Friday afternoon I drive to Ouray, Colorado, to meet a friend from high school. She has been ice climbing for years! I plan to watch, because ice climbing sounds terrifying. But I do take my harness, just in case. My friend talks me into trying it. The picture is NOT me. That is a competitor and she is amazing!
My climb was at the beginner ice wall. There are volunteers with loaner gear from gear companies. Boots, crampons, two ice axes and a helmet. My friend and a friend of hers give me instructions and I watch my friend climb first. She will be climbing all week!
I am wearing 1980s snow pants. Puffy and unstylish, but very very warm! I got all the way up and acquitted myself decently! Kicking each foot into the ice and then trusting that it will hold me, that is the interesting bit. Heel down, so that the crampon, boot and foot become a lever. And all the time in the climbing gym helped me to trust the harness, trust the ice axes, trust my feet.
Now, here is some tricky twirling. The photograph was taken by Terry, in April 2023 at the Bishop Hotel. Tom had an injured ankle but we danced anyhow! I was very careful twirling because his balance was tricky, his foot was sticking out and I did not want to knock him over! I didn’t, and we both had a good time anyhow.
This is from March 31, 2023, right before the Swinging on the Sound dance weekend. Live band and lots of dancers warming up for the dance weekend.
My daughter called home from college at one point and said, “Mom! I love to TWIRL!” She was contra dancing and soon started swing dance and shag and other styles. I bought her dance shoes for her next back to school supplies. We bring shoes that we don’t wear outside, to protect the floors of old 1930s dance halls. We need leather or suede soles often so that we can twirl and slide!
Here is the band that Tom and I were dancing with: Jonathan Doyle and friend.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“The cover of a book is only skin deep.” -Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway
My father came up with that one. It sounds like it makes sense until you think about it a bit. He and my mother did tons of wordplay and they would conflate adages. That’s “Don’t judge a book by its’ cover.” and “Beauty is only skin deep.” (I don’t agree with the second. The complex interiors of people have their own beauty. We just don’t have pageants for small intestines and hearts and brains.)
Don’t burn all your bridges, look before you leap and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We morphed those into Don’t burn your bridges before you cross them. Another I’ve heard is this:
The older we get, the more we learn
which bridges to cross, which to burn
Honestly, I am terrible at burning bridges. I think it comes from being passed around as an infant and feeling abandoned or a sense of loss and grief. I am practically incapable of really burning a bridge. At most I can put up a guardhouse with a tollbooth. Not that anyone ever tries, really. People mystify me and apparently that is not going away ever.
I love this old adage, too:
Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold
This weekend I traveled east and a friend that I’ve known since I was in high school and she was taking a year off from college, met in Glenwood Springs. We soaked in the amazing hot springs there and then stayed in Carbondale. We managed two more hot springs the next day. Saturday evening we went to Steve’s Guitars and heard Quinlan Valdez. He is touring from Wyoming and we intersected with his tour and enjoyed it very much.
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.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.