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Thought of a lot a lot of good opening lines*tried this one out on Mike and it got a laugh, so*

Mike, your worst fears are realized. I am still alive, proving that I don’t have to be dead to continue to haunt you.

(Thought I would share an interesting surgical experience, but now, having written it, it feels awfully narcissistic, and like, who cares? But what the hell*maybe it’s medically informative to the 1% interested*)

The eeriest thing about my pterygium excision and conjunctival graft was that I felt totally alert during the one hour procedure, even wanting to chat and jibe with Richard and Loraine. I wish I could say I had been one of those out-of-body perspectives from the ceiling so I could have seen exactly what was going on. Instead, I was fully in-body, with only my blurry pterygium-eye to reconnoiter, while Dr. Rodman pokes sharp instruments into itóbut without me feeling a thing.

I said at one point “so you went to Brown?”. “No” he responded. Bull * I did remember that correctly. Maybe he misunderstood me. Linda kept telling me afterwards that I was mumbling. Maybe I was mumbling then and having a drug-induced conversation mainly with myself.

An hour or so later I was dozing drowsily in my reclining wheelchair in the recovery room, eye patch in place, hearing some guy to my left angling to be let go, and then Linda coming in looking for her husband. I roused briefly to claim my jacket out of my clothes bag, tried to say goodbyes to all the nice people that had helped me along the route from prep to recovery (Aaron the prep nurse, Mary who took my vitals, anesthetist Dr. Liu and her anesthetist nurse Loraine, etc ̱ but I could not remember them all, and I was again probably still mumbling) (PS Рno one knew Rob Steinberg).

As I was wheeled upstairs via the large elevator, I remember thinking (saying?), “So, this is what it’s like to be Arthur !”. Helped into the front seat of the car, we were off to CVS for pain meds and then home to bed. Where I slept for fifteen hours, rousing only my Tylenols with codeine, lest my bruised eye start to complain too heavily.

While I thought I could play up the eye-patch-invalid-can’t-work-or-anything thing for several days, Dr. Rodman threw away my eye patch during my post-op visit the next day, saying my graft looked great (if he may say so himself), and that all I needed was “one drop four times a day, and come back in two weeks.” “I’m off to El Salvador tomorrow, to excise pterygia where they are plentiful among the natives [that work the fields and are in the near-equatorial sun all day]”, he said. (In those parts they have a much more mundane name for pterygia: carnosidad , meaning fleshy outgrowth , which describes the murky, blood vessel-filled, flap on the cornea). It is nice to know that this very successful Boston ophthalmologist still has a Socratic human side.

My pterygium is gone, the swelling is down, I drove around a bit yesterday, and declare myself back on-line.

A close-up for the ophthtalmologically curious. The red part is where the pterygium was (should have take a before shot). Looks worse now, but the idea is that the redness will go away, leaving my eye not looking bloodshot much of the time, and hopefully my reading glass prescription will come back into the normal range as the astigmatized eyeball regains its normal spherical shape.

Emmaís birthday cake, her matching tee shirt, and a must see

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Emma’s actual birthday was a week ago, but we had this second celebration with her family, Flo and Susan.

Flo and I napped on the drive home.

Emmaís birthday cake, her matching tee shirt, and a must see

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Emma’s actual birthday was a week ago, but we had this second celebration with her family, Flo and Susan.

Flo and I napped on the drive home.

Somewhere in France. 1981.
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Adam Kibbe

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Not all of Albuquerque was endless desert skies and appealing adobe, the waxing moon rising poetically each night over the rugged Sandia mountains in the impossibly blue high desert air.

Earlier this winter, the downslope neighbor had read my father the riot act after the septic pumper backed around the lone pi’on and onto her property while preparing to pump his system. Crushing nothing but scrub, but violating her invisible boundaries and offending her sensibilities by crushing…… well, something, I’m sure. Hard to tell with scrub chapparal. Delicate, slow-growing ecosystem, but it generally naturally looks pretty crushed anyway.

To take responsibility for future actions, however, my father set about finding his property lines, in the otherwise unfenced, unmarked rolling terrain of their neighborhood at the foothills of the Sandias. A plot plan quickly led him to the northern two survey markers down one long side of his house, and in a recent visit, my brother helped him relocate a short stretch of fence to allow the septic truck to turn before the pi’on, still on Dad’s property. But despite measurements and trigonometry, Dad had been unable to locate the southern two, covered, presumably, in the shifting topography of a dry wash arroyo.

Sons love to be helpful to fathers they love and admire. And they like to show them up, too. So on our own recent visit, I took advantage of the useasonably warm blue-sky day to get outdoors and wander a bit, enjoying the desert sun and pi’on-scented air, and hoping to find that which had eluded Dad.

The downslope neighbor’s son was rumored to have surveyed and staked the southwest corner, thus completing their perimeter defense. I did my own calculations and found a bit of pipe — which otherwise had no earthly reason being in the arroyo — sticking up a few inches out of the pebbly sand of the desert within a foot or two of where my cruder methods placed that corner. My “spot” was less to my father’s advantage (and also under a thorny bush), so I deferred to the greater precision of a level transit (and the thornless open earth) and accepted their verdict.

The last corner was never found. But I did find my father’s discrete wooden stake gratifyingly exactly where I first looked, though I calculated the SE corner marker to be several yards further away from the road. I got Tricia to come out and help me sight that line down to the SW plumbing pipe corner — a line which was suprisingly close to the south side neighbor’s house — and we began to look along that swath of scrub for the last marker.

About that time, though, that neighbor came out to see if their mail had come, and wondering who we were and what we were doing, came over. After introductions and explanations, he acknowledged a similar interest but launched into a long rationale involving legal setbacks and why it couldn’t be that close to his house, and then marched north about 10 yards into the arroyo (and my father’s land) to show us where we SHOULD be looking. Very friendly, mind you. We politely listened, and then gave up our search, rather than rub his nose in our theoretically more rational accuracy.

The previous day we had driven up to the crest of the Sandias (10,678′) and taken a brief hike in the snow 1/4-mile or so along the precipitous rim, until we’d come to a point where we could look down into the foothills and my parent’s neighborhood a mile or so below, and hopefully see their house. I took a telephoto image, which I could then also digitally zoom in on, and indeed, we could hazily make out their drive, and the neighboring houses. But from roughly a mile away, the land looked so spacious, ample beyond words. Houses dotted innumerably about, yes, but sharing that vast openness the western desert offers.

I thought of that contrast — the lack of borders from the perspective of distance, the rationalized but irrational, greedy protectiveness of humans in close proximity — as I trudged back into the house to report my failure to my father (I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or relieved). And I thought about the age-old adage that good fences make good neighbors. Here I’d admired the neighborhood’s lack thereof (the one my brother had helped move was just a very local ex-dog compound of the previous owners), but it seemed that the sense of borders was very strong indeed, and that the unmarked uncertainty led to broad, pre-emptive, antagonistic assumptions.

Anybody remember The Guess Who? (No, not the more famous band one Guess short of that……). And their hit song Share the Land? http://www.lyricsdir.com/g/the-guess-who/share-the-land.php

“Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand
Maybe I’ll be there to share the land
That they’ll be givin’ away
When we all live together”

Another 60’s lyric rendered absurd. But I’d loved that song, and I could hear it, distantly, as I stood atop the mortared mound of rock that is the Sandia Crest official peak elevation marker and taken a panorama the previous day. I’ve never believed in communal property — sounds oxymoronic, frankly — and I have an abiding respect for (some would say worship of ) privacy. But I wondered why I’d been so interested in finding those markers. Let them go unfound. They’re there should they be required to inform some future discussion. But to learn to forget them would be the true accomplishment. Reacquire that higher perspective. And learn a new adage. Good neighbors make needless all fences…….

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Complete Abuquerque gallery

I don’t know what the national coverage is, but I don’t think they’re exaggerating this storm.

It’s difficult to photograph snow to convey accurate depths – too much redundant white, plus I’d actually have to venture outside -but here are two from this morning.

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Afternoon
I’m a bit embarrassed to post these snow blowing photos, but I do have an ulterior purpose – for a change. You might think, gee, look at that guy braving the elements, clearing his driveway to provide safe egress for his family should any unforeseen disaster befall. Or, more mundanely, should one of us decide to go to work or school. And that would be okay.

However, if my mother were the shutterbug her son is, she would post similar photos of my father throwing snow back against mother nature. Except he is ninety and he would be using a shovel.

My ulterior motive is to thank my brother-in-law for the snow blower. He called me three times, before each previous snowstorm, urging me to retrieve it from his garage. Yesterday, finally, I did. And this beast with tank treads is the snow blower equivalent of Mike Mulligan.

I pulled it out the bed of my truck, it landed in the snow, buried but for the long handle. It started after two pulls and barreled through twenty inches of snow like a second grader through the frosting on a birthday cake.

Photo sent by Dan of his driveway.

Cheryl, Diane, and Wayne Mellin
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Bonnie and Greg Downing. Saco River, 1981.
Oh, and Diane in the stern which means she is steering?
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Emma’s room

I’m at the Finlay’s painting Emma’s bedroom. It’s late afternoon, Kate calls needing a ride home and Emma’s my navigator as we wend our way through the back roads.

As pure dialogue, this conversation sounds morbid. It wasn’t at all.

“My birthday is in five days?”

“Five days? I thought your birthday was in May?”

I had no idea when her birthday was.

“No, it’s January.”

“What are you going to be? Sixteen, seventeen?”

“No, thirteen.”

That much I did know.

“Emma, Do you dream?”

“No.”

“I mean, do you remember your dreams?”

“No. Do you?”

“I used to remember them better than I do now. I have a recurrent dream where I’m lost and I don’t know how to get where I’m going and sometimes I don’t even know where it is I’m going.”

“My friend Molly had a dream that lasted three nights.”

“Three nights? What do you mean? Like she’d get up in the morning and then that night she’d take up where she left off?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. She should write it down. Do you know what it was about?”

“Did you see The Dawn of the Dead?”

“Yes.”

“It was like that… .”

“With dead people crawling out of graveyards?

“Dead people that were infected. One of them crawled through a dog door.”

“And died?”

“He was already dead. The good guys didn’t think he could crawl through the dog door but he did.”

“And he killed the good guy.”

“Yeah. I died in the third dream.”

“How did you die?”

“I don’t remember.”

Spurred on, perhaps, by our discussion, I scored a trifecta this morning. In one dream I was lost AND I was running in molasses. In another I was to give a speech in front of a group of people, but I was in a panic because I had forgotten to prepare.

Peter, Diane, Eileen and Linda. Moving day, Acton, 1983.
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