Or Lake Huron wavelets breaking teensy-tinily with another on its heels.

Tuesday the 26th, second day of classes, I learned that my last living bioparent aka my 75 year-old dad drove himself to the local hospital just before daybreak, reaching the ER with a symptoms mélange that included cusp kidney failure resulting, as I understand it, from several months of what, as a non-physician, I would characterize as “low flow.” Kidneys back up. Supplements, most egregiously in the form of potassium, fail to reset us back to level best. Fluid builds in the best guess range of an extra eight liters, which converts to approximately 17.6 pounds. With urine as with language, our systems are built to process and express. Consequences follow from not paying the water bill, etc. You get the idea. I drove the 570 miles north from Virginia to Port Huron on Sunday of Labor Day weekend in routine supportiveness, as much for the living as for the dying.

The hospital stay was a stressful ordeal. Striving for survivable ranges: hemoglobintrotters shooting trick free throws more misses than makes, GFR high-shrugs, creatinine low-shrugs, drink your Ensure, waiting waiting, and noticings of the contents of catheter bags with an almost aesthetic quality, blood orange amber colors and hues and volumes not unlike talking and nodding about oh-would-you-look-at-that artforms with an inaesthetic lot, no art classes in medical school, I mean. McLaren Port Huron third floor was a doctors and nurses carousel with no simple roster or schedule of who is a nephrologist, who is a urologist, and no critical perspective on what hellscape fragmentary specialization has wrought. Good thing higher ed warmed me up all these years for right hands not knowing or caring about what left hands do, so to speak (quick parenthetical for the literalists: in the metaphor, hands are people who don’t communicate with one another about what they think they know, especially when wayfinding is in-progress).

I’m skipping a lot. A lot, A LOT. Things leveled off, stabilizing enough that he could return home on Friday. Pick up meds at the pharmacy. For this, you can talk to a Walgreens AI on the phone who will only tell you about how you have selected unwittingly a short-stocked pharmakeia; intelligent agents don’t experience stress despite having bad days, which must be wonderful for them. Home has entailed moving furniture, clearing space for intuitively prepared beef liver (not by me; no thank-you, I’m good), and watching the first half or so of the U Michigan-U Oklahoma football game. In Spanish. Because you get what you get and anglophone ABC no es esa cosa.

But that’s not the whole story, just a little slice. On the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I took to painting the rest of the front shed ceiling at the holler. Four-inch roller, discounted dark blue paint; slackers and mediocres just like me can make their own Sistine Chapels. As I did so, I began to notice a faint sting at the center of my right eyebrow. I listened to the sting and could not quite grasp what it was saying, something like a wasp or spider assaulted you in the night, you have a pimple coming on, did you touch poison ivy to your face, and so on. I listened and listened and mentioned to A that something was off with the sting but I did not quite understand what. Sunday drive blurred long miles into Monday hospital visits, and for a break I walked along the place where Lake Huron funnels narrow into the Saint Clair River, noticing more acutely the face pain compounding from sunlight and wind. I guessed it was shingles, an old friend from 1979 when I was five and had the chicken pox, now waving hello I’m back after all these years and what is new with you.

Everyone’s shingles will be different but awful. The thing I’ve learned about my own lifelong companionable varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is that, not unlike a 17-year brood long-underground cicada, it came back with astonishing alien energy singing its head off, weirdly wave-making intense sensations, like the cross-calling of whale songs mixed with ticklish, firey, explosive sonar, a storm of swirling pain, inflamation, blisters, then scabs. And this particular frienemy, my personal varicella-zoster virus wandered and dallied, flaring my eyebrow, no big, whatever, I’ve got other things on my mind, then my eyelid, forehead, scalp, and why not, more forehead. I found a local urgent care along this local main drag whose street name I still can’t quite remember (24th?). The attending physician told me she didn’t want to worry me but “you could lose your eyesight on the right side,” and here is a prescription for an antiviral which you can fill across the street at that same Walgreens. Good luck. Thank you. Good luck to you, too.

My childhood friend the long-dormant virus is now saying farewell so long and until next time. Cold compresses were too cold, the antiviral effective in countering, okay, if you must, you can visit, but you cannot stay long. I’m mending but not quite ready for the full moon observation, the talking and nodding about oh-would-you-look-at-that artforms with an inaesthetic lot, no art classes in so many degree programs, as it goes. Might be scars but I don’t have anything noticeable in the way of feelings about that prospect, German stoic compartmentalization coping for the soft-hearted; they wouldn’t be the only scars from when I was five.

I’m gonna stick around Michigan through the 14th, hopefully catch a hug from my granddaughter next week. I had planned to be here, anyway, for Parents’ weekend at U-Mich, which is coming up, plus a few other vague errands in-around Ann Arbor. And so that’s that. A travelogue dispatch and an explanation for why I’m kicking sand at the beach early September same time as holding it down with the online teaching and more.