BECOMING
Donna Camp
I’m not sure
when the deadline is and I’m afraid I may even have missed it. Lucy, I really miss those reminders you used
to send and I wish you would go back to doing them. My house is so chaotic I can’t even find the last mailing. I did, however, take your editorial to heart,
so I’m writing while I have a couple of things to write about, and if it misses
this mailing, then it will be there for the next.
I’ve been
thinking about the comment someone made (I’m sorry I can’t find it now to
direct my response personally) about my reading leaning heavily toward several
books by the same author and series books.
Also, in someone’s reading list, she noted reading The Skies of Pern with the comment “What can I say; it’s
Pern”. In that context, I’ve also been
thinking about Lucy’s comments over time about not enjoying multiple books in
the same world. I realize I’m not a
very adventurous reader. I like to have
an idea where I’m going when I start, because for me reading is a lot like
travel. I look forward to my next trip
to Pern, or Darkover, or Barrayar, or the Humanx Commonwealth, or Nero Wolfe’s
New York City, or Manticore, Maybe I’ll
visit a new tourist site there because I find a book I haven’t read yet. Or maybe I’ll go back to a place I’ve been
before and discover new things about it.
Or maybe I’ll just visit the same old place for the comfort of an old
friend. Yet I often find, especially on
Barrayar, and I suspect also on Recluce, that each new book in a series almost
requires re-reading all the other books.
When I said that to Bujold at an Albacon event, she observed that what
can make a book interesting is the interstices, the spaces between the reader
and the read, between one book and the next.
By extrapolation, each time I re-read a book it is a new book because I
am not the same person.
Another reason
I look forward to new books on old established worlds is that they are like
letters from an old friend. They bring
me up to date on what’s been happening in their lives. If the book is also good literature, that’s a
bonus. (Insert smiley face here.) I’m
not very good at writing back (witness these apazines, or the years-old letter
from a real old friend that I just found in a suitcase and have not yet
answered), but I do look forward to receiving them. And I am going to try to answer that letter,
too!
Another step
I have two
directions to go in with this topic. The
first has to do with my health. In May,
I finally had my second hip replacement, so I am now two- thirds of the way
done with getting my chassis rebuilt.
After the surgery I spent a month in a nursing home/rehabilitation
facility. It was not as bad as I had
expected. The rehab was intense -- 2
sessions a day, each about an hour and a half, plus ‘homework’ to do in the
evening, and the staff was wonderful.
The main problem was finding places to start IVs because I developed an
antibiotic-resistant infection which required intravenous antibiotic therapy,
and my veins were not co-operative. In
order to prevent me from going into Internet withdrawal, Marc got me a used
laptop, so now we all have laptops. (While crossing the border into Canada for
Torcon, we told the customs agent about them, and she said “I would think if
you’re going to visit a place, you would want to see some of the sights.” Ethan told her “We’re not that kind of
family.”) Still I was glad to get back
home to my familiar keyboard and program set-ups. And now I am finally beginning to walk
again. It is tremendously harder than I
thought it would be. In the two or so
years in the wheelchair I have lost a lot more muscle tone than I thought I had
to start with. Also my cardio-vascular
status/endurance now really “stinks”, to quote my physical therapist. However, I AM walking. It’s still a feat to make three round trips
from the living room (where I sleep) to the kitchen, but bit by bit I’m working
on it. Also we’re going to get the
exercise bike up from the basement so I can hopefully improve my cardiovascular
status. I am much more independent in my
‘activities of daily living’, which is fortunate, because the second day I was
in the nursing home, Gary’s mother fell, and he has been staying with her since
then to help her. I’ll be seeing the hip
and knee surgeon in January to see if I am ready to have my knees
replaced. He would like me to have lost
some weight by then and be able to walk two hundred feet.
The second
direction for this topic has to do with being a parent, and seeing/watching
your kid move another step away. We went
to Torcon this year (about which more later) and also to Albacon, which is a
regional usually near where Ethan goes to school. It turned out this year that Albacon was not
so near as usual to Albany, so each trip involved going to Troy, picking up
Ethan and then traveling to the con. So
we had a few meals on the road together, and I noticed that a number of times
Ethan would say to me, while we were ordering,* “I can handle it, Mom”. Sometimes, it would just be a straight
comment, through a smile, but sometimes the smile would turn into gritted
teeth, and once in a while there were overtones of “Mother, please! I’d rather
do it myself!” So eventually I asked him
if he thought I was being overprotective, and he allowed as though, yeah,
sometimes he did. But when I look at
myself to see what I’m feeling/thinking/doing,
it’s much more similar to bragging.
I don’t quite know how to explain it, but it feels like I want people --
strangers, waitresses and the like -- to know that this great kid is mine. So I
join the conversation, and it feels to him like I’m butting in and, I
guess, taking over. So I guess I need to
learn both how to shut up more and to talk more, but talk so the message is not
confused.
Conventions
As I mentioned,
we went to Torcon. We got another lesson
in how traveling with a handicap is an ordeal.
I guess we’d gotten overly optimistic because our trips to Troy have
only been a bit of a hassle. Part of the
ordeal was our doing and part of it was the hotel’s. On our part, we neglected to pack the battery
charger for the electric wheelchair. On
the hotel’s part, there was either some outright misrepresentation or merely a
large failure to communicate. We spent
the first two days trying to find if we could rent a charger locally, and
finally ended up having Gary run around down here shipping the charger to us
UPS Next Day, and trying to get the
hotel room with a wheelchair-accessible shower we had been promised when we
made our reservation, and finding out that the hotel we were in didn’t have
any. This entailed changing rooms the
second day we were there, to no avail.
Thus I missed getting to either of Amy’s program items and ended up not
seeing any BWAns. On the other hand I
did get to several pleasant meals with various friends and got to play a few
games in gaming. We had planned to visit
my parents on the way up, but got such a late start that we had to scratch that
plan. So we stopped on the way back home
for a couple of hours. Once again I was
very proud of this great kid who is my son.
We also went to
Albacon, which as I said, is usually In Albany. However, this year the hotel
had cancelled out at the last minute and the convention ended up being held in
a resort about an hour north. It was a
lovely place for a variety of resort activities, but not quite the best venue
for a science fiction convention. Still,
it was pretty good. I got to go to the
aforementioned panel with Lois McMaster Bujold, as well as another, more formal
one. And I bought a few books and got
some gaming in. And again we had some
pleasant dinners with old friends. On
the way back I tried driving again, for the first time in two or three
years. It too was harder than I had ever
thought it could be, and an hour exhausted me, partly because we had only gone
twenty miles due to the unanticipated congestion around a number of huge
tourist-trap malls in the area. However,
the driving turned out to be another area for me to relate to Ethan, and him to
me, as we critiqued each other’s performance.
Conclusion
So, that’s been
my life for the past few months. I can
only remember one comment that came to mind from last issue, and that was to
tell Esther that maybe she could be a jockey if school didn’t work out. We’re planning to make a concerted effort to
reduce the amount of chaos in the house over the next few months. (Must be a result of reading those Recluce
books.) It’s pretty clear that the mess
is out of control. We find ourselves
buying things we know we have but can’t even begin to find. After I started this I downloaded my e-mail,
so I know that if I can get this finished up, it will get into the apa. I hope you are all well and have had a
pleasant summer and are having a pleasant autumn, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This has been Becoming
a
work-in-progress of Donna Camp
1088 East
40th St.
Brooklyn, NY
11210
(718)
692-2373 a.k.a. (718) NY CADRE
e-mail: campground@acedsl.com
* Ethan is allergic to milk and a part-time
vegetarian, so it is often not a simple task to find acceptable dishes on a
restaurant menu.