blindness at the break of dawn

I had this panic attack, I think that's what they're called.  A real first.  It was about a month ago, one 5:00 AM or so.  My usual time for waking up and worrying about the seas rising. Trying to calculate whether I live in the flood zone or out of it. And by how much either way. Worrying about liquefaction.  Yup, I worry about things like that. Worry about whether I can pay my bills, balance the checkbook to the penny, live long enough to prosper.  I'm really good at worry.  But not panic.

This was a panic attack.  A real one.

It was about blindness.  My eyes have been misbehaving more and more of late. And in the place of my usual global-sized concerns came this quite visceral and personal one.  I contemplated life without sight, and what that might be like, and whether I would be willing to live that life., or let life go. I thought of every single thing in the world that I'd have to give up.

Could I live without color?  I really wasn't sure I'd be willing to try. I thought of every pleasure in my life, and every drop of it for me was visual.  Petty little things. Like hiking on the cliffs, picking fruit in the market, driving.  I included driving—and I hate driving. But it made for a good panic.

Got into a disagreement (too short to call a fight) with my partner's mother over dinner not long ago.  Or maybe it was breakfast.  Something I made, and I apologized.  It didn't look right.

"As long as it tastes good," she said. And I begged to differ.  How could it taste good if it wasn't beautiful?

And we dropped the subject. It would not have been a fruitful question to explore.

So. The panic.

I should note, that even now as I write, my eyes are starting to fail.  I'm not sure if I can finish this post before the screen fades completely before my eyes. Solution: I'll keep it short. Very short.

Went to the eye doctor, and what did he say? Cataracts still 'not visually significant' but getting there. And okay, so panic gone. Something can be done about it, right?

And the panic went away, making me feel silly. And selfish. I had panicked over something so personal, rather than something larger than the self. I felt ashamed.

But in my panic, I visualized life without sight. Right down to the minutest of details. I practiced, even. Waking up and going through the morning rituals with my eyes closed.  A shower's not so bad, unless the bar of soap slips out of your hand. Then it's a bit more treacherous...

A couple days ago, someone I hold dear went suddenly blind. And she may or may not regain her sight. She did not panic. She faltered. It was more than her sight she was losing. Her platelets were rebelling against platelets. An autoimmune disease.I find it all so inexplicable. There is no why.

She's handling it with such grace, except for the eyedrops she must endure every four hours. She's relying on other senses to get her by until her malady passes.  And I insist it must, it must pass. And she must live. And I look at her, and all I want for her is life. And she shows me how it can be done.

They key, of course, is that she's surrounded by so much love. Humans who adore her more than anything else in the world. She is cared for. Protected. And most of all, adored. She has those loving bodies curled up next to her, warm against her skin. The love wards off panic and fear, and maybe some of the confusion. She's calm. And greeting each and every moment.

And I? I'm a bit jealous.

...

I'm not proof reading this. The blur and haze are setting in for the night...

aaarrrggghhh as default

I want to complain.  But I can't do it without laughing or at the very least, just plain thinking that I've no right, no right at all.   My life is too good to complain. There are starving children in Africa. Kids still in refugee camps in Palestine.  Injustices and inequalities that matter absolutely everywhere.  I mean what right do I have to complain?

Watch this. And see how petty it is:

The guys came today to finish my deck. Or at least I thought that's why they came.  They had put the wrong stuff on it — um, about a year ago, when they started building it. So. The side railing is salvage from the old deck: stained and oiled, and beautifully aged.  The decking itself, for some reason, they slapped with brown latex.  Brown latex! Now what was that about? Oh. And the non-existant lights are nothing more than circlets of wire just hanging there under the deck.  The deck lights have been sitting in my living room for about the same duration — i.e. since last summer.

So.  The guys came today to refinish my deck.  Last week they power-washed it. This week they were supposed to sand it down, so that that latexy crap would disappear, and the whole thing can be stained and oiled and just be uniform like the beautiful old deck was (RIP).

I thought — great — and headed out to paradise to run Rosh through the trails and the dunes.  And stopped in at the market for groceries to fill the empty frig and cupboards.  And got some gas. And this. And that. So. We're talking maybe a solid 2-3 hours, right?

Come back, and find, what?

They redid the deck exactly as before.  More latex crap! A high decibel (internal) aaarrrggghhh — and then the pause. Pull yourself together, she said to self.

It's just a deck.

Does it really matter if it's dead yucky brown while the sides are vibrant oiled redwood with the grain happily winking through?  I mean, there's still warfare in Afghanistan. I mean, lookit Palestine! Arab Spring, important stuff — not to mention the Amazigh Spring (okay, that's wishful thinking — they tried that already and it did no good).  In other words, there are important things going on in the world. Even in my own life.  Why aaarrrggghhh over my deck's unfinished state?

I think the answer is redirection.  Maybe if I worry about my aaarrrggghhh deck, everything's really okay in the world.  Maybe it means that somewhere on earth there's a little spot of peace and quiet and petty concerns. Where someone's living high on the hog somewhere where nothing much is going on. Maybe it's a good model for how to be.  Maybe it gives hope for a possible future of backyard BBQs and sleeping on a chaise. Something to aspire to! Maybe it's important that somewhere in the world an aaarrrggghhy unfinished deck is the biggest problem at hand.  And that in this idyllic place on earth, the credit card gets paid off on time, and the house isn't foreclosed on, and the viruses aren't killers, and the dogs don't have rabies, and that the water is potable and plenty at the moment, and that the big one hasn't struck yet, and —

Maybe we really should sweat the small stuff.

Because when the big stuff hits, we really just need to focus, and we don't have the luxury to indulge our inner-aaarrrggghhh.

today I saw a ... a ...

Has it gotten to the point that I am such an urban creature that to know what I'm looking at in nature — I need to Google it to figure it out?  Sad. Very sad.  I'm not so different after all from the agrarian reform foreign aid workers in North Africa way back then who couldn't recognize the plants they were advocating — without looking them up in a field guide.  Problem was, the field guide only showed the plant in one season.  The fellahin complained that development workers would be looking for the crops they had advocated ... while standing right on them.  Well, ouch.

But this wasn't North Africa.  This was Fort Funston today.  The fog. The cliffs. The sand on the cliffs.  It was a perfect day.  Instead of my car reading 112 degrees F as it did leaving our BBQ in Sonoma yesterday, it was a perfect 58 degrees and cooling.  Breezy enough to make everyone smile, but not blowy enough to send missiles of sand up our eyeballs.  The fog was thick and moving fast.  Perfect, just perfect.

We started out at the furthest point by the hang gliders' hut, slogged through the deep sandy trail that the Forest Service now have labeled a 'horse trail' (which thank god, the horse morons haven't discovered yet), crossed over to the path by the doggie fountain, taking the left fork to the upper road and through the second WWII battery tunnel out to the cliffs. When —

But first — who is 'we'?  Which is important here.  The we is Rosh and me.  Just us. No other witnesses. And Rosh doesn't talk, although she speaks.

We'd just turned to follow the cliff through the fog.  The trail is surrounded by still green trees and thick brush.  And loping across the desolate trail was a —

Well, my first thought was a fox.

A grey fox. But it's body seemed too long.

For a moment, I thought dog. But it didn't act dog.  Still, I looked for a wayward human walker seeking the wanderer.  There was nobody at all.  Rosh started sniffing around...  The — whatever it was — crossed in front of us from the brush on our left to the brush on our right, just before the cliff drop.

Then I thought wolf.

It was larger than a fox, not a dog, and smaller than a wolf.  It's tail was long and bushy, almost raccoon like.  That tail was stunning, actually.  And it's body was uncannily long — just too long for anything that made sense to me.

Then I thought (okay, don't laugh) — power animal.

Rosh seemed unconcerned.  Clearly there was no threat.  Just a beautiful sight.  A wild creature minding its own business.  Someone on the trail I just couldn't put my finger on.  I'd seen a gray fox out there once before.

Maybe. Maybe this was the same thing.

So. Power animal.  Possible, right?  Well, was it giving me any power?  Did I earn it? Is there any such thing? What do I DO with this gift, anyway, if that's what it is?

I rejected 'power animal' first. Then dog. Then wolf. Then fox.  But we saw / sniffed something wild and free that was right at home on the cliffs.  We kept walking through a tunnel of tangled trees, and out onto the foggy coastal chaparral again. Hang gliders above. Three trails before us.  Roshi waited for me to decide.  I chose the middle path, of course. Rosh concurred, and took the lead.

We turned left at the tarmac path and there was a white Ranger truck, with a Ranger guy picking up trash from the can and collecting the large black plastic bags in the back of his pickup.  I walked right up to him. Rosh showed how law-abiding she is, and sat down on the iceplant to my left, very much off the service road.

I asked about the wild things that lived at Funston.

"I'm not a Ranger," the Ranger said.  "I'm not an authority —" he said, "I just pick up the trash."

"Of course you're an authority," I insisted.  "Here you are day after day — you know these trails, you see what you see. ... You've got the uniform!"

He sat there for a moment. Shuffled in the driver's seat and sat up straighter.

"Nobody's ever called me 'an authority' before.  Wow —"

He went speechless for a few heartbeats.

"The coyotes come out in the fog," he said. "They really like the fog..." and he began talking about which critters like which kind of weather.  He was much more knowledgeable than he thought he was.

"You're not just a trash man," I said. And he made it clear that I'd just made his day.

So. Today I saw a ...  a ... coyote (also known as the American jackal) cross in front of me and Rosh.  They're cousins of the gray wolf.  They love the fog. They're very shy. They pounce on their prey in a cat-like manner.  They hunt in pairs or in packs.  But the one we saw was alone.  And not very big.  Rosh was almost triple the coyote's size.

It wasn't a coyote.

It was a gray fox.  It had that long flexible body.  It was smaller than a coyote.  It was gracile.  It can make its way through tree tops just like a cat and ambush its prey.  Small things. Voles and moles and rats.  There aren't any coyotes at Fort Funston.  They all live more inland in the parks of the City.  The gray fox is a solitary hunter, usually nocturnal. And they thrive in the coastal chaparral — which is the biome we were walking through.

It wasn't a gray fox.

The truth is, I have no idea what we saw.  All I can say, is that it gave me another lesson in ignorance.  This comfortable creature of the coast made me glad I'd not fallen to having a tuna melt or Reuben for lunch today — having carefully opted for a veggie burger at Mel's instead.  That this graceful solitary hunter reminded me that it's worth paying attention. All of the time.

And that Rosh, my rather large, long haired German shepherd, has the right idea in just walking on by.

So.  Today I saw a ... a ...

I have no idea.