They never came: his barouche landau; my pretty landaulette

1996 Jaguar, faded gold

Dear friends and readers,

Today was the day the Admiral was to give his aging Jaguar away. This is the third car he’s given WETA (our PBS channel here in the DC area).

He bought one for Caroline, a green sedan; she used it steadily and then gave it back – as I recall Wally didn’t care for poor “Steve” (Caroline’s name for the car). Maybe he disapproved of its automatic shift? Very middle class car once upon a time. Then it was supposed Yvette’s for the time she was in Sweet Briar so (the Admiral’s unreal thinking here) she would not “feel stuck” there in Lynchburg country. She did drive it to nearby stores, to a movie once or twice, and parked it (for free) in Sweet Briar parking lots. But it was very stressful and two bouts of cruel bullying by cops who stopped her and berated her for going too slowly (30 miles an hour on the slow lane would not do according to these he-male bastards) put an end to her driving. So he called WETA and they came and towed it away. Auctioned it off they said.

Then he had an Oldsmobile, bought new, at the end of a year, in a place going out of business, cost $17,000 as I recall; he ran it for a couple of years but didn’t really like it and finally bought himself another Jaguar. (He had had one earlier.) The dealer didn’t deal in “lowly” Oldsmobiles. So he called WETA and they came and towed it away. Auctioned it off they said.

Now he’s had this car for about 8 years. The problem is it will cost at least $3000 in repairs and to pass inspection (due this month). I bought my new PriusC because my Chevy was similarly up for inspection in February — and it would have been a couple of thousands of dollars for a car said to be worth $100. The original plan had been for him to trade his in for a newer used Jaguar. But he cannot drive it now. I can’t. It never saw a garage it wanted to pass. It skids in the snow. It is comfortable to be in. His barouche landau. The PriusC my pretty new landaulette.

We had (to be truthful) discussed going down to one car before my mother died and unexpectedly left me money since we are both retired and we actually have if not very good public transportation, enough to get by so we can go down to one car. We live within walking distance of grocery stores, the Metro, Old Town. If we need a second car, or must take this one in, we can rent a Zip car. We’ve done that before. I didn’t like the idea of not having my own car. I like the feeling of independence. Well now the one car is mine — to my taste. I can drive it with ease. I can’t yet figure out the cockpit of gadgets before me, but I had a hard time with some of the little icons on the Chevy.

So he called WETA and was on the phone about it for half an hour on Friday, giving them information, promising to have the title when they showed. Yes it needs work to pass inspection, a lot. Yes it’s scratched. The insides bad. You can roll open the roof but the silk undercover has come away. He told them they must take the tags off as he no longer can.

I was prepared to be sad for him. It’s the first time without a car for him since the first few months we lived here in Alexandria (yes totally without a car, either of us), but they never came. Life’s little ironies.

It was 4 o’clock so I had to call them and go from phone to phone to find the person who was empowered with a tow truck. Finally a friendly helpful young woman said “there had been a disconnect but could they come tomorrow?” No, said I, come Wednesday. I had intended to go to the library that day but I can put it off until Thursday. We will not be here tomorrow or Friday.

Tomorrow he has another endoscopy – this one may take 3-4 hours. (I’m taking three books.) Then surgeon doctor’s appointment on Friday.

Kaiser has called and next Tuesday he’s set for his first visit for getting ready for chemotherapy — they will take pictures of all sorts, blood, do a whole work up. The idea is if the surgeon says we should begin with radiation, we won’t have to wait yet more for another appointment and can start say a few days after that (say just after Memorial Day); if the surgeon should say he’ll operate first, nothing lost. They are looking out for him now.

So the WETA people better come. Three cars we’ve given them, none in great shape but all auctionable, so now I need not feel at all guilty. I’m not a free rider, we’ve done our bit. The admiral did ask them if they could somehow rout the money to their radio station as that is what we listen to — especially in the evenings. We hardly ever put the TV on. Of course they said they’d try — but I give it to them they hesitated. They probably can’t earmark funds that way.

It’s sort of funny. Tried to give away his beautiful car. And still they didn’t come.

I’m very worn tonight. He’s in bad pain from his sciatica in his left leg, up and down and especially in the ankle. The pain medication just makes him groggy and does not sufficiently remove the pain. I see him with his hand on his chest. He belches a lot from swallowing air. The day has been very wearing.

Cela me désole.

Sylvia

For Sunday: music and pictures from Ang Lee & Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility

The movie’s a masterpiece and what makes it so is the music and pictures. They come out of, are chosen from a psychodrama which blends its dual auteurs, Lee and Thompson.

I never tire of it. Here is one of their climaxes:

We are to imagine Marianne playing:

We see a montage of landscapes she is looking through her window out at:

Then listen by clicking: you will see a montage of scenes of Rickman and Winslet together and Rickman alone. (I know, I know. It utterly distorts the movie which is not an erotic love romance. But the YouTube has the original music and you can hear the words clearly.) The words are by Ben Jonson; the music, Patrick Doyle; the singer, Jane Eaglen.

The lyrics also climax Lee’s autobiography which focuses on his conflicts with his father.

A few scenes before Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon read aloud this, another series of verses from a Renaissance poet, Edmund Spenser in Book V of The Faerie Queene by Spenser to Kate Winslet as Marianne:

Sith thou misdeem’st so much of things in sight?
What though the sea with waves continuall
Does eate the earth, it is nor more at all:
Nor is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought,
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

These connect back to the death of Thompson’s father: the death of a father is central to the thematic music of the film too.

One of my favorite stills:

Elinor writing of all that has happened — a surrogate for Austen

Another:

Rickman as a melancholy man of sensibility, early in film, as yet preferring solitude

Sylvia

Time; What does a book have to have to be read?; here’s your new “feminism” (Lean-In)

Ian: wresting to remove hamper cover while he sits on it

Try not to get cancer … the Admiral

It seems to tire him enormously as his body fights it.

Time moves so slowly. It feels as if each day is so full — of events, of happenings, though when I press my mind to see what has happened each day, it’s more thoughts that crowd my sense of the experience I’m now having: the Admiral’s cancer expands time. My mind is overfull.

So much seems to have happened since April 28th — 19 days ago — when we were first told. It’s as if so much occurs each day that I can hardly believe it’s still say a Thursday. I know intellectually or sensibly that everything all around me has not changed nor have we — after all what did I do today? a bit of cleaning, driving and shopping with the Admiral, study, read, play with cats — and yet it’s as if some transformation of everything has happened so what matters is entirely different.

The poet was right: April is the cruellest month. When I was 12-13 I endured an April 26th that changed my life ever after.

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Next morning:

I tried last night what people might call “summer reading:” Mary Wesley’s Jumping the Queue, about a woman unexpectedly widowed who wants to kill herself. It doesn’t sound like a light book, yet it’s written in such simple prose, so transparent, so unburdened, that it feels light in tone. Too light for this subject. She meets a man who is a drifter and takes him home and they talk. I stopped after some of the talk.

I can’t get on with it. It’s too easy reading. Isn’t that odd, but there it is. If something supposed unconventional lies ahead — and it does: she admits her children have no interest in her, or, as they are, she in them. She and her husband hoped to die together so saved nothing and meant to leave no burdens &c&amp. Yet it’s without the depth of feeling or thought felt in Aeschylus (who I read this morning on a blog) — or in Tom Jones in another register Fielding. The book leaves me flat.

It’s not that it’s not moral: Wesley does aim to be moral based on real assessments of the way we live and die now. She and her drifter friend talk about how most elderly people spend their last days: in a retirement home, warehoused, or decently-appointed, as wards of their not-too-patient adult children. Susan Hill has a book where her elderly heroine is released, knows the first happiness she’s ever known when she escapes her bullying daughter (after years of a bullying husband): A Change for the Better (even printed in large print for the person whose eyes are no longer what they once were.) But Hill has this depth of apprehension of inferences in her prose.

I know Wesley’s made oodles of money from her books and now they are made into TV films. I saw some of Camomile Lawn and what a cast it had, and it too had complicated modern plot which ought to have interested me, with characters who are adult, living in our contemporary world, from the point of view of what they do or are said to think and do say. but I didn’t finish it. I tried the novel, thinking to myself, then I’d get what I was not getting in the film, and remember I didn’t finish it either. I blamed myself for reading and watching them at night.

Cindy Sherman, from her Untitled series — 1950s look still with us — an image which links Wesley’s Jumping the Queue with Applebaum’s account of Sandberg’s Lean-In

We are talking on Trollope19thCStudies about how bad most books that sell widely are today and reasons why — in all eras since the commercialization of the press and the spread of an ability to at least process sentences, the press has been loaded with specious books, to put the phrasing mildly. Pope’s Dunciad the first hysterical reaction against. It’s hard to get out what are the particular flaws in a particular era. Ours is one drenched in a rhetoric on behalf of cold-heartedness, Ayn Rand visions.

After all Mary Wesley is not bad in the way of Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg’s Lean-in — a false book bad in values — though many will tell you how well-meaning moral it is. I usually dislike Anne Applebaum’s essays, but in the most recent issue of NYRB I must say (admit) Applebaum (a vitriolic anti-socialist type) shows she can think. Applebaum makes visible the usual gaps in these books (often the authors do not give personal details about their success or private lives at home, again crucial) and the most famous money-making of the type (they are listed in a footnote).

I believe it’s completely on line: How to Succeed …

Blandness, the nothingness of banality is I guess what I’ve hit on here.

Sylvia

Ian, looking up, a cat what leans out when he should lean in?

A Middle Eastern man, a Romanian lady, a Brazilian, Eygptian & Indian man too, all to take care of one Englishman,

Do listen. Jeremy Northam sings it every so lightly, all the more will the longing come through.

Somewhere there’s another land different from this world below far more mercifully planned than the cruel place we know. Innocence and peace are there ….

Dear friends,

Yes I watched Gosford Park last night and when Helen Mirren lost it, I got hysterical. (More on this on my Ellen and Jim Two blog.)

Still some relatively good news — or I would probably not be writing this.

We met yesterday (Wednesday) with the Admiral’s fifth doctor, Nadim Nasr, the radiologist, at Virginia Hospital Center. It was not easy to park there, and we had quite a wait in the waiting room. And for a while had to listen from CNN to these droning accounts of Angelina Joli’s masectomies and coming removal of her ovaries too. I did get up after half an hour of noticing no one seemed to take note to ask them to turn the sound off at least. I did note the mysterious thing called public approval was going in this woman’s favor. Apparently she is doing all that US people admire or accept or pretend to admire and accept.

One reason for the wait was Dr Nasr (Egyptian radiologist) was reading the Pet scan — which we achieved the day before (Tuesday). He had gotten it through the computer system from Kaiser at Capitol Hill. (We waited after the two hour test to get a disk to bring to Dr Fortes, the Brazilian thoracic surgeon.)

And he said — cautiously, not sure of course, rough estimate and we must wait for Dr Fortes to confirm — that the cancer appears not to have spread anywhere beyond that “slow-growing” (his word) lump (mine) in his lower throat.

Dr Nasr went on to talk of our options and what’s to come. Before he came in a nurse (Spanish-American) talked to us at length and took the Admiral’s history. Dr Nasr appeared to have read some of that. She gave us a free parking placard.

So, we will either proceed, probably beginning just after Memorial Day, to 28 days, 5 in a row each, of chemotherapy and radiation and he explained all that this was, how we would go about it. This depends on next week’s endoscopic ultrasound (I keep blocking that second word and having to ask the Admiral what it is again) to be done by Dr Fazel (the Middle Eastern gastroenterologist): if the cancer has not dissolved into the wall and Dr Fortes thought “he could get it all out,” the operation first. If it was dissolved, the the chemo first. The lump is 2 inches which Dr Nasr characterized as “not small.” When the chemo started, we would talk to a dietician to help the Admiral keep his weight up and keep using his esophagus (even when he has a feeding tube).

Dr Nasr explained there was physicist’s office (we saw it) where physicists would help bring together all the scans and results so as to get as accurate a three-D picture as possible of the cancer and the Admiral’s esophagus, plus nodes. He did say the nodes would come out and be hit with radiation. He came near our family joke: might as well, you will be not using them for anything and they might give you trouble eventually. They could be pre-cancerous.

What a fuss from one lump of cells in someone’s lower throat.

The hospital is impressive. Signs everywhere of Topness. “Top 100.”

I did not write on Tuesday after we returned from our adventures in DC — the worst of it was the many-leveled parking garage, cement, just filled to the brim with cars, very carefully gotten in every which way and very hard to navigate into and out of. Next time we’ll take the Metro as we discovered there is a Metro stop nearby.

Today (Thursday, is it still Thursday?) we see Dr Wiltz (the Admiral’s primary internist, Indian by heritage) as the Admiral has been having severe pain from sciatica — doubtless brought on by nerves. I spent literally two and one half-hours on the phone on Monday getting referrals and reaching the nurse of Dr Antabili (the Rumanian oncologist) for advice on what pain-medication he could take. I had the wrong general number and then when I had the right one felt very frustrated by a pre-advice nurse who insisted on asking a row of irrelevant questions before she’d give me the right phone number.

I did discover that every time we see Dr Fortes outside of the initial visit, the pre-operative visit, and the immediate post-operative one, we need a referral. I asked someone on the phone (who it was at that point I didn’t know any more) if he had to get referrals for Dr Fortes to watch over him in the hospital after the operation. No, said she as if this was not an astonishing thing to have to inquire.

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Yvette did not do quite as well yesterday. She went to Kaiser’s new Tysons faciilty for an MRI. Caroline had been generous enough to take off the afternoon to pick Yvette up by car and drive her to Tysons (impossible to get to by public transportation — takes about 2 hours to Kaiser at Springfield as Yvette has done that). Yvette had taken off by 1 pm (left her work) and was made to wait an hour and a half. (Caroline went off to visit with a friend.)

By the time they took her in, Yvette was stressed badly. Then the woman had the stupidity when she saw (probably) that Yvette was stressed, to remark she looked like a twelve-year old in her outfit. Yvette does not look like a 12 year old; she does dress conservatively and plainly and looks old-fashioned. She had a red sweater top and form-fitting skirt which came past her knees and was not tight. Her hair in a long-pony tail and no make-up. The world is filled with people for whom the slightest deviation in conventionality of this instance is worth of their notice.

Then without asking permission she proceeds to try to put an IV in Yvette’s arm. Well, that was it. No, said Yvette. She wasn’t having it. Then she was told she would not produce the many-colored dyes for her MRI. So what? This was of course deemed her fault. She was lacking. No, it was not. They did proceed anyway and now she has a disk to bring Dr Wiltz for her next appointment.

She tried to make a dental appointment with Dr Townsend (black woman American) but has been told they are not taking Kaiser patients any more. We are not sure how far she is covered, so we advised calling and just paying up front. Caroline provided three other names which she and her friends and/or relatives use. I hope Yvette will phone them too and ask if they are Kaiser related. They are a bit of a trip (Arlington). Phoning is not much fun — and it seems to make time pass so slowly, aggravatingly waiting to be frustrated.

Caroline had gone to a lovely shop somewhere in Vienna and bought home with Yvette (she had picked her up by car and driven her) a pair of savoury pies (pasties) of the English type which the Admiral and I then had for dinner. Thoughtful of her. He made peas so he’d have peas and pie. This place even has McVitty’s biscuits (!), our Englishman’s favorite just now. Next time. She and her friend, Marni, had made Yvette comforting large bowl of spaghetti when they brought her back so she was supposed too full for supper. Yvette really wasn’t.

*************************

We go to Springfield in about an hour. There he will have more blood taken and other tests for Tuesday’s procedure.

I have just returned from Shoppers Food Warehouse where by bringing cloth bags I earned an automatic 6 cents off for each cloth bag I brought. (I am not asking even for plastic, much less paper bags). 6 whole cents.

At each stage there are co-pays at Kaiser — $100 a time or test seems to be the new “norm.”

Sylvia

Crazy lady with flowers

Dear Friends,

When I was young in my later 20s (oh yes I was young then) and lived on 22nd street off 11th avenue (NYC) in a crooked (slanted) building, I used to see two old ladies on and off on my block who I would call “crazy ladies.” In NYC this used to be common terminology for older women whose behavior seems odd — why we called them odd since there were so many of them as to become proverbial I know not. One I recall was often in bedroom slippers. Well nowadays I walk about the world in ballet slippers as a regular thing.

This morning I was conducting another of the daily struggles of my existence. Clary my tortoise-shell cat wants to come into my workroom. She has wanted to do this since she was a kitten and thrown out permanently (along with her brother ginger tabby Ian) on the grounds they destroyed the wires to the computer. This year I have weakened. It is so hot with the door closed to the rest of the house (no circulation of air) despite my ceiling fan, the windows open, a second fan. And when the air-conditioning is on it’s hotter.

The immediate cause are birds, the awning by one window now has two (!), that’s two as the count would say, nests of birds. Clary just finds these irresistible. Beyond that there’s looking out the window, seeing squirrels, hearing insects. I felt bad about keeping her out and once I started to let her in she looked so hurt when I’d be inconsistent.

(When the Admiral comes in and claps his hands or says “Scat!”, she runs out less quickly than she used to, though poor Ian is just shattered in spirit and scurries this way and that, then slinks out like “the guilty thing he is.”)

I’ve talked of this before. But as of Mother’s Day a new attraction: my lovely flowers in a glass (breakable people) jar. She wanted to eat the green leaves and investigate the petals (to put that mildly).

All day long I am putting her out. And struggling with her. We are a comedy routine. As I go out, she hastens in. If I leave her, and then come back in, she scoots out and then when I emerge again, she follows me closely (sometimes in front as she can guess my usual routes) about the rest of the house.

Last night I was tired of it (and thought to watch Downton Abbey, on which another blog this evening), and put the flowers on the porch. I though they would be safe there. Then this morning I came to bring them back in and was struck by how sunny parts of the porch were. And warm, the air warm and balmy. The flowers would like that. All I needed to do was move the table and have them in the middle.

Then I decided to photograph it.

As I was doing all this it struck me that others on this block of mine if they looked would regard me as the crazy lady. In my wide-elegant gray robe. My hair askew. Ballet bedroom slippers. They are all going off to work or doing all those things with their kids or their well-regulated lives I’ve never done.

Sylvia on becoming the crazy lady on the block myself

Jumping the Queue, just a little

The admiral was just full of jokes this morning at his Duchess’s distress:

What you need to do is get used to the idea I’m going to die in a few months, and then when I don’t, you’ll be pleasantly surprised …

But now at around 4, our mood has improved. We have all appointments scheduled that I can think to schedule (to echo Swift) “as fast as can be reasonably expected.”

We have not had to wait for the Pet scan after all. The gastroenterologist came through at around 1 pm, with an appointment for the endoscopic ultrasound a week from tomorrow. So I phoned the oncologist with an urgent kind of message saying the thoracic surgeon’s assessment, which I probably garbled as I said it fast, but I was clear on the point that now that we had the second endoscopy, I was willing to go privately and would pay whatever was needed in whatever form (cash, check, credit card, I’d bring it in $50 cash in hand!) for a Pet scan that we would not have to wait for. (“Money-driven medicine” anyone?)

A couple of hours later we had tomorrow’s Pet scan.

We go for our radiology discussion on Wednesday.

And I called the office Dr Fortes, the surgeon, mostly on my own impulse, as were all my other calls today — you’d think I loved phones — to tell that we had these two appointments and ask how should I go about to bring the materials he needed. She responded by giving me an appointment the Friday after the endoscopy — the delay is to give the laboratory 2 days to get the thing developed and get it to him.

It seems I need a referral each time we go to Dr Fortes. I was a bit startled at that one. I said my understanding was the referral was for his treatment whatever it was; she responded by saying we would have so many times to come to his office per referral (or altogether?) and I opined we should have as many visits as needed. Silence. Then she said they would get the referral and I said I would call too. So in my new ceaseless phone life I recalled the oncologist office to ask for a referral, explaining we had this appointment. I asked the nurse or whoever to call me back once the referral was made so we would close the circle.

Tons of instructions for where to go, for each appointment is in another place. For different preparations before. I typed it all out as my handwriting is just execrable nowadays and usually I can’t read what I write within an hour.

I have done all I could and so may rest easy. In school before I would have a test, I would study as hard as I could. Once I had done, I would tell myself I had done all I could and would rest easy.

From cover of Wesley’s novel, set in Cornwall

Note to self: must read Mary Wesley’s Jumping the Queue after I finish Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (just now my 2 am book). It may be said I don’t need it, but perhaps she has some tips to offer. I remember she made $70,000 or some such fantastic sum on this her first novel. Surely the title fulfilled what it seemed to offer.

In the meantime here is Diana (Jenny Seagrove) jumping the queue in Andrew Davies’s brilliant neglected 13 part mini-series of the same name:

No more really comic than Wesley’s novel or me

I shall soon learn whether I’ve lost my gamble — like Dryden, I’ve had my life thus far and no one can take these 44-45 years from me; I’ll just have to find the wit to pay as little for it if I have to. I admit I still hope I won’t — though the admiral’s joke at opening exposes the desperation of the hope.

Sylvia

Mother’s Day, 2013

This from Caroline:

Named as all the world knows from Lady L in Sir Charles Grandison, that genuinely happy woman.

Thao sent me an e-card I wish I could share: suffice to say it was a love bird bringing a note to an older mother bird — all in a flowered landscape with peaceful soft music.

And Yvette and I are going to see Serena and Venus Williams in a film documentary at West End Cinema today,

Susan Herbert, After Monet: Wild Poppies Near Argenteuil

So vivid in the original it’s heartbreaking.

Sylvia