Tom Glenn's Blog, page 113
May 19, 2020
Josh at the Door
I’m currently facing the oddest form of writer’s block I can imagine. Over the past year or so, I’ve been sketching out a new novel tentatively titled Josh at the Door. Like all my fiction, it’s based on real events, in this case my twenty-year-plus relationship with a woman. The male protagonist is called Josh. The woman he loves is named Mimi. The original outline of the book showed how they met, how their relationship developed, how it ended when Josh died, and how Mimi shows the courage to go on living without him.
That all changed when the real woman in my life died at the end of March 2020. I found myself grieving in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, forced to stay isolated at home and to avoid all human contact. I was suddenly in a new world unlike any I’d ever encountered before.
So Josh at the Door as I originally conceived it no longer works. The book now must be about mourning during the lockdown. I suspect the story will be told in flashbacks, as Josh remembers how he met Mimi and their lives converged, their adventures together, her sickness, and her death. It will end as he finds the strength to go on without her.
I know what I have to do, but, so far at least, I haven’t been able to do it. I’ve tried repeatedly to work on the draft, but I can’t write. Grieving won’t let me.
All that said, I know in my soul that this is a story I must tell. I’ll keep at it until the words begin to flow. Something tells me that when that happens, it will be an avalanche. I’ll be writing all day every day. I must be ready when the dam breaks.
More tomorrow.
May 18, 2020
It’s Me Again (2)
Before 2015, I had been physically active. For many years I was a runner—that was how I injured my knee. And I had lifted weights all my adult life. I didn’t run or work out for health reasons; I did both because I enjoyed them and liked the way they made me feel. I regularly got runner’s high and a similar pleasure from hoisting weights.
But after the chemotherapy, radiation, and two surgeries I described yesterday, I was unable exercise. It was all I could do just to get around. I was a mere shadow of my former self. The man I saw in the mirror wasn’t me anymore. It was a feeble old man unstable on his feet.
In the long recovery after 2015, I continued my life’s work, writing. I worked on short stories and novels. I gave presentations and readings. I knew that due to my messed up knee surgery I would never be able to run again, but I tried repeatedly to resume weight lifting. Time after time, I failed. I simply didn’t have the physical strength. Stubbornness is one of my primary characteristics. I refused to concede to my fate. I kept trying.
Then, in February of this year, I tried yet again for the umpteenth time. I started off as always with very light weights and only a few routines. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that I could do it. I was actually pumping iron. Little by little, I increased the weights and added more routines. It worked. Now I’m up to fourteen different exercises, with three sets of twelve reps of each exercise and respectable poundage. The exercises include all the standards—sit-ups, push-ups, curls, military presses, rows, shrugs.
I feel better than I have in years. I have more energy and move with confidence. I still have my limp (and always will), but I now regularly go for long brisk walks.
Best of all, I look in the mirror and I see me. I look like Tom Glenn again. Older, yes, but the same man I always was before my surgeries. After five years of recovery, I’m back.
It’s me again.
May 17, 2020
It’s Me Again
In 2015, I had a series of downturns. A surgeon botched knee replacement surgery leaving me unable to bend my right leg very far—ever since, I’ve walked with a slight limp. Far worse was confirmation that I had a large tumor in the upper lobe of my right lung. In 2013, I’d coughed up blood, but my primary care physician told me it was nothing to worry about. When it happened again in 2015, he sent me for a lung x-ray. That revealed a large tumor in my right lung that had been there for some time. I spent months in chemotherapy and radiation to reduce the size of the tumor. Then a surgeon removed the upper lobe of my right lung. I didn’t understand until later that the lung cancer came close to killing me. I no longer trusted my primary care physician. I found a new doctor.
The lung cancer was my own fault. Until I was in my forties, I was a heavy smoker. When I was a teenager, literally every adult I knew smoked. On my eighteenth birthday, my parents gave me a carton of cigarettes, a lighter, and a cigarette case. I was welcomed to the adult world. During my military service, I didn’t know anybody who didn’t smoke. Then came my thirteen years under cover in Vietnam. Smoking was as normal as eating.
In the nineteen-eighties, the general population finally accepted the idea that smoking was bad for you. Through a long painful process, I weaned myself off cigarettes. But it was too late. I’d already done serious damage to my lungs.
After I was diagnosed with lung cancer and began treatment, my surgeon and pulmonologist were genuinely thrilled at how well my body withstood the rigors of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. My lifetime of running and exercise and my careful attention to a healthy diet had paid off in ways I’d never foreseen. Not only did I survive, I thrived.
More tomorrow.
May 16, 2020
Indie Book Award
I was just informed that my 2014 novel No-Accounts has been awarded the Indie Book Award as a finalist in the general fiction over over 80,000 words category. The book was earlier given an Eric Hoffer award. Celebrate with me.
No-Accounts, like all my fiction, is drawn from fact. At the height of the AIDS crisis, I volunteered to work with dying AIDS patients. Over a five-year period, I took care of seven men, all gay. They all died. The experienced moved me so deeply that I wrote a novel about it.
Green, Green, Green
Late yesterday afternoon, on the first really warm day we’ve had this spring, I put on shorts and a tank top and ate dinner on my deck at the back of my house. Months ago, I reported in this blog the magnificent view from my deck. In back of me is a circular pond, maybe two hundred feet in diameter, half filled with water reeds. All around it are trees of every variety and size concealing the houses of my neighbors built all around the pond.
During the fall and winter months, with the trees leafless, I could see the neighboring houses, all far larger and more grandiose than my humble split-level. I took several walks around the pond and verified that these houses were indeed far more imposing than my place, but none of them had a view of the pond because they were blocked by the trees.
My view is more beautiful than ever. This past winter and especially this spring, we’ve had more rain than usual. As a result, the trees have leafed out in shameless glory. When I sit on my deck, the green of the leaves all around me is like a cry of joy. The predominant hue is a medium-light vivid green, with lighter and darker shades shimmering in the background. This is life writ large.
As we proceed through the spring into summer and the months become warmer, the green will darken, lose its youthful glee, and become more passionate. Then, with the return of autumn, the leaves will turn color and fall. I will be reminded that death, too, is part of life.
So my view and the passing of the seasons are a portrayal of life itself. I see before me in miniature a mirror of my own life, with its beginning, middle, and end, written in resilient green.
May 15, 2020
Pretentious
In the “Speed Bump” comics strip in the Sunday, May 10, 2020 Washington Post, one character says to another, “I don’t know how you can call me ‘pretentious’ when you don’t even know the word derives from ‘pretentionem’ in medieval Latin.”
The joke is on me. It’s the kind of thing I might have said. It comes from my fascination with words as a result of having spent so much of my life as a linguist in seven different languages. I taught myself Italian and French as a child, studied Latin for four years in high school, then went on to study Vietnamese, Chinese, German, and Spanish. Meanwhile, I knew at age six that I was born to write and have been writing ever since. Because writing doesn’t pay the bills, I became a spy early in life, spent thirteen years on and off in Vietnam, escaped under fire when Saigon fell in 1975, then became involved in other adventures after 1975—all still classified so I can’t talk about them.
Through it all, I wrote. I retired from spydom more than twenty years ago and have been writing full-time ever since. Words are my life. I am more intrigued than ever by words and the delicate distinctions of meaning and inference among them. I struggle to refine my usage and choice of words to convey exactly the meaning and implication needed to shape the story I am telling.
As I scramble to find the underlying inference of words, I often go back to their origin. I trace their roots to Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, or French or occasionally other languages (e.g., “typhoon,” from Chinese for “big wind”). I struggle to determine the cultural hue of words and phrases to capture the connotation.
Does that make me pretentious? How could it when I know that “pretentious” derives from “pretentionem” in medieval Latin?
May 14, 2020
Email from Robert Reich, 10 May 2020 (3)
Continuing Robert Reich’s email:
Why is America so different from other advanced nations facing the same coronavirus threat? Why has everything gone so tragically wrong?
Some of it is due to Trump and his hapless and corrupt collection of grifters, buffoons, sycophants, lobbyists and relatives. But there are also deeper roots.
The coronavirus has been especially potent in the US because America is the only industrialized nation lacking universal healthcare. Many families have been reluctant to see doctors or check into emergency rooms for fear of racking up large bills.
America is also the only one of 22 advanced nations failing to give all workers some form of paid sick leave. As a result, many American workers have remained on the job when they should have been home.
Adding to this is the skimpiness of unemployment benefits in America – providing less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other advanced country.
American workplaces are also more dangerous. Even before Covid-19 ripped through meatpackers and warehouses, fatality rates were higher among American workers than European.
Even before the pandemic robbed Americans of their jobs and incomes, average wage growth in the US had lagged behind average wage growth in most other advanced countries. Since 1980, American workers’ share of total national income has declined more than in any other rich nation.
In other nations, unions have long pushed for safer working conditions and higher wages. But American workers are far less unionized than workers in other advanced economies. Only 6.4% of private-sector workers in America belong to a union, compared with more than 26% in Canada, 37% in Italy, 67% in Sweden, and 25% in Britain.
So who and what’s to blame for the worst avoidable loss of life in American history?
Partly, Donald Trump’s malfeasance.
But the calamity is also due to America’s longer-term failure to provide its people the basic support they need.
Stay Safe,
Robert Reich
May 13, 2020
Email from Robert Reich, 10 May 2020 (2)
Continuing the text from Robert Reich:
Epidemiologists estimate 90% of the deaths in the US from the first wave of Covid-19 might have been prevented had social distancing policies been put into effect two weeks earlier, on March 2nd.
No nation other than the US has left it to subordinate units of government – states and cities – to buy ventilators and personal protective equipment. In no other nation have such sub-governments been forced to bid against each other.
In no other nation have experts in public health and emergency preparedness been pushed aside and replaced by political cronies like Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in turn has been advised by Trump donors and Fox News celebrities.
In no other advanced nation has Covid-19 forced so many average citizens into poverty so quickly. The Urban Institute reports that more than 30% of American adults have had to reduce their spending on food.
Elsewhere around the world, governments are providing generous income support. Not in the US.
At best, Americans have received one-time checks for $1,200, about a week’s worth of rent, groceries and utilities. Few are collecting unemployment benefits because unemployment offices are overwhelmed with claims.
Congress’s “payroll protection program” has been a mess. Because funds have been distributed through financial institutions, banks have raked off money for themselves and rewarded their favored customers. Of the $350 billion originally intended for small businesses, $243 million has gone to large, publicly held companies.
Meanwhile, the treasury and the Fed are bailing out big corporations from the debts they accumulated in recent years to buy back their shares of stock.
More tomorrow.
May 12, 2020
Email from Robert Reich, 10 May 2020
On 10 May, I received an email from Robert Reich. It appraises the state of our country in May 2020. I will quote the entire email here in a series of posts because it is completely factual and offers entirely quantitative evidence for its conclusions. I invite reactions from readers.
Dear Tom,
No other nation has endured as much death from Covid-19 nor nearly as a high a death rate as has the United States.
And it is the only advanced nation where the death rate is still climbing. Three thousand deaths per day are anticipated by June 1st.
No other nation has loosened lockdowns and other social-distancing measures while deaths are increasing, as the US is now doing.
No other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US.
We now know Donald Trump and his administration were told by public health experts in mid-January that immediate action was required to stop the spread of Covid-19. But according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, “there was a lot of pushback.” Trump didn’t act until March 16th.
More tomorrow.
May 11, 2020
Radio Interview
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