On the fifth morning after I broke my foot, I got up, dressed in twice the amount of time it usually took, and donned my brace for my first day back at work. After easing myself into the driver’s seat of our Chevy Malibu and maneuvering my brace to the inside near the center console, I looked down at my left foot and experimentally rested it on the accelerator. Not bad. I pivoted to the brake pedal and back, wondering if my left foot would respond in an emergency. I shuddered at the thought of my right foot pumping inside the brace as my left foot dangled ineffectively and I helplessly smashed into the back end of a car that had stopped short in front of me. Thankfully, driving with my left foot proved easier than I expected.
My resignation, effective in two more days, made going to work seem anticlimactic. Still, I was happy to be back, and grateful that my classroom was just a short walk from the parking lot. I thought that my students would call me a chicken for missing the graduation trip to Six Flags, but they had more interesting things to talk about.
“What did you do to yourself?” asked my fourth period TA.
“Nothing! I just decided I am not enough of a fashion victim. I’m taking it to the next level. This is my half-gothic beach cripple look,” I said, lifting first my one black orthopedic boot and then my platform flip-flop. She raised one artificially chiseled black eyebrow and gave me a piercing look.
“So, did you get mad and kick a wall?”
“No, it was a freak accident. That kitchen linoleum is more dangerous than it looks!” I retorted in mock horror.
“Um, that’s pretty pathetic, Mrs. K.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I’ll miss my bow-staff class this summer. I may lose my black belt.”
Missing half of my last week of school was less than ideal, but it could not be helped. I was extremely immobile at first. I read six books in four days, reclining on the couch with my foot on ice for fifteen minutes out of every two hours. Every time I got up I would have to ease my leg into the brace, close the Velcro on the fleece that surrounded my ankle, and secure four wide Velcro straps that pinned my leg firmly to the back. My cat was afraid of the noise I made, as well as the sight of me crab-walking unevenly around the house like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
On Tuesday my mom came by with two large bags of shoes, all with lifts high enough to match the orthopedic boot. I chose a flip flop and a leather sandal, each with a three-inch heel. The right shoes went back in the box and straight into my closet. I won’t need a right shoe for six more weeks, I thought. I’m gonna miss the simple pleasure of picking out my shoes to wear every morning. Like my red Crocs, even though Uncle Dale says they look like Tupperware. Just thinking about my brand-new off-white beaded slides lying new in the box all summer makes me sick! All of my normal shoes were way too flat to wear, since I think that tall people don’t need to wear shoes that make them even taller. When I did get off the couch, I would sidle casually up to Craig and eye the top of his head, trying to see if my new platforms made me taller than he is. Apparently not, although I still check the vacation photos to see if there are any pictures in which I loom large and lopsided.
My students weren’t the only ones who loved to comment on my foot. “Auntie Krista is part robot!” my nephews screamed as I walked toward them in my new footwear ensemble. I did look a little artificial, in a Darth Vader sort of way. I wasn’t sure at first if the boot was an object of fear or admiration. Clomping around the grounds of the condos the family rented for summer vacation, I sounded like something out of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Step scraaaatch. Step scraaaatch.
“What is wrong with that lady?” children would point and wonder loudly before being shushed by horrified parents who would explain sotto voce that I was hurt and it wasn’t nice to draw attention to other people’s malformations. Actually, a neon sign saying LOOK EVERYONE, I HAVE AN OWIE! couldn’t have attracted any more attention than I was already getting. People of all ages couldn’t help bringing up the subject of my injury, even if they said nothing else to me. I discussed my case with the cat’s veterinarian, the bank teller, the librarian, and the bagger at the supermarket. My favorite comment was “Did you hurt your foot?” What does one say to this? Is it possible that I didn’t hurt my foot but put the brace on this morning in a state of sleepy confusion? “No, I just wasn’t sure if it would snow today or not and thought I should wear ONE ski boot just in case,” I would reply brightly.
I had more conversations with perfect strangers in my six-week convalescence than perhaps my entire adult life. In Grand Canyon National Park I rested on a bench while Craig took a ten-minute walk to a lookout. A nice older gentleman approached me, asked how my foot was healing, and then kept me company as he told me the story of his wife’s rafting accident in Something-Hole-Wyoming. “Three days into our tour she was climbing down the metal stairs to the dock, but they were tilted and she slipped off. Her shin scraped the step hard enough to expose six inches of bone. It took one hundred and forty-eight stitches to close the wound. They have excellent health care in Wyoming. The doctor told the nurse to do a basket-stitch to close the muscles back together, but she didn’t know how to do it and so the doctor did it himself. Her boot looks just like yours. She feels much better now, but she can’t get off the tour bus and we have a week of our vacation left!”
I was stopped in Best Buy by a woman my age who pulled off her sandal to show me a blue, swollen foot similar to mine. “I have a brace like yours in the car, but I stopped wearing it after three weeks. It was so hot I couldn’t stand it!” I could definitely agree with that statement. The black boot was like a greenhouse, trapping my leg in a bath of its own sweat. A week into my convalescence Craig started giving my leg warm baths, and I was moved to tears by his considerate pampering of my poor foot. Two days later the stench reached my own nose and I realized that I stunk so badly he couldn’t stand to sit next to me. During the drive to Kentucky I would take off the boot and scrub my leg with antibacterial wipes to keep the odor from overwhelming the cabin of the car.
Approaching weeks in the brace, I was definitely tired of other aspects as well. The cushy, shock absorbing foam that had allowed me to walk on my foot in those first tender days was mashed down and lumpy. Now it felt like walking on gravel, and I was tired of carrying around a visual advertisement of my recent medical history. While hobbling across the Lexington Mall, I noticed a salesman sailing confidently towards Craig and me. Suddenly, he stopped, his eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and he beat a hasty retreat, hiding behind his kiosk until we were safely past. I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I turned around and realized that he had decided it was a bad idea to sell a pair of roller-skate shoes to a cripple.
“Craig,” I mused over a latte at the Starbucks on Reynolds Road, “what if wearing the brace is a big medical conspiracy?”
“Hmm?” he stared back at me, probably thinking that the rocking motion of my walk had shaken my brain into a state of psychiatric confusion.
“What if this brace doesn’t help your foot to heal, but is just a punishment for being careless enough to break a limb in the first place? If it is, it’s working. I know I will seriously reevaluate the way I walk across the kitchen from now on.”
“If it is a punishment, wouldn’t it just be simpler to make you wear a sign or something?”
“Yeah, or a temporary tattoo that says I NEED TO BE MORE CAREFUL across my forehead.”
“Krista, you look so normal!” Craig remarked admiringly when I walked tentatively sans brace around the house three days later. He sure knows how to give a girl a compliment. I figured that if the woman from Best Buy could go cold turkey after three weeks, I could ditch the brace after just under five. I had a berry-red sunburn on my right knee from rafting down the Deschutes River, but the rest of both legs glowed winter white. My legs burned with the exertion of getting back on my bicycle, and when I got down off the bike my leg muscles wobbled with disuse. It wasn't the best way to introduce myself to the rolling hills of Lexington after avidly riding in the flat plain of the Central Valley. Truthfully, it would take weeks more for me to feel normal, but a whole new world of shoe choices opened up to me right away, and it felt great!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Serves Me Right
On a Friday night three weeks before the big move, Craig and I were having one of those picky little disagreements that mean the participants feel stressed and refuse to back down and be nice. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I remember that the skin above my eyebrows felt tight and I didn’t feel inclined to see things his way. I was planning to get up in a huff, stalk across the kitchen floor, and fling a bag of chips into a cupboard, closing the door not with a slam, but with just enough emphasis to communicate my lingering irritation.
I failed to notice that my right leg was asleep, and the signals that were telling it to move weren’t getting through. When I put my foot down for another theatrically emphatic step, I didn’t notice that I was walking on the top part of my foot, not on the bottom as people normally do. My foot twisted under me, and just before I was able to catch myself on my other leg I heard an ominous crack.
Well, the argument lost steam for me right there. I left the bag of chips on the kitchen floor where they had fallen and hobbled to the couch, noticing with dismay that my still deadened foot was making more little crackles with each normal step. No, I said to myself. It isn’t hurt. My feet pop all of the time; it’s just the way they are. I reached the couch, sitting and turning my foot so I could examine it. My skin was still so numb that it felt like touching someone else’s foot. Besides, I can’t be injured; I have too much to do! The eighth grade trip is on Tuesday! All week I’ve been promising my students that Mrs. Dean and I are going on all of the roller coasters with them! If I can’t go, they’ll think I am an old, motion-sick loser! My foot does (OW!) not hurt! Mind over matter: if I do not acknowledge an injury, I’m still all right.
The next morning, my mind had to acknowledge that I couldn’t walk to the bathroom without help. The first step off the bed was so painful it sucked the breath out of my lungs.
“Craig, I’m really worried,” I said tearfully. So much for mind over matter.
“Don’t be,” he reassured, “cats are really easy to litter train. She’ll be using the box before the day is out. You’ll see.” He thought I was worried about one of the mountain of small tasks that I had yet to start on.
“No, it’s my foot. It hurts really bad!” I trilled hopelessly. Craig walked over to the couch and sat down opposite me, fingering my streaky purple foot like a stack of index cards.
“Does it hurt when I press here?” he asked, as showers of white sparks clouded my vision and I gasped in shock. “It’s probably just fine, but let’s drive down to urgent care and have them make sure,” he said cheerfully.
He told me later that he knew from his examination that my foot was broken. He barely touched my joint and I grimaced like a torture victim, but he didn’t want to worry me so he maintained his air of casual calmness as I got ready.
I sometimes joke that Craig can judge how busy my workweek has been by whether or not I’ve made time to shave my legs. It had been a pretty long week, if you know what I mean. Though in pain, I couldn’t stand the idea of throwing on some sweats and having a highly educated stranger touch my unwashed, unshaven extremities. Getting into the tub meant putting all of my weight on my right foot for a few seconds. It hurt so much it made me dizzy, but I had no choice. I couldn’t hide the telltale signs of an incomplete beauty regimen by wearing pants. What if they had to cast me and I couldn’t get my jeans off afterward? Or would I have to take them off and wear a hospital gown home?
My limp up to the counter at urgent care was so piteous that they actually asked me if I wanted a wheelchair. I was immediately admitted to the room with the reclining bed and all of the operating equipment in it, the one I assume they save for the seriously hurt people.
Try as I might, I couldn’t make “walking across the kitchen” a worthy enough explanation for why my foot hurt so badly. The x-ray technician took it upon himself to further clarify the situation.
“Did you have a little drink before, huh?” he asked with a knowing smile and a conspiratorial wink. I hadn’t, but it didn’t surprise me that he asked. I had often listened to lame stories of other people’s injuries and assumed that a few too many beers had been left out of the story.
“No.”
“Were you mad?” he asked again.
“That I wasn’t drinking?”
“No. When it happened, were you mad about something?” The question was direct, but so kind that it disarmed me completely.
“Yeah.”
Still smiling, he shook his head understandingly. “Bad things happen when you are mad about something. A while ago my nephew left his Legos on the floor and I stepped on one.”
“Ouch, that must have really hurt!” I said.
“Yes, but then I got mad. I had told my nephew to pick up his Legos and he didn’t. I was so angry that I stomped my foot as hard as I could. My heel caught the corner of another Lego and drove it pretty deep into my foot. That REALLY hurt, and I had to get stitches. Sometimes bad things happen, but getting mad makes it worse.”
When I saw the doctor look up from my x-rays and frown at me, I knew it was going to be bad news. “It’s a hairline fracture.” He handed me a piece of paper.
“You have a hairline fracture of the proximal head of the fifth metatarsal,” I read silently.
I let out a long, slow breath. Great.
“We will give you an orthopedic brace.”
Score! No cast!
“You will have to wear it for six weeks.”
Six weeks! Are you kidding me? That would be…. the middle of July! I pictured introducing myself around Lexington in an orthopedic brace. “Hi, I’m Krista, your new neighbor/coworker/client/tenant/friend. I’m such a total idiot that I can’t cross a kitchen floor without committing grievous bodily harm, but it’s nice to meet you, too!”
“Sitting too long can pinch off your nerves. You need to move around more.”
“Yes. Definitely.” It’s all my fault. Go ahead and rub it in.
If you start tingling, change positions and don’t get up until full feeling returns.”
“Good idea.” Oh, I don’t think I can do that. I enjoy walking around on perfectly dead legs. Wasn’t the point that I didn’t feel any tingling? If I could FEEL that I had no FEELING, wouldn’t that mean that I COULD feel something?
“Would you like crutches?”
No. I would not LIKE a broken foot. I would not LIKE an orthopedic boot brace. What kind of a question is that? “Do I need crutches?”
“Well, some people get them if they need to walk a lot. It keeps the brace from dragging on the ground. How about pain meds?”
“No crutches, no drugs.” That’s all my students need. To see their English teacher hopped up on Vicodin. Hellllooooo, class! I feel goooooooood today, don’t you feel good, too?”
“Your injury is in a weight bearing area, so in six weeks you need to return for an x-ray to make sure proper healing has taken place.”
Not likely. In six weeks I’ll be three time zones away. I have PacifiCare insurance. As in The Pacific Ocean. They’ll refuse to cover anything short of an appendectomy out of the area, and I’ll be stuck writing a check for it. “Sure.” The doctor left the room, and I kept my face stretched in a rictus of cheerfulness until the door shut behind him.
“Wear this for six weeks,” said the nurse, strapping up what the staff called a “moon boot” for obvious reasons.
“I’m moving in three weeks,” I said numbly.
“Of course you are! Nobody ever breaks a bone when they don’t have something better to be doing. It’ll all still work out. Now, take a few steps and see if that feels all right!” said my nurse-cum-psychologist.
The boot worked by transferring my weight to my shin, keeping my ankle completely immobile while I took rocking steps forward. It was awkward, like a five-pound barbell was draped across my instep, but it beat the duck waddle I did to get into the clinic. “It feels pretty good. How many weeks until I can Thriller dance?”
As I shuffle-stepped past the checkout counter, I handed Craig one red sandal and smiled ruefully as I explained my injury dismissively. “Just a little crack in the bone, nothing serious, really. I’m fine!” I said brightly, waving to the nurse and insisting again that I didn’t need the offered wheelchair. I really did feel fine, up to the moment Craig shut the car door after me and I dissolved into self-pitying tears. “I broke my foot!” I wailed, with tears dropping off my nose and landing on my shirt.
We decided to drown my sorrow in a downtown Modesto coffee shop. Even carrying a latte across the café to our table was tiring and painful. Yesterday I walked miles without a problem. What a difference a day makes. “Sometimes bad things happen, but getting mad makes it worse,” the x-ray technician said. Boy, did I feel stupid. What bad things were happening to me? The long months of waiting were over, and we were leaving so soon. If I was so far behind on my work, why couldn’t I work harder instead of wasting time arguing like it was an Olympic sport?
I smiled tentatively at Craig, and he smiled reassuringly back. We had never really resolved our previous argument, but it was gone anyway. We were working as a team again, even though one member of the team would spend the next thirty-three days on the injured list.
I failed to notice that my right leg was asleep, and the signals that were telling it to move weren’t getting through. When I put my foot down for another theatrically emphatic step, I didn’t notice that I was walking on the top part of my foot, not on the bottom as people normally do. My foot twisted under me, and just before I was able to catch myself on my other leg I heard an ominous crack.
Well, the argument lost steam for me right there. I left the bag of chips on the kitchen floor where they had fallen and hobbled to the couch, noticing with dismay that my still deadened foot was making more little crackles with each normal step. No, I said to myself. It isn’t hurt. My feet pop all of the time; it’s just the way they are. I reached the couch, sitting and turning my foot so I could examine it. My skin was still so numb that it felt like touching someone else’s foot. Besides, I can’t be injured; I have too much to do! The eighth grade trip is on Tuesday! All week I’ve been promising my students that Mrs. Dean and I are going on all of the roller coasters with them! If I can’t go, they’ll think I am an old, motion-sick loser! My foot does (OW!) not hurt! Mind over matter: if I do not acknowledge an injury, I’m still all right.
The next morning, my mind had to acknowledge that I couldn’t walk to the bathroom without help. The first step off the bed was so painful it sucked the breath out of my lungs.
“Craig, I’m really worried,” I said tearfully. So much for mind over matter.
“Don’t be,” he reassured, “cats are really easy to litter train. She’ll be using the box before the day is out. You’ll see.” He thought I was worried about one of the mountain of small tasks that I had yet to start on.
“No, it’s my foot. It hurts really bad!” I trilled hopelessly. Craig walked over to the couch and sat down opposite me, fingering my streaky purple foot like a stack of index cards.
“Does it hurt when I press here?” he asked, as showers of white sparks clouded my vision and I gasped in shock. “It’s probably just fine, but let’s drive down to urgent care and have them make sure,” he said cheerfully.
He told me later that he knew from his examination that my foot was broken. He barely touched my joint and I grimaced like a torture victim, but he didn’t want to worry me so he maintained his air of casual calmness as I got ready.
I sometimes joke that Craig can judge how busy my workweek has been by whether or not I’ve made time to shave my legs. It had been a pretty long week, if you know what I mean. Though in pain, I couldn’t stand the idea of throwing on some sweats and having a highly educated stranger touch my unwashed, unshaven extremities. Getting into the tub meant putting all of my weight on my right foot for a few seconds. It hurt so much it made me dizzy, but I had no choice. I couldn’t hide the telltale signs of an incomplete beauty regimen by wearing pants. What if they had to cast me and I couldn’t get my jeans off afterward? Or would I have to take them off and wear a hospital gown home?
My limp up to the counter at urgent care was so piteous that they actually asked me if I wanted a wheelchair. I was immediately admitted to the room with the reclining bed and all of the operating equipment in it, the one I assume they save for the seriously hurt people.
Try as I might, I couldn’t make “walking across the kitchen” a worthy enough explanation for why my foot hurt so badly. The x-ray technician took it upon himself to further clarify the situation.
“Did you have a little drink before, huh?” he asked with a knowing smile and a conspiratorial wink. I hadn’t, but it didn’t surprise me that he asked. I had often listened to lame stories of other people’s injuries and assumed that a few too many beers had been left out of the story.
“No.”
“Were you mad?” he asked again.
“That I wasn’t drinking?”
“No. When it happened, were you mad about something?” The question was direct, but so kind that it disarmed me completely.
“Yeah.”
Still smiling, he shook his head understandingly. “Bad things happen when you are mad about something. A while ago my nephew left his Legos on the floor and I stepped on one.”
“Ouch, that must have really hurt!” I said.
“Yes, but then I got mad. I had told my nephew to pick up his Legos and he didn’t. I was so angry that I stomped my foot as hard as I could. My heel caught the corner of another Lego and drove it pretty deep into my foot. That REALLY hurt, and I had to get stitches. Sometimes bad things happen, but getting mad makes it worse.”
When I saw the doctor look up from my x-rays and frown at me, I knew it was going to be bad news. “It’s a hairline fracture.” He handed me a piece of paper.
“You have a hairline fracture of the proximal head of the fifth metatarsal,” I read silently.
I let out a long, slow breath. Great.
“We will give you an orthopedic brace.”
Score! No cast!
“You will have to wear it for six weeks.”
Six weeks! Are you kidding me? That would be…. the middle of July! I pictured introducing myself around Lexington in an orthopedic brace. “Hi, I’m Krista, your new neighbor/coworker/client/tenant/friend. I’m such a total idiot that I can’t cross a kitchen floor without committing grievous bodily harm, but it’s nice to meet you, too!”
“Sitting too long can pinch off your nerves. You need to move around more.”
“Yes. Definitely.” It’s all my fault. Go ahead and rub it in.
If you start tingling, change positions and don’t get up until full feeling returns.”
“Good idea.” Oh, I don’t think I can do that. I enjoy walking around on perfectly dead legs. Wasn’t the point that I didn’t feel any tingling? If I could FEEL that I had no FEELING, wouldn’t that mean that I COULD feel something?
“Would you like crutches?”
No. I would not LIKE a broken foot. I would not LIKE an orthopedic boot brace. What kind of a question is that? “Do I need crutches?”
“Well, some people get them if they need to walk a lot. It keeps the brace from dragging on the ground. How about pain meds?”
“No crutches, no drugs.” That’s all my students need. To see their English teacher hopped up on Vicodin. Hellllooooo, class! I feel goooooooood today, don’t you feel good, too?”
“Your injury is in a weight bearing area, so in six weeks you need to return for an x-ray to make sure proper healing has taken place.”
Not likely. In six weeks I’ll be three time zones away. I have PacifiCare insurance. As in The Pacific Ocean. They’ll refuse to cover anything short of an appendectomy out of the area, and I’ll be stuck writing a check for it. “Sure.” The doctor left the room, and I kept my face stretched in a rictus of cheerfulness until the door shut behind him.
“Wear this for six weeks,” said the nurse, strapping up what the staff called a “moon boot” for obvious reasons.
“I’m moving in three weeks,” I said numbly.
“Of course you are! Nobody ever breaks a bone when they don’t have something better to be doing. It’ll all still work out. Now, take a few steps and see if that feels all right!” said my nurse-cum-psychologist.
The boot worked by transferring my weight to my shin, keeping my ankle completely immobile while I took rocking steps forward. It was awkward, like a five-pound barbell was draped across my instep, but it beat the duck waddle I did to get into the clinic. “It feels pretty good. How many weeks until I can Thriller dance?”
As I shuffle-stepped past the checkout counter, I handed Craig one red sandal and smiled ruefully as I explained my injury dismissively. “Just a little crack in the bone, nothing serious, really. I’m fine!” I said brightly, waving to the nurse and insisting again that I didn’t need the offered wheelchair. I really did feel fine, up to the moment Craig shut the car door after me and I dissolved into self-pitying tears. “I broke my foot!” I wailed, with tears dropping off my nose and landing on my shirt.
We decided to drown my sorrow in a downtown Modesto coffee shop. Even carrying a latte across the café to our table was tiring and painful. Yesterday I walked miles without a problem. What a difference a day makes. “Sometimes bad things happen, but getting mad makes it worse,” the x-ray technician said. Boy, did I feel stupid. What bad things were happening to me? The long months of waiting were over, and we were leaving so soon. If I was so far behind on my work, why couldn’t I work harder instead of wasting time arguing like it was an Olympic sport?
I smiled tentatively at Craig, and he smiled reassuringly back. We had never really resolved our previous argument, but it was gone anyway. We were working as a team again, even though one member of the team would spend the next thirty-three days on the injured list.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Three Degrees Below Zero
For many, California epitomizes the American dream. “Go west, young man,” said Horace Greely’s famous 1851 editorial, and California is as west as one can go. “California, here we come,” trills the song. They make songs about leaving Las Vegas, but never about leaving California. In fact, I bet the person who left Las Vegas in the song went to California.
Those who wonder why Craig and I left California point out that California has it all: gorgeous state parks, mild winters, and fruit fresh from the orchard. Salaries are among the highest in the nation, and if houses cost more—well, that just means they appreciate more in value too. The beach is never more than a few hours away. Roller-bladers glide beneath the palm trees, and beautiful sunbathers lie in the warm sand. A radio plays the Beach Boys who “wish they all could be California girls.”
I once asked my then-boyfriend what slogan he would put on a bumper sticker, and he said “I LOVE CALIFORNIA.” And he did. We took rambling drives to enjoy the countryside, with or without a destination. Our first dates were to grand places like Yosemite, but also to small, out of the way streams and hiking spots. I remember one March morning in particular. We climbed the winding road to the summit of Mount Diablo. We spread a blanket, munched on sandwiches, and enjoyed a spectacular view of the Bay Area on one side and the Central Valley on the other. Craig proposed on an April afternoon at Half Moon Bay. Rays of sunshine pierced the clouds that had just dropped two hours of rain on us, and we were finally able to leave Craig’s car for a walk along the bluffs.
Craig loved California so much that I marveled he had ever left. He spent three years in Kentucky getting a master’s degree, and was a hair’s breadth from staying for a doctorate when something brought him home. I’m glad he came back, because we met six months later. A native of Modesto, California since the age of six, I ran into Craig at a church group meeting and was immediately interested. We dated long distance while I finished college. When he came to visit me in Southern California, the entomology degree never failed to come up in conversation. Craig was unique among the dates and loves of my friends, few of whom were in college, much less in possession of advanced degrees. My roommates called him “Bug Boy,” and amused themselves with composing corny love poetry from him to me:
Your eyes, they glisten like June bugs as they run,
Your lips are red like ladybeetles in the sun,
I can sense your pheromones from far away,
So fly to me, and let us buzz away today.
Craig made a few periodic inquiries about doctoral programs in the following years, but nothing ever came of them. When we got married, the subject of moving never came up. Like all young lovers, we were impervious to anything the world could throw at us. No matter what challenges we faced, all we needed was each other. We would live in California, in the Central Valley, the place you touch if you point to the center of a state map. Our parents would be close, work would be predictable. Kids would come, eventually, and we would have a good life.
Craig took a job managing crop protection on a thousand-acre farm outside Modesto. While not a perfect match for his degree, it was a chance to gain practical experience and make connections in the business. Walking through acres of healthy, green vegetables sounds restful, but keeping them green and healthy proved to be an enormous challenge. California summers, so long and romantic for schoolchildren, made for a brutal schedule from March to November. There was always a threat that needed vigilance—pests in the summer, diseases in the winter—and overseeing application of chemicals meant supervising the night shift. A year into the job, he received a cell phone, and it started ringing immediately. Some nights Craig came home at eight, took two or three calls before bedtime, and woke up to the phone at one. Then he would get up and dress for a trip to the farm to solve a crisis—shredded sprayer belts, oil leaking from tractors, or ruptured irrigation lines. It’s a schedule not many could take, and indeed three of Craig’s coworkers quit in his third year of work.
What kept Craig from quitting? He had a strong work ethic and a positive attitude. He remained grateful for the job and the opportunities it provided, except for the occasional two o’clock confession that he hated his job. But he always went out the door anyway. Admittedly, I was nowhere near so noble. I knew about overwork, but I had never seen hours like this. We would both jump awake in the middle of the night at the sound of the phone. Craig changed his ring tone three times that third summer, but it only took a month for each new one to raise my blood pressure and make me sick to my stomach. Craig would leave in the dark for yet another night, and I would lay with my eyes wide open, unable to fall asleep. This was not an office job; there was heavy machinery, and dangerous chemicals were involved. Craig is the most careful person I know, but how do you remain safe after working twenty-one of the past twenty-four hours? I lived in worry that Craig would be hurt, and indeed the signs of stress-related illness told me that the job was injuring him, slowly but surely.
On these mornings, I would wake up tired with the alarm, dress sluggishly, and head to school. Sometimes Craig would be back for a morning nap before heading back to work, sometimes not. My first period class and I would wake up together, and the poster on the wall of my classroom would haunt me:
Hold fast to dreams,
Easy for you to say, Langston Hughes. I just wished I knew what my dreams were. It’s hard to hold on to dreams without a good night’s sleep.
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
What about Craig’s dreams? Was getting a doctorate his dream? Did he give up that dream to marry me? I would stare vacantly at the mauve walls of my classroom, sucking down coffee in a show of hypocrisy (my students weren’t allowed to drink in class), and wonder if our dreams were dead. A teacher’s job is to help students find answers, and the irony of the situation never escaped me. I spent my days dealing out answers like playing cards, and had no right answers for myself.
Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams go….
Three years into Craig’s job, we faced reality. California agriculture turned out to be a profitable but shrinking industry. In an economy whose main crop is new houses, farmers retire and sell off land for development. In the fall, the orchards were ripped out, and in the spring a new crop of square stucco houses with red tiled roofs would take their place. There were no better jobs, only similar jobs. Occasionally, there would be talk of improvements to Craig’s current position, none of which included a reduction in hours on call.
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
California’s fertile fields seemed barren. They were devoid of opportunities, time, and sleep. Snow is a symbol of desolation in the poem on my wall, but the thought of snow seemed welcome and refreshing to my mental state. Winter is a time of death, but also a time of renewal.
In December, my students always dramatized “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and, while it never failed to touch me, that fourth winter’s reading moved me to tears. In the penultimate scene of the play, as the Franks and Van Daans say their goodbyes while Nazi soldiers kick down the door to their hiding place, Mr. Frank says to Anne, “For the last two years we have lived in fear; now we will live in hope.” I was trying to help my students connect to a powerful piece of literature, but this time the words on the page seemed written with a message just for me.
Deep inside, I knew that Craig would have to leave this job, and I dreaded what would follow. Months of unemployment? Terrifying uncertainty? Whatever came, could it be any worse than keeping this job? I glanced again at the poster on my wall, and in my mauve classroom with thirty-eight sleepy eighth-graders, I had a moment of clarity.
Hold fast to dreams…
Looking back on the weeks after Craig resigned, I most remember a feeling of complete and utter invulnerability. Craig lingered over coffee in the morning as if to make up for four years of throwing on his boots and rushing out of the house. We put a map of the United States on our den wall and started marking opportunities as they came: Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Canada, and finally Lexington, Kentucky. I didn’t see it as hitting bottom, but rather as giving up a scant hold on something we didn’t really want. It was better to free fall into icy water and begin the long swim to shore. What was there to fear? My fears had already happened, and they really weren’t that scary. In a way, we had lost everything—health, financial security, and our plans for the future—but it brought us simplicity and peace of mind. It reminded me of the starry-eyed optimism of our newlywed days. All we needed was each other.
A month before we left on our new adventure, we ascended Freemont Peak, the highest point overlooking Monterey Bay. We sat on a rock beside the flagpole, looking past the trees, and down over the rolling green hills. It was as if I was being shown all I was giving up. The fertile Salinas Valley is a center of California agriculture. We had given it a try, but the lifestyle was not a good fit for us. We were giving up California and all the pleasures and familiar places it had to offer. There would be no more trips to Apple Hill in October or San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square at Christmastime. California had been my home since childhood, but now we were ready to move on.
It is autumn in Kentucky, and around me I see the beginnings of the fall colors for which the state is famous. After that will come winter, and if I get my wish I will see Kentucky frozen with snow. I imagine us sitting indoors on an evening, reflecting on the past year and planning for the future. We glance out the window and see the first puffy flakes of snow drifting in the wind. We go outside and catch a few icy crystals on our tongues, glad that winter’s finally come.
Those who wonder why Craig and I left California point out that California has it all: gorgeous state parks, mild winters, and fruit fresh from the orchard. Salaries are among the highest in the nation, and if houses cost more—well, that just means they appreciate more in value too. The beach is never more than a few hours away. Roller-bladers glide beneath the palm trees, and beautiful sunbathers lie in the warm sand. A radio plays the Beach Boys who “wish they all could be California girls.”
I once asked my then-boyfriend what slogan he would put on a bumper sticker, and he said “I LOVE CALIFORNIA.” And he did. We took rambling drives to enjoy the countryside, with or without a destination. Our first dates were to grand places like Yosemite, but also to small, out of the way streams and hiking spots. I remember one March morning in particular. We climbed the winding road to the summit of Mount Diablo. We spread a blanket, munched on sandwiches, and enjoyed a spectacular view of the Bay Area on one side and the Central Valley on the other. Craig proposed on an April afternoon at Half Moon Bay. Rays of sunshine pierced the clouds that had just dropped two hours of rain on us, and we were finally able to leave Craig’s car for a walk along the bluffs.
Craig loved California so much that I marveled he had ever left. He spent three years in Kentucky getting a master’s degree, and was a hair’s breadth from staying for a doctorate when something brought him home. I’m glad he came back, because we met six months later. A native of Modesto, California since the age of six, I ran into Craig at a church group meeting and was immediately interested. We dated long distance while I finished college. When he came to visit me in Southern California, the entomology degree never failed to come up in conversation. Craig was unique among the dates and loves of my friends, few of whom were in college, much less in possession of advanced degrees. My roommates called him “Bug Boy,” and amused themselves with composing corny love poetry from him to me:
Your eyes, they glisten like June bugs as they run,
Your lips are red like ladybeetles in the sun,
I can sense your pheromones from far away,
So fly to me, and let us buzz away today.
Craig made a few periodic inquiries about doctoral programs in the following years, but nothing ever came of them. When we got married, the subject of moving never came up. Like all young lovers, we were impervious to anything the world could throw at us. No matter what challenges we faced, all we needed was each other. We would live in California, in the Central Valley, the place you touch if you point to the center of a state map. Our parents would be close, work would be predictable. Kids would come, eventually, and we would have a good life.
Craig took a job managing crop protection on a thousand-acre farm outside Modesto. While not a perfect match for his degree, it was a chance to gain practical experience and make connections in the business. Walking through acres of healthy, green vegetables sounds restful, but keeping them green and healthy proved to be an enormous challenge. California summers, so long and romantic for schoolchildren, made for a brutal schedule from March to November. There was always a threat that needed vigilance—pests in the summer, diseases in the winter—and overseeing application of chemicals meant supervising the night shift. A year into the job, he received a cell phone, and it started ringing immediately. Some nights Craig came home at eight, took two or three calls before bedtime, and woke up to the phone at one. Then he would get up and dress for a trip to the farm to solve a crisis—shredded sprayer belts, oil leaking from tractors, or ruptured irrigation lines. It’s a schedule not many could take, and indeed three of Craig’s coworkers quit in his third year of work.
What kept Craig from quitting? He had a strong work ethic and a positive attitude. He remained grateful for the job and the opportunities it provided, except for the occasional two o’clock confession that he hated his job. But he always went out the door anyway. Admittedly, I was nowhere near so noble. I knew about overwork, but I had never seen hours like this. We would both jump awake in the middle of the night at the sound of the phone. Craig changed his ring tone three times that third summer, but it only took a month for each new one to raise my blood pressure and make me sick to my stomach. Craig would leave in the dark for yet another night, and I would lay with my eyes wide open, unable to fall asleep. This was not an office job; there was heavy machinery, and dangerous chemicals were involved. Craig is the most careful person I know, but how do you remain safe after working twenty-one of the past twenty-four hours? I lived in worry that Craig would be hurt, and indeed the signs of stress-related illness told me that the job was injuring him, slowly but surely.
On these mornings, I would wake up tired with the alarm, dress sluggishly, and head to school. Sometimes Craig would be back for a morning nap before heading back to work, sometimes not. My first period class and I would wake up together, and the poster on the wall of my classroom would haunt me:
Hold fast to dreams,
Easy for you to say, Langston Hughes. I just wished I knew what my dreams were. It’s hard to hold on to dreams without a good night’s sleep.
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
What about Craig’s dreams? Was getting a doctorate his dream? Did he give up that dream to marry me? I would stare vacantly at the mauve walls of my classroom, sucking down coffee in a show of hypocrisy (my students weren’t allowed to drink in class), and wonder if our dreams were dead. A teacher’s job is to help students find answers, and the irony of the situation never escaped me. I spent my days dealing out answers like playing cards, and had no right answers for myself.
Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams go….
Three years into Craig’s job, we faced reality. California agriculture turned out to be a profitable but shrinking industry. In an economy whose main crop is new houses, farmers retire and sell off land for development. In the fall, the orchards were ripped out, and in the spring a new crop of square stucco houses with red tiled roofs would take their place. There were no better jobs, only similar jobs. Occasionally, there would be talk of improvements to Craig’s current position, none of which included a reduction in hours on call.
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
California’s fertile fields seemed barren. They were devoid of opportunities, time, and sleep. Snow is a symbol of desolation in the poem on my wall, but the thought of snow seemed welcome and refreshing to my mental state. Winter is a time of death, but also a time of renewal.
In December, my students always dramatized “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and, while it never failed to touch me, that fourth winter’s reading moved me to tears. In the penultimate scene of the play, as the Franks and Van Daans say their goodbyes while Nazi soldiers kick down the door to their hiding place, Mr. Frank says to Anne, “For the last two years we have lived in fear; now we will live in hope.” I was trying to help my students connect to a powerful piece of literature, but this time the words on the page seemed written with a message just for me.
Deep inside, I knew that Craig would have to leave this job, and I dreaded what would follow. Months of unemployment? Terrifying uncertainty? Whatever came, could it be any worse than keeping this job? I glanced again at the poster on my wall, and in my mauve classroom with thirty-eight sleepy eighth-graders, I had a moment of clarity.
Hold fast to dreams…
Looking back on the weeks after Craig resigned, I most remember a feeling of complete and utter invulnerability. Craig lingered over coffee in the morning as if to make up for four years of throwing on his boots and rushing out of the house. We put a map of the United States on our den wall and started marking opportunities as they came: Idaho, Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Canada, and finally Lexington, Kentucky. I didn’t see it as hitting bottom, but rather as giving up a scant hold on something we didn’t really want. It was better to free fall into icy water and begin the long swim to shore. What was there to fear? My fears had already happened, and they really weren’t that scary. In a way, we had lost everything—health, financial security, and our plans for the future—but it brought us simplicity and peace of mind. It reminded me of the starry-eyed optimism of our newlywed days. All we needed was each other.
A month before we left on our new adventure, we ascended Freemont Peak, the highest point overlooking Monterey Bay. We sat on a rock beside the flagpole, looking past the trees, and down over the rolling green hills. It was as if I was being shown all I was giving up. The fertile Salinas Valley is a center of California agriculture. We had given it a try, but the lifestyle was not a good fit for us. We were giving up California and all the pleasures and familiar places it had to offer. There would be no more trips to Apple Hill in October or San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square at Christmastime. California had been my home since childhood, but now we were ready to move on.
It is autumn in Kentucky, and around me I see the beginnings of the fall colors for which the state is famous. After that will come winter, and if I get my wish I will see Kentucky frozen with snow. I imagine us sitting indoors on an evening, reflecting on the past year and planning for the future. We glance out the window and see the first puffy flakes of snow drifting in the wind. We go outside and catch a few icy crystals on our tongues, glad that winter’s finally come.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
A Three Hour Difference
Yesterday, while clearing out my files, I stumbled on an old copy of the Holmes and Rahe stress test. This perennial favorite of the health quiz genre measures a person’s stress level by assigning a point value to events in the normal spectrum of life. Everything from Outstanding Personal Achievement (28 points) to Christmas (12 points) to Minor Violations of the Law (11 points) ranks on an objective, research-based scale, and the sum of my points is supposed to show how stressed I am.
“Finally, a quiz where you actually WANT a low score,” cheerfully shouts the brochure. I am not so sure about that. We Americans have a love-hate relationship with stress. It’s both a curse and a badge of honor. I’ve spent many mornings standing around the office coffeepot, comparing hours of lost sleep with coworkers determined to one-up each other.
“It took me four hours to finish the laundry, and I couldn’t start until the kids were home from soccer practice and in bed. I was folding towels like a zombie until TWO last night.” This gets a few sympathetic grimaces, but also a few eyes roll. Everyone has kids. Everyone has laundry.
“It’s tax season. My husband hasn’t come home from work in three days. I drove down there yesterday evening to help make copies so he could come home this weekend, take a shower, and get a few hours of sleep in a real bed. There we were, alone in the dark, empty building long after the cleaning staff went home. We were at it until THREE! Can you believe it?” A few exhale noisily. Another whistles in disbelief.
“I stayed up until FOUR A.M. to finish homework for class tonight after work. It goes until ten,” someone finally asserts triumphantly. The others dip their heads in grudging admiration and disperse.
If we weren’t all stressed, what excuse would we have? It’s the reason those ten pounds from last year still haven’t come off, the reason we haven’t scheduled that routine medical exam. The average American gives up four days of vacation time because using it would cause more demands at work, and a quarter of Americans check their work messages while on vacation. “Too busy,” we say smugly. “Too much going on.” I looked back down at the Holmes and Rahe test, and I wondered…
“Which one of us has a higher stress quotient?” I ask my husband, who reclines on his overstuffed chair with his plant pathology notes on his lap. He’s studying for a test on a Saturday afternoon, but I still think my stress quotient will blow his away. He looks at the papers with me, eyes methodically scanning the categories: Your Finances, Your Work, Your Health.
“I think it’s a toss up, don’t you?” he replies.
“Well, let’s take the test and see!” I grab a pencil, draw a vertical line down the right margin of the test, and label the two columns C and K. I scan the paper and pick a line at random. “Marriage (50 points). We each get fifty points just for being married?”
“Hardly,” Craig reasons, “Marital Separation (65 points) would barely be more than being married. It must mean new marriages. We get zero for that.” Craig frowns in concentration, gesturing for me to sit on the ottoman so he can see the list.
“Ooooh, here’s one! Personal Injury or Illness (44 points)!” I say. The generous number of points makes sense to me. It was almost as stressful to spend a summer nursing a broken foot as it was to get married five years ago.
“Yep, and that means that I get Change in Health of Family Member (39 points),” says Craig.
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me that you earn almost as many points just because I sustain a broken bone? All that pain and decreased mobility for a lousy five more points?”
“Well, you broke your foot, but who had to listen to you? Me!” Craig crows triumphantly. I still don’t see how driving me to Urgent Care and bringing me ice packs is all that stressful. He is really catching on to the spirit of the quiz, though.
“Whatever,” I say, “but I just changed jobs, so I get Change in Responsibilities at Work (29 points) and Change in Work Hours or Conditions (20 points).”
“I did, too, so I get both of those as well as Begin or End School (26 points).”
“That’s double dipping! You can’t count grad school as both work and school!” I protest. I eventually concede that he is right. A funded doctoral student’s schedule involves a complicated and rather confusing mixture of work and school. Right now Craig collects a paycheck for conducting research by the university, who also gives him free tuition for classes and the promise of a degree in four years if all goes well. It’s been a pretty reasonable two months, but the research project that will become his dissertation is just coming together. I can see long days on the horizon.
Category 2: Living Conditions should be a gold mine for both of us. We started the year in Ripon, just north of Modesto, California. In June we quit our jobs, handed our worldly goods over to be shipped, and loaded the car for the 2,500 mile drive to Lexington, Kentucky. That gives us Change in Living Conditions (25 points) and Change in Residence (20 points). Three months after our arrival, I keep staring at maps of the United States, finding the fried-chicken-drumstick outline of my new state, my eyes tracing the edge of the Ohio River until they rest on the middle-of-the-wide-part dot that marks Lexington. “I live here, now,” I think to myself. Maps of the East, with small, irregularly shaped states always got the best of me on history tests. They seemed so complicated and inscrutable compared to the West, where latitude and longitude mark off mostly-square boundaries of large states. If I got in the car right now and drove nine hours, I could pass through five states, depending on the direction. In California, a nine-hour car trip would take me to San Diego.
One strange thing about Kentucky is that the line between Central and Eastern time cuts a southeastern diagonal through the state. This means that you need to set your watch an hour back for a drive almost straight south of Lexington. It took months before I felt at home in a time zone I’ve always associated with places that were far away: New York, Washington D.C., and Disney World. Most importantly, the three-hour shift east gave us a Change in Sleeping Habits (19 points). Craig and I couldn’t fall asleep before midnight, which our bodies still thought was 9 p.m. If I tried to go to bed early, I would lie peacefully but fully awake, lifting my head occasionally to gaze at the clock to see how much time was passing. When Craig started his job, I would take him to work and then come back home to an indulgent mid-morning nap. I am sure this didn’t help me adjust. When it was my turn to start work, two weeks of waking up at 6:30 cured me of my insomnia so completely that I sometimes found myself nodding off in the middle of a DVD.
I guess the move qualifies us for Revision of Personal Habits (24 points). Even a trip to the post office requires a glance at a map, and the grocery stores are just as confusing. I spend hours navigating the packed aisles in search of familiar food that hides in strange places in the unfamiliar building. Since we sold a car before the move, we gave up our respective rural commutes to get into our Malibu at 7:15 every morning and drive down congested Nicholasville Road. Craig gets off in the traffic circle in front of UK, and I continue down Limestone to work. We also said goodbye to our beloved Ripon congregation, and have been sampling a series of places of worship in the Churches-Christian-Baptist section of the Fayette County phone book. That gets a category all to itself: Change in Church Activities (19 points).
“Okay, on to Category 3: Your Finances. Do we get Change in Financial Situation (38 points)?” Craig wonders.
“Yessss! The real question is: do we get 38 points for EACH change?” Eighteen months ago, Craig quit a demanding job without knowing what to do next. It was a gutsy move, but the hours he was working left no time for a job search. We didn’t want Craig to spend his entire career working days and supervising the night shift. We had to do something drastic. We fell from two incomes down to one, and then rebounded back to two again when Craig landed a similar but less demanding job. Then he spiffed up his curriculum vitae and sent off application letters to doctoral programs nationwide. During the summer move, we had zero income. Our savings paid the moving company, who wouldn’t unload our truck until receiving confirmation that our check had cleared. In Lexington, Craig started work in July, and I started in August. Our combined incomes don’t total six figures, as they did in California, but nothing would make us go back to those Saturday mornings when the phone rang at 1 a.m. and Craig got dressed for a spontaneous nine hours of work for which the two hours sleep he had managed would not be enough. We’d rack up almost 200 points if we counted each change to our finances, but we decided to settle for 38.
Hmmmmm… if these points were per change, we would get Change in Residence (20 points) twice, because in one week we move from our interim rental to a newly purchased home. Ah! Add Mortgage (31 points). I don’t see how getting a mortgage is more stress than changing towns, personally. The mortgage application involved only one afternoon of signing papers and explaining to the loan officer why every bank account in our names is less than two months old. Moving was infinitely more stressful. Try explaining to an angelic, free roaming tabby cat that she will be packed into a carrier and transported via backseat to a new home, and there is nothing to be afraid of. Traveling with our cat proved to be the ultimate test of our affection. If we had liked her less, we would’ve pulled over in Fresno, rolled down the window, and let her jump out, which, defying logic, was what she clearly wanted to do. After two hours of listening to her constant howl, it was definitely tempting.
Thankfully, we don’t have Trouble with In-Laws (29 points). I hope, at least. Surely both sets of parents, living ten miles away from each other in Modesto and Ripon, didn’t greet news of our impending separation with delight. Now, the most common question we are asked on the topic of our move is “Oh, do you have family out here?” People our age move to be closer to family, as careers settle down to a predictable routine and babies become a part of life. Thankfully, our parents have cheerfully given up having us close by in favor of seeing us happy and doing what we want with our lives. It means a lot to have their blessing.
Category 4: Your Family and Personal Life is by far the biggest category, proving that relationships, though they make life worthwhile, can be a source of great emotional upheaval. Death of a Close Friend (37 points) was a meaningful but difficult part of the year before our move. Annabelle, who had long been as close as a grandmother to me, looked forward to our move with great excitement, even though at 93 her poor eyesight and hearing would rule out most long-distance communication. She was perhaps in the best position to understand our need for a positive change. She often entertained me with stories of her many moves, telling me about pets she had to leave behind, driving the interstate with a husband who considered every move a race to the finish line, and getting rid of her electric blankets in Ohio only to find out that they come in handy in California, too. Sadly, she passed away rather suddenly in December, so I never got to share my moving stories with her. I was grateful to be living close at the time, so I could say goodbye and celebrate life with her many friends at her memorial service.
Scanning the rest of the family column, my eyes skim over Pregnancy (40 points), and I am thankful to cross that one off, for now. I explained to my doctor, who was quizzing me about my reproductive goals this spring, that a 2,500 mile move pretty much ruled out children until we were fully settled. “Nonsense,” he replies, “having a baby is a great way to get to know a new town! You find out where the good all-night restaurants are, and you can make new friends in childbirth classes. Then, you spend most of the next few months visiting all of the hospitals and shopping all of the large chain stores for baby gear!” My eyes roam around his office, fixing on a photo of three small children in pumpkin costumes. His enthusiasm touches me, but putting off children for now is a decision we don’t regret. Craig’s sister, however, is expecting her fifth child this winter, and that gives us Change in Number of Family Members (15 points). I can’t imagine how this entitles us to any score at all; the addition will be much more demanding for Laura than for us. It almost doesn’t seem like a change, because our nephews have been arriving with clock-like regularity every two years since I met Craig. This one will definitely be different, though. Laura’s having a girl, breaking a fourteen-boy family streak that started with her husband’s great-grandfather siring seven sons in a row. We’ll just miss the birth when we come home for Christmas, but I am sure we’ll hear plenty about it.
“Grand total time,” I announce, adding up two sets of numbers to find our stress quotient. Craig peers expectantly over my shoulder. Craig’s is 341, and mine is a slightly more impressive 355. I knew we would score this high! I imagine us at a club meeting for high scorers, the MENSA of the overstressed. We smile to greet the other members, gesturing at name tags with our respective stress quotients printed under our names. At the punch bowl, we stop to converse with a pinched-faced man who managed a respectable score of 301.
“Yep, it’s been a crazy year, what with the Jail Term (63 points) and the Divorce (73 points), but making it into a group like this makes it all worthwhile,” he quips, his eyes nervously scanning the room.
“It was moving that did it for us,” we exclaim proudly.
Back to reality now, I study the back of the Holmes and Rahe test. “A score of 300 or more indicates an eighty percent likelihood of developing illness within the next year,” it admonishes. Well, that brings us back to Personal Injury or Illness (44 points). I hope I don’t break any more bones in the near future. My broken foot last summer was entirely due to stress. How else does a healthy, young woman twist her foot grotesquely on smooth, clean kitchen linoleum?
The Holmes and Rahe stress test confirms the obvious: we all need to be mindful of our stress factors and how they affect our health and performance. Craig and I know that we are overstressed. We come home after six too many weekdays, mechanically chewing our food at the dinner table so we can jump up and finish making those phone calls. Laundry spills out of the hamper before we get around to washing the clothes, and we’ve been trying to schedule a car mechanic visit for weeks. Kind of makes us wish we’d stayed in Ripon, huh? Actually, no. We could’ve held on to our old jobs and our old life, keeping our stress level well under the recommended 50-150 range. Our laundry was getting done and our checkbook always balanced on the month, but living below our full potential was making us more stressed and unhappy. Moving is hard, but it was necessary when we looked around and realized that we weren’t where we wanted to be, and couldn’t get there unless we committed ourselves to a busy few years. This past year has been and will continue to be stressful, but we are confident. We did the right thing.
“Finally, a quiz where you actually WANT a low score,” cheerfully shouts the brochure. I am not so sure about that. We Americans have a love-hate relationship with stress. It’s both a curse and a badge of honor. I’ve spent many mornings standing around the office coffeepot, comparing hours of lost sleep with coworkers determined to one-up each other.
“It took me four hours to finish the laundry, and I couldn’t start until the kids were home from soccer practice and in bed. I was folding towels like a zombie until TWO last night.” This gets a few sympathetic grimaces, but also a few eyes roll. Everyone has kids. Everyone has laundry.
“It’s tax season. My husband hasn’t come home from work in three days. I drove down there yesterday evening to help make copies so he could come home this weekend, take a shower, and get a few hours of sleep in a real bed. There we were, alone in the dark, empty building long after the cleaning staff went home. We were at it until THREE! Can you believe it?” A few exhale noisily. Another whistles in disbelief.
“I stayed up until FOUR A.M. to finish homework for class tonight after work. It goes until ten,” someone finally asserts triumphantly. The others dip their heads in grudging admiration and disperse.
If we weren’t all stressed, what excuse would we have? It’s the reason those ten pounds from last year still haven’t come off, the reason we haven’t scheduled that routine medical exam. The average American gives up four days of vacation time because using it would cause more demands at work, and a quarter of Americans check their work messages while on vacation. “Too busy,” we say smugly. “Too much going on.” I looked back down at the Holmes and Rahe test, and I wondered…
“Which one of us has a higher stress quotient?” I ask my husband, who reclines on his overstuffed chair with his plant pathology notes on his lap. He’s studying for a test on a Saturday afternoon, but I still think my stress quotient will blow his away. He looks at the papers with me, eyes methodically scanning the categories: Your Finances, Your Work, Your Health.
“I think it’s a toss up, don’t you?” he replies.
“Well, let’s take the test and see!” I grab a pencil, draw a vertical line down the right margin of the test, and label the two columns C and K. I scan the paper and pick a line at random. “Marriage (50 points). We each get fifty points just for being married?”
“Hardly,” Craig reasons, “Marital Separation (65 points) would barely be more than being married. It must mean new marriages. We get zero for that.” Craig frowns in concentration, gesturing for me to sit on the ottoman so he can see the list.
“Ooooh, here’s one! Personal Injury or Illness (44 points)!” I say. The generous number of points makes sense to me. It was almost as stressful to spend a summer nursing a broken foot as it was to get married five years ago.
“Yep, and that means that I get Change in Health of Family Member (39 points),” says Craig.
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me that you earn almost as many points just because I sustain a broken bone? All that pain and decreased mobility for a lousy five more points?”
“Well, you broke your foot, but who had to listen to you? Me!” Craig crows triumphantly. I still don’t see how driving me to Urgent Care and bringing me ice packs is all that stressful. He is really catching on to the spirit of the quiz, though.
“Whatever,” I say, “but I just changed jobs, so I get Change in Responsibilities at Work (29 points) and Change in Work Hours or Conditions (20 points).”
“I did, too, so I get both of those as well as Begin or End School (26 points).”
“That’s double dipping! You can’t count grad school as both work and school!” I protest. I eventually concede that he is right. A funded doctoral student’s schedule involves a complicated and rather confusing mixture of work and school. Right now Craig collects a paycheck for conducting research by the university, who also gives him free tuition for classes and the promise of a degree in four years if all goes well. It’s been a pretty reasonable two months, but the research project that will become his dissertation is just coming together. I can see long days on the horizon.
Category 2: Living Conditions should be a gold mine for both of us. We started the year in Ripon, just north of Modesto, California. In June we quit our jobs, handed our worldly goods over to be shipped, and loaded the car for the 2,500 mile drive to Lexington, Kentucky. That gives us Change in Living Conditions (25 points) and Change in Residence (20 points). Three months after our arrival, I keep staring at maps of the United States, finding the fried-chicken-drumstick outline of my new state, my eyes tracing the edge of the Ohio River until they rest on the middle-of-the-wide-part dot that marks Lexington. “I live here, now,” I think to myself. Maps of the East, with small, irregularly shaped states always got the best of me on history tests. They seemed so complicated and inscrutable compared to the West, where latitude and longitude mark off mostly-square boundaries of large states. If I got in the car right now and drove nine hours, I could pass through five states, depending on the direction. In California, a nine-hour car trip would take me to San Diego.
One strange thing about Kentucky is that the line between Central and Eastern time cuts a southeastern diagonal through the state. This means that you need to set your watch an hour back for a drive almost straight south of Lexington. It took months before I felt at home in a time zone I’ve always associated with places that were far away: New York, Washington D.C., and Disney World. Most importantly, the three-hour shift east gave us a Change in Sleeping Habits (19 points). Craig and I couldn’t fall asleep before midnight, which our bodies still thought was 9 p.m. If I tried to go to bed early, I would lie peacefully but fully awake, lifting my head occasionally to gaze at the clock to see how much time was passing. When Craig started his job, I would take him to work and then come back home to an indulgent mid-morning nap. I am sure this didn’t help me adjust. When it was my turn to start work, two weeks of waking up at 6:30 cured me of my insomnia so completely that I sometimes found myself nodding off in the middle of a DVD.
I guess the move qualifies us for Revision of Personal Habits (24 points). Even a trip to the post office requires a glance at a map, and the grocery stores are just as confusing. I spend hours navigating the packed aisles in search of familiar food that hides in strange places in the unfamiliar building. Since we sold a car before the move, we gave up our respective rural commutes to get into our Malibu at 7:15 every morning and drive down congested Nicholasville Road. Craig gets off in the traffic circle in front of UK, and I continue down Limestone to work. We also said goodbye to our beloved Ripon congregation, and have been sampling a series of places of worship in the Churches-Christian-Baptist section of the Fayette County phone book. That gets a category all to itself: Change in Church Activities (19 points).
“Okay, on to Category 3: Your Finances. Do we get Change in Financial Situation (38 points)?” Craig wonders.
“Yessss! The real question is: do we get 38 points for EACH change?” Eighteen months ago, Craig quit a demanding job without knowing what to do next. It was a gutsy move, but the hours he was working left no time for a job search. We didn’t want Craig to spend his entire career working days and supervising the night shift. We had to do something drastic. We fell from two incomes down to one, and then rebounded back to two again when Craig landed a similar but less demanding job. Then he spiffed up his curriculum vitae and sent off application letters to doctoral programs nationwide. During the summer move, we had zero income. Our savings paid the moving company, who wouldn’t unload our truck until receiving confirmation that our check had cleared. In Lexington, Craig started work in July, and I started in August. Our combined incomes don’t total six figures, as they did in California, but nothing would make us go back to those Saturday mornings when the phone rang at 1 a.m. and Craig got dressed for a spontaneous nine hours of work for which the two hours sleep he had managed would not be enough. We’d rack up almost 200 points if we counted each change to our finances, but we decided to settle for 38.
Hmmmmm… if these points were per change, we would get Change in Residence (20 points) twice, because in one week we move from our interim rental to a newly purchased home. Ah! Add Mortgage (31 points). I don’t see how getting a mortgage is more stress than changing towns, personally. The mortgage application involved only one afternoon of signing papers and explaining to the loan officer why every bank account in our names is less than two months old. Moving was infinitely more stressful. Try explaining to an angelic, free roaming tabby cat that she will be packed into a carrier and transported via backseat to a new home, and there is nothing to be afraid of. Traveling with our cat proved to be the ultimate test of our affection. If we had liked her less, we would’ve pulled over in Fresno, rolled down the window, and let her jump out, which, defying logic, was what she clearly wanted to do. After two hours of listening to her constant howl, it was definitely tempting.
Thankfully, we don’t have Trouble with In-Laws (29 points). I hope, at least. Surely both sets of parents, living ten miles away from each other in Modesto and Ripon, didn’t greet news of our impending separation with delight. Now, the most common question we are asked on the topic of our move is “Oh, do you have family out here?” People our age move to be closer to family, as careers settle down to a predictable routine and babies become a part of life. Thankfully, our parents have cheerfully given up having us close by in favor of seeing us happy and doing what we want with our lives. It means a lot to have their blessing.
Category 4: Your Family and Personal Life is by far the biggest category, proving that relationships, though they make life worthwhile, can be a source of great emotional upheaval. Death of a Close Friend (37 points) was a meaningful but difficult part of the year before our move. Annabelle, who had long been as close as a grandmother to me, looked forward to our move with great excitement, even though at 93 her poor eyesight and hearing would rule out most long-distance communication. She was perhaps in the best position to understand our need for a positive change. She often entertained me with stories of her many moves, telling me about pets she had to leave behind, driving the interstate with a husband who considered every move a race to the finish line, and getting rid of her electric blankets in Ohio only to find out that they come in handy in California, too. Sadly, she passed away rather suddenly in December, so I never got to share my moving stories with her. I was grateful to be living close at the time, so I could say goodbye and celebrate life with her many friends at her memorial service.
Scanning the rest of the family column, my eyes skim over Pregnancy (40 points), and I am thankful to cross that one off, for now. I explained to my doctor, who was quizzing me about my reproductive goals this spring, that a 2,500 mile move pretty much ruled out children until we were fully settled. “Nonsense,” he replies, “having a baby is a great way to get to know a new town! You find out where the good all-night restaurants are, and you can make new friends in childbirth classes. Then, you spend most of the next few months visiting all of the hospitals and shopping all of the large chain stores for baby gear!” My eyes roam around his office, fixing on a photo of three small children in pumpkin costumes. His enthusiasm touches me, but putting off children for now is a decision we don’t regret. Craig’s sister, however, is expecting her fifth child this winter, and that gives us Change in Number of Family Members (15 points). I can’t imagine how this entitles us to any score at all; the addition will be much more demanding for Laura than for us. It almost doesn’t seem like a change, because our nephews have been arriving with clock-like regularity every two years since I met Craig. This one will definitely be different, though. Laura’s having a girl, breaking a fourteen-boy family streak that started with her husband’s great-grandfather siring seven sons in a row. We’ll just miss the birth when we come home for Christmas, but I am sure we’ll hear plenty about it.
“Grand total time,” I announce, adding up two sets of numbers to find our stress quotient. Craig peers expectantly over my shoulder. Craig’s is 341, and mine is a slightly more impressive 355. I knew we would score this high! I imagine us at a club meeting for high scorers, the MENSA of the overstressed. We smile to greet the other members, gesturing at name tags with our respective stress quotients printed under our names. At the punch bowl, we stop to converse with a pinched-faced man who managed a respectable score of 301.
“Yep, it’s been a crazy year, what with the Jail Term (63 points) and the Divorce (73 points), but making it into a group like this makes it all worthwhile,” he quips, his eyes nervously scanning the room.
“It was moving that did it for us,” we exclaim proudly.
Back to reality now, I study the back of the Holmes and Rahe test. “A score of 300 or more indicates an eighty percent likelihood of developing illness within the next year,” it admonishes. Well, that brings us back to Personal Injury or Illness (44 points). I hope I don’t break any more bones in the near future. My broken foot last summer was entirely due to stress. How else does a healthy, young woman twist her foot grotesquely on smooth, clean kitchen linoleum?
The Holmes and Rahe stress test confirms the obvious: we all need to be mindful of our stress factors and how they affect our health and performance. Craig and I know that we are overstressed. We come home after six too many weekdays, mechanically chewing our food at the dinner table so we can jump up and finish making those phone calls. Laundry spills out of the hamper before we get around to washing the clothes, and we’ve been trying to schedule a car mechanic visit for weeks. Kind of makes us wish we’d stayed in Ripon, huh? Actually, no. We could’ve held on to our old jobs and our old life, keeping our stress level well under the recommended 50-150 range. Our laundry was getting done and our checkbook always balanced on the month, but living below our full potential was making us more stressed and unhappy. Moving is hard, but it was necessary when we looked around and realized that we weren’t where we wanted to be, and couldn’t get there unless we committed ourselves to a busy few years. This past year has been and will continue to be stressful, but we are confident. We did the right thing.
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