Casino, Tornado, Coprolite, Dinosaur

Went on a road trip the other week. Ever since my cousin Nancy moved back to California from Washington we’ve talked about meeting in the middle, and finally Nancy suggested we meet someplace on Interstate 5, which would be a straight shot for both of us. She knew just the place: the Seven Feathers Casino and Lodge in Canyonville, Oregon. I may have mentioned before that my cousin Nancy loves to gamble. She occasionally wins, and has the self-control to stop playing when she’s losing. This makes her a happy gambler. When she was moving from Washington to California she stopped at Seven Feathers and hit a largish jackpot, so she is prejudiced in favor of the place. She made the reservations. The day finally came, and we both set out, she heading north and me heading south. The radio the first day was full of news of Edward Snowden and discussion of his heroism or treason. I put in a book on CD and happily drove on. The first night I stopped in Vancouver to visit my friend Sonya; Nancy stopped at the Rolling Hills casino in Corning, California, and won another largish jackpot. She called me to say I could order whatever I wanted for dinner the next night. This is the difference between my travels and Nancy’s travels: she often comes out ahead on the trip. The next day, after listening to a profoundly depressing lecture by Noam Chomsky on Oregon Public Broadcasting (Portland has the greatest selection of radio stations! Chomsky says we’re undoing the Magna Carta!), I once more headed south. I stopped to visit my friend Pennie and her husband Tom in their new home in a small town in the Oregon mountains. They showed me a lot of the sun stones they had found the last couple of years in their searching up in the eastern Oregon desert, then handed me a petrified dinosaur egg. Yes, friends, I held a petrified dinosaur egg in the palm of my hand. On one side was the smooth petrified shell. On the other side, the shell was gone, and you could see tiny feathers and the hints of the limbs of the creature that coiled up inside the shell all those thousands – millions? – of years ago. It never hatched, but it lives on in stone and it is a marvel to hold in your hand.

Clockwise, left to right: dinosaur egg, coprolite, sun stones Tom also trotted out a coprolite, or lump of fossilized dung. Funny, but thousands of years later and with its organic matter replaced by minerals, it still looks exactly like what it is. I googled “coprolite” and soon was looking at a poster of a dinosaur taking a poop with the legend, “Coprolite happens.” Moving on to Seven Feathers, I met up with Nancy and we proceeded to do what we do so well together: nothing. By nothing I mean we talked about everybody and everything, which Nancy calls “solving the world.” So we solved the world, and we had meals in the casino restaurant, and we gambled, and we went swimming, and we slept late, for two glorious days. No large jackpots, no big losses. At the end of our two days, we sadly said good-bye and headed for home. I drove up the Willamette Valley in torrential rains and wondered if I might see a tornado and if I’d watched too many of those storm chaser shows. Apparently, though, there was an EF1 tornado that day in McMinnville. Don’t you hate it when reality bears out your paranoia?

Arrived home tired and ready to rest up from my break, but learned that when I went south, so did a lot of things around the house, so now I’m in the middle of dealing with all that. It’ll be a long time before I leave home again, but it was wonderful seeing my cousin and my friends, and holding a dinosaur in my hand. I never expected to do that.

But Who Wants to Be Institutionalized?

Mary Martin, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Seattle, was interviewed by the Seattle Times the other week. She spoke of how she would fight for the working class as mayor. She said, “No other candidates except those from the Socialist Workers Party advocate the goal of working people taking political power out of the hands of the capitalist class.”* Ah, you go, girl. I love it when you talk dirty. I don’t kid myself – I think that any political party which is organized enough to call itself a political party has become an institution and you know what institutions do, don’t you? Come on, you in the back of the room. I get tired of seeing the same hands all the time. Institutions support and nurture institutions. This is a problem with most organized human groups. They start out with the best of intentions – social and economic reform, production, employment, salvation, housing, food, and shelter, for example – but turn into organizations that have to meet their overhead. People who love to have power are drawn to leadership positions, and pretty soon the institution is more about making sure the president can have a nice hand-woven carpet in the Oval Office, or the Bishop has a nice new Jaguar S-type sedan to drive (full disclosure: the car that ran into my car a few weeks ago was a Jaguar S-type sedan). When I worked for King County a few decades ago, one year during the week between Christmas and New Year’s the employees of an entire large county department were given the week off so that their offices could have new carpeting. Did the offices need new carpeting? Not so much. The point was, they had some money left over in their annual budget, and if they didn’t spend all that money, they would not get as much money in the next year’s budget. So they got new carpet. Oh, look, the financial people could then say – they spent their entire budget this year. We must give them at least that much money, and probably a little more, for next year. This is how institutions work. In other craziness, I had a prescription I’ve been taking for years renewed this month, for the first time getting it with my Medicare prescription coverage. A couple of weeks later I got a letter from my insurance company informing me that they had let me get my prescription “temporarily,” but this drug is not in their formulary. Now that I have insurance, I have to go back to the drug that costs $100 more per month because the cheaper tablet is not covered, and that’s how that institution works. This is the sort of cultural/economic insanity that makes me tic and twitch and mutter to myself. Our human brains are always trying to find patterns and make sense out of what we perceive. The only sense I can make out of the upside-down, inside-out, bass-ackwards way our country and economy are presently run is to frame it all within the paradigm of supporting the institutions which have the money and power. Will the working class rise and cast off their chains? Perhaps. Then they will evolve, over time, into the forgers of new chains. It’s a human thing. Meanwhile, Mary Martin will not be taken seriously as a mayoral candidate, because she is a Socialist and because she is a woman. She will get a small percentage of the vote, but no more. It’s too bad. Socialists have some pretty sensible ideas, as do women. It is profoundly sad and infuriating to me that we live in a time and place when the sensible and down-to-earth are not taken seriously, but are either patronized or vilified. I do not care for politics and I do love people, mostly. You can’t have one without the other, so I’m still working on how to live with both. I’ll get back to you on that. *©2013 The Seattle Times

Cherry Eyes and a Big Surprise

Our dog, Marley, had a condition called cherry eye, a genetic defect in which the “cherries” are actually membranes which are supposed to be under the eyelid, but instead are squeezing out next to it. It can be fixed so that the dog’s eyes are normal, but the fix is a surgery. VIPP (bless them!) graciously offered to pay for the surgery because we adopted Marley through them. One of the VIPP volunteers called around looking for the best deal, and it turned out the best deal was in Mt. Vernon. Which is how Marley and I ended up catching the 4:10 ferry off the island the other day. This little stunt made me feel my age. There I was, heading out on a three-hour drive, on only one and a half hours’ sleep. I’m not 18 anymore, which is the correct age for this sort of foolishness. I have to admit that the sun coming up over Everett is a beautiful sight, as were all the May blooms. We made it to Mt. Vernon two hours before our scheduled arrival time. I dropped Marley off, and went to have breakfast and contact a couple of friends who live in that area so I could arrange visits with them. The first one was Sherry Moe, an island resident for many years. She’s living happily in Mt. Vernon now. She has lately taken up painting mandalas. She said that at first she was only painting mandalas, but she felt they were a little too dry, and she wanted to add human interest. So now she finds complex mandala patterns and clip art online to use as guides, and combines mandalas and pictures to make moving and beautiful art. She let me choose one to bring home. It’s titled “Piano Lady.”

Here is a picture of that, and you can see many more of Sherry’s mandalas at: http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/311617-sherry-moe. She hopes to come down to the Vashon Saturday Market one Saturday a month this summer, so keep an eye peeled for Sherry and her art. After leaving Sherry’s I went to visit Dorothy, an old family friend. Apropos of that, we mostly talked about our families. No, I’m not going to share. Retired to my motel room for an early night. Got up nice and late the next day, picked up Marley at the vet’s, and beat feet for Seattle. There was a plan to this day: I was to go back to Seattle, pick Rick up at the ferry dock, and take him to his nephrologist appointment. I got to Seattle early, so went to Costco to pick up my new glasses – amazing how wonderful the world looks when you can actually see it – then headed for the ferry to pick up Rick. I was stopped at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and East Marginal Way, waiting for the light to change, when a woman in a Jaguar sedan came speeding down the off-ramp from the 1st Avenue South Bridge, and for some reason tried to zoom through the intersection even though the light had changed and traffic was already moving on East Marginal Way. I heard a honk, turned, and saw the Jaguar get hit by a truck abaft of midship. The Jaguar spun around and slid backwards on a diagonal from its original path, right toward…well, my car. “It might miss,” I thought. It didn’t. It hit and dislodged my rear bumper and broke the covers off of my tail lights. The good news: no one was hurt. My car and the truck (a Ford 350, not a good vehicle with which to get into an argument) were both drivable. A nice policeman helped me get my rear bumper into the back seat of my car. He actually folded it up a little so it would fit. I didn’t know bumpers could be folded, but you learn something new every day. Rick and I decided I could not get him to the doctor’s appointment on time, so he cancelled that, and I drove my bumper-less car home. We’d all had enough excitement for one day. So that was our road trip. Marley and I are at home, resting comfortably. Hope you are, too. There’s no place like home.

May and Medicare

It is May, and I have medical insurance. I won’t call it health insurance, because it isn’t something you use when you’re healthy. The insurance I now have is Medicare. I turn 65 this month, and I am officially signed up. It was not until I was in the process of signing up that I found out that Medicare begins on the first day of the month you turn 65, not on the day you turn 65. I remarked to my husband that this was an uncharacteristically rational policy for our government to have. How much simpler to roll over the paperwork once a month, instead of every day. It’s downright sensible. I wonder how it happened. But I’m not spending a lot of time wondering about that. Mostly I’m thinking about how weird it is to have insurance again. It’s been three years since I lost my coverage, back when my husband went on Medicare himself and we were out of money to pay for insurance for me. In this uninsured hiatus, I have had three significant surgeries and a few less significant procedures. I’ve become pretty good at applying for charity from hospitals. Last year we declared bankruptcy. Listen, you do what you gotta do. Now when I go for a medical appointment and they ask for my insurance, I can whip out my two Medicare cards instead of hanging my head and mumbling, “I don’t have any insurance.” Except for the thousands of dollars we couldn’t afford to pay and those humiliating moments when I had to fess up to my uninsured state, there was a lot I liked about not having medical insurance. I paid for office calls at the time of the appointment, which meant no bills in the mail later, so less paper and paperwork. Simple. I had no drug coverage, either, so I paid for all my prescriptions out of pocket. Both times that I drove to California last year and needed to get my prescriptions a little early there was no insurance company telling me it was too soon to buy my drugs and refusing to allow the prescriptions to be filled. That happened to me at least once when I had coverage. I didn’t go to the doctor if I could help it during this three years. This is the two-edged sword of not being insured – you’re less likely to be over-tested or over-medicated, but there is always the chance that you’ll not get treatment you really need. I had two surgeries to remove pre-cancerous cells during this three years, and of course my gall bladder imploded at the end of March and was removed in early April. I was really hoping that gall bladder could wait for five more lousy weeks, but no, so there are a few medical people waiting with their hands out now. Sigh. Fortunately, I am now a freelance editor. What does a freelance editor do? In my definition: proofread for punctuation and grammar while respecting and maintaining the writer’s voice. Format writing so that a piece is consistent within itself. Listen to and encourage the writer while being honest and having a heart. Make suggestions that seem like good ideas and having no attachment to whether the writer uses the suggestions. Editing is a bit like polishing a song – you want the text to sing, and make sense, and touch the heart of the reader, and not have punctuation and grammar errors breaking up the flow. So that’s what I’m doing, or trying to do, and I enjoy it and I get paid. Like they say, the perfect job is when you get paid for something you’d do anyway, and I don’t have to leave the house, so that’s even more perfect. It’s May, I have Medicare and a little gainful employment. Everything’s looking pretty peachy, except, you know, for that mortality thing, which looms larger as you age. One thing at a time – editing and Medicare now, death when it comes. That’s my plan. For now I’m looking forward to when the nasturtiums bloom. I love nasturtiums.

Another Internal Organ Bites the Dust

My gall bladder recently decided to pre-decease the rest of me. This is not uncommon. I am amazed by the number of people who have advised me to get rid of that sucker, because I’d feel a lot better without it. As I write I am 24 hours out from its removal. Just got home from the hospital, and am waiting for the feeling a lot better to begin. My need to have my gallbladder removed became apparent the Saturday night before Palm Sunday. I had a gallstone attack that landed me in the ER with intense pain, throwing up, taking the Lord’s name in vain, going through my entire repertoire of swear words, practicing labor and meditation breathing, reciting the Jesus prayer, and singing hymns. The technical name for what I experienced: biliary colic. Technical names do seem to sanitize what they’re talking about. The doc at the ER gave me a drug called dilaudid for the pain. It was given to me in an IV and when it took effect I felt like I’d fallen off a cliff and hit the ground, then been run over by a steamroller. It did make the pain of the gallstones retreat to somewhere far, far away, and after that I was like a drunk at a bizarre medical costume party. My abdomen was ultrasounded to a fare-thee-well and in the fullness of time a Dr. Shirk – I am not making that up – came in to tell me that I did indeed have gallstones, and needed to have my gallbladder removed, here was a surgical referral, now go home. Sadly, I had nothing to put on but the clothes I had worn in, and during one of the convulsive throwing up episodes on the way in, I had lost control of my other bladder (most mothers can relate to this), so my jeans now smelled like an outhouse. I rinsed them out as best I could, and dried them also as best I could with some towels in the bathroom, then put them on, damp and smelly. So picture me then: reeking, stoned, long gray hair sticking up in an even more disheveled way than usual, being released from the ER after midnight without a cent to my name because my purse had been left at home when the EMTs carried me out. At this point a tall, beautiful young brunette woman named Amy arrived, a social worker. I gave her my friend Becky’s name and number, and Amy went to call her. When she came back, she told me that Becky and her husband Roy were coming to get me. She handed me a slip of paper with Becky’s cell phone number on it, gingerly holding it with her thumb and forefinger as if afraid she might get cooties if she got any closer to me. In that moment I realized that I had become the Other: a smelly, stoned, fat old lady with wild, crazy, gray hair. A while ago I was a patient who was being treated. Now I was someone they hoped would leave as soon as possible, because I was, you know, icky. The transition from being wife, mother, grandmother, smart aleck writer and singer, person with home and family and friends and church and a Facebook account, to modern day leper – stinky, drug-addled street person – was as stunning as it was swift. Becky and Roy did come, bless them. This is friendship above and beyond the call of duty. They brought me clean clothes and my purse and the reassurance of my human connections. We caught the first ferry home. A friend remarked to me later that some people will do anything to get out of attending the Palm Sunday liturgy. So that was my Saturday night doing drugs with the stones. My gall bladder is history now. The surgeon said it was “gnarly.” Not a technical term. I’m on the mend and I hope not to be hauled to the ER for any reason in the near future, and I will never look at stinky, drug-addled street people the same, especially old ladies with wild, crazy, gray hair. My deepest gratitude and thanks to my family, friends (especially to Roy and Becky for coming out in the middle of the night to collect me), all the doctors and nurses, everyone who prayed, sent good wishes, and remembered me kindly. Blessings on you, every one.

Welcome to Type 1 Diabetes

Allysan shows us her diabetic ID dog tag. ~ Our granddaughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes a few weeks ago. The diagnosis blindsided us. She was wasting away before our eyes, becoming more listless and tired, but it happened so gradually. Her father, JD, was the one who sounded the alarm, and I give him credit for saving her life. We took her to Fulton Family Medicine one Saturday morning to have her checked out. Thanks and a tip of the hat to Sarah Hebert, who examined Allysan, took blood, and called us the next day. Sarah told us to go to the Emergency Room immediately because Allysan had Type 1 diabetes and was in diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition which can be life-threatening. We said yes, ma’am, and took Allysan in to Children’s Hospital, where she began her new life. How could this happen? How could a child be so ill, and appear so ill, and we did not pick up on it until she was dangerously ill? I’ll tell you how it happens. It sneaks up on you. Diabetes is called “the sneaky disease” for a reason. I have heard the warning signs of diabetes more than once – drinking a lot of water, peeing a lot, eating a lot but losing weight. I had noticed that toilet paper was going fast on the weekends. I thought, boy, little girls sure use a lot of toilet paper. News flash: they don’t use that much. These things were right in front of us, but we didn’t see them. She wears long sleeved shirts and jeans. It wasn’t until she put on shorts and a tank top one night that we saw it. How did she get so thin? How could our granddaughter, our slip of a girl who is thin naturally, get diabetes? Don’t you have to be fat? No. Diabetes strikes where it will. It can be genetic. The closest relatives Allysan has with type 1 diabetes are two of my brother’s grandchildren, one of whom was diagnosed as an infant of 20 months. This might indicate that there is a diabetes gene hiding in my family DNA, but we know of no other relatives that have it or had it in the past. As with most terrible things that happen, you don’t have time to sit around asking why and how. You hit the ground running and learn how to count carbohydrate grams and give insulin injections, among other things. Allysan is on the mend now – gaining weight and more her kid self. I admit I’m still in shock. I’m in awe of her parents, JD and Nycol, who have stepped up to the plate and are taking care of their girl, working as a team. They are truly rising to this demanding occasion. And I am grateful. I am so grateful that Allysan’s diabetes has been diagnosed and is being treated, grateful for the prayers and good wishes people sent our way. She has begun to gain a little weight, and is much more lively again. A couple of people have asked me if she’ll outgrow it. No. This is for life. I am writing about it here because even though Type 1 diabetes is rare, it happens, and it sneaks up on you gradually. I’m telling Allysan’s story so you can look at your child or grandchild or even an older person who might have Type 2, adult onset, diabetes. Or how about yourself? Do you or someone you know, drink tons of water and go to the bathroom constantly? Is this person always hungry, eating constantly, and losing weight? Take a new look and ask yourself what you haven’t been seeing because you didn’t think there was any need to look. If you read this and it leads to even one person getting diagnosed and beginning treatment for this killer disease, then hurrah. If you or someone you love gets checked out and is healthy, double hurrah. Diabetes is sneaky, it is deadly, and you need to get on top of it. Pay attention. So that’s my public service announcement for this week. May you and your children and grandchildren all be healthy and live long.

A Wartime Romance

Mark & Dawn Tuel, December 1943.~ My husband, Rick, has time to write now that he has retired, and he recently wrote up this recounting of how his parents met during World War II. He writes: My dad, Mark Tuel, was born in Lehigh, Iowa, in 1921, the elder of two brothers. Two years later Mom was born on Sugar Creek Road in Dover, Ohio, the younger of two sisters. Dad was raised in Lehigh and Ford Dodge, Iowa. He was a small town boy who grew up swimming and fishing in the Des Moines River. His dad was a tailor and sign painter. After graduation from high school he and three of his buddies pooled their money and bought a well-used Ford Model A flivver which they named “Penelope.” Together the four of them drove to Los Angeles and back in a month, sleeping on the seats and running boards and following U.S. Route 66, when they weren’t patching flat tires. My mom, Dawn Kennedy, grew up on her parents’ farm on Sugar Creek Road, essentially being raised by her older sister Doris. In those Depression years the farm couldn’t support itself and like most farmers in the area her dad worked at the Reeves Steel Mill to help make ends meet. The tradition in rural Ohio farming communities was for the children to grow up and take their places within the social fabric of their forebears, preserving and strengthening it for the succeeding generation. When Mom completed the 12th grade, her parents asked her what she wanted for a graduation present and were shocked to the roots of the family tree when she instantly answered, “Luggage.” They complied reluctantly and in July of 1943 she shook the dust of Sugar Creek Road from her feet and boarded a train for Los Angeles. It was not a random decision. Some months earlier two of Mom’s acquaintances from Dover High School made a break for it and landed in Los Angeles. Gladys and Hilda found jobs there and a nice house close to the beach and apparently the Great Depression was finally ending as the wartime economy began to rev up. It was freedom, excitement, and a whole new life out on the West Coast. The early years of World War II shook an entire generation of kids out of their nests, some to return, some not. One of the first casualties of the war was tradition itself as the new generation took wing, leaving its parents wondering what the world was coming to. By that time Dad had literally taken wing. He had enlisted in the Army in April of 1942 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. He was deep into flight training starting with the Stearman Biplane, a forgiving aircraft that allowed the cadets to learn the basic skills of flight control, takeoffs and landings. It was like flying a box kite with a 12-cylinder radial engine. The next step up the ladder was the BT-13-A, a fixed single wing trainer that the cadets called “the Vultee Vibrator.” A day in the trainer was the equivalent of taking a laxative. Dad was in training throughout the war, advancing to pursuit fighter aircraft and light bombers. As his skills increased he was shifted through a variety of duties from towing airborne targets for aerial gunnery training to flight controller duty on the ground. Here the miraculous begins to unfold. While working the Flight Control Center in L.A. he met Gladdy and Hilda. Off duty Gladdy and Hilda would go out night-clubbing with the flyboys and would invite homesick young men to their house for meals and socializing. At about this point, another train filled with Midwest-American refugees pulled into Union Station and in the fullness of time, Hilda invited Mark to come over to the house. There was someone staying with her and Gladdy who she wanted him to meet. And so Mom and Dad’s separate paths finally crossed and their meeting was…tepid. “Mom didn’t like me much at first,” Dad said years later. “She thought I was too cocky.” Likewise, years later, Mom added her own thoughts. “I had only been on my own for a few months,” she said. “I wanted more of that.” But there was a war on; there was no time for more of that. Dad didn’t know when he’d be shipped out and didn’t want her to be “the girl I left behind” to be snapped up by some other guy. When he received orders for further flight training in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he popped the big question right away. Mom went back to Ohio to think it over while Dad changed duty stations. Mom’s family tree got its roots shaken once again when she abruptly flew the coop and caught a train for Dalhart, Texas. Fears of shame and scandal back in Dover finally were put to rest when Dad and mom were united in marriage on Christmas Day, 1943.