15 November 2024

The leaves are down here in Madbury NH and we’ve had our first November night of temperatures consistently in the 20’s; though my snowplow guy Dave staked the driveway weeks ago, this is the first morning it seemed plausible I’d awaken to snow.  We’re on the threshold—in so many ways.

Last Monday morning I passed my annual Medicare Wellness check at my primary care physician’s office (“Remember these words:  banana, chair, sunrise.  Draw numbers on the blank face of this clock and show me 11:10”), and then, minimally encouraged, I drove to the friend of a friend’s home on the Lamprey River for a cold plunge.  I’d re-connected with my friend Lisa in Boston the previous Saturday at the SpeakEasy Stage’s production of Steven Drukman’s fine new play, Pru Payne, about a celebrated if acerbic critic finding cross-caste love in a memory care unit; again, note the relevance to my own possible trajectory.  Lisa had invited me to join her doughty women’s group for a plunge, and having discovered the physical and mental revitalization of cold dipping in the Atlantic over the summer, I decided such a post-election shock to the system was just the thing.

And it was:  stinging cold, and quasi-hilarious as the salty epithets of our august quintet of women echoed up the steep river bank for the next 5 minutes.  But!  Getting out of the river meant negotiating the sharp, leaf-and-muck-dense river’s edge, slipping backwards on the cold slime and initiating second thoughts about the wisdom of this exercise.  My catalog of catastrophes, other senior gaffs, came to mind:  leaving the handheld sprayer on after watering the dracaena behind the bathtub upstairs, resulting in a steady stream of water pouring from the downstairs ceiling fan onto the Steinway in the library below (9 August 2021); carrying the laundry basket down the stairs not holding on and missing a step, resulting in a broken right fibula (24 October 2022); believing my wallet stolen from my purse at a Bratton Room recital on the eve of my travel to Miami, only to find it on my return from Florida in the other purse I had already moved it to before the concert (26 February 2023).  Was freezing in the Lamprey to be my self-initiated cockup for 2024?

No, as it happens.  A hand from a friend and the will to avoid complete humiliation propelled me safely up the many leaf-covered steps sans railing.  Despite joints chilled into near non-compliance, I managed to get myself up out of the Lamprey gorge and into our host’s hot tub.  Sublime.  Finally, dripping in my bathing suit with only a towel wrapped around my lower half, I made it to my car to take my leave, opened the trunk, pulled on a sweatshirt, flung my purse inside, and slammed the trunk closed, only then realizing that the purse—with my key and wallet with AAA card were inside the now-locked car.  Humiliation complete.  Wet, cold humiliation.

Fortunately, I was among capable, sympathetic women  of comparable age who shared stories of their own mishaps and bid me forget about mine.  Our host Debbie lent me her phone to call AAA, served me hot tea, and lent me some dry clothes.  Bob from AAA arrived within 20 minutes, and, using a couple pieces of cardboard cut from a detergent box, wedged an inflatable bladder between the door and the rubber weather stripping, inserted and pumped up said bladder creating just enough space to insert a slim jim to hook the door handle, and popped that door open.  On seeing the PhD after my name on the AAA card I was finally able to retrieve from inside and show him, Bob asked what I taught.  When I told him mostly Shakespeare, he nodded knowingly, and as he headed back to his truck, turned to face me and said “Adieu,  adieu, adieu!   Remember me.”

So, a happy ending.  And tidings of what came next, for that same afternoon, I got an email from the head of author acquisition at Barnes & Noble, offering to place copies of my Will to Live book in all 51 of the B&N stores nationwide.  Apparently B&N scouts books published on several platforms, including Amazon/KDP, looking for what they think marketable.  Having judged WTL a good prospect, they want to include it in their upcoming December – May promotional campaign.

Turns out, the at last corrected proof copy of WTL I had unexpectedly received the previous Wednesday was printed by B&N from the master file now in their possession.  I am to pay for the printing, and they in turn print, distribute, and promote.  I get the royalties.  I spoke at length to the acquisition head on Tuesday, slept on it, and signed the contract on Wednesday.  Another plunge.  Slippery bank of muck?  Or money in the bank?  Time will tell.

Meanwhile, each day’s news is a nauseating told-you-so assault.  At the end of Wednesday’s excellent and so necessary yoga class with Ruth, I asked the young mom beside me how the post-election event she attended the previous just-post-election Wednesday went.  She told me that one man in that gathering, a Brit, said he had grown up in the UK never understanding how fascists could have taken control of Europe in the 1930’s.  Lesson learned:  “Now he knew.”

So, as Barnes & Noble prepares to launch my book, I’m trying to tend the garden I can.  My dear friend Diane’s Aristophanes translations have just come out on Hackett, and it’s certainly time to produce Lysistrata, as UNH’s Theatre and Dance program will this spring, I hope using Diane’s theatrically savvy new translation.

That South Korea’s 4B movement of the 2010’s (women say no, “bi” in Korean, to men:  no dating, no marriage, no sex, no childbearing) can take hold here, I doubt:  the manisphere seems to hold sway, at least for now, Trump winning the majority of women’s votes.  Is’t possible?  Apparently, yes.

So, on Thursday I returned to the excellent ministrations of masseuse Anne Marple, whose healing hands do consistently provide a respite, literally lowering my blood pressure by 20 points.

Anne’s lovely studio is in the lower Rollinsford Mill by the Salmon Falls River that separates New Hampshire from Maine, the other river of my week crowded with incident.

But it’s those enormous mill buildings I keep thinking of, once thriving, often “dark and satanic,” finally abandoned as technology moved on, and then re-purposed as condos and studios:  time and the river flow by those imposing structures,  change the only constant.

So we beat on, boats against the river flowing.  Our country has taken a very cold plunge into a future that does not bode well.  Slippery, murky, mucky slope? Again, time will tell. We pull up our socks and hope that, in the concluding words of Drukman’s captivating character Pru Payne, what we do to carry on will be “good enough.”