"The Signal"

It's a primary “Life Lesson”, up there with the recently mentioned “For a lot of the big stuff that happens to us, we have frighteningly little control.”

This lesson is better, in that if we retain it in our consciousness, it will allow us to feel hopeful (as opposed to the above-mentioned one, the natural response to which is, “Yikes!”  Particularly for people like me – and of my ilk – of little faith.) 

Today’s reminder (which I forgot when I came down with Legionnaires’ Disease) is:

Moods change.

(As, parenthetically, does your medical condition.  {Hopefully for the better.}  When you’re sick, especially extendedly, it is imaginable, at least to some of us, that we will never feel like we used to feel again.)

So there I am, a weakened warrior, shrouded in a less than upbeat perspective – remembering I am a person for whom at the best of times “upbeat” comprises only a sliverish slice of my temperamental pie – and I am thinking to myself, which I should know better than to do considering the dumps in which I am currently residing… but anyway, I am thinking…

Maybe I should give up my blog.

At that moment, the option to permanently “hang ‘em up” makes reasonable sense.  (Of course, at that particular juncture, I am under the sway of a dark – or at least dark-er – reasoning apparatus.

I had told close to two thousand stories.  That seems to be a lot. 

Every well runs dry eventually.     

Maybe I was legitimately “storied out.”

I had assiduously mined my past – “Story of a Writer”, my summer camp recollections, memorable tales of the various offices I had occupied during my extended career in show business.  My once-burgeoning cache of stories was  emptying out.  A handful of scraggly anecdotes remained, but you know… if I haven’t related them yet, how blogworthy could they possibly be?    

Yes, there are always new experiences to chronicle – technological devises I am unable to successfully program, infuriating “support staff” making me regret I ever called them for assistance in the first place, contemporary nonsense – cultural and political – that passes today for “business as usual”, the latest movies, plays and TV shows that do not measure up to their – possibly faultily remembered – predecessors.

I acknowledge perhaps a soupcon of literary flair.  But how many different ways can you say,

“It’s bad!”

How many “Thursday Walks” can I tell you about?  How many convalescences in the hospital?  How many excursions to “that fitness spa we go to in Mexico” or our little cabin in Michiana?  Yes, it’s an hour later across the street, but how many times do you need to hear that before going, “We get it!”  Probably once.

And then there’s the reverberating question haunting all writers, once posed to me by a stranger years ago when I told her I wrote a blog and I explained to her what it was about.   

Her immediate reaction:

“Why would anyone be interested what you have to say?”

So there’s that.

And, by the way, “Ouch!”

At that moment, it occurs to me that maybe it is just ‘Time.’”

Maybe I’m like the guy in the joke:

“Doctor, I can’t pee.”

“How old are you?”

“Ninety-five.”

“You peed enough.”

Maybe after almost eight years of five-day-a-week postings, I had – as is inevitable…

Peed enough.

A week or so later, I am home from the hospital, and I am watching TV.  The show breaks for commercial, and up comes one of those perplexing ads for a prescription medicine whose product name, though certifiably cheerful, gives no indication of the malady it was developed to treat.

Reflexively, I reach over for a nearby pen and a notepad, and I record the name of the medicine, for inclusion, I am imagining, in some upcoming post. 

Seeing myself doing this, I am genuinely astonished by my behavior.  And rightly or wrongly, I interpret it as a signal.

It would appear, ladies and gentlemen, that I have not entirely…

Peed enough.