Speaking for Sarah

as nap aficionados everywhere know, is being up late when you have to go to work early the next morning. At the time, though, it always seems worth it, that moment of burrowing into the couch and letting it all go.

Since I'm here, up late when I should be sleeping, I will say that my weekend was full of unexpectedly lovely stretches of time. Saturday afternoon I went to yoga, not cardio-yoga but a vinyasa yoga class at my gym that I like to go to when I can. I think that I must be feeling open to comfort wherever I can find it--or just open, maybe--because the yoga made me feel both sorrowful and serene, in turn. I felt aware of both my body and spirit stretching. During the relaxation time at the end I went away somewhere and didn't want to come back. But I did come back, went out into the day, which took me eventually to Barnes and Noble where I sat in the cafe and graded papers. I don't usually go there but to the Starbucks in my neighborhood, but at Starbucks there was not a seat to be had on a chilly autumn mid-afternoon--I guess everybody was jonesing for cappucino, comfy armchairs, and someplace to go with the kids. Barnes and Noble didn't look promising either at first, but I bought an apple juice, thinking portability if no table opened up, and then hovered strategically just outside the cafe browsing through the calendars and such. When I saw a woman start to pack up her backpack I casually but assertively made my move, scored the table, spread out my papers and pencils and texbooks. Periodically I had to retrench, make smaller, more compact piles, when someone would approach and ask to share the tiny table. I could see after awhile that that was the norm at this particular cafe--people were determined to sit down and not diffident about asking, as they sometimes are. I think because the yoga had left me in a kind of beatific mood, it all seemed very noble and admirable, the way people were sharing their tables. I overheard some interesting getting-acquainted conversations, although some people did preserve the invisible barrier across the middle of their tables. Unlike the Starbucks, which feels kind of like a cave, cozy enough at times, the B&N cafe is full of light, facing the big plate glass windows looking out on the street, so I could watch the parade of families and shoppers moving up and down the avenue, lots of kids in bright winter jackets. Oh, and then there was the couple and their friend with the adorable baby three tables away, big blond people talking some kind of Slavic language. In between all of my observations, I managed to grade a few papers. When I left at around 5:30 I decided that I would go to that Halloween party later after all and scrambled around to a few stores putting together my costume. The party was fun; I saw friends and danced like a maniac and didn't want it to end. Today I felt slowed down and content. Graded more papers, had brunch with my friend J., then walked over to the park with him to where our friends were playing volleyball. It was a meltingly lovely and warm fall day, much warmer than yesterday. Mindful of my injured finger (you didn't think I'd get through a whole post without mentioning it, did you?) and also my aching 47-year-old knees, I didn't play. Graded a few more papers and exchanged lazy commentary with whoever was sitting out at the moment--about my students' papers, the party last night, who was there, who wasn't, why weren't you there, we missed you....

I didn't want that time to end either.

When I got home from the park, at five or so, it was already dark. The nap was inevitable. The aftermath of the nap was facing the reality of Sunday evening, which entailed a somewhat scattered attempt to prepare for class tomorrow (I am being observed, no less) and anxiety about all the papers I didn't finish grading. And about other things. Once anxiety gets started, it does that, doesn't it, move all over the place...

But writing is good for anxiety. So is sleeping. Which I think it is time to do now.

Made it to Friday night somehow. Both my day job as an editor and my two-night-a-week job as a professor feel very intense right now. Fortunately there is cardio-yoga, a new class I went to on Tuesday night at a dance studio in my neighborhood. Forty-five minutes of dancey-aerobics and then 45 minutes of yoga to wind down. Only six of us in the class including the two teachers, one of whom, F., the owner of the studio, I've known for about, oh, 25 years. It's always a joyful thing being in a class with her because she is full of energy and funny and because she is my old friend. Although I must say my aerobic capabilities are not what they once were--I said to F., gasping for breath as we did some kind of polka-gallop across the floor, "Have I told you I'm 47?" She laughed.

After that romp the yoga was just calming and wonderful. During the relaxation part at the end, the teacher came around and rubbed each of our temples with lavender oil. A blissful moment indeed. Oh, before that she said, as we were lying there in the semi-darkness, "Let go of what just happened. Let go of what is about to happen." Very good advice, and it almost feels possible to take it after an hour and a half of cardio-yoga.

It's a splint, to keep the finger immobile for now until the doctor can see it again. The physical therapist said, "We just have to keep the finger quiet and see what happens." She made the splint by molding a piece of plastic around one side of my finger. I secure it with a piece of elastic bandaging. It's pretty comfortable. When I take it off the finger does seem less swollen and more straight, but, alas, not very bendable.

That's all for now. Pretty soon I'll resume blogging about something other than my finger.

Ok, wait, here's something else, a book recommendation: Just finished Medusa, the latest Aurelio Zen mystery by Michael Dibdin. The Zen mysteries take place in Italy, all different regions. You get atmosphere, history, all kinds of cranky ruminations from the Venetian protagonist-detective. And this one begins and ends with Zen happily in love. I feel very pleased about that and hope Dibdin writes another one soon.

More news from the pinky front for those who care. On the way home from work tonight, while waiting for a bus, I idly checked my phone messages at home from my cell phone. I didn't really expect to have any. When the machine told me there had been a message left in the middle of the afternoon, I expected it to be the Blockbuster computer voice telling me that the movies I rented for my brother a couple of weeks ago hadn't been returned yet. But no, it was a real voice, a male voice I didn't recognize. When I heard the words (or word?) "MRI," I realized it was the hand surgeon. I couldn't get all of the message but what I heard was that he had gotten the results of my MRI, and that there was tendon damage, and something about follow-up care. I listened to the message again at home, eagerly anticipating some wise advice. But when I heard the whole message, I was dismayed to learn that the doctor was going to be away for the next ten days and was instructing me to check in with him when he got back on October 27th to make sure I was getting "the proper follow-up care." But, I am already having physical therapy, at his referral. Did he forget about that? What does this mean? Do I go see the physical therapist tomorrow or not? Will the physical therapy damage my finger (which already seems much worse since I heard those words "tendon damage") even more? Whom do I trust? I am full of alarm and foreboding and regret (why did I let that unknown woman on the volleyball court yank my finger back into place anyway?).

I left messages for both the doctor and the physical therapist but since it was 8:00 already couldn't get hold of anyone. Well, there was a woman from the doctor's answering service who was refreshingly flustered and motherly and took a message that she said she'd leave for the secretary. ("Ok, let me make sure I got that. 'Doctor returned her call, with results. Her question: She started physical therapy last week, should she continue?' "). She also took all three of my phone numbers.

I know this is quite a cliffhanger so I will post with more news as I get it.

And of course I know everything will be fine.

So, it turns out my colleagues were not that far off the mark. One of the things I have to do for therapy is put my hand in a sinkful of hot water twice a day and try to flex the injured finger. I also have to wrap my finger in a length of elastic bandage twice a day to bring the swelling down. At the physical therapy office, they had this wonderful machine, which I wish I had at home. You put your hand into what feels like warm sand (actually it's ground-up cornhusks), the therapist flicks a switch, and the sand starts churning around while you do opening-and-closing-your-hand exercises. It was utterly soothing.

The whole experience was kind of fun--a roomful of adults of various ethnicities and walks of life siting around doing exercises with brightly colored toys and rubberbands, kind of like kindergarten. Most of the people there knew each other and were chatting away. The therapist was brisk and kind.

Physical therapy was pretty much the highlight of an uneventful and rainy weekend spent grading papers. I did make it to the gym once, did laundry, bought groceries, walked to the park where a few of my noninjured friends were playing volleyball in the dreamy grayness. I also went to the movies today and saw The Squid and the Whale, a film about the effects of divorce on a Park Slope (Brooklyn) family circa 1986, told mostly from the perspective of the two adolescent sons. It was painful at moments but also very funny and somehow, as the reviews said, forgiving. Oddly, I had just read pretty much in one sitting the new Nick Hornsby novel, How to Be Good, also about divorce. The couple in the novel live in a North London "postal code" whose inhabitants' intellectual and political leanings (pretensions?) seem to correspond roughly with those of the Park Slope population pictured in the movie. In the Hornsby novel, the couple are on the brink of divorce but don't do it. Their marriage, troubled to begin with, becomes even more complicated when the husband undergoes a conversion from angry, sarcastic bastard to an almost oppressively forgiving and saintly character. His behavior, in addition to infuriating his wife (from whose first-person perspective the story is told), makes her (and us) think about what lies behind liberal sentiments about helping others. Very funny and unsettling, even to the very end. And I found convincing the author's assumption of the narrative voice of a thoughtful woman trying to understand whether she should stay in her marriage and whether she is a "good" person and why she is so unhappy. I had a little trouble with the husband, whose conversion seemed too extreme and who ended up seeing like a caricature.

Back to grading papers. Or perhaps I will allow myself to watch the last 45 minutes of Medium, one of my guilty pleasures.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I visited a hand surgeon. My left pinky (or fifth digit, in hand-surgeon parlance) has not been the same ever since it got whacked by a volleyball on a mild August night nearly two months ago. I had been playing with some people at the net that's always up near the World Financial Center, right on the Hudson River. Wednesday nights from May to October there is a Battery Parks Conservancy employee there with a clipboard and a volleyball to organize things and referee the games, and that's when people like me, who love to play but are not necessarily of the very highest skill level, tend to play. (Other nights, I hear, belong to the serious, scary players.)

On this particular night, I continued playing long after I was too tired. It's always hard to leave, even as it's getting dark, because it's just so much fun and so much of a release and a break from regular life. And it's beautiful there, right by the river. So, it was getting dark, and I went for a ball someone else already had called, crashed into her and the ball at the same time, and felt the tip of my finger kind of go boing as it popped backwards out of place. I immediately staggered off the court, held up my finger, and started crying. Most of the people there took one look at it and averted their faces, but one brave woman volunteered to pull it back into place. "Do you want me to do it?" she said. I said yes. She said, "Just pull it straight?" I shrugged and said, "I guess so."

And she did it. Amazingly, I felt it snap back into place. She even helped me make a little splint out a pen that I had in my bag and a small plastic bag. (When I told this story to my "other" volleyball friends, whom I play with on Sundays in the park near where I live, one of the guys said knowingly, "Oh, she did the full McGyver on you.") I took a cab back to Brooklyn with the intention of going to the emergency room, but gave up that idea after I poked my head in and realized I'd have to wait for two hours. Instead, I stopped at Rite-Aid on the way home and bought a very attractive and shiny little blue splint. I saw my doctor two days later; she sent me for an x-ray which came up negative for fracture. She left me a message with the results of the x-ray, noting that if the finger didn't seem to be getting better I could or should go to the hand surgeon, because maybe it could be something with the tendons.

I didn't take the doctor's advice right away--I thought, airily, hand surgeon, that sounds like overkill, what's this about tendons, seems a little farfetched.

But after two months, the finger is still swollen, won't bend all the way, and, worst of all, is crooked. No, worst of all is that I've had to be very cautious about playing volleyball. I've played a couple of times, with the finger taped up to the finger next to it, but I kind of knew I shouldn't really be playing.

So yesterday I took myself to the hand surgeon, who was a very nice man. He asked me what happened, gently manipulated my finger, and then said a lot of things I didn't understand, about PIP joints and flexors and tendons. Or maybe I was just too panicked at that point to take it in. What I did hear clearly was, "You don't need surgery, but you need lots of physical therapy to get it back to where it was." Physical therapy--I couldn't believe it. For my pinky. Twice a week for six to eight weeks. Tomorrow, I'm having an MRI to make sure there are no tears in the muscle.

I asked the doctor if the finger would go back to looking something like it did before, and he said, yes, you'll get back there, but that joint will always have a tendency to swell.

So all in all I guess it's not so bad. I'm relieved that I don't have to have surgery and that my finger will presumably get better. Sad that for now I can't play volleyball (the doc made a point of saying that) but it's getting toward the end of the outdoor season anyway.

My colleagues at work think it's a gas that I'm having physical therapy for my finger. One person said, "Do they have a pool for your finger to swim in?" and someone else said, demonstrating, "Well, you could just put it in a glass of water and move it back and forth."

Tonight was the first night of Rosh Hoshanah, the Jewish new year. I went to services, something I don't do very often, even for the High Holidays. As I remarked in a previous post, I didn't grow up in an observant family, but in recent years have felt drawn at times to the world of the synagogue, of prayer and observance.

This is what I liked about the services tonight:

--the immediate sense of welcome and belonging I felt when I walked in to the crowded, brightly lit church (yes, this congregation meets in a church).

--the utterly beautiful music, the moments of silent meditation, the familiar sounds of the Hebrew prayers

--a passage that the rabbi read from a letter from a congregant who had recently lost his wife, and, when people asked him how he felt, could only describe himself as feeling raw and as "bearing witness."

What I didn't like:

--the rabbi's sermon was basically a plea for people to give thought to how they treat domestic workers that they hire. Well, it was more complicated than that--she made a lot of dramatic and valid points about race and gender. Abraham and Sarah and Hagar came into it, too. But it felt like a harangue at times, and for me, a single woman with a tiny apartment that I can barely afford and no children, the issue of hiring a domestic worker seems remote indeed.


In the end, I think I was unhappy because I wanted spiritual uplift or consolation, not political consciousness raising. And because, although I exchanged a few words with the people sitting on either side of me, one of whom was another single woman, leaving alone was hard.