Monthly Archives: April 2015

In this program, we have clinical weekends a few times a semester. We spend all weekend with a patient, and then write an exhaustive 30+ page paper on them that is due just a few days later. I have found that this drives me nuts. You know this massive paper is due, but there’s nothing you can do to start working on it until the clinical weekend starts and at that point you are too busy and exhausted to do much writing until Sunday night. And then you have three days to hack out a short novel, detailing everything from the (cited!) pathophysiology behind the patient’s admitting diagnosis to their hourly bowel habits, and all the connections you can find between. But it’s the days of waiting, knowing this massive thing is due and there’s nothing you can do about it, that is messing with my head. I want to start, to get working on it, to make some progress. But I can’t. It becomes the looming shadow of a thing, and nothing can be done to banish the shadows until Friday night at 5pm, when we get our patient assignments for the weekend.

Similarly, I have been waiting to get the keys to the new house for nearly two months. I have been anticipating this new place, the fenced yard for the dogs, the gas stove (oh, bliss!), the wall-to-wall windows and old wood floors. The peace of having my own space in Saint Paul, and having internet to work on school or watch movies during down times, being closer to school and to the hospital. All these things, I have been anticipating. I have also been trying to piece together the details. What do I bring on this first trip up? What are the essentials to camp out in the new house comfortably for the first few days? A mattress. A french press and coffee mug. Kibble. I have been stressing over these things for weeks and weeks, although until today, there was nothing I could do. And until tomorrow, I’ll have to hold my breath and see if I packed the right combination of things in the truck.

All of this is to say, that at the ripe old age of nearly thirty-five, I am still not very good at waiting. I want to get things done now, have things settled right away, not have to worry about them. But I am being forced, by time and circumstance, to wait. This was true in the lead up to Alaska last fall. And to my acceptance into graduate school late last summer. And for all I can tell, I’m not getting any better at it.

How can I find that middle ground, that space of eager anticipation that welcomes the waiting as well? A space that lets me keep my excitement for things to come but with peace about the waiting that lets me sleep at night and spend my days doing things other than obsessive fretting. I’m not sure, but I’m hoping that two years of anticipation-clinical-paper cycles will teach my mind to settle a little bit more, until it really is time to get down to business.

The coffee in Portland is a revelation. The taste of it is like no other coffee I’ve had in my life up until now. As if every other mocha was only a mocha through a glass darkly.

This week has felt like an escape, in the same way that moving into the house in Saint Paul in less than a month seems like a new start. Even though I am shaking nothing off as I edge my way a little further north, I press on with the futile hope that a new geography will somehow transform the messy life I’m dragging along with me, even though I know only time will begin to unravel and straighten things, not location. But maybe a new location will make the necessary passing of time a little more bearable? There is hope in that thought, a more realistic hope, if couched in disheartening reality.

I am staying with old friends while I’m here, in a perfect little wood-floored apartment on the third floor of an old brick building with windows opening onto thick-barred fire escapes and a view of Mt. Hood, a claw-foot tub tucked into the tiny bathroom. The apartment is in the middle of everything, a pleasant walk to Powell’s Books and more artisan coffee roasters than you could hope to reasonably try out in a weekend, or perhaps a whole month. Every third person on the street is walking a dog and the drivers on the highway are polite about merging. The ongoing west coast drought means sunny skies and dry clouds soaring overhead, despite Portland’s damp reputation. It feels like heaven, even though deep down I know it is just another place with bad drivers and rude hipster baristas, a mass of humanity with all her foibles, as everywhere. Yet the temporary escape from my life, at least for today, seems like a real one. I do not want to go home.

Driving through the low costal mountains, the tree bark is covered in moss, branches heavy with it, sagging over the road. The intermittent rain is thrown back up from the pavement by passing cars, making new showers, rewetting the windshield, leaving me fumbling for the wipers in an unfamiliar car. I catch sight of the ocean, finally, over a low hill, a fleeting strip of flat grey after hours of lush spring green. It disappears as the hill bottoms out, behind an ace-hardware and discount barber, walk-in’s welcome. I find signs for a public beach and park. Hopping across the muddy banks of a freshwater creek, there is suddenly a quarter mile of packed, low-tide sand between myself and a mountain of angry, crashing, bone-chilling water. A lighthouse stands sentinel on an outcropping far down the shore to the north. One family in rain boots teases the incoming waves at the margin of the ocean. A man and his black dog wander towards the rocky end of the sand, zigzagging drunkenly across the expanse, following the vagrant path of a wet tennis ball. Each are tiny, dancing smudges of black in relief against the water and sand, the bright, cloud hazed sun reflecting off their varying surfaces. I walk towards the water, obliquely. A direct route to such a force does not seem prudent, given these last weeks.

These days, the dreams wake me in the deepest part of the night and I am afraid to return to them. Yet I do not want to be awake. Even in sunlight, I do not want to be awake. Days that are not full are a threat, darkness crowds the edge of vision but flees when I turn my head. I cannot look this thing full on. Looking sideways as I have been, I cannot see where it goes, or how it will leave us in its wake. The glimpses are enough to set my heart racing. I think I am afraid of what I will see when I finally let myself look at it straight on, without shadow. I know it will be an ugly, monster of a thing. The future will be ragged with its passing. There are no even edges ahead, no clean wounds. So I hold onto the tasks, hands fluttering to find more, and flee the silences.

But standing in the sunset on the edge of the ocean, I want to be brave enough to face this like I am facing that immense, indifferent beast. How will I come out on the other side of what I am faced with walking through? It does not care about me, or how I will manage. It is just a thing that must be faced, be walked, be survived. There is no right answer, no easy way through, no way to pass without scratches, and bleeding, and scars. And I begin to fill with hate for what I was promised, and what I have been dealt instead. I push back against it, believing still that hate directed at fate only saps what energy you have and then falls, ineffectual, in a heap of useless rags before you are through the worst.

Last night, I stayed on a whim at the infamous Sylvia Beach Hotel, a haven perched on a grassy cliff above Nye Beach along the Oregon coast. I have been wandering around the building and its surroundings in a state of barely-veiled bliss since I arrived. I want to stay for a week, or maybe a year. There are couches and chairs, blankets and coffee and tea and an ever changing vista in three directions. It feels like a refuge. The ocean, turning from morning grey into a deep slate blue, is churning on the shore below where I sit perched in an overstuffed chair next to a roaring fire on the third floor, coffee at hand. This feels like a good place to sort through things and gather strength. And there is plenty of gathering needed, these days. I am loathe to leave, though I must. I hope it won’t be long before I can return.

Yesterday, after walking along the beach, I went back to the discount barber, his shop perched in a front room dingy with age and grease. There was a single spinning chair, patched with black tape, a curtain of indiscriminate pattern blocking the hallway. The list price for a new client cut, hand written on yellowing paper tacked to the faux-wood wall, was thirteen dollars. I told him to take off the length, but to leave enough that it could be pulled back. As I expected, he chopped quickly through almost all of it, a year’s worth of growth in a dark pile on the floor and nothing left to be pulled back. I smiled and dug out cash, reveling in the light- headed feeling of all that weight gone. It is not a new beginning. New beginnings don’t exist in the tumbling inevitability of time’s relentless push forward. We are caught up in the flow and there are no do-overs to be had. But it is something.