Seizing light

I keep rereading this passage from Gretel Ehrlich's book "A Match to the Heart" about her recovery after being struck by lightning: "Light is chemical, electrical, mineral, just the way memory is, and I wondered if light had invented the ocean and my hand dragging through it, or if memory had invented light as a form of time thinking about itself."

I have collected these memories...

Yesterday afternoon. An angry parent. She was frustrated with me because we got back late from a field trip and they would be late the girl's orthodontist appointment. I couldn't get the mother's anger off of me all night. I chewed on it for hours. The planning involved in the field trip included bus schedules, gathering bus money, filling out a field trip form, and organizing the tour of the NOAA fisheries facilities with the educator on their staff. When the city bus came to take us home, it was 10 minutes late and packed. The bus driver told us we'd have to wait for the next bus, but I put half the kids on the bus with another teacher (who filled in for my ill teaching partner) including the kid who I knew had to be back for her appointment. We waited for the next bus, which was 10 minutes later, and empty. Only an old woman who told us stories all the way back to school. When I walked into the school building, the mother laid into me as the first group arrived only 3 minutes before we did. I just looked at the mom and sighed. What was I to say? I've been practicing being grateful (New Year's Resolution #2). I wish she were practicing too.

I rode my bike to work this morning. It rained last night and the streets were wet, but the sunrise was magnificent and the cold air felt refreshing on my cheeks. Over the past few months, I thought I'd lost my love of rain. This morning, the rain redeemed itself.

By this afternoon, the hints of rain were gone, the sun was warm and energizing, and the ride home was a perfect balance of lungs, muscle, and weather. I wanted to keep riding for hours.

Once home, the dog leapt up to greet me, as excited by the warm weather as I was. I hooked him up to the leash and off we trotted on a walk up past the elementary school, right at the Catholic Church, and up an extra block because his legs and mine felt strong.

On the grassy lawn right by the library, Chester stopped, looked at me and refused to move. Oh shit, a seizure. He flopped down on the grass underneath a huge cedar tree and writhed and spun his legs as if he were bicycling on a bicycle built for four legs. His mouth pressed open in a gagging yawn and he moaned, that awful gutteral sound, like the last breath of a dying man. Foam seeped from the corners of his groaning mouth and his eyes fixed on nothing and everything. Unlike most seizures where he eventually lies quietly breathing deeply, he kept trying, during this one, to get up, to stand on the lawn as if nothing had happened.

Usually, when he goes into a seizure, I give him a syringe of valium rectally. It calms him down and brings him out of the seizure quickly. He wanders the house then, checking out every corner for food or smells eventually ending up in the backyard where he scents out every inch of the perimeter. Tonight I had no valium and I was a mile from home. Ann was at the doctor's office (she's ill with the flu) and the only way to get home was to walk. So we walked, Chester glued to my side, scraping his furry black paws against the pavement, too tired to completely pick them up.

I'm not sure how many seizures Chester has had over the past 8 months, perhaps 20 or 25, but the vet assures us that he remembers nothing of them. I remember everything. Ann does, too. This is the first seizure he's had away from the house. They've always been either early in the morning or late at night (though he had one in the middle of the day, but it was the 3rd in a series of 5 and we were both home).

Oddly, I wasn't really afraid. I never thought that he would die on that lawn or that we wouldn't make it home. Rather, I worried that he would be so disoriented and so "away" from home that he'd turn on me or bolt for some path or some smell that lead him somewhere familiar. I spoke quietly and calmly to him all the way home. We were 15 minutes from the house, but I went slowly and it took us a half hour to make the journey.

Now he's panting at my side, wondering when I'm coming to bed, almost unaware of the trauma of the day. Yes, he is worried, but that's been part of his nightly routine for the past few months -- whining until the lights go out and everyone has gone to sleep.

There is no connection to these memories, no thread I can pull from the angry parent through to the bicycle sunshine, no way to wrap it around Chester's sweet face. They are just events in the day of one person among billions. Yet oddly, I think they will live in my memory as somehow connected, linked by anger, invigoration, and sadness -- bands of light - chemical, electrical, mineral - inventing a way for time, my time, to think about itself.



And as I type the last word, I hear Chester in the hallway, writhing in yet another seizure. It's going to be a long night.