Happy Holidays

Jim Dandy in the red hat.

I Promise

The next morning my wife asked me to help her with a couple of cuff links--small little things that were to be threaded through the eyes on her blouse cuffs and then snapped snug at the wrists.

Try as I might, I could not accomplish the task. Every possible conspirator conspired against me--my fading vision, my shaking hands, the numbness in my fingers. She may as well have asked a camel or a giraffe to do the job.

Frustrated, she dismissed me, saying that she would do it herself, as usual.

I was feeling kind of low after that, and so by and by I returned to the bedroom to see if I could try again. I found her sitting on the bed, shoulders shaking, a teardrop rolling down either cheek.

And so I knelt by the bed and hugged her. I just stayed there and hugged her.

Why do you have to be the one with MS?" she said, catching her breath, forcing back tears. Why couldn't it have been your crappy ex-wife, or one of her kids, or . . . just someone else?

Well, it's okay. It's okay. It could have been worse. It could have been cancer, it could have been heart disease. It's not so bad.

For you, she says, for you. But I don't want to be alone, I can't be, I can't stand it.

Her shoulders are shaking again, she can't catch her breath, she's holding on tight as if I will soon slip through her arms like a scarf or a cloud.

I did not know she felt this way. Somehow, I did not know.

And so I told her that I would never leave. I told her that I would live forever if need be. I promised her so, and a promise is a promise, an oath is an oath.

The rest is up to He who collects and cares for such things.

Two Cognitive Hiccoughs to Start the Holidays

Yesterday afternoon I shaved, which is something I do every three or four days (the pain heightens the general sense of being alive), and then afterwards went looking for some sort of lotion for my skin. Quite naturally the search took me to my wife's bathroom, which is the best place to find lotions of every brand and flavor. I'm not particular when it comes to this sort of thing, and so I laid hand upon the first lotion handy.

Now, my eyesight is not what it used to be and tends to pick up key words rather than comprehensive descriptions. What I saw, therefore, were the words Coach, moisturizing, and lotion.

Perfect. I poured out a large dollop and applied it to my tender cheeks.

Sensation as it seems, for one in my position anyway, is often more immediately informative than visualization--for the immediate olfactory and tactile message received was that this stuff I had just applied to my face was not right at all. This was certainly like no lotion I had ever smelled, and definitely not like anything I had ever smelled on my wife.

Well, those familiar with the brand name Coach will know straightaway that this is a purse, not a body lotion, and that this particular Coach lotion is meant for softening leather, not the soothing of faces.

For the rest of the day I smelled like a saddle bag.

It's quite chilly in Portland this week. Temperatures in the 20s, dropping in the evening to the teens. So I decided to make a fire in our wood burning stove. This would be the first fire of the winter, and therefore necessitated some work in preparation--specifically the removal of all sort of things that had piled up against the stove during warmer days, so as to avoid setting these (and the house) on fire.

This was accomplished (to the best of my knowledge at the time), the wood was cut into thin pieces of kindling, and then the larger hunks that would follow, and the fire was successfully ignited, and soon burning like a furnace.

I went about other chores, happy for the growing warmth in the house.

This is where, once again, sensation kicked in, for no matter how foggy my brain becomes, my nose remains as clear-minded as ever. In much the same way as had happened with the purse lotion mistaken for aftershave balm, this fire in the stove simply did not smell right. It didn't smell like a wood fire at all, but rather like I would imagine napalm to smell, or an uncontrolled blaze in a tire factory.

A focused investigation revealed the problem. I had not after all moved all the aforementioned things from the vicinity of the stove, but had neglected one. This was (or used to be) a large green plastic armored vehicle belonging to my son which had previously made itself obscure directly upon the iron top of the stove--not a tank now, of course, but a puddle, a spreading, oozing, sizzling little lake of piping hot slime.

It was my son himself who made the positive identification. I grabbed what was immediately available from the kitchen--a metal spatula, two or three dish towels, and as I ladled the smoking goo into the towels, Sasha danced nervously back and forth, holding a sweater to his nose, shrieking Don't breathe, don't breathe, it's TOXIC!

During the holiday season, some peoples houses smell of pine and cider, some of cinnamon and cookie dough.

Mine smells of freshly fried plastic, with just a hint of five canisters of Ocean Breeze air freshener.

Jolly Old Me

I was today, for the first time ever, a Santa Claus. I suppose the timing is right--having gone old and gray, and self-sufficiently jolly (i.e. without having to be under the influence).

Who doesn't balk at the idea of being Santa? Of course I balked, made feeble excuses, voted in favor of anyone and everyone else, insisted that they would surely make better Santas. But to no avail. Anyone and everyone had already had his turn, and so balked with equal energy, though had also the justification of duty already done to fall back on.

I was therefore escorted upstairs by several female elves and deposited into my costume--the whole nine yards, for these folks were serious about Santa Claus--the red suit, the white wig and beard, the boots and the hat. A cumbersome bag of gifts was affixed to my back and I was told to say Ho, ho, ho--and to say it not that way, but the right way. I was told I must be louder. Much, much louder.

Who is equal to Santa Claus? Who can duplicate his joy? We find ourselves called upon, summoned moreover for the express sake of the children, bundled moreover into such a merry and inescapable straitjacket, that we have at last no other choice but to simply do our best.

Ho, ho, ho, ho--Now all you children sit down and shut yer yaps--Santa has gifts for each and all.

And so on.

Wonderfully, some of these children (the smaller ones naturally) actually believed me to be St. Nick. One dashed forth to hug me (and would not let go). Another started to cry. Still another froze in place, able to move nothing, no part of her person, but for her eyes, and those in the m9st careful sort of watchfulness, as if I must at any moment either give her all her heart's desire or suddenly explode into blinding light and smoke, shooting up through the roof while I was at it.

There were many children. Countless children, perhaps. And there were many gifts. And, truth be known, I soon found myself somehow believing that I had in fact brought each gift, specially intended for each individual child--and had come a long way to boot, through the wind and cold and the driving snow.

On Dasher, on Dancer . . .

Well, it wasn't so bad. As it turned out, it wasn't so bad at all.

Just don't ask me to do it next year.

The Royal Feast

Yes, Lady, here I was at last;
Here found I all I had forecast . . .
--"To An Island Princess," Robert Louis Stevenson

My wife is an Island Princess. Really. In Sulawesi Indonesia she is royalty, although this is, in our time, traditional rather than particularly applicable. Nonetheless, it does explain a few things about her character. Royalty, in other words, is in the blood, and no more extractable than the red.

A princess by any other name, no matter the locale, is a princess still, and forever. You can take a way the tiera, but not the title. You can subtract the ceremony, but the celebrant remains.

Now I wonder am I a prince as well--or will I be when I take my throne? Is the title automatically conferred upon the spouse, as is the Western custom, or do they eat their princes in that faraway land?

I shall soon find out.

One way or the other, it's all good--whether a royal figure or a royal feast, I shall end up quite consumed in the time that remains.

Here I was at last, as RLS has said. And also this:

"For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while before I set forth upon this voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect."

I know what you mean, Bob. May I call you Bob? For I feel a kinship in circumstance, a companionship in and out of time. We shall both attend and be the feast before we are full.

Ordered South

I have discovered, quite suddenly, not only the most efficacious treatment for MS, but perhaps even the cure--

Just say no.

It sounds simple, I know. Too simple? Well, it's like one of these things that's right under your nose, hiding in plain site--although given the size of my nose, and the ample darkness cast thereby, it is perhaps not so very surprising that something so close has remained so elusive.

Yes, just say no, just say fuck it--draw the line, set your boundaries--and then move to Bali. The tropics, after all, come with a well known history of being curative for pretty much any and every sort of malady (except for leprosy). We follow, therefore, in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, of Paul Gauguin, not to mention a lot of other people whose names I cannot think of.

Place is the key, not medicine. They have no medicine in Bali (that I know of anyway). They do have a witch doctor, who charges, I think, beads rather than bucks--whose office is the last palm tree on the right, and has no waiting line.

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and memory are both in one story, that I dare say the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived.

"Ordered South"
Robert Louis Stevenson

The Brain Buzz

One of the most unpleasant of the myriad unpleasantries associated with multiple sclerosis, for me anyway, is what I will call the brain buzz, if only for the sake of alliteration, and at the expense moreover of descriptive accuracy--for you see the phenomenon experienced is really more of a hiss than a buzz, though yet again not so much of a hiss as a hiccough tucked somewhere within the electrical pulsations at work within the gray blob otherwise known as my brain (itself more blob-like I think than most).


This, happily enough, is not a common nor an ongoing symptom, but one which arises at its own pleasure, whenever it will; and is, I believe, something that accompanies an active state of MS--a warning whisper, a rumor of war. It has become according to past experience my own diagnostic tool for identifying a relapse, just as reliable as the MRI, though much cheaper.

This buzz/hiss/pulse--this heavy breathing in my brain--comes along also with a sense of light-headedness and disorientation above the norm, and also vague nausea. Whenever this hits, I wonder first off what I can do about it, then remember that there is nothing to be done but to wait. It does finally go away on its own. So far, anyway.

I wonder if anyone else has this. It does seem that MS makes its attempt in each person to present an original character--so as to make each of us feel special, I think; and also to confuse doctors and frustrate timely diagnosis--and yet there are some common threads to be agreed upon--numbness and tingling in the extremities, for instance; fatigue; imbalance.

But how about the brain buzz in particular? Anyone out there feel me?