Jim Granter

Thursday June 8 2000

Noon – through Smithfield on 70 to Becky’s Log Cabin which is very nice. Checked in for Thursday and Friday . Lunch to Eddie Murphy film.

“Let us take time, therefore, to be gracious, to be thoughtful, to be kind, using the social graces as one means of turning the wheels of progress with greater velocity on the upward road to equal opportunity and justice for all” – Charlotte Hawkins Brown, quoted in North Carolina Historic Sites leaflet.

“Earl Had to Die” on Country Channel on TV/Radio (No picture). E-mails

4.00 p.m. Smithfield

 

 

 

Arranged to arrive Richlands end of next week to meet Vernon [who? 11.5.2011].

Library at Smithfield Thursday 8/6 [?] Superb set of encyclopaedia – American Decades edited by Vincent Tompkins (1996) Gale Research Inc., Detroit, MI48226 (a division of ITP Co Ltd) goes from 1900 to 1989

Fri 9^th June 7.50p.m.  Log Cabin Motel Smithfield.

At 7.15 I sat on a chair and hunched over a low coffee table looking at the Road Atlas when on came suddenly the right-side kidney pain I’ve had at least 6 times before. It isn’t getting any worse or better. Have taken two Anadin Extra. Best position is squatting or curled in a ball face down on the floor. It goes off for about 1 second only then returns. Have packed everything in case I have to call Emergency Paramedics and leave in a hurry and fished out the Medical Insurance!! It’s taking my breath away as usual. Hopefully it will pass through like all the others and I’ll just need painillers ’til it shifts. Guess I should drink lots of water, which I will now do.

8.05 Has moved round to the front, as is usual, and is just as bad, in waves which make me sweat, or at least go hot.

8.10 Two more Anadin Extras. Feel a bit sick now.

[1220 A.M. Friday I AM BACK]

Staggered over to the Motel office where there was nobody to be seen except a party of four also looking for the receptionist. She came in two minutes and they let me go first. She dialled 911 and Paramedics arrived within 10 minutes, one para-driver bloke, one woman paramedic and a trainee. They did not immediately jump out to help this bearded, rather unkempt, crouched over and grimacing apparition that greeted them in the car park. Having eventually got me laid down inside the ambulance, and checked out that I had insurance (pre-packed in top of rucksack), they started an IV drip of fluid, blood pressure, pulse 3 cardiogram (?) sticky connections to chest and lower left abdomen. In less than 5 minutes I am in the A&E booth for the painkillers etc. Everyone extremely efficient. Morphine given and it kicked in after 10 minutes, lovely. Asked for a urine sample, I was delighted to see the little bugger emerge into the filter over the sample bottle. Still woozy after the morphine, but am back in Room 28 of the Log Cabin Motel at 1230. They gave me a Yellow Pages to get a cab – $5 and a $5 tip. See specimen jar to see the only American Kidney Stone in the family [currently lost 21.5.2011]. Dr. Mike Baker gave me a comprehensive run down on everything they had done. All tests normal (including pulse of 68 while waiting for the pain to go off). He said his wife has had children and she’s had kidney stones and she would rather have a baby than experience the pain of kidney stones.

Plans back on track for tomorrow as long as wooziness has cleared.

0910 Saturday 10^th

Woke 0830 went to breakfast – one waitress for what looked like half a dozen coachloads of residents. Got some coffee, after 25 minutes and ordered toast. Left without, after 40 minutes for own banana breakfast. No more cheese-of-the-kidney-stone-making fame.

Saturday 10^th 2.40 p.m. Williamston Holiday Inn. 2 nights booked. Pool, coffemaker in room.

Phoned home with kidney stone news. Stopped off in Chocowitty – took photos of VW “Bug Meet”, had a hot dog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then stopped in Washington for an hour. On to Williamston up bumpy old 17N. 80% of travellers are retired, white haired, slightly overweight and very happy with their lot. No Yankees. Father and son fishing at Log Cabin. Son caught a big fish photographed by Dad. Thought about laundry today but thought again.

Receptionist conversation with resident: “Busy today?” “No, fairly quiet” “Just before the lull?(sic) ….” He was getting some “nourishment before golf this afternoon”. Put tickets and passport in safety deposit. Reception area of this Holiday Inn has leather chairs in greenand cardboard book spines on the “shelves”. They can certainly do eggs over easy and thin crispy streaky bacon. Waitresses “of a certain age”, very efficient, confident. Young black guy all in black strode through but he was on his way to the kitchen. Car still in the shade, though there’s a nice cooling breeze. Going to be 90+ today

9 a.m. Downtown Williamston – deserted. Discover Our Town pennants. Uh?

Only a few cars passing every so often mostly driven by blacks. White couple, retired, shorts, walking pug dog for its morning ablutions.

50% closed down shops. Drove out to Hamilton seeking Fort Branch Battlefield site. Missed it – found lots of churches, people arriving. Can’t find back road to the river. Saw Fort Branch Road on way back. Looks like it just leads to a house and nothing else. Drove on to get gas in Williamston and back to cool of room. Classical music station like ClassicFM. No towel or linen change today – door hanging notices ask for cooperation to conserve water and energy and environment. V. good idea. Holiday Inns a grade up from Days Inn.

2.20 Sunday 11 June Holiday Inn. Went out and found Fort Branch Battle site – Fort closed due to Storm Damage – see photos. [?]

Read discharge documents from Johnston Memorial Hospital. Very good detail. No mention of charges. 90 degrees outside but a good breeze. CNN World Report v.good. Phillipines, Spain, Sierra Leone.  Watching The Hunt for Red October – US propaganda submarine movie. Tonight at 8 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, tomorrow- Elizabeth City, Appomatox Virginia and maybe Lynchburg.

6:55 p.m. Appomatox Viginia. This budget Motel is OK. £35 a night, good A/C, grass and woods out the back window, Information Centre round the corner, supermarket next door, Post Office opposite, (bit like 62 Station Road, where I live). Reserving all day tomorrow for the Lee/Grant surrender site visit. Some of it is “reconstructed” but so what, this is where it happened. Long but pleasant 6 hour drive here well worth it. Came past the Great Dismal Swamp and through Suffolk Virginia.

About 21 miles to Lynchburg VA but don’t think I’ll go on to there. Sent Ed and Beth very strange “graduation” cards and e-mails to everyone, including Mick Cooke. Lady in gift shop by Information Centre says there’s a very good bookshop at the Courthouse site. We’ll see….

Everyone asks where I’m from. Nice lady in supermarket asked me if if Elton John lives in London! LA, I think. She’d lived in LA for 2 years.

8:55 a.m. Tuesday 13 June 2000

Sitting outside Confederate Cemetery at Appomattox Courthouse National Historical Park. Watching praire dog (?) feeding and going in and out of burrow. Birds singing, little traffic. I had arrived really early and I shall always remember standing by the roadside in the quiet morning; I swear I could hear the sounds of the final confrontation between Grant and Lee’s armies just over the rise, with the gunfire, shouts and horses. Park opens in 5 minutes. Praire dog having a wash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bought 3 tapes of Country and Western music. Liked the Park and the houses. And displays. Worth it. Very “atmospheric” $4 entry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Granny Bees restaurant for a BLT lunch. Very traditional 1950s type interior, locals eating there, more comments on accent. Found new book on Faulkner on the Recent Acquisitions display in the library after checking in and sending e-mails – Daniel J Singal – William Faulkner – The making of a modernist 1997: UNC Press: Chapel Hill & London [ bought this in 2010 to support a paper I gave to reading group at Bradwell Community Centre, Newcastle-Under-Lyme]. Village idiot came in gift shop back by Information Centre. Baseball cap, T-shirt, shorts, unshaven, eating ice-cream, greeted by shop assistant, “What do you need, George?”. Bought 3 CDs of string music/ songs and got a Christmas one free. Got to cool off.

Back to Budget Motel, been up since 5:00 Have put a plaster on the IV hole under my watch, which the paramedic shifted to my other arm.

 

Sounds like a firm of solicitors or a band. Today we talked about The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, set on the coast of Maine, USA.

Most people liked it, some a lot, some a little but a fairly vocal minority not at all. Soporific and unrealistic, thought some.  I loved it and was pleased to borrow a different edition with some other Jewett work included, as this one story Morag had introduced us to in our Wednesday class made me want more, even in the light of some comments that this was her best writing, putting the rest into it’s shadow. We’ll see. One viewpoint off the internet suggests that Sarah was influenced by the Trancendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/ralph-waldo-emerson/

Once I’d found out what that was I could see the reasoning behind that observation and understood more clearly one of the aspects of The Country of the Pointed Firs that made it so agreeable to me. I must be a Transcendentalist, (maybe). Off to Leek next week for a tour of the Arts and Craft Movement in the town.

Making a slow start to a Saturday morning, with stirrings of comforting emotions. Just listened to a tribute to the song “I will always love you” by Dolly Parton on Radio4. In the same way as millions of others, my wife Barbara and I would sing along to this, very loudly, in the car; my best memory of this is on a sunny day on the M40 on the way South to visit Beth in Brighton. I hope that this wonderful, small memory reflects, in its own small way, the truth, as I understand it, of a quotation from James Baldwin, on today’s Facebook for ‘Follies of God’, which appears on my page for some reason from time to time: “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” —James Baldwin (THE FIRE NEXT TIME; Vintage Books & Anchor Books).
Inspiring indeed. Today I plan one big, extremely satisfying gardening job while the sun still shines – cutting back the rambling Montana clematis on the side of the house. That may not seem relevant to what has gone before but it is, to me. On a later blog I shall experiment with uploading a photo from somewhere – a tool that I discovered as part of WordPress just the other day, while exploring the Dashboard with my friend Barbara. Now for the old shoes, the steps, secateurs and brown bin…

I’ve read quite a few articles over the years and more recently biographical accounts of grief at the loss of a partner. One of the most outstanding will always remain in my memory – The Year of Magical Thinking by one of my all-time favourite writers, Joan Didion. It’s been almost 9 months now since my partner of 57 years – Barbara – died. She had been suffering for several years from increasing paralysis on account of pressure on her spinal cord from crumbling vertebrae caused by osteoporosis, itself in turn caused by many years on steroids, prescribed to combat the painful and damaging effects of rheumatoid arthritis. This distressing lack of control of limbs and internal organs became chronically worse in her final weeks and days so that after a short spell in Leighton Hospital her system succumbed to what was diagnosed as sepsis caused by an unidentified infection. She was comatose for 24 hours and I was with her when she took her final breath. We had been warned several years ago by a spinal surgeon of the eventual fatal outcome of pressure on her spinal chord but Barbara chose not to undergo 9 hours of high risk surgery to “fix” the vertebrae, especially after consultations with 2 anaesthetists who were unequivocally congruent in their advice to decline the offer of such an operation. Whether this was in fact the cause of death or sepsis as on the death certificate is immaterial to the experience of grief undergone by me and our son Edward and daughter Beth.
Since 15 January 2023 we have each dealt with our grief and the ensuing period of mourning in our own ways, which must be the case for everyone who experiences such a loss. I am beginning to feel now that I can embrace some new feelings of enjoyment in my own life after those recent 10 years or so of living with and caring for the woman I had loved, who so courageously bore such pain and distress. Memories covering the whole of our lives together since the Autumn of 1966 will never cease to come back daily, inevitably bringing good or upsetting feelings, at first just powerfully upsetting ones, then gradually in equal measure and very recently better ones. In this I have been helped by some old friends who knew us both. It is getting easier and more rewarding now to “keep on keeping on”, so that life doesn’t just reflect the rather negative, dull grey and unvarying tone of that expression.