A rational part of my being is centered and positive and looking forward into my future. Another part is still all confused and unfocused and torn up by the last year's events. I am as much a scared, frightened child as I am an intrepid, fearless explorer. I can't seem to find too much of the practical picking up and cleaning person since my back went out, but I'm looking for him.
This weekend was kind of a washout on a selfish level, but very good for my soul in a general kind of way. You see, I drove up to Pismo Beach/San Luis Obispo to attend the memorial of a dear old friend, Robert Lee Norton, who I've known for 40 years. It was so weird, because he was taking care of his wife, Vena, who was having health problems. He also had a cough he couldn't shake, but his focus was on getting Vena better.
Then his diagnosis of lung cancer, and within a number of days he had died. Vena was just getting back on her feet when it happened. If they weren't both such resilient people, it would have been the end of them both, I think. But Vena seems to be hanging in there, and she has a support group of a cast of thousands.
Now back to me.
I know that Kittie and David were urging me to come up to the memorial to get me the hell out of the house and the megalopic miasma we call L.A. I knew I needed to get away, as well, so I made my reservations at Motel 6 and put out extra cat food.
I left Saturday around noon. The drive up was long, with a good half-dozen places on the road where the traffic came to a complete standstill or, at best, crawled along at 15 mph for long periods of time. Five hours later, I had arrived at the motel, and my back was singing a painful ode to the journey. "Sitting still" for that period of time, all the little movements and adjustments you make while driving (holding your arms just so to steer, that slight extension of the foot on the gas, the bouncing of the car) really put a strain on my back muscles, and they told me about it as I dragged my bags into the motel room.
It was nice to be on Kittie and David's turf again. The apple tree in their back yard was still putting forth fruit, so Kittie had yet another apple pie. This one with the appropriate amount of cinnamon. On Saturday, David was finishing up the work on the transmission that he had brought down to L.A. the last time they visited. The job was finally done and he was eager to get the car delivered and out of his hair.
I had stopped on the road and eaten around 4 p.m., so I was not particularly hungry and passed on dinner, but I did have some apple pie with them. David dropped me off at the motel around 11 p.m., and I had a fairly good sleep, but woke to even more stiffness and pain Sunday morning. I drove over to the Denny's that I would normally walk to, had a late breakfast and killed time until the memorial.
We gathered at Cuesta Park, a beautiful setting at the base of the Cuesta grade in San Luis Obispo. There were quite a number of people attending, and I ran into folks I haven't seen in years, some in years and years, some in several decades. We are all so wrinkled now. It was lovely to see them all after so many years, but it also brought home the fact that SLO, for me, is my past; something I can't retrieve but only recall.
I made it through the ceremony fairly well, standing erect and feeling only slightly uncomfortable. I returned to the motel after and lied down for an hour, then Kittie stopped by after returning from the service and ferried me to her house, stopping briefly at Radio Shack to purchase a WiFi router for their home.
They bought a Blue-Ray player that's WiFi ready, and I was trying to explain all the streaming services that are online these days; that you can get almost the same programming on them that you can from a cable service, and the cost is much less. I also touted the advantages of having WiFi at home and hooking up the iPhones (gifts from me when Steve died) and Kittie's iPad, so they run faster and don't use up the data plan.
David's still kind of gun shy of all this 21st-century technology, so I decided that, instead of waiting for them to purchase a router, I simply made a gift of it. Kittie and I took it home and I supervised while Kittie attacked the rat's nest of cable's behind the computer in order to hook up the router to the modem. We had the router up and running by the time David got back, and we had a grand old time connecting all the WiFi devices. I even got them to sign up for Netflix.
Up until now, they have been getting their TV over broadcast, which meant two, maybe three stations came in clearly enough to watch. When they broke down and purchased a digital flat-screen TV, all of a sudden they had many more channels. I'm hoping that they'll get hooked on Netflix, since there are a whole passel of films from the '30s, '40s and '50s that Kittie has never seen that I consider vital viewing for anyone to have a decent cinematic visual vocabulary.
We ordered in pizza and had another round of apple pie, then I said my goodbyes and David drove me back to the motel. I was ready to relax the back once more, as it had been a tiring day.
The next morning my back was so sore. I collected my things (very few for such a short stay), packed, checked out, gassed up the car and drove once again over to the Denny's for breakfast.
The trip back to Pasadena was uneventful, 65-75 mph all the way. It was a chore to get the luggage (two small bags and a therapy machine for the lower back I had gotten from Kittie). That evening I went to bed early.
Tuesday morning I felt as though my back had reverted to Day One. I was hobbling around the house once again, bent over like a 90-year-old man. I tried the therapy machine and it provided only marginal relief. My back was screaming and kicking over all the abuse it had suffered,
Today the back is feeling much better, since most of yesterday was recuperative. I have a couple of errands that need to be done today, and I'm back to that balance of being good to my back muscles and working them when they're up to it. I am noticing that I do bounce back quicker from these periods of overwork.
The chamber of commerce directory is my focus right now, and the next few weeks it will start coming together. I'm hoping that Paul will have new photography and copy this year, as it is my third time doing this book, and the old stuff is getting boring (at least to me).
October. A big month. The anniversary of Steve's death is 12 days away. The wedding ring comes off my finger and either goes back into its original box or will hang around my neck, I'm not sure which.
So my left ring finger will be naked once more, and I am sleeping on sheets now that Steve never touched. It has taken a year, but I slowly segue into mi vida de solatero, ma seule vie.
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