Sticks and Stones

My decision to set aside a period of time each day to read is going well.  I finished Jeffrey Tambor's autobiography the first day and yesterday finished Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling," which I started maybe as long as a year ago.  I don't know why I stopped reading it, but I probably got distracted by something which looked more interesting.  I do that a lot.  My own BADD, as you were (Book Attention Deficit Disorder!).  I have so many books I've started and intended to get back to when something else came along.  The other book I'm trying to read is Sally Henderson's "Silent Footsteps," about a woman's years in Botswana observing elephants.  I don't have a "blood and guts" thriller in the lot at the moment, which is rare for me.

Bryson's book is kind of a follow-up to his "Notes from a Small Island," written in 1995.  At the time he had lived in England with his family for twenty years and was ready to re-locate back to the U.S. and wanted to make one last trip around the country, traveling only on public transportation or walking and reporting on the idiosyncrasies of British life.

Walt and I found the book in a book store in Cambridge when we were in the process of driving around many of the same places Bryson visited and reading the book in conjunction with driving to and being in many of those places just added another layer of enjoyment to the trip.

In "Road to Little Dribbling," Bryson makes the same trip 20 years later, this time by car, visiting many of the same places and some other places.  The author is older and grumpier and grumbles a lot about modernization of the quaint places he loved before, but it is still an enjoyable read (and does he ever find Little Dribbling again?)

But one of the things I love about reading Bryson's books is picking up little tidbits that are just fascinating.  Take Durham Cathedral, for example.

He toured this edifice with the in-house architect and I learned that these old buildings (this one was built between 1093 and 1133) all have in-house architects because they are in constant need of repair.  But I just loved learning about how they are constructed and in awe at the knowledge of the architects of the 11th century.  The walls of the building are constructed of two layers, one layer outside and another inside with a space between them, which is filled with mortar consisting of sticks, stones, and other rubble.  This is how Bryson explains it:

Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But–-and here is the truly remarkable thing–-because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn’t get to it, so it took a very long time – 40 years to be precise – to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedral masons had to build doorjambs, lintels, and the like at slightly acute angles so that they would ease over time into the correct alignments. And that’s exactly what happened. After 40 years of slow motion sagging the building settled into a position of impeccable horizontality, which it has maintained ever since.

I find that fascinating, that these  architects built these huge cathedrals knowing that there was a good chance they would never live to see the final product but knowing that it needed to be built in a manner that allowed for the building to settle into what it was designed to be.
I just love learning tidbits like that.

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I had a call from Atria yesterday that my mother was out of something. I could not understand what word the woman was saying, but decided it must have been her Depends, which it was.  I bought two packages and restocked the larder.

My mother was in good spirits and told me that she and a friend had taken a long walk that morning, all the way downtown, and that she was tired when she got back.  I did not point out that she could not get out of the building and didn't know where "downtown" is.

When I left, she was trying to decide what she was going to cook for dinner.  Today I will not be going to Atria.  I suspect I will be watching MSNBC all day.

Meltdown

Walt looked at me warily as if I were a time bomb about to eplode.  Polly needed to be with me, but had that "don't touch me or I'll jump" look she gets when she's terrified.  I was in the middle of a mini-meltdown.  I opened a cupboard and trays fell out, with a loud bang and I slammed them back in the cupboard, then I got my chicken tenders in the oven only to realize I had left out a vital step in the recipe (this was not a Blue Apron meal) and had to remove them and see if I could fix it. Neither thing was all that catastrophic but I had just been at Atria for about an hour and a half and had left with all my emotions on high and was not emotionally prepared for minor kitchen disasters.

After the hour of repetitive conversation with my mother, which always depresses me, we had a major crisis.  When I arrived, her door was ajar, not closed, which surprises me because you have to make an effort to leave it open, since it locks automatically.  

She was worried, as she always is, because there was something she needed to ask me, but couldnt remember what it was.  Then she asked me to check her door because there was something wrong with it.  She said she couldn't get it to close and was afraid someone was going to get angry with her for leaving it open.

I checked the door and it was closed, and told her it seemed fine, which seemed to calm her.  I chalked it up to one of the odd fears she sometimes has.

Toward the end of the visit, I got up to get her laundry to take home and wash and I noticed that her room keys were not on the counter where she keeps them.  I didn't say anything, but started looking around and they were nowhere.  She realized I was looking for something and asked what I was doing.  I told her that her keys were missing.  She immediately got what Walt describes as the "kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar" attitude and told me she knew nothing about it.  She never used the keys. Someone must have put them somewhere.

She helped me look and at one point was standing in the living room saying "I can't even remember which shoes we are looking for."  I am afraid I yelled at her that we weren't looking for shoes, we were looking for keys. She was sitting on the couch with her head in her hands and I felt guilty for letting her know how frustrated I was.

I looked everywhere, but they were nowhere.  I even checked the refrigerator, where Alzheimers patients sometimes put things like keys.  I finally was going to leave her my set of keys when I thought that maybe she had put them in her purse.  Then I couldn't find the purse.  She keeps it in a drawer, but it wasn't there.  I checked all the drawers.  No purse.  I finally checked her closet and in a dark corner the purse was there, as were her keys.  

I took out her checkbook, which I long ago put in her wallet to keep her from losing it (that system has worked well).  In the keys search, I had found her AT&T bill and wrote the check for her to sign, but then found out that the return envelope was not there.  I also went to get the newspaper bill, which I made the mistake of not paying 3 days ago.  It was part of a stack of junk papers that needed to be thrown away but she wouldn't let me touch because she needed to go through it all.  I pulled the bill out and told her NOT to throw that away.  But of course she did.  

The nice thing about dementia is that even when something unpleasant happens, you immediately forget it, so by the time I had written the AT&T check and packed up the laundry to go home, stopping to talk with her about a headline in the newspaper, she had forgotten all the drama of a few minutes ago.  But of course I had not and got into the car still agitated.  I usually take the long way home, listening to my audio book, to decompress, but the battery of my iPod no longer holds a charge and though it had only been played about 30 minutes I had not plugged it in, it was dead, so there went my decompress time.

Which probably explains my mini kitchen meltdown.  Dinner turned out just fine.

This was Thursday and usually my Logos day, but I had accidentally agreed to work at Sutter, so Susan said she'd get someone to cover for me.  (She apparently forgot because Sandy called me at 2:30 to ask if I was coming). 

It was a quiet day at Sutter, not nearly as eventful as when I worked on Monday.  The major trauma was that before I left the house, I couldn't find my Kindle anywhere.  I finally decided that maybe I'd left it at Sutter and, thank goodness I had.  

So when I was not dealing with flowers being delivered (there were three deliveries for the same patient, who had also received flowers yesterday as well!) I was enjoying the last chapters of Bill Bryson's "The Road to Little Dribbling," which I have been reading for awhile.

Nothing like Bill Bryson to lift the spirits!  I've been a fan ever since I found "The Mother Tongue" decades ago and have read almost all of his books.  Years ago, Walt and I were in Cambridge, England and I saw a display in a book store window. The book was Bryson's "Notes from a Small Island," a book he wrote driving around England, where he and his family had lived for many years, for one last look before returning to the US. Walt and I were driving around England and Bryson's book became our most delightful tour guide, as he visited many of the spots where we visited. Bryson is the master of the little known fact about things you never realized. In this new book, he is taking another tour of England to see how it compares with his first book. As in "Notes," this one is chock full of information you didn't realized you wanted to know and things about people you never heard of before. 

I love his stories like trying  to register at a hotel where when asked where he was from and he replied "London" the clerk asked how to spell it.  Then she asked what country.  He said "England" and she asked how to spell that and she told him that her computer didn't recognize "England" (the country in which she lives) as a country.  And after trying Britain, Great Britain, and UK, she finally said that the computer recognized France, so she put in that he was from London, France.

He then lists a number of things you should ask yourself to see if you are truly stupid, one of which was "If you have been to a tanning parlor, do you think that because you cannot see that your eyelids are white, no one else can?"  Hmmm...wonder how he came up with that one...

This book is filled with tales of marvelous vistas, beautiful, walks, quiet beaches, quirky locations, eccentric people, and quaint little towns you have probably never heard of but suddenly desperately want to visit. And who knew that more people are killed in England by cows than by bulls..? Or that a building in Sellafield is "the most hazardous building in Europe" because it is filled with decaying fuel rods from England's nuclear years, when nobody thought ahead about how to safely handle such things.

"Little Dribbling" celebrates the best...and the worst of Bryson's adopted country. It's a great read.  I recommend it to de-stress after a stressful day!

Everest

I received notification from Amazon that they had charged my account for a book and sent it to my Kindle.  It was a title I didn't recognize and I immediately logged onto Amazon to check my account.  The book, "The Road to Little Dribbling, Adventures of an American in England," was the latest by Bill Bryson, and I had pre-ordered it several months ago and the book had just been released.  I was thrilled.

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors.  I encountered him for the first time when I read his "The Mother Tongue," the story of the English language.  It became my favorite book.  Who knew that a subject as dry as etymology could be so much fun?

I started reading all of his books.  I found a copy of his "Notes from a Small Island," his salute to England, where he had lived for many years, as he was about to return to the U.S., at a book store in Cambridge, when Walt and I were driving around England.  We were visiting many of the spots that Bryson was writing about and it became an unexpected travel guide.

His "In a Sunburned Country" was such fun to read after I'd visited Australia (though he gives short shrift to Western Australia), and "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" was a fun meander back through the 50s, remembering my childhood.  His book on Shakespeare was fascinating, discovering how little the world really knows about the Bard.  I think I have all of his books and have read just about all of them,

So learning that I had a brand new Bryson on my Kindle was great news and I had free time in the morning and spent a luxurious three hours sitting in a comfortable chair reading the book, and then read it through my down time at the hospital information desk all aftenoon. I got nearly halfway through it.  This is his follow up to "Notes from a Small Island," and is another tour around lesser known spots in England.  I loved his story of George Everest, the man for whom Mount Everest was named, who is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in the Sussex town of Hove, a place we have visited (not Brighton, Hove, actually).  I wanted to share the story with you.  Everest never even saw the mountain.  He was sent to India to work as chief assistant on an enterrise known as the "Great Trigonometrial Survey," which had at its goal to determine the circumference of the earth.  Everest went nowhere near the Himalayas.

The British most commonly called the mountain Peak XV and no one at the time had any idea that it was the tallest mountain in the world, so when someone put Everest's name on the map, it wasn't intended as a momentous gesture.  In the end, the trigonometrical survey was found to be largely inaccurate anyway, so Everest died having achieved very little.

Everest died in London, but was taken to Hove for burial.  No one knows why.  He had no connection to the town or to any part of Sussex.  "I was greatly taken with the idea of the most famous mountain in the world being named for a man who had no connection to it and whose name we don't even prononce correctly" (he pronounced it Eve-rest).

This is the kind of little known information that Bryson litters his books with and why I love them so much.  That and delightful observations like this, to which I can relate:

The worst part about aging is the realization that all your future is downhill.  Badas I am today, I am pretty much tiptop compared with what I am going to be next week or the week after.  I recently realized with dismay that I am even too old now for early onset dementia.  Any dementia I get will be right on time.  The outlook generally is for infirmity, liver spots, baldness, senility, bladder dribble, purple blotches on the hands and head as if my wife has been beating me with a wooden spoon (always a possibility), and the conviction that no one in the world speaks loud enough.  And that's the best scenario  That's if everything goes absolutely swimmingly.  There are other scenarios that involve catheters, beds with side railings, plastic tubing with my blood in it, nursing homes, being lifted on and off toilets and having to guess what season it is outside--and those are all still near te best-case end of the spectrum.

As funny as that is, it is also depressing...and so very true.  So much of it reminds me of my mother (especially the part about wondering what season it is outside because she won't open the glass door two inches from her hand, but waits for me to come and give her a weather report!)

Anyway, Bryson is just delightful to read, full of fun hitherto unknown facts and observations and given that I am one day closer to death whenever I wake up, I need to hurry and finish this book while I still have most of my faculties about me.