Garden Produce, Masks & Wolves

Most effective cure for angst is exercise, so yesterday I exercised like a mad fiend.

Went running for the first time in a million years. (Knee was a bit stiff, but it didn’t fall off or anything.)

Then I gardened. Behold the haul! Well, actually half the haul. The haul after I went door-to-door to all my neighbors’ houses, asking in my best Oliver Twist voice, Please sir, will you take some more? because I’ve baked all the tomato pies I’m gonna bake for 2018, and produce has a half-life that’s shorter than the next Food Pantry drop-off.

By one o’clock in the afternoon, I was a Real Human Girl again.

###

Fucked around desultorily with the WiP before deciding to obliterate 1,000 words or so of torturous electric shock therapy description. (Lauren Beukes deals very effectively with a protagonist who gets shot in the head by writing something like, But before he could, a rainbow opened up in the back of his skull.)

Reminder to Self: No reader wants to struggle through long descriptive passages in which Plucky Heroine is essentially tortured.

Not unless the novel is being marketed for a very different audience than originally planned.

Around four, the phone rang. Eleanor H.

“What do you want me to do with your masks?” asked Eleanor H.

“What?”

“I’m moving,” said Eleanor H.

“What?”

“Didn’t I tell you that? I could have sworn I told you that. I’m moving to Fort Bragg. On Thursday.”

###

A year and a half ago, on one of my California trips, Eleanor said, “I have a favor to ask you—“

She wanted me to track her for signs of dementia.

Both her parents came down with Alzheimer’s at roughly the same age she was then.

“Eleanor, that’s kind of impossible to do over the phone,” I told her.

There was simply no one else she trusted, she said.

Eleanor is pretty nutty anyway, and has been throughout the 40 years of our friendship. Brilliant, creative, capable of the highest levels of intuitive understanding, but with very loose associations: Her concentration span topped out at 30 seconds 20 years ago when she began teaching and has become progressively shorter ever since. lookfar might say her executive functions are impaired. Seriously impaired.

So, I didn’t have a clue how I might be able to tell Demented Eleanor from the Eleanor I’d Known and (Mostly) Loved for All Those Years.

But, you know. I was willing to give it a try.

And I was pretty good about monthly check-ins till last June when for various reasons, I kept putting the phone call off.

You know me and phones!

But anyway, no, I did not know she was thinking about moving. Fort Bragg is right outside Mendocino. Very pretty country! Momentarily prosperous as the center of an illicit dope trade, alas! now vanished. Lively still when the tourists are there during the summer.

She’s moving into a house in a kind of compound with people she knows. Good, good. She needs that human anchor to keep from floating away.

And it was not a Big Deal to call Eleanor B—Partner in Crime from my GSPP days who lives exactly one mile away from the house Eleanor H is vacating—to come rescue the masks.

Three plastic bins of them. Maybe 30 masks in all. I bought the first one several billion years ago at the first and only show I did on a Milano runway, and I added to the collection over the years.

Negligible financial worth, I’m sure, but immense sentimental value.

I’ll arrange to ship them to New York when I go out to California in November.

###

I am worried about Eleanor H.

She sounded quite mad when we spoke. Of course, she was in the process of packing up an apartment that had more-or-less been functioning as a museum to her Dead Husband for the past decade. Bill’s clothes were still in the closets! There was a postcard in Bill’s actual handwriting attached to her fridge with a cat magnet!

Besides Bill’s stuff, there is all that hideous mahogany furniture that she rescued from (I kid you not) her mother’s family’s Mississippi plantation.

If I’d known she was planning to move, I would actually have volunteered to fly out and help her pack though, of course, she might not have accepted my assistance. Probably would not have accepted my assistance.

This is one of the icky parts of the whole getting old thing. Watching various old pals lose their footing on the path. Watching various wolves that are hiding in the brambles salivate as they prepare to pounce.

I honestly don’t know what becomes of Eleanor from this point on.

I will visit her when I go back in November.