Sunday’s Post

In an inadvertent demonstration of the complicated interrelationship of aging and my remodeled brain, I wrote Wednesday’s post, asked Michael to look at it, and then promptly forgot that it was hanging out there, not posted. Michael forgot too, but that’s neither aging nor brain surgery, that’s just how he is, and always has been, at least as long as I’ve known him. I’ve decided that he and I have totally different concepts of time, which is one of the ways in which our contrasts make us such good partners. Like all flip sides of strengths, it’s a fault line in our life together, too, because even though I get that one signs up for the whole package, and it’s an obvious feature of Michael, contributing to many of his wonderful qualities, it’s utterly mysterious to me. At times, it’s maddening. This wasn’t one of them, that was just a little side excursion into thinking about the paradox. The simple explanation is that whatever it is about his makeup that lets him march to his own drummer... well, it means he marches to his own drummer. Anyway, that’s all a long way of saying I wrote the thing and forgot to post it afterwards, once I got engaged in other activities Wednesday night and Thursday. By the time I got home Thursday night, all memory of it had left me.

The medical week didn’t turn out that way, as the MRIs got postponed until farther in April so we could see the neurosurgeon right after the brain scan (his request) and we put off the blood work to confirm some of the specifics of what’s being tested. The blood pressure mystery deepened, as we’ve been tracking it across the week, and it’s wildly inconsistent even in the same settings/conditions. It ranges in strange ways and with fluctuations that don’t make much sense. It’s not a particularly satisfying mystery, but there you have it: this is one where all I get to choose about it is my attitude, so I’m cultivating curiosity and openness about what it might be and what options we might have.

Spring Break slipped away, though we did a number of break-like activities and, like clockwork, got mildly sick. Both of us. This is never a good match, but with decades of experience of how our normal happy synchronicity slips out of gear when we’re both sub-par, we’ve soldiered on. Upcoming: Week 10 of a 14-week semester, so the all-out sprint to the finish is about to begin. Despite knowing better, for me, it includes too much travel. In part, this is because stuff that didn’t happen during the big travel shutdowns this winter brought has all been packed in before the end of the semester and now’s the time to pay for the lovely unexpected time bonuses the cancellations brought earlier. In part, it’s just the normal rhythm of the requests, which are always heavy in October and April. October, I understand, as it’s after the semester has started up and it seems natural to schedule activities. I’ve never really understood the crush of April requests, but at least some of it is due to places that are on quarter systems and end later than we do, so their end-of-term scrum is offset from ours. Not living in a quarter system, I don’t have the same internal clock for it, so just accept that it exists.

In classic denial of what’s coming, I’ve planned a day of glorious sloth and visiting with friends for my Break Finale. The sun is shining and the trees are budding. The blossoming Spring promises to be beautiful this year. There’s always the fear of a late freeze, but in my best family-modified version of Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll worry about that another later.