A gorgeous spring day in San Francisco
Category Archives: Around home
Fat Tuesday, Lent, and the church steps at ChiChi
Last Tuesday, Michele and I celebrated – maybe over celebrated – Fat Tuesday, today our Lent starts. For the next six weeks, we have agreed to stay off of all intoxicants (we don’t count coffee, tea, or sugar). This has pretty much become a tradition of ours and we find it sort of ironically enjoyable to honor Lent without being Christians. Following a nominally Christian ritual without being tied to the dogma – or a Hindu ritual in a temple in Bali for that matter – always gets me thinking how religions build on the religious traditions they are replacing. Maybe build is not the right word, maybe it should be expropriate or piss on.
It seems to me that it takes both temporal and physical forms. Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, takes place at about the time of the old Pagan Winter Solstice festivals. The Pagans were here first with Solstice celebrations like the Roman Saturnalia, among others, and as Christianity became the dominant religion, it took on the trappings of Saturnalia but changed them to a celebration of Christ’s birth. Part of what happens in that the holiday is already there, so tweaking it to become the new holiday is easier than starting fresh but part of it is also sticking a metaphorical finger in their – whoever they are – metaphorical face.
I know that we are doing that in reverse. That is actually what we are doing. Every year we have a Solstice celebration that works because it is already holiday party season: the tree is up, the yule log is lit, so making it about the Solstice is pretty easy. That is also what we are doing with Lent. After all, Lent really is a result of adjusting to the scarcity of late winter, early spring. It makes a virtue of a problem. Like Gefilte fish came from the poor Jews of Eastern Europe not being able to afford a fish worth cooking whole, or beef bourguignon being the peasants answer to tough pieces of meat. The point being, the causes of Lent were already there; the Church just took it over.
In the same way. the Conquistadors, or Missionaries, whoever they were, built their new churches on old sacred sites. They jammed the new religion down the old religion’s throat. Now comes the fun part: in Chichicastenango, Guatemala – and I am sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of similar situations – the Mayas have now turned the Church stairs back into their Temple. They have re-expropriated the Sacred Temple. By acknowledging Lent, by honoring it; I like to think we are doing the same thing.
9AM….everyday
Everyday at 9 AM, I go into Sequoia Hospital for an intravenous shot of an high-octane antibiotic – daptomycin, Daptomycin with a capital “D”? – to protect my cow aorta valve. Every day for six weeks; Saturdays, Sundays, New Years Day, at 9 AM. I do not think that I have done the same thing at the same time for six weeks in my entire life, it is very strange – not bad necessarily, but strange – and I am having a hard time getting used to it.
What is also strange is the PICC line in my arm, just below the armpit, that runs through a vain – or artery, I am not sure which – up, through my shoulder, and down to a large gaggle of pipes near my heart. According to Wikipedia, the PICC lines are used when intravenous access is required over a prolonged period of time or when the material to be infused would cause quick damage and early failure of a peripheral IV, and I think that is the case with me. I had a peripheral IV port in my hand that they used for a couple of days and my hand is still sore.
I think of the PICC as a very small, very long, hole that runs from outside my body to, almost, my heart. It is very handy: anything anybody wants in me can just be shoved in through the hole; the Flue Vaccine I forgot to get earlier in the year, a Pneumonia Vaccine I didn’t even know I should have, lunch – I guess. But, and it is a big BUT, protecting that hole from bad stuff getting in is a big deal. A much bigger deal than protecting a IV because any bacteria traveling up the PICC would end up right next to my heart which is what they are trying to protect, in the first place, by pouring in the dosages of antibiotic.
Tuesday is the changing of the covering-dressing day and it is sort of emblematic of my whole Sequoia experience and – by only slightly fantastical extension – our health care system.
The changing of the covering-dressing is almost ritualistic in its detailed, loving, complexity; it is driven, in large part, by outside vendors coming up with new, improved, and increasingly expensive ways to do it; it is staggeringly wasteful; and once you see it, it is hard to think of a cheaper, simpler, way to do as good a job. First the nurse takes a sterile envelope containing sterile gloves and opens it to to form a sterile area, then she empties all the cleaning supplies and sterile dressings on to the sterile area. After she puts on the gloves and facemask, my existing dressing is removed and the area cleaned.
Each part of the new dressing comes in a sterile package that is now waste and has to be carefully disposed of. As an aside, much of the waste has my name and birthdate on it and each time that happens, it has to be disposed of differently so that my name doesn’t end up in the garbage where somebody could see it. End aside. Then the new dressing, including a jell-packet of disinfectant, is put on to cover the entry point of the PICC.
Lastly, the new dressing is dated. Then, probably for the second or third time, the nurse asks me my name and birhdate and gives me my daily charge of daptomycin. I have no idea what all this costs, somebody once said that the daptomycin, alone, is $110.00 and it comes with its own – wrapped in a sterile covering, of course – connecting line and two syringes to flush the PICC line before and after the dose.
Then I am happily on my way, back into the world.
Dharma talks
On Thursdays, Michele and I usually go to a Sitting and Dharma talk at our local meditation center. IMC, as it bills itself, says that it is a community-based urban meditation center for the practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation….dedicated to the study and practice of Buddhist teachings. One of the things most striking about the Dharma talks is the simplicity of their form. We enter the space quietly, sit on the floor or in a chair facing the teacher on a dais, meditate for about an half hour, then the teacher gives a Dharma talk for about an hour and an half – actually, exactly an hour and an half – then we put our hands together and bow – Gassho – to the teacher, and leave.
If we like, we can stay and mingle with fellow members of the Sangha, help put chairs away, make a donation for the teacher or the Center, and then leave. There is no music, no pomp, no passing of the donation plate, no chatting about the weather with the teacher at the door on the way out. In my imagination, the Dharma talk hasn’t changed in form since the Buddha gave the first Dharma talk or, for that matter, since Jesus gave a Dharma talk on the mount.
I love that. I love the subtle power of the tradition. I love the subtle change that the Dharma talks have made in our lives.
Lost in Reamde Cnt.
This morning started foggy and the fog hung around all morning making for a great day to read at lunch. As I was disappearing in Readme by Neil Stephenson, I kept telling Michele that it was great fun – after the first 100 pages or so – and she should get a copy from the library so we could read it together. By the time her book finally came in, I had almost finished but as soon as I did finish it, I was ready to start again. There were so many characters that I now knew but didn’t remember when I had first met them. Now we are both reading the book and are both lost in it.
So here we are, taking a break for lunch and both reading our books. I don’t think I have ever done this before and it is great fun. Talking about it makes it seem even more real and even easier to get lost.