"There is no fear ... only perception"

I've had a couple of days to think about it. He said he could not tell me that it was time; only I would know when it was time. It might be in six months, it might be in six years. It might be now. What he was talking about was another surgical procedure to relieve pain. "You know how long this has gone on," he said. "You know what you've tried in order to relieve it," he said. He also said the decision was mine, again. He repeated all the hazards, the benefits, the procedure and the recovery time. He encouraged me to do whatever research I could on the procedure; talk to friends and acquaintances who had had the operation. He reminded me that I could (and had!) send him emails or call his office and he would answer my questions. But it still came down to me deciding when it was time.

 A special girlfriend and I went to Asheville, NC from the surgeon's office. We had tickets for the Christmas Candlelight Tour of the Biltmore Estate. It's an outing I especially love and of which I have fond memories. Last year there was a particularly nasty snow storm just before I went there for the Christmas frivolities. The place looked like a fairy tale (which it is, anyway) and the snow gave it a sparkle and fantasy quality even greater than it already has. Girlfriend is a nurse and has a long personal and professional history of caregiving on many levels. A good person to be with when you're trying to make decisions like this. Fortunately, she also has a marvelous wit and earthy sense of humor to enhance her impeccable good sense. We engaged in a little retail therapy before it was time for our tour to start. She kept an educated eye on my progress in the car, walking, climbing into the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the estate house, across the cobbled surface of the stable courtyard and, finally, into the house. For someone who grew up within haling distance of Disneyland (the real one, not those Floridian and European knock-offs!) Biltmore is almost a sort of coming home. I do understand that, at one point, people actually lived there - lived among the astonishingly beautiful and legendary pieces that one can see today ... from the other side of the red velvet ropes. But it is also a rather spiffing version of a Golden Age Sleeping Beauty Castle (American, not Neuschwanstein). In the broad light of a summer day it is magnificent. Decorated and firelight illuminated for Christmas it is simply magical. Girlfriend and I went from floor to floor, up stairs and down. From public rooms that make you catch your breath to private rooms that engage your fantastical imagination. Fireplaces lighted and candles flickering, decorated Christmas trees in nearly every room. Dancers in the solarium, chamber players in the third floor living hall, even big buckets of seasonal greens in the laundry area in the basement. Who would not feel like a princess again, even for just a little while?

We walked and talked and laughed. But girlfriend watched me, too. George Vanderbilt installed a couple of elevators in the house to assist guests and staff. The one for guests is available for today's guests, still. Coming down the Great Staircase to the second floor, girlfriend said, "You really should take the elevator, you know." The docent in his natty blue Biltmore uniform offered to hold the door for  me. There were two exceedingly elderly little ladies with blue hair and canes in the elevator already. I just couldn't. Smiling bravely, I assured both girlfriend and docent that I was fine to continue down the stairs. And so I did ... slowly and with clenched teeth. We finished the tour and the shuttle bus took us back to Lot C-3. We walked slowly through the rain to my car and I fell into the driver's seat (as well as one can fall into a Mini Cooper) with a huge sigh of relief. Dinner was at the restaurant we traditionally go to; we both love German food and have happy memories of that country. With the grace granted by selective memory, I had forgotten about the 12, 000 steps from the parking lot up to the front doors of the restaurant. So, another walk through the falling rain and pulling myself up the stairs. Youthful and elegant as we are, the first thing both of us did when we sat down was take Excedrin Extra Strength by the fistful. Then we both laughed. We talked of many things over dinner: lost loves, the beauty of the house we had just left, old friends, Germany, getting older and, finally, what I was going to do about the Elephant Sitting In the Middle of the Room.

I had a surgical procedure just three months ago in an attempt to forestall this procedure. He told me at the time that the procedure had about a 50% success rate. My math is poor, but I'm pretty sure that means that there is a 50% failure rate. I flipped the coin. I lost. I know what pain was involved in that procedure and recovery. Recent memory is not as full of grace as older memory. That's probably why we can't pop out babies every few months like mice do. So, now I have to decide if the anticipated relief from another surgery is worth the discomfort and risk. Add to that the very real pressure of a health care insurance system run amok. If there is to be another surgery, it is wisest, fiscally, to have it completed before the end of the calendar year when we all roll over into a new deductible period. What a miserable thing to have to take into consideration. But there it is. And, as my child is so fond of reminding me, what is ... is. Ongoing pain is an evil spirit that clouds everything. I am tired of becoming more and more fearful of my everyday life.I don't want to have to continue to fear pain every time I stand up and every time I walk. I am tired of being frightened when my small pack of short dogs goes tearing past me for fear of being knocked over. I really want to take back control of my life. Perhaps I have made the decision after all.

"What must be at last, had better be soon." (Jane Austen, Emma)

For several months I've been dipping into Julia Child's book My Life In France. It's one of my Kindle books and I find I usually read it on the BlackBerry application (e.g., waiting rooms, queues, waiting for the hot water to get from the boiler on the far side of the house to the shower in my bathroom, etc.). I've always enjoyed Mrs. Child's wild-child attitude toward the culinary arts and her book has truly engaged my fancy. As you might expect, she goes on at great length about the places she and her beloved husband ate, what they ate, and how marvelous or mediocre it was (even France has less than stellar moments ...). I mention all this because yesterday I had cause to be in a Hardee's at an ungodly hour of the morning and overheard a conversation which called Julia to mind.

For those of you who haven't had the unalloyed treat of eating at a Hardee's, let me tell you that you have missed one of the great cultural experiences of the rural South. I do not refer to the cuisine, but rather to the lovely people you can meet and/or overhear there. Hardee's is on a par with McDonald's, Jack-In-the-Box, Burger King, etc. They do a line of breakfast biscuits with all manner of grease, plastic eggs, pork-like products, and anything else you can imagine that will cause your heart to clog and stop sooner rather than later. Upon placing your order you will always be asked whether you wish to upsize the amount of cholesterol you are ingesting. I can attest to this because I always get one or another of these dreadful things and enjoy every last crumb of it (I do not, however, upsize anything). More to the point of this journal entry, though, is the cultural aspect of Hardee's. Anyone who has ever run for elected political office will tell you that the shakers and movers of the last generation, in all their gray glory, can be found most mornings from around 6:00 a.m. until around 9:00 a.m. at their local Hardee's. One would not be wise to fail to plow this fertile field of opinion and good will. That said, in off years it is marvelous good fun to frequent Hardee's in the early hours just to hear what Common Wisdom is saying. A cup of coffee and a note pad will serve you well. Especially if you are a "Yankee" who has only been in the area for nearly a couple of decades.

I had gone to my veterinarian's clinic first thing in the morning to collect even more special formula canned food for my ailing population of companion dogs. As it happened, Madame Vet was not yet in when I got there. Since I really needed to talk to her about the current plague sweeping through the fur family, I had a choice of sitting quietly in the waiting room of the clinic or going out to get something to eat and coming back. I chose the latter. And so it was I found myself at Hardee's in the early morning. Weekend mornings at Hardee's are different than weekday mornings. It was one of the days of a holiday weekend, so the normal rules for anything did not apply. I, for example, was sporting a ball cap with a ponytail pulled through the back, no makeup, jeans, sneakers and my completely comfortable but ghastly looking purple parka. Fortunately, my appearance wasn't out of the ordinary for a weekend morning at Hardee's. I was standing in line to place my order when two young men queued up behind me. They looked to be about 20, with the slenderness that seems to belong to that age. One had long hair tied into a ponytail and both were wearing the regulation ball caps and camouflage that marked them as Good Ol' Boys in that making.  What caught my attention was the conversation between them regarding their breakfast choices. The young man immediately behind me was reading the menu on the wall aloud to his companion and accompanying the reading with his critical evaluation of each offering. It struck me as being a charming variation on Julia's life in France. With regard to one of the offerings, which included pancakes and sausage, the verdict was, "Really good. You should try it." But for one of the meals that the American Heart Association has placed on it's Top Ten Foods To Avoid (unless you want to die next year), his gourmandly assessment was that it was, "Totally awesome." And was this all so very different than Julia's stories of her life with Paul in France immediately after their marriage? Sharing a meal with a friend is, no matter where you are doing it, an act of community not to be taken lightly. So, Paris, France or rural South, United States ~ food taken with friends is all of a muchness.

I sat at my solitary table munching through my lovely, greasy breakfast biscuit. I was on the far side of a half wall from the Good Ol' Boys and could not see most of them, although I could hear them. I had walked past them with my tray to get to my table, so I knew who most of them were. They nodded their heads in greeting as I passed, then, I suspect, promptly forgot about me as I disappeared on the other side of the wall. This is as it should be; I am not one of them. A woman who is Not From Around Here, one whose job puts her on the far side of some fence, single, on the down side of Middle Age and who talks kinda funny. What I found so fascinating, though, was that although I know many of these men as articulate, professional, formally educated men in the work-a-day world, when at Hardee's on an early weekend morning, they all fell into that particularly opaque patois common to the cracker barrel or potbelly stove at the local hardware store. Except that all of those places have closed down, so they now come to Hardee's instead. Sitting there at my corner table listening to them, I honestly could not understand two or three words in ten. I don't know if it was the accent or the idiom, but had they been speaking to me I would constantly have been saying, "Sorry? Didn't catch that." The two young men who had been behind me in line at the counter went to sit with the Good Ol' Boys. They slid effortlessly into the conversation. It was interesting to watch the younger men paying their respect to the older ones in the terms of address and to hear the older ones instructing by example how one observes the social niceties of early morning male conversation.

I suppose a bunch of women would have their own methods of subtle conversation and communication. But you just don't see us out at Hardee's at that hour in battalion strength. I suspect we are at home feeding the young 'uns and getting the laundry started ... (you are expected to smile at this point).

"Old age, if it's nothing else, should at least be theatrical, don't you think?" (Martha Grimes, The Old Contemptibles)

Banked Passions (of a sort)

I started my public day yesterday in the dining room of a boutique hotel in downtown Nashville. Let me state publicly, so there is no misunderstanding, that the only reason for which I would stay in downtown Nashville in the first place is because there is some function scheduled there which I simply must attend and which begins at an ungodly hour of the morning. In the normal course of events, then, this practice requires me to be in Nashville at least quarterly for board meetings and a couple of times a year for judicial conferences. Having excused myself as being a conference attendee and not a common or garden tourist, I shall now move on to what I was considering as I cut up my bacon yesterday.

I have stayed in this particular hotel many times. It is the place this particular organization always puts me up the night before a board meeting. While the individual hotel rooms are remarkable for their sameness, the ground floor accommodations deserve a moment of note. The photo history lovingly preserved in the lobby by the decorating firm hired by the hotel chain explains that this building was originally a bank in the distant past (well, earlier in the last century anyway). There are charming black and white photos of the bank staff of that time standing proudly in the public areas of the ground floor; all looking as though they are quite pleased to be there. The building has twelve floors and I have no idea whether some or all of those above the first couple of floors were added later. A number of the surrounding buildings, which are of an age with this one, are no more than three or four floors tall. But back to the dining room.  I had taken what I considered meet* as my breakfast portion from the sensible, if Southern, buffet to my solitary table. There was a largish group of people there for some sort of meeting and they were congregated in the dining room also. I suspected them of being with a social services agency because, well, they just had that horrible “I-Know-What’s-Best-For-You” look about them. The men were slightly untidy and wore knitted ties (if, indeed, they wore ties at all) and the women were all wearing boots, jeans and sweaters with yards and yards of ethnic print scarves wound round their necks with the same casualness you would expect of a Russian missile launch. I was perfectly happy in my solitary splendor with my breakfast accoutrements arrayed about me like so much siege fortifications. The snatches of conversation (the ones you find yourself overhearing when you dine alone) confirmed most of my worst fears about this bunch. I also learned that two of the women at the next table diagonal to mine only washed their hair twice a week because it is thick and that the man with whom one of them shared her room has very fuzzy hair in the mornings. I am still pondering what to do with this intelligence. It also reminds me that large rooms can sometimes have remarkable acoustics.

As I was sitting in this room, actually enjoying my breakfast, I suddenly thought of another building very like this which had also caught my imagination. I was living on another planet back then and had the opportunity to visit Budapest while it was still under the direct, if not announced, political administration of the late Soviet Union. While in that ancient city, I had cause to go to a bank to change money, use the telephone, or some other such behavior one engaged in when one was, in fact, a tourist. The bank, which had either survived the depredations of the Nazis and the Soviets, or which had been renovated for capitol tourist consumption, was a truly lovely building with the high ceilings, marble everythings, and marvelous vertical expanses of glass that graced the fin de siècle period of building in European capitols. [As an aside, I note that I seem to have missed the class offered in the Department of History at the Central European University in Budapest, “Fin-de-siècle Cities in Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires. A Comparative Viewpoint.” Rats.] When I was growing up in coastal California, shortly after the demise of the Spanish empire, most of the banks I had any reason to frequent were of the variety that encouraged either queuing at an unappetizing teller window or driving alongside the “drive-thru.” I recall thinking that the Hungarian bank was simply the grandest thing I had ever seen. Of course, this was before I saw Gringotts Wizarding Bank  in the first installment of the Harry Potter films. However, neither the Budapest bank nor the hotel in Nashville featured any goblins while I was there. I have no idea whether the bank in Budapest is still there as a bank or if it has, like my little boutique hotel in Nashville, gone on to other things. But aren’t those spaces grand and glorious while they last?  They almost make you want to do something, just occasionally, other than online banking.

“Be careful, Tuppence, this craving for vulgar sensation alarms me." (Agatha Christie, Partners In Crime)

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* Middle English mete, from Old English gemǣte; akin to Old English metan to mete

First Known Use: 14th century

"Let All that are to Mirth Inclined" (a 17th Century English Broadside)

"Taking a break this year and not playing anywhere for Christmas," I told her. She got that look you imagine a deer having in a spotlight (they prosecute for that around here ...) and said, "But, what about here? Next Saturday?" It was my turn to play Jane the Doe. Despite absolutely no conversation on the subject being had, she thought I would somehow know that, just because I had played for their Christmas open house before, I would be playing again this year. I explained that it wasn't a standing date. She asked what she was to do and, being the eternal wimp, I said I would look at my music and see if I could throw something together. Well, I can't. I've played that Christmas music until I nearly loathe some of it and I just don't have time in a week to knock together a program of something fresh and sparkling (the arrangements, if not the tunes). Not with a fistful of doctor appointments for Mom, attending to the lamentable depredations of the minor villains of the area, and haring off to Nashville at the end of the week for a board meeting. There is simply no time. But how do you explain this to someone who thinks we just pick up those instruments and play? "You've played that stuff before. You know it," she pleaded. Yes, I thought, and you tap danced in the third grade; you want to try it again now in front of a bunch of strangers? I suppose the syllogism is not really sound, but it was all my tired brain could come up with at the time.

I went to a friend's house to hunt through her Christmas music looking for something new. She had some lovely things I would like to learn, but it just ain't gonna happen before next Saturday. In a fit of Magpie Mania, I ordered my own copies of her music (wonderful books by Suzanne Guldimann), but I shall learn them for my own pleasure and not for next Saturday. There are four harps in the house now, I use that as an excuse for more music ... (and as my friend says, "Sheet music doesn't go off like bananas or milk.")

In October a girlfriend and I go to Harp Camp in Asheville, NC. The retreat facility where it is held is simply lovely. They have undergone a rigorous renovation and redecoration program to better appeal to an aging population of conference and retreat-goers. I think our median age is rising precipitously and we no longer finding it richly amusing to try to scramble into bunk beds or sleep several to a room in them. My girlfriend and I always share a room, but that is because we are of an age and have reached that interesting place in our lives at which we are too old to do things we really don't want to do. So we get up in time for breakfast at the dining hall, but we skip workshops if we want to and loiter in the vendors' hall as long as we wish. We listen carefully to what the presenters have to say, but we don't hang on every word as we might once have done in the pursuit of perfect knowledge (it's not to be had). Best of all, we've both learned to try things and feel comfortable in saying, "Well, that's something I'm glad I tried and will NEVER do again!" Experience is seldom wasted ... except when your computer is acting like a sulky three year old child and you're trying to talk to an IT person on the other side of the world and you don't speak a word of Bengali or Hindi. But I digress.

I suppose then, this is all by way of saying that I shall tell her that I simply can not play for her on Saturday, but I would love to play next year. If she gives me some advance notice.

Today's Embarkation (albeit a brief journey)

How on earth does one find the time to simply sit down at Ye Olde Keyboard and whack out a blog entry on an average day when all one wants to do upon arriving home is stagger through the door, decant a reasonable glass of suitable wine, and then fall (preferably not face first) onto the sofa for a few blessed moments before the hysteria of the evening sets in? Or, perhaps more importantly, how does one arrange one's mind to the task when one has been absolutely tearing through a thousand other things that must be done at the computer first? This may be a project for Mindfulness. The basic exercise is supposed to consume an entire three minutes in which to compose one's self in order to then carry on without acting as though one's hair is on fire and the dogs haven't been fed. Let me give it at least part of that time and see where we get to.

Not quite three minutes later ...

 We shall rate the results of the basic exercise today as "some, but not all." It works best for me when there is virtual silence around me (those 3.7 seconds a day), but for now the iPod player in the kitchen is blasting out some Genius playlist of movie themes. They are heroic and evocative and don't encourage quiet introspection. One feels, rather, as though one should be wielding a sword, claymore, flintlock weapon or some such and doing brave deeds out of legend. Hard to quietly concentrate on one's breathing with all that excitement coming from another room. And I know myself well enough to know that, if I get up to address the musical distraction to meditation, I'll forget why I went in there and rearrange all the desert spoons or something.

The end of the calendar year looms on the horizon. The distractions of Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas and New Year are rising out of the mist like signal fires to guide the way. I have to tell myself that all that stuff I swore I'd get done needs to be attended to ... now.  Therein lies my present difficulty. My clerks have noted that there is no time in the calendar from here to the end of the year for special hearings. I've been trying to find time to force in appointments for me and for Mother that allow time to get to Archangel and back (where it feels as thought most of our appointments are these days). Then sit down and quietly and thoughtfully "blog." I still can not say that word with a straight face. It does sound so like the sound the dogs make just before something especially nasty comes up and onto the floor.  I also told myself that any public journal would not be a catalog of whining and complaining for general consumption (I can do that in my personal journals); so there is yet another shift of attitude to be done in the writing. Perhaps the challenge at the moment is simply to get myself to the chair in the room, not knock over the harp as I swing out the shelf upon which the keyboard resides, and just ... START WRITING.

 So, having addressed the question, we shall now move on. The more I think about it, the more I believe that those desert spoons need attention.