poetTess

Cussing and Cursing

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:51:51 -0400

CC is a profane man.
God Damn adorns
most of his unguarded statements.
Shit and Fuck intersperse
questions and answers.

He is sarcastic,
but sometimes
tones himself down to ironic

If one is thickskinned and patient
One will find a streak of practicality running deep and pure.
For he is a man whose
processes are not rote,
but individually reasoned.

CC is not for sale.

Highly spiritual
if mindfulness counts.

Ridicules Relgious Reason

But prayed the Lord's Prayer
when struck by a
recoiless rifle round
in a fighting hole,
atop three new guys,
beside his best friend
who was rendered dead.

CC's crippled right side
carries the weight of
Gary R. Guest,
Fallen friend,
who died without him.

Original painting of CC by Macaw Woman

Crippled and Crazy

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:51:35 -0400

Thursday was time for CC to go to Dublin VA Hospital to see his primary care giver on the Blue Team. CC had taken a twenty year break from using their services, but about a year ago decided to give it another try. Dublin is about an hour from our home via I16. We left at sunrise, as soon as our granddaughter boarded the bus for school.

At one point we got behind and then in front of and behind again of a van with Freedom is Not Free bumper sticker, a DV tag (disabled veteran) and a rather disagreeable man about sixty with at least forty buttons on his hat telling us exactly who he is. Only I can't read them because I am passing him at about seventy miles an hour. He has an ancient man riding with him.

We got there right as the fellow in the van unloaded a wheelchair at the main entrance and is lifting the much older vet into the seat. I let CC out at there too because we are 22 minutes late for the lab.

I drive around, park in our usual spot (we have a date at the VA hospital in Dublin about twice a month). It's my pay day. I get to keep the travel cash and it's about all the salary I get these days. I sit in the car for a few minutes fiddling with my Iphone, checking email, Open Salon, Facebook, Huffington report. Then I head down the narrow parking lot into a door sitting in the junction of two buildings.

The hospital is a series of two story, long connected buildings. You pass through a range of about ten buildings per visit. I need an internal GPS device to navigate through these parts, but I don't have one. I blindly rely on CC while we are here.

Sometimes he sends me on errands though. So I am having to slowly put together these mole-like tunnels in my mind to get from one place to another. I made my way to the Blue Team's lab waiting room.

There were too many people to sit next to CC so I take an empty spot a few seats away. Shortly thereafter, some loud man sits near me. He wants to talk about killing dogs or something equally repelling. I like to be a compassionate listener around there, but I wasn't in much mood for this fellow so I stuck myself further into the book I am reading and made more yellow marks on the page.

We moved right on into the Blue Team waiting room after they took four tubes of blood from CC. An earthy, happy looking woman who was also a veteran was making fun with CC about how they were moving from one station to another. She seemed a lot more alive then the usual partner-in-waiting. She got called right away. We had a long wait.

CC got involved in a conversation with the man next to him. He tells CC how they gave him twelve pills instead of one hundred and twenty. CC tells him that a few years ago they fired everybody working here after a man laid out in the hall on gurney for over twenty four hours, finally dying. Now the service is much better. The geezer said his heart problems stemmed from Agent Orange.

After about two hours of waiting the doctor was ready to see CC. I tagged on in. I opt out when it comes to lab work and needle pokes, but I usually go and listen to most of his doctors' visits. I heard once that it is good to have a witness cause some really crazy shit can go down in a doctor's office. Somebody might remember what was said if you have somebody with you.

CC sat near the door, Dr. Damn Meanie (a phonic spelling) sat at her desk and computer between CC and me. It was a little narrow room. She asked CC lots of questions and typed all the answers. She has a privacy screen on her computer and it looked black to me. The black screen raises my anxiety level a little. I mean she is typing about him, very intently and all I can see is a black screen. No glowing box. I even start thinking of some short story about journaling into a black computer that makes things happen in a parallel universe. His cholesterol is down about 45 points from six months ago from diet alone. She is amazed.

She has a paper on the table beside me and it has an article about opioids for non cancer pain. Damn, that is very much what CC's quest into the VA is all about - pain management on opoids. He even has a pain management doctor, Dr. Bad.

Two weeks ago when we were here for a teeth cleaning and a mental health consult; CC sent me to get his pain medication refilled from Dr. Bad. I traveled through the twisty turny long straight passages and found my way. I walked through the big swingy doors that had Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation written over them into the urniney smelling Corridor of Pain Management. I stuck my head into the secretary's office.

She was about 65, really prim with a very smooth complexion and a less than modern hair do and outfit. "Dr. Bad is out today. No RX's. He's on emergency. Left yesterday. Won't be back tomorrow either." (Get the fuck out of my office is what her quiet disproving demeanor was saying).

"You could go by Dr Damn Meanie's office and get her to write it."

I take this news unhappily, CC is barely walking this week. His shoe connected to the leg brace had torn up and the tore up shoe bruised his foot. Since he doesn't have much feeling in the foot, he hadn't realized it until the foot hurt really, really badly. He was on crutches, but two days ago had not been able to walk at all. And he really did need more pain medicine. And when he's on crutches, that throws out his shoulder. His whole right side was blown the fuck up in Vietnam and he is damn near sixty and it had been a bad week.

But I was nice to the lady. I promised we would go see Dr Damn Meanie. But when I told CC, he said that Dr. Bad had told him the nurse would fill his RX if he needed it. So we make our way back down to the Pain Clinic, through those cavernous doors into the hot and rarefied air back to see the Pain Secretary.

She was resistant. CC was insistent. Both stayed pleasant. But CC mentioned a patient advocate and she decided she knew who she could call, but it would just depend on who answered the phone. Seems like she got it all straightened out and we would receive the RX in the mail in a few days. So she said.

And it actually really happened. So on this trip, with CC up and about so much better then he had been previously - he wanted to go thank Ms Get 'er Done Pain Secretary. She is his new favorite person in the bowels of the VA hospital. But she isn't there to receive his gratitude.

Next we walk up to Mental Health. This is a new place to us. We have only been here once,when he saw a psychiatrist and she said he could have a PTSD diagnosis and she had made him an appointment with her for a month later. But nobody seemed to have known a thing about the appointment a month later.

CC started wondering if he was crazy. So we journey to where ever in the hell they hide the Mental Health Clinic to see about when he would ever have another appointment. The Clinic had been changed around since we were last there. Now it was crowded all together, the space abbreviated.

As CC negotiated a new appointment, I noticed a big wide wheelchair full of shoes. Shoes? Then I saw this little bitty old black man come to it and pull two big bottles of pills out of something under the shoes. I am interested. He trots on back to the back from whence he had come and left the wheelchair behind. I am imagining he is a homeless dude with an over-attachment to shoes that he wheels around with him everywhere he goes. CC said he probably has a foot problem and had to bring all of his shoes for the check up.

As we were leaving Mental Health, a fellow in his early twenties is wheeled by. He doesn't have on a shirt, Angry looking, he is blonde and he has a plethora of tattoos. Across his shoulders widely spaced scrolley letters proclaim USMC.

CC got his travel money and then one last errand. Find the Prosthesis wing of this place and get another one of those soft knee braces he wears every day. We go in there. I had a phone call and I decided to step outside to take it. CC points twenty feet away and says, "there is the car, just wait there for me!" And damn if the car isn't right there across from us.

CC makes it out to the car in about twenty minutes. We have been here for four hours. Driving off we spot the blue van with the Freedom is Not Free sticker leaving as well.

Sailing With Daddy

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 16:25:26 -0500

My daddy was an artist.  This is one of the beloved legacies he left me.  He didn't live a long life, dying at age fifty from complications of diabetes.

Daddy had many passions.
Art, architecture (his profession),
photography, sailing, science.

He grew up near Candler Field which is now Hartsfield International Airport. In 1941 when a twin-engine DC-3 crashed in on its way to Candler Field, my daddy biked over to the crash and took a photo of the wrecked plane.. The crash was especially big news across the country because famous World War I Ace and President of Eastern Airlines, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, was on board. He was one of eight survivors.

Daddy was in Army Air Corps before there was the bona-fide branch of the military we call United States Air Force and he trained as a glider pilot. I find this aspect particularly intriguing because it indicates that he was willing to volunteer for missions that were damned near suicidal. He was intense and this explains the potency of this attribute in me and my descendants.

Daddy trained as a glider pilot, but never went to war because WWII ended before combat could claim his soul. But his love of the science of wind had begun.

Diabetes took possession of my Daddy's health very soon after his military service. My mama says he nearly died before he was diagnosed. As long as I knew him, his health was increasingly compromised by this disease. It claimed his body, but never his spirit.

It isn't my Daddy's birthday or death day right now. Redecorating my house has offered me a new palette in which to view his beautiful paintings.

My father began going blind in the sixties. The diabetes began stealing his livelihood by causing the vessels in his eyes to hemorrhage. He gave up his architectural business and went to work at Fort McPherson in Atlanta overseeing construction sites. This new job took him away to Atlanta all week long and he only came home on the weekends.

He bought a sailboat and he began sharing his passion for the science of the wind with his family. We sailed every weekend - winter, summer, fall, spring. We raced, we swam and we capsized.

My father painted sailboats. I have two of these paintings. Neither are finished. First his eyesight went and when I was eighteen, he died.

But the colors. The movement of the water. The ghostly boats.

I Love America and My Daddy too

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 07:58:40 -0500

I have spent much of my adult life loving America, but becoming increasingly disenfranchised with the industries destroying the air, fundamentalists becoming dominant in their ignorant intolerance and the scorn in which people have been treated by big businesses. During the last eight years, I signed petitions just to prove to somebody somewhere that I didn't go along with all these policies. That this wasn't what I believed in. I have stood on a street corner and claimed peace. I have written editorials.

I have never stopped loving this country, the land on which I live or the ideals of freedom that our constitution has stood for all these years. I have never stopped speaking out and instead of found more ways in which to do so.

I was probably somewhere near ten when my daddy painted this picture of Abraham Lincoln. It would have been in the late sixties and our country was burning all around. My daddy didn't get out on the streets and protest. He watched the news and shook his head and painted Lincoln.
Lincoln is an oil painting and has many, many layers - clear ones, colored ones, just stacked in subtle ways one atop another. It took time to paint this picture. Painting it took the meditative focus of an introverted and troubled man in times of great turmoil.

And this is how I feel about America. Like creating a picture of Lincoln and Obama. In this picture throngs of people gather to acclaim that we are equal and free and responsible. That we can be better and will be better. I love this America and I will stand with the many others in creating a land "where justice flows down like waters. And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

True Confessions

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 18:45:37 -0500

This question of "Why Write?" has been bugging me since  the time I was a graphic designer at a small town weekly paper and I began writing a column sporadically. Once I even wrote a column claiming a constitutional mandate to write.  I was way too serious most of the time.
The thing is that the desire to blog  always makes me question my motivations  in spilling myself to others.  Why would I reveal myself?  The world is not a kind place.
The answer has finally come to me. When I was small,  we had a housekeeper named Elsie. I loved her;  she was my second mama. She took care of me after school  and when I was sick. Elsie would crush aspirins in coca colas to entice me to take them. And when I was holed up in bed  with one malady or another Elsie would bring me that very naughty pulp magazine "True Confessions".   I loved reading those stories.
I also lived right next door to the Piggly Wiggly, so often I would take fifteen cents, go buy a coke, sit down at the magazine rack and read all of the Real Story, Real Confessions,Real Romances, and Crime Confessions that I could before  the manager would kick me out.
What I have noticed is that the blogs I love to read sometimes function like a modern cyper true confession magazine and that is very obviously modeled after my first literary love. Therefore it finally makes sense to me why I am so consumed with the idea of blogging. I love reading others’ secrets and I have this compulsion to tell you mine.