Sunday, January 24, 2010

Now I Get It

I know I was a smart kid. Not the smartest, certainly, but I do remember that I scored points on national, separate-the-useless-from-the-dangerous tests, before the ravages of adolescence got to me, and then my lifestyle finished the job.

I knew some smart people and talked to them without making an ass of myself; also with an eye toward getting out of a discussion before the half-remembered developmental history, the brazenly subjunctive sentence structure, and the imprecise vocabulary would have revealed me, in one false comment or imprecise wisecrack, as a fraud.

But I was—a pretender who played well but occasionally stayed just a tad to long, or who waded out a bit too far, or worst of all, laughed at precisely the wrong time, by scant seconds.

So, I’ve been stupid, and I know it. And I’ve been dense, on occasion, really dense on others.

Since a week or so, I have been telling people that (Cablevision’s) Optimum Online optonline.net is cutting me off, that I can’t be reached at optonline.net any more. I can be reached, at edward.lowe1@marist.edu.

People have answered me at the Optimum address, which is not Optimum, but optonline.net, but I was supposed to know that.

So I, again, tell them that Cablevision’s Optimum Online optonline.net is cutting me off. Don’t e-mail me at the optonline.net address. They fire back, “What happened with you and Optimum?” posing this question in an e-mail to the Optimum address, optonline.net.

I’m panicking, because I don’t know when Cablevision’s Optimum Online optonline.net will pull the plug, and I’m saying I won’t have an optonline.net address any more, probably in minutes, maybe in seconds. I won’t get these messages unless you send them to the address, edward.lowe1@marist.edu.

I talked to a bunch of Optimum Online people at Cablevison before I realized what they where saying. They were very patient, before passing me along to the next voice who asked the same questions with the same patience. I did this five whole times before I got it. By that time, I was shameless. I said, “…but I had a stroke. I don’t know what you’re saying…” I was trying to buy a weekend to notify everyone I’ve e-mailed e-mails to for years (I know, I know).

Here’s what happened.

Back in 199?, when we were newer to this, I acquired an e-mail address from Newsday, then an e-mail address from Yahoo, because the e-mail address from Newsday didn’t always work so well.

Then, I think much later, an Optimum truck hit my neighborhood. I got an optonline.net e-mail address from Optimum, because I had Cablevision, which owned Optimum; I figured I was always going to have Cablevision, therefore Optimum, and as it worked out, I used the Cablevision Optimum optonline e-mail most often.
I began to believe it was my address, no one else’s.

A couple of years ago, Marist College, my Alma Mater, sent an unusual mailing, telling all graduates that they could have free e-mail for life. I paid little attention to it, because I already had e-mail addresses to spare. But I thought it was nice of them to do that. And, when I went to work for two other newspapers, I used optonline.net for one and Marist for the other, just for goofs.

Two years ago, I had a stroke. I was asleep for three months, half awake for another, and mostly awake for another, during the end of which time I found that I was not going to stay wherever I was for the rest of my life. I was going to go to Susan’s, to sleep in the living room. Asked about this, I cried, because I thought I was going to stay where I was.

My son, Jed, lived in my house for about 6 months, paying the Cablevision bill, because he wanted a lot more out of the TV than I did. After that, he moved to Florida, and the house was empty. My Cablevision was turned off.

Susan took over my bills, while I learned English.

Among the bills was my mother’s Cablevision bill, which came to my address, and was forwarded to Susan’s house. She paid it, because I had paid it.

About 9 months ago, I tried the computer for the third time, and learned to type, weirdly, at first, but learned. I also suddenly remembered my e-mail address, an optonline.net address, which still existed, but not because it was my address, as I stupidly thought.

In October, Doe died. My Mom. With her house being empty, and my not making any money, it seemed wasteful to be paying Cablevision (-Optimum-Online-optonline.net). So, Susan, with my approval, cancelled Doe’s Cablevision (-Optimum-Online-optonline.net). Now, I had no connection with Cablevision.

We got a refund on Doe’s Cablevision on a recent Wednesday. On Thursday, I couldn’t get into my optonline.net e-mail box. I didn’t put two-and-two together until I called the Cablevision number and kept having to say the same thing to employee after employee. I thought they were crazy, but it turns out, why should they give me an Optimum Online optonline.net mailbox for free when they can charge me $29.00 for it.

“What does the homeowner who owns your house pay?”

“She has Verizon, I think. Why?”

“Well, do you want the Cablevision service?” each one said.

“For $29.00 a month?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I want that?”

That’s when they passed me to another employee. I wasn’t getting it.

I thought of Marist. I had used Marist as an e-mail box for the readers of Neighbor Newspapers. Why not use them for all my e-mail?

“I see.” I said. “I can pay you $29.00 a month for my e-mail box, which is all I use, or, I can use the e-mailbox at Marist, and not pay anything.”

No comment.

“Let’s see, pay Cablevision $29.00 a month for Optimum Online optonline.net, or pay Marist nothing.”

No comment.

One of us hung up.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Remembering Times

Remembering Times

I’m trying to remember some things about the last few years.

It’s not self-punitive; hell, I can cover that in the last few minutes. And it’s not self-reflective, which I’m expert at (I mean, I can rearrange any scene I’ve just appeared in so that I’m the hero one way or the other.).

It’s more curiosity than anything else. I claim no credit for it, but I have a vivid memory. Other people—I mean, people with whom I habitually associate, all right, yes, but also a few people we would both be impressed by; and maybe people we would all be impressed by—have said, in public, that they have been amazed by my untrained memory, let’s say, for the details of a story.

Hell, I’m impressed with that, too, and I live with it, and I’m not easily impressed with myself. I can’t add 3 to 28, or remember whether I was going meet you this afternoon in The St. James in Mineola or Runyon’s in Seaford, but I can remember the details of story that happened in the Changing Times in 1992 detail for detail.

Could.

Both my mother and my father displayed uncanny memories, and, come to think of it, my uncles and aunts, too. My Uncle Eddie remembered plays so well that he came out routinely from his backstage role to play Murray the Cop in the on-the-road-version of, “The Odd Couple,” whenever the movie star called in…well…when he called to, sort of, say that he was not going to make the show tonight.

My 89-year-old mother performed songs and described scenes from the Nineteen-Twenties for her grandnieces before she died—I mean, literally, before she died; and my Dad had been a been detective, detecting for years, more than half of which was remembering who was wearing what cloth coat when the butler walked in.

So, imagine how naked I feel with a recent three months gone completely. I mean, three months gone, not a trace, not visitor memories, cards, doctors, nurses, not my own personal, health-care-advocate-and-spousal-equivalent-nurse, not my kids, not her kids, not her brother and his wife, not dear friends.

You would think somebody would allow you a spot on the ceiling to observe some of the headaches you caused.

Early on in my recuperation, I (suddenly) recall, a group of visitors were sitting around talking about the previous winter. They were sitting around me, to make me feel good, and they were talking, which I did not know I did not do well anymore, and one of them said, “Remember last January,” and talked about fighting snowstorms and seeing through frost-caked windshield and recovering from accidents.

I thought it would be my chance to chime in, saying, “Well, February and March were pretty mild.”

I killed the conversation. I mean, dead, in cold blood. Besides not knowing I couldn’t talk (“Befdh lookesqu,” I probably said), I had slept through the winter. I didn’t know anything about it, and I didn’t know I didn’t know anything about it. What do you say to a person like that? Even Politicians don’t do that.

Most politicians don’t do that.

You know, I do have this memory of (despite having passed out) looking up and seeing my ex-brother-in-law in a Vermont police outfit, and, he now tells me he was there, in Vermont, but that was still the last thing I remembered before the collapse, Jan. 5, 2008.

So there’s three months gone, and then, two more months where I’m pretty…not gone, but certainly out of it.

Like, I cannot recall huge chunks of life when, I guess, I appeared to others to be lucid, to have my eyes opened, even to mimic some form of speech, although, no form even vaguely familiar to anyone else in the room, or on the planet. The speech was fine with me, and I understood all of it. I didn’t know their problem.

I am even told I took some demonstrative control of my life and surroundings, and even try to change them, which got mixed reviews.

I evidently should have left the feeding tube alone, in Vermont, and some other things that were sticking out of, and sticking into me. I tend to meddle.

Even back on Long Island: I have no recollection of burning rubber in my wheelchair in the driveway after, “breaking out,” of the front door of St. Johnland, in Kings Park, the very first night I was there.

And, if I was trying to escape, it must have been in those fashionable PJ’s I otherwise wouldn’t have been caught dead in, which, now that I think of it, was appropriate for somebody who thought he was dead, anyway.

By the way, I didn’t know where I was; I don’t know yet where St. Johnland is; and, why, I wondered, wasn’t I goddam dead yet. (I mean, Dear Lord, if you can’t make up your mind, what chance do we have.).

Each morning that floats clearly in my memory of those days loses clarity and fades away just as fast, and some scenes that I remember vividly didn’t happen at all. Vivid scenes, proven to unhappen.

I think I learned on my last day at St. Johnland that there was a tag attached to the back of my wheelchair that read something like, “Escapee Risk,” or, “Suffers From The Delusion That He Can Talk.” It’s like a sign on your bumper that says, “Unintelligible, but otherwise harmless.” I reckon it was an early, “Watch out for this one,” warning.

They can tell me it wasn’t there. I can tell you I saw it. You can ask me, “How do you see the back of your wheelchair?” I can say, “Oh…yeah?”

I remember the physiotherapists read me right away. I mean, they took a look at my body and said, (in effect) “Well, no pull-up’s here;” certainly, no sit up’s, push-up’s, heavy weights, light-weights, feather-weights or weights. Whenever I came into their world, they knew, and I knew, that this was going to be an easy time, as long as they didn’t let me hurt myself.

The one thing I got was an all-purpose excuse. If I get an opportunity, I can say, “I had a stroke. I forgot…” whatever. “I forgot to bring my wallet;” “I forgot your name;” “I forgot the thirty bucks.”

So, things still are looking up.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Blind Eyes

Blind Eyes


A person or animal born without eyes cannot see.

(Simple.).

A person who cannot see, who never has seen, can’t imagine what sight is; or what is a scene; or how he looks; or what, “looks,” refers to; or how somebody, “looks,” different, or similar, or uncannily alike; or, how a snow-capped mountain looks when compared to a breezeless bay; or a busy garden on a bright summer morning with a hummingbird doing his business looks so vastly different from the exact same scene in the same place at the exact same angle on the exact same day, but after the sun disappears, and before the crickets tune their instruments.

(More complicated.).

The unseeing miss out on all that, we think, at least I think. I don’t know what you think. You maybe think that the unseeing don’t miss anything, because they can’t imagine what you’re talking about. I’ve tried thinking that, but my brain keeps snapping back to, “The unseeing miss out on…”

I fail to, “see,” that the unseeing aren’t missing out on anything. I can say it. I just did. But I can’t, “see,” it.

“Helped,” by the sighted, who try desperately to make sense where no sense can be had, literally because there isn’t any, the unseeing try to placate the sighted by making the sounds of thunder look foreboding, or trickling water appear gentle, or a garbage truck look useful; or the texture of a tree trunk, or the crackling of a campfire, or the playing of a flute, “look like,” what the sighted say it looks like.
The unseeing frustrate the sighted, because they want to know, first, what the word, “look,” means.

“Look,” is never going to be in their vocabulary. It is not of any use to them, and belongs in a tin box alongside panorama, vista and throng, as in, “a throng of people as far as eye can see.”

Let us tell you what it looks like, we say.

What is this, “look?” says the blind man. First, what does, “look,” look like. Then we’ll address what, “that,” “looks,” like.

Take another sense. Hearing.

A person or animal (or, who knows, a fish) with hearing equipment of some kind, “hears,” within, or, given the right equipment, even without, its tolerance level, from the vibrations things make in the air around us—or the water—some of it loud and abrasive, some of it sweet and melodious, some of it longing for company, some surprised by the seemingly awful and sudden arbitrary nature of…nature.
“Pfoof,” goes the anteater, catching lunch.

Without that sound, plus whatever chewing the victim hears before his insect heart stops, he scarcely would know he’d been eaten.

A person born with no, “sense,” of sound has no…well…sense of sound. As far as we know, he/she has four senses: sight, touch, smell, and taste. “Sound,” is as strange to her as time travel. In fact, time travel is imaginable to the unhearing. Sound is not.

I remember trying to jot down some of these notions years ago, in fact all the way back to high school, but I don’t recall what I did with them—except in high school—or whether I tried to legitimize them by casting some out of my head and into…well, forgive me…yours.

In high school, I was pretending to be a newspaper columnist, so I wrote them in a paragraph or two and put them in a high school newspaper.

I thought it probably was a hare-brained idea, although some people took it seriously, so I excused myself by thinking that they were hair-brained. I thereafter thought about these nagging questions whenever I thought nobody would catch me at it, or when the rest of my thoughts were too painful to think about anymore.

Now, I don’t know what I’m pretending to be.

My perspective has been pretty handsomely altered.

But the combination of the imaginary world of the movie, “Avatar,” which likely will be my first visit to a movie theater in two years, and the little back-of-the-newspaper photograph published last week captioned: “This picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, released yesterday [So, Tuesday, Jan. 05, 2010] shows the deepest image of the universe taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects, seen in insets, are galaxies corresponding to about 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago.”

Given that—that there may be more to life than currently I can handle (I mean, I can handle 12.9 billion years, for instance, but I don’t think 13.1 billion is going to fly in my head)—I decided to revert to my old, high school theory; that since you can be born without sight, and live pretty happily with four senses, just as if you had five, there may be—even must be—more senses than five.

I don’t mean, “a sixth sense,” I mean 27 senses, or 53, or, I don’t know, an infinite number. What the hell, we don’t know, because…because we don’t know. If you’re born without vision, you can’t even imagine what it is.

Maybe we’ll find a use for that 90 per cent of our brain we haven’t tapped yet. Maybe there is a, “Force.” Maybe you can look at, “The Road Not Traveled,” and go back to the fork, like, “Well, that was interesting, but, God, if you don’t mind, I’m going to start over, and travel this road.”

Maybe time bends, maybe the world is upside down, maybe you can translate thought; maybe you can be in Paris by clicking your shoes together.

Maybe anything is possible.