Thank God It’s Five Kinds of Muscular Dystrophy

I think we are all going a bit bonkers because of Covid. The reason I say this is because in the last week nearly all my friends have texted or emailed me saying I think I am going a bit bonkers because of Covid.

It’s not just that everyone is depressed, daytime drinking, and putting on forty pounds. It’s a serious burnout factor with the world in general, a sort of what the hell mentality. Or if we are feeling really energetic, oh what the hell. 

To counteract this feeling of lassitude, I decided last night to watch a movie called Infinite Potential, recommended to me by a new friend who clearly thought me more intelligent than I am. Since our summer porch bedroom was registering a record low world temperature, I clambered into the spare bed in the much warmer spare bedroom, known as The Bird Room, on account of its garish wallpaper. After I had rid the bed of some sand, eleven teddies, and a tinfoil teddy crown, I settled down to try and find the movie online. 

First I got distracted by Netflix’s vast array of TV shows. Suddenly it seemed a very attractive idea, to get addicted to a TV show. It’s what everyone seems to be doing in Covid. But on closer examination, most of them turned out to be about murderous psychopaths, hideous crimes against children, or futuristic dystopian Madrid. Much better to cleanse my mind in a deep bath of science. 

Infinite Potential is a movie about David Bohm and how he tried to find a theory of physics that would unify the disparate theories of Einstein  and Niels Bohr. Not so much a unified theory of everything, that had been tried by some physicists in the 70s and 80s and by their own admission, it didn’t go too well. But a theory that would help the big and the small meet in the middle. After sparkling nuggets of wisdom from numerous physicists, authors, and philosophers, I couldn’t help feeling they were missing the fundamental point: big and little meet where things are medium sized.

I had this feeling directly before I fell asleep for a bit. Even though I was interested in the movie, and delighted to be watching something that proved how fascinating and intellectual I am, it seemed to be going around and around some central point that it never reached or I couldn’t quite grasp. Sort of like life at the moment.

You would think that most people would be trying to be cheery in this gloomy time. Yet I find that this is not always so. Take our nurses’ monthly education meeting, for instance. Last month’s education topic was Really Depressing Diseases that Particularly Afflict Children. These were a buffet of the conditions you really don’t want to get: MS, ALS, Huntington’s. I sat through the meeting with my second cup of coffee, and after a while my third, looking at slides of terribly skinny kids with a variety of skeletal deformities while the speaker intoned how short their life expectancy would be. Did I know there are five kinds of muscular dystrophy? I did not. 

And then there was the radio today. I was driving home from getting a Covid test when I switched it on to a distressingly loud blaring sound. This was followed by a serious newscaster type warning us of a massive Winter storm approaching tomorrow night. Expect ten to eighteen inches, he intoned, dry fluffy snow. It’s hard to take a weather forecaster seriously when he uses the word fluffy. He went on to warn us against venturing out without flashlights, extra blankets and food for three months. 

It’s going to be fourteen degrees when we wake up tomorrow. One must have a mind of winter, said Wallace Stevens, to regard the frost and the boughs. I am working on this. It’s seriously freezing here, is what my Mind of Winter is saying. But I have glimpsed some frost and some boughs, and I noticed driving home tonight that the setting sun looked very good behind the black silhouettes of the leafless trees. And have been cold a long time, he continued, to behold the junipers shagged with ice. I haven’t been cold a long time yet, it has only been a couple of weeks. But I am getting the impression that by the time Spring arrives? Then I will have been cold a long time.

There are a few things that I like about Winter so far. You could quibble and say it hasn’t actually started yet, not till the 21st, but I say if the outside temperature is in the teens, screw waiting till December 21st. Here are Some Things I Like About Winter:

Crunching around in Blundstones on the snowy ground, all rugged and invincible. 

Coming out of my basement after using the treadmill, warm to the core, and there’s snow and it’s freezing but it can’t get me because, well, I’m rugged.

The way ponds freeze.

Finding my water bottle turned to a block of ice in the car. 

Long underwear.

That’s it.

Friday we have another nurses’ education meeting. I’m going to make a whole pot of coffee. By then the world should be a pristine wonderland. A friend who used to live on the East Coast told me a big snowstorm is cleansing. She also said Spring will make me feel born anew. I’d kind of rather be doing the born anew thing than the cleansing, but if there’s one thing moving to rural upstate New York has taught me, it’s that you have to take each change as it comes. That, and never leave home without three months of food. 

Hospice Nurse Evaporates Black Hole

This just in! Scientists have discovered that if you accidentally fall into a black hole, you do come out again. Such a relief! Not only that, but when you come out, you make the black hole evaporate. It’s due to something called quantum entanglement. Particles can be linked at the quantum level and display reactivity to each other even if separated by thousands of miles.

I could have done with this good news the other day, one of those days when you feel the black hole hovering a little too nearby for comfort. I started my work day with a visit to a young man who is dying of liver failure. Turned out nobody had told him, non English speaker that he is, that he is dying, or that the way his belly keeps filling up with fluid is indicative of end stage liver failure and is not going to stop. He took my news okay, in his quiet understated way, though who can tell what he was really feeling. 

After that I got called to a dying patient who had died by the time I got there. I had to tell her husband of 66 years, who has mild dementia of the sort that doesn’t really allow you to take on board the fact that your wife of 66 years just died in the next room that his wife just died in the next room. He seemed to get it when I knelt down beside him to tell him. In a general sort of way. As I led him into her room so he could say goodbye, he said “my girl is gone.” He was dry-eyed through my whole visit, kept reassuring me he was okay. It was me, walking to my car, who dissolved into tears in the cold Fall rain. 

Then there’s the Covid.

Sometimes you just need a serious jolt of humor to chase away those suicidal ideation blues. It is getting a little chilly in the Hudson Valley. Nobody told me there was a temperature below 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Have I been living in a fool’s paradise? Wednesday I went out to drive off to work and my car was completely encased in ice. I thought I could just turn on the windshield wipers with some windshield wiper fluid and we’d be good. Turned out that would completely ruin the windshield wipers. We would have to scrape the ice off the windshield manually, with  implements specially designed for the task. Implements? I wandered around our house and basement looking for sharp shiny metal objects that looked like giant palette knives. Our available implements turned out to be about as suited to the task as cooked spaghetti. After two of them, I had to resort to putting my vehicle in the microwave.

The spectacular Fall colors in the Hudson Valley have washed out to a palette of grays and browns. After the very last of the brave maples let go of their golden leaves, I spent a couple of days in a bit of a low place. All there was to see was sticks for trees with overtones of grey and brown. Even the squirrels seemed to have given up bounding across the roads and through the sticklike tree forests foraging for giant nuts. Instead they just lay in the middle of the roads with their innards smushed in a squishy sort of roadkill stew.

Then one morning I woke up and realized: it’s not exactly that the glorious Fall colors have all gone. Instead, they have been replaced with a beautifully subtle and mellow palette of grays, browns, and dark deciduous greens, cut through artistically with the streaks of red that indicate the innards of roadkill squirrels, skunks, and foxes. It’s not sad. It’s gorgeous. You just have to adjust your thinking.

I lay in bed, adjusting my thinking. I had been awake on and off all night with dreams of menace and threat. At 6am, I turned towards the window in the bedroom where I had gone for sleep solace and I saw two deer nosing around the remaining greenery behind our cabin. They were entirely unaware of the love that I immediately and unrequitedly lavished upon them from my lying position upon my bed. So delicate. So wild. So oblivious of me, despite their continued twitching towards the prevailing forest scents. I loved them for a little longer, and then I got up and adjusted my thinking further in a hot shower.

My daughter is not going to be able to fly out to be with me for Thanksgiving. My daughter is not going to be able to fly out to be with me for Christmas. The best that we can do, and it is really a ton of fun, is try to imagine tropical locations where we can meet sometime in Spring. Winter will be socking me in in the Hudson Valley, I do not know whether I will have sufficient implements identified to carve myself out of the weather. Covid will be running its course, whatever that is. Names like Caymen and Bahama and Maui tantalize us both. There is no knowing whether the pandemic will jerk these names out of reach. Could be so. Streaks of red on the roadsides.

As I drove away from my last patient this afternoon, the wintry sun burst with an energy I had not thought it capable of. It sparkled across the landscape of tributaries, swamps, wintry fields, brightly colored metal bridges, lakes, and ponds. I put the Spotify playlist that I share with Jessie on shuffle. Colours came on, by Grouplove. If the color’s red, no need to be sad, it really ain’t that bad...Really, yes: the colors are not yellow and gold any more but they are rust and so many shades of brown and light and dark grey and the figures of trees are reaching up to something that I can’t even imagine because I have never lived under this sky before but I’m willing to be open to it and not let the end of the vibrant colors bring me down but wait, patiently wait for the deep quiet of the snow.

All seven of the planets are visible in the night sky this week. If we ran outside in the subzero temperatures in our California very sadly underprepared clothing we might see them, should we remember in the subzero moment which to direction to look in. Much better to lie in our bed in our former summer cabin porch now actual winter bedroom and get the panoramic view from its walls of windows. Angel, our new rescue cat walks back and forth over us, back and forth, looking for the softest parts of our bodies to step on with her poky paws. She has found my rack of hanging necklaces. Bat, bat, bat. One by one they are disappearing down behind the bedside table. Like all cats, she loves keyboards. riuywp5[320tu.

People here keep telling me that Winter hasn’t started yet. Then they see my expression and they say reassuringly it’s not that bad. I know what they’re doing. But holing up is starting to have a nice ring to it. We have a hundred and eleven million books in our tiny cabin. I’m imagining just curling up on our sofa and working my way through them. Some of them have titles like Icons in Bulgaria (I am not making this up), but still. And we have hot chocolate, and rye, with the aid of which hot chocolate becomes hot spikolate. And if the black hole of January threatens to pull me in, I could always employ a spot of quantum entanglement and clamber out in May when the narcissi are poking up through the last of the snow.

Hospice Nurse Meets Zombie Apocalypse in Trumpie Yard

Really the title of this post should have been Riding Fool Meets Zombie Apocalypse in Trumpie Yard, because technically I was on my bike and not wearing my hospice nurse badge when I encountered the zombie apocalypse. But somehow I feel so much more equipped for meeting the living dead as a hospice nurse than as a road biker. Maybe it’s the bandages and the scythes.

It was a Sunday afternoon, the first really chilly Fall day in upstate New York, and I was out for a bike ride. It had taken me all week to work up to it but I was finally clipped in and feeling pretty strong and intrepid. I took a road I knew in my new neighborhood and then I veered off onto a road I didn’t know and just kept going. Now I was feeling indestructible. The countryside was bucolic, like it tends to be around here on Sunday afternoons. The last golden leaves clung to some trees, there were stone walls and horses and ponds.

There were also tons of Trump/Pence signs, a lot more than Biden/Harris signs but I tried to sublimate my desire to set fire to them all, and comforted myself with the thought that those with the most fear tend to shout the loudest. All those houses with no signs? Probably Democrats. There was no way all those raucous election lawn signs were going to ruin my ride.

I passed a farm with miniature goats, and one with a courageous little fountain making a clear space in the algae of its pond. My chain came off halfway up a scary hill with no shoulder but I got it back on in record time, just before being creamed by an F150 roaring up the hill with no conception of what three foot clearance means.

So I was still feeling pretty good as I coasted down the hill after the chain event and turned a corner. Imagine my delight to spot what appeared to be a life-size re-enactment of the Thriller video on the lawn of a white clapboard house. I took it in briefly as I rode by but I was in such shock I was three hundred yards down the road before I realized I had to turn back and get a proper look.

I rode back. As I did, I noticed the Trump signs in the driveway. But the horror of those was pretty much eclipsed by the mannequins crowding the lawn. There must have been fifty of them. Mummies, zombies, grim reapers, and general living dead types with hollow eyes and horns and hoods and freaky nun headgear. There was a fenced in graveyard with two giant signed gateposts: Mortuary and Village Graveyard. There was a warning not to enter the graveyard or zombies would take their revenge. As I stood by my bike taking photos, some sound effects kicked in. I took a last shot and sped off.

My parting image was of the weird little family of brightly dressed clowns in back of the zombies. They had a little pink car and were somehow the creepiest of the lot.

Driving around Dutchess and Ulster Counties seeing patients, I have been continually bludgeoned by the extent of support for Trump in what I had blithely assumed was a majority liberal state. I mean, it’s New York, right? Wrong. It’s the rural Hudson Valley. Not only are there a frightening number of supporters of the man in the Oval Office but they seem to feel obliged to bullhorn their politics in a glaringly belligerent way. Just a couple of hours before that Sunday ride, our peaceful weekend was harshly interrupted by a Trump Train: a parade of 30 vehicles past our house. Giant flags. Tooting horns. Predominantly outsized trucks, military-style Jeeps, and lots of angry noise. Then there were the trucks in front yards with hydraulic arms mounted on them hanging outsize flags supporting the man who would make America great again.

None of this was funny. But the zombies on the lawn suddenly somehow were. I mean, who does that? Who spends thousands of dollars to put a bunch of plastic life-size undead in front of their house a month? And it’s not like they live on the Interstate. This was a sleepy backroad. Kind of like putting your Trump/Pence sign up in the basement when the one lightbulb there has burned out.    

And now it is today, November 8th, and I don’t need to tell you about the great weight off the shoulders, the tension we didn’t even know we were carrying, and the massive relief that a babyman in metaphorical pullups no longer has the nuclear codes as of January 20th. 

I took another bike ride today, my first since being traumatized by the Thriller ensemble. The temperature was a weird balmy 70 degrees, the last brave trees were holding on to their golden leaves, and people with Biden/Harris signs were sitting out on their porches taking in the gloriousness. They called out good morning to me as I rode by, and I waved back and sometimes I called out something spontaneous and probably a little overly enthusiastic like isn’t it a gorgeously wonderful new day and I love you, I’ve never met you before but I love you anyway, oh my god I love you so much have an AMAZING life!

And the Trump/Pence signs? Taken down. And the hydraulic arms? Retracted. And the zombie apocalypse in the clapboard farmhouse yard? Gone from my sight. I wish that those lifesize undead creatures of horror were all behind bars in the state penitentiary for massive tax fraud and other zombie crimes, but for now, it’s enough for me that the lawn they inhabited is empty again and golden with fallen leaves. 

Thich Nhat Hanh Stops Eating

Today I learned that Thich Nhat Hanh has stopped eating, in preparation for both his 94th birthday on October 11th and, presumably, his death. Or at least, that’s what social media told me, and you know how everything you read on social media is completely true and so you should believe it.

Nevertheless, I googled it, just in case social media was not being entirely truthful for once in its life. I had to figure out how to spell Nhat and Hanh but once I got those down I saw lots of articles from the monks at Plum Village about how reports of Thich Nhat Hanh stopping eating were not entirely truthful. He’s doing really well, the articles said. And all the elder brothers who have travelled to see him at Plum Village have arrived and are undergoing quarantine so they can see him. I wasn’t quite sure how all the quarantining elder brothers who had travelled from far away to see him were indicators that he was doing really well. And how well can you be doing when you’re 93 and stop eating? But it’s hard to know what to believe when you google something.

My point is that the venerable monk has asked us all to do sitting and walking meditations and to extend forgiveness to others. These are his wishes as he prepares to leave this incarnation. I’m not really the world’s greatest meditator, as I have explained previously. I have a particularly difficult time with walking meditations. But forgiveness? That’s something I could really get behind.

I read about his request as I was on the treadmill so I had plenty of time to think about it. I got to wondering: did he mean forgive everyone? without exception? So I googled this too and I came across a YouTube video where some Chinese woman asked him exactly the same question. He thought for a long while about the answer and then he started to give it but he took such a prolonged time to get to the point that even though I felt a bit guilty about it, I paused the video and went back to my own thoughts on forgiveness.

I know the Dalai Lama once said that mosquitos were exempt from the whole hurt no living being thing. Once he clarified that it was okay to kill mosquitos, I figured there were several other members of the insect world that had exemptions filed against them also. Those yellow wasp traps where the dead wasps build up in layers inside: they were clearly fine. I mean, wasps? And ticks! Even ticks that don’t carry lime, the ones whose heads get embedded in your skin and whose bodies swell up till they are shiny and grey with your engorged blood. BLAM! Ok with the Dalai Lama, ok with me.

So, on to forgiveness. Since I hadn’t been able to muster the patience to hear Thich Nhat Hanh out on the question of exceptions, I was left wondering about a certain group of people that I was hoping he might have listed as such. This group of people may or may not have something to do with running the country at the moment. Did he really mean we need to forgive all these people too? 

I tried to imagine forgiving some of them. One of them. I tried to imagine forgiving just one of them, and not even the worst one. That didn’t work. So I moved on to another. Nope. So I went for gold, and spent a short time considering how I might forgive the principal player in all of this. If I could have stuck the YouTube video of the Chinese woman out to the end, I was pretty sure the answer would have indicated that yes, we have to forgive a sociopathic narcissist when he deliberately takes his mask off in a group of his subordinates while infected with Covid-19. 

Then it struck me how Ruth Bader Ginsberg had a dying wish too. And her dying wish got trampled into the filth by some of the same people I was having such a hard time forgiving. Where to go with all of this? I wished that I could be kneeling beside Thich Nhat Hanh’s bed where he was doing so well on no food and ask him for his thoughts.

Failing that, I felt that I should just imagine what he would tell me to do. Try forgiving yourself first, I imagined he might say. So I thought about things I needed to forgive myself for. There was that wish I had on Sunday that the guy in the MAGA hat would get so sick he needed a ventilator but there weren’t any so they had to fashion him one out of cardboard and duct tape. However, I didn’t really feel all that bad about having that wish, so I would have to come up with something else.

While I was trying to dredge up something to forgive myself for, I fell to thinking about the patients I have had who have made the decision to stop eating. It’s nearly always a difficult choice and tends to come after a period of great suffering and to have profound consequences on those close to the dying person. Sometimes it’s too difficult for people to carry through. Their bodies are maybe not ready to relinquish nourishment, they get too hungry and they start eating again. Or they just lose their resolve. 

I don’t imagine this is going to happen to Thich Nhat Hanh. I’m guessing resolve comes fairly easy to him after a lifetime of renunciation and spiritual practice. I hope he’s not relying on us all forgiving everyone who needs forgiveness before he leaves this life. I think I could work on a few lesser cases, maybe a couple of governors of states with no mask mandates. And in the meantime, I wish him well on his journey out of this life, that it may happen peacefully and without cravings for Haagen Dazs. 

Hospice Nurse Comes Home to Wonder Woman Chainsaw Event

I know that the title of this post is a little long. And I know that it doesn’t really make all that much sense. But bear with me. I just moved across the continent, my life has taken some sharp right turns, and now sometimes I come home from work to find members of my family trying out new power tools while other members, dressed as Wonder Woman, observe them.

Perhaps I should explain. It’s not that she was dressed solely as Wonder Woman. She was also wearing sunglasses, a pink and white tutu, and gardening gloves. Maybe I don’t really need to explain. Maybe those of you who have young kids are reading this and going uh-huh, yeah, that’s exactly like my house on a normal day. 

But just in case, let me elaborate. Last Monday I finished orienting at my new job. After more than two weeks, I got signed off on everything I need to make me a competent and effective hospice nurse in the state of New York. It was a very satisfying moment for me. I drove home feeling pretty happy. I was listening to my favorite songs, and finding my way home without Siri telling me to park in my own driveway. I was excited because the next day I was going to meet my new work team. That’s meet as in see in tiny squares on my computer screen for four hours.

Then I pulled into my driveway and I saw the chainsaw event and the diminutive Wonder Woman. Turned out that she had been running round naked until her Grandpa advised her that lumberjacks always gear up before they started chopping down trees. She asked what a lumberjack was. Grandpa elaborated: plaid shirts, boots with really thick soles, jeans and really thick gloves. She disappeared and returned in a Wonder Woman leotard, tutu, sunglasses, and gardening gloves. Lumberjacks could learn a thing or two.

I watched the inaugural bite of the chainsaw and then I drove up to the house and commenced unloading the ridiculous collection of hospice nurse supplies I had just packed my trunk with at the office. Suddenly my car was full of plastic buckets and containers. Plus endless other plastic plasticnesses that I couldn’t even really fathom a purpose for and just wanted to instantly set fire to in a really eco-friendly non environmentally threatening and yet entirely obliterating way. 

At my old hospice, the nurses ordered patient supplies from a company called Medline, who kindly delivered them the next day to the patients’ houses. In my new hospice, the nurses have to bring all the supplies with them. My capacious trunk will be entirely stuffed at all times with adult diapers, bed pads, and boxes of gloves. Not to mention PPE. Supplies are limited so we have a complex system of reuse - paper baggies containing N95s we have worn and are quarantining for 7 days till we wear them again for a total of 5 times. I think of all the other times in history that people squirreled away their life-saving masks in paper bags for a week till they could wear them again. Right, that would be never.

I spend lots of time in my new life comparing California with New York. Seasons. The rhythms of them, they’re so much more pronounced on the East Coast. Take squirrels for example. We have them in California. In the Fall they scurry around gathering nuts. But here, there are so many of them that you constantly nearly kill them just driving down the road. Maybe it’s their numbers, but they seem particularly fond of running across the road. They’ll have a giant nut in their mouths, so big it often falls out as they cross. I thunder towards them in my Subaru. They freeze. Nut! Car! Nut! Car! I yell at them to head for the verge but I’m not sure they can hear me.

One of the patients I visited last week, a woman clearly in tune with the seasons she has lived through all her life, was of the opinion that the copious squirrel population this year means we are in for a long cold Winter with lots of snow. I was impressed, and yet I badly want her theory to be full of holes.

And the turning of the leaves - people have been banging on about New England Fall colors for my entire life. Now here I am. And they were right. Spectacular doesn’t even begin to cover it. One day, I’m driving along and there’s a streak of red up a pole. It’s ivy, that turns first. A day later, splashes of yellow. Then one day, all the sugar maples on our hill simultaneously change from bright green to yellow brown and every puff of wind sends a dance of leaves eddying down to the forest floor. I’m reminded of Masahide’s poem: barn’s burned down, now I can see the moon. Soon, there will be both more and less light.

When you move from California to points north, you realize that most of your clothing is made of tissue paper. Fine for the perpetual blue skies of the Bay Area, not so appropriate for a place where the word blizzard is an actual weather forecast. The trick to surviving my first Winter in snow, I have been advised, is twofold: warm underwear and a pair of Blundstones. Having now purchased these, plus a down vest, which I also cannot apparently survive without, I am feeling confident. Snow? Bring it on! I’m ready to tromp about in it in my Uniqlo thermals and my awesome Tasmanian boots. I may be a milque toast Californian, but I am ready to crush Winter in upstate New York!

Talk to me in November. The temperature already dipped down into the 30s here at night last week and I had to put three quilts on the bed. I’m determined not to spend the entire Winter whining about the cold though. I’m excited to throw myself into frigid temps, snow drifts, and ice storms. What I’m not sure about is the notion of skidding on black ice. The idea of getting stuck is also less than appealing to me. I’ve been seeking tips from my workmates, and even my patients. Cat litter. Apparently that is a thing you should have in your car in New York. Not in case you come across any cats who really need to pee, but in case you get stuck in snowdrifts. The cat litter will prevent your tires from spinning.

Other tips I have been given, entirely free of charge: when the ice starts, I should go practice driving in a parking lot somewhere. Practice driving? I repeated, not quite getting the concept. I’ve been driving since I was sixteen. Yeah, just spin around and around for a while till you figure out how to do it when you’re on the roads.

This is not sounding like fun.

Today I visited the patient again who told me about the squirrels and the long Winter. I asked her if she had any more tips, any further portends of doom. Appearing to relish the challenge, she told me about woolly bear caterpillars. Apparently there’s this breed of caterpillar that appears in the first two weeks of October in these parts. They are black with yellow circles. Sometimes they are furry. If they have lots of yellow and not so much furriness, it will be a mild Winter. If they are really black with very little yellow, there’s nothing for it: I should just put on a Wonder Woman leotard, sunglasses, tutu and gardening gloves. 

Hospice Nurse Proceeds to the Route

I have been driving a lot lately in an area I don’t know. This, in case you missed the memo, is because I just moved to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Naturally I have been relying heavily on Google Maps to tell me how to get around. I even allow Siri to speak to me now. And I still get lost.

Getting lost is not the worst of my crimes. When I drive with my teen riding shotgun, my worst crime sounds something like this: Mom, take the next right. Next right. THIS RIGHT.  Ohh, you missed it. 

In truth, I have always had what could be charitably described as an execrable sense of direction. It has given rise to the saying in our family: All who wander are not lost. But some definitely are. 

This is not the end of it, however. I also have a weird habit that I cannot even explain to myself of knowing instinctively when I need to take a turning and yet not taking it. This was true before Siri was even a thing, and it is completely incomprehensible to my teen. Last week we were driving from my new home in Clinton Hollow to my new local town of Rhinebeck. Siri directed me to take a slight right onto East Market Street. I saw the turn. It loomed towards me. My instincts all told me I should take it. Yet I drove straight on along South Street. Try to imagine things that were said in the car. 

The reason I resisted having Siri speak to me for so long is because she is stupid and annoying. Yes, she helps you get places. Yes, I would be completely inept in my driving activities without her. But do I really need to be told to proceed to the route when I’m just driving straight down the road? Or that, after being warned that my destination is on my right, I have arrived? I know I have arrived: it’s my driveway! 

Sometimes I just miss the days when you had to pull over and look at a crumpled map.

I started my new job this week. The office where I am doing orientation is a 20 minute drive away. There are three turns. After a couple of days, I decided to take the training wheels off. I could get to the office without Siri, right? I got lost. Not just going to work but coming home. How, you might wonder, did I find myself over on the other side of Poughkeepsie and going the wrong direction? See above re all who wander.

To compound things, when you take a wrong turning Siri immediately forgives you and sends you home a different way. So now I’ve come home from the office three different ways, but I don’t know any of them. I did see some lovely farmhouses though, so there was that. And on Thursday I found my way to work all by myself, with no directions that my destination was on the left, I had arrived, or to proceed into the parking lot. So ha, Siri!

The real issue here is that I have moved across the continent. New York is not as different from California as California was from Ireland, which I left in 1989. But it’s different enough. They don’t sell wine in grocery stores here, you have to go to a bottle shop. I mean, what kind of alien planet have I landed on?

When you move three thousand miles to another state, you expend a lot of time and energy just taking in all the new sights and sounds, just trying to figure out how people do things around here. It’s fascinating, absorbing a new culture, and it’s also exhausting. You have to get a new dentist, a new driver’s license, a new favorite local coffee shop. But there are definite bonuses. After 25 years of using a post office box, I have a street address now, a real mailbox with the little red flag you raise when you have mail for collection. It’s very exciting.

Meanwhile, underneath the new road names and bird calls and landmarks, the global pandemic rages on, the election looms close, and black lives continue not to matter to law enforcement. It’s new here, and it’s the same. People say things differently, but they say the same things. In a couple of weeks, I will start to get my own patients again. No doubt, I will see that even twelve states over, people still die the same way. 

I’ve been riding my bike around the back roads, and have learned how to get from the 9G to the 9 and up to Rhinebeck on my own recognizance. Once I’m driving around Ulster County visiting patients, I know that despite her shortcomings, Siri will be my best friend. And even when I fail to take the next right, she won’t judge me. Like a strange mix between an endlessly patient mom and a really annoying older sister, she’ll just recalibrate and tell me to take the next available right and then proceed to the route.

Hospice Nurse Moves Twelve States Over

One of our favorite plants was not looking good. I brought this to the attention of my daughter one day last week. That plant is not looking good, I said, I think it needs more light. She peered at it and said it looked really dry, had I watered it lately? Nooo, I said, is that a thing?

The plant had been moved from its old happy home on a set of shelves to a new location in our living room. This was because the set of shelves, really just some blond pine wood balanced on glass blocks, had been disassembled and left down on the side of Cascade for anyone to take. 

Every single item in my house was going out the door. If it didn’t fit in three suitcases, it had to go somewhere else. I was moving to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. Upstate New York still has a very foreign sound to it, as does the phrase I was moving. Nevertheless, this thing happened and it had ramifications for every item in my house, right down the twenty-five cans of lentil soup in my pantry.

When the California shelter-in-place was announced on March 14th and everyone ran out and started panic-buying toilet paper and Clorox wipes, I panic-bought lentil soup. Nobody in my house likes lentil soup, least of all me. But it seemed like the sort of food one would relish during a global pandemic. I pictured us hunkered down in our kitchen, warming lentil soup over a one-ring camping stove, and feeling grateful for food, any food.

In reality, the grocery stores in Marin never ran very low on food except pasta for a couple of weeks. The empty pasta shelves would have been chilling to behold had I not also panic-bought pasta so that alongside the cans of lentil soup, I had many boxes of really cheap pasta. We made our way through some of those over the months of sheltering. They were all sorts of strange colors that supposedly correlated with vegetables, and they were really not tasty.

When you are moving twelve states over with only three suitcases, your stuff starts to lose its appeal. Cans of lentil soup: where are they going to go? I tried giving them away to a friend of mine who goes to the Food Bank. He said no thanks. I tried making my teen eat them. Ha. Then I hit on the Food Bank itself. They take food, right? I drove there the Sunday before I left. It was all closed up, the giant trucks silent and the doors locked. There were no donation boxes or notices saying thank you for leaving us your twenty-five cans of unwanted soup. I put them by the door in a cardboard box and drove away feeling strangely guilty. Why was I feeling guilty for donating food to a food bank? Covid has really messed with our world.

Moving across the continent really stirs things up. I’ve been having unusually vivid dreams, even for me. The other night, I dreamed my brother brought the police to my house in the middle of the night to investigate some awful crime. When I got up to see what was happening, nobody could see or hear me. I decided that I was either in Sixth Sense II or I was dead. 

The night after that however, probably on the heels of the VP pick, I dreamed that I met Pete Buttigeig on the street. He was in a trench coat. Although I knew he was a former candidate for President and his name had butt in it, I couldn’t immediately peg him. Nevertheless I shamelessly lied to him that I was a big fan and had been to several of his town halls. Then I asked if he had any contacts in the organic farming or nutritional biology industries, as I was hoping he could help my daughter get an internship. He said he’d get back to me. Even in my dream, he was probably thinking I’m from Indiana, you mad bat!

The next dream was even better. I was sitting in some bleachers somewhere with blankets and snacks. I happened to glance up at a giant TV screen to my left and there were the Obamas, enjoying a basketball game. Barack caught sight of me, and he began to engage me in conversation. I wasn’t sure he was talking to me at first. I mean, me? From a giant TV screen? But he was. He asked me, very loudly over the crowd and somewhat flirtatiously I thought, whether I preferred sporting events or the beach. I told him the beach. Just because he’s a huge basketball fan and the former President of the United States, there’s no reason to lie. 

He flirted a little more with me and then I shut it down. Come on dude, Michelle’s right there. Throughout the rest of the very long dream, I kept repeating our conversation to everyone I met. Nobody was as impressed as I thought they should be. Still, the overall effect was a very warm glowy feeling. And compared to my usual nights of being menaced, murdered, or left friendless and alone in strange cities, this was pretty good.

Now I am on the other side of the continent. I have been here for a week, the DNC has come and gone, and California is burning. The Bay Area has the worst air quality in the world right now. Friends keep texting me: you got out just in time. But most of the people I love in this world are back there, breathing ash and watching the forecast for more lightning. 

Hudson Valley is a little slice of heaven. The sun is hot, the rain is warm, and the countryside Arcadian. It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it how gorgeous it is. Covid is still raging across the world. Soon the leaves will turn here, the mornings get crisp, and we’ll head into my first snowy Winter with its election and its threat of further lockdowns. We might get snowed in, snowed under, or just plain snowed. All that notwithstanding, there isn’t a single can of lentil soup in my house. 

Mom and Teen Ravaged by Wild Skunk on Beach

You know how when you’re walking barefoot on the beach and the sand is all soft between your toes? I slept out on the beach last night. This was something Jessie and I have been wanting to do for years, to camp out illegally with sleeping bags and snacks and fall asleep to the gentle lapping of the waves. And it was indeed wondrous. But let me tell you, sand is not that soft. 

The other reason we slept on the beach was that I was homeless. Yesterday we left our house and Jessie moved into the loft apartment at her dad’s. I’m moving to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York for a while: a Covid migration. I’d had plenty of offers of spare rooms, but I fancied the romantic night on the beach idea for my last sleep in California. The day had been a smoking 102 degrees, so the evening was clear and balmy. Stars were out, and to ice the cake, the Perseids!

We know a private kind of beach with a staircase down from the road where rangers were unlikely to find and cite us for vagrancy with inadequate bedding. We just brought sleeping bags, and fluffy sweaters for pillows. Plus a couple of essentials, like chocolate. The tide when we arrived was really high. There was actually very little beach and once we got ourselves comfortable, the waves were alarmingly close. And they were loud. The lapping thing? More like a dull roar. 

But the stars were legion. We saw the odd meteor streaking across the sky, and lay there trying to figure out why they are still there every year. And where they are. And where they’re going. Then we told funny stories, remembered favorite quotes from movies, and nearly died in a rockslide. It was actually only one rock, but it sounded like lots of rocks in the dark and I had not considered the possibility of being buried in a landslide as we lived out our dream of sleeping by the ocean. 

Then Jessie fell asleep and a short while later I heard some mariachi music. I looked up from my fluffy sweater pillow and saw this Mexican dude down by the water. He was dancing to music on his phone and chattering excitably. Were we about to be stabbed in our sleeping bags by a lunatic? But then he took a long drag on a very fat cigarette and I felt reassured. Stoned guys don’t go round stabbing people they find sleeping on the beach. After a while he danced off and I saw his phone light fade away into the darkness. The whole episode felt every bit as surreal as it sounds.

By this time the tide was receding and with it all thoughts of being dragged out by the waves as we slept. I dozed off. Vivid dreams. And then a familar smell. Skunk. The smell of marijuana is just so much more enjoyable than the smell of skunk, even when it’s accompanied by unhinged dancing dudes. I tried to imagine what a five hour flight would be like if I got skunked. Helpful for social distancing!

Despite the hard sand, the very loud ocean, the landslide, mariachi band, and wild animals, I got some sleep. And when I woke it was 5:30 and the stars were still bright and hopeful and the ocean flat. The moon came out in the predawn, a crescent of light. Jessie’s face was small and sweet, cushioned in her sleeping bag, simultaneously so young and so grown up. I could see a string of lights moving across the horizon, some cruise or container ship steaming slowly out of San Francisco Bay. I could hear its gutteral hum across the quiet water. Goodbye, goodbye California! 

It was worth the wait, all of it.  After the turmoil of the past few months, global and personal, the feelings of overwhelm, the uncertainty, anxiety, sadness and fear, I could finally let go. What is that word for strengthened by fire? Strange how the same set of circumstances can provoke radically different feelings. This move that could terrify me could also elate me. Not so much a choice which to feel, as a choice to feel it all.

Jessie woke, and we watched the peaceful dawn wash over the world. San Francisco was wreathed in a long scarf of fog. A couple came down to the beach with their dog and we waved cheerily. Just came down to see the dawn! With our sleeping bags!

We climbed back up to the Jeep and I packed the last things in my three suitcases. As we drove off, I set up the playlist for our drive to the airport and Jessie asked me which song I would listen to on takeoff, and then she guessed and she was right.

We got to SFO’s International Terminal that also houses JetBlue, only it doesn’t any more. I hopped out of the car and asked a nearby security guard: what have they done with JetBlue? He answered in a broad New York accent. They’re over in the new Terminal One, the Harvey Milk. 

Why did they move? I asked. I may have sounded mildly accusatory. We have a history of turning up at the wrong place in airports. He told me to get back in the car and he came round the driver’s side. It was seven a.m. but I could see he was in a chatty mood. You guys are sisters, right? Let me tell you how to get there. He gave us careful instructions on how to get to Terminal One, which was a few hundred yards away and amply signposted. He asked if we were going to New York. My mom’s moving there, Jessie said. She sounded happy. Hearing her say it like that made it feel so real. He leaned in conspiratorially. Well don’t let her yell at any cops over there. 

I’ve never travelled with so much luggage before. I usually get by even to Europe with carry-on. A few bystanders watched in amusement as I tried to figure out the cart machine release. Then we struggled to balance three large cases on a small cart. And a hat. And a fluffy coat. And a plastic reusable face shield. This was all happening before coffee.

I am used to wrenching goodbyes at airports but this one was a breeze as Jessie is coming out in four days. See you at JFK! I pushed my teetering cart through the double doors. My hips felt like they had spent the night lying on some very hard sand, but there was the promise of coffee and takeoff, a last view of my beautiful adoptive city set in the jewelry of her bay; and everything that lay ahead, twelve states over. Forged, that’s the word.