In 2005
my wife and I moved out of an absurdly expensive cabin in the woods and bought
a 38 foot motor coach. We had decided
to make a major change of lifestyle. It
was an audacious and risky move, loaded with potential pitfalls. But it worked. We got out of our "stick house" and moved into a slightly
cramped but homey RV.
Our
original plan included travel. We
crossed the country once, and went on assorted adventures, but the price of
gasoline kept rising and our incomes kept falling.
The RV
became a home in a campground where the rent is cheap and all the normal
conveniences of civilization are available.
Internet: check. TV: check.
Phone, water, power, sewage: check check check check.
We love
our 38 foot motor coach and we live amicably with two dogs and three cats,
surrounded in a campground by a motley bunch of people from all walks of life.
Our flat
screen TV is in the bedroom. There are
cabinets and drawers, windows and fans.
The arrangement of space and the existence of five animal friends
imposes one giant fact of life upon us: the only way on or off our bed is from
the bottom. Crawl in, crawl out, head
first or butt first or any way you can.
It's a form of gymnastics.
Adding to the complexity of getting in and out of bed is the fact that
there are two sets of doggie steps at the bottom of the bed. Our actual exit/entrance is about two feet
of space between these steps. What's
the story? you may ask. The answer is
twofold. One, our bed sits higher than
the normal bed because that's how RV beds are designed. They are set on a swinging slab of plywood
that can be opened to reveal a large storage space.
Our cats
could get up and down without a problem, but when our teeny miniature poodles
arrived we found ourselves being constantly disturbed by whines and
whimpers. I want down. I want up.
I want down. I want up.
We
ordered this cool set of pet steps: a five step staircase that fit perfectly
into our domain. Gabriel, the smaller dog,
loves them. Bear, the bigger dog
(Gabriel's dad) is terrified by the steps and no amount of cajoling or training
will get him to use them. Being the utter saps that we are, we left Bear's
stool in place at the right end of the bed, put Gabe's steps on the left and
there you have it! No whines or
whimpers. Gabe up, Gabe down, Bear up,
Bear down, end of story. Each of our poodles is about the size of a
shoebox. They're half the size of our
smallest cat. They like sleeping and
lazing underneath blankets or within piles of pillows. There is a rigorous discipline involved in
the act of moving to and from the bed.
We must ALWAYS know the location of the animals. It has become second nature to make a mental
map of the bed before moving in any direction. We feel our way, hands, eyes, entire bodies recording the
positions of our loved creatures. And
it's been good; no one's been hurt.
Perhaps, even, the exercise and stretching keeps us loose and more fit
than might otherwise be the case. There
are times when I find myself in familiar yoga poses, contorted but otherwise
successfully moving to my destination.
Getting
out of bed is a job. Getting out of bed
is a job that has to be done cheerfully in spite of wake-up wrath, grogginess,
the pukes, piddles or poops.
I might
interject here that my spouse and I live this way with very little
inhibition. We show tender compassion
toward one another's aging bodies. Life
is inherently humiliating as it is; we are careful to grant ourselves some
dignity as a couple.
So...if
I say that we have a rare intimacy, I believe it's true. There isn't any choice. An RV is an environment that is not
conducive to privacy.
Getting
in and out of bed is a procedure that induces uncommon positions and
viewpoints.
It is
time now for me to give you another piece of information about myself:
I tend to fall asleep in unusual positions and at unusual
times.
Talk
about full moons! At this point, if you
are a bit prudish or tightly wrapped about certain normal anatomical realities,
I suggest you stop reading and find an issue of Vanity Fair or O(prah).
The Fox
and I are in our sixties. I'm not sure
how this happened. The God Of Hippie
Fantasies promised that we would never get older than thirty five. Anything after that was like one of those
thirteenth century maps of the world.
HERE LIVE DRAGONS, says the map and that's how we felt. Old age didn't exist. It would never exist.
We
weren't going to be sixty or sixty five.
Hell no! Something would
intervene to ensure our youthfulness.
We would discover that the juice of wild onions mixed with the nectar of
rare orchids would halt the aging process.
Or something like that. Getting
old just wasn't real. It would never happen.
Before
we met, The Fox and I lived wild and crazy lives. We were in dangerous places, courting viruses or murder and
dismemberment, to say nothing of derangement of the senses, intellect and
terminal brain damage.
Somehow
we ducked under those scythes. We
survived, and the onion juice/rare orchid miracle didn't happen. What is it that people say? That today's sixty is yesterday's
fifty? What bullshit. Today's sixty is more like seventy. Baby boomers have lived risky lives, imbibed
quantities of exotic stuff, participated in the great Poisoned Democracy, watched
fifty billion bullets and ten billion bombs explode all over the world, fled
from toxic clouds and radioactive dust storms.
We've lived in apocalyptic terrifying times! It's stressful! It beats
down those lovely anti-oxidants that we're supposed to cultivate.
What the
hell do we do now? Am I going to have
to be seventy? Just wake up one day,
bam! I'm seventy? No! Nuh-uh.
Fuck this.
Time
moves awfully fast. Time is sneakier
than a weasel stalking a raven's egg.
I can
fall asleep with a book in my hand and a mouth full of raisins. I can look perfectly awake but I am sound
asleep. I can raise myself up on my
left elbow to look out the window and fall asleep, halfway between up and
down. I can, so I am told, walk to the
fridge, make myself a waffle, then walk away and get back into bed. Eyes open but sound asleep.
The Fox
and I have had a rough year. I lost a
job I'd had for nearly thirty years. I
had worked as manager of a large commercial property. Great job. Name my
hours. No supervision. Decent pay. Then the property owner died
suddenly. One day last year I got a
letter giving me thirty days' notice.
It's
been that kind of year. The Fox suffers
from auto-immune diseases.
I have the feet of a hundred year old longshoreman. I
don't walk, I hobble.
When an opportunity comes along that gives us a good
belly laugh, we cherish the moment like precious treasure.
Last
week I woke up to take my two o'clock pee.
I'm lucky I only pee twice a night.
My prostate must be the size of a football. What is a prostate, anyway?
It seems to be a gender-specific time bomb buried just behind men's
nuts. Thanks, god. Thanks for the prostate. Great invention.
Anyway,
as I was sitting there taking my usual ten minutes to pee, The Fox woke up and
slithered from bed. It was time for her
two-fifteen pee and she stood before me in the dark, waiting patiently.
"You
know what you did last night?" she asked, unexpectedly. We don't talk much in the middle of the
night. We mumble and stumble, grunt and
nod until our missions are accomplished.
I didn't
say anything. She was going to tell me.
"You
got to your knees, turned around and started getting out of bed, head
first. Like you did just now. Except that as your head reached the bottom
of the bed, your elbows folded, you
laid your head in your hands and you fell back to sleep."
I
already had the picture. I am a big
hairy Jewish man. As I crawled forward,
dodging three cats and two dogs, I ran out of steam and fell asleep with my ass
in The Fox's face.
I
started laughing. It was late and our
neighbors are pretty close so my laugh was a high pitched "heee
heeee" but it was still satisfying.
"Your
snore was so rhythmic" Fox continued.
"The night lights gave me a complete view of your full moon and I thought maybe I could
play bongos on your butt, maybe they would be tuned to nice pitches, maybe a
minor third between them so it would sound like 'Sing Sing Sing'. But I didn't want to wake you."
I was
tweeting like a canary I was laughing so hard and trying not to roar as I might
in broad daylight.
"I
thought you'd wake up eventually and finish your chore. As long as you didn't fart or something,
what harm could your ass do to me? I was willing to take my chances. You were so deeply asleep; and of course I
think you're cute from any angle, so I figured 'what's the harm?'.
We were
both giggling like children. Oh my
god! You just had to be there.
I did of
course wake up after about five minutes and complete my forward facing slink
off the bed, snaking my way down with the help of the doggie steps, none the
wiser regarding the comic episode I had gifted to my spouse until she told me
this story the following night.
Have I
embarrassed anyone by telling this tale?
I couldn't care less. We have
been betrayed by the God Of Hippie Fantasies.
There is no magic wild onion/orchid juice to reverse our neuropathies,
our arthritis, our pops and twinges, our encroaching deafnesss, blindness and
dithering mental acuity. I hereby
decree that growing old is an activity of heroes, that it takes major guts to
manage the passages that lead us to the Great Light that waits beyond death.
And if
there is no Great Light? Then we will
turn back to behold our brief and insignificant life experiences and know that
this WAS the Great Light, one that we weren't able to recognize until after we
had lived it.
