Open Writing

Each Sunday morning I take a bath whether I need one or not, shampoo my hair, press in my finger waves, and then wander around until I am dry and the waves are set before I dress for Church.

Since I contracted Valley Fever four months ago, mornings have become slower and slower, or else I have got slower and slower. I would be able to tell which it was except my brain has also become less active at the same time, and sometimes I don't know the difference between coming and going.

Although the first hour or so after rising, everything seems to function as it ought, the longer I am up and around, the less able I become to function normally, and it shows. I take the dogs out to the dog park early so that I am shielded from the sun before it climbs over the eastern wall and begins its unrelenting rise to temperatures that would send a Saharan Bedouin scurrying for his ‘Bayt char, or "House of hair," as their tents are called.

Before I face the bath, I take the pooches to the park for an hour or so where they run around as if they had never run before in their lives. When I get home, I have a cool drink, sit down to tackle a mountainous pile of newspaper crosswords of varying degrees of difficulty before getting down to the serious business of the day. The business of my bath and shampoo.

Granted that I have considerable inertia to overcome for me to actually disrobe and get myself under the shower, a throwback to the soapless and waterless days of my childhood. I know that whatever else happens that eventual lavation is inevitable and unavoidable.

After staring at the clues for an hour or so, changing the odd one with heavy overwriting to fit a clue whose light has just dawned on me, the rest of the clues become as meaningless as a page of Chinese characters.

Then I know that my genius has reached the point where more flogging will yield no results, and so resignedly, I say to Gay, "I must take my shower."

"Go and take it." Says my beloved, encouragingly, not emerging from the newspaper. Do I hear her smile?

I cannot move. I have forgotten how my legs work. I try one more clue. Sometimes I figure it out, and sometimes the answer retreats even as I can almost taste it on the edge of the mushy grey matter in my skull. I screw up my brain and push, but nothing flows from it, there is no delivery. Minutes pass in pregnant silence, but it is a false pregnancy, nothing comes, and I become more discouraged.

"I am going to take a shower." I say in disgust at my mental stasis. Gay has heard it all before, but remains patient with me, for which I am grateful.

I pull a different puzzle from the heap. The silly clues are about songs I have never heard, actors and actresses I do not know, or, worse still, about something called baseball, which is, I believe, a version of the English schoolgirls' game, Rounders.

All I know about baseball is that Joe Dimaggio missed the ball more times than he hit it and, in consolation, married Marilyn Monroe. But, none of the clues point that way. I try not to bite my pen. We keep a dog for that.

"I'm going to get in the shower," I say with resolve.

"Yes, dear," says Gay, without enthusiasm. It sounds as if she is beginning not to believe that I will take a shower.

I look at the clock again. It is remarkable how fast time slips away when wrestling with clues as obscurantist as "Three letters - Played for the Chicago Cubs in the 72-73 season." Right! Tommy Lawton? Stanley Matthews? Posh Spice?

I turn to the computer to see if anyone is selling an Enigma Machine, that will give me the kind of help I feel I need. None for sale today. Drat!

Valley Fever took me in its grip four months ago and did extraordinary and cunning things in my lungs. It is not through with me yet. This week, I am going into hospital for a lung biopsy to find out what it is doing.

The CT Scan shows a nodule that looks suspiciously like the big marble I lost when I was a kid. Did I inhale it? I will have the answer to that question in a week. Besides weakening me, physically, it has slowed my ability to think and reason.

I take another look at the puzzle. It is reduced to a swirl of white spaces, black spaces, and letters that seem to have no connection with each other. It has lost its form, its sense, and its charm, and, because I cannot think of anything else to say, I repeat with greater resolve than formerly, "I am going to get my shower!" I almost convince myself.

My forcefulness causes Gay to drop her paper and look across at where I am sitting. "Good!" she says with equal resolution. I push my chair backward on its castors to free my legs from under the kitchen table. As I did so, I experience one of those moments when I know that all is lost.

Oh, heck!" I exclaim with feeling, "I've left it too late." The spirit indeed was willing, but the flesh had collapsed. I am pooped out.

It was another hour before the puppet-meister pulled the strings that pulled me back together enough to drag myself to the shower where I unenthusiastically cleansed myself, trying the while not to fall over. Belle, my big Belgian sheepdog, watched me as if she was weighing me up for dinner.

I’ll get back to the crosswords tomorrow.

Copyright © 2005 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Read more of Ronnie's stories at:

http://www.2theheart.com/author_ronnie_bray
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/voices/011024summer.html