12 January 1999: Marooooned

I picked up the last photographs from my trip home last June. RDC left the camera chez EJB, who failed to mail it afterward until deigning to hand-deliver it last month.

There's one picture I want to Photoshop the hell out of. I, mouth open in a barbaric yawp, am holding ZLT, who looks like the stolen child:

Away with us he's going
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside

…but a red streak from our light-leaking camera cuts across my eyes.

And pictures from Sea Breeze, including two of the "dinghy." EJB has an inflatable pool he uses as a raft and that I called the ship's dinghy. If you tie a rope through the drain in one corner to attach it to the boat and sit in the opposite corner, you can lounge in it and it doesn't ship much water. Having a rafty pool is a plus when Long Island Sound is too full of jellies for non-masochistic swimming. The first picture shows EJB alone in the dinghy, the painter taut. It is clear the tide is pulling the boat at anchor and the raft secured to the boat in a straight line on the current of the tide. The second shows that I have joined EJB and that something has gone wrong. The leashed opposite corner is now seaward, and we, the ballast, are astern, if astern be defined not as the intended back of the craft but the back of the craft in relation to its forward direction .Now how could this happen? The leashed corner should be closest to the boat, and the painter itself be taut except at slack tide, right? Well, no. In this photo the painter lies loose on the water. Someone on Sea Breeze had managed to detach the painter from its cleat, so there we were, being carried out of the harbor onto the Sound in an inflatable raft, to be marooned on Plum Island. Hello!

And pictures of the house, since besides wanting to use up the film I always like to have pictures of where I've lived. My freshling room, even my hateful sophomore room, and my beloved single, but neither of my grad rooms nor the Orchard Acres tenement. I might make a virtual tour for DEW.

When I went to Kaiser, I was in no mood to walk so I took a 2:36 bus, which deposited me at the clinic to check in by 2:51. Since a city bus (with stops, though) takes 15 minutes to traverse the south and east sides of rectangle whose north and west sides compose my usual route, I shouldn't feel bad about needing a half hour to walk what is probably about the same distance. But I do.

Isn't it odd that I "go to Kaiser" rather than "consult my doctor"? It doesn't bode well for my receiving personal medical care.

I had the same B-movie nurse I usually have. Every time I go, I am asked the same questions. I can understand getting blood pressure and so on every single time, but is my birth date likely to vary? The practitioners see so many patients that they do not recognize anyone from visit to visit and thus pro'ly ask routine questions to establish whether anyone's posing. I'm exaggerating. Anyway, this LPN always comments that I was born the day she graduated from high school. It could be just me, but when I notice how old I feel, in the sense of how much time has passed or how suddenly a baby I knew has grown up, I keep it to myself. I always hated it whenever anyone pinched my cheek and told me I used to be only this big. Like they could measure their lives only by someone else's milestones.

Anyway so in a pre-emptive strike I mentioned, in a small-talk kind of way while she took my blood pressure and before she began to enter any data, that I was born the day she graduated from high school. That I remembered made her laugh and being spared the usual asinine comment pleased me, so we were both happy.

I realized I had forgotten to call in my prescription so I waited in the pharmacy for it to be filled, wondering if I would be able to get home in time to go to the step class at the park. I stepped out into the setting sun, heading for Ogden upon which two buslines run: one would bring me back downtown and the other further south until it intersected with my regular bus route. Whichever came first would win moi as a rider.

In the downtown station, I took my less-favored homeward bus, leaving nine minutes earlier with a half-mile walk than my favored homeward bus, leaving nine minutes later with a quarter-mile walk. I read The Life and Times of Michael K and by the time I got to my stop I had about four pages to go. I jogged the half mile, calling it an aerobic warm-up, got home to change my clothes and scamper out to the recreation center well in time for the first step class of the quarter.

About that step class. Its room is a room, not a studio, and has no mirrors in which to keep an eye on the instructor. In fact instead of mirrors it has windows, so everyone walking by in the parking lot has a view. This does not please me. The step platforms, clearly acquired with public funds, are either a pathe knock-off of the Reebok Step with a sharply beveled edge or are plywood boxes someone pasted up. Yoikes. Furthermore the room is "multipurpose" and one of its other purposes is to teach ballroom dance. Its hardwood floor is shiny and new and polished and slick. The steps slip. And the instructor wears way too dark a lipstick.

The class, overall, is just fine. She's a good instructor and sets a pace that's does not slay me. It's not a class at a private club taught by a professional, but one with steps I can modify to make more strenuous if I wish. It's the first class of a series so I also imagine she'll set a higher or more complicated pace as the weeks go by. One thing I am not in shape for: she made us do roomsful of lunges, which is why my major lower muscle groups are screaming for mercy today.

She ended with upper body and abdominal exercises. As soon as she said "push-up," I started doing push-ups, while she told people their options: "You can do them military, like she's doing," and I was all self-conscious, "or modified on your knees, or just stand to push off the wall." Then she assumed her pose, worse than military: only one foot on the floor and the other resting on the one's heel. Yoikes. Then I thought of the scene in "Full Metal Jacket" in which a row of men, twelve or twenty or however many maybe are in a basic group, do push-ups in a long line with their feet resting on the shoulders of the man behind them and only the last man gets to push with his feet also on the ground. Hellish. If I had only done the ones she coached, I might have been able to do them all military, but my extras put me over the edge and I finished with my knees on the mat.

I was whupped and retired at 9:00 to finish The Life and Times of Michael K and begin From the Heart of the Country.

W.B. Yeats, "The Stolen Child."

Remember in "Silence of the Lambs" when Starling offered Lecter an annual week on Plum Island? I first saw that movie in Waterford, Connecticut, which lies directly across the Sound from Plum Island, upon which animal diseases are indeed tested. So the audience was laughing even before Lecter read that on the map for himself.