Some thoughts about belonging

 A little departure here. Click away if you don't want a little meditation on aging. This post began May 17, 2026. Updates noted and dated...

Contrary to what you've maybe expected, the title up there was written first thing. I may get a little self-deprecating or a little self-appreciating. I have no idea. But this post is the result of some old retired man introspection and who knows? I may just delete it after I write it. 

Note: I just connected headphones to my streaming player and put on "Sonus Choir" to play while I write. Let's consider that the soundtrack to this post. My affection for this group is biased largely upon my beautiful and talented daughter's membership in it.

So, night before last, my wife noted in conversation in between one of our nightly journeys into entertainment media on the big flatscreen over our mantel (yes, this has been festering a few hours) that I have been cancelling memberships and appointments with healers over the past week, and that I have not enrolled in my art studio class with friend and mentor Charles Brindley for nearly half a year now. Well, 5 months. All valid.

Here are my thoughts:

Yes, it has daily approached the 76th anniversary of my birth, here where we now live and love, in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Yes, a recent x-ray indicates the cause of my current dominating local pain may well be a torn meniscus tendon in my right knee. There are a lot of pains one must bear as one ages, but maybe one of my biggest is reading or hearing about old people discussing their pains. I will say that anyone my age has at very least a few, and at an average many. Also, let's get this out of the way: Anyone my age, and likely a decade younger, or older, who claims they do not have thoughts about mortality and some moments of despair over that upcoming inevitable and closing-in-too-fast condition is either 1) lying, 2) minimizing, or 3) very very lucky or very very ignorant. Mortality thoughts are about common sense, and I am clearly aware that if I had a faith or subscribed to a religious belief those musings might be a bit relieved, assuaged, at least to some degree.

Well, I don't. Have either.

And the reason that I don't may be that all my life, since early childhood, I have been wary of belonging. 

There. Cat's out of the bag. Be it church, social media, military, professional organization, political community or office, choir, school administration, or workout group, that's my take: Nah. Thanks but no thanks. My work environments have all been so central to my identity, and those disappeared, evaporated, passed, upon my retirement May 27, 2022.

I LOVE the little community that Charles has built around art and artistry, and I always enjoyed being there and interacting with other humans in its group of them, but committing to actually continuing to be one of them is something I have, eventually and perhaps temporarily, shied away from. When that mystical human addresses a room as "artists" he means it, and the ongoing work and conversation with the members has been so natural and welcoming that being amongst them has been unfalteringly lovely. I have made friends. Why not keep going on a weekly basis? Why put visits to my incredible Tai Chi master at Osher Center, Vanderbilt Hospital, or my brilliant acupuncture therapist there, on hold? 

Perhaps the answer goes back to my infancy, when as a second child I was left in a playpen for hours at a time. A memory that sticks with me is peering through playpen bars at my passed out paternal grandmother, a lit cigarette still streaming smoke from between her fingers on a hand draped down from her drunken body on the sofa across the room in our little Cadillac Drive bungalow. Maybe it's the time I was enrolled in Sunday school as a 4th-5th grader when I was in 3rd grade and bullied because of my size, never to return. Maybe it's the abuse inflicted on me by older scouts in the hallway outside the community meeting room of the Belle Meade Methodist Church, when they held me stretched out on the floor while another slammed a packed fluorescent light fixture into my groin like a post-hole digger. Or the resulting retracted testicle hernia repair, without which I would not have fathered our two young creative miracles. Heck, who am I to say?

Different perspective: What formal and informal groups have I belonged to? Let's bullet this:

• Cub and Boy Scouts
• Explorer Scouts
• a high school fraternity, Sigma Phi Omega
• an apprentice program team for a regional theatre company
• school classrooms, both attending and teaching
• a church
• jobs and work communities, including a magazine staff, restaurant/bar staffs, and various and sundry school faculties
• musical bands, as singer, guitarist, and /or mandolinist
• an artist community
• community organizer, The International Society for Technology in Education

Okay, I have been a joiner. Maybe as much as many people have. I just love undermining the point I intended to make.

I guess I am overstating my rebelliousness. Still, many of the things I have been pausing and refraining from participating in developed in the first place when I consulted a new (to me) Nurse Practitioner at Vanderbilt via a videoconference. I was finally, after years of slowly growing swelling and pain in my feet and lower extremities, looking for some relief, and possible healing, of that condition. My nurse proved very good at suggesting things to try, and together we adopted a kind of shotgun/kitchen-sink  approach to the problem. Hence the referral to acupuncture and Tai Chi, as well as massage. 

I saw the suggested masseuse but once, cancelling further work because the friend to whom I have been going more or less monthly for a couple of years is almost always more responsive to my physical needs than the new one appeared to be. We switched our session focus to lymphatic and the now once again regularly scheduled treatment works on the problem helpfully. Also a factor: literally none of the new services were covered by my insurance. I grew weighted down by the recurring new costs. My chiropractor, whose services are covered, is also an accredited acupuncturist. He is also brilliant, I must add, and nothing my new needle magician did was appreciably different than what he has been doing on a monthly basis. I explored, I appraised, I returned to my mostly insured, some new, standbys. Done. 

Physical therapy at the acclaimed Dayani Center (Vanderbilt Hospital)? The first visit he prescribed expensive compression socks. The therapist was madly credentialed and clearly knowledgeable, and the insurance covered the bulk of that purchase of two pair. I was sent to a third party commercial store in Brentwood for further fitting and  payment of the sizable part not covered by insurance. 

I hate them. They are a fight to put on, another battle to take off, and they make my feet and legs feel, well, claustrophobic, if that makes any sense. They did certainly change the sensations in my feet (apparently attempting to support not just my mobility but the British saying, "A change is as good as a rest"); but at the end of the day after wearing them, after awkwardly and strenuously removing them, my feet feel more like overinflated balloons than they did before I wore them. 

What about the Tai Chi? Well, I think that it's simply on hold until I get diagnosis and repair of my knee issues. Lining up the MRI that is prescribed as a next step is oddly complicated, then a revisit to my Orthopedist is needed a week after that, so all of it is butting up against my plan to spend nearly two weeks in Alaska with my beautiful son in July. I should be able to get an MRI at a walk-in clinic, but no, and my Orthopedist is now primarily practicing in Hendersonville, a half hour trek through the life-threatening gauntlet of Briley Parkway and I-65 in this increasingly insane Nashville traffic. That's another change I may have to make. Ah, decisions, decisions.

Update: MRI complete. Results received. Tearing and associated degenerative tissue conditions confirmed. Well. Okay. I hit Hendersonville this afternoon, June 3 for a reconsult with my orthopedist. I fly to Alaska four weeks from the coming Sunday.

Meanwhile, I persist.

I spewed this out, and really I don't care if anyone reads it. I am wary, I suppose, of joining your community of understanding. But I thank you for it if you've made it this far, and I reassure you that I'm okay. I'm in my element, which is most often aloneness. And, weirdly, I am comfortable in it. I have one life partner I love and cherish, I have one friend and confidant with whom I interact a couple times a week, I have one Texas brother with whom I conversate roughly once a week; and I have a small nuclear family with their own lives, whom I respect and am delighted to celebrate on any day. I have Blogger, and Second Life, and my mandolin and uke and guitar, and I am blessed with a Great Pyrenees mix who is my closest confidant. I have my paints, my iphotography, my insanely overgrown back yard, and my home studio. Oh, and my art website, and I enjoy some degree of consciousness every day. I have a beautiful home. I have words. 

And yes, all shall be gone someday. 

But not today.

Lemon