Saturday January 4
Gray foggy day. Dawdled in the bath and bed till nearly eleven. Made stock out of Harris’ smoked capon. Added Parmesan rind, red miso, left over sauerkraut, old cilantro and hot red chili sauce. Looking good. Upstairs to fiddle with diary but got distracted by flock of fat gray birds and one solitary bird with pale orange chest. Looked at my bird books but couldn’t identify them. The solo bird is quiet and watchful. It may be guarding a nest high in a nearby tree. The brush and woods to the west of the house seems to be a bird haven. Did identify a cute meet-up of chickadees.
Read more of Jim Krisniski’s memoir. He talks about a toxic event in 1953 that affected both Hudson and our town Averill Park. A bomb test in Nevada created a cloud of radioactive dust that travelled east intact until a thunderstorm dropped the load over this area. Some RPI students were monitoring radiation levels at the time and detected unusual high amounts. The government suppressed the actual numbers, claiming they were no higher than an x-ray, but RPI investigated further and found dangerous levels in the water supply long after the event. Then in 1960 Jim, who was on third grade at the time, became part of a longitudinal study led by a team at Bowling Breen that into the early 2000s. The parents were told the study was to identify the effects of television on kids, but the are questions. Why did researchers from Kentucky want subjects from Hudson? What did they need blood tests for a behavioral study. National science foundation funded it but I want to dig in a bit more.
Spent most of the day editing my diary. Made pork chops with a red chili/sweet pepper glaze and heated up the rutabaga: carrot purée.
Watch more Shtisel.
Sunday January 5
Met Scott, Jay, and Ken at Le Gamin with Ann. Scott usually pays for Ann, but he’s pissed off at her for coercing him into cross the river into Hudson because she won’t get to early enough to cross the river into Catskill. He complained, “If we had met at the Bistro in Catskill, I had a gift certificate and our brunch would have been cheaper. So I'm not paying for Ann.” I asked how his terrible wife Loretta was. She's still the wheelchair months after she broke her hip. That injury has healed but she has an ulcer on her foot from vascular stenosis that won't. She continues to smoke and, undoubtedly to attack Scott ("You asshole!!"), her other addiction. After lunch Scott, Jay, and Ken came over to the house briefly so that Ken (AKA Gun Boy) could see it. He had been head of security at Bard but as laid off recently, now he runs a training school for people who want to shoot. He also occasionally gets a job as a trial expert witness, usually for the defense and typically his defense is that the gun used has a tendency to keep on firing long after the perpetrator wants to stop. Also typically, his side of the case loses. A perennial bachelor and nice looking, but now sixty, basically unemployed, a hoarder of strange objects, and fixated on young women, marriage is probably not in the cards for Gun Boy.
My arthritis is quiet today and it is almost sunny this afternoon. Walked up the driveway and down to the pond, trying to hobble with an iambic gait and thinking in poetry. The cattails edged the pond like notes on the staff of some discordant song. A shimmer of ice palmed the water and everything glowed. A small but great walk. Inspired, I wrote a bad Elizabethan sonnet in the afternoon.
Email from Wendy saying that Danny was ok, the swelling had receded, but she still couldn't see his neck.
Went to Wunderbar for dinner and ran into Tim Hollis, whom we had seen earlier in the day walking down Warren with his girlfriend’s amazingly cute three year old son. He sat with us and we listened to his frustrations with the boy's mother—a mysterious beautiful blonde woman from Poland who has no visible means of income but lives in large apartment in Brooklyn Heights, sends her son to a private school, and spends months at a time at expensive Club Med resorts. Her pre-K son has over forty trips recorded on his passport. She won't tell Tim the source of her income, only that it's "savings". She constantly frets about money, and when Tim asks how she can afford her extravagant life style on savings, she responds, “I’m frugal.” As he describes her behavior, she is, finding deals on daily purchases, identifying inexpensive flights when she travels, taking the less costly Metro North to Poughkeepsie instead of Amtrak to Hudson, which is at least twice the price. Nevertheless, Tim, a lawyer and detail obsessed, finds the missing financial information bewildering and suspicious. Her back-story is unrevealing. She has an advanced degree in accounting and lived with an Israeli for twelve years partnering with him on start-ups, but apparently not successful ones. Her son's father is an absent abusive alcoholic. Her father was some major deal in the Polish military. Tim met one of her friends and asked if she knew how his girlfriend supported herself. “I’ve known [girlfriend Name] for years and I have no idea. She won’t tell me.” The consensus is that she’s a spy.
Home to more Shtisel.
Monday January 6
Off to radiation. Jill wrote back. She is sad that Harrison has gone back to Los Angeles and at the idea of Livy going off to college. Jill didn’t speak to me twice for years. She still will only email and won’t talk to me on the phone. How does she think I have felt? I guess because she doesn't believe in my feelings for her, she just figures I didn't have any during that huge chasms in our relationship.
Exhausted this afternoon and cold. Sat in the tub reading the dreary second book in the Minnesota trilogy, two brothers stalking each other during an ice storm on the shores of Lake Superior. Michael in bed napping with cold and exhaustion. I lay next to him and Killick, finishing this mercifully short dreary novel.
It’s so quiet this afternoon. I love the winter silence here after so many years in the city. The simple gray pencil sketches of the woods and the brown water color swipes of meadow. Restorative.
Spent the afternoon looking at recent data on Columbus Memorial from government site for the CCDC issues report. Need to pull something together for Carl Atkins. His organization for developing a process to get to Medicare for All has been halted by the stampeding variations on health care reform presented by the dozens of Democratic candidate. Carl is now working on a report of county health care for the CCDC committee and sent me a draft to review. Carl and I not only share one of my previous names but also bouts with cancer. (He’s in remission, but is currently recovering from surgery on small bowel adhesions from the radiation he had.)
Trying to organize a lunch with our friends at the Culinary Institute of America ($19.00 deal). Ann inexplicably is “passing”. She’s been progressively alienated and alienating, more so since she got back from Cincinnati after the holidays. She’s been talking about moving back because she can’t find work here, not that she’s tried very hard. With her social work degree, she could go volunteer work, but she never leaves her house or Judge Judy, whom she increasingly resembles. I’ve know her for nearly forty years but I feel we have never shared basic stuff—what’s funny, which actors are appealing, and whose sins to forgive.
Put together green and red chili sauces for beef tacos and chicken enchiladas tomorrow. Made pork and bean chili tonight. Talked to Sarah while we ate. She was in high rant mode over our leader’s assassination of Soleimani. Although I loathe everything trump does and represents, I had the mistaken belief that even given his narcissism, on of his blind blunders wouldn't be used to intensify your current endless military engagements. It looks like I was wrong.
Tuesday January 7
Kept obsessing periodically during the night on rhymes for Elizabethan sonnets. Diana currently sitting in my lap and being kneady and annoying. Off to radiation.
While waiting to be zapped I talked with a fellow radiatee, whom I have seen the last two times I was here and was curious about—a tall super thin super WASPy woman, maybe early fifties, with a chemo head dressing. She has metastatic breast cancer to the bones and liver, was down to 93 pounds and regained some recently. I had expected her to be reserved and upper neck-stiff, in keeping with the stereotype I retain for my tribe. Instead she very agitated, described driving herself to treatment today (like me, she usually is driven by her husband) as a traumatic event, maneuvering out of her driveway past two of their vehicles while her husband yelled directions at her. Getting here after that was ok. Her treatments have been difficult but throughout she stayed active until a few months ago by riding her horse, obviously the most important creature in her life. She couldn't keep the horse at place and had to send it to a friends' a few hours away for boarding. “I’m going to visit him this week. I haven’t seen him since October,” and her eyes welled up. I can’t empathize with that intensity of horse affection, which my sister Patty certainly shares, but I understand it in the light of our late stage illnesses, when you don’t know when you’ll see your horse or your daughter again.
Lunch at Cascade: Asian beef soup and teriyaki chicken sandwich.
Talked to Jim Dolan about local newspaper coverage on his suit against Virginia Martin, who had fired him shortly before the fall election. In his claim of lost wages and emotional and physical distress, he described the toxic atmosphere she created by discouraging any camaraderie with the Republican counterparts. He’s amused by the attention in the press, and chuckled that he probably won’t go after Virginia and her assistant Diane personally if the county pays him what he wants.
Spent the afternoon rewriting my dismal sonnet. Talked to Willie who had a couple really bad days, filled with grief and anxiety. Watched Master Chef. Made beef and chicken enchiladas for dinner. Watched new episodes of the sci-fi Expanse with Michael. Much better than Master Chef.
Wednesday January 8
So sleepy this morning I left my phone in the car at St. Peter’s garage, forgot to take my bra off for radiotherapy, and walked the wrong way in finding the waiting room.
Came home and ate leftover chili. Diana currently is sitting in my lap, alternating between being agitated, anxious, needy, and kneady, until finally one of us has enough and she leaves.
Emailed H&N to see if they want to join us at the Culinary institute lunch and got a grouchy response from Harris. He doesn’t want to be around people. What’s happening? Ann also refused. I texted to see if she was depressed and she said she wasn’t. But what's up. A $19 lunch at the CIA. What’s not to like?
Took a bath-nap which made me a little more alert but the day was stupid. Fixed the CCDC membership list and watched two more episodes of Master Chef, embarrassed by my lack of soul
Went to Ca Mea for dinner. Watched a woman non-stop talking stopping to her partner. She was about thirty, pretty in an ordinary way. He was much older and very overweight, bearded, with a not unattractive face. Couldn’t tell what the relationship was because he was entirely motionless and unresponsive for what must have been an hour of her animated and earnest monologue. As it continued, she became increasingly drunk and her affectations were those of playing out her own novel, which had a sad finale that caused her to weep quietly, At lest she wasn't loud. The man across from her remained silent. Not hostile, just disinterested. The check came, he stood up impassively, put on his jacket on and left. As soon as he was gone, she stopped weeping and began to text someone. Michael and I left soon after and as we were driving down the street I saw a couple, with linked arms and I could swear it was them. Entirely peculiar dynamic. Home to watch more of the Expanse.
Thursday January 9
Intense dreams of non sexual but joyful union with a young man—a stranger with bland good looks, architectural images of new versus old houses, the sea, and my usual crowd of family and friends.
Talked briefly to my fellow WASP lady radiation patient. She had a terrible cough last night that kept her awake but she seemed less frantic. Asked if she was going to visit her horse this weekend, which lives now near Utica, and she said that she had talked to the woman who was boarding him and realized there was no horrible urgency. She could drive over any time.
Lunch at the Maker’s Cafe in Hudson, overpriced and decoratively and culinarily overwrought. Michael had a ham sandwich ($14) and I had a mushroom burger ($17), both heavy on the description and light on flavor. Nasty coffee in the huge mugs that Michael hates. We had been here a few months ago but forgot what its essence was under its first classy impression. Michael said we have to go there every once in awhile to remember how much we dislike it.
Worked on health care issue report, using information from the latest government data comparing US hospitals. Our local Gulag, Columbia Memorial received 2 stars out of 5, and when I dug into the details found some suspicious numbers—that it ranked over 90% compared to national and state averages in avoiding hospital based sepsis, septic shock, and MRSA, but scored significantly lower in C. Diff. Hmmm.
Talked to Neville about meeting nest week for our movie night. She said Harris was in a miserable mood, which I experienced yesterday trying to set up the lunch deal at the Culinary Institute.
Michael had a meeting tonight to involved with changing the CCDC email app, while I watched my addiction, Master Chef, and kicked around my Elizabethan sonnet. It’s pretty bleak and I don’t know if it represents my feelings or just the result of finding rhymes that kept up logically with the ends of the iambic lines. It’s an interesting process.
Reheated enchiladas. Radiation effects may be starting to hit the esophagus with heartburn. Cutting back on wine.
Friday January 10
Wrote another sonnet this morning during double treatments—radiation and immunotherapy. I’m liking this process. Simple creativity using the old Elizabethan form that still works with existential concerns.
Saw the horse lady but didn’t talk with her. She was chatting intensively to another patient about her horse and breast situation. She lacks the WASPy reserve, which always surprises me.
Home to Cascades. Urge for tuna melt satisfied.
The tarp has blown off the compost pile, and after arguing with my arthritic hips I dragged it back and weighed it down with rebar. Hobbled up the driveway and down to the pond, with a brûlée-like film itching to be cracked. Walked the path back to the house flanked by winter brown grass and flowers. These tiny walks are triumphs. My mantra these days is, “Get up”. I don’t always listen but it's worthwhile when I do.
Edited diary entry in the afternoon about Samantha‘s concert. It was the last time we saw her except for her last sad pick up at the end of Thanksgiving Weekend when she drove Willie back to the city in order to break up with him.
Wasted a couple hours watching Worst Cooks in America Celebrity series, where a half dozen former kid stars, actors from dead sitcoms, plus a Michael Jackson sibling pretended to have the best time ever pretending not to be able to chop an onion. One of the actors had been on the Office playing Oscar. And his real name is Oscar. He is a very good actor now struggling to maintain visibility by making eggs Benedict amid desperate hilarity. Makes you want to crawl under the covers.
Made a barely adequate dinner myself—sausage and rice with the rest of my sauerkraut-onion mix. It was ok.
Watched more Expanse.
Took Claritin when I went to bed, with the hope that it would ward off a new terrible form of leg cramps, but was woken up violently in the early morning with one. These typically start with a hot flash that works its out way down to my legs, which then go into spasm. Unlike normal leg cramps. I can't work them out by walking, and magnesium doesn’t prevent them. They are coming on now about once a week, and I suspect they are related to my treatment. I rubbed my legs with an OTC steroid cream, and it went away, which might have had nothing to do with the agent, but was merely a coincidence or the welcome but unreliable placebo effect.
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