Tonight I brought dinner to Jerry at the rehab place where he’s staying (Do you have any IDEA how badly some of our elders are fed in these places?). We watched an episode of HGTV (yes), and I cried when the man with five children whose wife had died sold his house so he could send the children to college.
Trap # 1: the word depression. It only confirms itself. At the moment, okay, instead I’ll say the atmosphere around me is blue-black, and seems like a bass cello; no, I’d say an oboe, except that I’d see Sonia the duck in Peter and the Wolf. So like me, smiling at the duck while feeling like, well, shit.
Depression is a worthy word, though: a sinking. As if gravity has a double-hold. It takes longer to do everything, and I’m clumsy because of these weights attached to my spirit. Okay, Jerry’s out of surgery, I got Wally-the-cat and me home, while the ambulance brought Jerry to rehab in Traverse City. He’s been there over a week now, due to come home Friday. He’s doing great, better than we would have imagined. Meanwhile, I have my six months’ oncology checkup on Friday. My poor oncologist. He does his best to save people, and what does he get for it? Fear. As if he were the Wolf in the aforementioned Prokokiev story, fangs dripping. 
I’m weary. There’s been so much strain around Jerry’s surgery, getting it planned, making it happen, getting to Ann Arbor, spending the week there, then home in the snow. Bringing him food Plus several secondary health things that have had to be dealt with, one being that I’m getting a steroid shot tomorrow for the pinched nerve (yes, that’s what it was) in my lumbar area. And it’s a week from Christmas.
Trap #2: trying to identify a reason or reasons. If I only hadn’t had to do this, or if only that hadn’t happened….Who can say? Who knows what if this, or what if that?
I mean for the Wobbly Bicycle to be kind of philosophical, universal, thoughtful, and all I’m doing is describing how I feel. I'm wondering WHEN Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass, Lowell--the poets that got stuck with the label "Confessional"-- actually started those poems, if they wrote anything in medias res. If they did, I'll bet they woke up the next day, wadded them up and started over, with better sense.
Shall I post this? I’ll probably regret it. What happens is, you're down and the mechanisms you usually use to present a face to the world collapse. So you either curl up in a corner to avoid exposure, or you say more, or different, from what you meant to.
However, Wally the Buddha cat says, “No writing is wasted.” He always says the right thing. And Sonia the duck says, "What the quack? You want a good story without tension and worry and sadness? Not happening." 