Practice Six: What are the High Cards in My Deck?
If life were a deck of cards, we’d have to have some way to differentiate experiences (by positions in the deck), and if life were a card game, we’d have to strategize about which cards were more important and try to obtain and use those cards. The traditional high cards are jack, queen, king and ace. In my current situation, I have a fair number of days that are fives and sixes, even some twos and threes.
Both my cardiologist and my primary care physician have left town for month-long vacations. I’d just asked my cardiologist for a referral to the group of physicians and technicians who perform procedures aimed at ameliorating atrial fibrillation. After the cardiologist said he was willing to make that referral, he left town and neither his sidekick, nor the sidekick of my primary care physician, will make the referral. They both say it’s too serious for someone besides the chief poobah to do. So, I wait. I’ve spent a lot of time waiting over the last months.
Waiting isn’t a bad thing for me right now. I read for at least an hour every day (that represents at least a 10 in my deck) and currently supervise the painting of the trim on our house. Two lovely men (a father and son) and a young woman of perhaps 20 are changing our window frames and other trim from brown, the traditional trim on a Tudor house such as ours, to charcoal gray. The woman listens to podcasts and courses on her phone while she paints. The younger of the two men sings almost all day. I can easily hear them from inside the house. Both of these behaviors make me happy, or, at the very least, amused. Cards in my deck that are definitely higher than a seven.
I am shedding some furniture that has made the rooms in my house seem crowded. This morning I removed an upholstered chair that had been my dad’s newspaper-reading chair when I was a little girl. The chair had always been too big for the space alloted to it in our house, but it was hard to give up the memory of sitting in dad’s lap while he read to me or just listening to him tell me about the news. I put it out onto the sidewalk with a FREE sign scotch taped to its back. It was gone in less than two hours. Definitely a jack.
The most important high card is the ace. He/she/it is represented by my grandson, Lachlan, who is currently visiting me in California from Wisconsin. Ever since his birth, almost 18 years ago, I’ve known a kind of love I didn’t know before. It has been, by turns, sweet, painfully sad (not to be closer geographically), so proud and so humbled by this gift to my life.
He’s changed from a pudgy toddler to a long-haired youth, and now to a handsome 6'3" young adult. He’s smart, multi-talented, and kind — the last being perhaps the most important. He’s also changed from a giggly, awkward boy — a boy who was openly affectionate with me, his auntie, and his parents — to a pretty serious, sometimes angry world citizen. The anger is not personal. As he gets older and more sophisticated, the larger world seems less a benign place and more a place of challenges and frustrations. It took me awhile to get used to this seriousness and anger, but get used to it I have. As he is here, I’m having an ace day every day and will for six more.
In the past, we’ve done field trips and fancy dinners — the Grand Canyon one year, Yosemite a few years ago, the Russian River last year. I don’t have that energy now. This morning he helped me return a heavy box to the UPS Store. Then we moved the pink and green plaid chair from the back hall to the street. He reads curled up on the couch while I read in another chair in the living room. He’s finished five books since his arrival four days ago, but doesn’t appreciate the painter’s singing outside just beyond the window in front of which he reads. His auntie Blake takes him on adventures.
I believe I’ll live to see him graduate from college, and perhaps graduate school, seven or eight years from now. I’ll be around 86 then. I hope I’m alive long enough to see him find his own love and children if he wants them. Lachlan, after reading this says, “Of course you’ll be alive Grandma!” These seem like high cards to look forward to and I so need a future I can hope for. However, if the future I hope for does not come to pass, I’ve had this extraordinary love and so many aces, thanks to him, along the way.
