Man on bike gets one shot; Through the Window Metro Study #533; Royce gets his medicine but I miss mine, because time is speeding up

Once again, I find myself in a situation where I badly need to get something done that demands virtually all of my time. This morning, I figured maybe if I did it right, I could give the construction of this blog half-an-hour; 45 minutes at most. "Fifteen minutes would be better," I told myself.

So I gave myself an assignment. To shoot one single frame all day long.

I still had money left on the Mat-Su Family Restuarant gift certificate that Funny Face gave me, so I decided to use it. As I drove down Lucille Street enroute to Family, I saw this bicyclist pedaling in the opposite direction. I wanted to try to photograph him, but, as I was allowing myself but one frame, I wondered if it was worth the risk. I don't know how fast he was going, but let's say it was ten miles per hour.

I was doing close to 40. That would mean our speed in passing would be about 50 mph. As much as I love the pocket camera, it has many, many, flaws, including the fact that it recycles very slowly. If you keep shooting and you are lucky, you can get off one frame about every one-and-half seconds.

Sometimes, the shutter trips when you press the button and sometimes it doesn't.

Furthermore, I had to take the picture without looking at the guy at the moment of exposure. There was no other traffic nearby but still I have a rule for taking pictures out of the car: I can give myself no more time to prepare and set it up than one takes to check the traffic behind him when he changes lanes.

Still, I decided to go for it. If I missed and just wound up with a blurred image of trees, well, that would be my picture for the day.

I rolled down the passenger window and, with the bike rider still well ahead of me, pointed my camera directly at him through the windshield. Then, hoping to match our merging speed so as to follow him to the point of exposure, I swung the camera in an arc from my artificial titantium shoulder toward the open passenger window.

At the moment the camera reached a point approximately 90 degrees to the right of my line of sight down the road, I pressed the shutter and continued on, not knowing if I got the shot or not.

Fortunately, the light ahead was red, so I was able to examine my work.

Given the rules that I had shot it under, I had done okay. It would suffice.

Still, I determined that I would keep my camera with me at all times, because you just never know what you might happen upon and you don't want to miss a significant picture just because you were playing a silly game.

I saw several good pictures at Family Restaurant, but I did not take any of them. I saw more pictures as I was driving home. I ignored them.

When I stepped back into the house, I saw two cats, Royce and Chicago, posed perfectly. I gave each a pat on the head, but did not photograph them.

I then sat down right here, at my computer, pulled up my work. By coffee break time, I had accomplished but the tiniest fraction of what I had hoped, but, still, it was coffee break time and I wanted to hear the news, plus I had to pick up a new subscription for Royce at Geneva Woods and another for me at Wal-Mart.

So off I went.

Shortly after I pulled up to the window at Metro Cafe, I saw these two guys standing on the other side of Carmen's counter.

It was hardly that significant of a picture, but you must remember that I decided that these images of people on the other side of Carmen's counter had grown to a significant enough number that I needed to call them a study, an ongoing study, the kind of study that you add to at every opportunity.

And this was an opportunity.

Sadly, the fellow to the left, barely visible, was camera shy, even after I told them about my study and Carmen testified on my behalf. He stepped out of the picture - or mostly out. He thought he was all the way out.

Next, I pulled up to the drive-through window at Geneva Woods to pick up Royce's medicine. Well, I had already broke the one-frame-for-the-day rule. And I know a number of readers are greatly concerned about Royce. So I figured that I should photograph the medicine transfer.

Here it is. You can see my debit card, my receipt and the sack with the medicine in it in the tray. That's Maranda O despensing the medicine.

She was not camera shy. She responded as if it were the normal routine, as if every customer who pulled up the pharmacy window was there to pick up medicine for his cat and to take her picture.

This is good, because now she will be remembered for all of time.

Next, I headed to Wal-Mart to pick up my own medicine. It is very expensive medicine and I often go without it because the very expensive "Cadillac premiums" health insurance that am now more than two months in arrears on and will lose altogether if I don't get a payment in by the 10th never helps me with a single pill.

The last time I visited the PA to my doctor, he gave me a months worth of free-samples, which I stretched out over three months, but ran out of when I was in Barrow.

Yesterday, I kind of felt like I needed that medicine again, so I took my prescription in to the Wal-Mart pharmacy, which is cheaper than Geneva Woods.

As I pulled into the parking lot, NPR's All Things Considered anchor announced that, shortly, they were going to broadcast a story about why time seems to speed up when you get older.

I decided that I wanted to hear that story, so I drove out of the parking lot and continued on. I can pick the medicine up on my way into Anchorage tomorrow to get Margie at the airport.

What's one more day without it?

I decided that, at the very moment the story on time began, I would shoot a picture of whatever was before me on the road. As it happened, it was this sign.

Turns out, nobody knows for sure why time speeds up when you get older, but a couple of theories were advanced. The first was that you have kind of a mental clock in your brain that measures various beats and such and it slows down as the decades pass, which makes everything happening around you seem to speed up.

To test this theory, they had created an experiment wherein teens and young adults were asked to close their eyes and then to open them again when they thought 60 seconds had passed. The teens all opened their eyes between about 55 and 65 seconds.

Older people, like about my age and up, all kept their eyes closed for about 90 seconds. This meant that their perception of the passage of time was 50 percent faster than that of the youth.

HOWEVER... I just conducted the same test upon myself. My perceived time? Sixty seconds for 60 seconds. And there have been other times, not even knowing that this was a scientific test, that I have closed my eyes to see if I could keep them closed for a certain length of time and always I am pretty much right on.

I never hear an alarm go off, because if one is set, I will always wake up and turn it off before it rings. That's how much I hate alarm clocks.

In fact, I rarely use an alarm clock, because I don't need one. If I need to get up at a certain time, I will wake up.

But time is speeding by for me. Rapidly. It feels like New Year's Day was just one month ago - New Year's Day, 2009.

Another theory was that if you are six, then two years is one-third of your time lived, so it seems long, but if you are 60, it is 1/30th of your experience, so it doesn't seem that long.

A third theory was that when you are young, everything is new and you are always learning and memorizing, so your brain must work harder and more analytically, which makes time seem to go by more slowly.

I have had my own theory for awhile, and, despite the fact that I failed the test, it does bear some similarity to theory number one.

If you put Kalib and I together for an hour, he will make at least ten times as many movements and engage in ten times the number of activities as I will.

Honestly, I think it would be even more than that.

I have memories from when I was his age. It did not seem to me then that I was taking at least ten times the number of actions in the same time period as I am now. It felt pretty much the same. Which means that the same amount of time would have seemed to have been ten times as long.

I remember when Mom would tell me I could spend a full hour with a friend. I would be overjoyed, to have so much time to play.

I decided that I would photograph whatever was in front of my eyes when the story ended.

It was this church.

And here I am, getting Royce's medicine ready for him. I must put it on the tip of my finger and then rub it into his ear. It is made to penetrate skin, so I must keep it off of my skin. We are trying to extend Royce's good time upon this earth.

Now, I have some time to make up.

Cocoon mode* - day 15: leaf melts frost, commode goes down Church, reaction to Sarah Palin's big China speech, a tooth is pulled; I blow it

This morning, there was a leaf on my windshield. It had melted a patch of frost.

As I drove down Church Road, I saw a commode coming the other way.

On Lucille, I saw this group of children waiting for their school bus.

The big talk all day in Wasilla, all over Alaska and it seems the whole USA and the world has been Sarah Palin and her big speech in China. I've visited the other blogs and online news outlets and everybody is going on about it.

Me, I'd rather show you this car driving by Wasilla Lake, as I drive the other way.

Margie lost a filling and came down with a terrible toothache. Jacob and Lavina took her to Anchorage with them and dropped her off at the emergency room of the Alaska Native Medical Center. When she was done, she called me and I headed in to pick her up. I came upon this gentlemen right here in Wasilla, at the stoplight at the intersection of the Parks and Palmer-Wasilla highways.

I have immortalized him for posterity beyond his mortal days and he does not even know it.

If you know him, perhaps you could tell him.

After she called me, Margie had to wait for an hour for her pain-killer prescrption, so the timing was just about perfect. Her tooth had to be pulled and she was in tremendous pain. She took one of two pills, but it did no good. The other pill had to be taken with food, but her mouth hurt her so bad she could not stick anything in it.

Poor woman! She has spent so much of this year suffering pain. So much! Damnit!

After I got her home, she managed to swallow some Saltine crackers. Then she took the other pill. The pain eased off a bit after that.

As for me, despite the increased number of pictures in this entry, I am still in cocoon mode. It's just that I burned out tonight. Completely. I could not do another lick. So I decided to watch a movie with Margie, something that we have not done much of together in quite awhile - although she has been watching movie upon movie upon movie, because of her injury. But tonight all she wanted to do was take her Vicodin and go to bed.

When I was recovering from my injury, I hardly watched any TV at all. I read books, and I learned to use the pocket camera, took pictures with just one hand and with that same hand pecked away at my laptop computer. I also slept a lot. It was amazing how much I slept. I miss sleeping like that.

And then one night I went to bed and I could not sleep at all. I threw away my pain killers, but still this condition persisted for a couple of months. It was awful. And now I sleep but I still don't sleep much and I am tired 100 percent of the time.

Oh, how I ramble! This is because I am burned out and don't know what else to do.

I did not want to watch a movie by myself, so I came out here, made this blog entry and since I could not work, put in a couple of more pictures than I should have, being in cocoon mode. I still left some out, though. Some good ones - even better than the ones I put in.

I am tired of working everyday. Every day! The whole damn summer passed and I did not get to take one break and do one damn fun thing (although I do have fun with my work, sometimes, especially when I was on the Arctic Slope) but I have got to get this job done.

It doesn't feel like I ever will, but I have got to.

And then I need to blow out and go to Mexico or Hawaii or Argentina or someplace for a few days. I've just got to! Brazil would be okay. I could dance upon the equator. If some of those women that you always see pictures of, undulating their way through the Mardi Gras, were to dance upon the equator at the same time as me, that would be okay.

Even when you are married and love your wife, who may or may not be with you, depending on whether she wants to go or not, it is good to watch women dance upon the equator.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I am not going to Brazil when this project is done. I will be lucky if I can make it to Glennallen. And any woman who tries to dance outside there had better be well-bundled, or she will turn into a popsicle.

I'm not going to proof read this damn thing, either, so if there's any mistakes, that's just too bad. I probably wouldn't catch most of them, anyway. 

Holy cow! My email just pinged. It was an Anchorage Daily News update: Former Anchorage Mayor George Sullivan has died. Oddly enough, the sharpest memory I have of him is of him sitting in a big car in the parking lot of the Sullivan Arena, named for him even before he died.

I must have photographed that moment, but who knows where the image is?

My condolences to the family and all those who loved him.

Well, he just kept rambling.

Not Mayor Sullivan - he's done rambling. Me, I'm the one who kept rambling. But I will stop one day, too.

But not today.

*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.

How precious is one month? I walk, meet a friend who has discovered that she has a deadly cancer, but is determined to beat it

I passed these chickens as I walked, and thought of the day two years shy of four decades ago when I shot a pig between the eyes and then cut the heads off 76 chickens. It was a great feast, held in honor of a man 13 months dead, and it happened on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, not far from the new bank of the dammed Missouri River.

As I walked further, I saw a blond lady walking in the opposite direction, coming towards me. I had not seen her for a couple of months, since just before I left for the Arctic Slope in June. Over the past two-and-a-half decades, our paths have often crossed either on foot, on bicycle or, in the days prior to Serendipity, on cross-country skis.

Before Serendipity, these path-crossings happened mostly on trails, deep in the woods, but this cannot be anymore. Always, when we meet, we stop and visit for awhile.

"You're back!" she smiled. I noticed that she seemed more thin, more gaunt, then I had ever seen her. I attributed this to increasing age, and yet it seemed like too much aging to have happened in just two months.

She asked me how things were so I told her about Margie, and her fall. She listened and offered words of sympathy and consolation. Then, after a couple of minutes of this, she asked, "do you want to hear my story now?"

She had been suffering some abdominal discomfort for awhile and then had finally been able to go in for a cat scan. Immediately afterward, apparently before examining the cat scan, the doctor took off on a two-week vacation. 

Immediately after he returned, she received a call. Right after that, she checked into the hospital and got her gall-bladder removed.

During her surgery, the doctor discovered that she has cancer on her liver. Now she plans to see a specialist in the Lower 48. If that surgery goes well, then the odds are fairly good that she will have another year of life ahead of her. Without the surgery, or if it does not go well, she has only months.

"This is not right," she said.

"Can I give you a hug?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I wrapped my arms around her and she her's around me. She squeezed hard. It was a long hug. "It's hard," she said. "It's so hard."

She is a strong, tough, lady who has always kept herself physically fit. "If this had been done right," she said of her medical care. "I could have had months more." Months doesn't sound like long, but when you get down to counting in months, then how precious is even one month?

"I'm going to beat it," she said. "I'm going to."

Before we parted, she told me to pass her condolences along to Margie. "Tell her I hope she heals soon."

Margie just received some good news from the doctor. The original diagnosis - that there was no break but almost certainly ligament damage which might or might not require surgery, was completely wrong.

The break, as I have already noted, was not in her knee but on the outside of her femur, where it joins the knee. Now she learned that her ligaments were not damaged. She will not need surgery. Just time for the femur to heal.

So all that pain that we thought was due to ligament damage that really wasn't there was actually due to the break that we thought she did not have.

I told her about the blond lady. She cried.

She is a good woman, my Margie. 

And my daughter-in-law, Lavina, napping there on the couch beside her?

She is a good woman, too.

I drop Margie off for her MRI, see sights, big man gets stuck in children's slide, a femur fracture is found

"No, Royce!" I shouted as the old man orange cat ran through the door and dashed outside. I was about to drive Margie to town for her MRI and I wanted him to stay in the house. Even so, he went outside. After I helped Margie into the car, I picked Royce up and put him back inside the house.

"Where do you want to eat?" I asked Margie, once we got to town. She mentioned a couple of possibilites but when I noted that we had not yet feasted at the any of the Fourth Avenue hot dog stands this summer, she got excited.

"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "Let's go for hot dogs."

So, while Margie waited in the car, I bought two reindeer dogs. As the vendor prepared them, a guy roared by on a loud motorcycle. "What's this guy who comes by here everyday at the same time on his motorcycle going to do when winter comes?" the vendor asked.

I did not have the answer.

"I don't understand people who have to drive loud bikes," he continued. "Who are they trying to impress? I drive a bike, but it's not loud. A bike doesn't have to be loud."

I handed the money to the pretty young woman who works with him and who might be his wife and he handed me the hotdogs. I took them back to the car, along with Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and original Lay's Potato Chips. Margie and I sat there and ate them as the rain drummed on the roof.

It was the nicest time that we had experienced since she got injured and the dogs were delicious. I must go back and have another, but I think I will get beef next time, or maybe Kosher Polish.

I could not accompany Margie to the MRI room, so I dropped her off. I was told that the MRI would take 25 minutes, so I headed off to see what sights I might see. I had not gone far before I saw a young man push a woman in a wheelchair across the road as another man crossed in the opposite direction, carrying what appeared to be two cups of coffee.

The rain fell upon them all, just as the Bible says it does.

It didn't fall upon me, though, because I was in the car.

But not for long. Lisa had left her driver's license at Penney's, Penney's had sent it to us, so, as Margie lay in the MRI machine, I took it to the Alaska Native Medical Center's Family Medicine Clinic where Lisa works and brought it to her.

She then took a break and followed me back to the car. We then stood in the rain for just a little bit and discussed important things.

We hugged. "Bye, Dad," she said. I drove away.

To kill time, I circled the Alaska Native Medical Center itself and as I did, an airplane came flying by. At that very moment, Margie was in the tube, getting her knee cat-scanned. She did not like it. She felt claustrophobic, she kept her eyes closed and focused upon mental images of Kalib, running, laughing, playing. She saw him pull the telephone book off of the tiny table that it sits on, place it on the floor and then dance upon it - just the way he did yesterday.

She saw him pull Kleenix's, one after the other, out of the box and smile ever so sweetly and mischievously, as he drop them to the floor - as he did just a few months ago. She saw him at just a few weeks of age as he sat in his car seat in the back seat of the rental car and she and his mom drove across the Navajo Reservation to introduce him to his other grandma and a host of aunts, uncles and cousins.

She saw him as they drove on to the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and then how happy her own mother had been when infant Kalib met his only living great-grandparent.

She replayed scenes from his whole life thus far in her mind, right up to that moment when we stood outside the door to the birthing room and heard his first, beautiful, cry.

Next I drove up onto the campus of Alaska Pacific University, where I saw these children, gathered in a circle.

I then returned to ANMC, parked the car, and headed toward the building. There is a children's playground just outside the door to the emergency room, where I would enter the hospital. I saw a small child climbing into the slide, helped by his Dad.

The small child's mother scolded the dad. "He's not going to like it!" she warned. "He's going to be frightened." Just the same, the dad gave the small child a shove and down into the tube he disappeared.

His mother readied her hands to catch him.

Then the small child began to scream. He had gotten stuck, somewhere in the darkness within the tube.

So the dad climbed in, to see if he could unstick him.

The small child got the hang of it and came out with a smile on his face. Now the Dad was stuck. He could not go up. He could not go down. Why... look at the kid! It's my own grandson, Kalib! He had come to ANMC to greet his grandmother when she came out of the MRI tube. That must mean that the dad stuck in this tube... is my own son... Jacob.

Jacob wiggled a bit, and finally he slid out. Kalib headed back, ready to go again.

Margie had not yet exited her tube. I strolled through the hospital, looking at the art, reminded of what life was like in Alaska just a short time ago.

Finally, Margie hobbled out into the hallway and headed for the car. She did not know that Jacob, Kalib and Lavina were behind her.

"Kalib!" she squealed when she discovered them. "Thank you! You got me through the MRI. I kept seeing you in my mind and that's what got me through."

When we reached the car, Margie handed me her crutches so that she could climb in. Kalib took the crutches away from me and handed them right back to her. 

So she put them on the floor and then climbed in. Kalib was very pleased, for he knew that he had done something good for his grandmother.

Kalib, Jacob and Lavina then went off to do some house shopping. Margie and I met Melanie at the Title Wave Kaladi Brothers coffee shop, where we discussed the airplanes that fly over her new house, renovations that she wants to make, the dogs that come and pee in her yard, her cats and other important things.

It was even better than sitting in the car, eating hotdogs. It was, in fact, the most pleasant experience that I have shared with Margie since she got hurt, and all the more pleasant because Melanie was there, encouraging her mom not to be discouraged. "It will be better, soon," Melanie soothed.

It already seemed quite a bit better, although we did not know what secrets the MRI would reveal.

Shortly after we said goodbye to Melanie and began the drive back to Wasilla, we got a message that Margie's doctor wanted her to call, so she did. The doctor had taken a look at the MRI and had immediately discovered something the original x-rays had not. 

Margie did break a bone when she fell. Not her knee cap, but her femur, right on the outside where it meets the knee.

"Try not to put any weight on it," the doctor said.

We have yet to get a report on any ligament damage.

It still rains and as I sit here typing this on my computer, I hear the whistle of a train, passing by miles from here. It seems kind of odd, but sometimes when it rains around here, sound really travels.

Back to ANMC - Margie's first time out of the house in over two weeks

I had been a bit worried about how we would get Margie out the door, down the two steps and then up into the Escape, which sits pretty high off the ground and is averaging 23.1 miles to the gallon, but the process went fairly easy. She pretty much did it all herself. 

Then we took off for Anchorage. As I drove, I noticed a young man pass by on the left. He looked at us and then started laughing. I figure this was because Margie was in the back seat and me in the front. The young man probably thought that he understood the situation - that my wife was mad at me, and refused to sit in the front seat with me, or perhaps he thought that I had picked up a hitchhiker and had made her sit in the back seat.

Or maybe he thought that my name was James, that I was the hired driver and that it was mighty strange for a chauffer to wear a t-shirt and drive a red Ford Escape.

We pulled off the freeway in Eagle River to get something to eat. We went through the Taco Bell drive-through and then parked next to a police car. It is the first one that I have seen with this picture of Anchorage stenciled into the word, "Police."

Yesterday, Margie got a call from someone at ANMC who asked her to come half-an-hour before her appointment so that she could get new x-rays shot first. So we did, and then we waited an hour before the x-rays were shot.

"It's so good to finally be out of the house," Margie said.

Margie getting her x-rays shot. I had to stand in this room for my own protection.

Margie's knee. The Physicians Assistant, a camera shy woman, who would attend to her would tell us that her bone structure is not good; she has osteoporosis, which means she can more easily fracture her bones.

When she was a child, Margie's family was poor and there were many times when they had little more than flour from which to make tortillas and tennis racket bread (cooked over an open fire on a homemade grilling device that looks like a tennis racket - very tasty). She seldom had milk or other dairy products, although her grandfather had a wagon and a donkey and on occasion would take her up the hill to the trading post and buy her an ice cream cone.

She greatly enjoyed that, but it just wasn't enough calcium for a growing girl.

Her bones have been a bit weak ever since. One time, right after we were married, we were playing in a park when I wrapped my arms around her and twirled her in a circle. We were both laughing, but then a rib cracked. She suffered pain for weeks.

That was when we first found out what the childhood lack of milk had done to her. We haven't thought about that for awhile. Now we have to think about it, because she's getting older and its getting worse, so we must do what we can to arrest it.

Damnit! This should not have happened to my Margie! She should be able to hike through the mountains with me, and run down the downhills, but she can't.

As we wait for the PA, I examine a fake knee. We didn't learn much, because, despite all her improvement, Margie was still too sore and tender and could not bend her knee far enough for the PA to make a good exam. The PA scheduled her for an MRI Friday, so that they can take a good look at her ligaments.

If this had happened to me, and I needed an MRI, notwithstanding the $100 thousand plus dollars that I have spent on my insurance, I can tell you from experience that the insurance company would find the way to get out of paying most, perhaps all of the cost, and I would be set back several thousand dollars more.

This fear of further financial setback is keeping me from going to the doctor for things I ought to go to the doctor for, from taking medications that I am supposed to be taking, and from getting checkups that I am supposed to be getting.

American Indians and Alaska Natives paid a terrible price for the health care that the government is now obligated to give them, but the good thing is, unlike my private insurer, her federal insurer will make good on all expenses involved. Furthermore, if something is bothering her, she need not fear what a trip to the doctor will do to us financially, the way I, who have paid a modest fortune for my health insurance, must.

You see, Sarah Palin, screamers, et al, these panels that you try to whip up so much fear about are already active and are denying many Americans the care they need right now, even as they drive them into a financial pit - but they don't work for Obama or the federal government. They work for the insurance companies. 

And so do you.

Can you feel my rage?