Turn, Turn, Turn

This year.

The trains stopped running through the Gunnison Valley well over a half-century ago, but for me, there’s been a freight train barreling through, and it’s taken everything I have to hang on.

This year actually started in April 2023, when Lynn fell at work and broke the top part of her femur. They didn’t like the way her lungs sounded while she was in the hospital, so while she was waiting for leg surgery they took x-rays and CT scans, the second “to see if the cancer has spread to her colon.” And then the hospital’s computer crapped out for two days, so that was left hanging out there in the air without explanation far longer than it should have been.

No, no cancer in her colon; yes, something amiss in her lungs, but now, after at least 10 doctors over three hospital systems, three ever-more invasive biopsies, an interminable wait for results of two months in which medical types kept saying, “You just need to wait 10 more days” as the specimen moved from Colorado to perhaps Mayo and then Stanford, two infusions of a drug that stripped her immune system so thoroughly that she spent three and a half months coughing and feeling puny with at least three discrete respiratory infections plus an intestinal bacterial infection thrown in for fun . . . well, no one can yet tell us what the nodules in her lungs are. But they don’t appear to be an imminent threat that could be spreading to her colon anytime soon.

Sometime during this protracted process, Kara, my colleague of nearly 20 years and my business partner for the last eight, decided that her own life’s twists and turns were turning in a new direction, and it was time to leave the screen printing business. Halloween was her last day, and yesterday I should have been at work shepherding in our new era at Pat’s.

But I wasn’t, because I sat instead on the futon at home with a dying cat. “Little” Ki’o, all 15 pounds of him, reached the end of his life’s journey. He was 16 years and eight months old, was an uncontrolled diabetic for at least a year before we brought him home from the animal shelter over a decade ago, and he has had a full, happy life filled with food, snuggles, and whatever relationship it was he had with Marrakesh, whom he liked to climb on top of and start gumming his head. Which the 21-pound Marrakesh sat perfectly still for.

Ki’o’s body had been failing him for much of this year, although it was not until late Oct. 31 that he was literally left with no legs to stand on — they all gave out under him. There have been numerous visits with two different home veterinarians who have helped us give him a life long beyond what we could have expected or even hoped for. They both arrived yesterday and helped immensely with his peaceful departure.

So it was, and still is, a sad day, and apparently the only time I write is when it’s a sad day, but Life feels writ large all on its own this year, with spare time absorbed by doctors, veterinarians and accountants.

My vision for Pat’s had been that I would ease slowly out of the picture, turning it over to Kara who was already handling the majority of running the company. I was well on my planned path to indulgent idleness (although in my head I envisioned cleaning up my life here at home, sorting this pile and that until I put those Swedish death cleaners to shame).

Plans change, and I can hardly fault Kara, who has put in all the work of dealing with those customers who want something yesterday but then submit their order two weeks later. The pandemic seems to have made a lot of them cranky and/or rude, and it’s very hard sometimes to not respond in kind.

On top of that, we here in Gunnison County had a bridge go out, and while county and state officials jumped right on that and have worked their hardest to make this as smooth as possible, with the Kiewit Construction Company working 24/7 since April, early summer was very painful in Gunnison.

Officials assumed that since many of our visitors come from the south and east, we would be okay — but they failed to take into account the drive-through traffic that doesn’t make Gunnison a destination but will stop for lunch or dinner or the night and perhaps do some shopping and buy gas while they’re here.

The bridge is now sort of open to all traffic, but still one lane, still with a pilot car. The second bridge, which I thought was much longer but recently realized that’s because the road is on a long jetty, is also under repair.

Some day, but not today, we may all get to do what we took for granted five long years ago: drive to Montrose unencumbered by covid, construction or bridge repair. It’s enough to make even me look forward longingly to that shining moment.

Then, if all this wasn’t enough (it felt like enough to me, but no), it’s a very fraught election year.

Our congressional representative, who realized she wasn’t going to get Republican support because she wasn’t really representing anyone’s interests in the district, switched to a different district in the state even before she moved there and now becomes northeastern Colorado’s problem.

I believe this means our district will remain Republican, although the candidate from Grand Junction started out sounding quite progressive, wanting better rural access to health care and to protect Social Security and Medicare. That message must not have been perceived to resonate, because for the last month his commercials have instead mentioned “the border” (no plan, just “the border”) and attacking his moderate, centrist opponent as a “radical leftist.”

I liked the first commercials better, but I have to say, I really haven’t been much impressed with the Democrat’s campaign. He was all prepared to run against the “angertainment” of Lauren Boebert, and I don’t feel he pivoted well at all to competing against someone who, as best as the commercials can manage, wants to export San Luis Valley water and “serve corporate interests.”

And really, I don’t care what Republicans someone wants to vote for, as long as they recognize that the fellow at the very top of the ticket is an ugly, awful human being who has zero campaign other than sowing chaos, name calling and vindictiveness. I am abjectly appalled at the people who can’t see the ogre before their very eyes, and even more aghast and uncomprehending of the people who have elevated him to a Christlike status. I must have missed the part in the bible where Jesus wanted ultra-conservative Liz Cheney shot in the face.

I doubt it will all be over Tuesday, with so much of America’s hideous underbelly ripped open in full, ugly bloom, but I am hoping with all my might that Kamala Harris and her running mate, who went to a college that is part of the same athletic conference as Western Not State, prevail and that we ultimately succeed in, if not eradicating, at least pushing this bold racism and misogyny back into some dark corner rather than out into mainstream acceptance.

I get that people fear change, but as I have learned this past year, change comes whether we want it to or not. We have choices: we can meet it with all the grace we can muster, even if that isn’t very much; or we can be bitterly resentful and spend all our days ceaselessly litigating a past that never actually existed.

Cats grow old too soon; people get sick; people’s plans change; old steel starts to crack. Some of that we can fix, some of it we can’t. What we can fix, however, on Tuesday is another step toward the restoration of civility, by voting for Kamala Harris, a “radical leftist” who would nonetheless agree with Republican Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction that we should work toward better rural access to health care and preserve Social Security and Medicare.

I urge all of us to choose kindness over angertainment. It’s a much happier way to live.