Tag: being human

Breath

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To the initiated lung, breath comes with ease.  Steady in, then out.  Its housing rises and falls to an inner rhythm, broken occasionally by changes in task or by the entrance of an unwanted speck of dust or emotion.  It is such bliss to its owner, when accompanied by delicious scents and flavors, such as chocolate, roses or hemp.

One begins to appreciate this function of life as the rhinovirus takes a firm grip on tender membranes.  Nasal passages swell and drip, forcing a new pattern of breath down your throat.  The tissue is like Dacron: drip-dry and scratchy.  Hoarseness creeps into your larynx and deep honking coughs erupt from parts of the lungs you never knew existed.  For four or five days you sound like a freight train running amok in New York City.  Mercifully, the tube into the ears also swells, making these noises more painful to the outside world than to oneself.

As a child I often listened to my mother’s breath while she slept.  Her snoring was loud and incessant.  To this day I can’t listen to a chainsaw without thinking of her.  My breathing adjusted to the same rhythm as hers, with no effort.  The effect was hypnotic.  Occasionally she ceased abruptly at the height of an inhaled breath, not a sound uttering from her lips…or mine.  Both if us hung on that pulmonary precipice for many seconds, until an equally sudden snort ripped the air, her spirit returning to ground.

Breath is precious; hold it, at all costs.  We children played games with this theme.  How long can you hold your breath?  Time it; the winner gets first pick in the cookie jar.  Usually some other purple-faced child poked a finger in my ribs and tickled me, thereby assuring his or her own win.  On rainy days when my father babysat us, we played hiding games.  How many can hide beneath the skirts of an armchair?  All breath was held in the balance, as his feet thundered past.  The line between real and imagined terrors was fragile, his alcoholic temper being subject to flare at any moment.  Some forty years later I still hold my breath in times of anxiety or excitement.

And then there is that last gasp that everybody fears.  I have been there and back.  In a fit of anaphylaxis I tried everything in my asthmatic’s arsenal to open my swelling bronchial tubes.  The swelling was relentless, tightening its grip like a vice around my throat.  I radiated heat and my ears began to ring loudly.  I clutched my boyfriend and asked, “Do you think this is one of those times you call 911?”  Seconds later I blacked out.  Fortunately he had already called the rescue squad, and ten minutes  after I took my last perceptible breath, they arrived.

Most people don’t survive past ten minutes without breathing.  I survived beyond all the odds.  Even the ER physician counseled my boyfriend that, if I made it, I probably wouldn’t be the person he knew.  I think my lifetime of holding my breath must have enabled me to pass this ultimate test.  Now it’s my turn to have first crack at the cookie jar.

What Makes People Tick?

Tizzy and Bitty
People are always asking me why I write, where I get ideas for stories. It’s all about daydreams. While you are daydreaming about some good looking person you passed on the street, building your castle in the sky, or drooling over imaginary concoctions of Beef Wellington, I am wondering what drives a person to madness.

We don’t become crazy overnight. Of course there are some cases of chemical or endocrine imbalances, brought on by medication, trauma or sudden illness, which trigger aberrant behavior. But most disturbed individuals get there by degrees. What gets explained as a “fussy baby” grows into a “hyperactive child”, grows into “ADD”, “ADHD” or perhaps becomes diagnosed as  Aspberger’s Syndrome. We want to label or medicate it, thinking that temperamental children become unruly teenagers who may turn violent as adults. That’s the fear, so we sometimes step on the behavior hard, lest it get the better of us. This is the old school notion of discipline. The new school notion is more lenient, less punitive, more time-outs, fewer spankings.

I often wonder why two children, raised by the same parents in ostensibly the same environment, turn out completely differently. I used to babysit two children who exhibited “good child”, “bad child” patterns – and they sometimes swapped positions. I don’t think they ever talked about it or were conscious of the pattern, but it was very visible to me. Somebody always had to be the bad one.

Over time they became the saint and the sinner.  The saint would not only give you the shirt off his back but, should you admire any portable stick of furniture in his house, you’d find it packed in your car when you left.  The sinner battles alcoholism and wavers between model citizenry and vicious verbal assaults on even her oldest friends and staunchest allies. Which one is the most likely to go postal? I’d lay money on the saint.

In The Dark

I stared at the green carbon copy of an office memo with an address hand-printed on it. RR2 Box 347…no city, no zip code. Was this address at the beginning of the Staunton part of my route or at the end of the Waynesboro part? At 4 o’clock in the morning I couldn’t exactly go knocking on doors, nor could I telephone saying, “Hi, I’m your newspaper carrier and I can’t find your house.”

Maybe there was a clue in the street address. Ahh. Here it was: New Hope Rd. But before I could get comfortable with this new information, doubt crept into my mind. Was it New Hope Rd or Old New Hope Rd? Or was it RT 254 or RT 612, both of which some folks called New Hope Rd? Are you with me or did I leave you somewhere around Box 347?

I tried to remember what the person at the circulation desk had told me.

“It’s the place with the black mailbox with gold numbering,” she said, adding, “You can’t miss the potted geraniums or spotted chrysanthemums…whatever.”

I looked about me. The roadside sported a row of fifteen black mailboxes and several of the visible porches had potted somethings on them. With 277 more papers to deliver, I didn’t have time to check out each porch.   Though the mailboxes each glittered with gold numbers, there was no way to tell which were the corresponding dwellings. (As it turned out, the route number and the street address never did match.)

So I bagged fifteen papers with post-its announcing myself as the new carrier on the block, and encouraging the recipients of this free edition to start every day with our paper in hand. I dropped a note in the mail asking her to call me so that we could get it all straight. Three days later we were having coffee and inspecting her chrysanthemums.   I gave her an armload of papers and a gleaming new tube decorated with our company logo…and an orange reflector dot on it, so the next carrier couldn’t miss it in the dark.