Saturday morning, Oakland, California
Rain, taxes, requisite kitty--aka the power of the specific and minute
“Start writing,” commands the prompt, or prompts the prompt I suppose I should say. Often, that very command flummoxes me to the point of silence. If I sit and ponder, even for a moment, what I should write, I will stop. I will silence myself. All kinds of unhelpful catcalls from the peanut gallery ensue. “Well, what’s your theme? What do you and only you have to say? What does your ‘audience’ want and need? How can you be helpful? How can you save a life?”
Those questions and catcalls freeze me to the bone.
The truth is, it would be profoundly arrogant to presume I know “what my audience wants.” Equally so to pretend I’m an expert on anything. I sort of just mosey along in my life, sometimes charmed and sometimes completely deflated by my experiences and what I encounter.
I find it freeing to write about the specifics of the life I occupy. I also find it comforting and edifying and sweetly charming when other writers do this. When they open the curtain and give me a glimpse of their lives. Grand pronouncements aren’t required. Clever summations might be fun. Wisdom is welcome. But again—they’re not required.
Also, I find that when I’m writing, muddling along, the seemingly disparate parts of my life begin to align or interweave or echo one another in ways I didn’t anticipate. In other words, the very act of writing makes the writing. So, actually, the prompt here is excellent, is perfect. “Start writing.” That’s all we can do. That’s less intimidating than, “Tell your story.” A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end and presumably says something pithy along the way, something the reader can take along with them.
Again, I can’t presume to know what a reader might take away from my writing. How can any of us? I don’t even know what I will take away from my own writing when I begin. I don’t know what I will learn, what I will discover I had noticed without even being aware of it, as if by osmosis. It’s only by writing that I (sometimes) make a discovery. However, almost always, I feel better after the attempt.
Write for yourself, my friend K. says. Yes, that is what we all must do.
It’s Saturday morning in Oakland, California, and I am in the living room of the four-plex I bought with my son six months ago. I’m listening to “Light Blue” by Ron Carter and other songs from my Liked Songs list on Spotify. It rained last night, after an unusually warm end of the week, dousing the roots of my baby, pink-flowering California Buckeye (planted last fall) and the Pacific Madrone “Marina” planted two weeks ago. It also doused the roots of the chalky-white California native Dudleyas I planted, a plant I love but that I’ve had bad luck with in the past. They don’t like to have their feet wet, apparently, and drowned in the heavy soil at my old front garden on Guido Street. This time, I added perlite to the earth in hopes of creating or simulating better drainage. They looked a little soggy though yesterday. We’ll see what happens.
It’s stopped raining. The sky is dark and overcast. The street and sidewalks are still wet, and I like it this way. In California, we are blessed with an incredibly clear, bright light from the sun, and even in the Bay Area, so much cooler than Los Angeles, it is hot here for months on end in the late spring, summer, and early fall. It can be a bit ruthless. The days like this where we’re invited to shelter inside, listen to good music, read, and… do taxes, as today’s chore list requires, are welcome.
Also, I’m not entirely well today, having two days ago been hit with a bizarre and horrible incidence of vertigo which would have knocked me flat were I not already flat. I was just waking up Thursday morning when I rolled over onto my stomach and wham! was tugged, or thrown, into a hideous altered reality. The room began swinging like some unruly barge in the throes of an irate sea. I managed to get on my back again and watched the ceiling and the chandelier spin at high velocity above my head. Closing my eyes only aggravated the extreme pitching sensation in my body.
When I managed to get up, I made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up.
I canceled all of the meetings I had with colleagues at my new job, where it was only my fifth day, and spent the next few hours trying to get a medical appointment. I was scared. Was it a brain tumor? A mini-stroke? Was my heart suffering some sort of electrical storm? Of course, being the slight hypochondriac that I am, I could think of no small reason for this unpleasant episode.
My health insurance (COBRA, which is the very expensive interim insurance we have in the U.S. that allows you to keep the insurance you had with your employer for a high premium) ran out on April 1st. I was able to get me and my daughter on Medi-Cal, insurance for the unemployed and indigent. So, of course, I called Medi-Cal to find out where I should go. I won’t bore you to pieces with the ugly details. Suffice to say, it was impossible to find a real person to speak to. I was in a labyrinth of robo-call attendants, pushing buttons until I was crazed, not to mention livid.
I decided to call Kaiser, as that was my health care provider under my employer and during the COBRA period. They told me I wasn’t covered and yada yada. I learned via sleuthing and combing online directories that my new Medi-Cal “carrier” was Alameda Alliance for Health. I managed, after much effort, to talk to a real person there who informed me my coverage was “pending.” In other words, I had no coverage.
I called Kaiser to try to get an appointment with my former doctor and was unable to. I knew from my therapist Leo that Medi-Cal does cover Kaiser so I decided to walk, carefully, to my doctor’s office. No one would see me. They said, “Go to the emergency room.” They also said I would have to sign a waiver saying I would pay the bill if Medi-Cal didn’t. I left. I walked home (carefully) discouraged, angry, hurt, and also flabbergasted. There didn’t seem to be any help available.
That night, I had vertigo again, but not as extreme. I’d learned by now that if I didn’t turn my head to the side I could control the severity of the pitching. But the last half of the night I couldn’t sleep because I was dizzy and nauseous.
I also had strange half-dreams. In one, I was in the ocean with a second person, a friend or mate or family member. It was dusk or dawn. The light was blue-grey and misty. I looked up from where we were treading water and saw our ship drifting away, almost obscured by the fog.
I cried, “The ship!” And we began swimming frantically toward the ship. As I swam, I thought, how are we going to get up the side of the ship even if we do succeed in reaching it? I was trying to remember if there was a ladder. When I looked up again, I saw that by some miracle we were nearing the ship. There was a chance we would be okay.
Yesterday afternoon, my Kaiser doctor called, a minor miracle. She asked me some questions and then told me I likely was experiencing benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). “BPPV is thought to be caused by little calcium carbonate crystals (otoconia) coming loose within the canals. Usually, these crystals are held in special reservoirs within other structures of the inner ear (utricle).”
“Yuk,” said my son.
It’s short-term, resolving within days to weeks, and IT’S NOT FATAL. With the anxiety component of my symptoms lifted, I felt well enough to get groceries and a birthday cake for the dinner I had planned for my friend S. last night.
I got a perfect little amaretti cream cake Crixa Cakes. I went to beloved market Berkeley Bowl for salmon and greens and etc. (I figured I’d figure it out when I got there), but was chagrined to discover salmon for three (my son was joining us) would be over $50. I got an organic chicken instead, which I spatchcocked and doused in salt, pepper, some curry powder, and za’atar, under which I tucked garlic cloves and bay leaves—a little trick I learned from my son. With this perfect chicken, roasted for 45 minutes at 425 (turned down to 400 halfway through), I served roasted leeks, potatoes, garlic, and brilliant concentrated red bell pepper. S. brought asparagus and a delightful farro-herb salad bright with mint.
It’s no longer morning. Our 18-year-old tortoiseshell kitty is still sleeping beside me. Pancho Sanchez’s Morning is now playing. My son is still working on taxes in the adjacent dining room. The sky is still glowering. My feet are cold. The heat is on. Tea is calling. And later, tango. I’m planning on attending the milonga with live orchestra at The Dome, an art studio turned event space nearby, in hopes that my vertigo will continue to abate. I’m meeting tango friends driving down from Mendocino on California’s north coast at Pomelo, an Israeli restaurant on Piedmont Ave. a short walk away.
That is my summation for now. It’s a narrow view of my life, in this moment in time. It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.