HARD
WATER...Becoming...
Donna Camp
I’m behind on
minac so I definitely have to get a zine done.
I’m not sure if it will be long enough but it will be something. And
I’ll have it to Lucy before deadline!
Don’t faint, everyone. :) The
reason is that tomorrow I am going to have my next surgery - a knee
replacement. I have to be at the
hospital at 6AM, so I am getting this done beforehand. I don’t know how long I’ll be in the
hospital. The nurse at my surgeon’s
office said two weeks, but I have had too much trouble with my insurance
company to think that may happen without hassle. Then, almost as soon as I get out of the
hospital, if the insurance company goes along with my surgeon, we will be off
to Lunacon. For a number of reasons I
can’t go into at this time, this may well be our last Lunacon for a while. And after that we will be trying to clean the
house up enough to host the very last annish of APA-NYU that Marc will be
running. In a sad concurrence of events,
we learned a couple of days ago of the sudden death of one of the original
founders of APA-NYU: Samuel Edward Konkin, III.
We will miss him.
Rehab takes
forever. The exercises are boring and
time-consuming. I get tired of being
“sick” and want to do more normal things (like read or play computer games)
that keep me distracted from the ongoing tediousness of rehab to surgery to
rehab. I get to the point where I can,
for instance, do most everyday things with my arms and get too bored and/or
impatient to want to keep up the exercises.
So I ignore that I still can’t quite get my arm up high enough to reach
the back of my head and put my hair in a pony-tail. What the hell...I can always lean on the wall
for that last couple of inches. And when the only progress is to get strong
enough to get more surgery which will make me weak again, there doesn’t seem to
ever really be any progress.
However, every
once in a while something happens that lets me see how far I have come. One of those things this year (well, last
year really, but who’s counting?) was being able to make my holiday breads. I make three kinds of quick breads -
whole-wheat pumpkin, applesauce raisin oatmeal, and cranberry orange nut - and
give one of each to family, neighbors and some friends. I’m still not independent in the activity,
but I could hobble to the kitchen and sit in a chair. Then Marc or sometimes Ethan would get down
the ingredients I needed and stand by to move things from one surface to
another. So I managed with that
assistance to get two batches of the first two (about 5 loaves each) and three
of the last (about 4 loaves each) with extra batches of muffins for the
house. I also managed to bake a birthday
cake for Ethan and cupcakes for him to take to the birthday `event’ he had with
his friends. It was way too much, but
it felt good. It felt like I was `back
to normal’, overdoing like I used to. It
did show me that I have made progress, but it also showed me that I really do
have to keep working on those upper arms exercises.
And I also had
the energy, again with help, to put up some holiday lights. I used to like to
put them up on the winter solstice, along with the tree, and keep them up till
the spring equinox. In practice I would
wimp out on the window lights, but I always kept the tree up, keeping the sun
alive until it was reborn. Ethan was
home for semester break, and besides helping me with my bread baking, he helped
me with that, too. Not as many as I used
to, but more than the last couple of years.
I like white lights around the windows with evergreen, and the menorah
in the center. For many years I used to
use old strings, tediously checking all the lights in a string and replacing
the ones that were burned out. I had one
particular set that had the evergreen around the wire and clear caps over the
bulbs that would diffuse the light; but the last time I used them they were
half burned out and it was a chore to change them all and then find out that it
was the fuses that were burned out. Then
after I got them all working, they only stayed lit for a few days. (Just because I picked them up off the street
out of someone else’s trash, I don’t see why they shouldn’t work forever.) Marc went out shopping to find me enough
white lights to try to do it again. He
wasn’t sure what was watt with all the different sizes and styles, so he bought
an assortment. This time I couldn’t get them lit at all - changing all the
bulbs, changing the fuses - hours of messing around. He finally talked me into giving up on them
and letting him look for something else I could use, so he and Ethan went out
looking, (Ethan has a clearer idea of the decorative ideas I have, in part
because Marc thinks it’s something he can’t do because he’s color-blind) but
they weren’t able to get an exact duplicate.
So Ethan and I took the evergreen from an old string and managed to wrap
it around a new string. There were no
caps to make the lights more star-like, but it wasn’t too bad. And Ethan got it
up into the window near the start of Chanukah.
And since Marc had bought some colored lights too, we strung some up on
the fireplace. And I rediscovered something: Christmas lights make me happy. I also learned it’s probably more time-, and
maybe even cost-effective to give up the old stuff. At this point in my life, at least, it’s a
false economy to keep replacing old bulbs and spending hours checking the
strings. I can’t do it like I used to, and
it’s likely I won’t ever be able to again because I’m going to keep on getting
older, after all. New strings cost about
$5; my time and energy are worth more than that. I resent the wastefulness of the industry
that plans things this way. But
Christmas lights make me happy and it’s ok to spend a little money on
happiness.
The second day
I was in the nursing home last year, Gary’s mother fell and broke some bones in
her back He has had to stay with her
since then, mostly to make sure she doesn’t fall again, but also to help her
get to all her doctors’ appointments and such, much as he used to do for
me. As my mobility has increased, we
have managed to work around his absence, partly because Marc is currently
retired on full pay, till the end of the year since he wasn’t willing to move
to Florida when the bank did. Hopefully,
by that time all my surgery will be done and I will be independant again. Still, I have missed having Gary here,
especially during football season. I
still watched the games, but the few times he was able to come over and join
me, it was clear that friends make football more fun. I sure hope that next football season he will
be able to be here more often.
My heart fell when Ethan told
me that he and Esther had broken up. It
was a literal feeling. And even though
it was a clear possibility once they went to college, it left me stunned. I haven’t been sure how to address it, since
Esther is in the apa, too. For a while I
was so upset that I cried, myself, over every broken-heart, lonely song I would
hear. I still tear up sometimes. I
really like Esther. I really liked Ethan
and Esther together. I really liked how
happy Ethan was when he was happy with Esther.
But I really hurt over how unhappy Ethan was sometimes. I very selfishly want my kid to never be hurt
or unhappy. I know it’s impossible. I even know it wouldn’t be good for him. Nevertheless, I want it And because I like Esther, I hurt over her
being unhappy, too. And I want her to be
happy, too. For a long time I hoped it
would be another passing trouble that they would find a way to get through;
that they could eventually find a way to be happy together. But I realized last disty, when Esther said
Ethan had told her he didn’t love her any more, that it wasn’t going to
happen. I’m sitting here crying over how
much that must have hurt you, Esther, and I sincerely hope your hurt will have
healed soon, and as well as it can.
Maybe because I
am a woman, too, I empathized with Esther.
I could see that Ethan was not completely happy being `single’ again,
but he didn’t seem as broken up even as I was, much less Esther. It wasn’t till one of those
late-in-the-night, traveling-in-a-car conversations over Thanksgiving that I
began to get a glimpse of what was happening for him. What he said was that he was finally
beginning to feel like himself again.
Marc asked him who he had been, and he had trouble putting it into words,
but it amounted to trying to be what he thought other people wanted him to be,
and that he had been doing that with Esther for a long time. It was also something he had been doing
through-out his senior year of high school and freshman year at college, as he
`lost’ old friends and began to try to make new ones. Perhaps another reason that I don’t empathize
with that is that when I was that age, I never was `myself’; my Self was someone I kept finding for the
first time all through my adolescence and twenties, and in fact, still keep
finding, though at a slower pace. I
wonder if this is a gender-linked difference, or if it means maybe we did do a
better job raising our kid than was done for me, at least.
Now he is
getting involved with someone else and it is good to see him happy again. I hope he is going to keep on being himself.
I have one
particular comment to make. (I apologize
for the lack of mailing comments, again, but I have to be at the hospital at 6
AM tomorrow (2-26-04) morning for the next installment on my rebuilt chassis.) Lucy, I really think you are doing a fine job
as an OE. I don’t think it is a
reflection on you that the apa is shrinking.
I don’t think many apae are doing well with the change to Internet
communication that seems to be taking over the world. We apa people are becoming dinosaurs, and
there are fewer and fewer of us to keep the medium alive, let alone
growing. Witness the changes that are
happening in APA-NYU. We can but hope
for a new equilibrium, at a level that will probably be smaller. While I don’t want you to be doing something
that doesn’t please you any more, I hope you will find ways to be pleased for
quite a while yet.
As before, the concurrence of the
APA-NYU annish collation and the next BWA collation, as well as (hopefully) the
interest from people in both apas, makes a common zine seem common sense,
especially since, as I said above, this will be the last APA- NYU annish that
Marc will be running. Therefore I am
again combining the zines for the
occasion.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This has
been Hard Water... Becoming...
for BWA, APA
NYU and Friends
from Donna
Camp
1088 East
40th St.
Brooklyn NY,
11210
phone:
(718)692-2373
e-mail:
campground@acedsl.com
home page:
nycadre.home.acedsl.com