In The Blink of an Eye...

    Countless songs describe how quickly things can change, The song that says it most directly to me – “things change, rearrange in the blink of an eye” – is by the Moonalice Band.
    (You can listen or download a copy of the song and other of the band’s music at www.moonaliceband.com)
    We’ve had many blinks of an eye moments this year, and things certainly have changed and rearranged.
    The first was back in the winter when my wife, Adelaide, fell down the stairs at our house – 16 of them. Miraculously, she survived without permanent injuries, but it has taken months of recovery, and that process continues. Things change.
    Then two weeks after what is usually a routine surgical procedure, I began hemorrhaging, and made two trips to the emergency room in a single day. Rearrange.
    The resulting anemia left me weak and frustrated. It took an agonizingly long period for the red blood cells to regenerate, and I spent the summer only as a spectator.
    I slowly recovered, though, and had enough energy to attend the Biennial Roundup of the Usual Suspects that I wrote about in an earlier post, although there were a couple of times when I just ran out of gas.
    A couple of weeks after our return I stopped by the doctor’s office to get a prescription renewed. She asked about our trip, and when I told her that I’d hit the wall a couple of times, her ears perked up. You know, those can be the symptoms of heart disease, she said, and we ought to get it checked out.
    I respect her skill, so I had a calcium scan the next day. We hadn’t gotten home from that good before she was on the phone saying that I needed to come see her that morning.
 &nb  The scan results put me in an extremely high risk category, she said and made me an appointment with a cardiologist.
Here I was riding along with the top down, so to speak, and I got hit by a log truck.
     In the blink of an eye.
    More tests, including a heart cath. The result was not what I had hoped for, so, barring the unforeseen – boy aren’t there a lot of unforeseens in life – in the next day or so, a surgeon will bypass the clogged arteries and we will begin adapting to still more changes in our lives.
    There have been countless blinks of the eye that have been immeasurably great. But not so many this year. So we will be happy to put a close to 2008 and look forward to some of those great ones next year.
    “Things change, rearrange, in the blink of an eye.”


Bill Brown can be contacted at billatthelake@gmail.com

When things settle down...

    It’s a lesson that you would think I’d have learned by now, but I delude myself, and so I have to keep learning it over and over:
    Things are never ever going to settle down.
    I think that telling ourselves that things will settle down is simply a way of coping with the fact that we will always have more things that we need to do / want to do than we have the time to do them.
    So we pretend that eventually we will have all the time we need.
    When things settle down, I’m going to:
… go through the closet and get rid of all the clothes I’ll never wear again.
… finally read War and Peace (or one of those other important books that we would like to have read but haven’t ever put a high priority on actually reading).
… weed the flower bed.
… volunteer at the food pantry.
… learn a foreign language.
    And when will things settle down?
When the houseguests leave…
When I get through with all these medical tests…
When there’s a little more money in the bank…
When things aren’t so busy at work….
    “When things settle down” is a small-scale version of the “one of these days I’d like to…” syndrome.
    I’ve learned to deal with the latter more effectively than with the former. The “one of these days” want to list usually is made up of fewer, more substantial things: One of these days I want to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail. One of these days I want to go to France.
    Those “one of these days” things can be turned into reality by putting them on the calendar. You’re never going to make that trip to France unless you put your departure date on the calendar – in ink – and work backwards, listing everything you need to do to depart on that date.
    The “when things settle down” items are those things that don’t seem nearly as consequential, and they wind up on a list that only grows longer even as it gathers dust.
    So many of those “little” things seem to be beyond our control. Life in a family and in a community imposes obligations, and it is easy for the days to slide away one by one as we accommodate to the obligations we feel.
    Once again I am realizing that being more jealous of my time – even if it occasionally makes someone else unhappy – is the only way of getting to those things on the “when things settle down” list.
    There’s only time when things will truly settle down, and I’m not really eager to get there.

You can contact Bill Brown at billatthelake@gmail.com