Forgive Me This

Melancholy, Coleridge [argues], is more dignified than happiness. I suspect this is a sense that most people have – that joy is, at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped (link).

This is the sense of a certain type of person, I suspect, and not really common among a certain class of others.  There are many differences between people that are, to me, inexplicable.  But we'll get to that.  

I had a busy day.  I won't say it was productive, but it was full of actions.  I had an injection of hyuralonic acid gel in my right knee early in the morning.  It hurt.  The assistant took me to a room and in a minute returned with a silver tray holding what I assumed was lidocaine and what was certainly a syringe and needle full of the product to be injected.  I've had it before.  I wasn't nervous.  

Within minutes the doc came in.  

"So. . . it's been seven months since the last injection," he said.  "Does it help?"

"I wouldn't come back if it didn't," I said.  

He rubbed the lidocaine on the front of my knee.  What?  Every other time, he has done the injection from the side.  

"O.K.  A little pinch."

He pushed the needle in.  WTF?  Did he hit bone?  He pushed harder and I could feel it going deep, then the substance being injected.  It was everything I could do not to cry out.  

"There you go," he said.  

"You usually go in from the side of the knee," I said.  

"It doesn't matter where you go in as long as the gel gets into the joint.  If I push and the needle doesn't move, I know I'm hitting bone.  O.K.  I'll see you in a few months."

And he was gone.  I stood up.  My knee felt stiff and puffy.  I hoped it all went right.  I limped out to my car.  I was headed to the gym.  

First, though, I texted my dentist that my crown had cracked and part of the enamel was gone.  I was half way to the gym when I got a text.  

"come now."  

O.K.  Ten minutes later I was sitting in the dental chair.  The dentist came in and looked.  

"Did you put it back on?" he quizzed.  

"No. . . the crown didn't come off.  It must have been cracked.  I don't know, but part of the enamel came off."

He looked in my mouth again.

"Oh. . . I thought the crown had come off.  I saw that it had a crack, but I was hoping it would hold.  The metal is still in place."

"Can you do a filling or a veneer or something."

"No. . . it wouldn't hold.  It isn't worth it.  I wouldn't do anything," he said brusquely.  "It should be fine."

Bewildered, I walked to my car, my tongue exploring the broken crown.  WTF?  I am sure the dentist hates me.  

I determined two things.  First, I would get dental insurance.  Second, after I did, I would get a new dentist.  

At the gym, I limped from my car to the door.  My knee was stiff and swollen.  The doc had probably fucked up, I thought.  This hasn't been my day.  

The gym was all new.  They'd replaced equipment over the weekend.  People wandered around trying to figure out what different they would have to do.  I tried some of the new equipment.  It wasn't as good as what they replaced.  That, by and large, was the consensus.  

"What happened to your knee," one of the gymroids queried, pointing to the big bandaid.

"I just got an injection from the ortho."  

"Oh.  How does it feel?"

"It hurts."

"I would imagine."

"It usually doesn't."  

When I left the gym, it was past time for lunch.  Back home, I opened a can of sardines, put some crackers on a plate, and sliced up an apple.  

I looked at messages.  I dropped into an Epsom soak, then showered.  I looked at the clock.  Did I have time for tea?  I hurried, got my things together, and headed toward the cafe.  Halfway there, though, I thought I was being stupid.  I would have to hurry.  I had to take my mother to her therapy appointment.  It wasn't worth the effort, so I turned around and went back home.  I read for half an hour and then went to my mother's.  

The therapist was chatty.  

"What did you all do this weekend?" she asked.  

My mother looked into the distance trying to recall.  "Nothing," she said.

The therapist looked at me.  I, too, looked into the distance.  

"Oh.  I walked to the Art Festival on Saturday and Sunday."

"How was that?" 

What could I say?  The weather was nice.  It wasn't too crowded.  I got breakfast with the townies.  Everyone was drinking cocktails.  I ordered The Old Man Special Breakfast.  

I asked about her weekend.  Brisket smoked for 24 hours.  She showed me a phone pic of it.  I'm not a fan of brisket.  Too much fat.  

"Yea. . . my stomach didn't feel so good after that.  We have a big piece in the fridge, but I don't think I'll eat it.  The next day my husband's mother made hamburgers and her homemade sourdough buns.  I think I just need to eat salads for a few days."

I asked her if she wanted kids.

"Oh, sure," she said gleefully.  "My husband wants them last year.  He's ready.  He wants three.  I want four.  We both want one more than we grew up with."

"What?  Are you nuts?  Are you just having too much fun and thought, 'how can we turn this down a bit?'"

I went into my rant about dogs and kids at he art festival, misery loving company, etc.  She was looking at me with eyes a-popping.  

"You just went on a European vacation.  You have been partying, eating brisket, hamburgers.  You are having fun, doing what you want.  I don't get it.  What you really want to do is go to kids parties and soccer practice and talk about your children with other parents because nobody else is going to want to hear about how good little Sally is in dance class.  I don't get it."

I don't think I was making much of an impression on her, though, and I was certain at that moment she was a devout Christian and had done missionary work with her parents as a child.  Her husband was in nursing school, she said, and when he graduated. . . . 

I pictured the lives they aspired to and just went numb.  And now. . . to my point.  I'm sure she is a happier person than I am.  I have no doubt.  I do not doubt, either, that she will be happy and content as a mom schlepping kids to and fro, sharing family moments with her husband.  That's what people do, and I don't know if it is culturally inculcated in them or if there is a real biological desire. . . or if it is "at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped."  

I read a report of a study that asked parents of grown children if they had it all to do over again, would they have children.  The overwhelming response was an emphatic "no."  Not a 50/50 thing.  Not 60/40 or even 70/30.  It was overwhelming.  Kids grow up and move away from their parents.  They come to visit, maybe, a couple times a year.  They have the occasional phone calls.  Parents never mean to children what children mean to parents no matter how much they try to infuse themselves into their lives.  Children always talk about the faults of their parents.  There is a lot of blaming there.  

"Are you glad you had children?" the therapist asked my mother.  

"Oh, yes.  I wish I'd had two, but his father didn't want a second child."

"You're an only child?" the therapist asked.

"Sure.  That's why I'm so sweet.  Spoiled."

"Did you spoil him," she asked my mother.

"I don't think he's spoiled."

"Rotten," I said with a shitty grin.

"Aren't you glad she had you?" she asked, but it was more of a statement.  

"Are you kidding me?  No.  It is a life of toil and suffering punctuated, if we live right and get lucky, by moments of great happiness and pleasure.  But those things don't last, and in the end. . . ."

"But your mother is glad to have you."

"Sure she is.  I'm a man slave.  She's lucky."

My mother chuckled and shook her head.  Her friends don't have kids that do what I do.  I may piss and bitch and moan, but I am a noble motherfucker by and large.  

Duty bound. . . much to my chagrin.  

Last night, my knee felt worse.  It was hot.  "That can't be good," I thought.  I went to bed but was up an hour later.  My knee was throbbing, so I took some pain relievers.  

Knee and tooth and roof and rot. . . I'm trying to get things straight but they don't want to go.  Something stinky is living under my house again.  The phone is silent.  There is no knock at the door.  

That may not be bad, though.  The call, the knock. . . they don't usually bode well.  

The day is gray and wet.  What can I do that is productive now?  

Because it has some of the colouring of nobility, sadness is also, perhaps, more beautiful than happiness. Philip Larkin’s ‘Money’ (1973) ends:

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Larkin may not be the company most people wish to keep.  And so it goes.  I've read too much, perhaps.  I'm certain that the therapist reads only what is required. . . as so many people do.  

"You'll end up in therapy," I told the therapist, "and you will speak in therapist jargon to other people who undergo therapy.  Oh, you will say, my husband and I are working through some issues.  It is important, though. . . blah blah blah blah blah."

It's O.K. though.  My sweet and lovely melancholy has turned toward bitterness of late.  I may have become spiteful to anyone who (pretends to be) is happy.  Our souls are dark deep down.  

But what they want most of all is love.  

Yup.  My mother is lucky.  

I could use a little luck.