I recently wrote
another column for the Claremont Courier which follows below. The fact that I’m
continuing to write these columns says a lot.
It also says a lot –
it is at least painfully ironic - that when the column came out in the paper a
week and a half ago, I was in the hospital – again.
KEEPING
UP APPEARANCES
“You’re alive!”
I thought my traveling companion would die trying not to laugh or fall
over in shock when the woman exclaimed this as he and I entered the motel’s
front office. I had made reservations for the night, and this was the first
night of his first trip with me. When he
had taken the job with me as one of my attendants several months earlier, he
knew it would be some kind of adventure, but, clearly, he had no idea how much
of an adventure it would be.
I had stayed at this motel a year earlier, and the same woman was at the
front desk when a different attendant and I had checked in. It was in San Jose – not that we were there
to take in whatever (if anything?) it has to offer, but hotels there are much
cheaper than those in Santa Cruz, one of my favorite spots and therefore one of
our stops on that jaunt north, and it was a relatively short drive away on the
scenic 17, at least if we timed our commutes to avoid the notorious
traffic. (I guess hotels aren’t the only
things that are cheaper in San Jose.)
Although I was long used to people reacting to me in some unusual way,
this was one of the most outlandish and brazen.
I couldn’t blame my companion for being bowled over. After all, I may have been disabled and
severely so, but I was in perfectly good health. There was no reason to be surprised that I
was still alive.
This was not long after I turned 50 and at least a few years before the
spinal surgery I had two years ago that left me considerably more disabled but
also - as the surgeon made clear to me later, leaving me in tears – saved my
life.
“You’re alive” indeed!
·
*
“It’s good to see you back in the land of the living!”
Someone recently said this to me.
I could have been bowled over or have taken offense. But I wasn’t and didn’t. I just laughed, taking it in stride, as the
more polite, more understanding “You’re alive!” that I knew it was.
It was a Pilgrim Place resident who has known me for some years who said
this. I was at the recent festival
there, having gotten there myself in my chair, very much feeling back in the
land of the living. Not only have I been going out more and more on my own, at
least when it is warm enough with the neuropathy I now have (above 80 degrees –
the Pilgrims were sweating it out this year, with the temperature being
considerably higher for the two days of the festival), but, as in this case, I
have also been venturing further and further.
She
went on to ask me if it was worthwhile – putting up with all the pain, the
infirmaries – and to say that this is a hot topic at the retirement
community. I could indeed relate. I’m not nearly as old as the residents there,
but, as I have mentioned recently in these pages, it has been said that it’s as
if I got old very quickly when I had the surgery.
Yes, there are days when the pain in my legs
and hands is particularly bad, when I have even less energy, days when I do
wonder if it’s worthwhile. Yes, with all
the doctor visits and the many trips to
the emergency room – I have said that they should reserve a bed, preferably in
one of those private rooms, for me (“The John Pixley Room”) – and the three (so
far and hopefully only) hospital stays this year after going to my doctor maybe
once or twice a year, my life has definitely changed, even if I’m not all that
much older.
Yes, many people have expressed surprise that I’m still around, all the
more so since I began appearing again in these pages after two years. And, yes, I sometimes agree with them in
being surprised that I’m up and about, much less still here.
While I’ve come to learn that my life will never be as it once was, that
my legs will never regain sensation and what agility they did have, after
hoping for the first year or so that my body would return to its former state,
I’ve come to realize that this shouldn’t, that this can’t stop me from having a life.
If I can’t have my old life back, well, it was time to find and start a
new life.
As I have written about in these pages, I’ve been attending concerts,
including now at the college. Music fans
should know that we have an incredible bounty of free concerts in our small
town, all the more so with the colleges and their many free performances –
unusual, and unusually special, as I’ve come to discover.
I’ve also made return appearances at the Athenaeum at Claremont Mckenna
College. While I’m not going nearly as
much as I used to, I have enjoyed the – yes, free, again – talks by the likes
of Tara Westover, the author of Educated, a riveting memoir about
growing up as the daughter of Morman survivalists in Idaho opposed to public
education (and going to doctors) who went on to attend B.Y.U and then earn a
doctorate at Oxford University in England; Samantha Powers,
President Obama’s U.N Secretary whose book, A Problem from Hell: America in
the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003; and Haben Girma, a deaf
and blind woman who was the first such person to attend Harvard Law School (as
she recounts in her recently published book, Haben: The Deafblind Woman who
Conquered Harvard Law).
It has
been a real joy to be able to go to, to show up at these events, as well as at
movies at the Laemmle Cinema in the Village and plays at Pomona College and the
as-good-as-L.A Ophelia’s Jump theater company’s venue just over the border in
Upland. Sure, I wish that I wasn’t so disabled
now and that I was able to do all that I used to. I wish that I had my old life back, but I’m
very glad that I’m now able to find, to make a new life for myself and that
here in Claremont is so much the perfect place for doing so.
