Some Anniversaries Suck

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Fifty-one years ago today, on a Sunday morning, I got up for breakfast with the rest of my family. The steps I took from my bed to the kitchen table were the last unassisted steps I would ever take.





By dinner time, I would be in the hospital on an isolation unit. I would not see home, my baby sister, or my new puppy for another six weeks. I would not ride my pony again for more than six months. I would not see the inside of a school room again until the following September.


I had polio.


Every fall, my body remembers, even if I do not seem to myself. I get a case of the blues that lasts until after the holidays. Which is weird, because I seem (at least to myself) pretty well-adjusted otherwise.

I was thinking about this a little bit to myself this morning as I was getting ready to go to work, and I think for the first time it really dawned on me how traumatic that must have been to a seven-year-old kid. I'm pretty sure, for example, that I had never spent the night away from home except at my grandparents', which hardly counts. I certainly had never spent six weeks away from home. And then there's all the constant little daily traumas that go with being in the hospital: Shots, pills, strangers poking at you at all hours of the day and night. High fevers, drug-induced nightmares, loneliness, boredom, and in my case also a spinal tap or two and daily hot packs.


Not to mention, it changed my life--and to some degree, my whole family's--forever. And these changes would make childhood and adolescence damned difficult. My parents were both accomplished equestrians, and I would never be a good rider with one paralyzed hip and leg. I would not be able to participate in phys ed with the rest of the kids, or dance in high school.

I certainly was not marriageable, as it was then defined. All my clothes--especially my shoes--would forever after look weird. Skirts hung crookedly because I was crooked. Slacks that fit on one side did not on the other. The toes of my left shoes sometimes stuck up in the air. And I could never wear nice shoes because they couldn't hold up to the bracing. I fell constantly. 


Most of this is so irrelevant to my life as an adult as to actually be hard to dredge up from the deep cellars of memory for the writing of this list. I am married. We don't have phys ed at the office. I don't have the time or the money to ride any more anyway. And yet all these things, I think, swirl around in my subconscious come November every year. 


There is also much to be grateful for, in the It Could Have Been So Much Worse department: My family could afford my medical care. Some kids died. I'm only a monoplegic, whereas many kids emerged as paras. I came to my post-polio symptoms decades after many of my peers, and despite them I am still working. Some of my peers cannot. I did ride again--and swim, and hike. I even went backpacking once. I probably never would have chosen the career I did had I been able-bodied, and I do love my work. Trust me when I say, I'm grateful for it all.

And yet, every fall, the body remembers.


Simply,

chopping down the cherry tree

Our old cherry tree finally bit the dust--literally--this afternoon.

Mr. Simply had bartered for some serious yard work, and the landscape experts came out today and said it was time to put it out of its misery. I arrived home from work to find it already gone, along with a lot of the weeds and crap that have grown wild out there since Mr. Simply got sick.

There's nothing left of that beautiful old tree except a stump about two feet tall.

Simply,

I laughed until I cried

Image by ttstam via Flickr

Sometimes I really worry about Mr. Simply's stability.

Totally seriously, he asks at dinner tonight if I think it would be ok for him to inquire of our insurance agent whether we might be covered in case a burglar breaks in while we're here. Well sure, I say, we're covered, thinking of course that he's referring to replacement value for anything that might get stolen.

However, this is not what he is asking. What if they damage the house? he asks. Well sure, I say, thinking he means what if they trash the place? But no. What Mr. Simply wants to know, it develops, is whether, should he shoot a burglar, would the insurance company pay for the cleanup? And if it turns into OK Corral, Part Deux, will they pay for damages to the neighbors' houses? If no, he wants to get a rider.

The reason he wants to know if I think it's ok to ask this question is that he worries that our agent (who we've been with since 1984) might think he's crazy and cancel our policy just on general principle.

And he can't figure out why I just laughed until I cried.

Simply,

Still blushing

Mr. Simply, my husband of 30+ years, and I stopped off at the drugstore on the way home this evening. He needs to pick up an Rx. I, preferring to wait in the truck, ask him to get some Pears soap for me.

Cute Young Thing at the register asks him if I like the Pears, or if it really works, or something like that, and he replies, "Well, I might not be the one to ask because my wife always looks beautiful to me!" She thinks Mr. Simply is just the bee's knees, and jogs out to the parking lot to tell me all about it.

Aww, isn't he sweet? Her, too.

Simply,

Old age isn't all bad

For one thing, you might get to be a great aunt.

Yes, my niece is pregnant. Unmarried, (relatively) uneducated, completely unemployed, and uninsured. Whatev. It'll work out somehow.

When she told me, first I hollered and whooped. And then I cried. It doesn't seem that long ago that her mother was teaching her to write her name with soap on the bathtub tiles. "P is for Penny. . ." Only the way she said it, being still too young to have much grasp on syntax or facility with her Rs, it came out "P fo' Penny!"

Time goes by so fast.

The other thing you get when you get old enough, and lucky enough? You get to give your baby sister a ration of shit about being a grandmother.

Simply,

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Back to the Future

Sponsored by The Five Stairsteps

Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter. . .
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it undone
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter. . .
Right now, right now
(you just wait and see how things are gonna be)

Heard this song on a '70s station the other day, and flashed back to a sunny Spring day mid-decade wherein Mr. Simply and I were playing ball on the front lawn with our little dog Chester. It was our senior year, and within months we would be embarking on the great adventure of our lives--or so it seemed.

 Mr. Simply with Chester

in the Spring of 1975

I was momentarily overwhelmed with sadness: In the intervening 35 years, the future we so looked forward to has come and gone. In that long-ago Spring we dreamed the dreams of the young and innocent--of the careers we would have, and of family, and home. We joked about what we would do with our first million dollars. We envisioned vacations and cars, and college friendships ripening over the years. We thought we would always be healthy and strong, and that we would always be in love like we were then. We thought we would be happy. We thought, in short, that we would go on forever.

But things never got easier, or brighter, not really. Our heads never got lighter, nor did we get it all together and get it undone. Life is not like that. An older and much wiser friend of my mom's tried to tell us back then that "These are the good old days" but we didn't get it. The young never do.

Sure, we've had plenty more good times since that long-ago sunny Spring afternoon. We've had good laughs, good loving, and long periods of contentment. We kept to our ideals, with both of us having public service careers and adopting a child. But we've also had what we never envisioned then: all the losses of people and pets, deteriorating health, mounting debt, and friendships that fell by the wayside.

Mom's friend was right: We already walked in the rays of a beautiful sun. You can see it right there in the photograph. Sure, we lived in a rented shack on a dirt road back then, with a tin roof and an oil-burning furnace in the front room which provided our only heat. We were still in school, and only one of us was working. But God, we were so young, and healthy, and in love, and we were already a family with our little dog Chester.

I was flooded with tears for a moment, right there in the dentists' office (where else do you hear all '70s all of the time?) and I followed that with a few melancholy hours wherein I would have given anything to be back in that sunny yard with my skinny college boy and Chester, still barely out of puppy-hood, all our naïveté and optimism intact.

But eventually it dawned on me that I was making the same mistake now that I made then, and not just by wishing to have back a past that's over and gone. We still tell each other that things will be better this year, or next quarter, or after Mr. Simply's treatment is through, or whenever we [fill in the blank]. We joke about what we will do with our lottery winnings, now that it's pretty obvious we will never earn a million of our own. I realized that we are still longing for a future that's over and gone--hell, it's coming and going even as I write this. We're missing the great adventure of our lives that's happening right now.

Which thought jerks me right back to the present, wherein it's Spring again, except 2010 instead of 1975. We may spend more time in bed or crashed on the couch than we ever thought we would, but I still have work, with people I care about. We may have bills coming out of our ears, but we also have managed to put something aside for a rainy day. We get by. The sun is shining bright and birds are singing. We have our "snug little home", as Mr. Simply calls it, instead of the shack, and it's Diana and the parrots now instead of Chester. And perhaps most importantly of all, we still love each other deeply.

Thirty-five years from now, if I'm lucky enough to still be alive, what will I be mooning around missing that I have today? The world doesn't get much brighter than this, and I would do well to be mindful of it. Right now, right now. That's what counts, and right now is good.

Right now, we walk in the rays of a beautiful sun.

Simply,