In my last ALS Diary post I expressed my regret for subjecting readers to so much of the same thing (it’s always “a little worse”) along with so many extraneous thoughts and comments with a kind of cheap solemnity and faux depth. I decided that I should limit the entries and cap their number. This will mean saving the last few for when my ability to write is starting to fail.
Now, however, I have a noteworthy transition. Two days ago, my power chair was delivered. An excellent employee John North spent a couple of hours explaining how it works and training me to use it. It came in the nick of time. My legs will barely hold me. I realized that I would need it sooner rather than later. It’s easy to operate and it’s ingeniously engineered. I can imagine that some of my fellow ALS sufferers get some pleasure from operating these clever vehicles. I’m not one of them.
Yesterday, my wife was in Chicago visiting my daughter and today they came home together. While they were gone, I had planned to go to the YMCA to swim with Terri and Laura after lunch. They were going together in one car and I was going before them. I needed to go to the bathroom but thought I would wait until I was in the Y so that others could use the bathroom at home. That was a mistake I will never make again. This is the kind of thing I need to report for the benefit of my fellow sufferers. Unpleasant as it is. You need to heed the regularity of your bowel movements and attend to the signs strategically. From my delay much unpleasantness followed. But thanks to my friends, it was overcome and we had a pleasant hour together in the warm therapeutic pool. Afterward, Laura and I went to Schooners for dinner. By that time, I was too exhausted to watch a movie.
Fortunately, Laura had had an excellent idea for a pre-Xmas celebration. It’s the Icelandic custom called Gulabokaflut, “Yuletide Book Flood.” You exchange gift books (requests are advisable) and then spend the evening reading and talking about them over hot cocoa. It’s more soothing and probably less trivial and forced than your usual holiday ritual. I received and started reading Garcia Marquez, Love in Time of Colera. I gave Laura the recent Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, an Argentine author who lives in Berlin.
Love in Time of Colera begins with a long character-based meditation on “the authority of death.” I’ve explained before that literary darkness and death inoculate me against depression. Garcia-Marquez’s characterizations of people and places are rich and strange. In the richness of his details, he is comparable to Botero’s bloated portraits, not in point of girth but in terms of uniqueness and exaggeration. Read a capsule history of his native Colombia and you imagine a sad place left behind by history. Read Garcia-Marquez and his place and people are Dickensian denizens of a lost world of unique eccentrics.
In Love in Time of Colera, the eccentricity of his world is concentrated in the almost surreal power of love, carnal as well as ideal. This is the payoff for me. Even in tragedy and despair, love never yields to cynicism or indifference. It reminds me of one of Petrushevskaya’s most memorable stories, “The Fountain House.” In one way or another, love triumphs over death. But it certainly doesn’t deliver happy endings.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 