Monday Morning Beach Report and the latest Report from Pillville

Why do I like these gray days at the beach so much?

No place to anchor the eye this morning. Plenty of places to anchor my heart. My two weeks in Alaska were beyond perfect, but I am glad to be back here. 

I've told everyone who's asked that I've spent over 20 hours on a plane in the last couple of days. It was actually 11, but I guess it felt like 20. Maybe I'm counting my mom's hours too. Of course, the whole shebang of getting her to the east coast, coming back so I could leave for my trip, and then going back to Maryland to get her was over 20 hours just for me. Worth it. Worth it. Worth it.

We are back in our routine. Caregivers to relieve me, hospice nurses, pills, interrupted  sleep, yoga, T'ai Chi Chih, martinis, the hiss of the oxygen machine, dancing. I'll let you figure out who does what.

Last night during the dance classes someone asked if my partner and I were newlyweds. "I don't even know his last name," I said. We laughed like 8th graders. Except now I do know his last name.   All of the other couples are long married, I believe. My partner and I leave in our separate Priuses (his is white and newer, mine is red) and the other folks depart, not so subtly watching us as he hands over homegrown lemons, figs, tomatoes. I feel fairly certain that Dan has arranged this fresh produce pipeline. How do I return the favor? Savoring all the joy is the only thing I can think of. Savoring all the joy.

I want to say that you learn how to savor every joy when you hold a person you love as he breathes his final breath. And that's true. I did learn that. But the knowledge leaves me. I don't really know how a person can forget that, but I do. I forget that I ever learned it, and when it comes back to me, it's like an idea I've never heard of. Right now, I'm holding on to it. Hope I don't fall.

On top of it in Skagway, Alaska

The Rain Falls Gently on My Brain

Caffeine is a wonderful thing. Until you've had so much that your brain is twitching its tail like a crouching lion, eyes fixed on its next meal. I've pounced on chore after chore this evening as I wait for my mom to settle into her night. Laundry, dishes, scrubbing the kitchen floor, making my to-do list for tomorrow, laying out the papers to fax to my mom's new primary care doctor. What else, what else? the hungry brain asks.

I'm on the couch with the ancient cat (who has never stalked much of anything,) and  I'm hoping this glass of wine and her purring will undo the injection of artificial energy. Last night I slept for only a couple of hours--maybe three if you count the time I spent on a pile of blankets at the top of the stairs, waiting for my mom to go back to bed after she woke around midnight. She accidentally pushed her Lifeline button when she woke, and M and I scrambled down the stairs to assure the Lifeline monitor that she was okay. M won the race by a mile. My brain was still trying to decode the strange voice in the kitchen calling my mother's name by the time M had already taken care of things. I tried to go back to sleep, but my mother was up and moving around--now without the button on, I realized--and I didn't want to put the button back on her and risk it being pushed again and waking up M before her crack of dawn 100-mile drive back to school, or the man who loves me who was in my bed in his own fitful sleep.

So I waited. Then I intervened. What was she doing? She had to clean off her desk, she told me. She wanted another empty chocolate tin like the others I had given her for the dimes she'd taken out of her wallet. She needed to put safety pins away, file papers, rearrange this and that. "Go to bed," she told me. So I pretended to.

When I really did get back to bed, the man who loves me said, "We have to activate your mother's pills." Activate, I thought. Activate? Activate what pills? He was half in a dream, half trying to help with the real-life chaos. "Is she going to be okay?" he asked. I told him she was fine. That everything was fine.

This morning, I swear to god, my mother was singing a song that seemed to be about baseball to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner. I looked in her room and she was sound asleep...singing. "Hah-ha-ha," she laughed. "I don't know many songs," she said as she twitched and tossed, eyes closed.

The man who loves me used to frequently laugh out loud in his sleep. I haven't heard him do that in a long time. And I'd never heard anyone do that before him. If my mother wants to sing, I suppose that's okay too. I'd prefer to dream an interesting dream rather than sing. I'd prefer to sleep, rather than sit here typing. It's started to rain. Maybe all this crazy energy will be washed away. Sleeping to the sound of rain is a rare pleasure in Southern California.

How I Awoke with a Stepladder and an Empty Vodka Bottle in My Bedroom

2:27 a.m. And my smoke alarm beeping. Every 30 seconds. Cheerp. Cheerp. The man who loves me is in my bed next to me, dug so deeply into dreamland that he doesn't even stir when I get out of bed and stand directly under the offending device. In the dark, I stare up at the ceiling wanting to be certain it's this smoke detector and not the one in the hallway or the carbon monoxide detector downstairs. It is.

There's no possibility that I will get back to sleep unless I can stop the noise, so I go downstairs to the laundry room and pull out my plastic box of batteries. There's one 9-volt battery in the box and it's in a package that's been opened. Please be a good battery, I whisper as I head for the garage to get the ladder.

This should be pretty simple, I think. Back upstairs, I position the ladder, setting my iPad, in flashlight mode, on top of the ladder. I'm a 12-foot tall woman in jeans and a black lace bra in a spotlight and the man who loves me is still sleeping. If he wakes, I think, he may die of fright. Battery out. Battery in. Cheerp.

I stand on the ladder in the dark, typing "my smoke alarm won't stop beeping" into the Google search box. There are a variety of  remedies, but first I have to ascertain if my alarm is AC or DC. I'm guessing it's hardwired since my house is newish, and that's probably required by safety code, but I can't tell by looking, so I haul the ladder into the guest room, close the door and turn on the ceiling light to look at the smoke detector in there. I'm thinking it should twist off easily if it's just a battery device. It doesn't. 

The troubleshooting instructions insist that I must cut the power to the smoke detector, take the battery out, push the reset button, turn the power back on and re-insert the battery. Shirt on. Down to the breaker box on the exterior wall of my house. Each breaker is carefully labeled. None is for upstairs. There must be another breaker box upstairs. I can't find it. Unless it's in M's room. She's sleeping, and given her insane hours and her 65-mile each way commute to her job, she will probably kill me if I awaken her at 3:00 a.m. Cheerp. I'm thinking maybe that's not so bad.

Back to Google. Maybe if I just take the battery out entirely. Nope. Cheerp. Cheerp. Back downstairs. I recall that there was an extra smoke detector in the laundry room drawer when I moved in. If I can examine the device by holding it in my hands, read the white on white Braille-like lettering, maybe I can figure this out. There's a reset button. "Push to reset. Hold to test," the tiny letters say. How long is a push vs. a hold? Should I risk actually setting off the alarm? My mom will wake up. M will wake up. I'm not so sure about the man who loves me, but I'd rather poke out my eardrums than push that button. Standing upstairs in my closet with the extra smoke detector in my hand, I practice taking the battery in and out of that one, checking to see if I could have wrongly inserted the battery in the beeping detector. No. What if I push the button on the unattached smoke detector? It's not wired in. If the alarm sounds, I can rip out its battery. It beeps. Then beeps again. Now there are two smoke detectors cheerping. Good-bye battery. Cheerp. What??? The thing is cheerping and it has no battery. I stuff it into the pajama drawer in my closet and close the door.

It's almost 4:00 a.m. Google. Be sure the battery door is completely closed after you change the battery the umpteenth website says. Back up the ladder. Coax the cover. Wiggle it. Silence.

I have some booze on a pretty tray with a couple of glasses in my bedroom. Grand Marnier. Bailey's. A nearly empty bottle of Polish bison grass vodka that is so good, I have been reluctant to drain it. Now is the time. I sit in the big white easy chair in the dark, the bottle on the window ledge next to me. It's so quiet I can hear that lovely man in my bed breathing. Is he dreaming? Wait! What was that dream I was having?That dream just before I awoke. The Someone and His Someone. There were nefarious financial dealings. Blackmail. And….something. Some secret that explained everything about my divorce…but now it might as well have gone up in smoke.

Herons call over the water in the dark. The vodka bottle is empty. Back to bed.

In the morning, the moment he wakes, the man who loves me smiles and kisses me. When he sees the box of batteries on the bathroom counter, he says, "I guess you were up in the middle of the night." Later, over coffee, he tells me he slept well. And that he dreamt of Harrison Ford.

Books and Brie

Thanks to the presence  of daughter M, I went away for an overnight.

First there was this.

A reading at Flintridge Books by one of my favorite writing teachers.

This book includes snippets of writing by a few of Barbara's students. A half-dozen of us were there last night and we read, too.

Then I spent the night with the man who loves me at his place. 

Dinner was chips and cheese and crackers. After 270-some nights of cooking dinner for my mom with the only respite being three evenings of take-out pizza, and two previous nights away, last night's dinner felt like pure decadence. Cheese. Chips. I think we ate it off of plates, but I'm not sure because there was a lot of wine involved. Maybe we just shoved our heads into the bag and tore at the wedge of brie with our teeth.

I slept with both ears closed, dropping off to the distant yip-yip-yeeeee of coyotes. I sleep well-enough at home with my mom. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the middle-weight sleeping champion of the world. But there's sleeping and then there's sleeping.

Refreshed, my mom and I tried the various CPAP masks again this afternoon, thinking that we might have better luck if we tried a daytime practice run. 

Nope.