Exercise

It’s easy to blame Mom for some of the physical problems she’s facing, although we also profited from her working many extra years for the Department of Education. Sitting behind a desk all day and being physically active only sporadically in recent years contributed to her physical problems today. One of those problems goes at least back to her knee replacement surgery, when she was not able to do some of the exercises to get back her range of motion and make it easier for her to get up off a chair.

Tuesday I got some of this medicine myself, however. Ten days ago I reinjured an old knee injury – that goes back to running in high school and then a 1994 NYC car accident – when I slammed my knee into a metal barrier I was trying to climb over (something I’ve done several dozen times there) while walking the dog. Not only did the circumstances seem freak/stupid, but – when I got to physical therapy – one thing the therapist asked me to do that I couldn’t do was lower my foot slower from one step to another – and it was clear this was not just due to my injury but due to my failure to work out my leg muscles, as I was to do at home after my 18 months of post-car accident PT. In other words, my recovery from this latest incident might have gone more quickly if I had only exercised my leg muscles more (Mom would be too nice to say: take that, son!).

My knee really hurt after I slammed it into the barrier. Unfortunately, I had a whole long list of activities planned for the rest of the day – including door-to-door canvassing in the mid 90s in New Albany between 2 and 4 in the afternoon – and I did them all. Very late in the weekend I iced my knee and elevated it, and I have taken some somewhat hat baths since then too. Gradually, I’ve gone to some of my whole post-injury routine: using a cane (sometimes) (I didn’t find it until Friday, after we had gotten the trunk fixed), not running at all, wrapping my knee in a Ace bandage, avoiding stairs or going very slowly up and down them, driving with my left foot, etc.

I did 18 months of PT back in 1994-95 partly because I loved it, and I loved going to my physical therapist in Louisville for my neck/back/shoulder injury. So, ten days after the accident, I was finally back up at KORT Spine and Sport (inside pictured above), a few blocks from our house, being diagnosed and then – the next morning – doing an hour of exercises and icing/electrical stimulation. Some of the exercises were surprisingly hard. Periodically after walking the dog in the morning I do about 5-10 minutes worth of exercises: including some I picked up from past yoga classes, some from 1994-95 PT, and some from Louisville PT a couple of years ago. However, I have never been good about using light weights to do leg lifts, which is the kind of exercise I needed so that I could step down from that stair slowly (instead of going . . . plunk!). I also have some electric stimulation device my Dad got me, that I haven’t gotten out for years. I may have to use all of these, as I try to figure out how to do PT for at least a few weeks while I try to negotiate my PT being gone next week and then me being gone to Minneapolis and then Guatemala after that. The big question: will they allow me to take a cane on the plane? It’s going to be an interesting – but sometimes painful – few weeks. And who knows whether Stephanie dodged the blood clot bullet on her elongated (but also spread out) transcontinental flight? She won’t tell.

P.S. Two more Mom connections: Mom and I may even be doing some of the same exercises (she formerly in physical therapy and now at home or at the gym; me in physical therapy). Also, I plan to check with the physical therapist/gym staff about whether Mom could use the facility to do some exercises if she were to visit us for a week or two at some point (so she wouldn't get too far behind with that).

-- Perry

Changes

Vincent and my car going through some changes. You’ll recall that Vincent his grandparents’ long stay at his father’s and his one-bedroom apartment in Columbus got them in hot water with their landlords. His father had talked with us about him trying to buy a house in Upper Arlington (?!). Then Franklin County had pushed Vincent’s father to pay child support.

Vincent called Saturday and we got out of him that they lived their place near Easton, tried moving into a house and something like asbestos in the house made his father sick, and so they’re staying in a motel while the landlord cleans it up. Vincent didn’t say where in metro Columbus they were staying or arre staying now. Vincent called us putatively to try connect the WiFi on his father’s family’s laptop from a Bob Evans near where they’re staying (putatively to work on his classes). Apparently they can’t afford to pay the extra WiFi charge at the motel. (We weren’t able to help him figure how to get it connected.)

We’ve been working on Vincent to try to get him to go to our cousin Dustin’s wedding, at his mother’s house in Canal Winchester. We got the surprise news that he and girlfriend Jamie are getting married next month, via Facebook message. We met Jamie earlier this spring at cousin Corey’s wedding to Brittany.
Vincent says he’s been working six days a week at Bob Evans.

Ever since we got the brown Nissan back from my sister a couple of years ago, I’ve almost never locked it because the alarm system goes crazy when I try to unlock it. Twice this month – including until almost midnight Thursday – the alarm system has gone off and these times it just wouldn’t quit (even if we got the sound to stop, the car still wouldn’t stop) and so we had the car towed to a nearby mechanic. Whatever they did the first time obviously didn’t entirely solve the problem, and so back it went Friday night. Friday Stephanie got it back: They didn’t charge us, but said if we wanted to fix we’d have to take it to the Nissan dealer (presumably expensive), but gave us some advice on how to keep the alarm off. We decided to risk it and not take it to the dealer – yet, even though this is a good time to take cars in since Stephanie is not working.

One of the reasons I’m sometimes tempted to lock the car is that the trunk – which worked some until a few months ago, when my key broke off into the trunk when I was parked at a metered spot downtown – doesn’t work. A couple of months ago I took the car to a local St. Matthews locksmith. They got the remains of the key out and oiled the lock, but we still couldn’t get the trunk open. They recommended I try taking the car not to the dealer but to another locksmith on the far end of town. Friday – on the way from the doctor’s to the track for the Friday night under the lights – we decided to drop the car off at this locksmith. Saturday lunchtime we went back and got it. They said the oil must have seeped in by then and the trunk lock was working fine, and sure enough it was. They said we’d need to oil it regularly. No charge. So we got some advice from folks at both of these businesses and no charge, although we had to drive to the southern part of town once (although we’d found time to do it).

Hopefully Vincent will get into their apartment soon, and we’ll stay trouble free with my car’s alarm system and trunk lock.

-- Perry

Busy week

Last Friday was the last day at work for Mom and the last day of the school year (without kids) for Stephanie. Mom’s colleagues had a modest-sized good-bye party for her, and she went through some more files. She still has a work laptop at home and a very complex table of numbers she’s trying to finish working out.

Monday morning Mom lost the close-to-the-building handicapped parking space she had informally used since she moved to the retirement center and will have to use a space she now has at an outlying parking lot. Along with not having to drive to work, this will encourage her to drive even less frequently. Mom has consoled herself about her retirement by continuing to tackle a host of transition business she’s got to take care of. She’s also begun visiting and participating several different above-ground and in-the-pool exercise classes at the retirement center. Mom hasn’t been swimming since the early 1970s, and so we’ll see how that goes. Mom concedes that she has gotten out of shape and hopes to remedy some of that without straining too much. (Her initial swim class and riding the center shuttle to a shopping mall Thursday didn’t go great.) Mom also faces challenges settling into a dining routine she likes (as practices at the retirement center continue to change) and finding people she enjoys eating with.

Stephanie ended up going back to school every day during the first four days of the week (volunteering all but one of the days). She finished packing up – or bringing home – the stuff in her old classroom and helped the custodians move some of it to the much smaller new classroom she’ll be sharing with another teacher. Tuesday Vincent and the dog went to help her. Vincent has been here for most of the week.

While I was away for the weekend, Vincent’s father – on a moving job to a nearby town – essentially brought Vincent here. Vincent – who still has a job as a Bob Evans dishwasher up in Columbus - was here ostensibly for an informal one-year class reunion of his old high school and a doctor’s appointment. As usual, Vincent spent the first couple of days here out with friends – although this with a friend we approve of - and then was tired and somewhat grouchy much of the rest of the time. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were all eventful. The two kids Vincent hung out with most of the time he was here back in April – who soon thereafter got arrested – had tried to be in touch with him, and stopped by several times. Vincent finally visited with one of them, but apparently told this kid – who is probably headed to prison – that he wanted to take a break.

Then Monday, when Vincent went to counseling – in the end, with Stephanie and Frisco – Vincent, apparently tiring of counseling – brought up stuff from the long past. He’s apparently been going through some of his father’s court records and started a debate with his mother about who was right in the expensive trial we were in vs. his father some 10 years ago. Tuesday and Wednesday Vincent went to the doctor and then an oral surgeon and then set up an early September for having two of his wisdom teeth out (an experience, Vincent recalls, that was particularly painful some 14 years ago for his mother). Thursday Vincent’s father called to explain that the child support enforcement office in Ohio had finally gotten on him, threatening his driver’s license if he didn’t start paying child support, and he enlisted Stephanie’s aid in lowering the monthly amount due (never mind that the final amount to be paid is shrinking in real terms, due to interest and inflation). Stephanie also got out of Vincent that – being kicked out of their apartment for having two extra people (Vincent’s grandparents) for the past few months – they kicked out the grandparents but are now having to look for a new place to live. (The child support enforcement effort may put a crimp in their plan to buy a fancy house in Upper Arlington.)

(Vincent also reprised his knife incident in a very small way by knocking over and braking a glass jar with marbles in it but also surprised us by going to church for the first time in months, for a Wednesday night dinner designed partly to help out people in the congregation – like us – having trouble making ends meet, with a free meal.)

Unsure about how to afford the time and money to driving Vincent all the way to Ohio Thursday (Vincent pitched that we shouldn’t do the usual meeting his father in Covington (KY) just south of Cincinnati), instead, for the first time, we drove him to the Cincinnati bus station and but him on a Greyhound bus for Columbus. This was a trial run and he should be able to do the whole bus route between Louisville and Columbus at some point (but not if he has a lot of stuff). With a driver’s license or not, his father picked him up last night and they got home safely last night. Vincent was to work this morning.

(In the past, Vincent’s father has gotten out of the driver’s license penalty by saying he can’t work – driving a moving truck – without a license and therefore wouldn’t be able to pay child support anyway. But it’s a vicious circle, because when he gets his license back and works, he doesn’t pay any child support either.)

(Because Vincent’s relationship with his friends here has dwindled – except for the friends in trouble who he broke it up with – and I guess except for the guy he hung out with this past weekend – having Vincent home this week – when he wasn’t asleep – especially since Stephanie was home some of the time – was a bit like back when Vincent was on house arrest, in that he was willing to hang out with us and do stuff with us. Vincent and Stephanie watched “Ghost Hunters” and a PBS show about ferrets and their people on TV together Wednesday night.)

-- Perry

May session devotion

Popular culture has influenced my interpretation of scripture and my understanding of my faith as much as it has influence me in other ways. As a very, very, very late baby boomer, I’m of the right age that the two pop culture that did this for me at a particularly impressionable age of 11 or 12 were the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the musical “Godspell.” I have a particularly vivid memory of my sister, my mother, and me going to the theater district in downtown Boston in the winter of ’72 to see what seemed at the time to be a particularly loud performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” As many of you probably know, “Jesus Christ Superstar” depicts several days during Holy Week. “Godspell” covers Jesus’ adult ministry and teaching, mainly before Holy Week. Of the two, “Superstar” is darker, even cynical.

As I grew older, one thing I noticed about these two interpretations is that they both essentially lack the Resurrection. This is particularly blatant in the movie version of the “Superstar.” The movie is a performance in a film. The performers arrive in a bus at a site, apparently in the Sinai, and perform “Superstar.” Then, they get back on the bus, all except for the performer who played Jesus, whose character has just been crucified. It’s not entirely clear what has happened, but it appears that he’s dead. The other performers, - the “disciples” – look sad. But it’s almost like it’s all a bad dream that they’re trying to forget. Needless to say, this is kind of odd.

In spite of these oddities, what is it that I got – positive – out of these interpretations? What do I value in them? “Godspell” reminds me of the joy, spontaneity, and music of the small, progressive, mainline Protestant churches I spent part of my childhood in. A year or two before I was in Boston I was riding around Southern California listening on the radio to a conservative, evangelical pastor criticize what he called “Christian rock.” It took quite a while for me to get used to the association between the job, spontaneity, and music of what became known as “contemporary worship” and large, conservative, evangelical churches, instead of churches like my childhood churches. For me, “Godspell” and Crescent Hill churches are reminders that that doesn’t have to be the case.

The Holy Week set of stories are probably my favorite scripture stories. I’m going to blatantly steal some ideas from Pastor Jane here. One of the reasons I like these stories is that – during Holy Week – Jesus – and, by extension , God - experiences a full range of very human emotions – from joy, anger, and communion, to fear, pain, doubt, betrayal, despair, and forgiveness. It seems to me that a God who has experienced all of that might be able to relate with us in a variety of situations and support us in those situations.

When my cousin-in-law died, her family had her funeral at the charismatic, don’t-worry-be-happy church that they attended. Soon after I arrived at the service, we were admonished not to be sad. We were told that we were there to celebrate Kelly’s life and that she had gone to a better place. I didn’t necessarily disagree with all of this. But this was a woman who was probably abused as a child. She got married at age 17 and went on to face some real challenges in her marriage, at her job, in court, and with her health – some of those health challenges being self-induced. She had died at age 28, leaving two children – about the same age as my sister and me=I when we went to the play – without one of their parents. It seems like there should have been a LITTLE room for feeling sad. The God of Holy Week, and of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” would have given us that space, ad would have supported us in grieving.

It’s hard for me to think of Holy Week without thinking of my friend Todd. Todd and I were high school classmates together. Todd became a professional journalist, and went on a “working vacation” to Peru, where he studied the drug economy there. Soon before he was set to leave, Todd was kidnapped, tortured for three days, and killed, apparently by the “Shining Path” guerillas. Immediately after this, Todd’s friends and family asked themselves a question I’m pretty sure Todd also asked himself: where was God, during those three days?

I ‘d liked to believe, and I do believe, that God was there with Todd, holding his hand, keeping him company, staying up with him through the night. The God of Holy Week, and of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” would have done that for Todd, just as God will do that for you and me during our darkest hours.

I’ve kept this in mind – and felt this – during the last few difficult weeks and months for those of us who work at the Presbyterian Center. And I trust that you have felt this during difficult times.

-- Perry

Countdown

Four more days of work for two people in our family: till the end of the school year for Stephanie (who will take all but the last week of summer off, because the school district couldn’t afford to have summer school, and is currently spending part of her time at work packing up her books, files, and so on, since she'll be moving to a former closet, which she'll share with a colleague, over the summer); and – apparently – for the rest of her life for my Mother. Mom is trying to finish two projects at home and to go in to work (in the Florida Education Center - or Turlington Building - pictured above) to go through more of her files. A couple of months ago she gave her manager June 4 as the date. Mom is not advertising the end of her 35 years with the Florida Department of Education as much as she might because she has mixed feelings about wrapping things up, as her health really pressed her to do it. Jacob has another week and a half of school. This weekend I may see Penny, Jacob, and Serge, as I head through there on my way to or from a college reunion in Pennsylvania. At this point, Stephanie is slated to stay home, as Vincent will be back with his own little one-year reunion and a doctor’s appointment.

-- Perry