Life as a Spectator Sport

Blogspot seems to have lost one of its DNS servers, because while I can create and edit posts, any attempt to connect to my blog itself throws out a good old error 404. Not found, in other words, So here I sit writing in the virtual dark, confident that it will eventually see the virtual light of day.

The household is in one of its periodic fits of total chaos. Shelley, who last week had persuaded her boy friend to move in with us so he could help with the farming and with Clarence's care, swept in this weekend and moved both Mike and Nick out to a rented trailer on the opposite side of the county. I now have no help with anything. I also don't have the supplementary income I had budgeted for the rest of the summer, nor the money she already owed me for May and is apparently not going to pay me. Most of what she gave me went directly for Nick's expenses, of course, but the rest was being used for household and farm purchases, and several financial decisions I made this spring were based on the continuing presence of those funds. I did know that Nick would be moving out at the beginning of the next school year, but my budget had allowed for that. Not for a precipitous loss of the summer's extra income, and certainly not for the loss of May's income.

Her primary reasons seem to be Clarence's increasing dependence on Nick when I'm gone—specifically that Clarence had asked Nick to help him take a sponge bath—and that Nick was "terrified" of the upcoming opening night of the play he was in. If Nick had been asked to help me with a sponge bath, I can see why she would have been upset, but assisting another male doesn't seem to me to justify such a violent reaction. Blaming me for the occurrance, when I not only had not sanctioned it but had no idea it had even happened, is doubly irrational.

As far as the play was concerned, Nick wasn't the only cast member who was scared silly. None of them knew their lines word-perfect, the set still wasn't finished by the evening of the dress rehearsal, and the audio system worked when it felt like it. Anyone with theater experience will recognize this typical opening-night scenario. Nick was terrified mostly because he had never encountered it before, but Shelley seemed to think I had somehow mistreated him by getting him involved in what seemed to her like a complete fiasco. Nick , in fact, was better prepared than anyone had any right to expect, considering the circumstances: he was the youngest of the cast members by several years, he had come in more than half way through the rehearsals, after the boy who was to play his part had gotten cold feet, and he had no previous experience whatsoever.

I'm not sure I have mentioned the play or his role. He was playing "Mike Talman" in the play "Wait Until Dark." The plot revolves around a cocaine-filled doll that has inadvertently fallen into the hands of an innocent photographer and his blind wife. Harry Roat, a cold-blooded killer who wants the doll, entices a couple of con men into a ruse: they will fool the wife into giving it to them, by pretending to be an old Army buddy of her husband and a policeman investigating her husband for an alleged murder. The Mike Talman character is the most complex of the cast, as his seemingly amoral personality awakens to a grudging respect for the blind woman, and finally to a decision to abandon the search and leave the couple alone. Unfortunately, as he exits the apartment, Roat stabs him in the back and he falls dead, leaving the blind woman to the mercy of a man who has already murdered to acquire the doll. Audrey Hepburn starred in a movie version of the play in the late sixties, and its final scene in her darkened kitchen was one of the most electrifying movie finales of the time.

As usually happens, opening night went off well enough, the next night's performance was terrific, and while I didn't see the matinee on Sunday, Nick said everything was fine. He was already wondering whether he might make a career of acting (and I'll bet he could, too). But Shelley doesn't see the value of Nick's interest in music, art and drama, so now he is living with Mike, a nice fellow, but not someone who can encourage Nick in anything but boxing. One of the last things Nick said to me, wistfully, was, "I guess I don't get to play the piano any more." I promised him I'd continue to teach him if Shelley would allow it, and would certainly make the piano available to him if she would find him another music teacher. But I'm guessing she won't do either. As far as I know, he wasn't taken to his weekly art lesson today, and Shelley has already said that he can attend the drama camp he was interested only if I drive him up there each morning. She did allow that Mike could bring him home in the afternoon, but since I live over 40 miles from the site of the camp, and where they are living barely is 15 miles away, that didn't seem like much of a concession.

Just to make everything completely crazy, Clarence's weakness and cognitive disability does indeed seem to have been the result of medication screw-ups. He has been managing his own meds all along, and I assumed he was still capable of doing it properly, but apparently he was taking too much of one thing and none of several others. Now that I or another responsible person has been administering his meds, he has vastly improved. He still requires assistance with almost everything, but is speaking more normally, and made the trip to Virginia Beach and back yesterday with little more exhaustion than I was feeling myself. So all this frantic arranging of personal care, at the cost of considerable sums of money and extraordinary stresses on me, was apparently unnecessary.

I'm perfectly well aware that I'm airing the family's dirty linen in public, but that's too bad. I don't have anyone's shoulder to cry on but Kate's and if she is even halfway human, she is tired of hearing about it. I have several hundred dollars of nursery stock sitting on the front porch, with no help whatsoever to get it in the ground—things I would not have bought if I'd had any idea what was about to happen. My total gardening effort this year has been to plant lettuce, peas and spinach (which the deer ate down to the soil), and to transplant the four biggest of the tomato plants. All the rest of the seedlings are still in their flats under lights on the kitchen table, getting spindly and root-bound. I did manage to dig up part of the section where the sweet potatoes will go, but the ground was too full of roots to do a proper job with a shovel, and too wet to use the tiller. Tomorrow and Thursday I must work on my inspections, so the first day I can get back to planting is Friday. With my luck, it will rain all weekend.

Bitch, whine, moan. In a few months, it will all be behind me, and I'll have some other crisis to deal with. In one way, this split with Shelley is a blessing; I'm free to make decisions on my own now without having to consider her opinion of everything. But I grieve for what Nick is losing. Her lack of interest in the arts already cost him one of the most beautiful boy-soprano voices I've ever heard. She wasn't interested in his potential, and wouldn't encourage him even to participate in school music activities, much less anything more advanced, and of course, one day the voice was gone. If his budding ability in drama, and his now strongly established interest in music composition and performance, are both stifled as well, that will truly be a tragedy.

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RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email to liz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, Democrat, Christian. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT' "If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart. THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3 KNITTING BLOGS Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits FINISHED PROJECTS -------FINISHED IN 2006------- Peruvian Cap Tutti-Frutti Socks Shelley's Socks Carol's Socks -------FINISHED IN 2007------- Chain Link Socks Baby Surprise Jacket Valerie & Friend Baby Bonnet Rainbow Baby Socks Girls Pixie Hood Mitred Square Heart Red & White Socks Coffee Cup Pot Holder Nubbins Dishcloth Garterlac Dishcloth Suede Booties Kate's Socks Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap Half Thumbless Mittens Red Mittens for Akkol -------FINISHED IN 2008------- SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE -- Blogs and websites -- Causubon's Book Club Orlov Food Storage Made Easy From the Wilderness In the Wake Listening to Katrina Survival Topics The Modern Homestead The Oil Drum Notes from a Hillside Farm -- Mailing Lists -- 12vdc Power Living on the Land Rainwater Refrigeration Alternatives Old Ways of Living POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES The political sites have moved BOOKS I'M READING How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising ARCHIVES February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002