There are some people who go thru life at about forty to fifty miles an hour. I don't. I have two speeds--80 and zero. On my zero days I don't want to be bothered. Generally, I won't answer the phone. I especially don't like to be called after say about five o'clock at night. But I have a friend who likes to just call and talk. So I'll say, "I gotta go." But does that stop the conversation--Never. Even on non-zero days I don't like to talk much on the phone except on rare occasions or if it's work related.
You know, I'm finally getting to the point in my life where I just give myself permission to have these days--zero days. My husband, who is usually NOT a particularly helpful person, is pretty good about getting into the driver's seat on those days. Because I'm not leaving the house. My mom asks, "do you need to go to a doctor?" and offers me money. My voice goes all mean and hard, no I am just tired and I don't need to have an excuse or offer explanations. See, some of us--that's the only way we're going to recharge, go all the way down. I don't understand what's so baffling about someone needing one day every week or so to just not do anything. You don't have to be sick. I don't have to be. It's not like it's great fun, but it's necessary. I have accepted that, but my mother doesn't. Then I'm mad and feeling guilty for being so nasty.
I didn't even get out of my PJs today. Instead I watched Dr. Z except when dealing with the two phone calls I got. My daughter and her chum from next door are on an old-movie kick and I almost rented Dr. Zhivago for them last night, but I knew it was long so I got Vertigo and His Girl Friday. They didn't get His Girl Friday, which is kind of a good thing. But Dr. Z was in the back of my mind because I had gone to see that movie Must Love Dogs, which was cute and had some very snappy dialogue. Anyway, in that movie the guy obsessively watched Dr. Zhivago, and so I wanted to see it again. There was so much I didn't remember. I remembered the music, the snow and the battle scene when we register what is going on by the reaction on Omar Sharif's face. How brilliant that was. Now, they'd have to show you every bone crushed and every piece of flesh gouged and they would do it in slow mo and they would linger on the shot of the child being pummelled to death by horse's hooves. But here we just saw the shocked staccato moves of Zhivago's face and it was enough. Enough.
Dr. Zhivago is what we wish all doctors were like, what we secretly believe it means to be a doctor--someone who has such a strong calling to heal that that is what he does no matter who it is who comes to him. We'd like them all to be like that, people with an innate sense of justice, people who are poets at heart--not golf-playing Lexus-driving HMO drones. I read about a doctor like this. He lived in Chechnya and wrote a book called The Oath. A mesmerizing book. Unforgettable really. And my friend T is married to a doctor out of that mold. He angrily related to her the story of a homeless man who was released from the hospital with an open wound on his foot that would have become gangrenous. The doctor went and found him and brought him back to the hospital and kept him there while the wound healed. How much easier to fix the wound than to later amputate his foot.
There was a program here for homeless people set up by a resident, and every week doctors volunteered time to help out. It wasn't an onerous task. The way it fell was that each doctor had to volunteer about twice a year. This year the program was halted because the doctors couldn't give up that time anymore.
The movie represented some interesting parallels to me. But this is supposed to be a zero day so I'll wait till some other time to go into them.
