Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Marlon: RIP
It is now well past midnight’s threshold on the day of my vaunted return to reality, and I am staring wide awake down both barrels of my future. In my dream last night I imagined myself already back at work, focused singlemindedly on how a form had been filled out. I’m gearing up to bring lunches I won’t need to heat (too hard to carry back from the microwave to my desk with all the doors and crutches involved). I’ve completed several tasks I’d set for myself during my recuperation, and made my peace with a few others that will remain undone. Much has been accomplished, of which a large part has been the counter-intuitive accomplishment of doing nothing at all. That’s been a tough one, forcing myself to commit full energy to lying still and knitting my bones. I’m not inclined, generally, to unitasking - I like to do two, three, four things at once. For the last month, though, I’ve been keeping myself to fractional tasking at best. I’ll read with half a mind, between naps. I’ll make a cup of tea but abandon it to go cold in the kitchen, since it’s too hard to drag it back to the bedroom where I prefer to be ensconced. Things have barely been getting done, and I’ve been forcing myself to be okay with it.
I’m naturally resistant to inactivity. When I’m not grading highways, I’m grading term papers; when I’m not scaling mountains I’m scaling fishes, or perhaps teeth. If it’s not one thing it’s another. But over the past several weeks I’ve been forced into quietude, and I’m not now ashamed to say that I’ve developed a taste for it. I’m used now to staying abed while the world gets up around me, to living in my loungewear and watching a dvd and marking it as a productive lifestyle. It’s taken a while for my gnarled fingers to relax their death-grip on my over-zealous Type-A-ism. Now that I’ve re-trained them, I fear they may rebel against reverting to my old same ways. Well, I’d better limber them up now, because in four hours or so the alarm goes off and I return to the world I left a month ago and that seems much farther away than that today.
And let’s give the disability its due - it hasn’t all been isolated indolence for me. At most I’d only get three days at home alone in any week - the rest of the time Kel was around keeping the house from crumbling to dust, and the kids were home trying to dustcrumble everything as quickly as possible. I got to see everybody in the family a lot more than I usually do, sharing late afternoons and early evenings and all day Fridays for a change. I got to read long stories to Zach and to hold Jesse in my lap for those fleeting moments he chose to be still. The days have been idyllic and more joyful than typical. I will miss my being left alone, but I will also miss my being left with my family.
It bears recalling at this time, with rain pouring from the heavens to sully the sidewalks on which I will be crutchhobbling to work so painfully soon, how many really good things I have to cherish from these four weeks at home:
* That I got really good medical care
* That I got even better support from family and friends
* That my disability and sick leave covered my absence without any out-of-pocket costs
* That I even have a job, to say nothing of a good one with good people, to which I can return
* That I’ve been downgraded to “no ace bandage and just one crutch” along with my invariable massive velcro-strap boot
* 
Marlon
That’s right, this is one of the very few surviving images of Marlon taken in the wild. It’s typical of my exposure to him - brief but a little fuzzy, candid and crowded in the frame, as if startled at a watering hole or while sunning under the baobabs. A dashing, manly mustache, lithe and full of life, the sort that says, I may be recuperating in fuzzy pants, but I’m still a warrior in my heart. But then again, there’s the Marlon that the rest of the world saw:
This is the quizzical Marlon, the mustache that asked, Why bother and What matter? Wherefore and Whom with? Howitzer and Which hazel? A mustache that got lost on its way from my nose to my lip, and decided to make camp for a few weeks. This, too, was Marlon - not too proud to be straggly; too straggly to be proud.
And of course, there’s the version of Marlon that Kel tired of almost as soon as it appeared on the book of my flesh:
This guy really had to go, and he did. And so do I, so I will. Back to work tomorrow. Damn, I mean today. Join the millions wishing me luck!
