Hills – San Francisco

Getting steeper every year,

You stop at the top a little longer.

After you’ve caught your breath,

You keep watching.

Don’t know how long you’ll be here.

Sunday, April 15

Dear Jim,

There’s sure been a lot of wind lately. I’ve been inside all day. At least it’s nice not to wear shoes.

Last night my neighbor and I went to dinner. We hadn’t been in at least two weeks.

Instead of going to the Chinese place like we used to, we went to a Mexican place over where I lived for eleven years. It was the first time in the thirty-eight years that I’ve lived here that I went. I used to pass it all the time no matter where I lived.

I liked the food and I enjoyed the company of my friend, but I did not like being in my old neighborhood. Living there was the most unhappy period of my life. It aged me.

My friend was telling me how much he loves the houses in that neighborhood. They are beautiful – built in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s with a ton of trees on the street. He hopes he wins the lottery so he can buy one. I hope so too. I wonder if I’d see him again.

Remember your house? I didn’t like it or your neighborhood. I know you didn’t like your neighborhood. Did you like the house? I loved my house but didn’t like the neighborhood. Too suburban.

The important thing for me isn’t whether I live in a house or an apartment, but whether or not there is a lot of light, a lot of windows, especially on the south. I’m becoming more and more light deprived. Part of it is fluorescent lights, but an increasing part is that aging eyes receive 40% less light than the eyes of a young person.

I’m going to get a new tablet before winter. It will not have bad lighting built in like the one I have now. I’m also going to get a tall lamp with healthy bulbs.

One of the things I read is that you need healthy light coming down on you like the sun, not up to you like a desk lamp. And I don’t know if you can do this in an apartment, but there are tubes that can be hooked up to a device outside that will bring natural light over your work area.

I’m supposed to go to the eye doctor this month, but I’m thinking of changing doctors. I love the office though. It feels great to be in.

You know how the media talks about how depressed old people are in rest homes? One of the reasons is the fluorescent lights. Another is the bad light from all the TV’s and the third is the inability of old eyes to absorb natural light like they used to.

A long time ago I looked up lighting in rest homes. There was a guy who designed rest homes so that the rooms receive a lot of natural light and, I assume, use light bulbs that make rooms feel good to be in.

I will not be able to afford to live in such a place. I won’t be able to afford to live in even a gloomy rest home. If I did live in one of those lousy places with fluorescent lights and TV’s on all day, I would lose my mind. Remember the movie about the insane asylum where at the end the Indian breaks the window to escape from the place? That’s what I think I would do in a rest home.

I remember one time that you said ”Television is the killer of the soul.” I say television is a weapon parents and the staff in rest homes use to kill the souls of children and old people.

If I won the lottery like my neighbor hopes he does, I wouldn’t buy a house. I would make arrangements to move into one of those well-lit rest homes as soon as I turned sixty-five or seventy, whatever age I thought I would begin to need assistance. It would be great to be an old man in a place that feels good to be in, basking in the peaceful glow of natural light, listening to birds instead of television.

What we do to old people is horrible. What we’ve done to dad is terrible. Dad is defeated.

I feel defeated too. I have to force myself to pray. That’s scary.

I’ve heard on religious radio stations that faith is something you sometimes have to work at. Sometimes you have to ask God to keep you in faith. You have to keep praying even when you’ve lost your faith because eventually you will regain it.

I think dad has lost a lot of his faith. He hardly prays. What means the world to him I think is when we hang up he says, ”Be careful. I love you. God bless you.” He may have lost hope for himself, but he hopes everything works out for me.

Sometimes when I don’t feel like saying a prayer for dad, I’ll ask God to let him right into heaven when he dies. He just can’t believe what’s happened to himself.

There’s that priest from Miami I think I told you about. He has a radio show for two hours every night. At the end of the show, after he’s done listening to the troubles of some people and bantering with others, it’s prayer time.

A listener will call. The priest says, ”Por su doloroso pasión.” The caller says, ”Ten misericordia de nosotros y el mundo entero.”

They say it ten times. What reverence and humbleness. Do you think it’s beautiful? It reminds me of dad.

Love,

Dave

Friday, November 17

Dear Jim,

How are you? I´ve been weak since last Saturday. I stayed home for two days, then yesterday I got a helluva headache at work. It was so bad that when a customer asked me a difficult question, I went to get somebody else to answer it. I would have gotten sick if I had tried to help her.

My headache was an allergy headache. I took the wrong kind of painkiller after lunch. I wish I had taken something different. I almost didn´t make it until the end of the day.

You got a lot of headaches in high school. They had something to do with your glasses or needing glasses. When you returned from Seattle in your twenties, you got lots of headaches. I remember you refused to take aspirin.

All of us kids get lots of headaches. Sis I only gets them during allergy season. I used to get a lot of headaches like the one I had yesterday. One of the reasons I don´t get as many now is because I do not eat as much bread, cereal, soy milk, and pastries. I have more energy too.

Remember how your hands used to turn purple in the cold? I think that kept you out of Vietnam. I had really cold feet and hands for a long time, especially my feet, but in the last few weeks with the start of the cool season, they haven´t been as cold.

I think it has to do with eating more salt. I read a review of a book on salt in September. The review said that many people today do not eat enough salt, and that even more people eat too much sugar. It said that salt is essential and people should eat more. I knew I wasn´t eating properly, that I had to cut down on sugar, eat more protein, and increase the variety of foods I ate. So I went out and bought some classy salt.

Wow. It tasted great and I felt better. I felt lighter.

When the book about salt arrived for me at the library, I read it intensely. A lot of it was too hard to understand. But when I read the list of symptoms of possible salt deficiency, I felt good when I saw ¨cold appendages¨.

I´ll see how it goes the rest of the winter. I wonder if your hands were cold and purple because of a salt deficiency. I laugh thinking about your story of asking the guy in the mountains to go into your pocket to take out the car keys and open the door for you because your hands were so cold you could not feel.

I talked with dad today. He sounded really good and he felt really good. It is interesting to hear him struggle to be articulate. He´ll ask me what I ´ve been doing. I´ll say, ¨I just got back from the store. I wanted to go before it rains.¨ He will hesitate then say firmly, ¨You never know when a big storm will blow in.¨

I feel sorry for him. He also reminds me of myself and my struggle with speech.

I have been telling myself and others for years that I do not have enough people to talk with and that I desperately need to talk. When I go to work it is difficult to talk because, like I told you, most people are not interested in talking with me.

My talk at work is like the speech of a desperate man. I struggle to speak and sometimes I make no sense. I feel like I am an old man lost in the world he is no longer part of and that does not want to recognize him.

The other day I was working on a project with a guy. As we were finishing, a woman walks in and hears me sigh then say OK as I walked over to do something. She said, ¨People say ´OK´ a lot around here. Always talking to themselves.¨

Then two more people came into the room. She said, ¨I hear ´Allright´ a lot too.¨ I said ¨I say ´allright´ a lot.¨ Somebody laughed. ¨Yeah you do.¨ Then I gestured with my arm and fist – ¨Allright! Right on!¨ – and everybody laughed.

We bantered about more expressions from the 60´s and 70´s. I said, ¨My generation is easy to make fun of – ´Far out man!´¨

I don´t laugh much at work, but I did that day. I cut loose too – but that can be dangerous at work.

The problem at work is I need the people there to provide me with the conversation I do not have outside of work. It´s like people would rather give money to a successful man than a homeless man, so people would rather talk with somebody with a lot of friends than somebody with hardly any friends.

I´m worried about my mental health. I do not know what to do to have people to talk with like you and I used to talk, and the guy I used to play music with talked, and the way my friend who I met on the quad at Sac State talked, and the way I talked with some of my girl friends.

They say you´ve gotta grab the bull by the horns. Everything I have tried to do to embrace the world and meet people hasn´t worked.

I remember you telling me about a Scandanavian woman you met. She told you that friends in her country had long intimate conversations. You contrasted that with the horseshit relationships people have here.

I don´t move quickly. It would take a lot of time to make intimate friends, but I´m running out of time. Help me to think of something, and to have the courage to do it.

Love,

Dave