Sad notes and annoyances

May is a lovely month in my region, southeastern Pennsylvania. Perfect temperatures for days at a stretch. Blossoms everywhere. Birthdays of loved ones and my own.
This May, however, I have tests coming up that may indicate that having my leg amputated in February didn't nix the cancer and I'll be dead within a year or two.
Other things, most of them minor:

• A life on crutches in barely tolerable. The little things add up after awhile. An example: When you're on crutches both hands are so occupied that if you want to do something like scratch your ear or blow your nose you have to stop walking to do it. If you happen to be with someone else you have to tell them that and make a minor apology. Not that any real friend would care about this, but having to explain such small actions to people is a new burden.

  

  Author Rebecca Chace.

• I finished a novel I liked yesterday, Leaving Rock Harbor, by Rebecca Chace. I'd known the author when I was a teenager; a summer friend in New England. Usually, knowing an author puts a sort of veil over what I'm reading and I'm so busy judging the prose that I can't enjoy the book. In this case, though, it's been forty-five years, so that wasn't an issue. When reading the acknowledgements page I saw two names of mutual friends, both women, both of whom I carried a minor torch for. Not that I'd been on the cusp of romantic involvement with either of them, but after years passed I realized that both were my type and who knows what may have happened if we'd kept in touch? One had acted for awhile and then found that her real calling was teaching and she's now and Alexander Technique instructor. I watched one of her demonstration videos. She was still recognizable four-and-a-half decades later, and her laugh hadn't changed a bit, which was almost eerie but nice. The other had become a lawyer and worked on social justice causes. Then she became a pastor in her early fifties. Then, just two years ago, she died. Her obituary didn't list the cause. She'd married a guy I also knew back then, the early 1970s, and that surprised me. He was a little rough when I knew him. I guess he cleaned up. He died, too, but the obituary didn't say when.
• Mirror therapy is supposed to do wonders for phantom limb pain. I've seen videos in which users have gotten real relief within a week. I'm set up for it, but it hasn't done much for me yet. I have to put in more hours, I guess. A problem in my case is that mirror therapy tricks the brain into believing that your missing limb is still there by showing it to you as a reflected image. In my case, however, the missing limb, my right leg, was seven inches shorter than the left. When my non-existent foot hurts, the location is where the foot was, not where it should have been. 
• Yesterday I was replacing about two hundred gallons of the water in my six-hundred-gallon koi pond. As the new water was going in, the three koi I have got restless, thrashing around a little. This happens every year when I do it but usually that proportion of water replacement is one they tolerate well. Once the replacement is in, I immediately pour in a water treatment that makes the new water compatible. This time, toward the end of the replacement, one of koi jumped out completely! I was sitting outside during it, finishing the above-mentioned novel, and something rustling in the foliage next to the pond caught my eye. I had no idea what it was, having missed the actual jump. I crutched over in a hurry and, knowing that it would be very hard to pick up a vigorously writhing, foot-long, slippery fish, managed to guide him back to the pond. He'd never have gotten there otherwise and would have died an unpleasant death under an

  

  A koi jumping out of water.

  unseasonably hot sun. (Of course I talked to him during the seconds he was out of the water, telling him how foolish he'd been. I doubt he listened.) The water's not clear enough to see the bottom of the pond and therefor the fish, so the rest of the day I crutched out every half hour or so to look at the area around the edge to see if everything was all right. So far, so good, and that includes this morning. I'll have to build up the section where he jumped somehow so it won't happen again. 
• The older I get, the more mistakes I find in my writing. I go over what I write and I'm surprised by them. Dropped or incorrect word endings are the main category. Just moments ago, for example, I found I'd written "I finished a novel I like yesterday." Like instead of liked. I'm sure I'll find several others a few minutes from now when I go over this. If it weren't for the built-in spellcheck I use, you would have very little respect for me.
• I bought a new shoe Monday. The brand is New Balance, which certainly applies to me. My left foot has always been unusually wide. I describe its footprint as almost a square, though that's an exaggeration. The sales clerk was knowledgeable and considerate, but I'm not sure the shoe's a perfect fit or if I have to just wait for it to get fully broken in. I'm going to check at my rehab session this afternoon and if they say it's not, I'm returning it. Life, especially mine, probably, is too short to wear an uncomfortable shoe.    

Nonsense about the moon

There are those who still think a full moon causes odd behavior. Rubbish, of course. First off, the moon is always "full" whether or not it's at an angle which reflects a maximum amount of light from it to Earth. Hell, it's even full during the day! It's all there, with the same tug of gravity. 
Second, there is no weird quality to the reflected light of the moon that drives sane people mad. The only correlation the Complete and Total Loser's ever read of has been that when the moon is bright, people outdoors feel a little friskier because they can see better, so they'll go charging over lawns, skinny dip, spend more time outside and start fistfights. 
In the Loser's part of the world summer is much cooler than usual. It's mid-August, but it feels like New England around Labor Day. And though the Loser is in the polluted Northeast, the skies have been clear.

This is a picture of the moon the Loser took last night. Clearly, it is made of cheese.

Summer is Ending

The last weeks of summer are better in New England. You can smell autumn and at night you wear a sweatshirt even though the ocean's still warm enough to swim in and you're going barefoot. 

But that was decades ago, when the Complete and Total Loser was a boy who couldn't drive, could smoke and had no idea—none!what a pudendum looked like. 

Now he's an unattractively aging man living in his late parents' house which is haunted by his memories of them.

1968

The Complete and Total Loser is the one on the right. The other boy is his brother, two years his senior.

Consider this: They are on a rock on a Massachusetts beach, about 50 yards from the beach club, which prohibits eating on its premises. Their mother, who is taking the picture, is young and healthy at age 36. She can still flirt her way out of speeding tickets. Their eldest brother, a bully who loves to tease, is at a summer camp many miles away. Their father, a gentle, kind, fun man (but there are always those Oedipal/attention issues) us in their home city even farther away than the evil big brother, where he toils to support his family. They have their mom all to themselves. They are new to this vacation spot and not New Englanders, so the social scene is not yet a part of their milieu. They are happy with the simple pleasures of each others' company, the sun, the sea, the sand. The food is simple. Egg salad sandwiches, Fritos and a Coke, probably. In these circumstances, on a day like this, it's the perfect meal. Summer is a long thing. The agony of school is in a remote future. 

Consider this: This may be the best day of their lives, yet they have no knowledge of it. Amazing.

Alcohol

A drunk girl sits on a dirty train station platform.

Twelve years old. Summer. New England. Vacation. The Complete and Total Loser learns to ride a horse, which soon sizes him up and goes very much where he wants to go. The Loser doesn't mind much as where the horse wants to go is often more interesting to him as well as to the horse. A man named Frank often stops by the stable where that horse and another are housed. A telephone lineman, he shoes horses in his free time. He wears denim and a cowboy hat and is having a love affair of sorts with the girl who owns the horses. His wife was in a terrible car accident years before and is in a coma. Loyal to her, he does not let the affair come to full fruition until her death some years later.
Frank smokes unfiltered cigarettes and talks as if he was from Montana, which he may have been. The Loser is too dim to ask. Frank does not, however, drink alcohol. He sums up his reasons simply in sentences the Loser remembers nearly four decades later.
"If a man's got to drink to live with his environment, there must be something wrong with his environment. He's got to change it."
As he goes into his teens the Loser drinks nonetheless, but less often and less vigorously than his peers. He likes to think it's the wisdom of the man who spoke to him on a summer day long ago and that is part of it. Another part is what drinking does to him: It magnifies his loserdom. His jokes are unfunny and coarse, his approaches to women clumsy and lead only to humiliation.
Losers should keep their drinking to a minimum. It will not make them succeed, nor will it help them cope with failure. It will only make them fail more often.
Winners can drink but, when older, should limit their drinking to proper venues. The woman in the accompanying photograph is drunk in broad daylight and sitting on a train platform at a busy station. The platform is often marked with globs of mucous and bits of food. Pigeons walk on it freely. No sober person would sit there. Yet the girl is young enough, pretty enough and enough of a winner to make this rare discretion bearable to witnesses. She boarded the train with a man several years older than she and debarked by chance at the same station as did the Loser. They entered a nice bar, in a hurry because the girl had to urinate immediately, and presumably enjoyed their evening together.