All-Important Mission: Getting to the Coffee Shop

It's surprising what matters, later on. Routines, for example.

This morning, a man I've long known from the coffee shop came in on crutches: He's recently had a hip-replacement, but he got back to the shop as soon as he could. Crutches and all.

I've had similar experiences. When I had surgery for prostate cancer back on June 9, 2005, up at the Cleveland Clinic, I was, for a bit, a Hurting Cowboy. I just took a look at my journal, and here's a bit of what I wrote on June 13, four days after that surgery:

… up to see if I could make it to Saywells’s [the late great drugstore/coffee shop]; I did, walking the entire way; greetings from all who were there … walked home …

Getting there. Getting home. Enormous importance.

And there have been other times--including some recent ones--when I've been medically unable to get to the coffee shop, to go to the health club to exercise (the former I love; the latter I dread). But I've found that when I cannot do the things I customarily do (even the things I dread), it is nearly unbearable. I feel as if I've fallen from my horse on the merry-go-round, and I'm not sure I have the strength and the coordination to remount while the ride spins merrily on without me--seeming even to have accelerated since my fall.

And how--at these times--can I not think of my poor mother, 98, who can now do none of the things she once loved--from the sedentary (read, write, watch the TV news and PBS programs), swim (she used to go, first thing every morning), hike (when she lived in Oregon, into her 70s, she hiked the coastal trails with her friends), drive, shop, visit friends, and on and on and on and on and on. The list of things she loved to do is long; the list of things she can now do does not even exist.

And now, as I near 73, here's what I know--what I have always known, sure, but not really: As the days, weeks, months, years proceed, the things I've loved to do will drift away from me--autumn leaves that fall permanently, not to return in the phantom spring.

Already, there are some. I can't run (I used to jog every day--4-6 miles), can't really play catch with my grandsons (unreliable vision), play tennis (duh), stay up late at night (I'm pretty much done by 8:30: lights out!), climb a ladder or footstool (balance issues--issues that affect some earlier things in this list). There are others--you get the point.

I am, of course, grateful for the things I still can do. Walk and talk with Joyce (nothing matters more), bake, write, read, laugh, think, post nonsense on Facebook and my blogs (this post, of course, is not nonsense!), play a bit with our grandsons, drive (a bit), use the TV remotes (hey, that's complicated!).

But I've learned as well about the evanescence of all. And I've learned the importance--the immense importance--of getting to the coffee shop, every day.