Memories, ironically, keep me going

WAMC won't be broken

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I had my right hip replaced three years ago, and as soon as I could walk on it, I realized the operation had made my right leg longer than my left.

I told the surgeon a couple of times, and when he finally checked, he found I was correct. The leg is somewhere between a quarter- and a half-inch too long.

He shrugged — it’s not as if he was going to do the surgery over — and I walked around on it for about three months, until, one fall day, I could not touch my right foot to the ground without screaming at the electric pain shooting up and down my leg.

My son and daughter-in-law took me to the ER, where, after a few hours, I got a mild steroid and not much else. The X-ray showed that my back, never in great shape, had been thrown out of whack by my suddenly unbalanced legs.

The next several months were hell. I was taking 16 Advil and 8 extra-strength Tylenol a day for the pain, and three gabapentin to make it through the night. I had to sleep sitting up. Getting up in the night to use the bathroom was such an agony of limping and groaning, it was almost funny.

But little by little, over the last three years, my back has gotten better. My hip still isn’t right, because with my back out, it missed the chance to heal properly after the surgery. But I wear an insert in my left sneaker — a low-tech solution to the mismatched legs issue — and I exercise.

Bella and I go for a walk with Ringo most days, although she wearies quickly now.

“Where are we going?” she asks, as we meander through downtown.

“We’re going to cross here and go into the parking lot, then down the alley to our car, then we’ll go to the coffee shop,” I say.

“Good,” she says.

As I have gradually recuperated, she has continued along the subtle downward slope of Alzheimer’s. No exercise can repair the damage done to her brain. No pill can stop the progression of the disease.

I’m happy I’m getting stronger and feeling better. I can be a better caregiver, for one thing.

But I feel terrible for her. The Hallmark version of the sweet, vague Alzheimer’s sufferer, who smiles when a favorite old song is played and whose worst moment is when she forgets the name of a loved one, is bunk.

Bella cries every morning now, messy, ugly, heartbreaking crying that continues for an hour. I hug her and pat her back and try to soothe her with platitudes.

“You’re a wonderful person, a wonderful wife and a wonderful mom. We love you,” I say.

“I’m a jerk. I’m a terrible person. No one likes me,” she says, using her shirt to wipe her eyes and nose.

I’ve been thinking about entropy, which I define as the tendency of everything to fall apart.

Since I’m at home most of the day, every day, I focus on the things around me — the plants that have to be watered, the dog and bunny who need to be fed and petted and cared for, the lawn and the flower gardens, the old house with its issues, the laundry and vacuuming and dishes and cooking, the bills that have to be paid.

And then there is me and Bella — eating, showering, brushing our teeth, taking walks, going out for coffee and sometimes lunch, putting clothes on and taking them off, brushing our hair, sitting together on the couch.

So much has to be done to keep our balance every day, and although that is true for everybody, we have Alzheimer’s on top of it, changing Bella’s reactions and my responses almost on a daily basis.

I know I can’t keep up. But I think how Bella was before this disease took over, how she jammed so much into each day, how she would get angry if I slept in on a weekend, because the hours were too valuable to waste. For her sake — for who she was — I keep trying.

Bella, at left, captivates in black velvet at the wedding of good friends of ours in Saranac Lake about 35 years ago.

ICE agents should wear monster masks

State Senator Patricia Fahy has introduced a bill to ban ICE agents from wearing masks and plainclothes while undertaking civil immigration enforcement in New York.

I put in a call to our state senator, Dan Stec, who lives right in Queensbury and whom I know a little bit personally — he once cornered me at a high school football game to talk my ear off about a column I wrote that made fun of his volubility — but neither he nor his spokesman called me back.

Like Elise Stefanik, I suppose, Dan Stec no longer believes he needs to talk to his constituents, as long as he’s paying obeisance to Donald Trump.

It’s young people we need to persuade, anyway, because they are the ones Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be trying to hire now that the agency is being flooded with money from the Republican budget bill.

It’s young people we need to remind that they are defined by what they choose to do. Since ICE agents are currently acting like monsters, it seems to me any other career would be preferable to that one.

WAMC isn’t giving an inch

On Friday, I was surprised to hear the crew from WAMC — Host Joe Donahue, station CEO Sarah Gilbert, Roundtable and Book Show Producer Sarah LaDuke and News Producer Ian Pickus — running an enthusiastic fundraiser.

“Didn’t they just do one of these?” I wondered.

Yes, they did. Just last month, they raised $1.25 million over 10 days. But they were doing a special one-day “rescission package” fundraiser on Friday because of the news that Republicans in Congress had passed deep cuts early Friday morning to public radio and television funding nationwide. WAMC would be losing half a million dollars.

“We have a $500,000 gap as a result of the cuts, which is 5% of our budget,” Donahue said.

So they went on air to see how much of the gap they could fill, and in six hours, they raised $200,000.

“We had volunteers, a lot of great guests. The audience was fantastic, they responded beautifully,” Donahue said.

“It was sad for us, but it made us quite buoyant,” he said. “They (the phones) started ringing at 9 and they didn’t stop.”

WAMC is a regional treasure, and it’s wonderful to see that thousands of listeners appreciate that.

No cuts to programming are anticipated, Donahue said.

I don’t want to minimize the harm the Trump team is doing, or overlook the implications of its effort to silence independent media voices, but it is possible that at least some of its clumsy bullying will backfire and end up strengthening platforms for intelligent, reasoned, fair, diverse and entertaining conversation and debate like WAMC.

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