Chasing the filthy lucre

I finally did it. After two-plus years, I initiated the firing sequence (two negative Covid self-tests) and launched myself back into community. I'm (sort of) proud (but mostly shocked) to announce I mingled unmasked with a group of humans in an indoor setting for a two-hour event. I can't believe I did it, and I hope I don't regret it. 

On a mild morning this week, I drove up the winding road to an art gallery-slash-gift shop in an upscale mall in the Catalina Foothills. (Now that I've moved to the Trailer, I can claim I live Catalina Foothills adjacent. Look at me go, I've been here just over a year and already I'm a snob.) I had expected to wear my mask, as I always do in an indoor setting. However, nobody else was wearing a mask when I arrived. After seeing that, my higher reasoning faculties shut down, and I caved to peer pressure. Nobody said anything. I just folded. It is embarrassing and humbling to admit how little spine I really have. 

Maybe if I hadn't been the star of the show, I would have had more gumption. As an audience member, I'm good at hiding out in the last row. I could have quite happily hid behind my N95, no problem. However, I was at the art gallery to share with the gallery membership the knowledge and experience I've accumulated as a mentor to artists who think it would be jolly good fun to turn their art into a money-churning cash cow. In other words, I was there to give a lecture on business plans. Whoa, did you feel that breeze? That was your brain checking out for a second. I know. It happens to me too. Art and business? Wha—? 

Seems like we don't really hear of those two things being discussed in the same sentence, do we? At least, not in the real world, and by real, I mean like, actual reality, not the magical world of marketing that makes billions of dollars persuading artists they can become rich and famous without dying first. Art and business hook up in the business world, but not in the art world. MFA students aren't taught how to register as an LLC and get their marketing plans ready. Budding artists are told their art is not a commodity. It's something unique and special. In fact, to call art a product is a deadly insult to some artists. To call their art anything less than fine is fighting words. Don't you dare use the word artisan. Craftsperson. One step away from hack. 

Whatever. Artists love to hear about the joy of delivering their art to the art-hungry world. As soon as I mention the words sales tax or LLC, they all but run screaming into the night. In fact, only one person in my audience of a dozen or so wannabe artist-turned-millionaires was wearing a mask, so I could see the exact moment when their brains turned up their little cerebellar toes and said nope, not for me, I'm outa here. 

As usual, each artist in my crowd was at a different stage in their career. No way was I able to address all their needs. It's dumb to try and yet I keep trying. Isn't that the very definition of insanity? Well, no big epiphany there. Still, I did my best to be informative, pleasant, and engaging, even as they one by one got right into my personal space and breathed all over me. I didn't shake any hands and nobody touched me, I don't think, probably because I am a stinky mess, having forgotten how to groom. I've lost the art of caring about how I look. Or smell, apparently. Clearly, I've been alone and sweating in the desert for too long. But I wasn't stinky enough, apparently. They still got too damn close. 

I delivered my dog-and-pony show, and when it was over, I helped schlep the chairs back into the storage room and stack them in neat vertical piles, ready for next month's members' meeting, because my mission in life is to be useful, even if it kills me. I am not a member of this gallery, in case you are wondering, nor do I plan to be, even though as a creative knucklehead, I would fit right in. The idea of immersing myself into the bubbling angst of artists struggling to retain a shred of their creative souls as they troll the world of commerce for enough filthy lucre to pay their rent is too much for this introvert. 

Every conversation I have with artists these days starts the same way: I want to make money selling my art. After a while, I want to scream. With laughter, of course. I think I've been alone too long.

Tubbing it with my laundry

 

Howdy Blogbots. Feeling like giving thanks yet? Yeah, me neither, although I should. I'm alive, after all. I hesitate to admit things are going well but I can't honestly claim it's all bad. For a chronic malcontent, that is some admission. I pride myself on my ability—it's an art, really—to look on the dark side. Little Mary Sunshine, I am not. And yet, I persist.

Last night I was multitasking by taking a bath and doing laundry at the same time. I can hear you asking, what? Laundry must be done, and washing skivvies in the tub means I can save my quarters for the sheets and towels. So, rub-a-dub-dub. Nobody gets close enough to smell me anyway, so who cares if I reek slightly? Anyway, I often think while I'm tubbing, and last night as I was squeezing water out of my socks, I was thinking, should I feel guilty that my life hasn't really changed all that much since Covid? 

Sometimes I think I should be suffering more. It feels like my inner empathy machine is just a click or two out of alignment. Before I can get the empathy machine to lurch into gear and flood my system with angst, I have to nudge my brain into having a thought, oh hey, people are suffering, I should feel compassion. I should suffer too. Then the sluicegate opens, the wave of empathy and angst washes through me, and I cry a little. Then I wonder, were those tears artificial? Am I crying for others, or am I crying for myself?

For me, the great tragedy happened on January 9 when my cat died in my arms. Since then, I have felt frozen in amber, mired two heartbeats from feeling much in real time. I'm responding to life, I'm taking action, I'm talking, and showing up, but I always feel a step behind, like, did I say the right thing? Am I feeling the right thing? There's a long moment in which I feel suspended in freefall. I can name the abyss. It's uncertainty. The dark hole yawning beneath me used to be hidden by the fog of my mundanities but no longer. Yowza. Life is damn precarious! I bet you feel it too.

After a remarkably smooth trip to the dermatologist on Friday, we learned my mother has a pressure sore on her right ear. (Yay, not skin cancer.) After researching ear-hole pillows on the Internet, I leaped into gear, determined to use materials on hand to create a pillow remedy. A few hours of cursing later, after repeatedly remembering how much I despise sewing, I proudly presented my accomplishment to Mom's caregiver: A pillow with a hole in it and a pillowcase to match. Essentially, it looks like I took a pillow and shot it with a small cannon. I'm still picking up the stuffing scattered around the Love Shack, but Mom has her ear-hole pillow.

Tonight I finally conquered the problem of foggy glasses. It's difficult to drive with fogged up glasses, have you noticed? During the day, okay, but at night, impossible. With or without glasses, not good, I can't see a thing. That reminds me of a time my former boyfriend and I got stranded hiking in an arroyo near the Colorado River after dark. I had only my prescription sunglasses. After dark, I was blind with them and without them. I tied a bandanna to his beltloop and stumbled after him along the sandy riverbed, sure our bones would be washing out somewhere down onto the plain below after the next thunderstorm. Well, driving with foggy glasses at night is like that, without the bandanna and the boyfriend.

In an earlier blogpost I reported that I had discovered my ears were not in a good location for wearing a face mask. Now I can report that my nose also presents a prominent issue. That is to say, the bridge of my nose is quite prominent, which makes it difficult to get a face mask to cover that bony curve. Has my nose always been so bony? Big, yes, since my teens, but gosh, so bony? Why is all the meat on my body migrating away from my wrists and nose and going straight to my ass? Well, a question for the ages. Anyway, today I took a dust mask and stapled a rolled up strip of fabric along the inside top edge. I sprayed the strip of cloth with a little water (I read it on the Internet so it must work, right?) I donned the dust mask and pressed the metal band tight into my skin. Then I took two cotton balls and stuffed them into the two gaps on either side of my nose. Then I covered the whole mess with my faded plaid cotton pleated mask. 

Feeling well barricaded, I expelled some experimental breaths. Eureka! Success. No fog! Special added bonus: Tonight the rain stopped long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the half moon in the southern sky. See what you miss when your glasses are fogged up?

My bathroom is festooned with drying t-shirts, tank-tops, underpants, and socks. Because the bathroom is cold and damp, each load of laundry takes about five days to dry. I've got a nightly routine. After I am done with my bath, I dump the clothes into the tub with me. No, I don't try to wash them while I am wearing them, although that did occur to me. Even though washing them while wearing them might be more efficient, wet clothes are not comfortable. I won't do it, even in the name of efficiency. 

I wash each "load" cursorily with bath soap. I rinse the items in the bathwater and hang them on hangers to drip dry from the windowsill. That's the nightly routine. Every day I take one load of cold but mostly dry, wrinkled stiff clothes, fold them like cardboard, and put them away in my drawers. This is an odd way to live but I don't mind. I conserve quarters, which saves me a scary trip into the bank. 

Tomorrow I get to make a scary trip to get a mammogram. After that I'll do my weekly scary trip to the grocery store, masked and gloved. In and out, like a burglar. It's a scary time but I feel oddly well-equipped to handle it. I don't let the pesky holiday season get in my way. My family stopped celebrating years ago. This is a piece of cake. You stay over there, and I'll stay over here. If you want me, you'll find me on the Zoom. 

 

Almost time to roll credits

Near the end of most romantic comedies, a moment arrives that lets you know a change has occurred. The hero has been driving all night. The montage of headlights, dotted lines, and highway signs flows into a calm sunrise to represent the hero emerging from the dark night of the soul into a new day, transformed somehow, usually by grief or remorse or chagrin. The hero realizes the answer was love all along, or moving home, or apologizing, or singing outside someone's window holding a boombox. The music swells—usually violins—as the hero crests the hill or lands at the airport or whatever and sees the ocean, or the city, or the house, or the love object. When that moment comes, you know credits will soon be rolling up your screen and you can head for the bathroom.

Lately I'm hearing that music when I drive home from my mother's nursing home. I used to call it her retirement home—an unsettling euphemism for a warehouse where old people are sent to die. Now I call it the nursing home, because as she slides deeper into dementia, she's clearly way past the retirement phase of her stay there and there's no use pretending she's going to suddenly start knitting again or playing bingo with the other old ladies.

The music isn't anything specific, usually. Usually Marketplace is on when I get into my car and turn on the radio. It's not like my drive has changed. The restaurants with their optimistic welcome back, we missed you signs look pretty much the same every day, rain or shine. A smattering of cars in their parking lots, a few aggressive drivers on the road, and the sun setting in my eyes over the mountain I live on. Same destination, nothing fancy, nothing new, just my kitchen and my computer and the bad news about the corona virus. It's more of a feeling that a change is coming. 

I visit my mother's window every evening like a hopeful peeping Tom, peering through the screen with the sun reflecting in my eyes. What I hope to see is my mother just arriving from dinner, still alert enough to visit for sixty seconds at the window before she sinks limply on the couch. Earlier this week the nurse called to say they were going to let her take her meals in the dining room. Mom wasn't into eating her meals all alone from a tray in her room. Losing weight, headed south, yada yada. The past couple days she's been more alert. If I time my visit right, I can catch her before she fades.

Yesterday I was too late and she'd already settled into the black hole. I thumbed the button on the parental baby monitor unit and said softly, "Hello Sleeping Beauty, are you awake?" 

She opened her eyes and looked at me. I moved from the screen to look through the glass and pulled my mask down so she could see my face. She gave me a childlike grin and waved. 

"Hey, Ma," I said, waving. "It's me at your window again."

She gazed at me, smiling. After a long moment, her voice came through the monitor in my hand: "There's my Carol." 

"How ya doin', Ma?" I asked, hands cupped around my eyes, trying to see through the reflection. 

"Not too bad," she said as her eyes were closing.

"Okay, I'll let you sleep," I said. "I'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow, tomorrow . . ." 

"Tomorrow, tomorrow," she sang back, and opened her eyes to give me our version of the high-five—the peace sign. I returned it and leaned over the waist-high bush to put my nose on the glass. I can't quite lean far enough to kiss it, and you know, cooties. I try not to think about all the bitty spiders that are jumping from the bush to the front of my jacket.

"Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll love ya, tomorrow," I sang, off key of course, because I can't sing very well. Who cares, not me, I never see any other family members out there peering in their loved ones' windows doing their best to keep them alive by sheer force of willpower. I'm alone except for the occasional dive-bombing crested blue jay guarding a nest I suspect is in the gutter overhead. I wave goodbye, pull up my mask, and head back to my car.

She's pulling away, she's receding from me. It tears me up but I'm doing my best to be there for her. I read that our hearing is the last of our senses to leave us when we are dying. I hope that I'll be with my mother when she leaves. If I am, no matter who is listening, even if I'm bundled head to toe in PPE, I'll be singing the Happy Wanderer into her hearing aid as she goes over the crest of the hill. Roll credits, but not yet, not quite yet.

Covering one mask with another

Every now and then I get a Facebook friend request from someone who knows someone I know. I check out their profile, and if they seem interesting, I will accept their request. It's like putting your hand in a grab bag. Do you remember grab bags? We had them at school fairs when I was a kid. You pay for the privilege of jamming your hand into a bag of supposed goodies. You feel around among the wrapped objects and make your choice, hoping you chose the treasure and not the trash. I have yet to find treasure on Facebook, but the good news is, I can always unfriend the person after I see their true colors.

Today I accepted a friend request from a man (I presume he is a man, gosh, you can't tell from photos, can you?). A FB friend of a FB friend who is the brother of someone I went to high school with. That should be okay, right? I clicked accept and forgot about it. An hour later, a message popped up on my computer alerts.

"Hello, how are you doing?"

Oh, boy. Here we go. The last time I corresponded with a FB "friend," he tried to sell me insurance. Today, I'm bored and looking for some distraction. I have to take my entertainment where I can find it in the new age of COVID. I limber up my chit-chat fingers.

"Great, how are you? Why did you want to be FB friends with me?" I believe in the direct approach.

I wait and pretty soon the little dancing dots start burbling. And burbling. Either we have a slow connection or this person is a very slow typist.

While I'm waiting, I have some time to ponder the new world of grocery shopping in a pandemic. Yesterday I ventured out for my weekly foray to the store. As usual, I brought a cloth mask and a pair of purple gloves (meant to be disposable, but I'm recycling them with soap and water.) I carefully donned mask and gloves before grabbing my shopping bags (yes, they are plastic, and I bag my own groceries, so back off) and headed into the store, vigilantly maintaining distance and avoiding eye contact. I'm still a little anxious, but not as anxious as I was a few weeks ago. I'm starting to get the hang of it. Although I always forget to wipe down my plastic shopping bags, darn it. Well, whatever. Good news: I'm still alive, so whatever I'm doing (or not doing) must be working. It's hard to know, though, because my two-week-old actions might kill me tomorrow.

Eventually another message pops up on the FB messenger feed. My new FB friend has finally finished typing his missive.

"Well, you were among my suggested friends and I decided to add you up, sure you are not at me?"

I have to read the message a couple times to parse the bad grammar. Add me up, yeah, okay, I get that. Sure you are not at me? Hmm. Let me dodge around that hole in the sidewalk.

I write, "You are FB friends with [So-and-So], brother of [Other Guy], who I went to high school with many years ago. Are you a local person?" See what I'm doing there? First, I ignored his plaintive inquiry about me being mad at him. Don't really care about his codependency issues. Instead, I mention our shared connection (to build good will) and then I add the all-important words—many years ago—that signal I'm old and why are you wasting your time talking to me? Then I click send and sit back to wait, thinking about masks both actual and virtual.

As an older white woman, I'm used to being mostly invisible wherever I go. Wearing a face mask escalates my invisibility to a new transparency. People see my shopping cart, but I think they wonder, how is that shopping cart going by itself? I'm not sure, though, because I don't make eye contact.

Have you noticed: Avoiding eye contact is a thing now that so many people are wearing masks. On my morose days, it's always been my default mode to avoid eye contact. Making eye contact is excruciating sometimes. Now it's totally de rigeur to let my eyes skitter away, to glance at people sideways so I can take evasive action if they seem to be lingering near me or blocking my path. It's as if now that I can't see mouths and noses, I can't see eyes. And even better, they can't see me at all! I'm completely not there!

As I was cruising along the aisle hoping to score some facial tissue (allergy season continues to progress at roughly a box a week), I realized I felt more relaxed than usual. Invisibility means it doesn't matter what my face looks like. My expression was neutral under my mask. I wasn't walking around with an inane smile that I hoped said I'm harmless, please don't kill me. Nobody could see my mouth! It didn't matter if I smiled or not. Oh, the relief, I must tell you. I felt ten feet tall as I muscled my cart past the picnic supplies to the paper goods. Who cares if I can only buy one box. I'll sneak an extra box into Mom's order. That will make up for the loaf of gluten-free bread-like substance I bought her last week. No more slinking along the edges of the aisles, making room, grinning like a fool, giving way, hoping people won't be offended by my . . . oh, I don't know, you name it, my weirdness, my fatness, my whiteness, my obviously healthy diet of vegetables (just look in my cart).

Ding! My new FB friend responds, "Not really, we are just friends quite a while now. Where are you? Sure you're not mad at em?"

Seriously? Should I cut this guy loose or keep going? Anyone who can't write a grammatically correct message in FB messenger will never become a close friend of mine. Just saying. Politically incorrect, maybe, but grammatically incorrect, never. Still, I keep going.

I write, "Portland. What are you asking? I'm not understanding you, are you asking if I am mad at you?" I click send and sit back again.

A few nights ago, I went walking after I returned from my two-minute visit outside my mother's window at the nursing home. Spring is here, but warm weather isn't yet. It's good to get outside. I don't bother going into the park anymore, though—too many people. I wander up and down the hills in the neighborhood, crossing streets to avoid fellow wanderers. I guess I'm not totally invisible when I'm out on the streets. I admit, I feel just a twinge of rejection when the party coming toward me crosses to the other side of the street before I do. Like, darn, they rejected me before I could reject them.

Ding! There he is again: "About sending you a request. I'm from Austin Texas but presently in Copenhagen Denmark."

Wow! Copenhagen. That could be an interesting discussion topic. Later, it occurred to me to wonder what time it was in Denmark. Nine hours ahead, right? So about 2:00 a.m.? Insert heavy sigh here. Drunk? Sleepless? Up all night coughing with COVID?

"Why would I be mad?" I respond. "I didn't have to accept. I like [So-and-So] so I thought I might like you. Are you going to try to sell me something?" Might as well get it out in the open now. Insert long pause here. FB messages take a while to cross an ocean and several time zones.

His message appears: "No I'm not. I'm an independent rig engineer working with [Company Name] and also a teacher to the trainee down here." [Pause, new message] "What's your profession?"

Oh, darn. I should make up something really cool, like, underwater photographer or retired botanist. Penguin manager. Bluegrass fiddler. I'm not much of a fibber. Or a fiddler. I can't help but tell the truth, but not all the truth, of course, just the part of the truth that might make me seem really cool.

I write, "I'm an author and an artist." Then in the same message, I immediately deflect. If he is really interested in what I do, he'll pursue it. Meanwhile, I shove the focus back in his direction. I add, "What is Copenhagen like?"

After some moments, he writes, "Pretty, good entertainment, and beautiful morning when the sunrise."

"Is it cold there in the spring?" I know, dumb question. It's a conversational gambit to assess the willingness of the other party to be forthcoming. To bridge the gap. To extend the branch. You could do so much with that, really, if you think about it. Like, what is cold, in your opinion, and how cold is it, and do they have spring there, and what does one wear in the spring in Copenhagen?

"Yes it is."

Right. Okay. I guess I wouldn't be all that coherent at 2:00 a.m. either. Waxing poetic about spring in Copenhagen is clearly not something you can easily do in the middle of the night. Time to wrap this up.

I write, "Okay. I'm going back to work now. Thanks for the interesting chat. Stay warm, stay safe. Bye for now."

Might as well leave it on a pleasant note. I will probably unfriend him when I get home later. Then again, maybe not. In this strange new world, you can't have too many friends.