A week of driving to the hospital in stormy weather: yesterday I walked out to my car just in time to see a mom and teenage boy at theirs next to mine taking photos of the large limb a eucalyptus had dropped on their car. Not sure if the branch on the other side had been part of the first or not as he pulled it out of the way.

Today, blue sky and new snow on the nearby mountains.

I did not park under the trees.

This afternoon we watched a video and then with Richard and a nurse watching I practiced sanitizing edges and connecting examples of IV meds and saline syringes and how to do which dose how fast and how often. You set everything out in order on the sanitized tray and then you work your way across according to specific time intervals. (Write it out, I said. Yes they will.)

And then they kept him there.

The tall balding absolute beanpole of a nurse who loves his patients and looks and has a ready smile like Alex Pretti got assigned to him this evening and I didn’t say anything to the guy because I’m sure he’s heard it a lot and how can it not break your heart all over again.

Friends came to visit.

Turns out that from church this week, G had a pulmonary embolism, J had a burst appendix, L had a stroke, Richard of course…

And someone had a baby a few days ago.

I remember the wild thoughts with our first of, They’re sending ME home with this tiny thing? They think we know anything about being parents? Don’t they know we’ve never done this before? Don’t they know we have no idea what on earth we’re doing?

And then, day by single long day, you find out you can, in fact, do this, that you do learn as you go and it’s the wanting to do your best by others that makes it all somehow, inexplicably work out.

It’s all about learning to trust the life that is in us.

Thank Stanford for fighting insurers over billing, clearly, because of how it got us bumped to that other hospital. Not a sentence I’d thought I’d be writing.

When I said that podiatrist customer had changed lives? I had no idea.

Turns out there were two kids running the ski department of that outdoors outfitter. The customer helped the one get into podiatry school.

The two good friends who’d been working side by side there never saw each other again.

I came around the corner this morning and standing at the nurse’s station with his back to me was a middle-aged man with the same general build, the same haircut, the same touch of gray at the ear–but he seemed too tall and a smidgen too broad to be our doctor.

Richard’s hospitalization had brought them to the same floor.

Our doctor’s friend had gone to nursing school and was now the senior RN on the floor. There each other was. For the first time in all these years.

I had questions.

Who designs a new hospital such that there’s a big window in the room but the patient in the bed cannot see out it? His view was entirely blocked by the curving wall of the bathroom on the side of the room where the head of the bed goes. Maybe to entice the patient to start to be ambulatory? Okay, but when they most need to see the sky, anything at all beyond the whirrs and the beeps and the medical gear? They can’t. Only the light reflected off the wall over on that side. The mind boggles.

Maybe they were trying to protect from shattering glass in an earthquake? That’s the only thing that made sense. But Stanford is more seismic-safe in their new building and they didn’t do that. (The new seismic code went into effect a few years ago and a lot of hospital buildings got replaced.)

My view at home with the coming storm putting an exclamation point on the colors.

I had another question I wasn’t ever about to ask: how does one aspire to, I mean, cut off toes when one grows up? What would pull someone to that?

The podiatrist came in and, having a little time today, out of the blue chatted a bit about himself.

He’d thought of going to medical school but being a pilot sounded pretty cool, too, and he was leaning that way. Meantime he was working at one of those big outdoor outfitters, fitting people to their new ski boots–and he was good at it. Really good at it.

A podiatrist came in with his son and complimented his skills. That led to the doctor saying, You know–you really should be a podiatrist. Podiatry needs you.

He believed in the young guy, his enthusiasm rubbed off on him, he (the good now-doctor reminiscing chuckled) pulled some strings and got him in. And so the kid did go to medical school so that he could become a podiatrist, too, and here he was.

And I thought gratefully, one random stranger taking the personal interest and the time for someone else’s child changed so many lives.

He took off the bandaging a nurse had changed not an hour before to inspect how it had done overnight. It frankly looked a lot better than I thought it would: how does one make sense of half a big toe and the missing one next to it? How does the mind look at that and think yes, yes, that makes sense.

It doesn’t but in those skilled hands it had become okay, and I understood now how Richard had so trusted the guy to make the right decision and then to do the thing right. That foot looked the healthiest I’d seen it since August by far. It was such a relief to have all that infection we’d fought and fought against in a slowly losing agonizing battle for half an hour every night month after month simply–gone.

Two canceled trips to see grandkids last year.

There will be healing, and then we can start to plan our life the way we envision it again. It’s been awhile.

I’m going to put the p.s. up here because maybe it belongs there: typing all this out got me to realize that part of the problem could have been how immigrant nurses have been treated in this country the last few months and thus how many are no longer there. But on with the story.

—-

Come 11:30 for the 1:00, they said.

Well that’s a nuisance. (It was rather late in the day for the don’t-eat-don’t-drink.)

You know hospitals always do that, I answered.

People came. Patients got taken back. People left. People came back to pick up their family member being wheeled out. We sat there.

1:00 became 2:00. Finally they took him back and the nurse said she’d come get me as soon as he was all set up.

Right, I knew the drill, he gets into the hospital gown and they do all the set up, you kiss each other goodbye, you go back out to the waiting room and they call you when he comes to.

They didn’t do any of that.

The receptionist who’d checked us in left for the day minutes after we arrived and left her station unmanned.

Pretty soon it was just me sitting alone in that room, knitting away. A few hours in, I put down the knitting and picked up my book. You know how some books, you finish them and immediately start them right over because they’re that good? This emphatically will not be one of them. Oh well.

One guy came in and looked around and around, staring at the desk: why was nobody there? His distress was obvious so I spoke up, to his relief. But they called me! he said. Then they’ll be wheeling her out soon, I assured him. About ten minutes later that same nurse did.

And again assured me Richard would be soon. I said to her, it has been five hours since I’ve seen a bathroom and where on earth is one???

Oh, it’s right over there! (Ie between the inner and outer doors to outside. You don’t often see double sets of doors in California because we don’t have terrible weather but that building did. Hello? Could we please please add some signs?) Okay, I told her, thanks!

And then nothing.

The lights in the room suddenly dimmed and stayed dimmed. Oh thanks.

I needed to refill my water bottle and was glad I could now. I looked at those inner doors: I did not trust them. But I had to have that water and there was no other source.

It was after 5:00 and yes, I got locked out of the building. But, but, but, this is where I have to be for them to come get me to go be with my husband!

I stood there outside the glass doors thinking what on earth am I supposed to do, when at last two orderlies pushing carts walked past at the far side of the room. I tapped on the window and explained my plight. They stopped (bless them), tracked down permission and opened the door for me and disappeared quickly.

Five and a half hours. The second half entirely alone other than that brief encounter. There wasn’t even bad cafeteria food to retreat to: I had been told twice that I’d be called for any time now and this was a small building away from the main hospital building. (They seem to be connected in back these days with all the new construction.)

All I can figure is, they had told Richard yesterday that they would call and he had explained that texting is a better way to reach me because I can’t hear. But texting isn’t in their habit pattern and they simply forgot–but either way, I certainly wasn’t allowed to go through those patient doors by myself to go looking for him. I, meantime, was busy stomping down all kinds of thoughts like did he have a heart attack and they’re too busy trying to save his life to go get me.

When at long last I got their attention and got escorted back there, I sent a note to our Mormon bishop, who had wanted to know how things were going. The answer to that medically was, it was a worst-case scenario of what had been but a best-case scenario of what could have happened if they didn’t stop it now.

But I told him I had never encountered a situation like today’s.

He sympathized–and, it turns out, he was sure his friend the CEO of that hospital would want to hear the story.

What a day.

You don’t interrupt someone in the middle of a doctor appointment–but it had been three hours. Text.

A few minutes later: Four plans. Complicated. Tell you when I get home.

And then didn’t show.

Are you in the hospital.

Didn’t answer.

I hoped that was because he was driving and on his way.

I was putting his cold late dinner in the fridge and was about to call a friend to give her a heads-up that I might need to beg a ride to the hospital when the door opened and there he was. And yes a hospital is one of the plans–but not today and, turns out, not that one. Sitting around waiting for the first one to say no, they’re in a billing dispute with your provider’s corporate overlord is how everyone wanted to spend their time today. The second one said no problem, you’re in.

But at last we know what comes next. We can do this.

So our car has PG’s eyes now, I told him.

A friend of PG’s had had cataract surgery and had had the lens implants deliberately not match: one was set for seeing near, one for far. He told PG it was great. PG told his doctor that’s what he wanted to do, too.

We are designed with two eyes for a reason. Sabotaging binaural vision because you don’t want to wear glasses seemed a really bad idea to the doctor, who tried hard to talk him out of it. But failed.

Out of sheer curiosity I asked my own cataract surgeon about it and his take was basically you’d have the whole rest of your life to regret that in.

So. The Prius.

There’s the window switch and there’s the set of them for setting the outside mirrors. I got the left hand mirror where I wanted it, went to change the one on the right–

–and the thing fell down inside the door. Visible, at least, but useless.

One eyeball view for me, one for Richard. Good thing we have shoulders we can look over.

Tomorrow when the mechanic sees my note I can find out if that’s a new one on him.

I knew nothing of his background when we first met, and I’m glad of that; I got to know him a little with no preconceptions. His Scottish last name matched my great-grandmother’s and we figured we were cousins way back there somewhere.

Gradually, some of his stories seemed farfetched enough that I wasn’t sure I believed them.

Today I found out how true the one I questioned the most was. I was not expecting that.

His close friend from high school played a flamenco tune that James had taught him to play on his guitar all those years ago, and talked about James’s stage name and how he’d come by it and the travels and lessons and performances.

So that was real. That wasn’t the imaginings of a hard-core homeless man who once threw a major tantrum at me when I emailed him of an apartment opening for those who wanted to come off the street. I’m sure he saw it as me looking down on him, but it was pure naivet’e. He was where he felt comfortable being. In the end, just before his kidneys finished giving out, he did in fact accept moving into a place built to help people like him. That was his offer of comfort to the rest of us.

James was a gifted artist of a gardener. He was hired by someone I vaguely knew who was building a mansion up in the hills who described James as working on his own time and in his own way and you can’t rush him; all you can do is know that it will be glorious when he’s done. Glorious is a direct quote.

During a slow patch for him, I tried to hire him to come copper-spray my peaches against leaf curl disease.

I thought of him this morning as I did that task myself.

I walked into the church this afternoon; I’d met his mom, but surely this was his sister next to her. It was.

While their mom was talking to someone else, I told his sister–who made sure afterwards that Mom heard it, too–that James had refused to allow me to pay him that day when he was done. Said it was his gift to G_d today, that he likes to pick someone to just serve the Lord to and that was that.

Knowing his strong faith, I said, But the Bible says wo to those who oppress the hireling in their wages!

Didn’t budge him. He had done it for love. Always would. Please let him know next year when to come. (I confess I did not. I like to pay people for their work.)

And so I had knit him a soft wool blue cabled hat in thanks. James gasped at it: “I will treasure it the rest of my life!”

His sister said, “Oh, THAT’s where…” and trailed off. She’d wondered…

I did not dare ask how rare it was for her late brother to own and to keep something nice.

I knew the acidity of that dish was a bad idea.

Never mind what I was going to write before the result so rudely interrupted me. (At least this is rare.) And granted mine was from Crohn’s, not cancer.

But if you’re reading this and you’ve been putting it off but you know you should, go schedule a colonoscopy. Yeah I know they’re fun. Trust me. Do it.

The light is returning and the birds know it and they have started to show up more, picking out nesting spots, the hormones just starting to kick in.

I knew better than to park directly under our street tree–it had three nests last year, it’s a popular spot even if the storms took one–but I did it anyway. Habit.

It is safe to say our old Prius is a mess. And it’s not just the birds; the tree drips this time of year. I kept waiting for the gas gauge to go down enough to fill it at the carwash place.

Finally!

You put in the credit card, the little prompt comes up, Do you want a carwash today? Yes/No.

Except that–it didn’t. Huh. Maybe they changed the program. I’m sure it’ll ask me if I want that added after it’s done filling then.

It didn’t.

I considered. I puzzled. How does a carwash place not let you pick to do the carwash? Did they move that function over to the screen where you punch in your code right before it starts up? But what code? There were no temporary signs posted, looks like you could drive right on in like always… I mean, my car may be old but it really really needs a good cleaning off. My neighbors would surely be ever so grateful.

Just then a big white utility van pulled in. It turned around. It backed up to the end of the carwash building. And on the side of it, in large print, were the words, CARWASH REPAIR.

Oh.

But, but… That carwash is just there, it has always just been there, it works, I’ve totally taken it for granted.

Who knew there were enough carwashes and enough of them breaking down in close enough proximity and close enough times to warrant a clearly successful but also clearly very limited-in-scope business with a nice truck like that? And logo, too?

Well, as the old GPSes used to say, Recalculating… I found the standard gas station squeegee and soapy water and washed my own silly car. Not the whole thing–it was way too much to do to whoever might encounter that bucket of water next–but at least the front and back windows and the worst of a side one. Took me three tries and some fingernailing to get the bird poop off the windshield but it felt great when it was gone. I could see clearly again in all directions!

All the way home I felt the poem of it: that truck was the good people of Minnesota and elsewhere coming out to repair and restore our democracy and our rule of law we had so taken for granted. Clarifying the view.

While I did the small things I knew how to do to remedy what I could while trying not to burden others.

I parked on the other side of our driveway when I got home so that the birds could create their homes and live their new-life lives of the coming Spring with only gratitude from me.

It was reported that about a hundred of Alex Pretti’s neighbors joined in near his home last night in the bitterest cold to light candles and sing together, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” in tribute to the way he had lived his life.

It is not in our church’s songbook for children and there were so many choices they could have made–and yet this was the one that was picked and planned and practiced before his name was ever known to the world.

We had stake conference today, the gathering of five wards in one grand get-together. Not just our ward but most of the Peninsula. As part of the service they called all the little children ages three to about eight to come to the front and sing. Several of the youngest needed their mommies or daddies to walk them up there when they saw all those faces looking at them; some followed older siblings boldly, ready for this.

This Little Light of Mine.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one fighting back tears at that simplest of deliveries of a message that hit home.

G_d knew. He knew. The grief and the horror soon to come and how much we would need this very thing.

The message, through young children, that our one, own, inept, imperfect little light matters, that we must each hold it up against the darkness. Together we do create a brightness and it will prevail.

The look on his face when I told him that number!

Okay, there’s a plumber I like, Lee, good guy, a one-man show, been doing this a long time, knows his stuff, but he wasn’t available last time I needed one.

I thought about calling the company of the young guy who had come in order to ask him to, y’know, fix his mistake, if it was his mistake, but I just couldn’t. $850 and I’m still dealing with all this and my carpet’s been wrecked and the sunk-cost fallacy was becoming a little too literal.

It must have kept bugging Lee, because when he was done he felt compelled to talk about it.

I thought the other guy had said he’d replaced everything under the sink but the faucet. Turns out he had not. The two on-off switches were very old and they had failed.

I could attest to that–I’d tried one more time last night to see if I could get them to close and the result was that that five gallon pot couldn’t manage that much overnight. The floor of the cabinet was at last starting to dip heavily downwards and the edge of the carpet in the living room was wet again.

Yeah, he said, they forgot to put a washer in. That’s why it still leaked. That part? he said, pointing to the U-tube. Costs $16 and an hour of his time at most to put in. Then he explained, That company got sold about two years ago and the new owners are pushing their people hard for upsells.

Ah–so that’s why the guy waited for his friend to come over to get me a quote on how he was going to fix the damage to the cabinet floor and the wall behind it. (As I suddenly realized I was apparently paying the first plumber per hour for that, too.) I told Lee, I wasn’t feeling it. Didn’t agree to going forward with it.

He spelled out his own bill: $50 and $22 and $8 for these parts, $80/hour for his time, to say, And THAT is how it’s done.

Nothing drips.

Everything works.

The new faucet looks gorgeous. (Richard laughed when I said that to him. I said, It’s not what you would have picked? He said, No, but it makes you happy and that’s what I want. He is a sweetheart.)

The refrigerator line is hooked up again.

Next time Lee’s too busy I am absolutely going to wait till he’s not.

Went to the post office yesterday and was quietly admiring the sweater of the woman several people ahead of me. She had nothing in her hands.

The line did not move by a single customer in ten minutes and I was debating putting my boxes on the floor and pulling out the latest hat project. But didn’t. Finally it was her turn, and I couldn’t hear the conversation, I just got the faces and the tones of voice: sweater woman presenting what she thought was a reasonable request, clerk lady quickly turning to sounding like what I can only describe as almost triumphantly unhelpful.

Finally, the lady in the thick single-ply blue top-down hand knit gave up and turned to go in disgust.

I’m picturing myself back when they told me they could not pay out the insurance on a package that was a “this must never be lost” but was, and being blown off and being told it had to be missing for one more day than that before they could make good on it.

Five minutes after I got home I got the message that they had miraculously found it. Right there in that building after a month or two AWOL. I guess I’d put the fear of payout into them.

I hope they didn’t lose something she’d knit for someone.

Whether her issue gets resolved too or not, I wanted her day to go better than that, so as she went past me I asked her if she’d knit her sweater.

She had–but in her moment of trying not to voice how she felt at that clerk she took it out on the yarn: she grabbed a bit of fabric near her elbow and told me, Yeah, but it pills!

It’s beautiful! I said as she continued on by.

And it was.

And that’s the last thing she heard walking out of that post office.

I got the same clerk. She knew I’d seen all that. Maybe she even was glad I’d tried to make things better for the woman. Or maybe it was that because we were actually doing a transaction, her job required that she ask me at the end to click the pointer at the screen to mark whether I was smiley face or sad face at how I’d been helped.

Her face was such a funny mixture of pretty please!!! and this bared-teeth smile that was trying too hard that I fought back the ‘you have got to be kidding me’ impulse, the laugh-out-loud one, too, and gave her her hoped-for smile.

One for each of them. Fair’s fair.

So I was doing my walking time last night and saying a prayer, telling G_d the obvious and that I needed to know what to do about that water coming up into the rug.

Suddenly I knew. I KNEW. I mean, I didn’t know know but I knew!

So of course I ran to Richard to tell him that.

Well, go and look, then!

And there it was. The dishwasher was running and the water was streaming out underneath the sink to the ruined cabinet floor. Yes a $$$ major plumbing fix happened last month, but not that particular part. But that’s why I hadn’t thought of it, I thought everything under there was fixed.

I put my biggest dye pot underneath it. I didn’t know if it would run like that all night or just while the dishwasher emptied or what.

There were over four gallons in the morning. I couldn’t just empty it into that sink (actually I probably could have), I had to carry it outside. On second thought, I hope the detergent doesn’t kill the Chinese elm on that side of the house, I should have carried it down the hall to the bathroom but my back was distracting me.

A new faucet is on order.  The old one leaked a quart or two over the course of today, a whole lot less than I was afraid of, and I am not turning the dishwasher on again till the new Delta and its intact supply lines are in there.

Phew.

Two days ago I thought he’d spilled a glass of water  (“No…”) and dabbed it out with a towel. Yesterday my sock got wet again when I stepped on the edge of the carpet there. Today it was Houston, we’ve got a problem. The soaking went several feet wide now.

This house was built with the water pipes running under the slab but ours failed years ago. The then-plumber explained that the reverberations from one leak can make a weak old pipe give way in more places and in fact we had, suddenly, 16 of them. We could jackhammer the entire length of the house–or we could run new pipes across the roof.

Done.

And so here I am 32 years later, going, yeah we had a freeze, but there’s nothing under the house. The wall is dry. No sign of dripping through the ceiling. Somehow water is seeping up through the concrete from the ground, is the best we can tell, even though it hasn’t been raining. This is going to be $$$.

We tried to figure out who we should call for a problem whose cause we don’t know.

Well, a plumber would be able to pinpoint the sounds of the water if it has anything to do with pipes.

I’ve been pushing towels at it all day and the washer is running a load of them as I type. But I think at the very least we’re about to lose the carpeting in the living room.

So I did what one does in such circumstances: I went outside this evening, looked at my oldest Anya tree (2019) that didn’t get to go in the ground because it didn’t look as healthy as the other, but that could be because it’s been potted too long, and finally, a year after I bought a bigger pot and soil, did that transplant. By myself. Without telling anyone.

Those branches are fragile and so am I. It was heavy. That rootball was an impenetrable mass, no easing individual roots apart like I had intended, not while trying to keep it from falling over and crashing. I hope I didn’t leave bare spaces between it and the new soil underneath because air prunes off roots but I’m sure in some places I did. I ended up pushing the mass down with my knee from trunk to pot edge, around and around to try to connect it to below. And then threw those pants in the washer with the towel load.

It was all frankly a stupid thing to do because a friend told me he was going to get some kids from church to come do it for me, but I never got a firm time nor day. I didn’t want to pay another repairman, I didn’t want another major home repair (termites were $79k) and in that moment what I wanted most was the satisfaction of getting this one thing done that had bugged me for over a year so my plant could go live happily ever after and maybe even give me some fruit.

Besides, what are back exercises for.

It feels so good to have gotten it done.

I half-apologized and warned the friend from church so the kids wouldn’t be disappointed, and thanked them for the offer.

On a different note: fifty Bavarian sheep got distracted by acorns and then, they believe, someone carrying a bag in.

A feedbag! Thus suddenly they were checking out the inside of a grocery store. I imagine automatic doors were involved. Lettuce? Nah, go for the drinks.

Meanwhile, the shepherd in the middle of moving 450 other sheep didn’t realize he’d lost a tithing of his flock.

The grocery chain, rather than going after the shepherd for cleanup and replacement expenses, knew a priceless ad campaign when they saw the viral video, laughed, and said they would sponsor those 50 sheep’s feed for a year.

Loving, laughing, forgiving. Thanking.

Man, doesn’t it feel great.

I heard from two more Minnesota friends today. Love Thy Neighbor is what this whole resistance thing is about.