Train of thought

Thursday I went for my pre-op visit, a quick in-and-out so the nurse could check my blood pressure and tell me how long I’d be in surgery (I’ll be getting out the same day!) I’m always amazed at how nurses can go through the same process, time after time, with one new face after another, with the same good cheer and patience. I’m grateful, because for me it’s my first time. How often we sit at opposite sides of some desk or table, one experienced and one not, and we forget how differently the other person feels. Maybe this will help me remember as a teacher when I have some new student sitting across from me on her first day of junior high.

I have begun to feel twinges of uneasiness, especially if I wake up in the middle of the night. I know the surgery is not long or dangerous, but it is irreversible, a forever change, with a long list of possible consequences. I make myself think of other things, reciting Longfellow’s “The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of night…” or even his “I heard the bells on Christmas Day…” anything strongly rhythmic to change the train of thought, (though anyone with trains in their back yard knows that changing a train of anything from its nailed down route  is not possible. Maybe it means passengers changing trains. That’s not what first came to mind because, honestly, how many of us do that? Today we get in a car and stay there till the journey’s done. Maybe “change the plane of thought” would work. That we’d understand. Have I changed your plane of thought yet?)

I also feel time marching inexorably toward Tuesday 11:15. And the thought crosses my mind to simply blow it off and not show up. But I won’t. I’ll walk in and lie down and let them put the IV in and just wait for it to happen. How much we wait for things to happen. Robert and I watched a movie about a Jewish family during the holocaust that just stood up against a wall, waiting for the bullets. A woman in the background watched. This is not comparable, of course, but it has the same sense of taking steps of your own toward an inevitable end, of acquiescing to a process you’d like to stop.

Enough morbidity. The new place is full of windows and green lawn and Robert’s mom’s pictures on the wall, and fresh, juicy tomatoes from Stella’s garden, and fresh, juicy peaches from the Walls’ peach farm, and a borrowed lathe in the garage (!) and a Group of Seven straggly pine calendar in a prominent spot, and Gabriel’s cow slippers that go mooo (his parents are Colombian missionaries visiting us for a few days, and they accidently left his good shoes on the counter where the immigration officers ask to see your papers), and a jacuzzi and the occasional rumbling train in the back yard. It’s cool and sunny outside, so I don’t need Longfellow to change my plane of thought.

Our two days away to celebrate our 25^th changed our plane of thought. It seems to me that after a while we get wound up and lose our ability to see things from the other’s point of view, and we understand the person across the table a little less. When that happens, it’s time to slow down and just be together, walk around town at a slow, low-red-blood-cell rate, do something fun (watch Carousel), snuggle on the couch to admire Banksy’s Wall and Piece, and agree on things (we didn’t like the message of Carousel that women should just take whatever their fella hands out, and everyone should just BELIEVE!-- but it was well performed). It’s cool how we can watch our plane of thought take off and take measures to get off at the next stop and switch planes. I can somewhat control my route though the destination stays the same.