December 4, 2014
Thursday

The house smells of onions and overcooked eggs. It appears in order, but Lauren knows it’s merely clutter in a clever arrangement — stacks of old magazines, baskets of yarn and crochet needles, crystal bowls filled with bank pens and buttons and pennies.
— Nicole Cullen, American fiction writer
from “Long Tom Lookout”
short story originally published in Idaho Review

I read “Long Tom Lookout” on Monday morning. It’s in The Best American Short Stories 2014. I’d plucked that book up from one of the stacks I’d made over the weekend in my attempt to get the house ready for Christmas, even if Christmas will be experienced here only by Ron and me. That particular stack was on the table in the front hall, the spot where our crèche goes.

The books will have to be shelved — somewhere — before the stable and manger and figures can be added. I brought the crèche in its storage tub up from the basement on Sunday and got the Advent wreath from the cabinet where it lives during its off-season. The wreath has taken its place on the kitchen table, one purple candle burned down a little from five days now of C&C. The tub marked “Crèches Traditional & Hummel” is still on the floor in the kitchen.

Advent has gotten off to a wobbly start. When I met the manuscript deadline last Friday that I nearly missed because of the fuzzy thinking that attends a period of depression, I considered seriously what I might to be able to accomplish and what was truly essential. I reminded myself that when I was in the classroom, I managed to stage a complete Christmas with all the trimmings — decorating, gift wrapping, school and community programs, Christmas cards, and an elaborate open house for as many as 70 guests — working only during the evenings, because my days were filled with the business of teaching composition and American literature.

I decided that I would work toward another manuscript deadline of December 15 and then take a break to just have Christmas. I worked on Monday. Tuesday started out well enough, but by 10:30 I was sitting in a small room at the hospital where Lynn was born with Ron, who later in the afternoon underwent an emergency EGD (esophagogastroduodenoscopy). “Emergency” here means it had to be done today, not that there were lights and sirens and a life hanging in the balance. (Although they did ask me, twice, if he was an organ donor.)

Yesterday was a thud day, a draining of energy after having marshaled all my emotional and intellectual resources to be there for Ron.

Today brought the news that poet Claudia Emerson has died at the age of 57. I knew her first as a faculty member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2010. She couldn’t be there in 2012 because she was being treated for cancer, but I saw her again in 2013. I was surprised to see that she was 57. I thought she was my age! But when I thought about that, I came to understand that, instead, I thought I was her age, and that that age was maybe late-forties. She had that kind of energy.

And then, the call from my own doctor. After mentioning (not complaining of) a single episode of light-headedness and a tingle down my left arm while walking uphill, I was sent for a nuclear stress test. That was in June, an event remembered as an amusing morning of people-watching in a series of crowded waiting rooms. (One woman had a ringtone on her phone that periodically erupted from her purse: “Goddamsonofabitch! Goddamnsonofabitch!”) I hadn’t heard anything back, and I thought no news was good news.

It wasn’t. The test results are “abnormal,” but what they do suggest is “ambiguous.” I will need to see a cardiologist.

My house does not smell of onions and overcooked eggs. Ron can have only “soft foods” until he’s seen again by a gastroenterologist. This means he’s eating pudding and applesauce for dinner, something that is only fun when you are nine. Despite my supposedly organized poetry holdings, I can’t find Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife. I do have buttons and pens and pennies in appropriate containers, and the hallway is filling up with packages from Amazon and Bas Bleu and Levenger. Among the items is something I ordered for myself: two five-year journals (less bulky than a single ten-year tome).

I’ll have to ask the cardiologist if I should send one of them back.