Clueless in the Clinic: Basic English Vocabulary (Lynn)

After a few sessions in the cancer clinic, friends-and-family become accustomed to the dynamic of the treatment area. It’s like being in any waiting room, except that it is hyper-clean and there are really decent snacks for everyone. Strangers show each other small courtesies, and soon everyone has a sense of community. You know almost instantly who wants to be left alone, who wants to chat, or who truly needs a listener.

But you don’t learn everything all at once. 

My father was one of the patients in the recliners this afternoon who were variously reading, resting with eyes closed or outright snoring. The nurses and support staff spoke softly with those who were awake, addressing everyone by name and all the while setting IVs, reading orders, and running through checklists. When a woman two chairs down the row of recliners awoke and said she was cold, the nurse nearest to her--busy with another patient--said she’d be right there, in just a little bit. There were all kinds of wraps everywhere, so I picked up a printed fleece lap-blanket that was hanging over the pony wall to tuck around the chilled patient. An older woman sitting in the corner chair beside her companion who was half-way through her treatment said, “Get her a warm one.” I looked at the target of my intended assistance. She in turn looked sleepily back at me, and then we both silently considered the fleecie in my hands.  I thought surely it would be warm enough, the room wasn’t generally chilly, but of course I could have no idea how the drip was affecting her. I put the fleecie back on the wall in search of a better blanket. There was a heavy, crocheted afghan folded on an empty chair so I reached to fluff it up and over her.  Mid-stretch, I heard my advisor repeat, this time with just a touch of asperity, “Get her a warm one.”  I let the afghan fall short between my hands, looking at it, thinking, “But this would be good, it’s heavy and dense and, well, a little scratchy maybe, but it’d be plenty warm”.  Now wishing I’d just attended to my knitting, I heard  once again the short, sharp command from the corner, “Get her a warm one! A warm one!”

Fifty-five going on six, I stood in that aisle clutching a heap of unworthy afghan and teared up like a scolded child.  My father laughed, saying, “Lynnie, go get one from the cabinet over there”.  As I turned to see the gray metal cabinet with top vents and a black electrical cord coiled on its side, the glorious light of comprehension dawned at last. “OH, you mean a WARM one!”

Now I know where they keep the toasty, HEATED blankets.

Adventures in Culinary Alternatives...

I had talked a few months ago to a friend who uses a common, regulated medicinal herb for chemo pain relief about its possible use as an alternative to the narcotics that my husband, Marc, takes for chronic pain. My friend offered some of his supply for a trial, although he had nothing to suggest about how to use it other than by inhalation. That is not an option for Marc because his illnesses already affect his respiratory system. My friend nonetheless kindly gifted me with about half an ounce of loose, tiny leaves, all wrapped up in a white paper towel and then again in a beat-up plastic baggie. I put the baggie in my purse and drove straight home, feeling at once culpable, vulnerable and empowered.

When I got home that afternoon, I told Marc about my proposed experiment and laid the baggie on the bar in the kitchen. Marc said nothing at first, and I saw expressions of incredulity, censure, wry gratitude, and finally, curiosity cross his face. Neither one of us was terribly well informed, although years ago I had held a similar baggie briefly in my hand after picking it up from the lavatory shelf in the U of A women’s room. Before I could determine what it was, a coed had burst into the room, grabbed the baggie and darted back through the door as it swung.  

After staring at the small packet on the kitchen counter for a while, we engaged in a lengthy, wide-ranging debate, one that is obvious and no doubt universal among those seeking alternative medicines. At last we decided to leave all options open for a while (including just throwing it out) and I stowed the baggie deep in the tea cupboard, with half a grin for that small joke.

Weeks passed, and although several chances arose where we could have run the trial, the herb was still not in a usable form. Each time, Marc took the usual narcotic, and I felt bad each time about my failure to follow through. True, I’d come home with the product; done some initial research (finding out that in addition to steeping tea, one could also could brew a beer, but baked goods were best because fat was the most efficient processor of the therapeutic ingredient), and I’d think about it periodically before getting distracted by something. I have a habit of beginning but never finishing a project, but in this instance, I’d faltered partly because I’d read that the effect is slow to manifest and the potency difficult to measure. On a recent, particularly bad pain-day, I finally took action, deciding that I would prepare something called “bud butter” to have on hand. Spreading that on cinnamon toast might be the best option: it was lower calorie than brownies, and easy for Marc to prepare if I was not at home.

While Marc was sleeping, I put a pound of butter in a pot on the back burner of the stove to melt, and rummaged through the cupboard looking for the plastic baggie. In my kitchen, everything once opened gets transferred into one size of zip-lock bag or another before I toss it in the pantry. Now I pulled out a small (unlabelled, but then nothing ever is) baggie of loose leaves wrapped in white paper and poured it into the blender to grind up and add to the butter as the Internet recipe directed.  The recipe said to simmer for twenty minutes, until the butter turned green. This particular pot of butter was a red-gold brown and I wondered if I'd let it go stale. Perhaps it was a different variety. In any case, it smelled heavenly—slightly spicy and not at all cloying, as had been the hazy atmosphere of the rock concerts we’d attended years ago or of the annual open-air blues festivals at Reid Park. Marc, awakened from his nap, came into the kitchen. After one or two hearty sniffs he asked why was I making apricot decaf on the stove rather than steeping it in the electric teakettle.

Somehow that misstep soured me on the whole endeavor, and this project joined the myriad others left undone. I do have fruit-flavored butter for coffee cake that I might make soon, but the other ingredient has been returned to my friend. I’m sure I returned the proper baggie. There are no others, labeled or not, in that cupboard now. None at all.

Clueless in the kitchen, or adventures in food service

At home, a clean, well-lighted place

I have been maneuvering through daily life one-handed for the past three weeks after washing a wine glass in too big a hurry. This brings to mind similar accommodations after my mishaps long ago in restaurant kitchens. There were cuts and punctures (by which I discovered your living bones are actually pale green), burns or scalds (as on the eve of my wedding) and electrical fires (just two, but one was truly spectacular, with orange flames rising behind a chest-high bank of drawer-like ovens and bursts of sparks reflecting off steel-paneled walls).

Commercial kitchens are all straight-lined, right-angled steel and tile and the managers of those in schools and hospitals take the health inspections seriously. Early in my days as a part time galley slave I discovered that some retail restaurants can be vastly more casual about them. The two cafeterias I worked at while still in school were hygienic opposites. My mother was the kitchen manager of the one, and held herself, me and the entire staff to an “eat off the floor” standard of cleanliness. I doubt that eating from any surface at the other location was a truly prudent choice.

I was unsettled by the state of that kitchen from the moment I walked through it to reach the closet-like office in the back. There was standing water in the pock-marked concrete floor. Water bugs scurried ahead of me to dark corners where, I found out later, they hung out with the rats--all of whom had been given names. Every counter I saw was sticky, every cook’s apron was stained and smeared. The interview with the heavy-set, balding manager was brief (“You’re tuberculosis tested? You’ve had a tetanus booster recently?”) and paperwork for a transfer completed.  Whatever misgivings I had, economic expediency meant that come August when my sophomore semester at the U of A began and we were newly installed in married student housing, I needed to transfer to this more conveniently located branch. Doing so meant I could maintain my latest promotion (from line-server to 3rd cook!) together with its nickel raise past minimum wage, I could get there on a Suntran bus, and perhaps I would not be the only new employee. From the look of the place, no doubt a whole new crew was being hired.

Although I’d taken the bus home from the dorm every Friday afternoon during my freshman year, I was anxious about riding the bus four miles one way after a one mile walk from married student housing to the bus stop three nights a week. As it happened, the commutes to what I later named the E. Coli Kitchen were uneventful. The adventures were all onsite.

Patrons were fewer, generally older, and obviously poorer than the clientele I’d known. The older staff greeted their regulars with a fierce, defensive recognition of their common struggle to make do and get by. In a mix of compassion and carelessness, they combined questionable leftovers into menu items unsanctioned by the out-of-state corporate officials and offered these at lower prices. I could not reconcile this rough friendliness in the front of the house with their unconcern for anyone’s immune system in the back. I hoped that no one lingered over their meals. The safest course was to eat while the food was still well above the 140 degrees that inhibits pathogens.

The cooks’ intent was patently kind and I cannot say these plats du jour were inherently unwholesome, but their preparation was alarming. The cooks stopped short of actually smoking while handling the food, but any soup seasoned with fire-purified ash would have been safer than the one made with vegetables taken from the tub stored in the walk-in refrigerator under seeping boxes of raw chicken. As third cook it was my duty to keep that cold box clean, and that first night I wondered how long just ago my predecessor had been fired—or had quit.

My matter-of-fact re-organizing and scrubbing of the walk-in seemed to please the head cook. Trouble was, I was only there from Friday to Sunday. When I walked in for my second weekend shift, she jerked her chin over her shoulder toward the walk-in from where she sat on a milk crate in the back doorway, saying, “Hey, Miss College, grab a rag and get to. It’s been waiting for you all week.” Now I wondered how and with what the health inspector was being paid off. It couldn’t have been free meals.

Every Friday night for six weeks, I closed my eyes to the pervasive dirt, grease, and  spills in the kitchen. The soured, always matted floor drains were harder to ignore. The walk-in, as foul as it was, became both my duty and refuge. Hiding out in there meant I could avoid inadvertent comparisons to my mother’s kitchen that might land me in even more unpleasant cleanup. It helped, too, that the particular dank odors of the cold box were subdued in the still, cold air, that 40 degrees is not all that cold, and that the freakish metabolism of a nineteen-year-old allowed me to stay there for a long time.

On my last night, I spent most of my shift in the walk-in as usual. I threw out the latest round of unidentifiable fermenting objects. I sorted the remaining pans and used a big black Sharpie to label them with their contents and the date after first sealing them in fresh, tight plastic wrap. I wiped down each rack after first peeling away the thin but perversely elastic layers of congealed sauce that stretched from rod to rod of the open shelving. I scrubbed the crusted floor so that it could actually be seen to be tiled, although the grout remained black. At length, I scooted the scrub-bucket of bleach and detergent through the doorway toward the pot station and pushed my hip against the heavy door to close it. The door latched to with a satisfying click as I leaned back on it. While resting there I saw a giggling, shrieking line-girl run past me, followed three steps behind by a maniacal pot-boy swinging a drowned rat (Fred?) by the tail.

I walked slowly to the office, where I set down my apron on the manager’s desk. He raised an eyebrow, saying, “Couldn’t take it anymore, hunh?” I mumbled something pleasantly innocuous, but I recognized a strange new emotion as I made my way through the parking lot to the bus stop. I could not remember feeling contempt for another living person before.

“It was about yay long”… an incidence of overly graphic gesticulation

Most of the stories I tell on myself are vintage, maybe because time heals all winces. Yesterday at Marc’s physical therapy appointment, though, I was reminded that I can still embarrass myself any time, anywhere.

 Marc and I both are infatuated with the marvelous medical benefits of physical therapy, and with our vision and grace impairments, have had frequent need for it. The PT facility Marc is going to now is in a store front on Grant Road. It is a large box of a room, with a network of paths to the weight stacks, massage tables and the traction station (or as every single patient there calls it, the rack). There are a few curtained alcoves for consultations and the more intimate procedures, but most frequently one exercises or is treated out in the open.

The waiting area is small and usually crowded. I sit and read or knit and chat. Yesterday there was only one place to sit, beside an older man wearing a paper mask. I plopped down to the right of him, settling in for the morning (Marc’s therapy takes a long time) with my tote and purse and books and Tupperware cup of yogurt’n’twigs. I usually wait until the crowd thins out before breakfasting, and since a lot of people have coffee, I don’t think it’s too rude. I acknowledged my seatmates with a smile and began to read. The masked man on my left said quietly, “Don’t worry, I won’t make you sick, I’m waiting for a marrow transplant and have almost no resistance because of the chemo.” I wanted him to be comfortable, so I said, “Oh, no worries, and I won’t make you sick—I’ve been away from my school for about six months, so I don’t have any kid-germs that will hurt you…”

He went on to describe his condition in some detail. It sounded increasingly grim until he said the disease had been arrested and the weekly therapy helped his breathing. I was so relieved to hear that he was not actually moribund that I rushed to praise the benefits of PT, how it had evolved over the past twenty years, and oh, the tools available nowadays! How useful they are and how downright elegant they can be. Why, I had been given the simplest of devices for my wrist. “It was a simple plastic rod, about yay long (holding my forefingers about eight inches apart) and about an inch and half in diameter (circling my right forefinger and thumb) and you grasped it by the base (sliding those fingers in mid air across an imaginary cylinder) and just shook it back and forth (vigorous twisting of my right wrist). It was just so effective, it was really worth the few minutes it took every day”. I’d kept my eyes on my hands to be sure my gestures were truly illustrative. I must have communicated something unintentional--I heard a snicker to my right and when I looked back to my left, that poor man, who could hardly breathe in the first place, had turned bright red and his eyes were watering. He said simply, “I imagine so.”

The story really should end here, but… I was able to escape right at that moment because Alex, Marc’s therapist called me over to explain how I was to assist Marc with his last set of home exercises. I bounded up, grabbing my purse for us to pay and leave, but as I crossed the room, I tripped over a small, short-legged trampoline leaning up on the wall next to them. Alex and Marc each caught an arm to pull me up before a full face-plant and I tried fiercely to listen to Alex, ignoring the laughter behind me.

Ok, instructions received, and final exit papers signed, I rush to just, please Lord, get out of there when Marc says, “Oh, I need my jacket!” He walks over to the reception alcove, but I know he is not going to be able to navigate the still-crowded seating area, so I push past him to pull his jacket off the wall hook. It’s the kind of hook that is wedged between horizontal slats and it comes off with the jacket. It bounces into the wastebasket in the corner. Alex calls, “Just leave it, I’ll get it later.” As I bend to retrieve it, I push Marc into the lap of the man who’d been sitting to my right. At least it wasn’t the masked man. Marc stands up and I straighten up at the same time and we bounce off each other. Alex comes over and leads Marc out of the chair maze, saying “You two do realize that this was your last authorized visit, don’t you?

Later, when I was pretty sure the waiting area would have new clients, I went back  to retrieve my tote.

Adventures in Elementary Sciences

Communicative technologies have made everyone a critic, appreciative, admonitory or simply off the wall. Educators at all levels have always been evaluators, trained to give useful feedback. My fifth of seven principals would always give his staff “two to glow and one to grow”. Dr. O administered our back-to-basics curriculum with a tight focus on procedures and schedules. Time on task was paramount, with little allowance made for distractions.

My library lessons went over well enough, but my sketchy grasp of everyday physics created a number of inadvertent diversions from the “feet flat and eyes forward” mindset of both the student body and staff. One time I carried a clipboard and freshly sharpened pencil through a swinging door and ended up with the pencil point embedded in my behind. Another time I rode a ladder in my workroom down from its top step to the floor below while stacking puppet boxes above the library workroom cabinetry. Even though the library was in the middle of the building, and isolated behind two sets of doors, the commotion was enough to bring the nearby kindergarten teachers and the entire office staff running. My assistant, Pat, however, remained at her desk. She greeted the would-be rescuers with, “She’s most likely ok. I don’t even go check anymore if it’s just a bunch of noise and a few squeals.”

Bumps and bruises were commonplace, but my pride suffered even more frequently. Shortly before Dr. O left, another teacher and I decided to spruce up the teachers’ lounge, unpainted in 1995 since the original coat laid down in 1983. Dr. O approved the project as long as it didn’t take in-school time or involve on-duty personnel. My co-worker and I would provide the labor after school and the district supplied the paint—standard contractor’s issue in five gallon plastic tubs. While my partner was taping the cabinet and counter edges late one afternoon, I decided to stir up the paint where it had been delivered to just inside of the cafeteria doorway. The floor in that room was linoleum; better to mix the paint there than risk the carpet in the lounge. That did mean, though, that I had to get the tub across the hallway, also carpeted. The bucket was too heavy to carry, so I looked around the cafeteria for options.

The custodian’s long, low floor cart stood next to the milk refrigerator. I pulled it to the doorway to the hall but forgot to set the brake (a little metal flange that flipped down to compress the tire’s tread enough to prevent its turning) on the second of the two front wheels. I swung the paint bucket by its handle up to the cart but not quite high enough. The lower end of the bucket collided hard with the flat base of the cart. The cart rolled away, the lid flew off the bucket and five gallons of Navajo white billowed onto the blue carpet. At that moment, Dr. O stepped out of the front office eight feet across the way to see me standing ankle deep in thick, creamy paint. With no word of censure, he swallowed hard, sighed and radioed to the custodian. “John, please come to the front office and bring the shop vac. We need to assist Mrs. Finkelstein—again.”

Accelerated Adaptation

I always think I have enough skill to carpenter, plumb or paint as needed around the house. We own few tools, though, and I’ve had little training so this unshakeable faith continues to mystify Marc, my family and the nearest emergency room staff.  After one adventure at our second house, though, the only thing injured was my pride. I wanted to build something—a bookshelf, probably. There was a four foot pinewood board in the back yard shed, a cross-cut saw and a sanding block.  So what if the final product wouldn’t make it into “Fine Woodworking Monthly”, I could still get ‘er done. I marked a 6 inch cutting line about 1 foot from the end of the board and upended it on the concrete driveway in the back yard.  I steadied the top end with one hand and sawed briskly for a moment, but the board kept skittering over the pavement. I braced the board with my right knee. That worked for an inch or two more until the saw bound in the cut. This time, I decided that going horizontal would be better, so I put the board across a metal picnic table we had tucked under the eaves of the back-room. Again I secured the board with my right hand. It slipped and slid all over the table top, so I swung my left knee on the near end of the board to weigh it down. I pushed down on the board’s far end with my right elbow and managed another inch or two before my strength failed. Our scrappy back yard was scattered with landscaping bits and pieces, one of which was a cinder block  pushed up against the fence. It had a center hole just wide enough to wedge the board into.  I shoved the board through it and hefted it on the table. I climbed onto the table, straddled the block with my shins tucked under me, and triumphantly completed the cut.  I looked up to see Marc leaning against the brick wall of the back-room, weak with laughter. “Watching you for the last ten minutes was like watching the evolution of man.” he said, “I was looking around for the monolith".

·

Adventures in Babysitting

I was an early entrepreneur. I sold greeting cards door-to-door in the military housing neighborhood on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base when I was in elementary school and marketed awful perfumes that a friend and I had distilled with unlikely ingredients and by no recognizable method to my classmates. I did extra chores for a nickel or a dime, and began sewing for hire in junior high. I was known as the family banker, someone who could be persuaded to pull a dollar or two from the stash in my Bible. I couldn’t wait to start what I saw as the lucrative career of babysitting, the venerable economic mainstay of tweens and teens.

My avarice was tempered by some degree of kindness so I had a fair amount of business. My first bookings were overflow requests for my older sister. I scheduled as many evenings as I could at a rate of 60 cents an hour, a ten cent premium charged not on the basis of my junior high school Red Cross certification but because I could make minutes into pennies.

One of my mainstay clients was a sweet southern woman whose husband was the base psychiatrist. She was a compulsive talker who would review the same information each and every time I came over. One night, after her typically interminable directions and rambling, she drifted toward their front door. Her husband, who almost never spoke to me, took me by the elbow into the kitchen. There he said quietly, “I was counseling a young airman today who had a violent outburst. He has threatened to kill me and my family. The APs have him now, but if anyone comes to the door tonight, don’t open it.” Then they left. That was the longest evening of my life. Every scritch of a tree branch on a window, every pop or crack of the house settling had me clinging to the ceiling like Sylvester, the cartoon cat.

When my family moved off base, I lost my clientele of officer’s and higher-ranking NCO’s wives and had to rustle up new business. My clients now were single mothers who lived nearby our house in our working-class neighborhood of new tract-development houses. I walked to their houses; there was no father or husband they could send to pick me up and take me back home.

There was one confusing evening when a young widow for whom I was sitting was preceded home by her date, who leaned on the door jamb and told me to go home because the mother would be home shortly. I couldn’t keep him from entering the house—I didn’t try—but there were two toddlers and a baby asleep down the hall so I stumbled around, not actively refusing to leave but nonetheless remaining until I saw my client standing in her own house. She did indeed arrive about half an hour later, as drunk as he and with a couple of friends in tow. I left, unsettled about leaving the kids and about the ways grownups entertained themselves.

I was still saving some of my earnings with a hazy idea of college tuition in mind, but would occasionally splurge on record albums. High school studies should have taken more of my attention, but I maintained my babysitting contacts, and worked every day of the summers that I could. Later that year, I was baby-sitting for a working mother of two little boys.  I remember the tedium of daily lunches, Mr. Rogers and naptime. The boys had a few toys, but were often bored, so I made up a few games, and once went through the hall closet looking for creative play materials. I didn’t know quite what to make of the 8 mm projector and some film canisters, one of which was labeled, “The Twins and the Banana”.  One of the days was enlivened by a tornado touching down on the far east side of Tucson. I heard later that it took the roof off the science building of my high school. Meanwhile, three miles away, I took the little boys into the bathroom and had them play in the tub. When the water got cold, I wrapped them in towels while I drained the tub and ran fresh hot water into it. Adding bubble salts the second time kept the boys entertained long enough for the storm to pass.

I was losing the will to be self-employment by the summer of 1972. I was working then as a wildly underpaid housekeeper for a woman who asked if I would sit for a friend of hers who had three small children later that week, adding that her own ten year old daughter, Sara, could co-sit with me. This would be handy, partly so the daughter could see how it was done and partly so my employer could join her friend for a night out as I’d be taking care of her child as well. This was illustrative of the generally Dickensian nature of this woman. Not only was she paying me an exploitive 25 dollars a week for full housekeeping: laundry (including ironing school clothes for the little miscreants who took their cotton shirts from the closet for summer play), vacuuming, dusting, and toilet scrubbing, but she required me to prepare lunches and start their dinners before I left for the day. Nonetheless, an extra few hours on the end of this week would be a few more dollars, so now I had plans for my Friday night.

That evening I had four children to look after, but they were good natured and easy to amuse. I had put the littler two into their bunk beds, and was diapering the baby when the power failed, as it often did in Tucson during the summer monsoons. I managed to get the diaper pins fastened by feel, which is pretty much how one does it in any case. I held the baby up on my chest and carried him up the hallway. I called for Sara to come to the kitchen and stay there. We found two squat candles in a drawer. I handed the baby to Sara, lit the candles from the gas stove burners and set them on the table. The baby slept in my arms as we sat in the flickering light, me telling Sara any story I could remember from the Andrew Lang fairy books. After a bit, I went to check on the toddler boys. I wasn’t gone more than two minutes when Sara began screeching. I ran back to the kitchen to see the curtains above the sink on fire. Sara had carried the candle to the window to look at the trees flailing in the wind and rain. I hauled Sara out of the room, and almost threw the baby into her arms. I told her to go stand on the porch and I ran down the hall to roust out the boys. It took forever to awaken them; I largely  dragged them down the hall and out the front door. I growled at Sara to keep them on the porch and ran to call 911. The phone was in the kitchen, but so was the fire. I looked from one to the other and decided to address the blaze rather than pick up the phone. A wet dishtowel served to douse flames of a fire larger that it would have been had I simply thrown water from the sink on it in the first place rather than staging a wholesale evacuation, but still small enough to make the telling of this modest adventure longer than the experiencing of it. I retrieved the children from the porch just minutes before the return of the adults. I was grateful that they were matter-of-fact about the blackened curtains, agreeing that getting the kids out of the house had been the proper course of action and that I should still be paid.

Those summers impressed on me at long last that working for ready money with near-slave labor was not going to pay for college or much of anything. In fact, independent sales as a tween and kitchen duty as a teen-ager snuffed out any desire for the rewards of capitalism. I set my sights on academic rewards and steady government work.

Life in the Village

Long ago, my husband, Marc, and I lived as almost starving students in a Quonset hut that was part of Polo Village, the U of A’s married student housing facility. We’d married earlier than we’d planned to get access to one of the limited number of available units, but the absurdly low 47 bucks a month rent and food were about the only living expenses we could cover.  We were content without other not-quite necessities such as a phone or a car. We admired Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog and wanted to co-evolve as well as two previously well-sheltered suburban kids could.

 

Daily life in the Village resembled camping in many ways and was just about as secure. Few people even bothered to use the simple spring locks on their front and only doors. Most couples had dogs that wandered the neighborhood and cats that availed themselves of unscreened windows necessarily left open for ventilation. The dirt and dust drifted in constantly from the unpaved streets. The gaps in the cave-like arc above us meant we were wet when it rained, and sweaty when the summer sun burned down on the ribbed steel panels that were both wall and roof.

We had to adapt to being very, very close to nature while living in that 400 square foot hut. After about six months there, I reached up to a shelf I’d nailed to the kitchen wall and when I had my copy of The Joy of Cooking” in hand, threw it across the room with a shriek to raise the dead. It was a book in form only, just cover boards over a mass of moiling little black bodies. There were no pages left under or around the hundreds of cockroaches.  Another time I was taking a shower in the minuscule bathroom when the two foot square metal floor pan broke from the rusted screws that fastened it to the painted greenboard of the stall.  It dropped to the ground below, with me—so not like Aphrodite-on the-clam-shell—riding the pan down the seven or so inches to the gravel beneath the plywood floor.  A trickle of water falling from the still-intact showerhead dripped on me as I watched a variety of displaced insects and small reptiles hop, slither and scurry away from my wet feet.

Our miniscule rent would have kept us in Polo Village far longer had it not been for my mother-in-law’s aversion to vermin. Mother Harriet visited us frequently, but for over two years was unaware that we were not as animal-free as our allergies would demand. We set humane traps in hidden corners, but like rodents everywhere, our cohabitants seemed to be born knowing how to lift the peanut butter bait with impunity. I tried to capture a few field mice using rubber gloves and spaghetti tongs. That resulted in a net loss of territory in the pantry and of dignity later in the Student Health Office when I asked for a check on mouse rabies.

 We lived in a tacit truce with our house-pests. They had the advantage of numbers since our allergies negated any possibility of population control via a cat or terrier. As I long as I put every bit of our food in glass jars or the refrigerator, the mice (thankfully, they were just that, no rats were involved at any time) could have the seeds that blew in the windows or grew under the floorboards. They were pretty well fed in any case. Most nights, a scratching run, run, pause, run, pause, run followed by rustling plastic would remind me that yet again I had left the bread out on the counter.

Perhaps my continual carelessness made them bolder as well as fatter. One time I was sitting with Mother Harriet at my Formica dinette table wedged in the alcove defined by the curve of the wall when her expression froze.  She was staring at the upright piano only five feet across the room. A plump brown mouse was bobbing up and down on the middle volume pedal. It scrambled across the indoor/outdoor carpet and literally over Mother Harriet’s sandaled foot. She shuddered violently and started screaming as the mouse slid under and out of the door.

One week later, Papa-Bob and Mother-Harriet  picked us up for Sunday dinner back

at their house and on the way, turned up a side street off Speedway. As Papa-Bob drove north, Mother Harriet asked how did we like the small red brick house on the right?  I said that it was a cute little place. “Glad to hear that”, she said, “You’re moving in on Monday.”  My in-laws made it a point of honor not to interfere, but a Jewish mother is an irresistible protective force. We lived in that cozy little bungalow, roach and rodent free, through graduate school.

Shotgun Wedding Sans Pregnancy

Last week I was wrapping a wedding present (knives, no couple just starting out ever buys themselves a decent knife set) and reminiscing about my own early marriage that, against early odds, has endured 37 years.

We had several strikes against us to start. Not just extreme youth, but two cultures and one food service job between us added to the peculiar realities of my young husband’s chronic disability had friends and family placing bets on our timeline. Even we had no intention of marrying while still in our teens, but the unexpected availability of married student housing at the University of Arizona prompted a hurry-up wedding to beat a 'be married or miss out' deadline.

Couples and families often waited for years for one of the scarce married student housing units, especially after the restriction to veterans only was lifted in the sixties. Marc and I were finishing our freshman year in 1976. Each of us lived in on-campus dorms during the week and went home to our parents’ houses on the weekends so I could work and Marc could study—he is visually impaired, and managing that disability in a college setting sucked up huge amounts of time). We were not only planning on graduate school, we were both on ‘the five year plan’ since we had both changed our majors. With such long-term plans, we figured we’d eventually want to take advantage of the ridiculously cheap but limited number of WWII era apartments, so in March Marc added our names to the long wait-list.

On the last day of his finals in June, Marc wandered into the student housing office just to see where we were on the list. The clerk said, “Well, I have a unit available unexpectedly, and I can’t reach anyone on this list. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re married, you can have it next week.  Marc called me later that night when I got from the cafeteria in a mall on Tucson’s east side where I worked on the weekends to ask, did I want to get married a little earlier than we’d planned, say on Monday?

I took a bit of persuading, not for the eventuality, but for the timeline. My parents were mightily unhappy, certain that this meant I’d never finish my degree, but the two families put a few hurried plans in place: Marc’s mother, Harriet, had been told ‘Judge Fenton did a lovely ceremony’, so she arranged a 10:00 appointment in his chambers down at the Pima Courthouse. I gave notice at the  restaurant, planning a transfer to the Speedway location, but not really following through. All that was certain was my last night at work would be that Saturday. Marc’s father took him to get the license and the rings. I hemmed a never-worn pink prom dress. After my mother saw me reading the ingredient list on the Ovaltine jar and heard me wondering aloud how simple vitamins and minerals could possibly affect ovulation, took me to my first GYN visit for a hurry-up, double-dose regimen of birth-control pills.

On Saturday night, I was ‘striking the line’, i.e. carrying the serving pans from the steam tables to the pot-boy in the kitchen. On my third trip, I backed through the swinging door with the double-decker mashed potato pots (the lower one held about a gallon of hot water insulating the upper pot with the spuds). Someone had spilled oil, gravy, I never knew what, on the tiled floor and down I went, losing my grip on the pots on the way. The mashed potatoes were at this point room temperature so their heavy warmth after they plopped onto my hair and my face, and down inside my uniform was rather pleasant; the boiling water from the steam jacket splashing all down my left side was anything but. Someone ripped off my white nylon uniform before I could stand. I remember sitting up to hook my thumbs under the waistband of my nylon slip and drag it off, along with the stockings we were required to wear. Unfortunately, that action took the blistering skin on my thigh and calf along with the clothes, so I was a starchy, sticky, oozy, half-naked mess when bundled into an ambulance and taken to St. Jo’s hospital, a half-mile away.

While I was being cared for in the emergency room, my father, still gruff and disapproving of the whole endeavor, called Marc, saying bluntly, “There’s been an accident, Lynn’s in the hospital. We’ll call you when we know more”, and hung up.  Marc told me later that he walked outside  his parents’ house and sat on the curb with his head in his hands,  imagining everything from car accident to assault, and thinking back on a short life long on disappointment and concluding, “Good lord, I just can not catch a break.”

I left St Jo’s around midnight wrapped from ankle to hip in white gauze and high on Percocet. Sunday remains a mystery to me still, but early on Monday morning, I swallowed some more painkillers and the Orvo-whatever,  washed my hair, slathered on the blue eye-shadow we all wore in the ‘70s, and struggled into that pink dress. I managed to get it up, down and mostly around all the bandages on my left side. My parents, my little sister and I met Marc, his brother and parents at the fountain in the courthouse and we all crammed into the same elevator to the third floor office. Judge Fenton bustled in the room to perform the ceremony in a rushed recess between two murder trials.

I was only hazily aware of the whole event, woozily clinging to Marc’s arm while Judge Fenton, kept emphasizing ‘this is forever, it is not easily undone, it’s a commitment’, etc, all the time looking pointedly at my dress, which with all the bandages, was very full about the middle. I wanted to say “Hey, Bud, I am so not pregnant!”, but my obvious nausea from all the meds was additionally misleading. I managed to say a simple “I do”. At that moment, the summer heat in the stuffy chamber overwhelmed my mother  and we all rushed to the cluster of overturned chairs where she'd fainted.

We’d planned a family dinner with presents and cake at my parents’ house but first was a side trip to the GP for a check on my burns. When Dr. Grossman saw that the emergency treatment Saturday night had been….inexpert…, he said, ‘I’m so sorry, this is going to hurt’,  braced his left hand on my forehead (!!?), and with his right, ripped away the gauze stuck to the wounds in one rapid sweep.  More painkillers before leaving that office made the mini-reception a blur.  Neither of one had a driver’s license, so my new father-in-law took us to the El Dorado Hotel as planned for the three-day, no-refund honeymoon he and Mother-Harriet given us. Since I couldn’t even walk, Papa-Bob helped Marc get me to the honeymoon suite and then brought us pizza for dinner. By Thursday, I was mostly mobile and almost drug-free, so we asked our parents to take us, our books, bicycles and an upright piano to the as yet unseen ‘housing unit’ west of the U of A Medical Center we’d scooped.

In the quiet of our first summer night in our new home, I looked at the rusty steel walls and plywood floor of our new home and reflected that some women marry for money, whereas I had apparently moved heaven and earth for a 400 square foot, roach-infested Quonset hut.

Lessons in detachment... of various kinds

I’ve hesitated to post this, because… I am the other driver.  I am the vessel of the divine that offers Cas and the community opportunities to practice compassion while on the road, or more particularly, in  parking lots.  I take no pride in the role; it is my fate to be the humble instrument of instruction.

As my husband, Marc, said plaintively to his brother once while I was on the phone for yet another insurance ordeal (difficult for the rep perhaps, my repeated practice with the “recorded to serve you better” phone calls has put me quite at my ease), “She’s actually a good driver, she’s never hurt anyone.”  Trash cans, ash cans, light poles, guard posts, plants and planters, and poorly placed public artworks would all tell a different tale were they animate.

It is stationary vehicles that are the most distressed.  For years, I maintained there was a magnetic attraction between the metals used in older cars’ bumpers, perhaps caused by the energy field created by turning on the ignition, but the fact that I’ve … made contact… with as many of the newer rubber bumpers as the older steel ones suggests the ignition may be involved, but only peripherally. The newer rubber baby buggy bumpers are no help in improving my fellow drivers’ acceptance of the inevitable. Their ‘paintability’ is touted as a improvement, but the merest kiss causes deep scuffs and scars and pigment apparently costs three times as much as chrome, so fat furry false savings on that, Mr. Estimator.

The latest evidence of the insufficiency of rubber bumpers was after a recent play date with the terriers of a friend who lives in the foothills. I wasn’t there to help a puppy of my own learn doggy manners; I have no pets. I was visiting primarily to play with the dogs myself.  Drunk on puppy-loving, wishing my allergies would permit me to live with a dog rather than just occasionally dating them, I backed my Subaru out of their owner’s steep and winding driveway. I heard a scrape and felt a tug. When I got out to check the rear, I found I had backed over a low retaining wall that bordered the driveway. I saw nothing in the bright sunshine: no damage to the rubber, no black marks on my friend’s expensive brickwork, no need to go inside and say anything at all. All the way down the rolling hill to the four lane street that would take me home, I wondered what was that tugging feeling?  I pulled into a shopping center to find the wraparound bumper that had looked just fine at first had actually popped off the entire left side of the Outback, and must have been swaying back and forth as I drove. I drove home slowly, on side streets. The next day, a sympathetic male teacher at the elementary school where I worked managed to wedge the bumper back into place, with the panel hugging the body close enough so that its recent adventure wasn’t terribly obvious. He also pounded out a dent in the rubber that I still hadn’t seen. This kindness meant I was able to leave the whole incident unmentioned at home. I support honesty and truth in a relationship, but when stories like this are such oft-told tales, perhaps every telling isn’t essential.

It is my great hope that latest Subaru bumper story will be a book-end to earlier ones about my recently sold Honda Pilot, and there will be no more. I'd gotten to know the Pilot's power and size after introducing it repeatedly to our large green trash bin, and once to a friend’s front-mounted tow-hitch. Another friend Jen, had joined us for dinner and a DVD one night. While she was chatting with Marc in the living room, I was messing about in the kitchen. I realized I had forgotten the salsa for our tacos. I hollered from the kitchen door that opens into the garage, "Be back in sec!", jumped in the Pilot, backed it out of the garage and into Jen's new (of course) Toyota Corolla. I take the $600.00 for her new bumper out of savings, and am grateful that we carpool to the same school anyway. About 4 months later, Jen is again over for dinner, and this time, having forgotten butter for the brownies, I grab the keys, jump in the Pilot, back out of the garage and into Jen's car again. Another $600.00, even with DentBuster's good customer discount. This time I have to put the expense on our charge card, and there is a slight chill in the carpool over the next few days. A few months later, dinner is complete, we've had a lovely evening, and we're walking Jen out to her car.

"Jen, why is your car parked sideways in our driveway?"

"Oh, I got sideswiped at the grocery store by a hit'n'run, and figured since Lynn would be hitting me again anyway.. "

Well! But, the sad truth is, about nine months after that, I did indeed back into her car in our driveway a third time. Jen burst into tears, seeing that this time I had managed to crunch her front bumper, and somehow the hood was buckled as well… and the front left side panel looked a little droopy. At 1600.00, this one had to be handled by our insurance company which also provided a rental car for a stony-faced and silent Jen. Now when she visits, Jen leaves her car across the street in St Jude's church parking lot.  Most of our repeat guests do so, each being offered multiple opportunities to practice compassion.

Sweets Eaten In Secret

Marc Twain observed that too much to drink is sometimes barely enough. Substitute chocolate, and you’ve got me covered. Midway in my eight-year adventure in the restaurant on the second floor of Levy’s, a venerable department store in Tucson’s first mall, their marketing department added a bakery just a few feet from our open entryway on the second floor. Insidious fans blew a luscious caramel aroma through the kitchen in the early morning hours, sweetly trumping the odor of roasting meats and sulfite veggie soak. Even more challenging to me, a glass and steel dessert case appeared one morning between my salad station and the wait-staff’s coffee counter.  Rows of tarts, éclairs and cookies reposed at eye level across the narrowest of counters. I resisted their sweet, sticky allure since I had recently lost my teen-aged chubby chipmunk cheeks and was not looking for their return. My resolve was tested daily as I was the one to re-stock the case. I would at times surreptitiously tilt the metal rack and watch the chocolate, or jellied treats slide slickly on their paper liners to my greedy lips, but I was generally iron-willed.

On a certain December Saturday something, a glistening dark chocolate glaze or gentle swell of custard, some promise of gastronomic ecstasy seduced me. I tucked three éclairs into their column, and ate the fourth, and the next, and the next—and the next. I fell, sticky and dizzy with sugar, into utter debauchery. Every time I heard a waitress slide the front case-door open, I’d nudge the back fellow closer to her side, and eat his comrade. Surrounded by tall stainless steel cabinetry, my stealthy decimation of the baked battalion proceeded unobserved. By day’s end, the éclairs MIA were in the double digits, and these were not dainty little finger-sized treats. I could not ride my bike home after work. I had to walk beside it, and was grateful in my glucose-drunken haze to have it as a rolling support.

When I finally got home, I rested my forehead on my crossed arms at the kitchen table for a while. My husband, Marc, was there waiting for our walk across Speedway to the neighborhood pizza joint for our weekly sausage and pepperoni, hold-absolutely-nothing fast food feast. Changing our pattern could provoke inquiry that might reveal my dissipation, so I weakly agreed, passing my lethargy off as just the result of an unusually hard day in the kitchen. I choked down enough pizza to avoid comment on an unusual lack of enthusiasm and again staggered home. I was so full I could not lie down and so hot that the winter night felt like an evening in hell. I paced around our tiny bungalow in equal parts of physical pain and anxiety that my gluttony would be discovered.  My shame was revealed when Marc awoke in the early hours to find me moaning softly and pressing my burning face against the cold glass of our bedroom window. The éclair affair passed into family folklore, and forever after, the offer of a cookie, brownie or any baked treat has been tagged with, “or would you like them all?”

Trust and Consequences

What do women want? Sir Gawain knew (or King Henry, depending on whether you’ve got the folktale or the ballad at hand): we want our own way. But doesn’t everyone want that? I’ve only met one apparently easy-going person ever, and he was shamming. I myself have been named more than stubborn—my own mother called me Stalin in drag: the iron fist in a velvet glove. So when taking care of the dead 25-foot sycamore in the back yard was miles higher on my priority list than on that of my husband, Marc’s, I bit my tongue and awaited an opportunity. It would be breaking trust for me to spend without further discussion the $600.00 a tree-removal specialist had quoted for the job, and due to a thorough and well-demonstrated clumsiness I have been forever banned from any power tools lying around.  I figured a little quick, quiet yard operation with hand tools was in bounds. It would be easier if Marc just happened to be away from the house at the time. When he and his brother, Bill, decided to go to a Padre’s spring training game, I figured that the two hour window between the first pitch and their arrival back home would be plenty of time for me to get the tree down and dealt with. I maintain this discreet willfulness was acceptable--the chaos of that afternoon was due to other character flaws.

I rushed home from work on game-day, entering the house through the garage and noting that Marc must have failed to arm the security system—odd, because he was very precise in all things, but just as well since he was usually the one to disarm and I was none too sure I remembered the code anyway. Out through the garage to get the tools, around to the side gate and in ten minutes I had several lower branches down—just enough to realize that it would have been smarter to trim the higher branches first and that apparently yardmen get paid for more than just their brawn. Back around to the garage to get the ladder. Time was slipping away. I sawed feverishly. The higher branches dropped one by one, mostly over the side yard wall--not as rude as it seems, because next door was a vacant lot, and the retainer wall in between was 20 feet deep and surely no one would notice a few yard trimmings down there in the desert scruff. All the tugging and shaking and swaying of the dead tree must have loosened its roots because the mutilated tree slowly fell toward the fence with me, clinging to the ladder, following. The mangled trunk toppled four or five bricks down the far side and came to rest balanced in the jagged new gap in the block wall. The root ball on the near side dropped dirt clods every few moments on me where I lay flat down on the gound and under the ladder.

I staggered up from my cushion of leafy debris, thinking madly how to hide the evidence of my stubborness and selective honesty in my rapidly shrinking alone time. Perhaps I could lever the whole wretched thing over into the abyss. I ran into the house through the back yard patio door, whereupon the earlier absent robo-voice now announced “intruder alert!” I ran to the control panel across the room and punched in several possible disarm codes on the nearby panel, but could not recall the correct number sequence. The secondary wailing, hideously loud siren followed the first alarm. I was stabbing at the key pad randomly, hoping to hit the right code when the phone rang.

“Are you safe?” the Security One rep asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine, this is a false alarm—please, please, please turn off
that awful siren”. “Certainly, ma'am, if you will please give me the security answer”.  I couldn't remember that any better  than I did the disarm code. The siren swung into an even louder “whoop-whoop-whoooooop”. I fiercely regretted my habit of handing off everything systematic to Marc and then never listening to his patient, methodical summaries.  “Blackbury? Cicada? 1984!” “Ma’am, none of those are on our list and you seem very agitated—for your safety, we will contact the police for you.” The phone clicked off, but the siren continued its cyclic wails, whoops and blats.

Explaining the defective alarm, the damaged wall and damnable tree to the police was mildly embarrassing, but more so was the arrival of a familiar car to pulling into the driveway as they questioned me. The security company’s next call after the police had been to the back-up contact Marc had set up, but I knew who that was no more than I did the disarm code or the security answer. It was Marc's brother, Bill. Of course he’d answered his cell phone there in the Hi Corbett field bleachers with Marc sitting right beside him.  What I did learn from the very married moment that followed later that evening was that if I was going to get my own way on the sly, I needed to be quicker, smarter and a tad more attentive to the details of daily life.

Assisted Evolution

Sadly, I stand as a murderer today. I was filling up our backyard pond by hose yesterday because the auto-fill function has been broken for months. Perhaps today it will be fixed because Roger, my plumbing-capable nephew, is coming over to take another water-based disaster out of my life and far, far away: a miserable, mountainous mistake of a portable (hardly) spa). As happens so frequently, I stood on the patio for quite a long time, distracted by nothing in particular. The water lapping my shoes where I stood staring at the new leaves on the bottle trees startled me back to garden duty and I ran to turn off the spigot. Dozens of tiny tadpoles were swimming frantically in the ¼” halo of water skimming the concrete patio that overhangs the pond. Wondering where they’d come from—there’d never been anything but algae in that pond before—I swept those that I could back into the pond with a broom I’d left out. I hoped the tads would sink, but they were pulled back with the overflow returning to the concrete. I ran into the house, grabbed a soup pot from the kitchen and bailed water by the gallon onto the nearby plants. I realized tadpoles were raining down onto the lilies with every overturned potful. I ran a second time into the kitchen for a colander to fit over the pot rim, but the one handy had holes too large. My crashing and banging around in the cabinets woke my husband, Marc, from a summer nap but I triumphantly hauled out a sieve from over the stove. I rushed out the French doors a second time, immediately slipped on the wet cement patio and went down hard on one knee. Marc tried  to get me into the house for some ice and an explanation, but I still hoped to avoid a mass extermination. I limped back to the pond to pour pot after pot of water over the sieve held steady between my feet, trying to balance speed with force so fewer tadpoles were transported airborne to an uncertain fate. 

There were many unfortunate victims in the end, some who perished on the plants or fried on the concrete, others who were found later stuck on my person like short-tailed beauty marks, but I believe those I rescued (after admittedly introducing them to peril) number at least fifty. A few of the survivors will go home later today with Roger, bound for great-niece Emily’s brand new amphibian habitat. I’m sure they will thrive. We’re such an ecology-minded family.

Lynn's Bio

I am enchanted by names. As talismans, they are pivotal in a hero’s quest, as eponymous adjectives, they rival pictures in descriptive power. As a precocious (my mother said “pert”) child, I labeled my chores Herculean and felt my efforts to charm or please my perplexed family Sisyphean.  I thought “quixotic” meant all the flavors of “curious”, or perhaps just “inexplicable” and didn’t realize until lately that there’s a certain level of fit there for me.

I was disappointed early on by the weakness of my own name. It alluded to nothing, no “elven-wise” as in Alfred, or “beloved of God” as in Benjamin. My limp offering for the acrostic name poem that teachers assign after the inevitable “summer adventures” essay would be: “Um… I’m Lynn….  and I’m (just so very) lucky… and I have yellow hair…. and… I’m new?” A trove of allusion lay hidden in my older siblings’ names: “Guy Duane” (pronounced initially in the French manner) and “Darcy Careen” and even more in the Civil War homage given to my seven years’ younger little sister, “Sheriden Leigh”.

My first name is not as richly elegant as my siblings’ but even so my family found it just a little too fancy for everyday use. It’s Annette, as in the Mouseketeer.  My being unmusical and unlikely to wear a bikini ever, I’d say any spell casting by the name fairy failed pretty fully. Even my parents sensed the lack of fit because I was “Lynn” from the first day home from the hospital. That fairy may be granted some small prescience: when I met my eventual sweetheart in high school, he spelled his last name—Finkelstein—to the tune of “Mickey Mouse.” I was amazed by that for years into our marriage until he pointed out that any name with eleven letters works).

The powerful names of the heroes of myth and legend were totems that drew me further into a mixed-up imagined world of Greece and Britain and Arabia. I lived entirely in Arthur’s Britain, Robin Hood’s Sherwood, and Aladdin’s lamp. I would hazily emerge from the lands of fable to find my mother had given up calling me to my list of chores and my sister was plotting revenge for having had to pick up the slack.

I tested myself with the didactic children’s classics even though I never fell into them as completely as my beloved fable and fantasy. Hans Christian Anderson would test my infant sense of justice with his devastating consequences of choice. Louisa May Alcott taught me to catalogue my flaws and those of others and I hoped, as observed of Demi-John as he fell asleep nursing a handful of popcorn kernels in Little Men, that my faults were of the better sort. Since I try not to be one of those who lie in their own journals (I wish I could remember what character said that of another; my memory is a slow accretion of literary bits and pieces without the possibility of attribution), I will admit that secretly I believed I had no faults. I was the pure and honest principal of every tale in every color of the Andrew Lang fairy books that I gorged on.

My obsession with fairy tales kept me in a middling state of moral and intellectual development: I would be rewarded for goodness and kindness, for patience and sacrifice. I can’t blame fairy tales alone, though, for my early and persistent belief that I could live in an imagined world. If I believed truly and tried purely, everything was possible said parents, teachers, Disney. I supplemented magic with a dogged but haphazard empiricism with Leonardo Da Vinci as my model.  His paintings were otherworldly, his illustrations of the natural world fantastical.  His being a left handed Virgo as I am was incidental to my emulation, just a pleasing lagniappe . Faith and faulty reasoning made me an endangered disciple. I observed slow moving desert reptiles and catalogued the insects inside and around our slump-block military housing unit. I mixed invisible inks and concocted love potions. I stared directly at the early morning sun on my way to school just to see how long I could do so before looking away. I wanted to soar like a bird but before attempting flight, I tried swimming—and breathing—like a fish. I’d been told there was oxygen in air and a little less in water. I assumed the percentage was the crucial difference, and I just had to try hard enough to breathe underwater. After my mother hauled me choking and spluttering out of our backyard vinyl pool, I accepted that if the lack of gills mattered so much, the absence of wings might more, and I’d best foster a facility for dream-flight.

Partly by inclination and partly through circumstance, science fiction was the natural next step in my literary evolution. The public library on Davis-Monthan, the Air Force base where my father was stationed, had a small children’s room, but most of the collection was tailored to the young airmen who were its primary clientele. My previous aimless and unsuccessful experimentation had pushed me away from the hard sciences, and in intermediate school I immersed myself in the social science fiction of Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin and Roger Zelazny. Fantasy was inter-shelved with science fiction in that tiny library. After discovering and devouring the four volumes of Tolkien, I read them over and again more than ten times straight, and refused to believe there were no more. I checked out books on the “T” shelf with similar titles by other authors hoping they would prove to be sequels. This led to some unusual discoveries, and raised eyebrows from the librarians, who had given up shooing me back into the gaily-decorated room with the shelves of Bobbsey Twins and The Five Little Peppers.

From my tweens through teens, I continued to marinate in genre fiction mixed with 19^th century British and Russian classics. My taste broadened to include contemporary novels, and the discovery of magical realism bolstered my sense that reality was really quite flexible. (It did seem as if I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in real time, that one was a little chewy).  I married early, and my young husband learned early, as my family had earlier, that it was difficult to get my attention. Possibly thinking that it was easier to join me than change me, he proposed that we read aloud in the evenings. Not yet out of our teens, we adopted the Spanish custom of reading Don Quixote on the threshold of adulthood, anticipating a second reading at the beginning of maturity, and a third time at  at the onset of old age. When we read it that first year in the summer heat in our Quonset hut just off campus, the framed stories from Spanish folklore reminded us of tales also told by Shakespeare and Boccaccio. At forty, it seemed to us to be Sancho’s book. We laughed at his willing seduction by the promise of wealth and admired his earthy wisdom.

We have come now a little early to the third life-stage reading at the present milestone of my retirement from librarianship. Modern technology promises us a protracted old age, so we intend to add a fourth reading in time. In this third trip to medieval Spain I find I have a certain something in common with Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Don Quixote was convinced of the verisimilitude of the fanciful. I am generally aware of the here and now, but am not overly attached to it. Lost in contemplation, I can end up in Ajo on the way to the store. The Knight spent his days wholly in the adventures his creator designed for him. I lose time and space dreamily reflecting on those in all the books I have lived in for fifty years. The ingenious gentleman and I both wander through and around reality.