comes and goes

October 9, three months ago right now, Malinda checked in to Admissions at Sacred Heart Hospital, Pensacola, for her third brain surgery, this one to coil and stent a second aneurysm before it could rupture and bring on a second and likely fatal cerebral hemorrhage. 

Several hours later we were called to visit her in the Recovery ward, where the neurosurgeon told us the procedure had been quite difficult, but went well. And so it did, though an apparently unrelated mild stroke that evening has left her with impaired short-term memory that we trust may resolve in time even if to date we have seen no change.

Sunday before leaving Panama City on Monday, we had cleared completely our bayside porch as well as, an afterthought, the cubby outside our front door at 7H, thinking it unnecessary but a precaution against the winds of the tropical storm way down south. I might say the rest is history but am not inclined to grace Wednesday, October 10, 2018 with any positive-sounding term. When I woke up in our motel room that Wednesday morning and turned on my computer to check the storm while I dressed to return to Malinda's hospital room a few blocks away, I was stunned to see, not far offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, a major hurricane with 155 mph winds, its eye and direction pointing into the east side of Bay County with a west eyewall that could not possibly avoid crossing East Bay into town. The words of my exclamation are not often printed in my blogpost, suffice that it ended with "...ddamn category 5 hurricane!" And that's what happened.

WTH, this is my blog, as personal as I need it to be: the anguish begins again every time, as last evening on our way from SoWalton to a monthly event at HNEC, we turn right in StAndrews from 10th Street onto Chestnut Avenue past Oaks by the Bay Park, heightens turning left onto 9th Street, jaw clenched tight. Resumes worse, worst, cursing the sky as we cross Tarpon Dock Bridge, left onto 2nd Court, left again and cling to the Bayou, riding around Massalina Drive, the odd-numbered side where I lived all my growing up years. In time the churning fury of outrage may temper and fade, even die; but I wish not to spend the rest of my life feeling like this, yet see no way. 

2018 was/is lifechanging as still months on the confusing mix of almost blasphemously focused anger and grief is nearly unbearable at times. The calm and stress and calm and stress and calm comes and goes. My family has lived here since 1908 or 1909, a century and a decade; but maybe I need to lighten up a bit by living where I'm not a heart-invested born and bred native? 

Song keeps returning to mind, "I guess you had to be there"* - - born in a little hospital downtown between Harrison Avenue and Massalina Bayou, remembering every time on Cove Boulevard you drive by the building that was Dr. Carmel Roberts' clinic where you had your tonsils out when you were two, standing up behind your mother in the back seat of the car when you were a little older, riding on the merry-go-round at the circle at the south end of Harrison Avenue, starting first grade at Cove School just before Pearl Harbor, that red & white rat cap your first week at Bay Hi when you were fourteen and wishing you were back at Cove School!, walking home down Harrison Avenue after school, full range of teenage emotions those high school years that ended when you were seventeen; leaving at eighteen but returning every college holiday and, like an inbound yo-yo, every leave those Navy years, coming home to stay when you were sixty three meaning never to leave again. Still don't understand? I guess you had to be there. 
  

Dawn in SoWalton looking east toward Bay County: a beautiful, sunny winter morning, yesterday about 70°F, cooler today, may even be chilly. The lower planet is Jupiter. Looking higher, that's Venus.

T

* Lorrie Morgan, about 1992