Where I've Been Lately

I’ve been under the weather.

It’s hard to keep the days straight, but a week ago Saturday I expected to be in my shop and then could not get there because I had no plow-out at home until evening. I made a brief foray out into the world on Sunday before Monday dumped two feet of new snow. 

On Tuesday evening farmer/plow guy came with big tractor and monster snow blower, which allowed me to get out Wednesday to collect mail, purchase OTC relief for a nasty cold, and renew the license plate tab for my car, but since then I’ve stayed home, lying low, sleeping as much as possible. My laptop notified me that I spent 40% less time online in the past week than the week before. Duh! I'm sick! Leave me alone!

Here are a couple things I learned, hunches I followed up with online searches when finally I had the energy to pursue information again. If these tidbits keep one or two of my blog readers from being caught off-guard, it will be worth my mentioning them.

(1) A simple illness like a bad cold can bring on, trigger—mimic, if you prefer—depression. The scientific explanation has to do with cytokines and the body’s immune response, and my science nerd friends will want to follow up on the research in this area. For me, confirmation of my hunch was all-important to “bouncing back” (which I am doing in super-slow-motion), because at my lowest ebb I had no energy at all: no energy to care, to feel grateful, to feel hopeful, no energy to feel. And not feeling, not caring for or about anything but my own misery was worse than the misery itself. Everything dear and important seemed pointless. Life itself. Why go on?

Then on Saturday, the morning after the worst day, I woke up feeling, if not exactly “better,” at least not as completely terrible, and I cannot exaggerate the effect of that slight improvement. It was a re-entry into life! Still sick, coughing, and low on energy but able once again to smile when my phone's ping! announced a text from my special someone. Love was not an illusion, a sick joke played on me by a malevolent universe, and I was not dead to its wonder! I was reborn! Hallelujah!

(2) Coughing can cause [more] coughing. This was another hunch I had that proved out, and it’s a good reason to treat the symptom, in order to break the vicious cycle. 

I was still able to read — sometimes — off and on. 

At my worst, it was much more off than on, sleep too demanding to be denied. I would often wake from hours of sleep only to drag myself through a page or two before giving up, exhausted, to pull the covers over my head again. In better hours, though, the force of the story would pull me in and along, giving me as much of a reprieve from self-pity as I could hope to achieve. (Because self-pity was the absolutely most disgusting aspect of the whole thing!)

The Lincoln Reader, edited by Paul M. Angle, published in 1947, was one of that year's Book-of-the-Month Club selections. BOMC News, in announcing the choice, declared that while Angle’s book would have been impossible without all the previous books written about Lincoln (it borrows from many of them), it duplicated none of them. Angle’s selections are grouped according to the chronology of the subject’s life, beginning with “Kentucky Childhood” and proceeding through “Youth in Indiana,” “New Salem,” etc., all the way through Lincoln’s careers in law and politics, his presidency and the Civil War, to “Death—and a People’s Grief.” Let me quote from the BOMC News flier that accompanied the volume: 

[The book] is based on all the great biographies…. It draws from the intimate narratives of Nicolay and Hay, and from the priceless reminiscences of Herndon. It gets color and variety from the homely remarks of his contemporaries, many of them little known. It uses the newspaper reports of the political battles…. It includes off-the-record stories by a great many men and women who knew more than they would tell when Lincoln was alive. 

There are also sections in Lincoln’s own words, whether speeches given or letters written.

BOMC notes of distinguished Lincoln scholar Paul Angle that he “shepherds this flock of witnesses, and cuts them in and out like sheep in a moving picture…,” and as we proceed through the chapters we meet Lincoln from a variety of perspectives, both sympathetic and critical; from a distance, on state occasions, as well as in personal surroundings, alone or with his intimates, and the overall effect is that of living alongside him, in his times, from the first to last page of the book. 

Has there ever been a more American president than this gangly, rawboned, self-educated “Westerner”? For Kentucky and what we now call the Midwest were the West then (Michigan and beyond the Northwest), the country as raw as the man—not only the frontier but the capitol itself, Washington. This is how a member of the House of Representatives, Albert G. Biddle of Ohio’s Western Reserve, described the capitol when Lincoln arrived there in 1861:

 It was then as unattractive, straggling, sodden a town, wandering up and down the left bank of the yellow Potomac, as fancy can sketch. Pennsylvania Avenue, twelve rods wide, stretched drearily over the mile between the unfinished Capitol and the unfinished Treasury building on Fifteenth Street…. Illy paved with cobblestones, it was the only paved street of the town. The other streets, ... were long stretches of mud or deserts of dust and sand…. Not a sewer blessed the town, nor off of Pennsylvania Avenue was there a paved gutter. Each house had an open drain from its rear, out across the sidewalk. 

Squalid as were his surroundings, however, and informal as his manners could sometimes be, Lincoln’s presidential statements, within Cabinet meetings or to the public at large, were marked by thoughtfulness, principle, and dignity. His entire first term of office was passed in wartime, the first shots at Fort Sumter fired on April 12, scant weeks following the new president’s March 4, 1861, inauguration. Lincoln sought and carefully weighed advice from his Cabinet and his generals. He never thought he knew more than anyone else but accepted the fact that the ultimate decisions granted him in the Constitution were his responsibility. 

During his first inaugural address, Lincoln appealed to Americans’ sense of shared history and contiguous land, reminding them, “We are not enemies, but friends.” Then, perhaps more practically, “We must not be enemies.” On March 4, 1865, the war all but concluded (Lee would surrender to Grant on April 9) and his re-election accomplished, Lincoln’s inaugural address acknowledged the price suffered by four years of bloody conflict, a longer, greater, and more awful war than either side had anticipated. His final words that day are justly famous:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

Angle’s book, in giving me a fuller picture of Lincoln the man than I ever had before, also gave me a much clearer realization of his greatness.

And now, as I slowly come back to my own ever-so-modest role in the human race, still resting a lot between short bursts of housework (not really “bursts” at my current speed, to be honest), having so enjoyed The Mill on the Floss, I am reading another novel by George Eliot, Adam Bede. At the beginning of Book Two, the author addresses her readers directly to explain her reasons for choosing the characters she does. That they are not mythic heroes or villains, she readily acknowledges, but if she chose to present only such unrealistic figures, making it obvious where readers should admire and approve and where they should condemn and hate,

[W]hat will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry?—with your newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor?—with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing?—with your neighbor, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence?—nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes?

She continues, without breaking her paragraph as I have done here:

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are, …and it is these people—amongst whom your life is passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire—for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.

Content to tell her “simple story,” the author tells us, she dreads nothing but falsity, noting that “things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome” and that she would rather reconcile us to love each other despite our faults and flaws than to be indifferent or coldly prejudiced against one another. Another author would have portrayed the character Hetty, for example, very differently. Eliot’s portrait is kindly and leads us to be more generous in our estimation:

…Hetty’s was a spring-tide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence—the innocence of a young star-browed calf, for example, that, being inclined for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe steeple-chase over hedge and ditch, and only comes to a stand in the middle of a bog.

Yes, I think George Eliot may become one of my favorite writers.

Someone has been a spectacularly good girl!

You know who I’m talking about! Sunny Juliet has been an angel dog for her momma this past dreadful week! Who walks my dog for me while I’m sick? She walks herself! I bundle up in my barn coat and sit in the porch doorway while Sunny goes out and tends to her business. She may do a little wandering around the yard and exploring, but there have been no long walkabouts: no, she has stuck close to the house and has come back without calling, sometimes so quickly that I order her back to “Run around! Run, run, run!” before we go back indoors together. I could not have asked for an easier, more compliant, easy-going companion than Sunny has been during what has to have been an incredibly boring stretch of days for her. Good dog! I am so proud of her and grateful for her presence! Grateful, too, for all the offers of assistance and get-well wishes by text and other means that have come my way. Thank you all!!!