Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

Several years went by and I forgot about upper respiratory problems and sinus cavities. Then I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains, on exactly the same latitude as Nashville, Tennessee, and, like Nashville, situated in the middle of beautiful tree-covered hills.

  The first spring I lived in Fayetteville I thought I was catching recurrent colds from the other students in the writing program, where I was attempting to learn how to publish my poems and stories.

  I noted the “colds” but I didn’t treat them or worry about them. I was too entranced with the absolute beauty of watching trees and spring flowers turn the black and gray of winter into a fairyland. Redbuds, dogwoods, forsythia, oak, pine, hickory, cherry, apple, elm, maple, and locust trees were flowering and leafing in such elegant processions and with such perfect timing that I would walk about all day thinking of William Wordsworth and Robert Frost and not even trying to turn my joy into words.

  As much poetry as I was writing every day I could not begin to make poems out of the wonder of watching a real spring develop. I had been in New Orleans for eleven years where everything is always leafed and blossoming. In Fayetteville I was watching the tiniest of buds develop into leaves and bloom, the beginning buds so like the human hand that there is nothing else to say after you say that.

  “A flower of feathers or a winged branch,” Pedro Calderon de la Barca had written many centuries before. It was a description of a bird in flight but it worked for what I was watching on the trees.

  Besides the trees and flowers, the hyacinths, daffodils, jonquils, violets, dandelions, lilies of the valley, and tulips, there was the weather, banks of beautiful clouds, rainstorms, thunderstorms, threats of tornadoes. That spring had it all for a pilgrim who had been raised in the temperate zones and returned after long exile to the splendor of seasons. There were days of downpours that made every hill a waterfall and, for once in the Ozarks, no untimely frosts to kill the buds.

  When I left in late April to go back to New Orleans I packed my Rambler station wagon, then went out into the yard to have one last inspection of the hickory trees near the sidewalk. There was a delicate leafing slowly evolving on them. Tiny buds that turned into pale green hands, then darker green, then gold.

  I remember thinking, well, at least I might get rid of these endless colds, but I can’t bear to be gone when these bright green flowers turn into leaves.

  The following year I moved to Fayetteville for good. I kept a house in New Orleans for awhile but Fayetteville had become my home. It was the place where I liked to write, the place where the muse came to me and stayed with me and brought me blessings and brought me luck.

  It was six or seven years later before I gave in to the pleadings of my friends and went to a physician to see if, by some weird turn of fate, I could have “allergies.” I barely knew what the word meant. I thought it was some sort of weakness or shameful defect that could not possibly apply to me.

  Sixteen years later I am a full-fledged chronic sinus sufferer, proud to be a survivor of full-fledged allergic reactions to pollen, mold, dust, and every gorgeous tree and plant known to man. I take allergy shots. I inhale cortisone through my nose and suck it down into my lungs. I take Advair and Flonase and Zyrtec and, when the pollen count gets high enough, I take prednisone and, God forbid, Sudafed.

  I am in a bad mood when I ingest and inhale these medicines. Remember, I am an enormously healthy person who has never been sick in my life and I think some mistake has been made. Possibly, I have overlooked a variable, and, as soon as I find it, this will all be over.

  I have a young friend who likes to tell me that no matter how much I understand this illness, it will not make it go away. She wants me to accept these allergies as part of the inevitable tragic nature of “life in the body.” Sometimes I pretend to see the wisdom of her counsel, but deep down inside I know it is not true. I can conquer this aberration. After all I haven’t even tried Singulair yet. I like knowing I have Singulair waiting in the wings in case the star falls out during a performance.

  Meanwhile I know two things for certain. I will never stop adoring spring and its gifts and beauties. And I will never stop knowing that most of my life is lived with hope and promise and a clear head.

  A few months on Sudafed is a humbling experience but it is a small price to pay for flowering and blossoming and blooming.

  MARCH 26, 2007

  UPDATE, OCTOBER 16, 2010

  I have made a discovery about allergies that may be of use to other sufferers. In June of 2009 a young married couple I know went to a clinic in the Swiss Alps to be treated for Lyme disease. It is an alternative medicine clinic called Paracelsus.

  The day they got home from Switzerland they begged me to come over to their house and talk to them about what they had learned. They were glowing with good health and happiness. They felt they had made their first real assault on the disease that had been plaguing their lives for five years.

  The heart of the treatment was a detoxification diet which rids your body of primary allergies you developed as a child and are unaware of having. These primary allergies are a constant low-grade drain on the immune system and make things like allergies and asthma much worse.

  I took the book my friends had brought me and went home and went on the diet. It is easy to do. You remove all foods from your diet that have ever been known to cause allergies in anyone. What is left is a diet of steamed vegetables, vegetable soup, grapefruits, apples, pecans, cashews, broiled fish, salads, goat cheese, cashew butter on Spelt bread toast, eggs, and, especially, a lot of things to eat that I had not tasted in years. Avocado, baked potatoes, one piece of dark chocolate every day.

  I went on the three-week diet religiously. I had been suffering spring allergies so badly I could not work.

  In two days I began to feel like a different person. I lost five pounds without ever feeling hungry. My head cleared. I stopped taking allergy medicines, except for Astelin Nose Spray.

  I stayed on the crucial beginning diet for four weeks. Then I went on the maintenance diet which adds foods slowly and carefully.

  If my allergies get bad I go immediately back onto the beginning diet. This has worked wonders for my allergies and my energy levels and my general health.

  I learned from the diet that I am allergic to wheat bread and cereals, which have always been the main thing I like to eat. I had already eliminated dairy products from my diet.

  My allergies are not a problem for me anymore. I stopped eating everything that made them worse, especially things that contain gluten, a word I later learned.

  Allergies have many causes all mixed together. Perhaps my discovery will be of use to some of my readers. My editor thinks I should take this part out of this essay but if it stops one person from having to resort to Sudafed it’s worth it to me.

  The Joy of Swimming

  MY REVIVED LOVE OF THE AUSTRALIAN CRAWL BEGAN AS A LAST resort. A last resort is exactly that, “something to which or someone to whom one looks for help; a source of aid or refuge.”

  I am a short, redheaded Pisces, how fitting that my last resort should be water. All my life I have loved getting wet, wanted to wade or jump into any body of water, from bathtubs to lakes or rivers or cow ponds. I have viewed any floatable device as a way to save drowning people or go out deeper into water. (I took Red Cross life-saver lessons in my early teens.) I have wanted any boat I ever saw or read about, from Huckleberry Finn’s raft to fishing boats tied to the pier in front of my grandmother’s house. Later, I owned a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands. I never loved motorboats as they make too much noise. My relationship with water is quieter and more spiritual than that. Besides, in my youth most motors didn’t work most of the time. I liked paddles. You can count on a paddle.

  When I was four years old my father began to teach me to put my face down in the bath water and breathe out air. He was teaching me to swim all winter while we waited for spring. I have no fear of drowning because my parents were teaching m
e to swim and preaching water safety tips even before the Red Cross instructors took over.

  To this day if I walk up to a swimming pool the first thing I notice is the white lifesaving ring. It lifts my heart to see one anywhere.

  Is my love of water instinct or learned behavior? I think about that every morning when I open the door to the glass house which covers my outrageously expensive lap pool and walk around the edge to watch the light moving on the water. Then I climb down the ladder and begin to swim my fifty or sixty laps.

  We are drawn to water because we lived in it for millions of years before we climbed up on land and started compressing our spinal columns by walking. While swimming the spinal column stretches out and feels wonderful. It is compression of the lumbar spine that caused me to rediscover the joy of swimming and build a ridiculously expensive lap pool.

  In the summer of two thousand and eight, at the age of seventy-four, my lower back absolutely wasn’t going to let me run or walk long distances or do yoga or Pilates anymore. I had seen it coming. Several times, in the last fifteen years, I had looked out into my large, unused backyard and begun to make my plans. If worst came to worst I could always swim. I would build a long skinny lap pool and swim laps. Someday I might get so old that I couldn’t do anything, but not yet, not until I had tried every single thing that man’s imagination has made possible.

  In the meantime there were exercises I could do on machines at my health club. I could walk half a mile on good days. I could lift weights while lying on my back.

  I was searching for a neurosurgeon to operate on my back. I was getting injections from a pain management specialist. I was talking to a young chiropractor who takes care of the athletic teams at the university where I work. I was thinking as hard as I could. This was a problem to be solved and I could solve it.

  One morning in late June I took a friend to my health club. She is a beautiful woman who is struggling valiantly to care for her brave dying husband. I wanted to get her out of her house, to remind her to care for herself while she cared for him. “Bring a bathing suit,” I said. “There are two Olympic-sized saltwater pools at the club. We might try them out.”

  “Have you been in them?” she asked.

  “No, the water is too cold in the indoor pool and I’m never at the club at the right time to use the outdoor pool. I can’t get much sun anymore.”

  When we got to the club my friend scared me by putting too much weight on the machines she was trying, so I said, “Let’s go swimming. The water may be cold but we can try it.”

  “Let’s go,” she answered. “What is there to fear? If it’s too cold we’ll get in the sauna to warm up.”

  “Have you ever been in a saltwater pool?”

  “No, but I’ve been in the ocean. Not to mention the womb.”

  Fifteen minutes later Callie and I had on bathing suits and were climbing down a ladder into water that was heated to seventy-nine degrees, not hot enough for ladies our age but bearable. Callie is only sixty-five and is the kind of woman they don’t make anymore. She attended the same Episcopal boarding school that polished my mother’s perfect manners.

  “It’s cold,” she said. “We’d better start swimming.” She struck off down the seventy-five-foot lane with her perfectly coiffed head held out of water, a style of swimming that would break my neck.

  I lay down in the water and started doing the old Australian crawl my father taught me years ago. The first six or seven strokes were awkward, then it began to come back to me, all the years of coaching when my father dreamed I might grow up to swim the English Channel. “Elbows, Sister,” he would yell. “Use those legs.”

  I stretched out and began to swim faster. It felt wonderful. For the first time in many months I was exercising without pain. I was getting out of breath without having to pay for it with pain and numbness.

  I swam thirteen laps. Callie swam twenty, using the side stroke and the back stroke and her head-above-water crawl.

  Early the next morning I went back to the pool alone and swam twenty-two laps. By the end of the week I was swimming twenty-five. By the end of the month I was up to thirty.

  I had a goal. I had read in the newspaper that a neurosurgeon at Duke University had operated on Ted Kennedy’s brain. The Kennedy family had done my research for me. My publisher in Durham, North Carolina, found the neurosurgeon’s name for me and I called and he told me the name of a spinal surgeon on his staff. I flew to Durham, met the surgeon, and made plans to have a minimally invasive decompression of the lumbar spine in September.

  I was training for the surgery by swimming. I swam almost every day. My friend Callie, meanwhile, had hired a trainer and was lifting weights for exercise. She was not ready to trade her hairdo for endorphins. Even a saltwater pool has a certain amount of chlorine in the water.

  The pool I built is treated with Baquacil, but when I had to swim in pools treated with salt or chlorine I did it, just as I climbed down into the water no matter what the temperature as long as I had to do that.

  Being able to walk without pain is worth any price. The joy of moving through water, of getting out of breath, of keeping my blood pressure low, not to mention the Zen pleasures of being immersed in water, far outweigh a momentary discomfort in cool water.

  Swimming thirty laps a day was the only exercise I did during the months leading up to my surgery. When I went to the hospital for stress tests to see if I could stand the surgery I passed with flying colors. I was as strong as I had been when I was running six miles a day.

  While I was in Durham recuperating from the surgery at Duke the stock market fell two thousand points. I didn’t even call my stockbroker. I could walk without pain. It seemed irrelevant that I had lost half my retirement savings.

  When I got home from the surgery I called a pool construction company and ordered the pool. I went to the bank and borrowed money for the first time in my life. The pool company came into my yard and cut down four nice trees and tore up all my grass and started building. They built me a sixty-foot-long lap pool that is ten feet wide and covered by a steel-and-glass house.

  My hair has already been sacrificed so I cut it even shorter. All my life I have had shoulder-length hair. Now it became shorter and shorter. I love having short hair. It curls all over my head. It almost never has to be fixed or messed with. My students say it makes me look like a character in a Scott Fitzgerald novel. My cousins say it makes me look like my mother.

  Meanwhile my back is free from pain, my posture has improved, and my arms and shoulders look better than they have looked in years.

  There is something about swimming all alone in cool blue water that is pure Zen. I swim the Australian crawl, slowly at first, then faster and faster. I swim forty to sixty minutes every morning as the sun comes in the windows and makes wonderful patterns on the lining of the pool. Sometimes I take off my swimming suit and feel the water moving the muscles of my arms and legs. I pretend I’m Michael Phelps. I pretend I am a dolphin. I think about my father running along the edge of a pool coaching me. “Elbows, Sister. Let them lift themselves.”

  I listen to music while I swim. John Coltrane, Beethoven, Bach, the Gypsy Kings, Keith Jarrett, Louis Armstrong.

  When I was young I wanted to be the bravest, fastest girl in the world. Now I am the oldest person I know who was ever crazy enough to borrow money from a bank in the middle of an economic crisis.

  We swam for millions of years before we walked on land. We swam for nine months before we came out into the air and started screaming. No screaming in the water. No screaming in the beautiful little blue and white pool I built with borrowed money. I’m paying it back as fast as I can.

  AUGUST 27, 2009

  Today I paid off the last of the money I borrowed from the bank to build the swimming pool. The list of things I did without or gave up doing is long and interesting. I don’t miss any of them and probably won’t go back to buying, using, or doing them ever again.

  POSTSCRIPT: MAY 13,
2010

  It was a totally Zen experience to trade Chanel makeup for stuff I buy at the drugstore, to give up massages by treating my back to the long, hard swims in the pool, to stop going out to eat in crowded restaurants and learn to cook vegetables and make my own salads, to “shop my closets” now that the exercise I’m doing every day is keeping me from gaining weight. I don’t know if I can prove this but swimming is much better for the way my body looks than the long, hard miles I used to walk and run.

  This is just a partial list of how I managed to pay back the bank without feeling deprived. I felt empowered actually. I decided I was secretly related to the “bene Gesserit” women in the Dune books.

  Don’t dread jumping in the cold water. Just do it and start swimming. Don’t care how old your blouse is. Just iron it, put it on, and leave the house.

  I wonder if the mall misses me? I bet it does.

  Behaviorists, Freudians, Jungians, and Zen: A Short History of a Learning Curve

  I HAVE HAD MANY GREAT TEACHERS IN MY FORTUNATE LIFE. I had parents who loved me and were busy teaching me everything they knew from sunup to sundown. So maybe I give too much credit to things I learned after I left their care. Perhaps it all happened in childhood and the later lessons were just reminders of things I had already learned but didn’t pay attention to until I needed the information as an adult.

  I was in psychotherapy for many years. With a great Freudian in New Orleans and later with a Jungian Zen psychoanalyst in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Before those two great adventures I learned to quit drinking from a behaviorist. He was a distance runner who had given up surgery when he had detached retinas. His ways of being a psychiatrist were very close to the way I live my life. I was for many years a distance runner so, of course, we got along. He tried many behavioral tricks to talk me into quitting. The hypnosis failed. Both of us were too hyper for that to work. In the end he gave me a drug called Antabuse. If you drink while it is in your system you will get so sick you think you are dying. I didn’t take it for long, just long enough for me to learn to live in a world where everyone drank and there were parties every night without joining in the drinking. It showed me how horribly boring and dumb people become when they drink alcohol. So I quit going to the parties and very easily I never drank again.