Ten-Finger Exercises

Outings with good outcomes

What unexpected treats this day has brought!

I had a delightful visit first thing this morning with a woman and her daughter who moved home to be her caregiver. That is not always a good thing, but I’ll leave that story till another time.

This pair is not especially close. In fact, the daughter tells me they do not get along at all; but the very modest home is immaculate, sparkling all the way to the chandelier. It is the house where the patient was born, and is filled with clocks and china brought by the patient’s mother from Germany around 1900. This is the fourth patient I’ve visited who was dying in the same house he or she was born in.

The daughter served her mother a meal that was attractive and balanced, with fresh fruit and vegetables, and she graciously brought me coffee, a first in all my patient visits. Last week each was critical of the other, even in each other’s presence. Today each praised the other, although one compliment was a little “left-handed,” as my mother used to say.

After some work at the office and a lunch of leftover stir-fry, I got some personal business taken care of and headed toward home. I had three calls yet to make, and they are the ones I least enjoy. All three are institutional settings: a nursing home, a group home for developmentally disabled, and a memory care center (dementia unit.) None of the interactions with patients was extraordinary in any way, but the trip to the nursing home was terrific. Two men, one on a steel guitar and the other an acoustic, were entertaining, and they were terrific. This was only the second time they had played together, the first time in this place. Residents who had previously shown hardly a glimmer of life clapped appreciatively. I had such a good time that I’m wondering who’s playing in the local bars tonight. That would pretty much be a first for us too, Bill and me, to go out to a bar to hear the music. I envy those of you with neighborhood pubs nearby.

Yesterday I took my hundred-mile drive to the hinterlands, the beautiful Palouse, to see my patients out yonder. There’s a bicycle race scheduled along that country road today, and I didn’t want to be navigating through that kind of traffic. As it was, there were pieces of road equipment that I don’t know the names of slowing traffic in one area, big, yellow monsters made by Caterpillar, with blades like snowplows but angled over to the side. They were cleaning out the ditches, vertically scraping the banks of the wheat fields that ended sometimes as high as eight feet above the road, and then cleaning up the resulting mud from the asphalt. Quite an undertaking.

Having rushed out of the house without my camera, again, (sigh,) I decided to let my eyes be my camera, trying to see everything with the wider lens of my peripheral vision as well. That’s the thing I keep trying to capture when I have my camera with me: the sense of being in these high, rolling hills that are anything but predictable. They are not spaced evenly or going in the same direction like the ripples in the sand at the edge of the sea, although this was a seabed at one time. Glaciers also acted on the geology; and the steep inclines have little regularity, either in my view from the road or the airplane.

The spring wheat is so intensely green that the sight is thrilling. Some fields have just been tilled, and the earth is rich and dark. The most unusual look is in the fields that have been threshed and seeded over, so that the tracks of the heavy machinery have made flatter rows in which the green wheat shows clearly. In between the wheel marks, the stubble shields the new growth, causing it to look chartreuse. So, in effect, those fields are striped. I hope I can get a picture of that next week.

Maybe it's strange to be so moved by scenery, especially without mountains or an ocean in view, but I was. As I thought about it while driving home, I tried to name my emotions. One of them was thankfulness. I momentarily felt sorry for people who don't believe in God, because they wouldn't have that feeling of gratefulness and awe; but then I thought, sure they do. Even if I did not believe in some Creator, some prime mover or force for good, I would feel grateful to be in that place at that time and to experience the wonder.

I wonder what you think about that.