March 10, 2004

• Family Moments
  and a
  Fast Pace

  
  

  Maybe I’m psychic or something.

  
  

  When I woke, all I could really tell was that it was dark outside and I hadn’t had my full sleep.  I found my voice and asked, “Is it morning or night?”  Greyfox’s voice came back, saying it was 5:30 AM. 

  
  

  The sound that had awakened me was a clattering in the kitchen.  As I lay there trying to pull body and soul together into some form of consciousness, I heard Doug ask from his seat on the couch, “What are you doing?” 

  
  

  Greyfox came back, “Giving the dog a bath.”

  
  

  “What!?” I croaked.

  
  

  “That’s a joke,” in Greyfox’s sarcastic tone. 

  
  

  I wasn’t tracking well enough to figure it all out for myself, and I didn’t want to ask since I recognized that as Pandora’s box, so I started talking about what was on my mind when I woke up.  I said I was thinking about “life on it’s own terms,” the sort of acceptance advocated and, ideally, practiced in NA, and about pain without suffering.  I went on that way a while as the clattering and crashing continued, speaking about when I encountered that idea of “serene acceptance,” reading Autobiography of a Yogi around the end of the 1960s and how it meshed with things some nurses had taught me as a child.  They said it would hurt less if I’d relax.  As it turned out, my hypnopompic meanderings turned out to have relevance to what was going on in the house in that pre-dawn time.

  
  

  Greyfox explained in that voice he only uses when he’s on an NPD tear that he’d decided to wash dishes since Doug, “seems to have better things to do.”  He had been awakened about three with muscle spasms.  He walked into the front room and his voice gradually changed as he discussed pain without sufferering with me while he gathered up the bags of trash he’d tied shut and left here and there.  Then he went out the door with the trash.

  
  

  He mentioned the new snow when he came back in and I said that when he had been talking about accepting pain I’d been remembering seeing him, a night or two ago, leap from the bed, pick up a paperback book off the floor, and whap his leg a few times with it as he muttered obscenities at his leg for its muscle spasms.  We talked about empathy a bit.  Lacking it due to his narcissistic personality disorder, he’s trying to understand it based on descriptions and definitions:  words, in other words.  He keeps characterizing it as, “feeling other people’s pain.”  I keep trying to convey the idea of “identifying with” whatever, attempting to take the emphasis off the pain.  I say we can, and maybe should, identify with our bodies, think of them as more than just meat vehicles that impose limitations and pain on us–that we can learn to love them, too.  My voice trailed off as I grasped my skull with both hands and moaned/wailed, “I can’t find this pain!”

  
  

  ** In case you haven’t read about it here before, or don’t remember, I regularly use a pain-transcendence technique that involves focusing my mind on the sensation to shut off the “pain” alarm signals and turn the sensation into neutral neural signals.  When it works the pain goes away and sometimes I get impressions or information that help me deal with the cause.  When it doesn’t work, it is because the pain is “referred”, sensed in a location separate from it’s source, and I can’t “find” it to focus on it. **

  
  

  Then with an “AHA!” tone, Greyfox grabbed the newspaper off the coffee table and said, “That’s why I couldn’t find it in the driveway.  I was afraid I was going to have to shovel snow before I could read the paper.”  His relief was audible.

  
  

  Doug responded that it had come around two.  “They’ve been getting earlier.”

  
  

  When we had been talking about the new snow, I had asked Doug to get it shoveled off the roof ASAP, “before it melts and runs down through the holes.”  We’re going to have to redo that roof this summer, and I hope we find a better solution this time.  I hear him up there now, but I’m getting ahead of the story.  First he got up off the couch and I heard the buzz of the massager.  It heats and vibrates and my two men have been finding comfort in it a lot lately.  For me, the pain of holding my arms up to use it on my shoulder negates any benefit I might get from it.  But Doug ran it briefly over neck, shoulders and legs, ironing out the muscle spasms before climbing the ladder to shovel the roof.

  
  

  We talked briefly about whether shooting at initiates (with blanks) is or is not a common practice in Freemasonry.  I’d heard of it before, Doug said making them think their lives are in danger is part of the ritual, and Greyfox said sometimes they use fake knives but shooting is not a common practice.  None of us knows, not being part of that secret society.  This was all in response to a story in the news.

  
  

  Then the discussion turned to the Iditarod, and while we were talking I “found” my headache, in muscle spasms of the scalp.  It’s still there, but not “pain” now, just a tight sensation, like my brain’s too big.

  
  

  

  
  

  Anna Bondarenko is as surprised as anyone at her own fast pace in the race this year.  She won $500 for being the first musher to reach the Shell Lake Bonfire.  The team she’s running is the B team.  Her husband Jim Lanier was out there with the A team, somewhere behind her. (He smashed his sled and broke a tooth when he crashed in the Farewell Burn.)  She’s a special ed. teacher.  I can imagine a bunch of delighted students seeing this picture on the front page.  In Nicolai yesterday morning, she was still only minutes behind the leaders.  This year’s pack (at least this early in the race) differs from most years by being at the front of the race instead of a few hours behind the leaders.  Charlie Boulding and John Baker were both also within half an hour of the leaders into Nicolai.   A second pack was about two hours behind the leading bunch.

  
  

  Martin Buser (my favorite musher) and Jeff King (my favorite musher who is also a park ranger) were in the lead when the pack came off the ice of the Kuskokwim River into McGrath yesterday afternoon.  Perhaps not coincidentally they are both riding the new-design sleds that Jeff King introduced this year.  On them, the musher sits on a sled bag (cargo bag) in the middle of the sled instead of standing on runners at the back.  Having seen the new sled of King’s and built one of his own based on the design, Marty said it had lengthened his mushing life by twenty years.  I think it was Martin Buser who started the now-widespread practice of using ski poles to assist the dogs with propelling the sleds.

  
  

  

  
  

  Besides Jim Lanier’s broken tooth, there have been other injuries.  Doug Swingley’s vision is blurred from frozen corneas (it was cold out there), and Rick Swenson was waiting at Rohn for a new sled to be flown in to replace the one with a broken runner that had him “limping” over Rainy Pass.

  
  

  Yesterday, I wrote about the affection between the mushers and their dogs.  This is Kjetil Backen of Norway, taking a break in Nicolai yesterday.  Aren’t they sweet?

  
  

  Greyfox had trouble accessing www.iditarod.com yesterday to get race updates.  This morning’s newspaper explained why that was:  nine million hits.  I said HE had trouble.  I didn’t.  He was trying to use the “front door” and I went in the side, straight to the standings.  No prob.  Check it out.

  
  

  

  • 11:52 am
  • 2 Comments