The quietness in this blog is the opposite of the noise that reverberated throughout the house and life the past week. We had a visitor, Stefan, who brought the electricity of another body, the vibration of a newbie to the United States, the eyes and thoughts of someone who had not grown up surrounded by corn fields and long low horizons. It was good to be exposed to all of those influences, the breeze that flew some of the dust off of the typical around here.
The past week was bookended by mowing the lawn. I've been doing as much of that as I can--and I've found yet another fault in my previous thinking. I used to think that senior citizens who didn't mow their own lawns were either lazy or avoiding the wonderful exercise available to them through the simple act of pushing a mower. I of course used to find it easy, and enjoyable, to slip my headphones on and turn up some Kylie Minogue Station on Pandora and let it rip. There's nothing like whipping through overgrown clover while Alison Goldfrapp croons 'Strict Machine' in your ears.
Let me, though, apologize to every senior I ever judged against mowing--because, damn. Pushing a mower is hellaciously hard, at least it is now. To make it worse, I'm a clipping bagger. I think a lawn with minimal thatch is a beautiful thing--and I am driven to tearful distraction to see lawns with heaps of browning, rotting cut grass left spread out like a peculiarly slutty date.
There is little I want more in my life now than to hold onto my previous standards as though nothing has happened to me--to claw my way back by act to a state I call normal:. A bagged, clipped lawn; a garden with beautiful flowers; weeds pulled back from triumph. I would though asterisk normal to detach from it the whole sense of superiority I used to get from fulfilling these self-indulgent goals. Measured against the small circular flower beds of my neighbors, mine are flagrantly large; seen against the Sargasso of their thatchy lawn, the relative calm of mine was inspiring--at least to me. Well, no more. After mowing twice over the full week, I can say that I dread the next time it needs to happen. Did it take cancer to humanize me or did it humble me? Probably both.
The work I've been putting into gardening, into mowing, into cooking for our guest, into enjoying the feeling of another person around me, all of it has been--to me--pieces of puzzles coming together. I've been wishing to go back to work lately, and the fact that i've been able to do fairly physical work (in small discrete units) has lead me to hope that less physical effort spread out over an 8 hour day, backed up with the mental harumph I seem capable of producing might mean that work is not an impossibility for me. I don't think it is.
Of course, I'd like to make money again, contribute to my retirement fund again (I laugh when I use the words retirement fund, btw), buy stupid shit for no reason--but I also want the regimentation that work offers, the frustration that it spreads amongst one's colleagues, the sense of shared purpose, the idea of contribution--all of those things are lacking from my every day. I miss them, though Elizabeth Bishop was correct to note, the art of losing isn't hard to master.
I have always thought of myself as more an island than a peninsula, assuming that the fewer people I had around me the better for me. I never wanted an idle chatty social life, I never sought to be at a cocktail party each week--and I believe these statements are still true. But I found in having Stefan here that what I missed is hearing the occasional sounds of others, the voice, the thoughts of another person.
Being unable to speak, it is perhaps that give and take of conversation that I miss most of all things I've lost. Even more than a hamburger or a peanut butter sandwich, I long for the easy give and take of chit chat as I walk, observations that come from people passing by, commentary that is of the moment, ephemeral, that dissipates as its generator moves away through space and time. I cannot type and walk, I cannot type fast enough, I cannot stand typing sometimes.
I have applied for a few jobs with no call for an interview and this is not a great surprise--I have to make my limits known upfront, and it would and will take some seriously good imagination for someone to interview me as I can't speak (and most jobs want excellent verbal communication skills), and have listed as my main accomplishment over the past year the act of survival.
I know what that survival took, too, and as an accomplishment, I've got to say it's proof that I'm nobody's bitch. But what that says to someone else, I can't predict. To those who wonder where I see myself in five years, it may well be answered by the word dead. I don't know. All I know if that I have to keep on keeping on, and all I can do is try to climb back into life.
I can't, too, claim that survival as a singular act, though I don't mention this in my cover letter. At no point in my march back into attempted normalcy have I been alone; nurses, doctors, medicines, combinations, therapy, exercise, Scott, Charles, my friends, my family, something, someone, has been there telling me I should not stop, I must try, I have to live.
Perhaps what's so hard about mowing these days is its alienation, as delightful as Goldfrapp, Madonna, and Kylie can be on a hot day. In my floppy hat, and my old glasses, my stooped and skinny shoulders pushing forward, doing it alone is just not as fun as it used to be. In trying to reconnect, I'm not simply plugging into the great cosmic ATM of work, nice as it is, but attemnpting to plug back into the hurly burly of others, bringing their otherness, crowding my mind with all of their puzzles.
At some point in the past year, I became a people person, without acknowledging it. I became dependent upon the expertise of strangers, and turned them into friends of my recovery. I took friends and relaized they were my family of choice. I considered family to be necessary, finally, where before they seemed accidental. And these are not simple acts of change, they are the fruits of necessity, born of how people like me become people who--in spite of themselves--need people after all.
