Category Archives: 7 sins and friends

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Love gently

Honey is older, nearly thirty years since that first feeling of being bitten by ants. She is back in corporate medicine, as a temp. Temporary, short term, maybe that will work better.

It is a joy to go in a room and be alone with a person and their monsters. Theirs and hers. Sometimes the younger ones haven’t experienced it, they are terrified if one of their monsters becomes a little bit visible, they hate seeing them. Honey tries to be gentle. If they only want to talk about the sore shoulder and not the stress and violence, well, she leaves the door open a crack. Sometimes the monsters cry.

Older people may be stiff to start with, but when they realize their monsters are seen, acknowledged, this isn’t another robot doctor in to say increase your diabetes medicine, lower your diabetes medicine, tell them a plan without ever connecting, the older ones lean back, sigh, and relax. The monsters play on the floor, Honey’s monsters playing with theirs, happy, engaged.

The hard part is the clinic staff. Honey is with them daily. The medical assistants are young. They kick their monsters aside as they walk down the hall. It is terribly hard and heartbreaking to work at her desk, with the medical assistants’ monsters cowering under their desks, kicked, abused, silent tears and holding bruises. Honey’s monsters mind. They climb into her lap and hide their faces in her shirt, under her jacket, peer over her shoulder. They don’t understand! Why can’t she be nice to THESE monsters?

Honey whispers to her monsters when the medical assistants are rooming patients. “I am so sorry, loves. If I acknowledge these, the monsters of the women working, I become a demon. It is very hard to share an office, no wonder I worked in a clinic alone for eleven years.” Honey has been through that. It is still inconceivable that some people don’t see the monsters at all. Is it learned blindness? Or just not developed unless someone had to learn it? Unless someone grows up in terror and seeing the monsters is the only way to survive.

Honey thinks some people learn to see them as adults, at least their own monsters. Hard enough to do that, without seeing the monsters clinging to other people.

Honey is tired of her monsters crying in sympathy with the staff’s monsters. She thinks maybe there are small crumbs that she can leave for these demons. Little gifts. Her monsters can creep under the desk when she is the only one in the room and leave something. A flower. A dust bunny. A crumb of a crisp. A small rock. A little gift to let them know they are seen and loved. A poem. A prayer. Just a tiny bit of love.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: crisp.

The photograph is me all dressed up for the 1940s ball.

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Bolster meaning

It did not even occur to me that yesterday’s dream could be taken as complaints about patients! That was not my meaning!

I wrote the dream out because I wanted to know what it was trying to tell me. And I look at it from the perspective of all the people in the dream being aspects of myself.

So who is the whiny guy (me) who won’t cooperate with authority (me) and who wants attention and is difficult? That’s not a very nice aspect of myself!

First of all, he reminds me of my father. My father really did not like authority and did not like most men. When I was quite small, I announced that he would have to die first, because he couldn’t live without my mother, but she could live without him. I was wrong as well as being an awkward child. My father’s dislike of authority interfered with his employment and he was mostly underemployed. He finished a Master’s in Mathematics, but never wrote the thesis for his PhD. I asked him why once and he said, “I was bored.” I don’t know how much alcohol interfered with his working.

I am not brilliant with authority either, though I am trying. I notice systems and often annoy authority by asking why something is run a certain (foolish and unproductive) way. I used to study whatever system I was in and then say, “Here, I’ve thought up a solution for this problem.” Then I would get in trouble for suggesting that there was a problem and I would be the problem. I learned to go to authority first and ask, “So is this (huge problem) a problem? I find it difficult. What is your advice?” Priming the pump, so to speak.

As a temp, the authority problem is weirder. I am an outsider, short term, no one really has to be nice to me. That fast trip home and back made me realize that I am lonelier in a group clinic than I was in a solo clinic. In my solo clinic there was me, my receptionist and the patients. In this group clinic I have less people to talk to and it is lonely. My problem, not theirs. They are about to move me to another clinic and I will see what approach I can take to this. The system might have a Balint Group or I may be able to start one.

What about the frozen looking spouse? Ha, I think that’s the part of me that is trying to keep my mouth shut with authority. The kids? Some days I want to pull the system apart and fix it, but I am not in authority to do that here. The grumpy nurse? I am running behind and I can’t fix everyone. Some people don’t want to be fixed, including me.

I could go home and try another place. However, I think that the cracks in the US medical system are in the whole system. As a country, we built this. I hope that I see single payer healthcare in my lifetime, but I may not. And Martha is right too: I thought that this place was doing better handling a chronic illness than where I worked in 2021, but they aren’t, really. They apply a formula, but the patients don’t get much out of it. They just get shuffled in once every three months. I did upset that apple cart by spending more time with those people and talking to them, but I do not know what the next physician will do. Sigh. The patients are already my patients and are saying goodbye.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: meaning.

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Letters

I went to the post office Monday. I am in a rental house, and get packages every so often for the previous renter. This time I realized at the post office that one was misdelivered and was to the house next door. Ooops. But the post office said they would redeliver it.

I love snail mail letters. I have colored pens and stickers and stamps. The whole thing makes my inner child very happy. Once I got a letter from my mother-in-law saying that my letters are national treasures! I kept that letter.

I haven’t written myself a letter, but maybe I should. What would I write?

I sent the envelope above out, but it came back. I will be driving home soon and wrote to a friend on the way, but I must have the wrong address. I bought the stamps here. The stamp pads were expensive, though, so I only got two!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: post office.

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Naughty

The naughtiest postcard I ever sent was to my friend B, when he was living the romantic life of a government tax economist in New Zealand. He had been working for the US government, but went off to work for New Zealand’s government for two years. I felt rather jealous. Uprooting as a physician with a husband and two children to go work in a foreign country seemed a bit insurmountable. There was an awful lot of difficult family drama and illness going on, so that is the real reason that I did not do it.

Anyhow, naughty postcards. I sent B a postcard from Georgetown. It is black and white, a man lying prone looking up. A sheep is standing over him, so that no naughty bits can be seen, but one certainly suspects that the man is nude. He and the sheep are looking at each other. The caption is “No more sheepless nights.” Eeeeee. I bought two of that one, because it made me laugh.

B sent a letter back, along the lines of, “Cut it out, you are getting me in trouble with the postman.” I desisted. I did not have any more postcards like that one.

I have bought and kept blank cards and postcards over the years. Good thing, too, now that cards are a whopping $4.00 to $7.00 each. People must buy them, right? I have picked up blanks at garage sales too, once in a while. And the ones I don’t like can go out in the Little Free Library for other people.

I plan to make a calendar and maybe some postcards of Elwha’s cat art. He did it more than Sol Duc does. The photograph is one of the designs, from February 2023. I did see both of them adding to it. Perhaps there was some sibling rivalry going on, I don’t know. This installation is quite complex, with two toy mice, the earbuds, one of those glittery balls tucked under a mouse and the toy made of pipe cleaners.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: postcard.

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Visit

It is time to visit. It has been long enough and it is time.

He is in a dungeon. I have to go down flight after flight of stairs. It gets colder and damper and there is mold growing on the walls and puddles. Light comes with me.

I can hear him one flight above finding him. He’s having a tantrum and hitting something.

I find the door in the dungeon. It is thick and moldy damp wood with bars in the window and a huge lock. It is also open. My friend is screaming at the ceiling and hitting the ceiling and walls with a yard long heavy pipe. It clangs and I feel a tremor when he hits metal. There is no window, we are too far underground.

I lean on the doorway. “If you go deeper in to the earth, it will be warm and dry.”

He turns with the pipe held like a bat. He is huge and muscular and dressed in rags and very threatening. The room is mostly dark. He sheds a faint light. He glares at me and then lowers the pipe. He shrinks to his child self, like me. About age three.

“You are awfully cute at three.” I say.

He drops the pipe and lets me come hug him. The cell smells truly awful. There is a drain in the floor that appears to be working, sort of. There is a visible liquid level below the drain.

He is still while I hug him and then relaxes. “Ok,” he says. Silence for a minute. “I didn’t really think you’d come back.”

“Friends forever, right? That’s what you said.”

“Yeah, but,” he hesitates. “You were mad.”

My turn to shrug. “Yes. I got over it.”

“Took you long enough.”

My eyebrows go up. “You could have made the first move.” Now he shrugs.

“How about a picnic?” I say. “This is icky. Let’s get out of here.”

He looks at the ceiling. The stone is scratched and chipped. “Yeah. No progress here. Might as well.”

We leave the cell and go up. “Damn stairs.” I say.

“Your lungs are good.” he says.

“Most people’s lungs are pretty good at three.” I say.

“You are pretty cute at three too.”

“Thanks.” I get tired of the stairs and transport us to a meadow in my garden. It is summer and full of wildflowers. It is on a sloped hill with an enormous willow tree. “This is from when I was 7, really.” I say.

“Nice.” he says.

I have a picnic basket and get food out. We don’t really need to eat but it’s fun anyhow. We can taste food, a bit. His keeps turning black on his plate.

“Cut that out.”

A shrug again. “I like bugs now.”

“Did you at three?”

“Naw, but I ate them if I was hungry. Ants are not good. Grasshoppers are better.”

“Are you making any progress at all?”

He leans back on the hill, about as relaxed as he gets. Still hyper alert to everything around us. “No, and I don’t think I will. He’s 69 now. Getting older.”

“Well, he’s expecting to die of a stroke at 80.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty much too late. There is too much to process. And wine and pot do not help.”

“Using more?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s talk about something more fun. Politics or taxes or something.”

He laughs.

We talk about cabbages and kings. Why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. The sun moves like the real sun.

He is starting to fidget.

“Time?” I say.

“Yeah. You know, it’s not fair that they need us even if they won’t listen.”

“Seems like it.”

He glances at me and away. “Yours listens.”

“You’ve seen the results of that.”

He looks down. “Is she happy?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes sad, sometimes lonely, sometimes impatient. You know, all of it.”

He nods. We start packing up and we trek back to the dungeon and the endless stairs. We have gone down two flights when the landscape shifts. A forest, dark and huge trees and overcast. Damp and cool. He is morphing. “Oh!” he says, “Asleep again! And it’s 4 pm. Must be tv. And wine.” There is a small clearing in sight with a shack. It looks run down, no vehicles. My friend has morphed and split. He is a huge bear with red eyes. And an older man who smells of alcohol and reaches into his shirt for a handgun.

“Really?” I say to the man with the gun.

“They are his memories,” growls the bear. “I have to go.”

“Well, the bear isn’t. Goodbye and good luck.” I say, patting a furry leg. “I will come back.” But he is not paying attention any more, he is focused on the shack.

I go home and he goes to try again. Wake up, my friend, wake up.

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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: confusion.

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Turtlehead

I don’t know if this monolith is named turtlehead, but it certainly looks like one to me.

I lost the trail early on and had to backtrack. There was a turn and then rock steps down that I missed. I was more careful after that. I like the way they mark the trails here: rocks and more rocks.

Here is the sign at the start.

Here is a future monolith near the top of the Corkscrew Trail.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: monolith.

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Rumor

Oh, kindness. I think one huge kindness is not to listen to rumors and not to assume that they are correct. Whew. Though if you are ever the victim of a rumor, it will tell you who your real friends are. They will stay present, stay in touch, stay with you. Some will ask about it, others won’t, but they will stay. And you may be amazed by how many people disappear into the woodwork. They are staying “neutral”, they’ll say, but they don’t call, answer calls, or include you any more. Then they may show back up in the future. You will not trust them again. Ok, if they were going through some trauma of their own, but otherwise, no.

Sol Duc is keeping an eye on the neighborhood. She never tells me rumors, ever.

Here are three versions of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. I like the Bessie Smith one best. The John Lennon tune is different.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: kindness.

And another:

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Driving Lily

I was driven yesterday. I have an ill friend. She is currently in a “rehab”, aka “nursing home”, in Sequim. I drive 40 minutes to be with her at an hour appointment. Afterwards we check in at the nursing home and then I drive her back to her house, 40 minutes again. That is where Lily is. Lily is her cat. My friend was in the hospital for six days and now the “rehab” for two weeks. My friend wants to go home. Lily is miserable. She misses her person and hisses and swipes at me. I was driven to take my friend to see her cat.

Lily let me pet her yesterday because I brought her person home. However, the whole thing was a near disaster. My friend has been trying to get stronger, but she is not stronger. She is weaker. She has three steps into her house. We were there for about three hours. She sat to wash the cat’s bowl in the kitchen sink and Lily was very very happy to be near her. My friend was then tired enough that we had real difficulty getting her out of the house and back in the car. I used a bath stool to let her stop and sit about every four feet. She was using a walker, but could barely walk. She sat in the doorway of the house and talked about crawling. However, those muscles in your upper legs? Those are some of the biggest muscles in the body, and if you can barely walk, scooting or crawling is not feasible either.

We made it to the car without having to call an ambulance. I’m pretty strong for my age and size, but I’m not strong enough to carry her alone.

Poor Lily. I don’t think I dare try to get her in a cat carrier and she’d probably cry all the way driving and anyhow, the nursing home would need a shot record.

Lily will have to put up with my care for now.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: driven.

I am not my friend’s doctor, I am just a friend.