September 25, 2005

• Driving down the winding highway through the Su Valley late Saturday
  morning, I was fighting gusting headwinds and crosswinds that made me
  think my car’s steering had gone wonky until I noticed a flag in
  someone’s yard, snapping and twisting.  A couple of times a bend
  in the road conspired with a shift in the wind, and a tailwind boosted
  me over the speed limit and almost off the road.

  Birch leaves skittering across the road ahead of me looked like golden
  coins scattered from some pirate’s spilled treasure.  A few trees
  still held tight to their leaves, giving back to the sun the golden
  light gathered in during the summer now gone.

  At the library in Willow, I dropped off the books that Doug and I had
  checked out on our last town trip together.  The assistant
  librarian had looked with distaste last time at my handful of high
  quality detective novels (Robert Crais and Lee Child) and asked me if I
  wasn’t interested in something with some literary merit, suggesting a
  young woman’s collected reminiscences gathered from some old Europeans
  who’d survived WWII.   This time, she made no comment at all
  until I was turning to leave.  All she had to say this time was,
  “…and she’s off!” 

  At my response, “Yeah, down to the Wasilla Library,” she groaned and
  grimaced, and much of the way on into Wasilla I was wondering
  why.  Sometimes I wonder why I don’t ask such a why or try to
  defend the literary merit of great genre fiction.  I don’t wonder
  for long, though, before I realize why I don’t bother.  Why bother
  with fools?

  With exquisite timing, as I waited for the light to change in the
  left-turn lane just before Felony Flats, Greyfox was a couple of cars
  ahead of me.  As he parked in front of his cabin, coming home from
  a trip to Big Lake to use their library’s computer, I was pulling into
  the space beside him.  We did our usual routine, exchanging the
  collected mail and a pair of warm flannel sheets I’d brought to him,
  for the media bag and mongo he had collected for me. 

  As I had left home today, I’d had the nagging feeling I was forgetting
  something.  As I sat on Greyfox’s bed and drank a cup of coffee, I
  remembered that I’d left in my fridge the chicken-rice casserole I’d
  meant to take to him.  It wasn’t until he asked me about them,
  that I remembered that I had also forgotten his new shoes that had come
  in the mail.

  We piled into Greyfox’s swank new minivan and he played chauffeur. 
  We enjoyed our spicy and economical senior citizens’ enchilada platters
  at La Fiesta, did a little shopping, then went to the library to pick
  up the CSS guide that I had placed on hold a month or two ago when the
  online catalog showed that it was “in process” at the library, probably
  in a stack on a counter in some back room, waiting to be
  catalogued.  Finally they processed it out into circulation, and
  I’m the first one to get to read it.  We had an hour or so to kill
  before the NA meeting, so we sat in the library and read.  It is a
  well-written guide and I’ve already picked up some helpful tips from it.

  Good meeting, but how I do get weary of being asked with such pointed
  concern how I’m doing!  Friends don’t see me for weeks and maybe
  they wonder if I’m out getting loaded, or maybe they know and care
  about my other chronic disease (besides the addictions).  I won’t
  lie.  I say that I’m okay mentally and spiritually, but not so
  good on the physical level.  Maybe I slightly exaggerate the
  mental well-being, but what I mean is that I’m not depressed or anxious
  or any of that.  Just nuts, as ever, still crazy after all these
  years, as anyone with perception can see without my telling them.

  The heavy shopping, two vast supermarkets and miles of aisles, we saved
  until after the meeting, in deference to the frozen foods, dairy
  products and fresh produce that would have had to wait in the car
  otherwise.  The sartorius muscle in my right thigh had spasmed so
  hard during the meeting that I sat there and kneaded the knots out of
  it through the latter half of the hour.  It had seemed prudent at
  the time to take some ibuprofen, and I suppose it was the right
  move.  I made it through the shopping without further muscle
  spasms.

  Fatigue hit me as Greyfox was driving us back toward his cabin.  I
  moved a few bags of groceries from his car to mine, then knew I needed
  to rest.  This time, for once, I paid attention to that need
  instead of stifling the body’s complaint and pushing ahead to finish
  the task.  I rested a while on Greyfox’s bed, then discovered when
  I tried to get up that I couldn’t quite do it alone.  That scared
  me.  I strained my shoulder trying to push myself up off the bed,
  and lay there rubbing away the spasms until Greyfox came in and gave me
  a hand up.  He had moved most of the rest of the bags to my car,
  so it was fairly quick and easy for me to finish up and get on the road.

  I noted with relief that I still had a half tank of gas and didn’t need
  to stop to fuel up.  In the condition I was in, every little step
  I could save or task I could skip was a big plus.  Almost as soon
  as I left Wasilla’s streetlights behind, the rhythm of the road and the
  sound of the jazz on the radio took me out of myself.  I heard
  Lady Z singing Twisted Cupid and went into a delightful but insane fantasy about a lover who awaited me at the end of my trip up the valley.

  I came back to myself along a dark stretch of highway and realized I
  had no idea where I was.  I passed a lighted house that didn’t
  seem familar and wondered if I had fantasized myself right on by my
  turn-off.  Before panic could set in, I recalled that when I’d
  checked the gas gauge I’d also checked the trip odometer I’d reset the
  last time I filled the tank.  I looked at it again, did some quick
  subtraction and realized that I’d only gone 36 miles, about three
  quarters of the way home.  Then some familiar landmarks appeared
  and I was okay.

  Deliberately choosing not to lose myself in the romantic fantasy again,
  I started thinking about CSS and XHTML.  Apparently, my mind was
  willing to take off along any path I offered it, and before I knew what
  I was doing I again realized that I didn’t know where I was.  Then
  I rounded a curve and saw the distinctive lights of a roadside tourist
  trap, so I was aware, briefly, that I wasn’t lost.  But when I
  crested the hill just before Sheep Creek, a couple of miles from home,
  I noticed with surprise where I happened to be, and that time I had no
  idea where my mind had been in the interim.  I don’t think it had
  gone back to the fantasy or into a fugue of web design problems. 
  I simply don’t know what it was doing while I was out of it.

  This is jarring, unnerving, but not as scary as it would be if I did
  not know that this stuff is “normal” for someone in my condition. 
  I have experienced similar episodes of non-mindfulness, loss of
  vigilance, thoughts that just wander away, but this is the first time
  it has happened while I was driving.  I trust that decades of
  behind-the-wheel conditioning would ensure my ability to respond to
  highway or traffic hazards as necessary.  Some part of my
  consciousness must have been in control of the car.  Otherwise, I
  wouldn’t have made it around all those curves and switched from high
  beams to low and back for oncoming cars as necessary, which I know I
  did… I remember that, vaguely, almost as if I observed it detachedly,
  from a distance.

  This is not easy to articulate.  It is confusing to
  contemplate.  I’m tired… more than tired, exhausted.  There
  are still groceries to be put away, and then I’m going to bed, tired
  but wired as usual after one of these trips, and with something new to
  think about, to let my mind wander off to as I read myself to sleep.
  

  • 4:49 am
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