4-26-13

 It still weirds me out that it is 20 13.  It always was and still kind of is a SciFi date to me.  The last 15 years have also been "bonus time".  I was surprised to wake up, after some length of time, in a hospital, and to be alive and more or less whole.  I had to relearn a lot of things – that I was really who they said I was – and felt like everything was New again – familiar, yeah, sort of, but New to me, the new me, all over again.

I had a kind of compressed New Life; I was born in a hospital and went "home" to the Adult Foster Home.  The Home I grew up in.  Treatment went on and the Lift service from Trimet, the local transit authority, picked me up and took me to, and picked me up from medical appointments, most of the months that I was there, and it was with a real sense of accomplishment that I could use the "regular peoples" buses and trains to get around.  Be Independent. Keep track of things, times and places and appointments. I did a lot of walking, to make my left leg work right again.  I lost a good chunk of my left thigh in the wreck, and that ankle got damaged by the metal folding around it.

Everything was New again.  It looked kind of familiar but kind of not. By ’98. I had lived here almost ten years, and I thought I knew the area pretty well, but I really felt like Everything Old is New Again.  Sorta familiar but not really.  It was neat to go to familiar places and see them as new.

I "grew up" enough to live on my own again – there were lessons in Homemaking too, before I moved out, and I moved into this place and I have been here ever since.  I grew up, moved out, went to school, and am living that new life.  On that Timeline, I’m about 15 – almost 15, cuz I was in a coma for awhile.  The wreck was in April and I woke up in June.  New.

I went back to college to work on the degree that I had been working on since, umm, 1980, and I took Summer School classes, one per "term" of Summer School.  They were "condensed", every day, four days a week, 3 – 4 hours each, so, kind of intense for my still soft mind.  The first class I took, as a way of easing back to the "routine" of going places and being there on time, day after day, was one to fill up the Science portion of my Gen. Ed. degree, by taking a Geology Of Portland van tour of the metro area for a couple of weeks and reading some stuff, writing a bit and going places.

That would have been laughably easy, before, but after the wreck and going back to school, which then had been a large part of my life prior to the car wreck, and which had been, too easy – which cut into the value of a College Degree, to me.  I mean if those people were getting degrees too, well, they were sort of idiots, I thought, still in flippin’ High school.  This is BS.

After the wreck, it was Hard.  Harder, anyway.  Focus and attention and Social Skills were Needed, now, and the "easy" tour of Portland and the area was a way for me to ease back into Learning, by learning about the place I’ve lived in most of my Adult Life.  Learning about "the Familiar", you know.

One class I Failed and didn’t drop out soon enough was a History Of Oregon class – soo embarrassing to Fail a class, That class, an "easy" class…  It was beyond my abilities, at the time.

It was kind of a self-planned Brain Rehab, after the insurance ran out and treatment ended.  "Self-Planned", but mainly on the suggestions of the person I thought most of then, my former wife.  It was due, in fact, to her urging, that I even tried to Try to go back to School and get the degree I had been seriously working on, since 1987, when we came here from Japan.

Working on it a little at a time, after the wreck, stretched it out a bit more, but I did Graduate with a degree in Social Sciences, and with a pretty good GPA, after Failing a couple of classes. After the wreck, I did badly in two classes, one of which I dropped in time and one that I didn’t, which cut down on the high GPA I had had before the wreck.

Back when school was too easy, and I wished I was like "everybody else".  Kinda "High Schooly", like everyone else and less serious than I am.  Or was..  After the wreck, oh yeah, I was more like "everybody else", yeah, and less so too.  Thank god for the high grades I had gotten when school was "too easy".

Kind like coasting on my prior abilities, but not being able to restore them in this new life.  Just coasting on prior momentum.  Worked out pretty well for the degree, but it’s  Not working out too well for Daily Life.

I haven’t had any much momentum to coast on, after I got The Degree in 2000.

***

Well.  A lot has happened to give me thought the last couple of days, but I’m happy to report that my biker friend gets better every time I see him, and that things are working out between him and his son – new aspects of relationships, and I’m mostly the friend with a car to do grocery runs and medical appointment runs.  I washed my black Caliber extra well, lovingly, today at my friend’s house, and gave "the kids", my shirt–tail nephew and the woman who’s staying with him and helping, a ride home the from the Safeway super store a few miles away.  They had walked, on the best day so far this SciFi year.

 It was NICE.

Last night, I saw the best moonrise Ever.  It was spectacular – a BIG full moon, rising up and out of the Cascade Range to the east, through sharp, jagged shadows that the moon, moving visibly, cleared fast. it was so Big, and rose into the sky, catching bands of clouds in a mostly clear night, and was just BEAUTIFUL.  I felt like applauding.  It was an outstanding sight to see.

The best, biggest moonrise I have ever seen, and  seen from my balcony.  First time I saw the balcony, I turned and said "I’ll take it." Really a good choice.

Best thing to come out of wrecking my car – this place I’ve called home longer than anywhere else in my life.

***

Stuff happened this week.  I gotta think about it.

 

***** 

 

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