Photo by the author of the Jacobite (Harry Potter) train
We had just stepped off the Jacobite Steam Train after crossing the Glenfinnan Viaduct, made famous by Harry Potter.
Photo by the author
It’s hard to see in the photo, but there are hundreds of people on the bank to the right of the bridge and underneath the first arch that greet each of the four daily crossings.
Instead of Platform 9 3/4 at London’s King’s Cross Station, we boarded the Jacobite on Platform 2 at Fort Williams, and rather than broomsticks, we flew over the Skye Bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to mainland Scotland in a taxi driven by taciturn Sean, a pleasant man, who drove very fast.
When asked by our van mate John if we could stop for lunch on the four-hour trip to Viewfield House, Sean’s eyes darkened, and his head moved ever so slowly side to side.
Rebecca and I are settled in a dry accommodation in Scotland’s western highlands. I know it’s Sunday because tomorrow we’re off to Skye.
My phone’s weather App gives our location as the villages of Caol and Mallaig, but we’re not duped. It’s so easy to be fooled by Mother Nature Apps. We know the closest hamlet is Spean Bridge because we detrained there yesterday and will return tomorrow.
Today, we’re going to hike in the wooded area you see below.
Photo by the author
I’m smiling in my rain gear because around here precipitation is an hourly fact of life. At first, we resisted, constantly checking our phones to find dry interludes.
Now, we’re back from a three-hour hike in the Glen along the River Spean. Mostly a smirr, with several skliff showers. Very fortunately, no plouter or stoating on a dreich day.
It can’t be The Odyssey because Rebecca and I are almost twice Odysseus’ forty years, even older than his impersonator, the stolid Matt Damon, at fifty-five.
Still, only a Bronze Age spear’s throw from our first destination, Oban, lies Corryvreckan, the third-largest whirlpool in the world, sans Charybdis and Scylla, Odyssey-like.
We decided on train travel for our two-week sojourn through Scotland. Not the one you see behind Rebecca in Glasgow’s Central Station, but another that arrived two minutes later, exactly on time.
Instead of a sleeper car, we’ll bed down each night in a stately B & B, like the Heatherington House.
Photo by the author
So, for our first time in this beautiful country, we opted to follow the rails through traditional Scotland, the villages of the West Highlands, and modern Scotland, the cities of Glasgow, Inverness, and Edinburgh.
Three days ago, Rebecca and I walked into an old building that now houses an antique business. Its wood floors had just been polished. It was a second or two before the familiar lemon smell reached my nose.
A day later, sitting on our front porch, talking over our September trip to Scotland, we heard the first whistle of the fall football season.
Yesterday, a neighbor, who teaches high school history, lumbered by with Rome, Greece, the 13 colonies, or maybe all three in his backpack.
I taught for half a century and learned to love seeing students’ backs and fronts. That’s something underappreciated about a teaching career. The routine prepares you for depletion and renewal.
Repeating the lessons of fall and spring, nodding off and early rising, and season four of Ted Lasso.
Something every good teacher and Bob Dylan know: if you’re not busy being born, you’re dying.
It’s been three years since I was last scammed. An ice cream man, believe it or not, crouching in wait under the Washington Monument, just a hop, skip, and jump from the algae-infected reflecting pool in front of Honest Abe.
Imagine a con in Washington, D.C., even before the biggest con man of all returned. You can read the hoary story here.
I’m soon to be 77, with the history of a mother who was determined to live out the winter of her life on her terms which meant, in her house, in control of paying bills, etc. Our father, also Paul, died of sinus cancer in 1993.
Mom was like a fort, impregnable, with a moat in front and the draw bridge up whenever any of us even tip toed close to taking any of these responsibilities away. She saw Trojan Horses everywhere.
One thing my two brothers and I worried about was mom’s vulnerabilty to phone fraudsters. So, sometime in her eighties — she would live to 95, all but the final two years, in her home — Pat, who lived five miles from her, and with mom’s reluctant permission, added his name to her bank account.
Which he would monitor on her computer every Saturday morning before they went for breakfast at Panera Bread.
Did you know you can order a DIY castle online? According to the website, the first piece is the defensive perimeter. Amazon will deliver it on Tuesday.
Kidding aside, yesterday morning, a Saturday, I did order a PDF of what I thought was going to be information about my house that would include the deed that I needed and somehow I had misplaced.
The domain, Public Records Data, in it’s header come-on, promised a plethora of information about my property. Scrolling down, without reading too closely, I discovered the cost would be $7 for the report.
I filled in the required information, including my credit card numbers.About five minutes later, I received a text with a link to the report. Once downloaded, I began to read.
Lots of data but the names and dates did not quite fit. For example, it had me purchasing the house in 2003 when I had bought it in 2000. And there was no deed.
My tightened stomach told me I had screwed up. So did Rebecca, when I told her what I had done as I handed her a first cup of coffee.
“You did what,” she said. “You’ve got to contact your bank, and the credit card company.”
“The website looked legit,” I replied, even as a feeling of dread swept over me.
Not a complete idiot, I first went to my online bank account. There was the $7 charge from Public Records Data, out of Las Vegas. Damn. I reloaded the bank site, and a $26 charge appeared from the same company. Double damn.
Next I called the number on the back of my debit card. Fidgeting and berating myself while on hold for about 10 minutes, I explained the situation to the Visa fraud specialist. She pulled up my account, including the two recent payments, and gave me the Public Records Data phone number. She said it looked like a legitimate business.
As I worked the problem, I began to calm down. Rebecca sat on the back porch every so often asking for an update. I called Public Records Data and, with very little waiting time, got a second real person. She asked for my email address and looked up my account.
I told her I understood the $7 charge but not the $26. She replied the additional charge was for a monthly subscription to their service automatically added whenever anyone purchases a report which was, she said, in the fine print.
I cancelled everything and asked that my information be deleted from their site. She said it would be done immediately. Two minutes later, three emails from Public Records Data described the expungement of “Paul” from the site. They even refunded my $7.
I carried my computer out to the back porch to join Rebecca, still feeling unsettled. Public Records Data was not like the DC ice cream scammer. When I looked again at its web site, in smallish print, but not hidden, it describes the service it provides, pulling public information, from third party sites, and makes no promises about the accuracy of its information.
For someone not paying close attention, like the fellow in the image, intended to mimic me, it’s easy to purchase something that really is bogus. In that sense, the company is playing on the vulnerabilities of people who are looking for easy access to the information they need.
But are older people, like my mother, like me, uniquely susceptible to this phenomenon? As Rebecca says, I’ve always acted rashly, often jumping into things before I’ve thought them through. Exactly what I did this morning.
Perhaps there’s no reason to fit a tendency I’ve had at every age into an aging narrative. On the other hand, I believe Joe Biden at some point in his first term, before the disastrous debate with Donald Trump, did age out of being an effective President. Perhaps, the same will be true for me, regarding the routine tasks of everyday life.
In other words, that some kind of cognitive and emotional intelligence decline will impair my judgment requiring unwanted interventions.
When that happens — if that happens — I don’t want to just pull up the drawbridge. I want to do like my friend, Will, who at 90 turned over to his son the keys of his car as his periphery eyesight declined.
It’s always good to start a story with a bit of leg exposure. In the first photo, the before.
Photo by a nurse at Decorah’s wound center
Now, two months later, the after. As one of my nurses said, ‘beautiful,’ and ‘now it’s completely closed, so no longer a wound.’
The rest of the story. And one more leg picture.
Healing
Five years ago, while dismounting a bike in Perry, Iowa, my right lower calf muscle scraped a pedal that left a deepish gash. I dressed it with a band-aidand rode on.
Out of sight and mostly out of mind for the next half-decade, except it never did really heal. Occasionally, I’d rebandage it and forget about it. Until last spring, when it reopened, Rebecca said, “You’d better go to the wound clinic.”
A test came back positive for Basal cell carcinoma, the better kind of cancer, in that it doesn’t spread beyond the tissue of origin. At least, that’s the theory. And our hope. The surgeon explained the Mohs procedure that, in my case, was done in the hospital under general anesthesia and took about two hours.
She cut away four times, thin layers of skin, and sent them to a pathologist to test for the offending cells. In the first photo, you see her precise work two days after the repair.
To replace the damaged cells, she placed skin grafting material over a hole about two by three centimeters. This wound would take exactly two months to heal, from the bottom up, with initially quite a bit of bleeding and draining.
So for the first week, my care nurses attached a ‘wound vac’ to drain the blood. I carried it in my backpack wherever I went.
Photo by the author
Thankfully, the next week and for the duration of the healing, they replaced this behemoth with a small Pico canister that fit in my pants pocket.
Photo by the author
The compression sleeve protects the incision and helps promote blood flow to the new skin.
Because I couldn’t get my leg wet, I wore a plastic covering when I showered or it rained. Amazingly, it sealed well enough.
In case you’re wondering, I did have to take my canister friend to bed, so I used my workout shorts with a pocket.
Photo by the author
Humor
This morning, no machine, no drainage chord, no plastic sleeve while showering, and no compression sock. Just a 3 by 3 inch band-aid that I’ll wear for another month or so.
Sadly, no more Wednesday morning visits to the WinnMed Wound Center and the nurses that cared for me. I miss them. Because of staff rotations and vacations, I met 10 different professionals over two months of weekly dressing changes. All were women. It’s not often that a 76-year-old man starts his day cared for by people whose only concern is my well-being.
They became my friends. I learned about their children, partners, and vacation schedules. They asked me how everything went when I took my apparatus to Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City to join 70,000 others for a World Cup soccer game or how I swing a golf club without catching it in the drainage chord.
And, on the last visit, I think it was Jenny who said, “I’ll bet you check your right side pants pocket several times a day to see if Mr. Pico is hiding somewhere inside.”
“More than several,” I replied.
Hope
What have I learned? Most obviously, pay attention to cuts that don’t heal. On the few times over the years I thought about that persistent sore on the back of my leg, I’d think it can’t be anything too serious since it started as a laceration.
Yesterday, encouraged by Rebecca and many others, I made an appointment with a dermatologist to have a full-body scan to check out the various blotches and bumps that naturally appear on a septuagenarian’s skin.
Forewarned is forearmed.
But there’s something else about this summer journey that I’ll carry along, not in a backpack or pocket, but in my psyche. My aging body can still heal and fight off, with a lot of help from friends, including the intelligent and aware parts of me, and not the dumb and clueless ones, the various less than malevolent invaders that lie in waiting.
Not forever, and not as well as they could ten years ago, and not the big daddies that lurk and overwhelm regardless of defenses, on that matter, and thus far, I’ve just been lucky.
So, Paul, don’t pat yourself on the back too much. When something big hits, as it slammed into your brothers Pat and Peter this year, and just last week, your friend Rick, who was like a brother, you’ll face the end with their grace and good humor in mind!
I hope you don’t mind if I rest for a moment. I’ll leave something that will help your grass grow. I’ve heard you are one of the good ones who set a proper example for your children.
I try to do the same with mine. They’re across the street, enjoying Ed and Carol’s garden and that phenomenal stone arch. I tell them not to take more than they give. Some are only takers; a few, the enlightened ones, give and give and give. I believe in moderation, the best most of us can do.
What do you think?
By the way, we live in Palisade Park. We’ve noticed that you walk through it every day and are very respectful of our turf. Not everyone is.
Rebecca and I rotate, every month, a home-cooked dinner with Maggie and Mike. They moved to Decorah ten years ago. We met at a retirement party Maggie’s daughter, Carly, organized for me. She hoped the four of us would hit it off. And we did.
Last night, it was their turn. Mike began with a precisely prepared cocktail. A Black Manhattan that was dark, strong, and with a licorice taste. He takes his role very seriously, and it’s fun to watch the careful preparation from this retired engineer.
Maggie, formerly an activities director at a nursing home, served a summer-themed meal on their back patio of chicken salad, corn on the cob, and the honey wheat bread you see in the photo. Mike scooped ice cream for dessert.
Three hours later, she tucked a loaf wrapped in moist white paper into my hands.
After my dad died in 1993 of sinus cancer, my mother decided to become a little more active in her Catholic Church, St. Paul’s, to take her mind off her sadness. The priest asked if she would take responsibility for the breakfast after the 6 a.m. Mass. This would require her to get to the church hall to set everything up around 5:30.
That was no problem as she was always an early riser. She didn’t catch a worm but did make many new friends in the decade she performed this service.
She passed this morning chronotype gene to her oldest son, who has been getting up around 4 am for half a century.
This morning my eyes popped open at 3:45 and saw those numbers on the ceiling from the new projection alarm clock. I haven’t needed a wake-up device since Richard Nixon. Oh, for those halcyon days of only one corruption story a month.
After putting on the backyard lights, I walked the garbage out and said good morning to Mr Owl. I’m writing these words at 4:30 after my first cup of coffee.
My night chronotype friends refer to my perverse rising time as insomnia disguised. Otherwise, they think, why would I do it?
They get up around 9.
They can’t help themselves, either. My wee-hour habit fits my natural endowment. It’s no more a part of character development than my obsessive neatness. Or your tendency to pile the mail on the kitchen counter, read after midnight, or say good night to Mr Owl.
That’s what I feel, three days after my friend Rick Brown died. He was 83 and went fast, with bone and lung cancer. So quickly that his final email to me, two weeks ago, said, “No good health news, early next week will work, your house.” Soon after, his wife Melissa told me he began home hospice care.
Rick, a Marine, saw combat in Vietnam and, eventually, became a substance abuse counselor. He was a practicing Catholic and Buddhist.
We knew each other well for about a decade, each taking turns hosting two-hour discussion sessions that wore me out.
Deep, deeper, deepest.
Politics, religion, soccer, and Truth, with a capital T, and by that he meant the continual search for how to Love better. Until we get that right, he taught, as individuals and as a people, we are lost.
