Y’Never Know
Sat., January 4, 12:28 PM
I’ve been slipping into a blue funk. (To all you misspellers, that’s fuNk.) I already felt constricted by the darkness. Three days a week I go to the office and come home immediately after work. I can get to the bank or drugstore before I go to work, but I look forward to Wednesdays and Fridays to run longer errands, get some walking, and so forth. With the holidays on Wednesday – twice, I lost two of those days. Last Friday I had things planned but Husband wanted to be taken out. So I did the more pressing things in the morning and came home for lunch, only to have him decide that he didn’t want to go after all. (I took him to the store for his goodies on Saturday, but I did not get any kind of exercise.)
So already I’m feeling less than my best – my sugar is climbing, but my brain wants to eat. Not a good thing. And yesterday it snowed. I could deal with snow that came in the night and stopped by morning, but this storm began in the morning and worsened throughout the day. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m upset. I’m too depressed to do much in the house at this point. I hate when it’s so cold in the cellar that I need a coat to do laundry. My biggest exercise of the morning was to go downstairs to get my newspaper and to walk over and pick up my neighbor’s paper too.
Let me tell you about this neighbor. I’ve lived next door to the woman for more than thirty years, and I doubt that we’ve had more than a dozen conversations. She is painfully, painfully shy. Her mother and her brother have passed away, so now she lives alone – retired, comfortable if not rich, still a very private person, and becoming feeble. She has given up driving and takes a cab for shopping. And she’s still so shy that, if she’s outdoors when I come out, she goes back in.
One day as I drove up, I saw the mailman helping her back to her door. I couldn’t ask, of course, but I assumed she must have fallen. Every day since then, I put her newspaper on the step where she can reach it from her door. I don’t know whether she knows who does it; if she wants me to stop, she can’t tell me because that would entail calling me to tell me so.
Anyhow, that was the extent of my “exercise” on Friday morning, and I was really settling into the blues funk. I read a little, but mostly I was sitting at the computer playing game after game – because at least that keeps me out of the kitchen. I was aware of conversation outside, but paid no attention, figuring it was neighborhood kids. It continued – didn’t sound like kids – and I looked outside to see Miss Neighbor on the ground, trying to pull herself up by the fence, a shovel and a trash can nearby. (She was talking to herself.)
I put on shoes and a coat and went out to talk to her. I couldn’t pick her up, and she was terribly embarrassed – kept calling herself a stupid woman. I told her I was going to call 9-1-1, and she said “please don’t let them use the sirens.”
So I went inside to phone and brought a blanket outside to wait with her. I know she was cold, but she kept knocking the blanket off. She asked me to get the snow off her feet, but there was no snow on her feet. She must have been out there for some time. When the paramedics came, they lifted her up but she couldn’t stand on her feet. She was caught between “please help me stand” and “please don’t touch me.”
They wanted her to go to the hospital, but she said no, so they carried her into the house. She must have convinced them because I didn’t see any tracks for an ambulance. They were concerned that she seemed confused, but I thought she was just cold.
Y’know, I have so much to be grateful for. I have people to do what I can’t do, and I’d never be outside when it was dangerous. If I can’t go out, I have radio, television, and a computer to keep me in touch with the world. In addition, U.D. lives here and M.D. and Son check on Husband and Me regularly.
There’s nothing like a little excitement to pull you out of a blue funk.
