We've all been here. There looms on the calendar a big day, an event, and you're standing in your bathroom days before picking at a zit, rubbing lotion on dry skin, evening your tone, whitening your teeth--and what should be white is yellow, what's normally pinkish is fever red, where peach glows normally there's a patch of brown. This is where I am, and I know it sucks.
I've been living the undisturbed life, and life in stasis, since my plane landed in Indianapolis in January. I've deflected invitations and excused myself from interactions. I've told myself that I'll become social again after I've recovered from surgery, then surgery 1, then surgery 2, I tell myself when the weather is consistently nicer I'll walk more and inevitably see people, I promise myself to pace my day with the sun when it's out, I say I'll be a presence. Instead, I'm a bit ghost-like, an apparition whose 50 foot walk to the mailbox is done as if on heels, head down, a shame runway. Even doing this I stand in the door and listen to see if there are cars coming, and hope to god that one doesn't round the corner as I'm deered in the headlights and unable to escape unseen.
No one forces me to do otherwise, and I am deeply grateful for the fact that I'm not living in a sitcom where there's a lesson to be learned, but living with someone who respects the fact that I'm a rational adult and can come to decisions entirely upon my own volition; no guilt pep talks, no bullshit, thank you Charles! I really am planning to garden this Spring, I promise!
I am being tempted out of my self-hardened shell though by the one temptation guaranteed to crack me--a lecture being given on campus that I want to attend. On campus! People, and lots of them! in the IMU, center of campus, on a Friday afternoon!
This lecture, in fact, will be heavily attended by many people I haven't seen in over a year--it's the Trivedi Memorial Lecture, sponsored through the Dhar India Studies Program at Indiana University, where I worked for a year. I may not have mentioned it previously, but that was one of the best years I passed at IU--I met people, went to talks, and engaged with a culture that is amazing, complex, venerable. I conspired to find ways and means to get myself to India, to experience it, which now I think will not happen (travel is, at best, a complicated procedure for me). Although I don't miss some of the paperwork, I deeply miss the people work, the small feeling that I was part of bridging the gap between here and there.
So this year, the Trivedi Lecture is "Democracy, Socialism and Liberalism in a Complex Society: Nehru's India in the 1940's and '50's" given by Sir Christopher Bayly of Cambridge and the University of Chicago. Just typing that sounds interesting to me. Sure, I may reveal my geek credentials, at least one of them, but a talk like that is usually the type of bullet of sets me going in a great direction of thought. I'll ponder, I'll find a book or two, I'll come to agree or disagree with what I've heard, I'll head on my merry way to the next topic. Yes, I'm a dilletante, and that has negative connotations, but so be it. I know an inch deep on an ocean's worth of topics, and I'm always willing to listen to experts who can drill a bit deeper than me. Put Nehru and India in front of me and I'll shut up and say nothing until the speaker is done with the business at hand.
I mention this because I'm really pushing myself to go, but there is push back from inside. I say, "Mark, this sounds fascinating" and I then say back "but Mark, you'll see all those people you used to work with, and work for, and no one will recognize you, and you'll freak them out, and people will try to talk to you and you can't talk and this won't end well." I hear this voice that says to me: "people will talk about you, pity you, stare at you" and that does not move me to want to go.
I am pushing myself to go against the advice of voices that are judgey and relentlessly negative about other people--probably because I would have pitied, and I likely would have stared and perhaps I'd have talked were I one of them, and someone else occupied my space. I can hear my voice saying: "That's Mark?" in a way that implies both incredulity and a bit of revulsion. I'm not perfect, I'm not near it, and my past behavior isn't whitewashed by my benighted present.
Things might happen between now and then, but I'm posting this entry, # 101, in honor of getting the hell over myself and making something happen and appealing to anyone who reads this to make me get the fuck over it and go do something that would be incredibly enjoyable to do. I would have to do some really wild shit to accomplish this--I'd catch the city bus on Kinser Pike, ride down to campus, get out and walk up to the Unioin Building which will be full of people, walk through the building to the lecture room, engage with all those coworkers and colleagues who haven't seen me, and find ways to indicate to them that I can't speak (I'll have to have my Ipad with me), and likely walk over to the Music Library when the lecture is over and catch a ride home with Charles from there. That's a hell of a lot of territory and exposure for a guy who has covered little and had virtually none. It's as if a virgin were to become a prostitute as a first job. Learning to swin by being thrown in the deep end.
It could be a one-off, or it could be the start of something--that eventually I'd become unremarkable by being seen in my surgical mask (yep, sorry, gotta wear that--the mouth hanging open thing is not for public consumption), that another lecture, an Early Music performance, an opera, a poet, actor, public official speaks on a topic of concern, and I might unremarkably be a part of the audience.
So, as part of that, I'm posting with this a morning selfie, taken in my bathrobe, hair is a mess, me in my surgical mask with my trach tube, looking pretty much as I now look everyday. The strip tease is over. Even if I can't get to the Trivedi Lecture, and even if my walks to the mailbox continue to be a bit courage backwards, let this be a mark of progress. I look like hell and I don't care quite as much as I fear I should, more than I need to, less than a normal 53 year old but sort of like what happens to any person who undergoes great change, at a moment's notice, and can't ever find a way to change back.
It's only forward from here, even if we don't know to where.
You look great Uncle Mark love ya !
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