cool. So there she was, in an oversized grey cashmere sweater, cargo capris and, accidentally--a hat with the home team's logo on it. "Darn!" she said, "now they'll all think I actually care about this." We came to 9th street, in front of the Episcopal church, and we'd arrived just in time. We could hear the bands up the street and see the lights of the motorcycle cops leading the parade. And right there, in front of us, was my best friend from highschool, Heather.
Heather is 2 years older than me and we grew up together. Heather taught me to drive and how to put on mascara and, incidentally, how to roll a joint. Heather was the first of our group to do everything: the usual stuff. And she gave us enthusiastic reports from the front. She had a boyfriend that she really loved. (He's now a curator at the Guggenheim). Every beautiful loop cruising heart of saturday night wild lovely memory of my adolescence is due to Heather obligingly sticking me in the back of the car when she and her prettier friends went out on the town, Aerosmith blasting loud enough to damage your kidneys. When I moved back here I was really looking forward to striking up our friendship, but it didn't happen. We had lunch once, I think. Our daughters were the same age, but she never invited Lilly over. She cut off from everyone from high school, I found out. None of know why.
Last summer, her dad died, and while he was in the hospital for 3 weeks, accomplishing this, she called me almost every night. Late. We would talk and talk--about her dad, about everything. We used to do that in high school. Then he died. I went to the funeral with Jay and I remember thinking, well this is terrible, but at least Heather and I are friends again. But afterwards, I didn't hear from her. I left a few messages but my calls didn't get returned, so I gave up.
So there we were yesterday, watching the parade. I tried to point out Nick in the lineup, but couldn't find him. Just a sea of trumpets. Then we made fun of people going by, which is what we always used to do. She's really funny--skinny and blonde, pretty wrinkled now,--and she laughs at her own jokes which makes the whole thing funnier. She had her two boys with her, and they scrambled for candy with the other children, almost under the wheels of the oncoming floats.
Lilly was getting restless, so I said goodbye.
"We have to go to Ernie's."
"Happy birthday--the 23rd right?" she said.
"Yeah--41 can you believe it?"
"Well, you look 28."
"Thanks!"
"If you like, cover up that little pouchy thing under your chin---hahahahaha!"
"I thought my cleavage would distract from that." My lack of breasts has been an ancient joke.
"Now that it's by your belly button."
I flip her off and leave.