Sitting with My Father

by D. J. Green | Aug 10, 2017 | Ground Work

I walked into my father’s room. He sat in his blue easy chair, wearing a maroon turtleneck and gray sweat pants. His hair and beard were freshly trimmed. He looked dapper, for Dad. And he was awake. A good day for a visit. But he seemed to be fussing with something in his lap. I got closer to see what it was and found him pulling at the skin on his hands.

“Help me get these off!”

“What? Those are your hands.”

He yanked at the skin on each finger.

“I’ve got to get these gloves off!”

“That’s your skin!” I tried to get him to stop pulling on it, but he brushed my hands away.

“Boxing gloves,” he said. “I need to get them off now.”

My father was 94 years old when this happened. As the years had slipped away, he slipped away with them. Our family transitioned month-by-month and year-by-year from a time when he joked about “incipient Alzheimer’s” to living in the grip of the advanced stages of the decidedly-not-incipient disease.

“Dad, please don’t pull on your skin like that. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

His caregiver for the day came in. I was relieved to see his hands come to rest, when his attention shifted to her. He looked from her to me, back and forth.

Deb’s Dad ready for the fight.

Then he turned to me, “Can you beat her?”

“What?”

“Boxing? Do you think you can beat her?”

I had no recollection of how to address boxing questions from the Savvy Caregiver’s Class given by the Alzheimer’s Association, but I decided to play along.

“She’s a lot younger than me. And bigger.”

“But you’re tough. And fast.”

“Okay. I bet I could beat her.”

Dad was not much of a talker, except for the odd day when who knew what made the tangles in his brain twist in a way that rendered him downright animated. Like that day.

He waved his hands at us. “Well? Go ahead! Box!”

She and I exchanged glances. I stood up. She raised her fists and I raised mine. I did my best float-like-a-butterfly Muhammad Ali-style dance steps. We threw fake punches.

“Go get ‘er, Deb!” Dad cheered, laughing. “Get her!”

We sparred. Dad was firmly in my corner. He chuckled and egged me on.

Most days I saw recognition in Dad’s eyes, felt affection in the hand he reached out to me when I arrived. Some days he said my name. That day he cheered for “Deb.” Later, I would write that down in my calendar. I don’t know why it seemed important to know what day would be the last that he knew my name, but it did.

I was as close to my father as he would let anyone be, aside from my mother. He instilled the love of science in me and inspired me to become a geologist. I missed talking with him about geological work or him commenting on articles he’d read in Scientific American. I missed the Life Master in Duplicate Bridge. I missed the reader and movie goer. I missed the passionate traveler. I missed my father, though he was still there, sort of.

I went for a flurry of air jabs and my opponent succumbed.

“She beat me!” she said, “I better go rest up. I need to get your lunch soon, Sid.”

“She beat you?”

“She sure did.”

He smiled up at me.

Fists raised in triumph, I smiled back.

My father, by the way, had never been a boxing fan. Who knows why it was on his mind that day. Perhaps a research neurologist knows, someone who will help spare families the pain of Alzheimer’s in the future.

Maybe my father was pulling off those gloves because he was tired of fighting?

But most days, we just sat. Some days he slept through my visit. Some days he roused and gave me a smile. He often held the newspaper, his reading glasses propped on his nose, and I wondered what he saw in the words and pictures before him. Sometimes I held his hand and sometimes he held mine back. One day in March of this year, when I asked how he was, he said, “I’m happy to see you.” My heart sang. His face lit up when I walked into his room and he waved when I left.

So, I sat with my father, as long as he was here to sit with. At nearly 96 years old, he passed away peacefully in June. One of many things I’m grateful for – he knew me until the end.

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Schist

by D. J. Green | Jun 2, 2017 | Ground Work

This rock is very old, though new to me. I recently picked it up on one of my many desert walks. Having rained the day before, it was rinsed clean and sparkled in the sun. Its glistening was irresistible to me – like a bottle cap to a raven or a tennis ball to a Labrador Retriever. It’s been sitting on my desk ever since. Its shine shifts with changing light. Schist does that. I pick it up, tilt it this way and that, and let the light play over it.

Schist is a metamorphic rock.

That means it’s been recrystallized by heat and pressure, fundamentally changed from the rock it was to the rock it is. [I can see the metaphor in this – I’ve also fundamentally changed, under pressure, from who I was to who I am. But it’s really more fun to talk about rocks.]

This stone started out sedimentary, probably a shale deposit, composed mainly of clay minerals. It would have been deposited in a low energy aqueous environment; low energy meaning still or very slow moving water, otherwise the tiny clay particles would have stayed in suspension. Then it would have been buried. And then lithified, turned from sediment to stone.

Later, it was subjected to heat and pressure. In the case of schist, medium grade metamorphism, the middle range of temperatures and pressures rocks can be subjected to. During metamorphism, the clays would have recrystallized to platy minerals (like micas and graphite) and elongated minerals (like hornblende), both of which I see in this rock.

The compression it underwent aligned the minerals perpendicular to the direction of stress. That would tell me something about the tectonic history of the area if I found it in place, which I did not. I found it thousands of feet below its outcrop and more than a billion years after it first formed, since the metamorphic rocks here are associated with the Precambrian Sandia Granite. The intrusion of the granite body was the event that metamorphosed the surrounding sediments, now meta-sediments, like this schist.

And so the cycle continues – deposition, lithification, metamorphism, erosion, and deposition – this rock is a sediment again. It made its way down slope and came to rest beside the trail I walk. [Again, I can see all this metaphorically. But sometimes a beautiful thing, like a stone shimmering in the sun, is so perfect it can be just that. It can be my picture, the memory I carry home, from a walk in the desert.]

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Tell me – What catches your eye? What do you carry home?

Why I Don’t Take Pictures

by D. J. Green | May 12, 2017 | Ground Work

I brought my camera when I walked in the desert today. A blog needs images, right? Right. But not this morning. It rained yesterday, and the prickly pear fronds are swollen with the storm’s bounty. But it’s subtle, and the pictures just look like prickly pear, not subtly swollen prickly pear. Droplets of water still cling to a yucca’s waxy blooms. The chollas’ spindly, spiny branches also seem fuller. And their buds, with just the tips of what-will-be fuschia blooms peeking out, hint at the flowers that will come with the next rain, but they aren’t very photogenic.

When I’m thinking of composing pictures, I lose the wonder of a tiny purple flower in an effort to make my unsophisticated camera focus on something so small. I forget to listen to the meadowlark’s song, hearing instead the whir of the camera’s auto-focus honing in on a quarter-inch of color. The flower’s five tiny petals are lavender deepening in hue toward the middle of the bloom with lacy green leaves below, but its image is just a blur.

A pair of ravens soar overhead, screeching. Are they scolding me for not paying attention? I stop. The camera whirs one last time, when I turn it off. I zip it into my pocket and walk on.

With the camera tucked away, I delight in the dogs’ gaits, instead of feeling frustrated that they won’t pose suitably (because they do look so very picturesque, until I try to get them to sit still for a picture, that is).

Now I see yellow and white and orange flowers too. I only know the white ones by name, desert primroses. They’re so delicate, they won’t last long. I kneel and stroke a satiny petal. I notice that there are new shoots of the desert grasses that some years don’t come at all. But yesterday’s rain invited the new growth, and today’s sun coaxed it out.

The rain settled the desert dust and a newly rinsed piece of schist catches the sun’s rays, and my eye. Its silver warmth feels good in my hand. I carry it home. It will serve as my picture from today’s walk. Sitting on my desk, yet another of my myriad rocky paperweights, it will remind me of the lingering smell of the rain, the buds and blooms, the fresh grassy shoots, the swooping ravens, and the meadowlark perched atop a juniper.

P.S. – I confess that I went back out and did a picture-taking walk. Hope you enjoy both the words and the photos.

Going to School, Again

by D. J. Green | Apr 21, 2017 | Ground Work

[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]For me, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth learning to do it well. And that means going to school, perhaps in a traditional way, perhaps not.

Schooling

I didn’t walk out of high school and into my professional life as a geologist. I went to school for six years. I studied in classrooms and labs. I tromped the Tobacco Root Mountains of Montana in field camp, and took field trips to diverse geologic terrains from the Adirondacks to the submarine canyons of St. Croix. Then I went to work, where in addition to learning the science, I was schooled in how to plan and implement a site investigation, how to interpret the collected data, how to draw maps and cross-sections that communicated that data best, and how to write a report that told a project’s story effectively. I apprenticed myself to excellent geologists and project managers. I learned my trade.

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A New Trade?

I’ve always been an avid reader, I grew up in a house filled with books, and it took. I love to be transported by story, to landscapes and into emotions I’ve never known, and back to those I have. But when I sat down to write my first story, and then read the draft, yikes. It was clear to me there was much more to writing than just having a story to tell. Everyone has stories worth telling, but that doesn’t make everyone a writer. It was time to go to school again. But…I admit it was uncomfortable to be a novice, to not even know where to start. I had reached a certain age and level of competence at work, and in life. Was I really willing to not know how? Though I said I wanted to learn new things all through life, it was harder to step out of my comfort zone and do it.

Inspiration

Jerry skiing at Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Then another mentor came into my life – my late partner, Jerry. Not a natural athlete, and also of a certain age and level of competence in life, he took on learning to ski at 60. Both downhill and cross-country. He took lessons. He read and analyzed. And he practiced, taking joy in that work, celebrating his progression from green to blue to black slopes. It was inspiring. If Jerry could do it, learn something so outside his comfort zone and love the process, so could I.

I chose a non-traditional route for my education in writing, since spending months on field projects for work didn’t lend itself to a classroom schedule. I took classes at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, I took online classes, and I studied authors I admire by reading and reading and reading. I learned to read as a writer. How did that author make me laugh? Or cry? I spent one summer re-acquainting myself with grammar, studying Sin and Syntax and Eats, Shoots & Leaves. And I practiced what I learned over and over, not unlike Jerry’s determined turns down the slopes. I still do.

It took years of my writing apprenticeship to find the story I needed to tell, then nine years and more drafts than I can count to tell it. Have I learned my craft well enough that readers will want to inhabit the world I’ve built with words and become acquainted with the characters who live in it? Again, I’ll have to step outside my comfort zone to find out. But like Jerry, I can push off the lip atop the slope and make the first turn.
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Jerry at his most beloved cruising spot, near Toba Inlet in BC

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This post is dedicated to Jerry Blakely –  a wonderful mentor, devoted friend, and kind and generous man, who died four years ago today.

Sky Blue Pink with Yellow Polka Dots

by D. J. Green | Mar 8, 2017 | Ground Work

I thought I was going to write about blue today, but it’s going to be sky blue pink with yellow polka dots instead.

When I was a kid, if you asked my dad what his favorite color was, sky blue pink with yellow polka dots was his answer. Maybe that gives you a sense of what he could be like. Let’s just say that my family often put the fun in dysfunctional.

Chip off the old rock? Deb with her Earth Science teacher dad at the top of Sunset Crater Volcano in Arizona, Summer 196?. Photo taken by a kind fellow hiker with a Polaroid camera.

Dad, Summer 1975

This starts with blue and that’s fitting, because that’s how I feel. My father will be evaluated for hospice care tomorrow. This is not wholly unexpected, he’s 95, and in the late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. His disease has progressed with long periods of stability punctuated with precipitous declines. A few days ago, he began to slide after more than a year of somewhat steady state. It’s not unlike Stephen Jay Gould’s famous (among paleontologists, at least) theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolution. But rather than evolving, my father’s life and being have devolved in this way. As an Earth Science teacher, long before the depths of Alzheimer’s, I think Dad would have found that metaphor interesting. Given the starting point of this decline, it’s hard not to think it his last.

As I so often do when I feel blue, I walked. With little Capi in my backpack and Sandy by my side, I ventured from home into the desert. Today, the path before me recalled so many others. And my first hiking companion, my father. We hiked up Sunset Crater Volcano in Arizona, to the top of Lassen Peak in California, we wandered the Black Hills of South Dakota, he explained stalactites and stalagmites at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and with me holding tight to the back of his belt where the trail was too narrow for us to walk side by side, we scaled the heights of Angels Landing in Utah. I am who I am and love what I love in no small part because of who he is and what he loves.

Like so many winter mornings, a flock of mountain bluebirds rose from the first junipers the dogs and I passed, evoking a memory of my first birdwatching buddy. Dad, of course. What a contrast the Saturday morning bird walks in the woods of Staten Island are to my desert morning bird walks now. And as I was thinking that, a raven flew so close I could feel its wingbeats move the air.

The breeze freshened, ruffling Sandy’s fur, and he waved his lovely plume of a tail. He ambled back to me and nudged my hand with his wet black nose.

“I guess there are worse things than being blue,” I said to him, and one of the mountain bluebirds agreed. Perched atop a juniper, he sang.

“Life isn’t always easy,” he seemed to say, hanging onto his branch in the wind, “but it is sweet.”

Not just sweet, sky blue pink with yellow polka dots sweet.

Note: I will be working on a deadline for the revision of my novel over the next weeks. I’ll be back here with you in April. Stay tuned, everyone! Thanks, Deb