My step-daughter Risa and her husband Perin are awaiting the birth of their daughter Celia, their first baby, in January. I was looking around for helpful hints and found this nifty Powerpoint slideshow in the depths of our county community clinic’s network folder. I thought it was just the thing. So click here, Bringing Baby Home, to try it out.
I was already late in finishing up my work today. It was one of the busiest days I’ve had in eight years, with a total of six psychiatric patients on involuntary holds at three hospitals around the Portland area. The only bright spot was getting to see my wife Ruth (the nurse) at work on the psychiatric ward at Good Samaritan Hospital. Sometimes we get into this cycle where we have to make do with that. It’s tough, but there is that little benefit of a reasonable salary that goes with Ruth being there rather than home. So I just have to put up with it, I guess.
Anyway, it was already 5:00pm when I pulled into the parking lot of Emanuel Hospital to see my last two patients of the day. I was counting on just dashing in, doing a couple of quick interviews, and dashing out to head home. But just as I pulled into the parking lot and was ready to turn my car off, NPR started its coverage of President Obama’s press conference. I turned off the car, but left the radio on, intent on just listening to his opening statement and then heading on inside to the ward. An hour later, I was still sitting in the car.
I think I’d forgotten what it was like to listen to someone who actually sounded presidential. Someone who could think and speak at the same time. Someone who conveyed the calm confidence of the leader of the country and the free world instead of a swaggering bully intent on proving he’s the toughest kid on the school yard. Someone who respectfully called the members of the press by name and noted their affiliation, instead of demeaning them like his predecessor who tossed out condescending and childish nicknames that only served to make himself seem even smaller than he already was. Someone who could not only decide, but outline the various alternatives, weigh each against the others, explain the advantages and disadvantages of each potential option, and then spell the best one out to all to us in a way that makes sense.
I honestly don’t know how we made it through the last eight years. I also sometimes think the nightmare isn’t over, especially as I watch the Republicans continue to espouse their failed ideologies and posture before the cameras like bantam roosters, even after having the living daylights kicked out of them in the last election, I honestly believe they think they did something good for the country and that if they can just cackle loud enough, we’ll realize how wrong we all were to elect that silly black man who doesn’t even have a southern accent, for heaven’s sake. And accept their own explanation that the three weeks he’s been in office are actually what’s caused this mess instead of them running up the deficit, ruining our standing in the international community, selling off the wealth of average Americans to their corporate fat cat cohorts, and turning the world’s best military into what in a few years is bound to be the greatest PTSD factory ever seen.
It would serve them right if the next elections were next week. Perhaps if their rolls were slashed again by the voters they might finally get the picture that we’re just plain tired of all their empty talk and smoke and mirrors approach to economics, foreign policy, and our civil rights. Maybe if what’s been trickling down to the average American trickled on them for a while, they might realize from the smell alone that it isn’t the prosperity they promised us, but something much more foul. But I doubt it. I really doubt it.
I hope the rest of the country can see how strong this truly young man, younger than me by eight years, actually is. I look at him and see impatience. I see his disappointment in the smallness of people who he so badly wants to rise up and be great. I see someone willing to take the country where it needs to go and wondering where all the people are that should be right behind him. But I don’t see fear. And the way things look like right now, if there’s anything that he actually deserves to be, it’s afraid. The fact that he isn’t, or at least doesn’t look like he is, is pretty much the thing that gives me the greatest hope that everything is going to turn out ok after all.
So I sat and I listened until President Obama, my President, was through before I turned off the radio. And actually wished he were still talking when I did.
I’m 55. And the driving I’m talking about is driving myself too far at work, physically and emotionally. And I can’t do that at 55. I have to learn to take care of myself. If you read my previous post Psychiatric Blues, you’ll get an idea of the highly emotionally-laden stuff I’ve been dealing with at my job, which is pretty much one of the most highly emotionally-laden jobs you can have in an already highly emotionally-laden world. The issues I raised there have been continuing through this week, if not escalating. And then there’s the inevitable degradation of my physical self. I don’t have any broken bones or anything. But being slightly overweight, having the horrible designation of being “pre-diabetic” (the last time I was anything “pre” was “pre-teen”), and not being able to run a full marathon anymore (OK, I can’t run even the smallest fraction of a marathon anymore) has made me feel a bit overwhelmed and, to be quite honest, wussy.
And now I’m home sick. Nothing major. Just feeling blah and crummy. I got home yesterday at a reasonable time, actually earlier than usual. Even though I was feeling a little burned out, I figured that I’d just get something to eat, chill out, and I’d be fine. I even remember telling myself that I’d get up today and head for the gym to start getting back in shape. If I’m really honest with myself, though, I knew in the back of my mind it would probably just end up being a normal, you’re-still-55, don’t get your hopes up too much big boy, day. And I’d probably talk myself out of going to the gym in favor of an extra hour of blissful Tempur-pedic snoozing.
Well, that didn’t happen. I actually woke up at 3:00am. And felt nasty. So nasty I picked my cell phone up off the bedside table and left my boss a voice mail that I’d be staying home sick. In retrospect, I think waking up at 3:00am and leaving a voice mail on your boss’s phone saying you’re sick and won’t be in is probably a great strategy even if you aren’t sick. No boss in his right mind would think you’d actually wake yourself up at that time in the morning just to pretend you’re sick, ensuring that he’ll give you sympathy while you’re actually taking complete advantage of his naivete.
But back to the story. I finally crawled out of bed about 11:00am, still feeling icky and consequently assessing myself as even more wussy than ever. But then I suddenly got the idea for this post in my head. And was instantly thankful because I know that, if I weren’t home sick, I’d be at work and probably would never have gotten around to actually writing it. So here goes.
Yesterday had been a great day. It started with my wife, Ruth, receiving her student loan check (she’s in graduate school for her Masters of Nursing and specializing as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner). And, although having the check was good, the real reason the day was great was because Ruth had followed through on my suggestion that she use a portion of her student loan money to buy a new state-of-the-art MacBook to replace her aging HP laptop. The HP laptop had been superb four years ago but now was proving inadequate for Ruth to simultaneously review her class notes, write and answer email, and communicate with all the hundreds of people on Twitter who follow her vibrant and exciting life (In comparison, I have twenty some odd people who follow me, most of whom I recently discovered are actually public utilities, libraries, and people trying to sell me things I don’t want). What really made the HP laptop completely inadequate, though, was when Ruth tried to do all of the previously mentioned tasks while also engaging in her most recently acquired on-line addiction, Second Life.
She was off during the day and planned to pick up the MacBook sometime that afternoon. I had to work, so I didn’t see her during the day, but I talked with her while she was picking it up at the Mac Store and could tell from her voice that she was back in the zone that she’d been in when we went to the Mac Store the previous weekend to check out the MacBooks. It’s a really cool zone. Almost surreal like….well, just read on.
Life would be even more miraculous if we had the ability to foresee the future. That would have been so helpful during the early days of my relationship with Ruth. I know now that, if I had just bought her a hard drive or some cool electronic gadget on our first date, she would have probably married me on the spot. But no, I had to go through jewelry and flowers and romantic meals before I finally figured it out. And that was after she married me.
I remember the moment it really hit me. I think it was her birthday. I’d bought her this beautiful (and pretty expensive) diamond-studded 14K gold heart on an equally nifty gold necklace. It was partly an apology present. I’d been fooling myself for a long time that I’d been a great husband to her, when in fact I’d been much less than that because of a whole host of things from the disaster and trauma of my divorce that I should have just left behind. But I’d come to see the light and had devoted a lot of effort (and therapy) into really turning the corner. Even so, I was also afraid that she wasn’t yet to the point that she believed I’d be able to keep from slipping backwards into my previous self-absorbed state of pity, depression, and unpredictability.
So I’d given a lot of thought about a present that I could use to cement my improved self as genuine and permanent in her mind. I’d seen this one diamond heart that looked really beautiful, much more so than the cheap little gold hearts I’d seen around at a lot of the jewelry stores. It seemed just the thing to tell Ruth that my love for her was eternal as diamonds and that she was more valuable to me than the most precious metal. That sounds so chintzy now, but at the time I would have done anything for her to look at me and see the person she’d seen the first time she told me she loved me. So I bought it.
On the way home, though, I remembered a sale ad I’d seen for one of the nifty new digital cameras that people had been talking about and thought to myself, “Hey, that’d be a nice add-on to the necklace.” It was an Olympus and had a whopping 2.2 megapixel resolution, which at the time was really good. She’d been saying she wanted a digital camera and, having some expertise with cameras, I’d looked at the specs and thought it was probably just what she needed. So I stopped and got the camera, too.
We had some friends over for the celebration that evening and, when it came time, I handed her the two presents. She opened up the necklace and stared at it in disbelief. I was feeling great and I could tell that she got the message I wanted her to receive. She looked at me with this genuinely loving smile and just kept staring down at it and up at me again.
The only thing I felt bad about was thinking that I should have given her the camera first as a distractor and then watched her be even more enthralled by the necklace. Too late, though. So I handed her the other package with the digital camera in it and waited while was tearing the paper off, thinking she’d be pretty underwhelmed. Then she turned it over and saw what it was.
That moment was what I still consider a true epiphany. She didn’t do anything as drastic as toss the necklace over her shoulder, but I still remember the look on her face and in her eyes as she cradled the camera box in her hands, looked at me, and wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. I realized at that moment that salvation and redemption, at least in my relationship with Ruth, lay somewhere in the magical realm of digital technology.
So when I made the casual suggestion the other day that it would be fine with me and a great idea for her to spend a portion of her student loan money on a leading edge MacBook, I saw her face kind of glow a bit, more of a teaser for the look than the look itself. But when we went to the Mac Store to look at the different models and pick out what she wanted, the look started to develop from that teasing glow to full blown epiphany-mode, which I can only describe as quasi-sensual….nope, now that I think about it, there was nothing quasi about it. I know that sounds a bit over the top, but read on.
If you’ve never been to a Mac Store, you should run out right now, even if it means driving to the nearest metropolitan area that may be hundreds of miles distant from your residential setting. If you want to know why Apple is rising when the rest of the economy is sinking, all it takes is one visit.
You walk into this brightly lit, incredibly well designed environment with MacBooks, IPhones, IPods, ITouch’es, and everything else “Mac” you could think of arrayed in perfect symmetry. And there’s no crummy screen saver that some stupid high-school kid has to unlock with a password for you to enjoy the experience. It’s all up and running and ready for you to walk right up and use it. Even more incredible, unlike at Best Buy or Circuit City or any other big-box office or electronics store where most of the seemingly pre-adolescent employees wouldn’t know how to plug in an AC adaptor, every employee at the Mac Store seems to be a subject matter expert on everything in the store. They even have an employee whose job title, as far as we could tell, is ”the Genius”. He or she is the one who upgrades memory, does magical Mac things in the back room, and handles problems the lesser-gifted employees can’t tackle.
What’s most amazing to me, one of the country’s most cynical shoppers, is to find a place where the employees tell you not to buy something when they think you don’t really need it. I saw that happen in Miracle on 34th Street, when Macy’s took Santa’s advice and started sending people down the street to Gimbel’s and telling people what store had what Macy’s didn’t carry, but I never thought I’d experience it in real life. Not to mention that each of the Mac Store employees genuinely conveys the feeling that, if asked to choose anywhere in the entire universe to be at a given moment in time, the response would be ”Why, the Mac Store!”.
So we headed off to the Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, Oregon, the store nearest our home across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. Once we got to the Mall, there was only one slight deviation along the way to the Mac Store when Ruth, usually someone who avoids sales promotions like the plague, suddenly stopped at this sales cart out in the center of the mall. And made me come over, even though I was shaking my head no, no, no. That brief stop resulted in me rubbing myself with salts from the Dead Sea, learning how to dab magic Jewish moisturizing oils on my face in what was probably some sort of ancient ritualistic Hassidic pattern, and spending $100 for the experience.
I learned afterwards that Ruth’s deviation from her normal avoidance of such things was because Ruth thought the Israeli salesgirl was “cute”. I do have to admit that the Sea Salt/Magic Oil experience turned out to be a generally pleasurable one, mostly because of the Israeli salesgirl that Ruth thought was so “cute”. That wouldn’t be exactly the word I’d use to describe her, though I agreed with Ruth at the time. But, being 55 and not wishing to end the exceptionally positive experience up to that point (or my marriage) by saying that I thought “hot” would have been a more apt description, I chose not to contribute that to the conversation. Good choice.
So we left the Magic Dead Sea Scrubbing Salts place. I walked Ruth the remaining fifteen paces to the Mac Store and guided her through the doorway. And watched her shift to the aforementioned sensual realm the moment she walked up to one of the many MacBooks available, reached down, and touched it.
FYI, this is where it kind of starts to sound like a Harold Robbins novel, but writing in Harold’s style is the only way for me to accurately capture the essence of the whole Ruth/MacBook interaction.
After Ruth’s hands made contact with the MacBook, I watched breathlessly as she lovingly stroked the beautifully crafted carved aluminum case, danced her fingers over the perfectly spaced, slightly cupped, and ergonomically placed illuminated keys, stared longingly at the amazingly clear, bright, and beautifully rendered true-color screen, and longingly caressed the large integrated no-button touchpad, gasping as it responded instantly to the ultimate of all interactive techniques, MultiTouch, intuitively expanding and contracting the active window almost as if it were responding to her will. “Take me, Ruth! Take me now!!”, Jeff whimpered…..No, wait, that last part was just in my head somewhere. Sorry.
But you’ve got the picture. It’s sad to say, but I really was basically standing there watching and thinking that, all things considered, I would have loved to be the MacBook at that particular moment. But, on reflection, I think putting the idea in her head and thereby making the MacBook experience happen was just as satisfying. Because I got to see her turn to me with that look in her eyes again. And it was for me, not the MacBook. Which made everything up until that point and afterward completely worthwhile.
