Last Saturday, I made my first in-person appearance since the pandemic at Boston’s Boskone convention. It was brief but enjoyable. I moderated a panel on “Hopeful Futures in SF,” which is something I feel we need more of; and I moderated a panel on “Writing and Structuring Long Series,” which is something about which I feel more writers should finish what they start. Ahem. Both panels were lively, with good input from my fellow panelists. I also talked to a fellow writer who told me he’d made extensive use of my online writing guide when teaching writing to high school students. This totally made my day.
Tomorrow I’m off once more to Puerto Rico, because we need to get going again on The Ponce Chronicles, or something like that. Also, I miss my wife and my dog. One of my daughters is already there, and the other one just landed in Ecuador. Doesn’t anyone stay home anymore? I guess not. I’ll be back in touch when there’s something to report in the next episode of the hit webcast, The Ponce Chronicles. (Cue rousing theme by John Williams.)
Here’s another of my promised updates on my battle with pulmonary fibrosis. Now back in Boston (see below), I just had my first CT scan in a couple of years, and the new images show that my interstitial lung disease has progressed more or less the way my pulmonologists expected. This is a lot like, Sorry to report, but we’re continuing to spiral in toward the black hole. Still, according to my pulmo, she’s seen worse. My need for supplemental oxygen has doubled in the same time frame, which is not great news, either. I have a “new” 10L oxygen concentrator here at home now, as well as the actually new one I got in Puerto Rico. This thing is loud! It might be saving my life for now, but it’s killing my hearing and threatening my daughter with migraines at the same time. Looks a little like Robbie the Robot.
The new drug that promises to stop the progression of this damnable disease has just completed dual trials, with favorable results (according to my doc, who keeps her ear to the rails). There’s hope that it could be approved for use before too long. But that’s only if the Musk/Trump wrecking ball currently demolishing our government doesn’t disrupt the FDA’s drug approval process. (Bets, anyone?) That aside, in April, when I come back from Puerto Rico for the second time, I’ll be looking to get listed as a lung transplant candidate.
That’s all kind of a downer, isn’t it? Let’s see if I can end this on a more positive note: I have a whole lot of people praying for me. And I can still do all the push-ups and squats and lunges and weight-lifts I was doing before. I just need a little extra push in the atmo department. And ear muffs. What’s that? (Cupping hand to ear.) No, I can hear you just fine! It’s just… can you stop mumbling and speak up a little?
Upon arriving home from the tropics, this was the scene that greeted me. Brrrr.
We’ve been in Puerto Rico for the last week—Allysen a little longer than me—and it’s quite a change from the fitful winter weather of Boston. Here, it’s been warmer than usual for January, ranging up and down in the 80s. The house that Allysen’s parents built is as beautiful as ever, with about the usual number of things that need fixing. This time, though, I’m doing only minor fixing, and we have someone reliable (we hope) for the big stuff. Our friend Crystal has joined us again, taking a respite from fretting about the L.A. fires and worrying about the safety of her own home there. And…we brought our dog McDuff down with us! She seems to be really enjoying it. She gets much more time outdoors, and it really suits her.
For me, there was one big thing I couldn’t leave at home, and that was my need for extra oxygen, which has gotten more pronounced in recent months. I am just in the process of getting my O2 concentrator at home upgraded to a bigger, 10 LPM (liters per minute), machine, and I needed that here, too. My portables are enough to get by on for a while, but not enough to make life easy. It seemed to make sense just to buy a 10 LPM unit down here, and that I have done. But it took days of phone calls to accomplish the seemingly simple task of getting a prescription from the Brigham Lung Center. (Great docs, not a great system.) Also, the high cost of renting a car for months at a time finally drove us to buy a used car for the house. We now have a little 2018 Ford Eco Sport for getting around. Well used, but in good condition.
Yesterday we drove to Yauco to see “Yauchromatics,” an art project literally painted onto the houses of a neighborhood, quite lovely.
This evening we enjoyed a sunset dinner at the café at La Cruceta, the enormous cross at the top of the hill overlooking Ponce.
Tomorrow I fly back to Boston for some medical appointments, and will stay long enough to attend Boskone. Then I’ll come back to rejoin Allysen, McDuff, and various visitors at Casarboles. More to follow.
If you subscribe to this blog, you might have missed notifications for the last umpty-ump posts. In which case, you might have missed a whole run of The Ponce Chronicles, which I know you don’t want to miss out on. (Something was broken, but now it’s fixed–I think.) Here’s a good place to come into the story, if you want to catch up:
Crash. That’s what we did upon arriving home in Arlington this week. Despite our best efforts to get everything wrapped up, cleaned up, and tied up ahead of time this year, we were still up until 3 a.m. the night before our flight home, getting things squared away. But we got a ton done on the place, and left it in better shape than it’s been in many years. Here’s a shot of the ponds, partially filled with rocks.
Arriving home, we pretty much crashed and burned. Allysen got started on rabies shots, because of the dog bite, and I got started on an antibiotic because of a persistent ear infection. Even our daughter got to go to the docs for a toe infection. So for the last few days, a great deal of time has been spent with us apparently lifeless in front of the TV, staring unblinking at the flickering screen, empty pizza cartons strewn about the place. We are hoping someone will come along and water us and bring us back to life, like a house plant that’s been ignored for too many weeks.
We’ll leave you with this idyllic seashore memory, from Rincón.
I said I would not be doing major repair work on this trip. But that was then. The contractors who did some of the heavy work did a shoddy job, and there was no one else to finish the work, and it needed to be done. So a lot of things have been getting fixed, spaced out over time. By me, Allysen, and our friends.
The paneling in this bedroom used to be falling off the wall. It’s not anymore.
The deck! We got the deck painted, after some badly needed repairs! Mark helped me with this formidable job.
The koi ponds are getting filled in. It’s not something we wanted to do, because they are beautiful. But they were also a hazard to anyone here with small children. And they were breeding mosquitos. I tried to drain them on a previous trip, but failed. So we’re filling them in with rocks from the back forty, and hope in time to make the space a sunken garden. Allysen and Misty have been carrying buckets of rocks from the back forty, to fill in the ex-ponds.
The car! I backed the rental car over some rocks too high for its low-slung profile, and tore loose a panel underneath that covers the oil pan and other things. I was in the pits, because we’d declined the insurance coverage in favor of other coverage options, but it seemed unlikely they would cover this, at least not without enormous hassle. I was dreading the time lost, and the cost. Then a miracle occurred. The guy who came to fix the dryer told us about a body shop down near the port, where he was sure they would take care of us. I was skeptical, but we went anyway. The nicest mechanic in Ponce brought it in right away, jacked it up and crawled under it, and fixed it for us on the spot. No charge. Just a totally unexpected act of kindness from a complete stranger. And a big weight off my shoulders.
Another day found Mark up on the roof with me and some tubes of silicone, looking to plug leaks around various skylights. There was a lot of MacGyver’ing involved, especially around the creaky wooden structure of one big skylight. Did we succeed? Only a big rainstorm will tell us for sure!
Yesterday I painted the bridge over the ex-ponds.
Then I got on a rickety step ladder with a drill and a bunch of screws, and I set about to make these ancient sliding doors not feel as if they will fall down at the first gust of wind. Mostly screwing them in place, as the cost of proper replacement is prohibitive, and anyway, no one seems to want the job of doing it. Well, I have done it.
I concluded by resting on my laurels and waiting for Allysen to return from Home Depot, before going out for a hard-earned dinner of ceviche at Sabor y Rumba.
This one is heartbreaking, and if you don’t want to read it, I won’t blame you. But it is a part of life here, and thus a part of the chronicles. I wrote about the street puppies earlier, which were already tearing at our heart strings. We buried one of them after returning from Rincón. It had been hit by a car right in front of our driveway—and just left there, probably by someone speeding up to the abandoned hotel lot above us. That was hard enough.
But two days ago, one of them got caught in our driveway gate while it was operating. We took it to the vet clinic at PetSmart, where x-rays showed a broken hip. Ultimately, we decided that the kindest thing we could do for her was to put her down. That doubly broke our hearts. She was a sweet little critter. The doctor was very kind, and we stayed with her to the end. She needed a name to be seen by the clinic, so Allysen called her Satita—little Sato (Puerto Rican mutt). After that, we took Allysen to the ER, to be seen for the bite that the terrified puppy had given her. What a lousy end to a good week.
Our hearts ache for both of them, but also for the lives of the rest as street dogs here on the hill, and indeed all over.
Edit: Report has it that a neighbor has adopted one of the puppies, so that’s good news.
Mark and Misty are friends from our church in Cambridge, whom we had not seen in at least 25 years, maybe 30, since they moved to Texas. They came to visit and help out. Man, did they help out! But more importantly, it was really good to reconnect with them and get to know them all over again. Misty was very fond of my rum punches. Here’s a picture of us at Vistas Restaurant, close to sunset.
They are super into birding, and they photographed (and showed us) lots of interesting birds right here, near and around our property. That bird that we thought was some kind of owl? A white-winged dove. (Wait, did I get that right? Mark, correct me if I got it wrong.)
Here we all are, at Casarboles.
They left today, headed to see some other friends on the island, and then to go spend several days at Vieques, which we have never been to and which sounds beautiful! We are envious.
I love the smell of burning mosquitos in the morning. The zap racket is the greatest invention since the wheel! The snap of a mosquito being electrocuted is the best.
Yeah, we have a lot of mosquitos here on the hill, but we’re doing our best to reduce their numbers.
Oddities are always fun, and we found a few in Rincón. On the way into town, we passed these humongous gears in a field by the side of the road. We don’t know what they are, or what they’re from. They seem to have been placed there as a sculpture. A truck parked nearby had the word “crane” on it, and that got us wondering if these were taken from some old, enormous crane. The big one was probably 15-20 feet high. Edit: I later learned that these were left over from now-defunct sugar cane operations.
The second was botanical. It was a tree right next to our hotel balcony. It had a very odd trunk, splitting into multiple, curving sections just above the ground. Rather alien-plantish, actually. The thick, smooth branches appeared to be bare when we arrived, and also when we headed out for dinner. When we got back, it was stunningly transformed—filled with beautiful magenta-pink flowers, with very fine filaments. The next morning, most of the flowers were on the ground. The second evening, the scene was repeated.
An internet search revealed it to be a Pseudobombax ellipticum, also called a shaving brush tree, or a Dr. Seuss tree. Proof that nature has a sense of humor?
