Day 4: Treatment (June 20th)

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    Day 4: Printed out some recipes to take to the sisters today at the Infusion Center. Sounds important - Infusion Center - and it is. Great staff, working hard, and trying to manage a fairly complex environment, while staying calm. I was not very calm, but a bit agitated yesterday morning. I had a lot on my mind, but was focused more on what annoyed me in the center. Everyone has a personal TV and we're only separated from each other by cloth curtains, so the noise of two or more TV's can be on at the same time. The elder nature of the patients, including myself, often calls for higher volume to compensate for losing some of the high range of  hearing, that comes with age: It is loud. I thought personal headphones might do the trick, but in the meantime, I got more agitated by the rising cacophony. I thought of the word hospital, hospice, hospitality - all related words and concepts leading to or springing from the central idea of healing and possibly rest.

    I have to watch myself at this point because I have a slightly snobby disposition and become indignant if everyone isn't watching or listening to something culturally relevant like NPR or PBS. I show my flag hear, but the underlying impulse is trying to correct everyone so that they behave in a more acceptable (like me) manner. I am reminded of a short story by Flannery O'Connor that epitomizes this same, haughty confrontation in a doctor's office in a small town somewhere in Georgia. The nice people are intermixed with the "colored" and the "white trash" or simply, trash, as she refers to them in her mind. We hear the women's thoughts and sometimes her words crafted to communicate to the other respectable whites in the room, her extreme disapproval of the children's unkempt appearance, blank stares and mostly lack of manners. The other respectable people in the room get her reference, while the targets don't usually rise up to the heights of this surreptitious discourse. They are used to being contemptible in the eyes of especially, their betters, because they happen to be white, yet poor and uneducated like their fellow "coloreds". So our respectable Towns person has nothing but contempt for her "fellow" whites, they somehow, by virtue of their skin color, ought to know better. 

    

     

    My recovery literature specifically talks about this habit of character as being a subtle form of anger, ie annoyance. We feel superior to those people who annoy us, and we get some satisfaction from that sense of being "better than" them. The literature and my faith tell me of the dignity of all people regardless of their origins or their current situation in life. I don't have to look too far back in my own life or that of my family's to see the need for a scapegoat, someone or something to blame to get the glare of scrutiny off of my own self and that of my family. I felt ashamed of them all, myself included; so keeping afloat in what I assumed was "normal land" required constant propping up of myself in the eyes of the "dignified world" by putting down others. 

     Distinctions: I felt compelled, always distinguishing myself from my "lessers" - at least in the privacy (and indecency)  of my own mind, and this was a full time job. In a loving and patient way I learned from my experience of Recovery to look beyond the surfaces and discover the person inside. I learned patience, reserving judgment, examining the judgments that came so readily to me. (Why was I so expert at these? I was the Quickdraw of judgments it seemed.) And then I heard someone use the slogan, "If you spot it, you got it!" God forbid, but it was true. Some of the same things I so readily judged others by I was familiar with myself. "Familiar" comes from the word family, so it's like recognizing someone by a shared trait or look. Was this my new family? I was taught to try to identify and not compare or judge my fellow human beings. This had a secondary and beneficial effect of releasing me from the clutches and the claws of the real or imagined folk that were always judging others, possibly even me, when I was not around. This habit of mind became less habitual; I learned how to pray for people who I didn't understand, not in a self righteous way, but in a real way. Many of my new fellows and friends in recovery were, by their own admission, quite contemptible before finding their way there. So a smile, a nod, an attempt to try to "understand than to be understood" is what is becoming habitual for me.

     The sisters arrived with a smile and hug for me, and I presented them with the small collection of recipes that I brought them. I remembered to include my email to encourage them to return the favor in kind, not for payback, but simply the further spreading of the joy. I've included it in the post to you who are my family, too.