Dropsies

 Dropsies 

I am still seeing Dr. Feight on Mondays and Thursdays. He counts the two sessions as one, and the one is paid for . . . well, I’m not sure how – some combination of insurance and anonymous charity, or so I think. I saw him this morning; our appointments are now at 11:00. I’m “the last thing in the morning,” he tells me, but he doesn’t explain what that might – or might not - mean.

     I am driving myself now, but I pick up Uncle Albert on the way,* and he reads in the odd combination of magazines and journals in the waiting room - The New York Review of Books, Scientific American, Poetry, Dissent, and Field and Stream - while I talk to the doctor. Then, usually, we go to lunch. Today, though, we came back to the house. I had made soup over the weekend, lentils and onions and ground up Andouille sausage spiced with a splash of beer and a couple of pinches of thyme; and there was plenty to get rid of.

     We drank small glasses of beer with it. Uncle Albert lamented the end of the Premier League season – and Arsenal’s finishing out of the top four (and the refereeing in yesterday’s match against Everton). He doesn’t know how much attention he’s going to pay to the transfer window this year, he said; and he asked me what was going on with Dr. Feight. “Have you said anything to him about how clumsy you’ve become lately?

     “I haven’t,” I said.

     “You should. It’s like you’re half drunk half the time."

It’s true. I drop things three to a dozen times a day – pencils, books, salt and pepper shakers, note pads, napkins; I spill drinks pouring them. I stumble going up the stairs; I burned myself brewing the soup. Yesterday, I almost fell when we stood up when the priest came in.

St. Jude’s

     I stepped on an edge of the kneeler, sticking its tongue out from beneath the pew in front of us and my ankle and then my knee buckled. Fortunately, I caught myself on the edge of that pew, before Uncle Albert reached to lend assistance and I knocked him down. (Thank God for his 96-year-old reflexes.**) I caught myself and had to hold on hard to keep from going to the floor.

     “I suppose you’re right," I said, perhaps because the sermon yesterday was about listening, and that included validating what the person you were listening to was blathering on about. I don’t know how from any of the passages we got there, unless (speaking of blather) we were supposed to be ready always to pay close attention to others when they began giving their “account of the hope that was within them.”

But you know already what I think about hope, that it is the enemy of joy; I should today, however, add that it is better than dropping stuff all the time, especially when I reach down to pick it up and it slips through my fingers – I drop it again.

05.22.17

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  * . . . as I think I’ve said: (05/15)

** I don’t know how many years I have been referring to Uncle Albert as 96, or maybe said he was 97, thinking I’d said he was 96 in a previous year’s post. The truth is I don’t know how old he is, except more than 90 and – I’m more than reasonably sure – more than 95. As I’ve said before, he is not really my uncle, though I’ve begun in the last year or so to wish he were.