February 28, 1999 - March 6, 1999

Sunday, February 28 Brain, Kent, and I got up at a decent hour and headed up to Bolinas. I was hoping for a bright, sunny day, but the usual winter weather prevailed instead. Brain and Kent did not get to see much of the spectacular coastline visible from Highway 1 as we approached Stinson Beach. We arrived at Don's shortly after noon, then hopped back into the car and went for lunch at the Parkside. There was very little parking nearby, so we parked about two blocks away. I asked Don to lead us to the restaurant. He walked past the entrance and crossed the street. When I asked him where we were going, he pointed to a restaurant across Highway 1. "Isn't that the Parkside?" he asked. I told him it wasn't, that it was across the highway from where we wanted to be. He looked around then and found the restaurant and we all went in. It was very crowded and I was worried at first that this would be a repeat of the museum experience, with too much distraction for Don to cope. He said it wasn't, but he wasn't very talkative. When we were seated, he sat next to a window, which was on his right. At first, he gazed out the window, not talking to the rest of us much. But as the food arrived and we all started feeling better, he became more engaged, and by the end of the meal was partaking in a four-way conversation. After lunch, we all went for a walk on Stinson Beach, which was elegantly gray in the afternoon drizzle. Kent even found an intact sand dollar. Don and I had a long talk about depression and the nature of our friendship. He mentioned that feeling depressed was in itself frightening because of a severe bout of depression he had had a few years ago. That episode had left him feeling suicidal. The current depression, however, was nowhere near as severe. Nevertheless, he was afraid that merely talking about it had created in people the impression that he was suicidal again. "I'm definitely nowhere near that bad," he assured me, "but I'm afraid the buzz around my caregivers is that I am." After our walk, we headed back to the house in Bolinas, where Brian installed the modem on Don's computer and showed him how to log on to the internet and receive mail. Kent showed him how to use Outlook as a day planner. After making certain that Don could repeat the steps, we left to return Brian and Kent to the CalTrain station in San Francisco. They had an early flight out of San Jose the following morning, and took the train down to my house to spend the night. After dropping the guys off, Don and I headed for a movie. We wanted to see Shakespeare in Love, but couldn't find it playing near by. We settled on Life is Beautiful, which I had wanted to see for some time. We didn't discover until the show started that it was subtitled. Again, I feared I had made a mistake, subjecting Don to too much stimulus. However, when I asked him, he said he was doing fine, though he didn't have enough time to double-check most of the subtitles to see if he'd dropped any words. Afterwards, eating at Max's Opera Cafe, he said he missed about half of the dialog. On the plus side, he said going to a movie was fun in itself, and he had no problem dealing with the crowds. Perhaps we'll try another next weekend.	1. Don and Lou at Stinson Beach 2. Brian's Picture of Kent, Don, and Lou Brian's Pictures of the Stinson Mist
Monday, March 1 Don and I talked about the progress he was making on the way back from San Rafael, where Don had had his first therapy session with Virginia Veach. He was happy with the progress of his physical therapy and liked his physical therapist. "It's like having a personal trainer," he said. The speech therapist gave him information about "executive functions" and "attention," two cognitive functions that have been affected by his stroke. And David, the occupational therapist, told him that "people with much worse field cuts than you are driving cars." Even more encouraging, David agreed to ride a bicycle alongside Don to see how well he's doing. Apparently, Don's riding a bike raised quite a stink last week. Shankari accompanied him on a ride into Bolinas and said he did just fine. Jnani, however, was alarmed. When she spoke to Don about it, she said something like, "The nature of your injury is that you don't understand the nature of your injury." Don told me how much such statements angered him. "It is pretty much the standard thing for right brain injuries," I said. He said, "I will be so relieved when me and 'the nature of my injury' are not the main topics of every conversation I have." Then he mentioned that Jnani had suggested that, if he didn't follow the precautions and guidelines that prevented him from endangering himself, he could be put under some kind of conservatorship. "She can't do that," I said at once, almost without thinking. "That's what Virginia said, too," he said. "Medical power of attorney and conservatorship are two entirely different things. They can't take your rights away without a court battle, and believe me, it would be quite a battle." "Virginia said she'd ask Jnani to back off on that." "Good," I said, relieved that someone else would be charged with giving her that message. Then Don remarked that he was encouraged about the physical progress he was making, but didn't know how to judge his improvement in the cognitive area. As far as he could tell, there had been no change. "Well, there's three things I can think of right off the bat that are much better," I said. "We've had an almost continuous conversation since San Rafael, talking for more than an hour on a broad range of topics. Two months ago, when you first arrived at Kentfield, you couldn't do that. You'd talk for five or ten minutes, then either fall asleep or branch off into some out-of-the-blue topic that had nothing to do with what we'd been talking about." "Really?" "Yeah," I said, and recounted some of his more famous non-sequitors. "I think we've found the origin of Zen koans," I joked. "Yeah, right. Enlightenment as brain dysfunction. What else?" "Well, I'm going to explain this next one in computer terms. Computers keep a list of the things they've been asked to do called a 'stack.' When a new request comes in, they put it on top of the stack, but they remember all the things that they were doing already. So when the new thing is done, they can go back to doing old things. You couldn't do that. You had no stack depth. As soon as something would interrupt what you were doing," and I thought of Carol, "you would make it your top priority and forget everything else. You're much better at that now." "Better," he said, "but I still lose some things." "That's why it's important for you to keep a list when you go to a complex environment like the office. It'll help you keep your stack." "Well, I certainly don't want to blow my stack!" We joked about that for a while. How is it possible to tell if someone is more confused than normal when they were normally pretty confused? Then, as we approached Bolinas, I remembered the third improvement I wanted to tell him about. "Even in Kentfield, you were pretty good at telling yesterday from today, but you weren't able to tell today from tomorrow. Everything that was in the future, scheduled a day or a week away, was always just about to happen." "Oh, boy," Don said. "I finally achieved living in the moment. And that's better now?" "Yup. When I asked you when your appointment with Dr. Angeloni was, you said Friday, and you knew that that wasn't today." Arriving in Bolinas, we decided to go down to Agate Beach before I headed back to Mountain View. We stopped first at the Post Office, where Don picked up his mail, then Don went off to The Bakery by himself for another cup of coffee. I waited in the twilight, wondering just how worried I should be about him wandering around Bolinas on his own, and looking up at Venus and Jupiter, just beginning to be visible through the trees in the afterglow of sunset. I remembered how foolish my worrying had been when I had dropped him off at the Hyatt, and acknowledged that much of my concern was simply my own inner drama finding an external focus to project itself on. Don returned in due time without being run over by a truck or setting fire to the Community Center and we drove out to the beach and climbed the hill overlooking the ocean. I pointed out Venus, shining brilliantly in the west, with Jupiter just a bit below her and Saturn, barely visible at first, halfway up the sky. "Waz was at The Bakery," Don said. "Oh?" "Of course, he had heard the buzz about my 'suicidal tendencies.' I told him it wasn't what people were making it out to be. I've been there before and I know what that feels like. This was entirely different. It was just depression, nothing more." "It's nice to know you have a whole community looking out for you." "Yes, it's pretty wonderful," he said. "God help me." We turned to go back to the car and saw the full moon that had just risen over Mount Tamalpias. We embraced and gave each other a long kiss. "That's been the trouble with this weekend," I told him. "Not enough smooching." We agreed to make up for it next week.
Tuesday, March 2
Wednesday, March 3
Thursday, March 4
Friday, March 5 Around 6:30 this evening, all three of us at Glyphic were working hard to get a first version of GlyphicSpace up and running. Brad's wife called and they made plans for the evening. Then Mark's partner John called and they made plans. "I'll bet my sweetie is calling, too," I said defensively. Indeed, he was. He had left me a message on my home machine. He had had his first meeting with Dr. Angeloni and was very happy with the outcome. Of course, the doctor gave him more tests - more "poking and prodding" - but had very encouraging things to say. He said he could tell that Don's brain was healing, and he proposed a series of bio-feedback exercises that might assist the process. Don was delighted. "An angel has entered my life," he said.
Saturday, March 6 I went to John and Frank's housewarming before leaving for Bolinas, so I arrived a little after eight o'clock. Don was very glad to see me and gave a full report of his office visit with Dr. Angeloni, including the doctor's offer to start him on the QEEG bio-feedback. Since he knew this would not be covered by Don's insurance, he said he would do it for free. "I said, 'That's very kind of you,'" Don told me. "And you know what he said back to me? He said, 'That's what we're here for, isn't it? To be kind to each other.' That blew me away." Later that evening, we went over the poems I had left with him last weekend. "Some of these are very powerful," he said, noting "The Koan," and "Christmas with the Dead" especially. He also liked "Mandlebrot and Others," and thought it a fine companion piece to his poem, "Duality." We were both surprised at the number of parallels there are between our poems. "The River to Your Eyes" and "Mask" are another brace that go well together, and his image of the angle of oblivion makes a stark appearance in my "What I Forgot." I asked him for his help in getting up the courage to submit my work for publication. He said he would like to do that, and also had some helpful tips and form letters I could use. I look forward to working with him on this.