Karin's 35th birthday.
I texted her at work and asked for the code to get into the main house. I was sitting there enjoying my morning soup and rereading Chapter 1 of my book when David came into the house. He had just dropped Sam off at daycare, come home to shower, and go off to work. He said he came home at 10:30 last night. Truth is I didn't hear him come in despite having difficulty falling asleep.
I'm on these Chinese herbs for my hot flashes. They are stimulating, and sometimes I struggle to fall asleep. Fortunately, I know meditation techniques to calm myself enough to knock myself out. If I have to choose between hot flashes and insomnia, I prefer hot flashes. Sleeplessness is the worst for me.
After I had written for a while and finished my morning soup, I got dressed and ready to go to the Frye Museum, which Dorothy recommended. I prepared to call for a Lyft.
No one uses the front entrance of their house. There is a steep set of stairs from the street up to the front door. The entrance that is used is technically the back door. It is accessed through the driveway, which is around the corner from the front of the house. I figured it would be too difficult to get a pick up from Lyft at the house, so I walked to the main drag and called from there. Easy peas.
The Frye is a small museum with an odd collection. The traveling exhibition wasn't open until the next day, but the permanent collection was available. I walked through the gallery and thought, huh? I thought most of the pictures looked amateur. There was something wrong with so many of them. The trip there wound up being more of an intellectual challenge than an aesthetic treat. I spent my time figuring out what was wrong with these pictures.
Since I didn't have the traveling exhibit to look at, I concentrated on the pictures in the permanent exhibition. I walked through the small gallery three times and stood looked at the pictures from varying angles, hoping I would see something that I had missed. Why would these pictures be in a museum?
When I spoke to Dorothy after I got home, she expressed the same opinion, which she had initially not shared with me. She was expecting a special exhibit to be open. She says those are good. When she went into the gallery with the permanent collection, she laughed. She thought they were terrible as I did.
These were the pictures the Frye family had collected. They even had an art expert to advise them. When they died, they had this charming small museum built to house their collection. As Dorothy said, if the Fryes hadn't provided the space, no other museum would have displayed them.
I found a number that were reasonably good and even took pictures of them. It was a little like a treasure hunt, finding gold among the dross. I concluded that most of the pictures lacked a clear focal point; either there wasn't one, or there was too much included. The other problem is that many of these paintings didn't flow. A good painting guides your eye over the surface by its lines. These paintings were static. The coloration was simplistic and the subject matter rendered uninteresting. Dorothy said the subject of the paintings was kitschy. I think all subject matter can be interesting. Most of these painters managed to make these images boring.
Before I left, I had a bit to eat in the museum cafeteria, a bowl of minestrone, and three slices of good Italian bread. I also stopped in the gift shop to buy Karin a birthday card. I found one with a lineup of cats sitting in a row of boxes, with someone sitting at the piano behind them. The implication was that the pianist controlled the cats' calls. This was a perfect card. Mike and I had our rendition of the Happy Birthday song, inspired by Mike's total inability to carry a tune. We caterwauled our way through the lyrics. It was fun. It became our tradition. People look forward to it- not.
I overheard one of the waiters speak to a customer about the history of the English language. Naturally, I piped up. While I would hardly call myself a linguist, I have an abiding interest in the subject. He mentioned something I know: how the gh spelling slipped into English orthography. It was the Dutch typesetters who couldn't imagine a language without that spelling in it.
Then I went off to find a CVS. I wanted to make sure my hyperness wasn't due to high blood pressure. My blood pressure had always been good until I spent five weeks in Oahu with Mike in the hospital before he died. My blood pressure went up to 160/95. I discovered this when Mike's first wife, Jean, visited him, bringing her blood pressure monitor. When I tried it, I was duly shocked. I called my internist immediately, and she prescribed blood pressure medication. I was on four pills a day and couldn't bring it down to normal.
When I got home, I continued the medication but less. I was taking two pills a day. One evening I missed; the next day, it was 136/85. Not terrible, but not great either. Then I started taking my blood pressure daily and keeping a record. I was generally under 130/80. I could maintain that with one pill a day. But now I am having this strange sensation of blood pounding, which is keeping me up at night. I was concerned that my blood pressure was up again.
Before I found a drugstore with a blood pressure monitor, Judy called. I was starting to get worried about her. I had called her several times yesterday but hadn't heard from her. Thank God, she is okay; she had her phone turned off. I told her of my concern. When I took my blood pressure, it was 125/75 shortly after I sat down. I retook it, and it dropped to 118/73. I think I'm going to have to rethink my medication regime. I don't want it to drop too low. While I'm traveling, I'll stay on one pill a day. I called Judy back to give her the news.
While I was waiting for my Lyft to return home, Karin texted me to tell me she was sick. She thought it was an ear infection and not Sam's flu. Her doctor corrected her; it's Sam's flu. She said now she understands why he was moaning all the time. When she took her temperature, she had 103.5, an impressive temp for an adult. Some birthday!
Since I can't imagine that I will avoid getting sick, I texted Shivani and Damon to warn them. I may have to go home to Hawaii from Seattle, so I don't get anyone else sick along the way. Damon told me that August, his sixteen-year-old son, was already sick.
Dorothy called me and asked me to bring a flask of cold water to Karin, who was lying in bed. I did that and returned to the Bnb, a fantastic separate unit, to do some more writing. After a while, poor Karin knocked on my door. She had to go pick up Sam and the food she ordered for dinner. I offered to do both; she turned me down. David wouldn't be home until 7. It wasn't much of a birthday celebration. So glad I'm not the one who introduced this mayhem into their lives. They live on overdrive as it is.
After she came home with the baby and the food, we spent some time together before David got home at 7. After the Tylenol wore off, her temperature was 103.6. They spent some time together clearing Sam's nasal passages so he could eat. There's this contraption now for doing it. First, you flush the nasal passage with saline, then you stick a tube down the baby's nose and suck. No, you don't suck the phlegm into your mouth. It's pretty yucky even with that precaution, but the baby feels so much better. When the baby feels better, so do they.
I went over to the Bnb and watched some TV. I had trouble falling asleep again. I got up to check my pulse to see if it was running fast. It wasn't. I think it is that I miss Mike. While I have known the people I am visiting for years, in some cases all their lives, I am with people I don't know well. It's stressful to be outside my routine and my environment. Mike was my portable home base. When I rested in his arms, I knew I was okay just as I was; no more effort was necessary. He didn't so much protect me, except from my mom, as he reassured me that I was okay just the way I was. Nothing else was necessary. The good news is I got lots of work done on the book.
When I checked my email, there was an email from JJ, the Bikram teacher, who was on the mainland for the summer. He was asking if I was okay because he hadn't seen me in class. He asked if I needed anything. How lucky am I that I live in an environment where people would reach out like that??!!!
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