Cat Burglar Therapy

And now, as John Cleese, aka Monty Python used to say, for something completely different: Cat Burglar Therapy.

Back decades ago when I was firmly convinced that my future lay amidst adoring throngs along Broadway, I paid a lot more attention to choreography. Even back then in high school nothing would bring down the director’s wrath more quickly than an actor standing woodenly, gazing sheepishly out past the footlights with no idea where they were going next. Somebody had neglected “blocking” which is the fine art of moving actors around a stage set in a manner that not only seemed natural, but also enhanced the visual appeal of the performance.

Alright, now take a couple of conceptual leaps with me now.  If you have had the time to read back a few posts you know that soft socks, polished hardwood floors and an ill-timed late night call to the BR tossed me on my butt, resulting in a compression fracture in that same butt area. 

  

OK, leap number two, in addition to wearing a back brace designed by the Marquis d’Sade and doing exercises under the tutelage of some of his disciples, I am catching up on my ongoing mystery novels binge. Hey, there has to be a silver lining somewhere.

OK, leap number three. In the course of this reading jag I have become reacquainted with two characters.  Actually two versions of the same character who play on different teams. One is the cat burglar whom we often encounter slipping in and out of the shadows surrounding a posh mansion in Bel Air or the Hamptons or Mayfair. And, second, our cat burglar is being cautiously shadowed by an equally mysterious figure dressed all in black. Depending upon the narrative one is the protagonist and the other the antagonist. It is not always clear which is which.  But that is not the point.What is important is the manner in which they move about the environment through which we follow them. They glide, moving silently, dark shadows moving with infinite grace, lit perhaps only by the uneven glow of a cloud-streaked moon.

And now leap number four which hopefully brings us full circle and home to healing.  A realization I came to today, while swinging a weighted ankle back and forth, is that a vital objective in my physical therapy is to rewire my brain and the various appendages it controls. Maybe re-habituate or reacquaint are better words, as the object is to reacquaint the brain with all the un- or subconscious actions it controls.

And to me that means “blocking.”

The idea is to “block” the major pathways in your life, similar, according to some things I have read, to the process blind folks go through. X number of steps from the bed to the BR, Y to front door, etc. But in cat burglar therapy the objective is not simply to get from A to B, but rather to “cat burglar” your way from A to B,C,D, etc., until you can retrain your brain to once more guide you gracefully through your world.

I have run this idea past both my physical and occupational therapist (the difference between which I have yet to discern) and both said, “Hmm. That’s interesting. I never thought of it that way.” Neither seemed to dismiss it out of hand. So I will continue to play this little head game as I progress through my therapy.

But please heed this important word of warning. Remember as you seek to move cat burglar-like, gracefully from place to place I AM IN THERAPY BECAUSE A FALL IN SMOOTH SOCKS ON SLICK FLOORS CAUSED THE FALL AND INJURY THAT MADE THE THERAPY NECESSARY. SO WEAR SHOES WITH TACKY SOLES - GYM SHOES OR SOMETHING SIMILAR - LIKE THOSE HOSPITAL SOCKS WITH GUMMY DOTS ON THE SOLES. PICK YOUR FEET UP AND PUT THEM DOWN CAREFULLY.   We may all enjoy watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers move gracefully across our various screens, but we aren’t there yet!

Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset

Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset

This image need a bit of explanation:

First, a few years before Dad died, so he must have been late 90s, Christine and I took him over to Long Grove, a little village 45 miles or so northwest of Chicago that, at the time featured a couple of nice art galleries. We were walking through one, where patrons were murmuring comments among themselves, when we heard Dad remark, clearly and from across the room, “I wouldn’t hang that in my toilet!”

In his defense, age and fading filters aside, he shared the notion with many of us who spent our lives lecturing to rooms full of college students, that he could say whatever he wanted whenever, and however, he wanted. But we scurried over, decided it was time for lunch and beat a hopefully graceful retreat.

The object of his assessment was, admittedly, a rather garish abstract and my reaction would have been along the same lines, but more acoustically restrained. Perhaps more accurately, neither of us understood what the artist was attempting to convey.

Which leads me to the second part of my explanation of today’s image. I get daily posts from a website called Artsy. It is an online gallery which lets me know when I can bid on an Andrew Wyeth or a Hudson School piece for 5 or 6 figures, as I listed those among my “preferences.” But they also show, seemingly randomly, other images - images that call my father’s Long Grove review to mind.

I have no idea how they select those additional images, but I try to remember my own, more gentle artist-centric assessment - I just didn’t understand what the artist was trying to communicate. Which for some reason got me thinking about the images that parents lovingly display on refrigerator doors around the world. Works of their young artists, the communicative intent of which was no doubt explained and is now shared among the whole family.

OK, now here is the leap of faith we have to agree to regarding the current image. “What,” I asked myself, “would I draw, or perhaps better, would have drawn, when I was six or seven?” A naive version of the images I currently labor over? And do those images still exist somewhere down some dusty pathway, in some neglected corner of my cortex? So I opened my trusty, but also sadly neglected, Strathmore 9 by 12 inch sketch pad and a simple set of markers. And a few days later out jumped Inner Child #1: Roses at Sunset.  I have no idea if there will be a #2 or #3. We’ll have to see what the kid has to say.

Patterns and Parallels

 Patterns and Parallels

Removing the structure of a “normal job,” as retirement does, effects your life in a variety of ways, some of them rather unexpected. Among the most surprising, for me anyhow, is stumbling across behavioral patterns from my childhood, long neglected but now rediscovered like an old pair of shoes behind a bucket out in the garage, still functional, perhaps even the right size, but somehow just forgotten. 

These patterns were some that probably made me seem a bit odd to my peers in junior high school, perceptions to which I remained blithely unaware. Two cultural realities enabled these particular patterns. First, I lived close enough to school to ride my bike to school, and second, educational policies were still sufficiently rudimentary to permit me to ride home for lunch. It was what awaited me there at home that might well have raised eyebrows amid our version of The Harper Valley PTA.

No, nothing so obviously titillating as those revealed in Jeannie C Riley’s 1968 hit, but something which, on deeper examination could be seen as culturally more insidious - The World Book Encyclopedia! It was all there from aardvark to zyzzyza, untouched, unconsidered, and certainly unapproved by the local school board. You could easily slide straight from transportation to transgendered on the same page! Not that my editions from the 1950s would have contained “transgendered.” And I obviously exaggerate for editorial effect. In truth what drove me to the encyclopedia was simple curiosity. I would select a volume at random and with an equal sense of freedom, dive into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and begin to read.

It was, I believe, those random readings that opened my mind to the idea that there were no boundaries between ideas. That each little lunchtime ramble could connect in someway to those that had preceded it and those yet to come. Perhaps had some “lesson plan” dictated that I start with aardvark and proceed in some orderly manner to zyzzyza I would have allowed that process to rein in my more flamboyant curiosity. Fortunately my mother was most likely reading her own novel, or was busy putting the ironing into the refrigerator - another story for another time. So I was free to construct my own amorphous notion of the ways in which structure and pattern found their way in existence.

Years later an equally intellectually liberated woman gave our young daughters an entire set of The Encyclopdia Britanica. We had many friends who would gaze at the impressive tomes and remark upon the seeming inappropriateness of such a gift for young girls. I would simply smile and and comment on the weather - assuming we were having some.