Skip to main content

Ground Control to Major Tom...

The classic David Bowie rock ballad is running through my head as I sit in my power wheelchair with my v-pap strapped to my face. I mean, how space age is this?! And I'm communicating with human beings all over the planet from my Tobii.

When I was a kid, the Viet Nam war was regularly on the news.  The Bay of Pigs was a reality. There was no such thing as a reality shows. Astronauts walked on the moon and we watched it on TV. We stood up at the beginning of class and put our right hand over our heart and pledged allegiance to the flag and the United States of America.

I watched The Nightly News with Walter Cronkite, Dragnet, Lawrence Welk,  Hee Haw, and Laugh In with my grandfather. I watched Sesame Street, Mister Roger's Neighborhood, the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, Wild Kingdom, Disney, and lots of cartoons. With my mom, I watched Dark Shadows, Peyton Place, Days of our Lives, Twilight Zone, and movies, especially scary ones.

You know what's scary? All the things we used to be scared of are no longer scary. Like the Vietnamese, Russians, and African Americans. Mystery lifted, fear dispelled. Aliens, okay fear of aliens is box office magic, but we feel pretty safe from life "out there". War, yes war is a worry, but  it's different these days. We hate the toll taken of soldier's lives, but some are oblivious or focused on the economics of war..Otherwise, war feels more like a nasty Xbox or PSP game these days, and it's not.

It seems as if the biggest fear now is threats to our health and well being. Ebola, enterovirus 64, e-coli, flu.... Where's ALS in this mix? Ground control to Major Tom... We are dying out here...A slow /fast  death, depending upon your point of view...No known cause...No known cure...Certain death... Cruel twist of fate, paralyzing the healthy and active.

Major Tom, can you help?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Remember...

I remember catching fireflies,  putting them in a jar, as a girl of five. I picked pears off a tree that overhung an alleyway on my route home from school, then enjoyed the forbidden fruit. .I had a golden cat who chased a gray mouse through our living room sending my mother, 3-year old sister, and me screaming atop the sofa and chairs. We lived in a farmhouse and I watched Romper Room. A daddy longlegs skittered across my dirty kid legs as I teeter-tottered on a broken kitchen chair back. I played grocery store and laid out a bedroll for group nap time in preschool. We lived in an apartment attached to a bakery. My maternal grandparents visited and a photo was snapped. Grandma held Dawn and Grandpa held me. I held Grandpa's chin. Walking through the back of the flour-caked kitchen, I saw scrumptious pastries and colorful toys stuck in the cupcakes with my hungry kids eyes. We lived in a two-story apartment building next door to a large farmer's field.  That field was my...

I Heart Trellis

Early in our relationship, though we were traditional nine-to-fivers, we were driven to create something together. At 36 and 43-years old, respectively, we were beyond creating babies. Besides, we came into our relationship with a perfect daughter each. Mine was 13 and his, twenty-three. Both blonde, bright, and beautiful and his came with a bonus, a baby! I came into the relationship with a condo that needed no work. He had a work-in-progress in the woods, actually two. We would spend our lives together redesigning and improving these "cabins in the woods". But, before that we took an afternoon cutting down young alders to use to make a trellis. Working together, we .wove supple, young branches into a nine-foot tall trellis with two hearts stacked one atop the other. We were in the gooey, sickeningly sweet, first months of love, forging a new life together. Here we are seventeen years later, separated by circumstance, through no fault of our own. I live in a hospice faci...

Tuesday

Tuesday is shaping up to be my best day of the week. Every day holds the requisite eating, changing, television, and napping. But Tuesday, I got a glorious, hot bath in a handicap-accessible bathtub with my Angela and Lisa, reorganized my shower caddy with my Lisa, read "The White Album" by Joan Didion with my Lindsey, "supervised" doughnut-making and sampled same with my Sandra among others, and listened to Ryan Feng play classical piano. A new book fell into my lap today. Of course, I mean that figuratively. "Play It As It Lays" by Joan Didion was just laying on top of the informal Bailey Boushay House library cart, so I borrowed it. .Guess what we'll be reading? I feel very blessed!