On Freedom

I woke up Monday morning with anxiety because I still didn’t have anything lined up for this week’s Thursday’s Columns. We’ve got a couple of guest columnists waiting in the bull pen, but I figured I’d been away long enough. The stands were filling up. I figured it was time for me to get back on the mound before losing my stuff.

One problem…

For going on two weeks, I had disengaged myself from a world of problems just waiting for me to make everything all right. Had Gaza finally been leveled and turned into a construction site? Had work already begun on the Ben Gurion Canal? And what about the people who had been living there? And Trump? What courtroom was he in now, or had the election already been held and he’d won and pardoned himself? I had no idea.

So, waking up Monday morning, I knew that I had to write a column this week, but I couldn’t think of anything to write about.

I thought about writing about my wife, Culley Jane, the retired professor and novelist. But she’s not an easy one to write about. I have to be careful about what I write about her. She doesn’t like it when I make things up. If she’s unsure about something, she doesn’t take my word for it and looks it up on the internet. Her father was a professor, too.

She had knee replacement surgery a couple weeks ago. Amazingly, it’s now an out-patient procedure and within hours we were back home and suddenly I’m no longer directing the action on a global stage, but a post-op, always-on-duty, home-care nurse.

Lying in bed Monday morning, I thought about writing about nursing. I didn’t know what was going on in the world, but I knew about nursing. I used to be a nurse, back in the 90s, after I got exiled from the press and before I became an over-the-road trucker. The one thought I remember most from my 10-year nursing career came to me during a clinical rotation on a psych ward when it struck me that what makes a person crazy is not so much what they think as not knowing why they think the way they do.

But by Monday morning, a week and a half after her surgery, I was no longer the post-op, always-on-duty, home-care nurse. She’s one of those “I can do it myself” girls and was starting to get around just fine without my constant attention and I had to admit I kind of missed it.

I could recall and re-call the feeling I experienced that first day back home as I helped her up the stairs and into the bed.

Just the two of us.

The cats sensed the difference and then fit right in.

Just the two of us and two quiet cats in our quiet oikos in the suburbs of a busy city.

The first few days were all-consuming. My work of constructing a new international monetary system based on an axiom of unlimited resources got put on hold, and then put out of sight as I watched my wife the retired professor bravely taking her first tentative steps, reminding me of my own little ones taking theirs.

A mere five years ago, she and I would have been like two strangers at different tables in a crowded ballroom. But now I know lots about her and she knows more about me because I’m the extrovert in this pairing. And now there were just the two of us. My obsession with solving the problems of the world dissolved into her, she was the world and I was a good nurse and I felt… what did I feel? I’m not good with “feeling words.” Something implying the freedom to breath without tightness.

Lines from the 60s rock opera “Hair” came to me:

How can people be so heartless…

Especially people who care about strangers

Who say they care about evil and social injustice

Do you only care about the bleeding crowd

How about a needy friend

I need a friend

Lying in bed on a Monday morning worrying about what I was going to write about for this week's Thursday’s Columns, I decided to go to work. Hemingway said he spent his whole life trying to write “one true sentence.” Maybe one day I’ll write one true newspaper column.