Shards

What kind of tree are you this morning?


I got word on the MRI of my disc last Thursday, while attending a two-day seminar in the Big City. I don’t have a full rupture, just a big bulge at C6-C7. It’s a slightly unusual position, but common enough. The opening for the disc has become smaller than it’s supposed to be, and is helping to squish down on the nerve, which is causing my current problems. You could say that my problem and I have a fair amount in common. We both start out as big pains in the neck, but if you live with us long enough, we settle into pins and needles. Painkillers help on both fronts.

Dr. Disc doesn’t even want to see me again, unless the signs take a turn for the worse. My current round of anti-inflammatory steroids should finish off on Wednesday. I don’t need more pain meds. I’m not surgical. I just need physical therapy and patience. All this is fine by me. If this is like the last time, it’ll take four or five months to work the final kinks out, and then it will go away for another eight years or so.

Frankly, it’s the steroids I’ll miss the least. I don’t know what they teach kids at school about steroid use. I have had people tell me that steroids don’t affect them in the least, and that the “rage and aggression” mood swings they are accused of is outright false. I can tell you it’s no myth. A short story should explain.


I’m dropping things now, if I use right-hand only. I’m dropping a lot of things. Groceries, pills, books, coins, and probably small cats (if there were any such small cats about willing to let me lift them with just my right hand, which there aren’t). It was in this spirit that Saturday I dropped a small water glass into the kitchen sink while taking it out of the cupboard.

The crash of glass was at once spectacular and improbable. The cup I broke was of an old make known to explode on impact. Over the last twenty years another five of these glasses had gone from my fingers in a similar manner, and each time was an amazement. Picture in your mind’s eye a splash of crystal exploding out of a kitchen sink like so many drops of slivered water. I’m not talking dozens, or even hundreds of pieces of glass. There had to be thousands of shards, ranging from less than an inch across to no more than a speck of sand. Kitchen counter, sink, floor, even stove top took some of the resulting shrapnel. The scraps were tiny, deadly and a total mess.

The cats immediately ran upstairs, of course. I, being the human and the one with common sense, just broke out into tears instead. It seemed the sensible thing to do at the time. I blubbered while pushing what I could over the edge of the counter into a plastic bucket, continued blubbering while wet-sponging with paper towels, managed to reduce the flow to sniffles while sweeping with a brush and broom, and resigned myself to hiccoughs while vacuuming. The cats stayed disappeared.

Now this particular glass was not worth the histrionics. So it went out with a blaze of glory. Good for it. I hate what’s left of this set of glasses anyhow. They’re scarred and etched from years of wear, they’d been recalled by the manufacturer because of their propensity to go “BOOM” when bumped, and they were impossible to clean because of the facetted decorations cast on their bases. It should have been the first tip-off to me that all was not right in the mind of the Salamander.

I confessed my deed to the Socialist when he got home an hour or so later. I didn’t want him stumbling into the kitchen barefoot and locating pieces of glass the hard way. Not that there was any glass left about mind you. After all, I had just carefully cleaned the fall-out area, and was proud of the good job I’d done even under the influence of my little temperamental maelstrom.

The Socialist checked out the battlefield and found glass I hadn’t cleaned up. I was wounded. He did it on purpose. He just wanted to prove my incompetence, so he went out of his way to find more glass. While the Socialist contentedly wiped and swept and vacuumed, I went upstairs to sulk with the cats. The cats decided they’d rather be downstairs with the vacuum cleaner. That should have been the second tip-off that all was not right in the mind of the Salamander.

Later, when the sound of vacuuming had faded and I was starting to feel silly, I slunk back downstairs to the kitchen and found something to do. The Socialist, wise man that he is, didn’t prod too much.

Sunday the Socialist and I ran a few errands together, and then decided to go our separate ways. As I was getting ready to head out the door again, I had an epiphany, aided in part by a twenty-percent off coupon for a local kitchen store that happened to be sitting by the door. I would go shopping for new kitchen glasses. I would toss out the old hand-grenades, and get nice, new, clean, safe glasses for my very own. I was actually giddy with the prospect of going out and doing the hunter/gatherer thing. Armed with my discount, my VISA card and my little Prius, I aimed for Bed, Bathrooms and Beyond, prepared to make my purchase.

For once I knew exactly what I wanted. The glasses had to be:

Smooth: No pressed-in nooks and crannies that would hold hard water residue and make them hard to clean.

Round: No twirlies or squared edges, also hard to clean.

Big enough to fit my hand in: None of that narrow at the top nonsense that requires cleaning with a bottle brush. These were going to stay clean, by Jove.

Tapered: In a word: stackable. Why waste all the cabinet space? Get glasses that stacked, and then you wouldn’t need to keep rearranging things when you wanted to get to them. Cabinets would be less cluttered, and Salamanders would be happier.

There’s a problem with knowing exactly what you want. It turns out that they very seldom make it. Three hours and five stores later, and I finally settled for the closest approximation I could find. And I bought it at the despised Wal-Mart, which was the only place I could find with anything that even approximated what I wanted. Granted, I only spent twenty dollars on the purchase. But I’d have happily spent more for the right thing.

I came home, purchase under my wing, proud that I’d been a dutiful comparison shopper and certain I’d done the best I could given the economics and availability of the situation. Even though I should have been feeling at least a little happy, all I felt was victorious, like I’d won some great battle. I’d slain the mighty Vitrobeast, and was bringing his head home to roost in my kitchen cabinet. I came around the bend into my section of the apartment complex … and there was no parking space. Our parking space was taken by the Socialist’s Matrix. And there was no legal parking space within sight of our door. I’d just gone to five stores looking for water glasses. I’d then gone to the grocery store for three bags full. I had lots of bags in the back of the Prius, and there was no freaking parking.

I was livid. I parked behind the Socialist’s car, and decided to just unload then and there. Almost immediately, the Socialist was at the door, opening up the apartment for me and helping me with the parcels. I think he might have been able to tell I was a little annoyed. “This was the only spot when I got home,” he told me. I said something clever back, like, “Yeah.” In my mind I’m thinking, “Well, if it was the only space, and you knew I was out shopping, why the heck didn’t YOU park in outer Jibbip and save our numbered spot for me, dammit?” I made as quick a dump of my packages as I could in the kitchen, then tore out the door to move my car a building down in search of a free parking space there.

By the time I walked back up to the apartment, I was trying to calm myself down. I knew I was being an utter loser, though I was only partly ashamed of myself. But I’d found my table glasses, and by gum, I was going to get them out of the box and show them off. I worked for them and I was going to bask in their newness and in my job well done. While The Socialist watched bemusedly on, I took the glasses lovingly out of their box, one by one, and recounted the tale of so many trips to so many different stores in search of the perfect water glass. This is the third point that I should have realized that the Salamander mind was going completely deranged, but I think I was too far gone to see clearly by now.

As I took the glasses out of the box, I set each one on the top rack of the dishwasher, readying it for its maiden spin and dry cycles. First the short glasses, then the longer fifteen-ounce glasses, one by one into the dishwasher. As I lifted the last accursed glass from it’s box and slipped it into place in the washer’s drawer, I heard this sound:

*tink*

The Socialist looked down and said, “What was that?” He reached into the under-tray of the dishwasher and lifter out a curved, inch-long piece of glass. I lifted the glass I’d just lowered into the dishwasher. His piece fit a low sloping scar on the rim of the glass.

I set the glass down … give me that much credit. I wanted to throw it, but I didn’t. I set the glass down, and spoke with that quiet calm my mother used to get when I knew she was furious and I was a dead-kid. You know the tone. I’m not sure what I said, exactly, but it had to do with my incapability to believe what was happening concerning copulating water holders. I then kicked the door to the cabinet under the sink. I truly tried to break it, though the possibility of me succeeding at such a task is only slightly more probable than a kangaroo swimming all the way to California in Speedos. I then stormed out of the kitchen, into the living room, and realized exactly what an ass I’d been the past two days.

Well, OK, for longer than the past two days, but it’s the past two days that are in question for this story.


If you were skimming up to this point, slow down. This next point is important. I don’t care if you care about my water glasses or not. But please care about this. The Socialist is a saint. There was no word of recrimination about how I’d been acting. There was no hostility, no self-righteous supremacy, no pity, no indication at all that he was frustrated or angry or even bored with me. He just walked over, held me, and said he felt better about getting angry sometimes if even I do it. He then helped me pack up the glasses again, and return them to Wal-Mart for a refund. And THEN he offered to take me to two other places in search of the elusive perfect water glasses. This, at seven o’clock on a Sunday night when he was starting his spring break and had been looking forward to unwinding at home. I wish all of you find something like this rock for your lives.


Me? I’m still crazy. We went out tonight, to a place the Socialist had checked out today, and it turns out he found almost exactly the water glasses I’d been looking for. And they cost half what I would have spent at Wal-Mart for more glasses. I’m still having major problems with mood swings, and am counting the days until I’m completely off the prednisone again. First last summer, and now this. I was completely whackers both times. Even now I know I should feel more ashamed of how I’ve been acting than I do feel. If it’s like last summer, though, the shame will hit as about a week after I take the last anti-inflammatory. The docs are going to have a hard time forcing any of these between my teeth any time soon again. I’ll live with the pain, thank-you very much. It makes me more human.


OK, now we get to our transcendental, this-only-means-something-to-the-authoress-and-she-ain’t-quite-right-in-the-head moment of our production.

What kind of tree are you this morning?

Someone asked me that Saturday, when I was just starting to wind up on this banshee-binge of mine. The question captivated me. It still does. I was later told that “sequoia” might be an appropriate choice, but the sequoias and I have our doubts. I kept turning to that question all weekend. I thought of it while driving from store to store and looking at the trees along the roadway and by the parking lots. I thought of it at the store, watching my canned goods tossed into paper bags made from somebody’s karma. I even did a web search of tree pictures, to see if I could find my image in some grain of wood.

I’m still looking for what tree I was that morning, when I was asked. I’m half-convinced the answer is somewhere locked in this story, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

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11 Comments

  1. With your mood swings, you could be like a Magnolia tree we used to have.

    It bloomed 2 or 3 times each year (OK, it only bloomed 3 times one year), switching back and forth between barren, new leaves, blooms, mature leaves, blooms, Autumn leaves and back to barren.

    I’ve yet to see another one like it, but hope I can find another like it someday when we have another house. I loved looking out to see all the differences in it day by day.

    Alli

  2. Well shoot.

    There goes my dream of becoming the female body builder champion on my block.

    Dang.

    No steroids for me I guess.

    What kind of tree indeed.

    Interesting question.

  3. I think you are a weeping willow.

    It is my favorite tree, always has been, always will be.

    It is so firmly planted in the ground always near a source of life…water. Its beauty is rather special. Its strength only seen when tossed by the wind.It sways and groans, but is never displaced.

    The best tree by far.

    ck

    xoxo

  4. Your story was very familiar to me. I have moderately similar episodes thanks to an influx of hormones once a month, lasting for about a week. I too throw things, I too get that tone to my voice that means death, I too sulk and cry and despair. Reading this made me want to cry. Medication helps me; in your case it is the medication itself. I wish for both of us an even keel. It is okay to get angry sometimes, necessary. But I know it is NOT fun, and I understand the shame too.

    Julie

  5. Egads woman! You just described me when I am off my anti-depressants. My head swivels 360 degrees, etc.

    On a serious note. As you well know, things will level out once you are off of the pred. That is one nasty drug. My mom had to take it for the inflammation in her lungs and it really whacked her out with anxiety….

    As far as what tree you are, my guess would be a weeping willow 😉 The good part about that tree is that they stand tall and weather storms well.

    Take Care,

    Hugs,

    Bobbi

  6. Some how we cope with the day and grow strong in

    effort to sway like a tree in the wind. I love the mountain Aspen for it dances in the wind and changes so many colors.

    How about a fine Plastic glass for this trying time, they bounce and you can have a reward when this troubling phase passes to shop for glass.

    I too drop things as after surgery on my hand for

    Duptprens contracture they cut so many nevers that I must look at times to see if my paw really holds what it should.

  7. I’d say whatever kind of tree you are, it’s flexible. The wind may move you, but you just don’t seem to break. Good thing, too, since glasses do all too easily. :/

  8. ohhhhh and I wish I could say I absolutely couldn’t relate to your story, but been there, done that and thankfully I have a great rock too!

    And the glass thing… I went through the… I’m a grown-up and I want glass glasses to go with my pretty dishes..many stores…similar criteria…bought mine at Walmart….have broken two or three so far… I have my next set picked out already, from IKEA where you can buy them one at a time… just waiting for the rest of the ones we have to continue on their deathly road.

    ~QE

    and I’m the one that finds all stray shards of glass in my flat little feet. I guess I have more surface area in which to trap them!

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