Maybe next year

I’m not much of one for New Year’s resolutions or year-end retrospectives, but lately I have a headful of observations. I’ve been looking both forward and back, and neither resolutions nor observations quite covers the territory, so I’m going to call my list reservations. Some of these are the happy, hopeful reservations like those you get for a table at a fine restaurant. Others are the simple, worrisome reservations like those you have about going out on a cloudy day without an umbrella. The darkest ones are the ones where we hide from ourselves, like the nuclear reservations where we confine our toxic waste.

Vicious Bru

“Why are you so vicious?” she will ask when I react angrily to certain speakers.

The answer is simple, but loaded — as, it turns out, is the question. I become what she calls “vicious” when I am frustrated. I find that I am most angry when I feel at fault. If I spill paint on the carpet, I am upset that I made a stain, but I am FURIOUS that I could be so clumsy or perhaps that I was trying to carry too many things with too few hands. My anger is proportional to how culpable I feel for the accident. In a similar way, I become vicious when I am ashamed of myself.

Gentle echoes

In dealing with disability, I have many moments of melancholy. I am busy in Bruce-watching, because I must be attentive to my health so as not to become sicker. When you are busy watching yourself be sick, though, mostly what you see is how you have faded from your remembered youthful vigor.

On my mind 20091118

So many things need saying that there never seems enough time to say them, yet a job once begun is half done. Let me begin today with a moment of silence in memory of a friend. I learned a couple of days ago that a childhood crush who became my first date died of cancer a month ago. We were neighbors and our families were close, but now it seems only funerals help us restore contact. I remember a beautiful smile blossoming from a generous heart. Roads not taken? What might have been? No, the short time together in a bright, happy childhood shines with all the glow it needs. Farewell, pretty girl. You touched my heart.

See, I don’t fit in

I am a faithful watcher of Rankin/Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In 45 years of annual viewing (more than annual, since it airs multiple times and I also occasionally stick in a videotape), my love of its kindly wisdom grows ever stronger. I especially like “We’re a Couple of Misfits,” when Hermey and Rudolph decide to “be independent together,” and Clarice’s loving reassurance that “There’s Always Tomorrow” for dreams to come true.

An age of wonder

I like to say that I know the exact day I became old, because I remember the awards dinner Suzy and I attended in Dallas 11 years and two days ago. I remember the first sniffles and sneezes of an infection that weekend that marked the beginning of my life with Crohn’s, putting me in intensive care a few weeks later.

Thinking about us

Oct. 14, 2009: I’ve been a bit caught up in my own little worries these days, and in thinking about how the way we live is Simply not good enough. It’s a little uncomfortable to constantly find myself to be the easiest example to cite for the kind of inadequacies I wish we all would worker harder to overcome. Indulge me for a moment while I atone for the latest slip.

Simply not good enough

Half a lifetime ago, I wrote about the day I lied (twice) to a panhandler about being able to give him the money he was begging for. That day, I had just come out of the local pool hall where I had been spending money to drink and play games.

Looking on the bright side

Today is “Be Glad to Be Alive Day.” Yesterday’s post, and my mood of late, have been too gloomy, a little too resigned for my taste. I don’t like surrender or the feeling of weakness. It is a measure of my illness that it saps my get-up-and-keep-going.

How are ya, 5-0?

I’ve been on this rock in the void for 50 years now, and it’s feeling especially cold this turn around.