Sunday, February 1, 2015

The Scholar and the Adventurer


“Hey Curmudge, in your postings about people, are you trying to be some sort of psychologist?”  It certainly doesn’t fit your résumé.”

“No way, Julie.  I’m just a storyteller—sort of a Caucasian Uncle Remus.  Our posting on Companion Qualities was just common sense, and the one on Brain Health for Young and Old was based on a hyperlink to great research by Barbara Fredrickson on the characteristics of love.”

“Okay Uncle Curmudge, what’s today’s story?”

“Well, Swifty, if you had taken a moment to read the title, you would know that it’s about two very different people, a scholar and an adventurer.  And by the story’s conclusion we’ll realize that these people aren’t as different as we originally believed.”

“Sit there in your rocking chair, Old Guy, and tell your story.  If it stops rocking I’ll know that your peripheral neuropathy is no longer just peripheral.”

“Mary was attractive and intelligent, and even in high school, was devoted to her profession, her family, and her church.  In college she joined one of the best sororities and dated guys from the right fraternities, one of whom characterized her as ‘spoiled.’  Nevertheless, her profession dominated her activities.”

“I trust that Mary was not the adventurer in our story.”

“Right.  That was Joe.  He canoed in bad weather; ice skated on a big lake in view of open water, and ran rapids—alone—in a small, inflatable boat.  When he saw a mountain, his first thought was, ‘How can I get to the summit?’ “

“In my opinion, some of that approached the extreme side of adventure.”

“To get to the point, ma chère, Mary and Joe attended the same college and were married the week after she graduated.  Somehow, Mary and Joe knew intuitively about Barbara Fredrickson’s characteristics of love before she wrote them.  By the time their children were in high school and college, Mary had become sufficiently daring to travel alone to Paris to study for a month.  And she didn’t speak any French.”

“Wow!  She had really moved up on the ‘adventurous’ scale.” 

“And while she was there she successfully discouraged an attempt at seduction by a Frenchman who spoke excellent English.”

“I perceive, Curmudge, that adventure can be fun when you initiate it but not when you attract it.”

“In subsequent years, Mary and Joe took many separate vacations.  She went to Europe, and he went hiking and even technical climbing in the Rockies.  His adventures were low key with excellent guides, and he learned that one must climb on good rock and with good people and good rope.”

“I’ve got it, Professor.  Mary and Joe’s scholarly and adventurous spirits converged, possibly because they learned to trust one another to do the right thing.”

“In later years they went to Europe together where she looked into every cathedral they encountered and he practiced foreign languages and took day hikes in the Alps.  And as Mary and Joe aged they took cruises on most of the rivers in Western Europe.”

“You can’t kid me, Old Guy.  This time I’ve really got it.  You, Curmudge, are Joe, and Mrs. Curmudgeon was Mary.  You gave it away when you mentioned foreign languages and river cruises.  And you proved that some differences can converge and stay converged for 52 years.  But some differences are so great as to be nonreconcilable.  For example, I’d bet that Mrs. Curmudgeon wouldn’t have stayed married to a septic tank cleaner or a pig farmer.”

“Well, she kept me even when I lived 2,000 miles away and only came home once a month.”

“Sure, but if she had been married to a septic tank cleaner, it would have been on the condition that he lived 2,000 miles away and never came home.”

“Julie, you win.  You always win.  But that’s because we reconciled our differences over 300 postings ago.”

Kaizen Curmudgeon

Link to posting from blog archives: Sepsis 2—diagnosis, management—9/07/11

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Bedtime


“Golly, Curmudge, I haven’t seen you for a long time.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s have come and gone.  I was afraid that Santa had run over you with his sleigh.”

“No such luck, Julie.  I just got tired of writing about serious stuff, like Curmudgeonocracy.  Let’s talk about something lighter which has, however, a serious ending.”

“Have at it, Old Guy.”

“Remember long ago when even in the comic strip, married people—like Blondie and Dagwood—slept in twin beds?”

“And now, married or not, it’s one bed.”

“Right.  But in real life, such as my 52 years married to the late Mrs. Curmudgeon, we slept every which way.  When we were first married and I was a graduate student, we moved the single beds in our apartment together and rotated the mattresses 90 degrees.  Then 31 years later we were back in single beds that were 2,000 miles apart (between Wisconsin and Washington).”

“Wow, Curmudge, that lasted for seven years with reunions in Appleton, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and even Paris.  And in Appleton you had single beds with a common headboard.”

“Then after I was transferred back to Appleton, Mrs. Curmudgeon contracted sleep apnea, and her CPAP machine kept me awake.  Dave was in the Army, so I moved to the single bed in his room.  I slept with the window open but had the bedroom door closed to avoid cooling off the rest of the house.”

“And you lived happily ever after, right?”

“With the exception of one of the most frightening events of my life.  Over the years Mrs. Curmudgeon had knee, hip, and shoulder surgery that robbed her of a lot of dexterity and the strength in her right arm.  Taking prednisone for interstitial lung disease produced her inevitable weight gain.”

“You are building up to something bad, Old Man, but I can’t envision what it might be.”

“One night in the fall of 2010 I went to bed (in Dave’s room) and inexplicably left the bedroom door open.  And I must have been sleeping with my good ear up.  Sometime during the night I heard a weak, repeated ‘Help! Help!’  A frantic search and there Mrs. Curmudgeon was, draped across a jumbo bale of Depends®  head-first into a closet.  Because her arm couldn’t move the sliding closet door, she was unable to slide sideways off the bale; and her arms and legs weren’t strong enough to move her backward off the giant package.  If I hadn’t heard ‘Help!’ she would have been immobilized until morning with her weight against the pack opposing her efforts to breathe.”

“So, Curmudge, you fetched her out of the closet, and everyone went back to bed.  So what was the big deal?”

“The ‘big deal,’ Julie, was fetching her out of the closet.  I could grab her, but bent over, I couldn’t lift her.  Fortunately there was an exercise bicycle in the room, and I moved it close to Mrs. Curmudgeon.  Then I kneeled behind her, put my right arm around her waist, and used my left hand to climb up the bicycle frame until we were both standing.  It was exhausting.  We then both staggered off to our respective beds.”

“I presume that you never again slept with the bedroom door closed.”

“True, and we never speculated regarding what might have happened that night if my bedroom door hadn’t been left open.”

“I guess you both were just too busy.”

“The events of late autumn and the holiday season, as we described in The Last Christmas, proceeded as planned.  Regrettably, the menacing shadows (white on the x-rays) of pulmonary fibrosis and pneumonia also proceeded across Mrs. Curmudgeon’s lungs, and she died on January 18.”

“And that, Curmudge, is why at this time of the year we remember those special—and sometimes frightening—occasions of her life.”

Kaizen Curmudgeon
  
Link to posting from blog archives: Sepsis—8/26/11 http://kaizencurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2011/08/sepsis.html