panic of the 7's

I haven't stopped panicking since we returned from our Mardi Gras road trip late last Friday--since, tired and rumpled from hours on rain-soaked Routes 81 and 78, I couldn't resist the urge to pick out and read (among the Smoky and Blue Ridge mountain sized pile on the table) the letter from my health insurance company notifying me that I had been disenrolled, was not longer "eligible." Of course I read this a nanosecond before bed, pretended, with my newly revived sense of adventure, that it didn't matter: I am danger-proof, waterproof, recession-proof, panic-proof. But I awoke next morning at the ungodly hour of 8:00 with that familiar rat eating my gut from the inside out. I carry him in there like other people transport a small pet in a cage or screened carrier-consciously or unconsciously showing off the cute creature to fellow passengers or pedestrians, knowing in that unknowing way that it will draw attention to themselves. Only my rat doesn't feel cute at all. I respect him--like I respect his cousin the subway rat, but it's more accurate to say he instills a melodramatic fear, like the rat in that old 70's movie, Ben (strains of quivering Michael Jackson for effect here please).

I never outgrew the 70's, so this reference is more than appropriate. I never outgrew the 70's or being 7, as I was in '75--interesting since the month and day of my birth are 5-7, one of my prized offerings when my bag of cleverness to impress other starts to empty. A friend who is the step daughter (barely) of an iconic sci-fi writer, whose work, from the little I know (I hadn't even heard of him when I met her at a writers retreat), emerged most prominently in the 70's, told me seven is the number (ah, but is it the word?) of mysticism in I forget which religion. Buddhism maybe?

I forget a lot these days. Makes me wonder if I'm an early candidate for the mental worm holes that plague the elderly inmates at the nursing home I've begun to visit as a newly-minted hospice volunteer. I don't know what I'm doing there most of the time--sitting being a "friendly presence" (like Casper the Ghost?) the hospice volunteer coordinator assures me "makes a difference." I forget a lot but when I lean at my visitees bedsides and look attentively into their shrunken apple faces, I have a feeling of deja vu. I recognize something familiar. Perhaps they too remember a hole torn in a new birthday outfit. Mine was in the knee (I think right, but let's say left), of the new plaid polyester pants presented me on my 7th birthday after a skidding fall on the blacktop driveway during a chase or a game--my few little girl friends (most likely the children of relatives my mother invited) running down boy "perps" in the style of embryonic Charlie's Angels (a year before that show, mother-banned to my viewing, debuted), but more likely bionic woman Lindsey Wagner/Jamie Sommers (a character who shared that unisex first name with my father, and thereby took the edge off of it). But of course, the people I visit don't remember my 70's. It's the last thing they would give a crap about if they had the option. Still, I get the strong sense that to them, womanhood and manhood newly amorphous, a torn pants leg, a missing jacket, a waylaid scrap, wanting to go home to a place that is and always has been temporal, is more important than the sum of panics over 'what's next?' 'what do I do now?' 'who do I have to call to get this bullshit straightened out?' Someone may or may not be dealing with that--beyond of course the maintenance of their current incarceration. Otherwise, someone else feeds them, cleans them, nurses them, friendly visits them, None of these know what happens when they cross the blacktop driveway out into the street--torn knees be damned--and disappear down the block, around the corner, into uncharted neighborhoods we've all grown up around.

After each visit, I get into my car and drive.