Sunday, April 18
I decided to take the train to Tanforan Shopping Mall to pick up
my car. I asked the conductor which stop would be the closest.
He said, "Millbrae." He was wrong. I ended up walking six
miles to get to my car. I was pissed.
When I arrived at Don's, I say his backpack, wallet, and day
planner out on the back porch, which was curious. Don himself
was upstairs in his room.
"I had two great experiences today," he said. "I rode my
bike out to Commonweal."
"Wow," I said.
"Yes, it's a hilly road, as you know. Anyway, when I got there,
Jnani was just leaving in her car. I thought, 'Uh-oh, I'm
going to get it now.'" Don's unauthorized bike riding had been
a point of contention last month. "She slowed down and rolled
down her window, but instead of scolding me, she said, 'Looking
good!'"
"She did? That's great!"
"And then when I arrived, Michael Renneker saw me and said,
'Go, V!'"
"I guess your bike riding is officially approved."
"Yeah. It's a red letter day."
Don expected Jnani to arrive soon to take him to the Post Office.
When I asked him about his stuff on the back porch, he said,
"I try to make sure that Jnani and Shankari don't mix."
'Great,' I thought, 'the cared for taking care of the caregivers.'
Aloud, I said, "Have you thought about dinner?"
"Jnani's coming over with left-overs from the conference.
Sara food."
"Mmmm," I said, "Sara food."
Jnani arrived soon after that, but there was no food in her car.
The two of them figured out that Don had loaded the food
into the trunk of someone else's car. "I saw him leaving with
food and I just followed him." Automotive recognition doesn't
appear to be one of Don's skills. I wonder if it ever was, or
if this is part of the spatial reasoning deficit.
"Looks like I'm taking you out to dinner," I told Don.
Jnani made no mention of taking Don to the Post Office. Instead
she said she had a massage appointment she had to get to
and was eager to leave.
Don wanted to thank her for being so encouraging when she saw him
on the bike earlier today.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"In the past, you've been restrictive.
Jnani laughed. "Please don't project than on me," she said.
They hugged and she left, and soon after we went into Bolinas
to eat. Over dinner, I reviewed the collection of poems he had
assembled for Curtis. "Headache" was included, with some
lines Don had added since the stroke. The new stuff began
with, "A surgeon with a knife saved my life." The
rest proceded in a similar vein, half- and full-rhyme dimeter.
It was awful. I felt so sad. But instead of giving him my
full reaction, I pointed to two lines that I particularly liked.
"The rest seems more personal that universal," I said.
I recalled
Frost's dictum, "Poetry should be about griefs, not grievances."
Don agreed that poetry should approach the universal, and that
too much of modern poetry was egoistic wailing.
We planned to read some Baghavad Ghita or watch
Kundon this night, but neither plan materialized.
We went to bed very tired, though I was awake past midnight,
unable to fall asleep.
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Monday, April 19
After a breakfast of oatmeal and a stop at the Bolinas Bakery,
We arrived at Dr. Angelone's.
Dr. Angelone says Don is doing much better at keeping the
green bar (the visual indicator of his brain waves) in the
proper zone during the biofeedback session.
He also says he believes Don's middle left
"quadrant" is recovering. I watch him test Don, presenting
his had below chin level (for the lower quadrant), at nose
level (for the middle), and above his head (for the upper
quadrant). I honestly do not see any difference between Don's
response to the upper quadrant, where his field is still
completely cut, and the middle quadrant. Still, Angelone
says it is improving.
"I am also getting fewer calls about you," he says. "In
fact, none lately."
"What do you mean?" Don asks.
"I used to get calls from your roommates about your behavior.
Leaving tea bags in the cup in the sink. Of course, I never
answered them, but I don't get those calls anymore." He
turned to me. "What do you say, Lou? Have you seen any
changes in Don's behavior? How is he now compared to before?"
I suddenly feel very much on the spot.
"Well," I begin slowly. How can I say what I'm thinking
without betraying him? I want to say, 'His poetry is much
worse,' and 'His room is a wreck.' Instead, I say, "He is
not as fastidious in his personal grooming as he was before
the stroke, but he is better now than when he first got home
from Kentfield. The disorder in his room has decreased. It
used to be all over - the entire room. Now it's pretty much
limited to one corner. He isn't hoarding dishes in his room
anymore. I used to look around and see two or three cups and
classes and a plate or two. Just this morning, I looked around
and there was nothing." I remember Jnani desparately trying
to tuck his shirt into his sweatpants on his first trip back
to the office. "And he's much better dressed now than
he was a month ago."
Angelone gives Don an assignment: write an article that
summarizes information he was able to pull off the web on
a topic - he gives him MSM. Angelone wants to read it to
see if Don's verbal and organization skills are also making
a recovery.
At lunch, Don is elated. He felt particularly good about
being "in the zone" during the biofeedback session. "It
was a sense of euphoria," he said.
Then he brought up Jnani's "don't lay that one me" comment
from yesterday. He said he thought it was disengenuous of
her. "She has been controlling in the past," he said.
He remembers Jnani bringing up the idea of conservatorship
if he didn't behave "in his own best interests." He remembers
how both Virginia and his former therapist told him she could
not do that. (Oddly, he doesn't seem to recall that I told him
the same thing.) "That was certainly an attempt at controlling.
I think she needs to face up to that."
"I think Jnani is a person who feels she must sacrifice something
in order to prove her worth. It has to be something she values,
and unfortunately that sometimes means the thing she
sacrifices is her friends." I told him the story Jnani told me
of the woman she had committed, and how it ruined their friendship.
So she knows, from that experience, that she was
in no position to have you put under a conservatorhsip. It was
an idle threat, and she knew it."
"I think I know where this fear of control comes from," he said.
"It's an internalized parent, some incident from my childhood."
I had an insight. "Do you mind if I play cafe psychiatrist?"
I asked.
"Go ahead."
"I think I know who your internalized parent is. It's you.
How long did you deny you were gay? How long did you suppress
it? You fear a return of your internalized homophobia."
Don looked amazed. "That's a great insight," he said.
"I'm just drawing on my own experience. Why do I fantasize
disasters? Because coming out would be one. It would wreck
my marriage and ruin my career. And it did. Thank God.
And it's not an unreasonable premise: it is dangerous
to be gay. So you controlled it and repressed it, being an
over-protective parent, and I projected the danger onto the
whole wide world, a world full of enemies."
Don's therapy schedule this day was very light: we had the
entire afternoon to ourselves. So we went for a hike up
Mount Tamalpias. It was another gloriously clear day. After
hiking a bit along a paved road, we took off along a path
that went up a grassy hillside full of lupines. We stopped
in the middle of the field to look around. Everywhere
was the most startling blue: the lupines in the field, the
sky, the Pacific Ocean. When we got to the top of the
hill we sat and rested for a while, and after a while made
love. Afterwards, we looked out past the Marin headlands
to San Francisco. You could see every sail on every boat
on the bay. "Wow," Don said. "I can't stop saying 'Wow.'"
On the way back to his house, Don mentioned that his primary
care doctor, Forrester, was pleased that he was taking
control of his medical decisions. I said I was pleased
with it as well.
He also talked over plans for making his room tidier. We
both agreed that having the futon in a corner on the floor
was an invitation to disorder. Don decided he would remove
the futon and instead sleep directly on the floor. He would
fold up the bedsheets each morning, making a much more
compact pile than the futon would even when it was folded up.
When I arrived for the weekend, we would sleep in the loft.
"Are you sure you are ready to climb in and out of the loft?"
I asked. He said he had already been cleared to use the
loft. This was news to me, but it seemed reasonable,
considering the recovery of his strength and balance.
So next week I look forward to sleeping in the loft again.
I haven't slept there since New Year's Eve, when I left our
picture in his bedside nook. It will be like old times.
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Tuesday, April 20
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Wednesday, April 21
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Thursday, April 22
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Friday, April 23
Don arrived by train around 8:15 PM. We got a pizza in
Palo Alto and took it home to Mountain View to eat.
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Saturday, April 24
We did the BayLands FunRun and BaysideBrunch in the morning.
In the afternoon,
Don proofread the web pages that will accompany the FieldTester
on Glyphic's website, using the laptop Glyphic has lent me.
(The sight of me programming with my shirt off the previous
weekend was enough to prompt Mark to give me one so I wouldn't
have to swelter on weekends.)
Don made several useful comments which will make the text
clearer to people who aren't acquainted with brain anatomy.
That evening, we went to dinner at an outdoor cafe in Palo
Alto. The food was very good (and very generous), but the
service was excruciatingly slow.
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