The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic by Nora Gallagher

Author:Nora Gallagher [Gallagher, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-96231-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

I was in it. It had me.

I could drive, after practicing in the neighborhood. I drove more slowly and did not take the right periphery for granted. A new Whole Foods Market opened near our house, and I drove over to check it out. I was soothed by the 1960s music, by the bins of food, by the cheeses laid out to taste under plastic domes. I held on to the cart as if it were a walker and wandered around. I took to shopping two or three times a week—pretending to shop, that is, just to feel soothed by the music and the cartons of food. The world goes forward, I wrote in my journal. I do not.

One of my friends wrote to me that she and her husband were going to Italy. Another casually mentioned a week in New York. It didn’t even have to be Rome or New York. They spoke of going out to movies during the week, staying out late at restaurants, working on the weekends, doing a “bunch” of errands. They had so much energy. Their lives were so bizzy. They had somewhere to get to. My friends could not have known it, but for me what they were doing was … out of reach … way over there.

One day, as I was driving to Whole Foods for my biweekly vacation, I found my usual route blocked. Signs were up that the road would be closed intermittently for four months. A backhoe was positioned in the creek bed under the bridge I usually drove over. Later I walked to the park that the creek ran through and read the signs that said the creek restoration was now in full progress, as part of a larger project to help bring back steelhead trout to southern California. The backhoe was taking out the concrete that the Army Corps of Engineers had put in there in the 1940s to “prevent” floods. I had of course seen this creek many times in the twenty years we had lived near it. The concrete along its edges made it odd and unattractive. It always had bits of trash, plastic bags mainly, somewhere in its waters. It went dry in the summer, as do many of Southern California’s creeks, and then it was an alleyway in the city; people crossed it if they couldn’t figure out another way of getting from one side of the park to the other and dropped trash on the way. I didn’t have a whole lot of hope for this restoration, but I watched its progress. I waited.

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