Day 27, socializing

Friday, 12/28/2018

Went for a run first thing. Ordinarily my Friday exercise is a long walk, but I’d shirked exercise both Tuesday and Thursday. Passed the time unproductively until 1pm when it was time to go to the Museum to lead a docent tour. The Museum was unusually crowded and I was the only docent who’d booked for the 2pm tour. Ordinarily there’d be two on a holiday weekend, so we can split the tour crowd to manageable size. Not today; so I started off with over 40 people in tow. That’s too many; there’s just not standing space around the exhibits I want to talk about, and the people in the back can’t see. Well, the visitors solved that for themselves by just peeling off and leaving. At the end of the tour I had about 20 still with me, which was just fine by me; but I regret the other 20-odd having a frustrating experience.

In the evening, met Su for dinner at a restaurant (hi, Su!). A lot of the conversation revolved around retirement facilities: what we want out of them, what we know of them. That was fine (and informative to me). At least we did not talk about that perennial subject among elders, our medical problems!

Emotionally this was a pretty calm day, and at times I felt quite comfortable in my new skin. I’m only slowly grasping that this is really my life now, and it’s up to me to run it. You’d think I’d’a figured that out during the months of anticipation, and I did, at an intellectual level. But there’s an emotional settling-in taking place now which is quite different (and hard to describe).

Day 26, out of town visitors

Thursday, 12/27/2018

Today I had a long-planned visit from Joanne and Brad. Joanne is the daughter of Marian’s college roommate and long-time friend Lolly. Marian liked Joanne and Joanne shared Marian’s interest in birding. Joanne and Brad planned this visit back in November, expecting, of course, to see Marian. When that sadly did not work out, they came anyway and I was glad of their visit.

Besides Joanne and Brad, there were their daughter Sierra, and Ria, a visiting student from Thailand. As I had planned, I gave Joanne a silver and onyx pendant that Marian had made when she was learning jewelry-making in her 20s. The pendant is kind of large and clunky, but Joanne seemed to think it was quite wearable.

Then with some trepidation I invited the three women to look at the remaining items in Marian’s closet, those “better” items that consignment stores didn’t want (see Day 20). I thought they might flip their way through the hangers and see just old-lady stuff, but in fact they seemed to enjoy looking at everything and critiquing each other’s taste, and took away several items each.

Then as planned we went to look at the Stanford campus, although since the trip was planned Sierra has decided not to apply to Stanford. After a short walk around the quad and a bit of a drive around, they dropped me at home and headed off to meet another friend. So that was a pleasant and warming visit.

In the afternoon I spent another couple of hours on a programming project and actually made some progress.

In general I think I am feeling more comfortable in my new life. I haven’t been bothered by that low-level anxiety for several days. It’s easy to trip into spasms of grief of course (I nearly broke down explaining the provenance of the pendant), but on the other hand I’m noting little satisfactions. Every partnership requires compromise, and when the partnership ends, those constraints are removed. I mentioned in passing on Day 9 that I’d gotten rid of three ferns that I’d never liked. That was one compromise eased. Here’s another: I stopped at the grocery store yesterday and among other items, bought a loaf of bread — bread of a brand that we never had in the house because Marian didn’t like it. I did like it, and now I can bring it home when I want. Trivial, but a tiny up-side to the process of fitting into a new life.

Day 25, Boxing up shards

Wednesday, 12/26/2018

Began the day with the customary run. (Marian often complimented me on doing something for exercise every — well, almost every — weekday morning. I accepted the compliments but felt awkward, as if I didn’t deserve credit for doing something so simple. I really do it out of fear; I’m scared by prospect of how fast my body will turn into a blob if I don’t keep it moving. Twenty years ago, when I was still cycling, I was “off the bike” for six weeks because of a persistent pneumonia. I’ve never forgotten the shock, when I could get back on the bike, of how feeble I had become in a few weeks, and how long it took to get any sort of condition back.)

Then I took care of a loose end. I’ve been keeping Marian’s laptop going just so I could check it each day to see what mail she’d gotten. Boy, was she subscribed to a lot of lists! But after a couple of weeks of clicking “unsubscribe” — and changing the contact email on a number of financial accounts — I’d gotten it down to almost no incoming mail at all. But in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago, it had dawned on me, doh! why do I not simply redirect email to her gmail account, into mine? There must be some way to do that. Today, with only 15 minutes of fiddling around reading Gmail help articles, I found out I could sign in as her, then designate me as a “delegate” who could read her emails and reply or delete them. So I set that up.

Now I can let her laptop sit on a shelf until such time as I can get up the nerve to reformat the drive and sell it. Opening it to see her familiar messy desktop littered with files she’d created… I can’t. Not yet.

I spent a couple of hours on a programming project, or rather, an hour rummaging through system documentation trying to figure out how to do something, and then encountering a bug that kept me from running a test case, then an hour googling for solutions for this bug. Programming. I do it for fun, I tell myself.

Shards

As 2pm was approaching and I’m due to help sort books at FOPAL today I pulled down another shelf of books to box up and donate. Here I hit a couple of “shards”, bits of the old life that is going away, which hurt quite a lot as they peel off.

One is a box of bookmarks. We were both readers and until, say, ten years ago we had several books apiece in progress. So we needed bookmarks, and we’d grab free bookmarks wherever, and after a while Marian set up a box on a handy bookshelf to hold bookmarks so it was easy to grab one. There are bookmarks in the box from several decades of reading. Bookmarks from bookstores we’ve been in: Powell’s in Portland, Davis-Kidd in Knoxville, the Tattered Cover in Denver, Munro’s in Victoria. Dozens.

Now, here’s the thing. Starting a decade ago, we pretty much stopped buying physical books and moved to reading on our laptops: stuff on the web, or books on Kindle for Mac. We typically had one (1) bookmark in operation, in whichever book we were reading aloud from at bedtime. Everything else was on a screen. So these bookmarks have been gathering dust, unused, for years. The newest is from a hotel in Normandy from our 2012 trip there.

Unused, unregarded bookmarks. They should be tossed. But it definitely hurts to do it.

As I was boxing books from this shelf I hit three map books from our days touring the UK: a road atlas for Ireland, the AA road atlas of Great Britain, and a book that was absolutely essential to us for several years, the Master Atlas of Greater London. You see, children, there was once a time when we didn’t have GPS or a phone that ran a map app. We were utterly dependent on maps printed on paper, if you can imagine something so crude!

These handsome volumes have no use whatever now or in the future. The maps are out of date; before today they literally haven’t been off the shelf for 20 years; it has been literally forty years since we used the London Atlas. On my first day of sorting at FOPAL I learned that travel guides printed before 2000 are not kept; they go straight to the recycle bin. These books need to go into the recycle bin right here at home.

Along with the bookmarks.

And it hurts.

I can imagine a sympathetic person saying “Well, why don’t you keep them, then? Or a couple of bookmarks anyway.” But that just puts it off. I’d face the same issue when packing to move to wherever I go next spring. It’s just more possessions to be responsible for, and really useless ones at that.

There’s the contradiction: these objects have a triple nature:

To me, they are powerful symbols of a life I once lived.
To anyone else they are meaningless.
And for me, they have no practical use in the life I am moving into.

There are a lot of objects in this house that have this contradictory nature. How many do I keep?

Day 24, Christmas

Tuesday 12/25/2018

Had a very quiet morning: a walk around the neighborhood, then couch-potatoed for two hours catching up with my YouTube subscriptions. I only subscribe to a few people’s channels, but I hadn’t looked at them in weeks and they’d been busy creating content. (Which makes me feel mildly guilty for not producing any content for my little channel with its 150 subscribers. Well, I’ve been… busy?)

During the morning I had very thoughtful phone calls from Dennis and from Marc, which made me feel connected. Appreciation for that.

That brought me to 2pm, when I drove the mile to Chuck and Suzanne’s house and got to participate in an elaborate and cheerful family Christmas dinner. Which also made me feel connected. So all told, a pretty good Christmas day.

Day 23, Calendar, Cushions, Varnish, Amazon, Good Grief

Monday 12/24/2018

My Calendar

It’s Christmas eve, and as of the morning my calendar for today and tomorrow was completely blank. This did not perturb me. I have intentionally, deliberately ignored everything about the holiday season this year, first as Marian was getting sicker and neither she nor I wanted any celebration; and of course after she died I did not want to go through any empty motions.

In an academic sort of way I thought it might seem sad to have nothing to do Christmas day, not so much because I desired company, but because if someone asked me later in the week, “What did you do on Christmas?” I would have to say (no doubt in an Eeyore-like monotone) “Ohhh, nuthinnn.” Which would be embarrassing, and would provoke entirely unwanted sympathy from the questioner. Or maybe I could lie, invent dinner with a relative the questioner doesn’t know.

I went for my customary run, which felt fine. During it, I got a text from my friend Suzanne, very graciously inviting me to share supper with them on Christmas day! I replied with a grateful acceptance, and now I have something on the calendar for tomorrow.

I texted back asking what I could bring, and Suzanne suggested “flowers for the table”. Sure, I thought, no problem… oh, wait. It’s Christmas bloody Eve and I have no idea where to get a flower arrangement, OMG OMG OMG what’ll I do? Yelp to the rescue; there are at least four florists within a mile radius. I walked into the nearest and the proprietor, a very pleasant woman, said, “Well, there’s this one I’m just working on,” and showed me a nice arrangement of red candles and red roses in pine branches (not botanically convincing, but a good color match). So I stood by and commented as she finished it with lots of sprigs of tiny white blossoms, so it ends up a bit like miniature fireworks. So that’s set.

Cushions and Varnish

After that I finished putting Leather CPR goop on all the green cushions for the second and last time, and put yet another goddam coat of urethane varnish on the little tables, because there were two little screw-ups in the previous coat that I couldn’t stop seeing.

Amazon Fail

Back in 2014 when I was an original backer of Soylent, my first order of Soylent came with a pretty Takeya pitcher for mixing a day’s nutrition. Last week, the plastic top ring split, so I ordered a replacement from Amazon. According to Amazon it was delivered to my porch Saturday at 5:30pm. That would be 15 minutes after I left the house to get supper and go to a movie. It wasn’t there, and didn’t show Sunday; then today when I got back from my run, on the porch was the empty box. It had been crudely ripped open, and inside was only the little air pillows for packing. Inside my mail slot was a business card of a Palo Alto police officer, with the note, “Inform Amazon your package was stolen, if that was the case.” I assume the officer had found the emptied package somewhere and brought it around to my house.

Well, you know, Amazon offers no way to tell it, “My package was stolen.” You can return a shipment if the goods or the package are damaged. I started down that path but realized, how could I return an empty box? It would just confuse things. Back to the “where’s my stuff” link: nope; Amazon doesn’t give you any way to say, my package was stolen, please send another. At least, that I could find. It was only $18, I just ordered one.

Good Grief

Pathways Home Health, the company that provided home care for Marian after her operation, and again during her Hospice period, send me a brochure on Grief Support. Based on this I think I’m getting off pretty lightly:

As we grieve during and after the death of a loved one, we may feel numbness or anxiety, shock or fear, nausea or exhaustion. Confusion, denial, or disorientation are also common. … You may feel flooded with sadness, guilt, or a sense of being in a fog.

OK, I’ve recorded anxiety a couple of times, although not the last few days. Surges of sadness, definitely; although the strongest of these are associated, as I’ve written, with the loss of a lifestyle or life-pattern, rather than the loss of a person. When I think of Marian I feel pity and regret. But the sadness of bereavement is different, comes at different times and from different triggers. (I still can’t bring myself to take down that list of entrées from the bulletin board; and there is a whole closet I am carefully avoiding.)

Anyway they offer a “Partner Loss” group session on Tuesdays, resuming January 7th. I will think about this; maybe I’ll attend one.

Day 22, another Sunday

Well, that’s a boring title, innit?

Sunday, 12/23/2018

This Sunday I maintained my long tradition of doing the Sunday* NYT crossword, the big one, first thing. Time, 38:40, about average, and entered it into my spreadsheet of crossword times, now nearing its fifth year of daily crossword time records. Who’s an obsessive nerd? Not moi!

That brought me to 8am, and I went off by car to Baron Barista for an almond croissant and a cappucino. I didn’t walk, like last Sunday, because I needed to get back before 10. I think I’ll go back to our old haunt for Sunday coffee from now on, the one 1/4 mile away.

Showered, shaved, and at 11 headed off to the Computer History Museum to lead the 12pm docent tour. Sunday of a holiday weekend there should have been two docents, but none of the other volunteers signed up, so I got to lead a group of 30, about twice normal. I did it well and several people told me they enjoyed my presentation, so that’s nice.

On the way to and from the museum I was “talking to my steering wheel,” a habit I’ve had since I’ve had a driver’s license, to lecture my dashboard about what’s concerning me. Homeless people do it while pushing their shopping carts of trash through the streets, and look crazy. In your car, nobody can hear you — and if they notice you talking, these days they’d assume you’re on the phone, probably talking to (depending on your vehemence) your dealer, agent, or parole officer. But not crazy.

Anyway, I was explaining the reasons I’m quite sure I won’t be hooking up with another romantic partner. There’s a lot of things I don’t expect to do ever again; this morning for some reason it occurred to me I’ll probably never go camping again. But not taking another partner was one of the first decisions I made when I began thinking seriously about “being a bachelor”, months ago after Marian’s diagnosis. Then it was based on practical reasons. Now — as I explained to my dashboard — I have another and stronger reason, one I couldn’t have conceived of then.

It’s this (and here’s the kind of snappy dialog my dashboard is privileged to hear): At the very top of my list of experiences to never, ever have again, is the experience of supporting and nursing a loved partner as they fail and die. I did it once, did it I think as well as it could be done; but a saint I am not, and I am not going to put myself in line to do it again, thankyouverymuch. At my age, any anticipated pleasures of love are very much overtopped by the anticipated pain of that experience. Or by the pain of the alternative, being the one who goes through the dying process, dependent on the generous care of a partner. Nope. Not going to be in an emotional partnership ever again, because at my age, one of those scenarios is the inevitable end.

That settled, I was home at 2pm to enjoy the rest of the day. A pretty slow afternoon; I should have improved it with something useful, but didn’t. The only event of interest was the delivery of a new reading lamp, but I think I’ll write about that tomorrow.

*actually the Saturday NYT puzzle, but our newspaper has always printed it on Sunday.

Day 21, what will I do with myself?

Saturday, 12/22/2018

9am: In my Google calendar, today and the next two days (through Christmas) are blank. The first un-eventful days since… I don’t know when. How will I fill them? There are many possibilities… I’ll update this post later.

For a start, I made an errand run, first to the hardware store to turn in three fluorescent bulbs for recycling, then to Whole Foods for some groceries. I supplement the meal replacements with fruit, cheese, avocados, occasional bacon or sausage. Stuff that I can prepare in 5 minutes or less. While making this run I was hit with a couple of waves of deep sadness, not triggered by anything specific, just… sad.

Putting the groceries away turned into a further clean-out of the pantry. I’ve been nibbling at the edges of this job off and on. Threw out two more boxes of breakfast cereal that were lurking up there. Box of cake flour: out. I’m recycling these food items: the food itself is poured into a bio-bag and put in the green recycle bin; the box is flattened for the blue bin. I set aside quite a few unopened cans and bottles; I mean to find a food donation box for them. Saved a container of baker’s sugar because it will work in the hummingbird feeders. But I wonder how long the cake flour and baker’s sugar had been up there? I can’t remember the last time Marian did any baking.

Brought in the hummingbird feeders and filled them. The feeders tend to get patches of a nasty black mold inside and have to be thoroughly cleaned. We’ve been supporting several hummers for a couple of years now. I feel obligated to feed them through the winter, but come spring when blossoms appear, they’ll be on their own.

Finished painting the little tables. There are imperfections but I’m done. They look better than they did after 40 years of neglect.

I have several “real” projects, projects that might have meaning beyond my domestic room. Two software projects, two books. I haven’t “laid a finger” (to use a phrase of my mother’s) on any of those worthwhile projects in weeks. This afternoon I spent two hours re-familiarizing myself with one of the software projects — rereading the code, editing the comments, getting back into it. Two hours is about all the concentrated thinking my brain can stand, but I did that much, and it felt like progress.

Watched the rest of the Return of the King DVD special features, all about the making of that huge project. They wrapped in 2003, 15 years ago. Wow.

Went out for a burger at Gott’s, then to see Bohemian Rhapsody. So quite a bit of stuff in this empty Saturday. Just to make sure tomorrow isn’t empty, I scheduled myself for a docent round at the Museum. And so to bed.

Day 20, More closet work

Friday, 12/21/2018

A drizzly morning so instead of the long walk I like to take on a Friday I drove to the Y and ran a half hour on the treadmill. Back home I revisited the problem of disposing of the “better” selection of Marian’s clothes — the four bags and several hanging items that Jean thought were too good for her church’s thrift shop, and should be consigned, with the receipts perhaps going to Stanford Women’s Basketball. This was a brilliant idea of hers.

However, I emailed two basketball friends who I thought might know about consignment shops, and they replied that they didn’t. So I started researching them. Actually Yelp lists second-hand and consignment clothing shops. A couple in Menlo Park, a couple in Los Altos.

From the sites for these stores I got a better idea of the kind and quality of clothes they want and how they operate. It wasn’t looking very promising, frankly. So I unpacked the four bags and did another division of sheep from goats, that is, setting aside only items with fine fabric (cashmere, silk) or brand names that I recognized as not being run-of-the-mill store or catalog brands. About half made the cut and went back to the closet: leather coats, silk or cashmere tops, a couple of other obviously fine items.

On Santa Cruz ave. in Menlo Park is the American Cancer Society “Discovery store” where donated clothes are sold to benefit cancer research. I took the two big bags of lesser items there. Then I checked out the two shops in Los Altos. The lady at one said she was overstocked, she might look at my things in January. The lady at the other was quite negative: people look for high-end designer brands (the only one of those that Marian had was a little blouse from DKNY); leather and faux-leather jackets don’t sell well; silk and cashmere tops are pretty slow. Welp, that just about eliminates my inventory.

Probably in January, unless another idea surfaces, I’ll take the remaining items to the ACS shop.

In the evening I finished playing The Return of the King and spent some time going through the bonus material on the third disc of this “extended edition”. As to the film, I was most impressed by the way Peter Jackson and crew created battle scenes. The seamless mix of live and CGI and model work to produce the chaos of a fantasy battle is amazing. I still don’t forgive him for discarding the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire”. He addresses this directly in one of the bonus talks: to him, the story was all about Frodo. He just didn’t see the wonderful possibilities for irony and humor in this closing chapter, or the importance of finishing the arcs of Merry and Pippin. It could all have been done in three minutes of film.

Day 19, Marian’s closet

The play last night was oooo-kayyy I guess. Into the Woods is a very complicated play with lots of characters, and the Los Altos group did a very good job of staging it in the confines of the tiny Bus Barn Theater. My seat was in the front row and I had to be careful not to stretch out for fear of tripping one of the actors. Most of the cast was competent (the young woman playing Cinderella was really good). But the play itself, oh my goodness. The first act ran an hour and a quarter, the second didn’t start until 9:40 or so, and it is slow and full of long, soliloquizing songs with very little melody. Didn’t get home until 11pm.

Thursday 20/12/2018

Walked to the Y for a workout in chilly fog. Then spent an hour beginning the process of clearing out all Marian’s clothes. I started with drawers in various cabinets. When sister in law Jean arrived, we began the process of dividing the clothes into “thrift shop” versus “consignment”.

Jean said her church’s thrift shop would take all used clothes, even shoes and socks, which surprised me. So everything worn-looking or inexpensive went to them, about 8 large plastic garbage sacks to stuff into the trunk of her car.

Almost that much bulk, four plastic sacks and some jackets and ensembles still hanging up, are the “consignment” collection. I don’t know anything about second-hand clothes stores, so I have emailed a couple of women who might, for advice.

This was not too bad an emotional experience, as long as I kept focussed on the practical job at hand and took care not to picture Marian wearing any of the items or remember a time when she got it or wore it. I was astonished at how much she had neatly (of course) packed away. She had at least 20 nice scarves in a wide variety of patterns, and she almost never wore a scarf. I recognized just one, a very soft knitted lavender-brown one. She bought it in Germany because we kept seeing German women who were wearing scarves and she thought the style looked good.

One object just broke me up. I tried to talk about it to Jean and just could not make my voice work. (Fortunately emotion doesn’t clog up my typing fingers the way it does my throat and mucous membranes…) Sometime in the 1990s, Marian embarked on making a quilt, based on a very elaborate pattern of stitched flowers. She bought the fabric and the matching thread; she stitched probably four complete squares out of the twenty or so in the pattern; cut and sewed parts (stems, petals) for a few more. But she found her eyesight just wouldn’t support the very fine hand-stitching required. She stowed the project neatly in a drawer; once every few years she’d take it out and look at it; but she could never finish it.

So here is this unfinished quilt, a pile of neatly-cut fabric sections, paper patterns and templates, and small boxes of completed components, representing probably a couple hundred hours of work with hundreds more to finish it. Does it go to the landfill?

Jean took it and said she was confident that the thrift shop people would find someone who wanted it. I hope she’s right; anyway it is a relief to have it out the house, I guess.

Day 18, Books and Haircut

Last night’s adventure was to attend a “story slam” put on by The Moth. Back-story: my niece Laurel has been trying to connect me to her friend Ed Lewis, who has an avocation as a story-teller. Ed was going to be in San Francisco for this slam, and we agreed to meet before the event to eat. My friend Scott was interested so we drove up together. Ed is a cheerful guy with a lot of stories. At the slam, anyone can put their name in a bag, from which ten names were drawn to tell their stories in five minutes each. Ed’s name wasn’t drawn. His professional opinion of the tellers who were chosen was not positive, except for the two who were scored highest by the judges. Those two really did tell gripping personal tales with confidence and panache. Ed invited us to come to a story-telling festival he’s running in January to hear “really good, professional tellers.”

Wednesday, 12/19/2018

After a run (another good one, 40 minutes nonstop and felt fine) I spent some time trying to master this WordPress blog’s styling. Ended up using the WordPress online chat for help, which was quite helpful. But I really would like to get an archive of prior posts in the sidebar, similar to what Blogger offers, and it doesn’t seem possible.

New Gig

At 1pm I went for my first volunteer gig at FOPAL. This was quite enjoyable. I’m going to like this weekly 2-hour gig. What I’m doing for now is sorting. FOPAL has defined about 60 interest categories, like “computers”, “classic literature”, “travel narrative”, “movies/tv” and so on. Each category has some shelf space in the big Sale Room, where the monthly book sales take place. Each category has at least one volunteer “manager” who prices and arranges her category’s books on the shelf before sale day.

People come to the door with bags and boxes of books as donations, and of course these are not nicely categorized. The donation boxes and bags pile up in a small mountain in the center of the Sorting Room. Around the walls of the Sorting Room are shelves with boxes labeled for each category. What I and other sorters do is to open a donation box; look at each book; decide if it is worth keeping at all, and if so, into what category box to drop it. Then put the book in the box for its category. When a category box fills up, move it to the appropriate area of the sale room for the category manager to handle.

It’s a fun job, good mental exercise evaluating the books, and physical exercise as well, walking back and forth and carrying heavy boxes of books around. Nice people to work with, too, as one would expect at an all-volunteer outfit.

Haircut

Since the 1980s, Marian and I both had our hair cut by Chris Johnson. She gave Marian’s last shampoo and blow-dry the week before she died. On the way home from that appointment Marian asked what I planned to do about haircuts when she was gone. I said “Oh, probably stay with Chris, no point in changing”. So today was the appointment for haircuts that we’d made weeks earlier. I left early from the FOPAL gig to make the 4pm appointment. Chris and I kind of talked around issues, not doing a lot of reminiscing about Marian, so I only choked up a couple of times.

Home for a rest and supper, then I go out again at 7:30 to see Into the Woods at the Bus Barn theater.