Steven Rubio's Online Life

dreams

First, a timeline. I broke my ankle on June 19 (a day before my 71st birthday). For a variety of reasons, we didn't find out it was broken until a week later. I had surgery on July 3. At my next doctor visit (August 15), if all goes well, I will have my cast removed and get a boot, which will allow me to walk. I've been confined to the house for almost a month now (can't put weight on ankle, not using crutches etc.). Even that sounds better than it is ... I am actually restricted to my bed and the commode.

It's not as bad as I make it out to be. It's the modern world, after all. There's a TV and Spotify and Siriusxm, I can watch movies and read, I have my cell phone (using it to write this). People bring me meals and everyone is very nice to me. When I get bored, I can always do my physical therapy rehab, and if all else fails, I still have one last Oxy pill.

Ah, but my dreams. Almost every one involves me moving, walking, even flying, going places, interacting with the world. And at some point in every dream, I remember that I am stuck in my bed, and I wake up.

Tonight I dozed off with MSNBC playing in the background. Before I went to sleep, I passed the time on Facebook, where I checked in on an old acquaintance I haven't seen in decades, charming guy, very smart and learned and a bit contrary. I fell asleep to the sounds of my wife snoring (she has just finished months of cancer surgery, chemo, and radiation, and she is getting better but she's tired, and she still has to take care of her invalid husband).

In my dream, my wife and I are at some political discussion. She is sitting with the aforementioned acquaintance, I am lying on the floor so I don't have to walk anywhere. The host of the discussion, who seems to be from MSNBC, introduces a guest who is an expert on the affairs of the day. She is sitting near me. The moderator asks her a question, but before she can reply, the acquaintance begins a long monologue about the topic. The guest smiles politely, but I am close enough to her that I can hear that she is snoring throughout his monologue.

At this point, the host says we will go to a commercial, after which we will continue the discussion on a special edition of Morning Joe. And I wake up, realizing it was all a dream, and the snoring I was hearing came not from the expert, but from my wife.

And for some reason, I feel obliged to grab my phone and write this blog post, so in the future, I will have a record of what life has been like for me the last month.

home

It's good to be home from the hospital. But be careful what you ask for! I can't leave the house for at least six weeks, and for now, at least, I'm confined to the bedroom. Which didn't seem so bad in the abstract, but the reality....

ouch

My ankle is broken in 3 places. Updates as they arrive.

empty nest syndrome

We bought our house in 1987. When we moved here, we brought our cat, Mr. Kitty. He quickly found a girl cat he liked, brought her home to us, knocked her up, and disappeared. (Men!) Mrs. Kitty (and their son, Little Mr. Kitty) lived here until 2005 or so. When Mrs. Kitty was at the end of her life, we got Starbuck ... the next year, we got Six and Boomer. Thus, there has never been a cat-free day at this house since we got here more than 36 years ago.

But now Six, Starbuck, and finally Boomer are gone. We won't get new cats until May, as we are hoping to be in Spain during April. It's an empty house tonight.

xmas eve monopoly

pee-wee herman

I'm not positive on the date, but I think it was November of 1983 at Wolfgang's, a small club in San Francisco, where we saw Pee-wee Herman live. Paul Reubens started a live show, "The Pee-wee Herman Show", in 1980 I believe. It was filmed by HBO and shown there in 1981. We didn't have HBO in those days ... I'm pretty sure we knew Pee-wee from his appearances on Late Night with David Letterman:

Here's a clip from that HBO special:

Of course, from there he went on to the classic Pee-wee's Big Adventure and the TV series Pee-wee's Playhouse, both of which were big favorites at our house.

It was the weirdest thing, reading the obits. He was 70 years old. That's the same age as me. Paul Reubens' age was always hard to figure, given his Pee-wee persona. He was a grown man playing a kid. You knew he wasn't a kid, but you never really knew how old the actor was, because if he put on the Pee-wee suit, he looked pretty much the same. If I had guesses his age, it would have been, I don't know, 60? The fact that I am the same age as Paul Reubens is hard to process.

the san francisco giants and me: 1958-2010

Got a message from a friend, Phil, who had inspired the original series of posts I have linked to here. Thought it would be nice to get it all in one, linkable, post.

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 1950s"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 1960s"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 1970s"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 1980s, Part 1"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 1980s, Part 2"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 1990s"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 2000s, Part 1"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: The 2000s, Part 2"

"The San Francisco Giants and Me: 2010"

on turning 70

We moved into our current house in 1987. I was 34 years old. There was a huge tree in our front yard. It had been there a long time. A friend who grew up on the block said he and his friends used to play basketball using that tree ... it was never quite clear how this worked.

One morning last week, 7:00 AM, a crew showed up at our house and starting trimming the tree. Except it turned out their mission was not to trim the tree. Their mission was to remove the tree, which was sick. By the end of the day, there was no more tree.

In 2003, Joan Didion's husband of almost 40 years died. At the age of 70, she wrote about her reaction to his death in The Year of Magical Thinking. In that book, she wrote:

We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

In the last paragraph of On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote, "Nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old." Kerouac was 47 when he died.

Bruce Springsteen was in his 20s when he wrote "Backstreets":

Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see
Trying to learn to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
And after all this time, to find we're just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets

He recorded "I'll See You in My Dreams" when he was 70.

Randy Newman wrote "Old Man" when he was in his 20s.

Won't be no God to comfort you
You taught me not to believe that lie
You don't need anybody
Nobody needs you
Don't cry, old man, don't cry
Everybody dies

Newman is still alive and is 79.

When Luis Buñuel was 70, he made Tristana. This is how I described the plot:

Fernando Rey’s Don Lope lives in a world that is crumbling … he believes in the old codes of honor because they have always benefited people like him, to the point that he thinks the codes are natural. When he takes in Catherine Deneuve’s Tristana, it’s not exactly clear what their familial relationship is, or even if there is one. But when Tristana is orphaned, Don Lope takes her in and treats her as his daughter and his wife simultaneously. In both cases, he attempts to exercise control over Tristana’s life. She escapes and falls for an artist played by Franco Nero … some years later, she returns with a tumor on her leg. Don Lope takes her in once again, the leg is amputated, and they get married in the church, so they are not sinners. But the power relationship has changed … Lope is an old man, Tristana has come into her own (she looks more like Catherine Deneuve as the film progresses).

Cyndi Lauper is the famous person whose birthday is closest to my own. I am two days older than her. She turns 70 on Thursday. Here she is on stage a couple of months ago:

50 years ago

white elephant

A few pix from our family's belated White Elephant day (photos taken by my daughter).

This was my contribution to the White Elephant pile ... the person who ended up with it pretended she liked it: