October 24, 2007

• not an ordinary day here

  
  Foggy morning, smoggy sunrise, photos by S. Doug Studdert
  

  Let’s see… where to start….

  Greyfox had medical and dental appointments at the clinic up the valley, so he has known for a couple of weeks that he would be passing through here today.  He made his usual heroic offer to bring us supplies, and started making a shopping list.  I kept adding items to the list as they came to mind up until last night.

  For perhaps four or five days, Greyfox has fallen into another pattern that is usual for him in such cases.  He started getting stressed out and testy, tired of trying to find places to stow the stuff he had accumulated for us, sick of tripping over some of it, regretting ever having offered to do it… the usual.  Yesterday, I got a plaintive message on CallWave:  He had been limping and gimping around a supermarket for twenty minutes, trying to find the enchilada sauce.  He wanted to know if I knew where to find it.

  I called back and told him where it had been the last time that I had been in that store, but that was no help to him.  Finally, he went to the customer service desk and was told that all the salsa and such had been moved into a new “Hispanic foods” department.  He found that, but they were out of hot enchilada sauce of any kind, so he ended up at a different store, where he finally scored my sauce.  My hero!

  I had decided that I was going to rest as much as possible, in the interest of self-preservation.  I resisted getting caught up in Greyfox’s stress as much as I could, and when he suggested that I bake one of the pizzas he was bringing for us to eat while he was here, I delegated that job to Doug.  Doug knew that his help would be needed for unloading our supplies, so instead of going to bed early this morning, he stayed up.  That meant I was relieved of the fire watch and being the cats’ door opener and closer.  It helped, especially since I wasn’t breathing too well in the smoggy air before the morning fog burned off.

  I had been running low on things to read and this morning I started on a book one of us had picked up from the library discard rack, a Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown volume, Search for the Soul.  I was well into the story of James Kidd, an eccentric Arizona copper miner who left hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and stocks to be donated to “research or some scientific proof of a
  soul of the human body which leaves at death,” when I discovered that someone had cut a bunch of pictures out of the book, taking with them the text that had been on the opposite sides of the pages. 

  That distracted me, and I flipped through the book looking at the captions for the missing pictures.  Apparently, each one included some Christian symbolism, leaving me wondering if the miscreant had been a Christian scrapbooker or decoupager gathering crafts material; a Christian purist who objected to the symbols’ being in such close proximity to pagan symbols and text involving reincarnation, transmigration, etc.; or if it was someone who found the Xian symbols offensive.  I may never know, just as I may never know all of James Kidd’s story.

  I remained in bed while Doug and Greyfox unloaded our supplies.  My bed is in the living room, close to the wood stove, since I’m the most likely member of the family to notice a decrease of warmth and get up to stoke the fire.  I had told Greyfox I was running out of stuff to read, and asked him to check the discard racks and the unlimited checkout paperbacks, and bring me things that looked good.  During the past week or so, I’ve gotten several calls from him, in which he listed what was available and I told him yea or nay.  As the kitchen filled up with bags of groceries this morning, my bed filled with bags of books, a few DVDs, and the selected sections of Sunday papers (funnies and Earthweek, mostly) that he habitually saves for us.

  After Greyfox left for his clinic appointments, Doug helped me dig out from under the books on my bed.  I moved over to the couch and we watched a western movie.  The Old Fart blew through on his way home, stopping long enough to pick up the DVD we had been watching while he was up at the clinic.  Now, the sun is going down (we are down to less than nine hours of sun a day now), Greyfox is already back at his place in Wasilla, Doug has gone to bed after having been up for about 24 hours, and I’m back to having to decide how long to put up with the draft from the half-closed door each time a cat goes through it, before I get up and shut it.

  It is very quiet here.  I like it that way.
    

  • 9:57 pm
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