Yesterday morning was bright and warm. But the weather report said that in a day it would get cooler and then there would be several days of rain. Meanwhile, I had garden work — mostly, edging the garden strip to cut back the ivy sprawling from the strip onto the patio, which it clearly intended to vanquish — that I’d put off for weeks because of earlier rains, so this was my chance to clean things up.
It’s hard work for someone with my disabilities who gets around with a walker. A heavy long-handled lopper is involved, also a clever long-handled grabber tool to pick up the clipped stems and leaves and put them into a plastic bucket (so that I can take them inside to very slowly and methodically use sharp-edged hand tools to reduce them to short bits of stuff usable as compost back on the garden strip). The ivy trimming is demanding, sweaty work, but satisfying because the result is a handsome garden and then, eventually, a pile of excellent compost. But there’s a nice rhythm to the labor — and it sets my mind free to wander on other things, like the postings I’m always composing.
Very quickly I realized that it was in fact blazing hot — 85F, high-summer-hot — so I speeded up, and got considerably less fastidious as I worked along the strip. Retreated inside the house, did my slicing and chopping until I had a pile of compost bits.
By then my caregiver J had arrived. I gave him the bucket of bits to distribute in the garden, he came back to quiz me about my medical state. Looked anxiously at me, because I was flushed and speaking slowly, but he went on to ask some general medical questions. He asked if I’d weighed myself, adding that he’d seen in the bathroom the … umm … what do you call that in English? And I couldn’t think of the word. I went on haltingly to explain that I was having trouble finding the word, but not to worry, this was normal, I was just hot and tired, I wasn’t having a … what do you call it when you get a blood clot in the brain? or even that thing that Jacques had when he suddenly couldn’t talk or walk, it has a name with letters and another long technical name.
I know, I know, not being able to find words for not being able to find words.
In the forest of unfound words. I could sense that J was about to send desperate messages for help, so I told him again that this happened sometimes when I was hot and tired and my brain wasn’t getting quite enough blood flow, it had happened all of my life, it happens to lots of people, and by now I was speaking fluently and with assurance, and I got to say that I was talking just fine now, surely he could see that, and no, he shouldn’t tell me to try harder, that was terrible advice, it made it impossible to find words, what you needed to do was creep up on the words indirectly, through related things, let your mind just wander around, and that in fact just starting to search through related stuff often got you the word — when my typing on a search for “device for weighing …” came to a halt when scales popped into my head, illustrating this very point. And we both broke up in delighted laughter.
From NOAD:
noun scale-2: 1 (usually scales) an instrument for weighing, originally a simple balance (a pair of scales) but now usually a device with an electronic or other internal weighing mechanism: bathroom scales | kitchen scales.
And then the initialism TIA came to me, and I could unpack it to transient ischemic attack, and remembered that TIAs like the ones that so alarmingly afflicted Jacques were sometimes called mini-strokes, and then I got stroke too. Again, from NOAD:
noun stroke: … 5 a sudden disabling attack or loss of consciousness caused by an interruption in the flow of blood to the brain, especially through thrombosis [AZ: a blood clot]
I know a fair amount about strokes and the techniques for recovering from them. Since I’m taking a blood thinner, I’m unlikely to have a thrombosis. But, as I confessed to J, I’m shit-scared of Alzheimer’s, having had those 15 years of caring for Jacques through his dementia. But my occasional word-finding glitches are not signs of incipient dementia, and I’ve learned not to panic. And so I’m able to explain to people that I’m talking slowly right now and can’t find some words I want, but in a couple of minutes I’ll be fine. And so it is.
On the slopes of Pacifica. After I’d talked far too much about myself I shifted to asking J about things in his life, starting with my anxieties about his work papers (which are totally legit and he’s in line for a green card, but the wait time is several years), in the current atmosphere of hostility towards aliens in this country. This led to some talk about the many jobs he’d been through (after a career in software engineering) to get to his current caregiving work (which is mostly with dementia patients, so I’m a lot of fun for him to work with).
Eventually that led him to a job that was wonderful in some ways but just awful in others: delivering food in Pacifica CA. The wonderful part was that Pacifica is breathtakingly beautiful — built on the side of a mountain ridge overlooking the Pacific, with stunning views and amazing beaches. A photo (without the beaches):
Pacifica CA, south of San Francisco, on the Pacific Ocean roughly where the airport (SFO) lies on the San Francisco Bay (photo: Kinoko Real Estate)
Now, the down sides. First, a delivery job in Pacifica means you are forever driving up and down that ridge. Second, it’s a delivery job, and such jobs are generally high-pressure and low-paying. And third, a delivery job in Pacifica means you’re constantly dealing with rich people, a fair number of whom tend to believe that they are inherently privileged, to hold service people and other proles in contempt, and to demand deference from them. Or, as I put it to J: “You know, a lot of rich people are just flat-out assholes”, which totally cracked him up.
Experience has taught me to assume that rich people are assholes, deserve no respect, and are best avoided as much as possible — until they demonstrate that they are in fact decent human beings. And there are a fair number of decent rich people. But you probably won’t encounter many of them if you’re delivering food in Pacifica.
March 27, 2025 at 6:28 am |
I’m curious about the implication that the single-platform weighing device commonly found in bathrooms is “usually” referred to in the plural, given that my experience is quite otherwise.
I believe I am right in remembering that the 2007 Palo Alto motss.con included a Segway tour in Pacifica, which is indeed beautiful to look at.
March 27, 2025 at 7:01 am |
Not an implication, but a direct claim in NOAD (and some other dictionaries). “Usually” might be too strong; I believe that the claim is that in the Oxford data overall, the plural is more common than the singular. But that of course would be consistent with some varieties of English using the singular here. (I am often astonished to discover that some variant I use myself and believe to be the standard is in fact a minority usage. But there’s nothing wrong with minority usages.)