P o c k e t CT

I think that I am not so good at blogging when life is happening at full force. I can’t seem to write until I get out something about the thing that is taking up all the space in my brain, all the time in my life and looks at me with intensity saying “this is the real deal.” The thing is that my mom has been in hospital – first with a thing that was a little alarming but seemed like it would turn right around. That ended with a phone call from mom on New Years saying that she was home and happy. Good. Fabulous. On the second though, there was one of those 4:30am wake up calls that had heart attack, bypass and not in a good space for this surgery all in the same sentence. I can now rework in my head the poster for “Worried Person” to have my picture on it. This is a person who can not sit to write about the interesting things around her life because there is an elephant in the corner and its name is “mortality.”

The elephant scene reminds me that one time on a job interview that I was asked the following question
“please answer the next question without a lot of thought… what ever comes into your head. Someone gives you an elephant. What do you do?”

I said, following the instructions to the letter and not missing a beat, “Ride it”

I had at that point never ridden an elephant. I have now and that is a hugely humorous story with a woman traveling with me that was so incredibly gargantuan that she made the elephant literally buckle and another person we were traveling with squeal “I’m squuuuuiiiished” over and over for the entire ride, all in her spanish accent that made me laugh so hard I could cry even though it was clearly.not.funny.

But here I am getting off subject. Oh yeah, that elephant someone gave me. The answer, to ride it, wasn’t exactly what the prim HR person was hoping for. Apparently this question is a perfect mirror into the true soul of a person and I had just proved myself an opportunistic hedonist, not a nurturer like she had hoped. Valued answers in her opinion are “feed it,” “make a home for it” the fund raising favorite of “thank you” or the practically peppered “give it to the zoo.” I did not get this job, and oh how I am thankful to be passed over by the plastics factory with their dour faces and funny smelling production floor.

But here is that other elephant. It loomed large that first day with the surgery. With the good news of survival and the myriad of not so good pieces and the non committal comfort of “I have seen people recover from this state” and what wasn’t said in that statement. Then there were continual baby steps to shrink the looming pachyderm. Now it is small enough to hear complaints and desires of home. All this gives me a profound sense of relief, but underneath I am developing an understanding of something. The element of life that is mortality sits between us all the time, in any relationship we have in the world someone will go first, someone will be left. Keeping aware of this I hope to somehow not squander the time with the people I love.

The pictures were taken around the hospital and garage. There were many times I saw the medical equipment with its repeating tubes lights and odd colors but that felt a little freakish. I settled for the winter sunlight through the building architecture.