Finishing: Forbidden Knowledge

Learning: about lovely 50s food.

Listening: Matchbox 20? Everlast's? "Keep Your Lights On"

Viewing: "Notting Hill." I liked "Four Weddings and a Funeral" despite the fact Andy McDowell makes me break out in hives, so Hugh Grant with Julia Roberts, whom I could watch file her nails, should pose no problems.

30 November 1999: Giving

The only thing I wanted to accomplish today was to donate blood. There had been flyers for a community blood drive at a downtown hotel sponsored by the NBC affiliate and with the Denver Broncos; despite the football, I decided to give blood since it's about the only decent thing I do.

In 1992 I had Lyme Disease and took antibiotics and as far as anyone's been able to tell me I'm fine. It's not like mono, with a long recovery period, and it's not like chicken pox, where the virus can hang out on a nerve ending and erupt into shingles 25 years later (as happened to me). In the fall of 1992 I tried to donate blood but was deferred for six months because it hadn't been long enough since I finished the course of antibiotics. I continued to donate blood through the Red Cross in Connecticut until I moved to Colorado, where not the Red Cross but another organization called Belle Bonfils (after an unfortunate who bore that name) harvests blood.

Nearly four years ago, I dropped into a Belle Bonfils donation center in Denver. One of the standard screening questions is whether you've ever been deferred. I answered truthfully and told why. Bonfils told me they didn't want my blood. This really peeved me because they only knew I'd had Lyme Disease because I'd tried to donate too soon after antibiotics. If I'd slacked for three months, I wouldn't've been deferred and therefore could've answered the deferral question in the negative.

In 1997 a hospital recruited at one of my former office buildings. I filled out the questionnaire honestly and answered the questions honestly and gave my blood. No one asked me about Lyme Disease. That has been the only time in Belle Bonfils's state that I've donated.

Today my Lyme Disease didn't come up in a spoken question about any past deferral. No, by now it's made it to the printed list, right alongside dental work, tattooing, hepatitis, and traveling outside the country. Permanent deferral.

Might as well stamp my forehead with a big REJECT stamp and send me back. I'm tainted. Besmirched. Useless.

Neither of my parents donate blood because they both--including the one that's an LPN--think you catch "catch" AIDS from donating. My sister doesn't donate. Someone at work said "ick" when I announced I was leaving for an hour, but she doesn't even have novocaine at the dentist because she hates needles. Another coworker can't and HAO can't because they weigh under 110. This is giving at its most fundamental, giving of yourself. I do not understand selling blood, either out of your own vein or from your banks into a buyer. I want to give it. And I can't. I have to wait to die to give of my self and then my organs'll pro'ly be rejected because of the damn Lyme Disease and my whole body'll go to waste 'cause it'll be illegal to dump it raw into a hole in the ground with an acorn.

Stomp stomp stomp.

So anyway. I decided to go early instead of during lunch to avoid lines (and I hope at lunch time there were lines) and to pop into Victoria's Secret as soon as it opened to pick up a pair of thigh highs, since in a moment of desperation this morning I yanked pantyhose onto my resistant flesh. It wasn't quite ten yet, though, since I hadn't actually donated, damn it, I'll get over it soon really I will, and I loitered outside with another man who was waiting for maybe the tobacconist to open. I figured I'd console myself with a cookie from the Corner Bakery but once at the counter I realized I had no cash (and I refuse to use a debit card for such a piddling purchase). So I smiled and apologized to the clerk and left. A moment later, outside in the courtyard, I turned to someone calling, "Ma'am?" (I'm old now: in the past it wouldn't occur to me that ma'am could be me, even in an empty courtyard.)
"Is chocolate chip your style?"
Fumbling, grateful, fearful of being misunderstood, I apologized, "Oh, I'm not hungry, I didn't mean--"
She understood that and was just giving me a cookie. I was staggered. How kind. She waved aside my thanks and went back inside.
There was no one around who looked like he really was hungry; as soon as she was out of sight I would have given the little bag entire to someone who needed the cookie. I know I didn't look myself like I was hungry, really hungry, dressed as I was, being able to afford a whole different pair of spectacles for sunglasses, clean, with a rounded cheek. But there I was, standing there with a karma cookie.
I turned to the man waiting on the bench and asked if he'd like to share my cookie. I broke it in half and we sat there waiting for our shops to open. He told me about a man who'd brought his lost son and son's friend home from a hunting trek they'd gone astray on, and how he had that in mind several days later when he himself gave a lift to another lost hunter. I told him about the man who took my picture with Captain Kangaroo and how I took photographs for other strangers over two years later. I believe in giving it back.

Hence why I donate(d) blood.

The man pointed out the clerk likely knew I was a good customer and this would make me a better. Yes, that's true, and I did buy my lunch from the Corner Bakery today although I hadn't planned to this morning. And I would've bought an extra sandwich, and a cookie, for someone who needed it more than I, but I saw no one on my circuitious way, from work to bank to bakery. In fact I wondered if I would see a homeless person today. Seven homeless men have been decapitated in Denver over the past two weeks, leaving corpses difficult to identify (with no idenfication cards, no work wondering where someone is, no family in close touch to worry, no head with a face to lead to a name, with all the stigma against itinerants and homeless people leading the murderer(s) to assume no one will notice or care. Between that and the temperature finally dropping, there're a lot fewer street people making an appearance these days.

---

I just caught the bus on the way home. I threw myself into a seat with Forbidden Knowledge in my hand and a pen marking my place 15 pages from the end. For the first time, my bus had mechanical problems, problems not caused by a decrepit bus but by vandalism. About halfway home, the rear door wouldn't close and thus the bus wouldn't move. This hasn't been the first time I've been grateful for a bus following its approximate route only three minutes later, and I took that. I got off at Blockbuster, what the hell, picked up "Notting Hill," which I'm sure I'll regret, or at least regret publicizing, stopped at the office to sign the new lease (our second nine-month lease), collected the mail, and came home only 20 minutes late, despite what Blake tried to make me believe he'd been suffering.

In the mail was a package from NBM. Purple socks and a note. I called her on Thanksgiving because I was thinking of her and wondering where she was spending the day. She was widowed two years ago (or whatever you call being widowed when you weren't married to the person) and SEM's away and I figured she was with either her aunt (who raised her) or SEM's father (she is good friends with her ex-husband and his second wife and her two half-sons or whatever you'd call SEM's two much younger half brothers), but I just wanted to make sure.

The house was clean and the bird was in the oven and I was sitting on the floor addressing Christmas card envelopes (because I'm so organized, you know; NBM was such a good influence) and my uncle, totally out of the blue except it was Thanksgiving, called me, and I was expecting our friend N---- (same name) to dinner, and I decided that this time, I should immediately follow through on my impulse. So I called. But she was at her aunt's.

NBM is amazingly organized. When her partner died, his son was at UConn and he'd left no will and it was all a mess; by contrast, she said, "When I go, you know, I'l have it all organized and color-coded and SEM won't have to bother with anything." This is true. Her basement is color-coded. It's remarkable.

Months back I sent her an ad I saw in a magazine for clothes, I think, not for closet organizing, but the clothes were all in a closet about the size of Donald Trump's boudoir, yet despite the size it had maybe six garments altogether, and just to complete the look there was a bizarre ball of no discernable purpose other than toe-stubbing in the middle of it. NBM's gripe about closet organizing systems is that they assume you have four dresses and three sweaters and two pairs of shoes. I annotated it, telling her that she should get rid of everything in her closet that wasn't in a neutral sand hue (since other colors wouldn't go with the closet's color scheme) and get one those balls and then she'd finally have the tidy closet she's always wanted. She got a kick out of that. She writes just like she talks. She gets kicks [one of her words] out of things. I heart her.

And SEM's going home for Christmas, and althought he won't be there for DEDBG's New Year's fête, their visits home at least will overlap. Good.

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Last modified 30 November 1999

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