Denver survival tip # 5,280

Take that, New York: We've got crazies here too.

Other than that, things are slow and serene here a mile above the sea, except that it is HOT. I find that I eat little these days; most of my caloric intake is of the liquid kind. Whatever I can get my hands on -- water, soda, smoothie -- if it is cold, I will take it. Most days (even hot ones) I enjoy warm water with lemon, but today I just haven't had the heart.

It occurred to me this morning, as I was watching a travel show about Macchu Picchu*, that I should talk a little about altitude sickness. (Maybe I have done this at some point. I've been so tired lately. Maybe my brain is leaking.) At any rate, the host was fighting the effects of altitude sickness, stopping and taking rests and drinking lots of water. Smart girl, because that is exactly what one should do when facing altitude sickness.
Altitude sickness is a reality here, too, certainly in the mountains but also (to a lesser extent) in Denver itself. When you come to visit our fair city, be sure to drink lots and lots of water. And just when you think you've had enough, have some more. You may find yourself getting tired more easily, or getting a lot of headaches. When that happens, sit down and take it easy. And ... wait for it ... have some water. If you don't heed your body's signals, you're likely to start throwing up. You don't want that. Double up again on the water if you plan to have much coffee or alcohol -- better still, until you know how your body handles the lack of air here, lay off altogether.
(A related aside: A few weeks ago, while my mother and I were both sick, one of my good friends here -- fit and athletic, not quite 30 -- was rushed to the ER because he appeared to be having a heart attack. He was blacking out, having pain on his left side, the whole bit. Turned out, he was dehydrated and had had too much coffee that day. And he's lived here for a while. Word to the wise, dear readers.)
All this, of course, makes the heat that much more thirstifying. Now I will leave you and get some more water.

*According to Wikipedia, Macchu Picchu is 7,970 feet above sea level. Obviously that is higher than Denver, but not higher than many places around here. It's nothing to live 8,500 or 10,000 feet above sea level just a half-hour or so from here. That's probably the elevation of most of the places where we take little day trips.

learning to see

Why do we always think that possessions will change us? Perhaps it is our evolutionary status as tool users -- the thing that distinguishes us from most animals, though not all, as we used to believe. I honestly think I thought when I bought a digital camera I would take it with me everywhere and learn to record all the extraordinary images that bombard me each day. That learning to take good photos was only a matter of knowing how to see, and I already knew that.

Instead, I take it with me only sometimes and the amazing images are strangely shy. They seem to go into hiding when I start to think, how would I shoot this? Usually I am sadly disappointed with how my pictures come out, though the nice thing about digital is you can just erase and forget.

I do rather like this picture, though. The giant women peers down at Port Authority and Eighth Avenue, seeming not to approve of the slice of early 21st-century New York she is looking at. I like all the parallel lines, and the late-day light.

Thursday I went to the floating pool. Though I had watched the progress of work being done on it ever since it arrived at the Brooklyn Heights waterfront, I had not thought of actually going. Public pools in New York I always imagine as being crowded, loud, dilapidated and generally unpleasant places. The floating pool was none of these things: It is spanking new, with a techo-industrial vibe at the entrance. Although there were the expected number of screaming children and frolicking teens, the fact that the pool was open to the air meant the sound traveled up and over the East River instead of bouncing. The two lanes reserved for lap swimming were positively serene. I left only slightly sunburned and in a strangely calm, amiable mood that lasted the whole rest of the day.

Now it is Saturday. Officer Timoshenko, 23, shot not a week ago, has died. In a city full of sad stories, this one struck everyone especially hard. Because he was so young and seemed so promising? The only son of parents who had moved here from Belarus so that he could have a better life in America? That said life bought the men who shot him only a few more days of freedom (which they spent hiding in the Poconos)? I don't know. It's all so sad. Where do you begin?

East Coast-West Coast rivalry

Maybe this is a good time to go over one of the other peculiarities of living here, after so many years of East Coast citizenhood: the brand-name changes. What you know as Kroger, we know as the far more comical King Soopers. Same store -- I still even use my old Kroger card, and they carry the Big K brands -- but a much sillier name. (My mother-in-law can't keep it straight. She calls it Super Bob. And when it annoys me, I call it King Stoopers.) You call that ice cream Edy's, but we call it Dreyer's (or "Breyer's with a 'D'" -- why would they pick a name so close to another brand?). And Hellmann's mayonnaise becomes Best Foods.

Why, I ask you? Why? Any clues? It's really not that big a deal to drive over the Mississippi. Heck, if you live in O'Fallon, Illinois and work in St. Louis, you do it every single day. I wonder if the citizens of O'Fallon compare Edy's and Dreyer's, looking for differences. The mind boggles.

the air up there

Robin's last post was fascinating. All these small things you never think about, about being so high above sea level! I think we have discussed in the past our shared childhood fascination with the high-altitude caveats on cake mixes.

I tried to think of a similar warning for people new to New York. The only thing I can think of is to be very careful about where you buy your milk in the summer. If you don't use it fast enough, it will go sour far sooner than you might expect. This is because of how groceries are delivered to stores here: sitting out on the hot pavement as they are unloaded from the truck is usually an essential part of the process. Hence, milk in the NY metro region has two "sell-by" dates on it: the New York City one being a few days earlier.

I always buy my milk now at the CVS around the corner. It seems weird, buying milk at a drugstore, but they have only a few dairy products for sale and I reason they can get them inside faster. So far it's worked fairly well. I have also become a big fan of the Parmalat shelf-stable milk since moving to New York. Just in case.

Advice for newcomers to Denver

When you open anything fresh from the store -- a bottle, an aluminum can, one of those cans/jars with foil or paper over the opening -- it's a good idea to point said vessel away from you. If it was packaged somewhere other than Denver, i.e. somewhere less than a mile from sea level, the change in pressure will cause the air inside to expand. Which means that when you open said vessel, it might just go, "Pop!" and empty some of its contents all over you.

Even those of us who have been here for a couple of years forget sometimes.

Time to change clothes.

The news from here

Kathleen has taken lovely photos, and I thank her for sharing. Ah, to be in New York in summer. With air conditioning.
Here in Denver it's 100 degrees in the shade; I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to escape it. Denver's great photo-ready feature is, of course, the mountains, which are hardly visible this time of year for the haze (Denver is in a valley, which makes us prone to ozone warnings and dirty air and such when it's hot). So for me, photos will probably have to wait until September, unless you want to see photos of my buzz cut. More on that later.

So, my near-death experience. Kathleen exaggerates. During my stay in North Carolina, I got sick. I suppose I had been sick for a while -- a few days before my symptoms began, my brother-in-law took my temperature on a lark (he's that kind of person) and it was 101. "I feel fine," I said when he looked at me askance. And I did. So I probably had been walking around with a fever for some time.
A few days later, when the fever was past 104, I no longer felt fine. My blood pressure couldn't regulate itself, pains began to settle in various areas of my body and made it difficult to move, and finally I broke out into a full-body rash. Needless to say, when the fever began I left North Carolina and high-tailed it back to my mother-in-law's house in Tennessee, where most of my kids were, because I didn't want to pass anything on to my mom with her compromised immune system. A bored-sounding doctor at the emergency room in Knoxville said I might have a systemic infection of some sort, and he prescribed antibiotics that I couldn't take while nursing. Stubborn old me said, "Let's wait it out another day," hoping it was a virus and I wouldn't need the medicine. I needed the medicine, and until the antibiotics kicked in I was drifting in and out of consciousness. My daughters made get-well cards and put them all over me. One of them gave me a foot rub, which I slept through but thanked her for later, and kept checking my temperature. My poor children. How scared they must have been.
I am much better now, and I am pleased to say that the antibiotics did the trick, so it probably was an infection. I am worried that everything I read indicates it could have been an autoimmune response to the infection (which probably occurred in the first place because my stress levels the past few months have been off the scale). I am seeing my doctor next week to try to get to the bottom of it.
And that's the end of that.

The one who REALLY had a near-death experience was my mother. She contracted pneumonia and was rushed to the hospital not long before I was sitting in the ER in Knoxville. I remember sitting there, thinking of me in the hospital and my mom in the hospital, thinking, "This is one of the top five worst days I've ever had." While I was barely conscious and scaring my children, my dad called and I'm pretty sure he said they didn't think my mother would make it. I don't remember much of the conversation, but when my husband called later I told him to call my father because there was news of some sort and it wasn't good. My husband drove in two days later, and together with the kids we went back to North Carolina for another week.
The next night, I sat in the hospital with my mother (since I figured I wasn't contagious) as she slept, barely breathing, pale and limp, and I thought every good and positive and healing thought I could. I prayed to every god I could think of, hoping one of them might be listening, and wished for her to make it back home. "She's not ready," I thought, "and I'm not ready for her to go. She wants to fight. Give her a chance to do it."
And the next day, she started eating again. She sat up and talked to visitors. She began to be able to breathe without her face mask. And two days later, her doctor was expressing his shock at how quickly she had bounced back. "Frankly, I didn't think this would be the case," he said.
I am not saying that prayer, or the power of positive thinking, or any of it had anything to do with it. But I sure don't think it hurt.
She is now doing well, back home although still a little weak. We set up a room for her downstairs, with a hospital bed and all the accoutrements she needs to be comfortable, and with physical therapy she'll get strong enough to make it up and down stairs again (we hope). She is upbeat and ready, once again, to take cancer on. That's my mom.

So, the buzz cut. Because we love my mom, all of us -- right down to my 8- and 9-year-old daughters -- have shaved our heads down to fuzz. This was something for me, as my hair was until a few days ago touching the small of my back. I cried as my husband cut the ponytail off, and I wasn't expecting to. All the things that hair has been through. It's barely been cut for three and a half years. It's seen the birth of two children. It's also seen the horrific tragedy that befell one of my best friends, the suicide of another, a cross-country move, money woes, my grandfather's death, and now my mom's illness. So much energy, both good and bad, gone from me. Afterward I felt a little drained. But now all I can think is all the new things my next head of hair holds for me.