This wasn’t the vacation I was expecting. They never are, but this one was more unexpected than normal.
It started with being diagnosed with Lyme disease a few hours after landing. I seem to have had a severe but not uncommon reaction to the doxycycline I was prescribed – to put it in a nutshell, I lost my sanity for three or four days. Lyme disease itself can supposedly lead to feelings of confusion and mood change, but apparently the antibiotic I was given can also induce “confusion and anxiety”, and as it kills the bacteria, the cell walls of the Lyme bacteria release toxins into your blood stream (this is all courtesy of online searches, so take it with a grain of salt) and that can also produce similar feelings of confusion. On the extreme edge, the Internet conspiracy theorists also claim that doxycycline can produce feelings of paranoia and, in rare cases has been connected to suicide.
Last Sunday morning I thought the world was imploding, and it got worse before it started to get better midweek, albeit with moments where I mistakenly thought the worst had passed. I talked to my father about it on Thursday, when my perception of reality started to return to something I found to be “normal” – that is, there wasn’t a curiously observable curvature to the space-time through which I walked, and I stopped feeling like I was emitting a kind of high pitched whine that was warping other people and forcing them to avoid me – and he told me that he was worried I was going to do something dangerous. I told him I was worried too, and the most worrying thing about it was that while a part of my brain was able to understand that all of this was just a chemical reaction to the antibiotics and the bacteria, I could only keep that part isolated for brief moments – the rest of the time the thoughts that were objective and rational were no different from the parts where I thought the roadway ahead of me was going to fold and collapse and the parts where I could sense the missiles just over the horizon and the parts where I felt not just useless, but destructive to the point of thinking I needed to leave the world for the good of everyone else. He said he had seen that look in my eyes.
That has gone away, although the literature on the side effects of the normal treatment of early stage Lyme disease says that over the next two weeks – I have 13 days of antibiotics left – there will be a mix of “good and bad episodes”. I haven’t felt much physically, although supposedly it’s normal to feel fatigue and joint pain and general soreness, and frankly I’d trade a few bad physical days for any of the hours I spent in a psychotic haze early this week.
Finding a way to navigate through that while also spending time with my parents and my son was, to say the least, a bit challenging. I’d play with my son on the floor with his trains for a few minutes, and then get up and have to go for a walk. The only sustainable times were when he would crawl into my lap for a cuddle, and then his energy and warmth helped bring down my heart rate, and the chemical soup emitted by a ridiculously cute five year old child was able to partially counteract the miasma swirling through my body.
There were other challenges, though. I had lunch with a senior finance guy in Portland on Monday, an attempt to try and begin networking locally and look for a permanent place for me back here at home. I was using at least half of my mental energy to shut down the strange thoughts and voices in my head, so I’m not sure how well it went; he hasn’t written back to my thank you email, but he’s on vacation, so who knows. In any event, by the end of the lunch – on a patio, outdoors on an absolutely perfect summer day – I could feel myself shaking, and I said I was feeling a bit chilly in the shade and apologized. He didn’t think anything of it and we wrapped up. I made an excuse that my car was in a different direction, and found a quiet spot, and cried for an hour and wondered if I should even bother to return to my family.
That’s not what I normally do when I have an enjoyable business lunch.
My mother got a cracked rib, a mix of weakened elderly bones and a slightly overexuberant grandson, and she’s been struggling through the week as well. It’s too bad, because all I really wanted was to curl up next to her on the couch and give and receive hugs – but she’s been barely able to breathe this week. Nevertheless, she kept pace with my son – it does seem to energize her, even if she was energized through the sharp pains shooting through her chest all week – so I didn’t feel it was right to ask for anything myself.
The five year old has been in heaven. Legos and Brio trains on Grandma’s living room floor, a bed just his size in the front room with a fluffy pillow and kid sized quilts and blankets on chilly late summer Maine nights, lots of yummy food, his auntie’s kittens and a sleepover. Every day he’s collapsed in a heap at night, exhausted by play and the billowing waves of love coming from Grandma and auntie and Grandpa and Dad, plus lots of adventures meeting new people who all love him and want him to be happy. He’s been outgoing and fun, and unafraid of the world around him. Of course he’s been unafraid – there is nothing to be afraid of, really – but he’s often timid in his own Seattle world, so seeing him this way in Maine has been just wonderful.
He’s had just one moment of awkwardness, where his auntie asked him to sing a song for her. He said he didn’t want to, and I heard auntie say “well, then you can’t have a cupcake” as I walked to another room. He’d already had a cupcake, so I wasn’t particularly bothered by this, but he then said “I don’t like you – you have to leave now” in an abrupt and angry voice. Grandma was a bit shocked, and I came back to the living room and said that was a very mean thing to say, and he needed to apologize. “No!” was the response, and I told him it was time for a time out to think about how to be nice to his auntie. He dissolved in tears but absolutely would not budge on either apologizing or on his position that auntie needed to leave Grandma’s house and not come back.
After a few minutes in his room, I went in and said he needed to apologize, as my sister stood quietly just outside the door. She crept inside and said she was sorry for trying to make him sing a song, but no dice – he again told her she had to go. I told him that in that case, he wouldn’t be able to see the kitties at her house again on this vacation. He gave me a puzzled look – and I’m starting to realize that I don’t know what he’s thinking at those moments, just as I can never know what anyone is thinking or feeling, and I was wondering whether his look meant “I see no connection between the kitties and having my aunt leave me alone”. Or was it “that seems unnecessarily harsh” or maybe “you are part of the world conspiracy that I am starting to hate”. In any event, he didn’t back down. I sternly told him I didn’t like that kind of talk and we were going to talk about it more the next day. His grandma then got him ready for bed, we read him stories, and he went to sleep.
My mother was fuming about the episode. She is sensitive to how my sister feels, and she had been overjoyed that my son had had a successful overnight with my sister and was building a real bond with her. And he does love her, and this episode will pass – I think. But my mother thinks it’s endemic; it reminds her of episodes with my ex-wife which used to shock her, the depths of my wife’s ability to feel wronged and hold onto the feeling of being wronged as a kind of dark energy eroding the foundations of her heart. It was seeing the effect of that corrosive bitterness on me that led my mom to challenge my own choices four years ago, helping to set into motion this odd but nearly complete shift in my life. Seeing any trace of that side of my ex-wife in her grandson puts her into a tailspin.
I tried giving her some perspective. My son is five. He had had a huge day – including playing with some circus-trained teenagers who juggled and tumbled and stood on their heads for him – including building sandcastles on the beach and watching the tide wipe them out – including making cupcakes and riding his scooter to the mailbox down the road and eating cupcakes and too many hot dogs. He was tired. He had been asked to sing and he doesn’t like singing on command. He’s five years old.
But to no avail; Mom railed in hushed tones about how he’s getting his temper from his mom. So I reminded her that he’ll get plenty of bad traits from me, too, and his mom will have to do her best to counteract those.
And Mom has a cracked rib, a sacrifice to her grandson, and she only wants the best. She worries about him the way she worried about my sister and I when we were his age. I told her that I’d be firm with my son, that I’d make sure he understood the need to forgive and to be forgiven, that he’d understand the value of reconciliation with his auntie. Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll make sure he understands, I said. Please just let it go.
Truthfully, though, I can’t make sure he understands. He’ll learn something from this episode, but I don’t know what it will be. We can never know what other people will learn from their actions, from our reactions, from our words which often disconnect from our actions and reactions, and how their conception of the world will shift as all of these actions, reactions, words and thoughts integrate into a whole. And even if we could, it would be incomprehensible to us compared to the vision of the world we had taught ourselves from the similar but slightly differently viewed actions, reactions, words and thoughts we had observed and participated in. At five years old, moreover, he only has the beginnings of language, and at forty-two, I’m infinitely far removed from his directly lived experience, the kind that comes when you don’t yet have access to the pure abstraction of modern language. My world is mediated through language and memory; his world is direct.
What I’d really like him to understand is that the direct access he has to lived experience as a little boy might get lost if he gets too buried in the words and semiotics of adult life, and if I could give him any piece of advice, it wouldn’t be about reconciling with his aunt, it would be about taking the words and symbols and abstractions of our human world and see them for what they are, as mediations and crutches. Our brains are extraordinary but no finite mind could live a pure directly lived experience forever, taking in the mass of nature and created space and things and living pulsing things interacting with one another, without building mental shortcuts and tools to break the universe down into comprehensible bits. But, son, don’t forget that doing that means you lose some of the detail, maybe the most important details – don’t forget that with abstraction comes loss, even as it enables a different kind of creativity, even as it enables you to help build the social constructs that have let human beings explode in number, in the capacity for beauty, in the capacity for love. Don’t forget that your ability to abstract for higher dimensions of creation is built on rejecting some of the details of lived existence.
Don’t forget, son, that rejecting any detail of lived existence is a kind of arrogance. The bits that you ignore – maybe it’s the smaller leafy plants on the forest floor that you ignore while you gaze at the oak-leaved canopy above you, or it’s the way the lines around a girl’s eyes draw out as you look at her and you listen even more closely to her words and you focus on the way her cheek curves when she smiles – are still important, but your having ignored them might be taken as a slight, and don’t forget that those slights might be more important, in the long run, than the love you try to express. And remember, son, that others are doing the same, and they’ll occasionally ignore the details that you feel are most meaningful, that you hold most dear. We humans can’t help ourselves for ignoring details as we become the abstracting, building, creating adults that built the world you will live in and build and create yourself. But that also means we can’t help but cause tiny – and sometimes not so tiny – slights as we ignore what others want us to see.
It will be easier, son, if you can keep as much of the capacity you still have at age five to live fully, to live without filter, in these waning moments before the impulses to abstract and define that we’ve been building in your brain take precedence. But still, let the impulses take precedence, son, and become an adult – but don’t tell the other adults that you still take time to pay attention to details no one else sees, and let the other adults know you value the details they see as much as you value the ones you see.
Your auntie will let you see the kittens again, I have no doubt. I have to remove the air conditioner from her bedroom window on Sunday; I’ll see what I can do. And she will forgive you, and if you remember this, you’ll forgive her.
But what I told my son, as I put him to sleep, was that I loved him, more than any other little boy in the world. He told me I was the best dad and that he loved me so much. And I closed the door behind me, his nightlight behind a chair casting blue-white streaks against dark shadows onto his face across the miniature air mattress and the carpet. Then I went to my room and took another blue capsule of doxycycline, wondering what dreams or fantasies or horrors would emerge in my head in the early hours of the morning.
No, this hasn’t been a normal vacation. But it’s had its moments. I saw an old high school girlfriend and her family – it’s her twentieth anniversary this week, and her kids are everything I’d love my son to be – and she and her husband and I sat on the pebble beach and watched boats motor in through the channel at the head of Portland harbor. We drank beer and ate popcorn and my son and her son built sand castles and dams in the last few minutes before the tide came in. My son and I drove to see his namesake and his model train collection, and I watched the boy and the middle aged man with the same name wear themselves out around a tiny simulacrum of a New England city. I talked with his wife and his almost-in-college son about airplanes and Boeing tours, and returning to Portand, listened to Canadian satellite radio while my exhausted son slept in the backseat, his head resting on the middle armrest on top of a teddy bear and a fleece pullover. I had Italian sandwiches from Amatos. I wore shorts on the first crisp morning of September, the feeling of autumn already crowding out any thought of summer from the steel hard blue sky.
Soon my son and I will head back to Seattle. He’ll be heading home. I’ll just be on another plane. Unfortunately the pills will come with me.