This has been a fairly eventful couple of weeks. It would have been less so if I’d had the brains – memory and foresight, mostly – to avoid an old friend. But I didn’t, so I’ve had to go through it the old-fashioned way.
After a recent day trip to northern New York to visit the 66th reunion of the first class I ever taught, back in 1962, I noticed heavy swelling in my left leg just above the stricture of my sock. Uh-oh. I’d seen that before, and knew just what it portended. But I’ve been in Vermont a while, and my default response to such symptoms has become the old Vermonter’s classic last words: “Guess I’ll give it another day and see how the infection goes.”
How it went was sideways, fast. By next afternoon, I was apparently unintelligible on the telephone. My ever-vigilant nearby daughter and son-in-law got me out of my lounge chair and into an ambulance, and soon I’d begun a five-day siege of intravenous antibiotics in a very friendly hospital in Berlin. I suppose it’s an inevitability of age, but to be lying on your back in a hospital bed, almost unable to move, with an infusion of diuretic flowing into your veins is a constant losing battle with calamity and disaster. The lovely weekend that Bea and I had planned on the coast of Maine went by the boards; but she was here, sitting not far from the foot of my bed with her laptop and earphones, listening to thesis defenses and emailing back and forth with friends. She was able also to hear, interpret, and simplify the advice and instructions I was given so that even I could understand them. My son in Arkansas again picked up my column over the weekend, so we kept that string alive.
Bea left Tuesday (I think; time sort of slips away from me in there), and my older daughter from the State of Washington arrived the same day. My tenant, who lives downstairs, was mothering Kiki, so all was well in my little bailiwick, I had a ride home when I was discharged at last, and fresh food in the fridge.
So I guess I’m more or less back in business. My daughter’s flown home, but Kiki still commutes between up here and down there in the house. I had plenty of help with the much-needed laundry, and home health visits start tomorrow. As I slowly begin to feed myself back into the household system, my biggest challenge is trying to figure out where in hell everything is. But oh! they were all a tremendous help.
What I wanted to write about before all this nuisance with sepsis began was the night before. I was sitting here at my desk as usual, typing my daily billet doux, when a sleek brown bat flew between me and the screen. Nuts! Gotta let him out. As if to reinforce that thinking, he made a surprisingly unhurried second pass; so I got up, went out into the hall to open the screen door, and watched him go by again. There was nothing for it but to open the screen door in the hope he’d find it and depart.
There’s little sense agonizing over how bats get in; they can squeeze through holes amazingly small, hang out for a bit, then start flying around looking for an exit. (One appeared in church years ago. Just as I was describing the entrance of Marley’s ghost into Scrooge’s sitting room, something very briefly occluded a candle on one wall of the nave. Ha! I thought. I know what that was. I never saw it in the darkened church, but apparently several audience members did. My wife had to escort two terrified elderly ladies out the back.) Trying to catch bats is pretty fruitless; put away the tennis racquets and landing nets.
I didn’t want to leave the screen door open all night; there’d be a million bugs inside the following morning. But the greater good was a happy bat, so I left it open and shut it before breakfast. I haven’t seen him since, which means very little, but at least I’d done my duty. And marvel of marvels! Only one bug.
That’s a good thing, and at the same time an ominous one. First of all, the bat was there to hunt crepuscular and nocturnal bugs. That means we still have some around. When we first moved here about twenty years ago, I could sit on the front porch as dusk deepened and watch the little hunters flit across my vision and on calm nights even hear an occasional click as a bat’s teeth snapped shut. No more. The phoebes, who once nested in the most irritating way over the cars, now stop for a day or two and move on. We’re losing our bugs and birds, almost imperceptibly. I’ve read that when we lose them, we won’t be far behind. Sometimes it’s not too bad to be old.
