October 24, 2019: Unintentional Hiatus

I’m sorry for having neglected the blog. There’s been stuff. Kate began her senior year, and I keep thinking, so that was it? It’s a little depressing that I can’t do anything but recite the cliché about how fast it went. Sadly for me, she’s doing an excellent job of becoming a strong, willful, quick-thinking, independent young woman. The prouder I get of her, the less I think of me.

Bainbridge High had senior night for the soccer team, and that was painful. Kate’s played with these girls for so long. I’ll include a picture from those days, courtesy of the great photography of Michael Nalley.

Then, in a true old person’s thing, I developed an excruciating pain in my upper right arm. The discomfort increased the difficulty of dragging bags around. The pain is a mystery; there’s no cause for it. I’ve gone to the acupuncturist and it’s better, but it just won’t Be Best.

To add to all this, I flew to Boston this weekend to see my dear Cousin Kathy, her sweet husband Jack, and their daughter Isabel, who had come down from Amherst for the Boston Book Fair to man the booth for Amherst’s magazine “The Common”, for which she’s an editorial assistant. The trip turned out to be a flawed idea.

First, my flight on Thursday was delayed by the cyclone bomb over the northeast. As I waited at the gate in Seattle for an additional hour and a half, I had stowed my CPAP—the machine that mitigates my sleep apnea—under my seat. I literally can’t survive without that thing; otherwise I apparently wake up 30 times an hour, and I definitely feel all beat up the next morning.

Somehow I didn’t notice that a Bad Samaritan picked it up and took it away. When I was getting ready to board, I couldn’t find it. Clearly someone had stolen it. With my usual composure, I alarmed everyone nearby with my screams. Then somehow I thought to check the gate agent. It was up there.

The flight wasn’t terrible! The middle seat was empty, which never happens anymore. But I still landed around 2:00 a.m. and wasn’t at my room till nearly 3. Then I couldn’t get the door open. It was fitted with a pass code, a lock, and a handle, and it wasn’t clear how they all worked in harmony if at all. After about 15 tries, I got it open, went inside, ministered minimally to my physical needs, and dropped into bed.

Then the recovered CPAP wouldn’t work, probably because it was angry that I had nearly lost it. I struggled through a horrible night’s sleep, and, after my shower, as often happens now after I have a bad night, I feel hot, unmoored, and dizzy.

But when I had recovered a little the next morning, I went in search of my backpack to drag out my laptop and check the news. Has He Who Should Not Even Exist Much Less Be President resigned yet?

No fucking backpack. Nowhere. More panic, sprinting around the room, looking for places it wouldn’t ever be. Oh my god, it had my laptop, passport, and a significant number of greenbacks, as I ironically figured that stowing them in a remote corner of the backpack would be safer in than my back-of-the-pants-pocket jeans.

Deciding to throw myself in the Charles, I went out in the hall, where cleaning people were working. I explained my predicament in stuttering, wildly confused prose, and one of them wordlessly pointed to a sill above a fireplace. There it was.

Once in the loving embrace of my family, all was better—except somehow I’d begun perspiring profusely.

I have to back up and confess that somehow I had completely sweated through my shirt by the time I reached the gate in Seattle.

(And here I want to apologize to our great friends Tim and Shaunna Duffy and their suddenly tall son Zach, who were also flying to Boston on the same flight to watch their daughter/Kate’s great friend Grace row for Holy Names Academy in the Head of the Charles Regatta. While you guys were such great company, you must have thought I was a meth head or worse, as wet with sweat as I was. But I don’t apologize that, when you were allowed to board so early due to some perk that Shaunna has earned, I passed you comfy in your seats and declared that when the Revolution came, you wouldn’t get to board so early.)

Everywhere I went, I was sopping with sweat. I don’t get it. I looked up the possible causes and figured that I had hyperthyroidism.

The next night was worse; though the sleep apnea machine was officially working, the readings the next morning said, no, man, you were on your own. It malfunctioned again, and again I had to lie down on my bed and feel hot and sense my heart beating way too fast. Eventually I recovered, but this was the day of the book fair, and I perspired all day. Still no idea why. Stress from being an idiot?

At this point the story peters out. You are now officially reading a shaggy dog story. Anyway this doesn't claim to be some grandly epic narrative sweep but just an excuse for not writing lately. So shut up.

The flight home was uneventful except that an enormous person plopped down in the center seat and took about 25% of my space. I’m always glad to get home, but never more so than this.

So with all the usual pain plus the extra, Kate’s seemingly imminent disappearance, and this rather stressful trip to Boston (much of the stress of which was my fault), I haven’t been up to writing.

On the plus side, on the plane, I read the memoirs of Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under Obama. What an amazing person, and what an honest, painful, brilliant, insightful memoir—“Education of an Idealist”. I’m going to buy a copy for Kate for Christmas. Every little girl ought to read it. For those of you missing Obama, this doesn’t help any. He turns out to be a kind, empathetic, and wise boss with a great sense of humor. And you want your daughter to be like Samantha Power. She sounds like your best friend: diligent, intelligent, and with a conscience and a sense of honor and integrity. And a sense of self-awareness so sadly lacking in most human beings. Though this description might make you wonder, none of this comes off as self-serving. I forgot to mention that she was humble to a fault.

As I like to do with authors whose books I like, I tracked down her email address and wrote to praise the book. She wrote back about ten minutes later--I suspect that this is a hint about the habits of high-achieving people. She was very gracious and kind. I highly recommend that book for everyone.

OK, as the old cowboy song goes, I’m back in the saddle again. You’re soon to read about a speech I was unaccountably asked to give, a meltdown by AIG’s CEO, and many other things indeed, including a take-down of sports organizations and praise for immigrant taxi drivers.

Come back soon!

Happy Halloween. Maybe a ghost will do some magic in the White House…

"You want a piece of me??"