Back to the Ironing Board

Exercise Therapy, only available in the mornings from 8:30 until 12:30, leaves the afternoons open. To keep myself occupied and to try and help out Ruby a little with her Coral Sands motelier chores. I will clumsily attempt to do things such as make the beds and clean out various room refrigerators but my specialty is to press the pillowcases. 

When she first asked, I blurted: "I haven't done it since the stroke . . . but I'll try." I didn't have much hope of succeeding. Not only hadn't I done it since THE BRAIN ATTACK but I've never been very good at ironing.

I bellied up to the board, aimed the fan my way, noted that I had a view of the pool from the ironing station in Rube's "Let'er Buck Suite". I warily took hold of the waiting pre-warmed tool (Black & Decker®) and went for it. 

I've been ironing almost every day for three weeks. Left alone to my own devices. I am surprising myself. I am getting self assured. Cocky even. Yesterday, as a test of skill, I spent my day off slowly ironing five of MY OWN shirts. One shirt was linen. Two were rayon. As I slowly pressed, I thought. Though always from a different viewpoint, ironing has seemed a marker in my life.

When I was a kid, before I was in kindergarten, I used to follow my mother around while she did chores. My Pop was at work. My brother was at school. She seamlessly ran the house, on a schedule. Tuesdays were ironing day.  She would stand at the board set up in our small "dining" room, take the clothes she had washed on Monday, had smoothed and rolled up, slightly damp, and iron all day. Before spray-bottles, it was important not to let clean laundry get completely dry. If needed, an old 7-up bottle, filled with water and fitted with a wide perforated cap, stood by. 

I know that it was pre September 1959. I remember she wore (ironed) full skirted pastel house dresses. There was something hypnotic to a toddler in her repetitive sway at the board. The huge, flared, slip filled skirt agitating like the washing machine itself. I recall the vision as it appeared to me, laying on the floor looking up at her ironing. The enveloping, luminescent umbrella-like dress moving back and forth, following a few seconds behind her repetitive twists, the sight and sound of the big softly starched cotton, like a pastel tent in the wind. I remember sadly the day that all ended. My mother thought I was looking up her dress for other reasons not even dreamed of by this fey 4 year old. So it stopped but the ironing went on weekly, until after I was in college.

In college, a lot of my time was spent with the girl I met at 16. We were together for 8 years. In all that time, Gerri must have ironed. But I was young, I ignored that.

After Ger came Michael. A painting painter from New York. In the 5 years together, he never ironed. Clothes came out of drawers wrinkled and splattered with paint. We wore them proudly.

After Michael and my 30th birthday came Dick. Richard was a clothes pony. Hence he always ironed, meticulously, even clothes made out of fabrics I thought could NOT be pressed. He was an artist, both graphically and at the iron. Not only would he do his own wardrobe, he would do mine. He would press the clothes from the famous designers we had found for me at the New York and New Jersey outlets. I looked FABULOUS. I was happy to let him have at it.

At 35, After he left me (for another, well-pressed, guy),  I was in extreme pain PLUS I couldn't iron all the clothes I was left in the divorce. I was alone, I was wrinkled, and not just from crying. A collegue at the magazine I worked at took enough pity on me to offer to teach me how to iron the educated way. She made me promise that I never reveal that the high powered New York business woman she now was had once studied Home Economics in COLLEGE. I never did, sorta. We laughed through her serious lessons. I learned the correct way to do a shirt. It goes like this: Collar/yoke/cuffs/sleeves/the rest. DB taught me to do the back of doubled fabric first, the importance of pulling, what needs to be done up-side-down on a cloth. I listened. Sponge-like, I absorbed. I attempted this alone. I still fumbled.

Soon after, my magazine, the black sheep in a family-values type of publishing company, was sold off to the hipper, more experimental French. Almost everyone was fired, including me. Suddenly I knew how dirty laundry felt. Loveless, jobless, seemingly worthless and rumpled. 

A few months later my sister-in-law needed me in Seattle for a design consult. She called, I went, I moved there. A few weeks later Ruby was installed permanently in my life. Then, after a few years of single (permanent press) living, the bouquet carrying B entered my life.

Brian was a younger, unfettered bachelor. I was fettered, some would say "styled" stylist/writer/freelancer with all the encumberance that would fit in my Queen Anne backyard bungalow. Everything but an ironer.  Eventually I got a real job, Brian got a real car, we got a bigger house, our first Weimaraner, a domestic partnership certificate from city hall. A life together. A new iron. Brian can iron when he wants to but usually chooses to use the dry cleaner. I go right along. I have for 15 years.

Then in October of 2008, Stroke struck. Early this month, after a long, cold, snowy, housebound, ironing free winter, I came here. To Palm Springs, The Stroke Center, The Coral Sands Inn, Ruby, and circuitously back to the ironing board.

Dear Ruby asked and I tried. The first few cases came cautiously easy. Then the Jersey cowboy cases rode in. Ruby rules that ALL pillowcases be pressed. "They just FEEL better". So, for Rube, I struggle, (I may curse, but I keep ironing). Our lovely photographer friend Debra, overlapping my first few days of respite here, came like the cavalry into the room to help me tug, pull and smooth the bunching, creasing, uncooperative fabric decorated with the deceptively grinning cowpokes. Eventually, AND for the last three weeks reappearing, cases calmly get done. I was taught to muddle through. (But for the record, I DON'T LIKE THEM)

In the last three weeks of slow ironing I have had a lot of quiet time to think about my life. I not only considered how lucky I am to be here (in Palm Springs and on this earth), I found that I have had time to gather together what I've learned about this art of ironing from some wise women in my life. 

Among these: Ginka (my mom) taught me craft, Donna taught me the economy of technique, Debra taught me that when the going gets rough, diligence (one of the Seven Holy virtues) will eventually smooth things out and Miss Ruby taught me to keep trying, to never ever give up.

All by myself I learned that falling tears, whether wept due to heartbreak or deep appreciation, will iron right out.

- - - David

Week 2 draws to a conclusion: Let the 3 day weekend begin

   Stroke Recovery Center, Palm Springs, CA   

I know, I know, you are all wondering  HOW I am doing. How do I do it? What AM I doing? 

For all of those enquiring minds, here's the scoop; for the others, run while you still can.

I still get up early, 6 AM at the latest. That means this tired old body is ready for rest just when the other folks at the Coral Sands are getting going, but it also means that I can wobble around in the morn, sight unseen. I might even take off my shirt and go into the pool, a thing I would never inflict upon witnesses. I hear you, but apparently vanity is the last to go, way way after stomach muscles.

I can also be there waiting like a panting dog when Ms Ruby cracks open her doors to let out the fellow canines. I can assure her that I am in no hurry to get going to the Center. I can wait.

Ruby's my saint of a driver. She and her VW, "Dinah", take me the 2.3 miles and pick me up after. So far I have never called a cab (though I did foolishly try to walk back once). I think I'll wear out my welcome first. Don't I always?

Once there I am watched over by two ladies and sometimes a trainer. I usually start on the bike, a machine, fully balanced, on the floor. I foot pedal for 15 minutes then arm peddle for 10 minutes more. I am up to a resistance level of 10. The ladies seem to think that's good, but I think they would tell me it's good even if it were bad. The perfect overseers.

I also do stomach crunches on a machine that lets me do it sitting up, strapped in and never reclining. Instead. I crunch forward. A miracle find of a machine. I can exercise the flab without lying back and up which caused my head to spin so badly once that I am afraid to try it again. So far I've done 50 crunches a day, and no tilt-a-whirl effect.

There are parallel bars  to practice heal to toe walking (in case an officer of the law ever wants to drunk test me). There are pulleys to pull, calf muscles to stretch, a machine to build up my legs with reclined squats, another press to exercise them differently and one to jiggle my Chi. I even saw a "personal trainer" this week who gave me a series of leg and eye exercises to do at home to lessen the wobbles. I am getting into this.

I just may have the nerve to get on a real bicycle soon. (Do they make adult training wheels?)

Someday I may even restart my pleas to Brian to get me a motorcycle. 

I have to do that quickly, while he still feels sorry for me and before I get too much older. Do they have a cut off age for the license?

Even if he balks (and I have a funny feeling he will), I know in my heart that I am already better (even though I still walk like a drunk). Much better than I was 7 months ago

As Brian wrote when he sent the picture of Lucy and me in the hospital wheelchair, "Amazing how far you've come!"

He wasn't referring to the 2,500 mile flight, was he?

- - - David

oh lucy

bedouin
Originally uploaded by saikiishiki

I miss my grrls (and my man, of course)

- - - David

photo on flickr

Singing in the dead of night

Looking up from the NYTimes at the Coral Sands

The mockingbird song is always changing,  I am told. The bird doesn't have a singular sound; it mimics the songs of other birds (as well as insects and amphibians, Wikipedia informs me). The mockingbird might do this for devious reasons but it sings beautifully, full-out, exquisitely. 

Wikipedia also relates this birds' place in history. "Charles Darwin noticed that the mockingbirds . . . differed from island to island" . . . "with what he had been told about Galapagos tortoises, could undermine the doctrine of stability . . . "

The mockingbird: inspiration, evolution, natural change put into song. 

Sung to me.

The birdsong is performed every morning, a repeat show at sunset, it's permutations cannot be predicted, not by me.  The sound of change, it is in the air. This "symbolism" has finally sunk in. With a little work, with a little effort, I can not only talk the talk, I WILL walk the walk.

The Coral Sands, taken in by the Ruby, embraced by friends old and new, my Lourdes of the desert, should I be surprised that it's not only a life changing miracle but that it's been put to music by this historic song writer?

My life has become a stupendous musical.

I can dance to it. 

Well, I plan to, soon.

- - -David

Miracles in the desert, already

It's dawning on me in Palm Springs

   

Heavenly intervention? Mothers' Day karma? Full Moon? Ruby's Lemon Pie? Somehow something seemed to make everything right. But it was a bit of a trial, I may have exhibited a little discombobulation.

Everything started out fine, we even left a little early for the airport, I was packed a full day early. After getting B to his gate for his plane to San Antonio, I made the flight (by myself) in Detroit, the mile long connection in Minneapolis, and I even made the long walk out to the main terminal, through security, and all the way back through another terminal in San Francisco. (No big deal, you say, and I would have said that too, BEFORE, but now the longest trek I had grown accustomed to was the way to the back door at home.)

It was at that LAST x-ray machine in SF that I noticed that my iPhone was lit up as it went through the inspector in it's little grey bin. "That's odd." I remember thinking, "Maybe Brian's trying to call"

When I retrieved it, and my laptop, bag, belt, watch, wallet and slip-ons, the iPhone was in call mode and locked, the bottom "return to main screen" button didn't do it's job, nor did the off button, the ringer button, the loudness toggle, nuttin' honey.

No time to spare, I had 20 minutes to make my plane to Palm Springs, I pocketed my phone and wobbled to the gate, finding the new Samsonite™, 4-wheel rolling suitcase doubled as an ersatz walker for the weary.

Finally, making it to the gate, I called B, in San Antonio. (is it me? Is it ALWAYS the last gate?) "Have you ever had your iPhone stuck in the phone function?" I asked. "No." he replied. I said goodbye, I hung up, I was starting to feel panic, I had made it so far, but NOW I couldn't check my email OR facebook!

I boarded the almost deserted Alaska Airlines flight and made sure to sit on my phone. Did I mention the "off" button wasn't working? When the steward said the speech about dis/enabling all electronic devices, I may have appeared just a little guilty and blushed slightly, I may have shifted in my seat JUST a bit, I remember praying that nobody called and lit up the phone JUST as the steward passed. Was it my imagination or did he look a little like Himmler?

No one called, the phone was still locked but we made it to Palm Springs, I was able to call Ruby's machine, and I made it through the FABULOUS open air terminal to carousel 2 in baggage claim.  The near empty plane's luggage was already waiting. Mine was not. The carousel stopped moving. It emptied. I glanced at the "baggage assistance" desk, closed. I made my way to the small sign on the desk, I was instructed to go back to ticketing, 1000 yards later, I find ticketing also closed, at 7:30 PM, did I mention it was after 9?

Ruby had gotten my message and left a message. I knew this by looking at my phone screen, apparently the ringer was also out of order. I went to the curb with my carry-on. The airport was deserted, I was alone. Eventually I grew impatient (big surprise) and walked back to the deserted ticket counter. I reread the sign, picked it up, planned to do something creatively evil with it and noticed a call bell next to the small sign. I pushed. I waited. I left. Seconds later from a few feet away I heard a door creak, I saw a head pop out, I yelled. The drill: flight, name, UPC code, phone? Phone? WhaT? Like I had my own cell number memorized? Ruby's? Isn't the address enough? Did I mention I can remember all the phine numbers in my life until I reached the age of 30 and then it STOPS?

"No phone" the tired worker said as I tried to explain my predicament. "No phone" I repeated wearily, glancing down at my iPhone where Ruby's smiling face was now displayed. She must have called again. I explained and hurredly made my way back to the curb. Ruby's dazzling grin was now not only frozen on my phone but also in front of me. I made it to her open arms, her blonde convertible named Dinah, a star covered desert night and to a full up Coral Sands. Waiting for me on the boisterous pool deck were the cheering Debra and Charlie, our old pals from Seattle, now dear friends of Ruby's. We hugged hello. I had a feeling all would work out.

And it did. Sunday morning Marcy, the wonderful wife of my college roommate, the mother of my Georgetown grad student/former W-S worker bee/pal/"niece" AND my facebook friend, fixed my iPhone VIA FACEBOOK! I was offered clothing, given toothpaste and served coffee and comradery by my fellow guests AND my luggage arrived on the morning flight from SFO.

Mothers Day miracles . . . or the magic of the Coral Sands Inn? You decide, I have. 

I'm feeling lucky.

- - - David

Driving, Miss Daisy?

WARNING: Horn you may hear is being tooted by this old driver

Question: What is more bothersome than an old geezer slowly inching into traffic in front of you? Answer: Being the old geezer.

Yesterday I practiced, with B in the passenger seat, driving the highway from my NEW doctor’s office in Ann Arbor to the lovely alley behind our house in Adrian. No one was hurt. This drive was momentous enough for BOTH of us to mention it on facebook. No red lights were run; no vehicles were sideswiped; no curbs got in my way; I barely cringed when oncoming traffic sped by inches away. I felt like a student driver except for the invulnerability. I felt mortal, in a big way.

Other things have changed. When I see someone seemingly DWE (Driving while elderly) gone are any pangs of anger, instead there is a feeling of connection and a prayer of support. I have not become an sainted angel. The same old furor has simply been transfered to tailgaters, passers who ignore yellow lines and those who refuse to take notice of blinking school buses. “He’s just in a holy hurry” I mutter or “She must be so much more important than the rest of us”. Maybe it’s the effect of IEED or just another sign of age but I do not suffer the ways of bad drivers lightly.

Early this morning, with Brian following in the Honda behind me, I drove back to the area to have my blood drawn. Both the dogs were in my car. This increased the sense of accountability. If I crashed so did they. Brian followed me all the way to the hospital. There I walked in, like many times before, for a simple draw to test for various things my new doctor might find interesting. I made my way to the lab passing the Emergency room. I glanced and at the gurneys and the IVs and the antiseptic halls. Unexpectedly I shuddered. 3 weeks of forgotten incarceration came flooding back. Another silent prayer came to my head, all those people, all that pain, countless people offering aid. Help them.

I strode on. I became fully aware I was walking; no wheelchair, no walker, not even a cane. I was never as happy to go into the lab and chatter with the techs. If they had asked I would have gladly filled many more vials. I finished and got back into the car. The grrls were waiting. I was back in Adrian before I had a chance to get nervous. I was driving highway solo. By 8:45 AM I had gone over 55 mile. I was following a slow going vintage pickup, an aqua and white Corvair, past our local 1885 courthouse.

I was happy.

- - - David