Sadness at McLean

 I had a sobering experience. My DBSA (Depression Bipolar Support Alliance) office key has been dodgy for years. Last week it finally wouldn’t work at all. Our office is located in the cafeteria of McLean Hospital, a world-renown psychiatric hospital that was founded in 1811.

I decided to call my husband, Jim, to see if he had any suggestions. The reception in the cafeteria was poor, so I walked outside towards the parking lot to talk.

A woman came walking by with a companion who was obviously a McLean staff member. I recognized the woman: an acquaintance from long ago at DBSA. She always had a ready smile.

The change in her was striking. She walked very slowly. When I called out her name, she stopped and looked at me. I wasn’t sure she recognized me, so I reminded her of our connection. I rattled on about how DBSA has been on Zoom for three and a half years and how we missed being in person.

She looked at me intently but never said a word. Then I said I had to go (because I had run out of things to say) and she continued her slow walk.

It was tough. I know nothing of her history the past several years. I know nothing of what brought her to McLean this time. She acts so differently from the friendly person I knew way back when.

It made me realize anew what a serious condition mental illness is. I have been blessed: the medications, for all my love-hate relationship with them, have allowed me to have a full life. They are far from perfect. Sometimes I feel like we are in the era that general medicine was in before antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs. Like chemotherapy, psychiatric meds are a blunt instrument with serious side effects. Although researchers continue to learn more about mechanisms, many of the drugs are decades old. I think there are many kinds and causes of mental illness which makes it very difficult to find effective medications that target the specific cause.

Whatever the reason, psychiatric drugs are, in the words of David Anderson, TEDxCaltech presenter, Your Brain is More Than a Bag of Chemicals (January 2013), like trying to change your car’s oil by pouring oil all over the engine hoping some of it reaches the right place.

My encounter at McLean reminds me that mental illness is a terrible illness with huge costs to those who aren’t’ treated successfully. My heart goes out to all who still suffer.

Oil tanker or trim little schooner

The night before our Bahamas cruise, in our Tampa Bay hotel, we slept in a king-size bed. I have never understood the appeal. It feels like an oil tanker: I’d rather ride to sleep in a trim little schooner.

When we’d been married two years, Jim was offered a job interview with Ford in Detroit. We were such hicks then, even though Jim had grown up near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park and I in the sophisticated suburbs of New Jersey. Very budget-conscious, we packed canned food for the trip, bread and peanut butter and crackers, not expecting an expense account. The secretary in charge of reimbursements couldn’t believe we had spent nothing on food.

We chuckle about it now. We were such babes in the woods.

The hotel was fancier than any I’d ever stayed in, perhaps to this day. I felt bad getting cracker crumbs on the carpet. The bed was enormous. I suppose many people in America had a king-size bed, but it was new to us.

I still don’t like king-size beds. We started married life in a sublet studio apartment of a Princeton grad student. Our honeymoon trip, at Camp Liahona, the family campground owned by the Church, was kiboshed when our Nova’s water pump broke just outside of town. Back to the sublet we went, where we had a wonderful first week of marriage, soaking up reunion lectures at Jim’s alma mater.

In August we drove to Chicago and moved into married student housing at the University of Chicago. Jim’s dad had negotiated the purchase of much of the furniture of the departing tenant couple. A white vinyl pullout couch, four painted oak chairs, a drop-leaf table, and a double bed with wooden headboard and foot board. We were told that the mattress was old and needed replacing. They were embarrassed to sell it to us. We kept it for six years. When we did finally carry it out on the curb for trash pickup, it started to rain and as I watched out the window I realized with a pang that there was no going back.

Each of our six children was conceived between those head and foot boards and we still have the frame to this day, though I think we’re on our third or fourth mattress. (The current one is from Bed In A BoxBedInABox and came wrapped in strong plastic. When we unwrapped it, the foam unrolled and inflated as we watched. Within a month my chronic back pain had disappeared.)

The few times we have slept on king-size mattresses, when we stay at an upscale hotel, have left me mystified. What do people see in them? Perhaps because I have slept on a small bed for forty-four years, I’ve developed the habit of only inhabiting a few square feet of mattress. King-size beds are wasted on me.

And too, isn’t a point of sharing a marriage bed to be close to each other? There’s plenty of room in our bed for no-contact sleeping, but it always feels very cozy.

I mean no criticism to those who need more space to sleep. And it is fortuitous that I prefer a double bed. Our 1895 house was not built for king-size beds. To get even just the double-bed box spring up the staircase when we moved in in 1993, our friend, Marc Butler, had to remove the window frame at the stair landing. Four people were needed to hoist the box spring into the window from the garden and pull it through the window frame. If we ever do get rid of it, we’ll have to chop it up first.

 

A Perfect Day

 Our Summer Retreat, the annual reunion with our children and grandchildren, just concluded on Saturday. This year was a first: we took a cruise with Royal Caribbean to Key West and the Bahamas. I’d been to St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, many times from 1992 to sometime in the teens. My mom bought a shore-side condo in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, in about 1989, and my parents invited their children and grandchildren to spend time with them in paradise.

I was intrigued with the idea of the Bahamas, especially after I listened to The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard. From 1706 to 1718, a loose confederation of privateers turned pirates wrought havoc on international sea trade. Their headquarters were the Bahamas, favored for its many small islands and cays (keys or quays) among shallow waters and dangerous reefs that offered protection from larger navy ships that couldn’t navigate there safely. The pirates practiced a form of democracy: all the crew members voted on their leaders and could oust them at will. Plunder was distributed evenly.

Each year that I visited St. Croix, usually in February, we watched a cruise ship arrive on Wednesday. I concluded that my situation was far superior. I was able to really get to know the island and while the cruise passengers were hurrying back to the ship at 4 p.m. I was going out for my late-afternoon swim. We would often enjoy supper on the veranda, watching for a green flash at sunset. I like to avoid full sun, so having scheduled island time be between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. would have cramped my style.

But here I was, on a cruise. And it was fine. I especially enjoyed visiting new places, conversations with family members, the nightly entertainment, and the delicious food I didn’t have to prepare or clean up after.

After a day in Key West, we cruised to a small cay (a small low-lying island composed of coral rock and reef) owned by the cruise line. Evidently the staff aboard the Grandeur of the Seas are trained to say “Perfect Day at Coco Cay.” I never heard them refer to the destination simply as “Coco Cay.”

For me it was a fine day, but not perfection. The beaches featured row upon row of lounge chairs and beach umbrellas and expensive souvenirs. I borrowed mask and snorkel from Annie and R’el (I forgot to pack my own) and swam for over an hour in the turquoise waters. Then I walked along the whole beach area and around the cay, thus including two of my favorite activities.

The next day was closer to a perfect day. In Bimini, I talked some of our party into walking along the only road in search of a beach less crowded than the one next to the cruise pier. It was a hot walk, and we weren’t certain what we would find. The third person we asked directions of gave a clear description of our route (we had already walked for over a mile): up the hill, past the Catholic Church and Anglican Church, and onto a beach.

And what a beach! White coral sand, the shade of a tree, gentle waves, and no other people. (This was not perfection for my grandson. He spied some people far down the beach and asked, “Can’t we go over to them?” But he was overruled.) Again I swam over an hour and was in paradise. When I came back to shore I discovered that I had worried Jim. He wasn’t concerned about my swimming ability but about what would happen if I had a seizure or some accident.

For me it was an echo of my time in St. Croix. I used to swim the mile to the Fredriksted pier. Before 2001 I would sometimes touch the cruise ship below the water line, just because I could. And then I would head back to my parents’ condo. I always stayed close to shore, but I loved the tranquil loneliness.

Palmyra, the Taghkanic Mountains, and the Berkshires

 Earlier this week Jim and I met Xiomara and their kids in Albany, New York (about 2 ½ hours away), and drove in one car another three hours to the Eire Canal village of Palmyra. In late June we had taken a bus trip with our Cambridge Stake youth group and wanted to share the experience.

The Airbnb was a homey, two-story house with three bedrooms circa 1920. We visited all the Church history sites. Everyone’s favorite was the Grandin Building, where the first 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon were published. The informative tour described Joseph Smith’s experience and explained the nineteenth-century printing process. We each got a sheet with the first 32 pages which we folded into a quire.

I had lugged two bases and a frisbee to the ward campout two weeks earlier and never used them. In Palmyra I got my chance. In the late afternoon we found a grassy area near the canal and played running bases, taking turns being basemen and throwing the frisbee. It only landed in the bushes a few times.

Monday we had ice cream outside the Chill and Grill and the next evening I enjoyed Maine blueberry ice cream at a Byrne Dairy convenience store. There was plenty of butterfat and the rich taste of Maine.

Our family book club selection this month is the Netflix’ series, Wednesday. I cancelled my Netflix account in protest many years ago, when the company suddenly split their DVD and streaming services, doubling the charge for subscribing to both. That controversial business decision was made in 2011, but I’ve never forgiven them.

However, my Oma heart can’t resist Victoria; Wednesday is her selection. So I subscribed for a month and Jim and I watched the first four episodes at home. I found the character disturbingly dark, but she lightened up a bit as the series progressed. I could pass on the gore and physical suspense, but at least the scary music warned me to get ready to close my eyes. In Palmyra we watched the final four episodes together. Andrew and Victoria had already seen the whole thing and Andrew had a hard time not delivering spoilers to me. I warned him quite sternly but lightheartedly.

After we left the Bronx crowd on Wednesday, I drove Interstate 90 from Albany to our home. The late-afternoon sunlight suffused the Taconic Mountains and the Berkshires with a golden-green glow. The forests are dark green, soon to enter their autumnal phase. I even saw one tree with a tinge of fall color. I composed this post as the Mass Pike wended its way through the wooded rolling hills of western and central Massachusetts.

To quote my favorite Massachusetts troubadour, I drove "the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston."

What a difference a year makes

 A year ago Jim and I joined our children and grandchildren in Roatan, a Caribbean island belonging to Honduras. Then we flew to the mainland to visit Xiomara’s home town and her relatives.

I got the usual traveller’s complaint and made it through two more family reunions (in the excitement of the lessening of the pandemic, three branches of our family planned travel reunions.).

I didn’t recover with my usual speed. Actually, I don’t usually get sick, so I didn’t realize that 104 degree temperature is dangerously high. I went on our annual Church campout because I didn’t want to disappoint our four grandkids: we’d planned for it all year.

At the campground, I fell three times on the gently rolling lawn. In a state of total denial, I blamed my old sneakers, with worn-slick soles. Turned out it was a kidney infection.

Anticipating the campout this year, with our two grandkids from the Bronx, I felt an inexplicable dread. I finally realized the anxiety was caused by a fear of a repetition of last year.

But I hadn’t been to Honduras this year and I didn’t fall once at the campground. Instead of sitting, exhausted, in my camp chair by the pond, I swam some laps and paddled with my granddaughter. We're all looking forward to next year.

In the Weeds

 Saturday morning I spent two hours in the weeds.

About six weeks ago I noticed some leaves of three (let it be) with a tinge of red growing alongside our driveway. You may remember my brush with poison ivy five years ago. After a terrible bout of rash while in Charleston, SC, and a dose of steroids I came home, bought a full-body Tyvek suit, and was successful in eradicating the menace from my north yard.

This time I warned my teenaged assistant gardeners to stay out of the patch and bought another suit. I then spent six weeks vacillating between pulling the plants and spraying herbicide. Every few days it would rain, which postponed the project. In between there was a trip to Church history sites in Palmyra, NY,, with our Church youth group, a week of Girls’ Camp, and Joe Cannon’s funeral in Chicago.

Jim had suggested mowing the patch. I resisted. Mowing wouldn’t remove the roots and the stems close to the ground. The mower blades might send particles of poison into the air. I wanted to eradicate the plants, not just cut them back. (Jim later suggested my approach was irrational. I have to agree.)

The Thursday before, Jim had mowed our backyard again. Afterwards he told me he was tempted to mow the patch and pointed out that it was just getting worse as I delayed.

So, the next morning I donned the Tyvek and a pair of industrial-strength blue PVC gloves and marched out to face the task.

I saw to my horror that the ivy had spread and other woody weeds had overtaken the area. But undaunted I started at the far end, just east of a large maple tree, clipped the woody plants to the ground and pulled the ivy where I could, cutting it when necessary.

What had been little patches of ivy over a month ago had become a jungle of vines, five and ten and even fifteen feet long, partially hidden by the woody plants.

Eventually I considered giving up. I went inside: two hours had transpired. My project would take at least four more hours if I had the strength. I called Jim and asked him to come survey the scene. I was careful not to touch anything with the contaminated Tyvek suit and gloves. He served me a much needed glass of water with a straw. I was dripping sweat inside the suit and the tips of my gloves had pools in them.

Jim assessed the situation and said the woody plants were thin enough to mow. I asked him to do it: I was worn out. (Back in 1981, just before we moved to Columbus, Indiana, for Jim’s first big job, I called a man on Saturday about some arrangements. He answered the phone a bit breathless and said, “I’ve been working in the strawberries. Excuse the language, but I’m pooped.” I thought it was charming and chivalrous. It wasn’t until years later that I realized he considered ‘pooped’ improper because it implied excrement. What impeccable manners.)

Jim put white plastic garbage bags over his shoes and made three passes with the mower, creating a swath of mowed grass and weeds six feet wide. We watched for a rash, but none developed. He’ll probably finish the job today, before we leave for Utah.

As I worked on my poison ivy project I started writing a sermon in my head, all about facing a nasty job early on when it is manageable. I imagine the original project would have taken an hour. (Actually I imagined it would have taken a half an hour but I am very bad at estimating projects.) The sermon seemed very wise and nuanced, but now that I’m writing this, I’ve lost most of the thread. It’s really pretty simple. I had a nasty but doable task. I put it off. I put it off some more. The ivy wasn’t waiting for me. I didn’t even realize how much volume had grown over the six weeks, since it was hidden among the weeds. Many of the vines were under the grass and weren’t visible until I started pulling one end.

Poison ivy is pernicious. It manifests in many ways. It can be a single plant, a bush, a vine among the grass, or a vine up a tree trunk. It does always have three leaves, but they can be any shade of green from light to dark. The leaves can be shiny or dull and have smooth edges or a few coarse notches.

I did develop a small rash, under my unprotected chin. I went to urgent care, remembering the painful incident five years ago where a single bump became extensive rashes on both arms, severe enough that I couldn’t bend my elbows for days until I went to urgent care in Charleston and got a steroid shot and oral medication.

Jim, of course, did some web reading and found that best practices is to use herbicide to kill the ivy. Pulling it stimulated growth of the roots. Unfortunately, a herbicide would kill the grass too and leave a large area bare. For now, Jim will keep mowing and warn visitors to stay away.

Explosion of Green

 I flew back from California May 24 and drove with Jim to my 45th college reunion two days later. Never has the Mass Pike seemed so verdant, so lushly green. Mile after mile the hills were packed with tall deciduous trees in every direction. In Main Line Philadelphia stately maples and ancient copper beeches graced the countryside.

California was lovely. I’ve never visited in May and didn’t expect so many roses in gardens and wild flowers along the highways. Northern California, Oregon, and Washington presented majestic evergreens. But for sheer volume of delicious, deciduous green in rolling hills, nothing matches the East Coast.

I returned home just in time to enjoy a glorious season of rhododendrons. I’ve made a study of them over the years. They always bloom in the same color order. Right now, the earliest color, a light purple, can be seen all over our town.