Ran into a girlfriend of mine at Albertson's. I'd been staring wrathfully at overpriced leaky-looking watermelon chunks when she hollered a cheery Hey! She and I go back aways and I've always been fond of her for lots of reasons, one being that she speaks fluent Girl, a language I deeply appreciate. I remembered first noticing her in my small anonymous group. Just before a meeting, she remarked that she'd bought a new car. "What kind?" one of the guys asked, with instant guy interest. "Red," she told him happily, and I warmed to her instantly. Red!

I'm known to go to Albertson's more than I go to the bathroom, so there I was and there she was a bunch of years later, with her long ironed hair, a faceful of makeup, and her cute mini-me daughter, and there I was with my long unironed hair, a faceful of makeup, and new sparkly teef. Just a coupla Dallas lipstick lizards, hanging around bright pyramids of produce,  enjoying a cool periodic mist blown over from water sprays that crisped the lettuces and shined the peppers.

"Writer To the Stars!" she hollered, "Hey!"

"Hulp!" I gurgled back. I didn't know if she could understand me and didn't want to freak her. I was between fittings and my new pearlies hurt like a bastard. "New teef," I said, "S'ard for me ta tawk." Her daughter stared at me without any expression, while I looked back, admiring her pert school uniform.

" So how you been?" she asked, smiling her usual big smile.

"Well, y'know Mr. WTS had a stroke. A bad one..."

"I heard," she said, hefting a cantaloupe and giving it a good hard sniff. "So's he all gorked out an' in that bad depressed thing...?" Here I should mention that my Dallas girlfriend is an RN. Been a nurse for about thirty years and she's good at it. Very good. 

"He's not gorked at all," I said, quite clearly, all the while thinking Gorked! Haven't heard that since I worked at the hospital ' bout 110 years ago. I flashed on that dank Dickensian pile of slag in the heart of New Brunswick, NJ, where I ran the orderly department. Back then I heard gorked! used casually, day to day. It meant lights out, gaga, nobody home.

"Well, that's great," said my girlfriend said grinning, and then I spent some time admiring her daughter, who waited, solemn and smart, enduring my chirps. We both hugged, turned away, walked on, then suddenly turned back at the same time and waved: a combo hello, goodby.

Later that night I remembered that I'd heard Gorked! quite recently and from my own red lips. I'd used it on my husband, trying to light a fire under him, on a day when he felt especially clobbered. You're not a goddamned gork, I told him, you're smart, you're getting strong, your paralysis is lifting. You're ungorking! He'd laughed at the word and I did too, not quite knowing where I'd got it.

When my girlfriend said gorked out at Albertson's,  I felt a sudden happy glow creep over me, the kind you get when you realize that, against all odds, you might have done the right thing. I was around stroke victims, I remembered suddenly from forty years past. I saw them in all shapes and sizes. Some were gorks and some weren't gorks at all. Not by a fucking long shot.

Soon it'll be two years since a lightning bolt ran through my husband's brain, leaving him entirely paralysed on his left side, wiping out big chunks of memory, leaving him angry, raving, confused. He wasn't alone in his fury and bewilderment. I was pretty goddamn angry and confused myself and, for sure, I did my share of raving. Unlike him, I felt guilty too.

Day to day, I discovered I was falling short of everything expected of me as his nauseatingly named caregiver. I did not run him through the exhausting morning routine outline in that hefty looseleaf notebook, the one that landed in my lap the day I wheeled him out of Baylor. When he shouted at me, I sobbed or shouted back or cracked a joke but I didn't wheel him into a dim room, as advised, and leave him there. Nor did I force him into a weird contraption that featured a lot of velcro and supposedly prevented his damaged arm from dropping out of its socket. I believed that immobilizing his whole shoulder and arm would make it atrophy but what did I know?

He itched all over, and I told him his body was waking up, but I didn't know if that was true or not. He refused to do  his billions of repetitive exercizes because they were boring and I didn't make him. Instead I hauled him in front of the TV and we watched every comedy we could find. I tried to cook the no salt, no sugar, no fat diet he was sternly advised to follow, and watched him eat almost nothing until he was a wraith. When he glanced at himself in a mirror and flinched, I thought, That's enough of that fucking diet. I switched to an all vegetarian diet, used a bit of sea salt, sweet butter, and added dessert. You get dessert, honey, I promised, you'll always get a dessert. And the thin hunched haunted figure he'd been disappeared, not to return. 

Not only did I ignore all the instructions I'd been given, ignored the diets, and turned up my nose up at the stroke support groups, I realized I was no caregiver. We'd been married thirty-two years and we'd been through a lot together: the terrible last illnesses and deaths of our parents, joblessness, the deaths of our dearest friends and pets, auto accidents, a mugging, and various catastrophes, and this was just another goddamn thing, I decided, and we'd do it together. I didn't know how, but we'd do it.

I wasn't terrific about any of it. Because we've both tried hard to be as honest as we can together, I was honestly hideous. I went nuts. I mourned our lost life, became drenched in self-pity, screamed at times, shouted,  swore, threw stuff, frightened him and scared myself, came un-fucking-glued, got sick, became so depressed I considered The Last Decision, then shrugged it off because how would that help anything? 

I prayed a lot, my kind of prayers. God, you're going to have to help me here. I'm a goddamned mess. And God's big ear seemed to hear. Somehow I listened too, to my real Self, the Self who remembered all the experiences I'd put away or discarded:  years of teaching disabled kids, and that awful year in New Jersey, the one where I learned how to move patients, clean rooms, confront lunacy, and deal with the dead. I thought about my own family: my sister, stoically staring down cancer one more more time, fighting it through with her own down-played grit.

And I remembered again and again, the life of my great-grandfather, that Texas cowboy, who said, Never was the horse that couldn't be rode, never was the cowboy that couldn't be throwed. I pulled from that tangled mass what I could, and found a few diamonds: some ideas that worked, small actions that helped.

 I discovered I wasn't afraid anymore.  And somewhere, sometime, in the midst of all my turmoil and floundering, I realized that nothing my husband was or might be could destroy the love I felt for him. It sat between my ribs, that love, solid as a stone. I'm in for it now, I thought happily.

So, nearly two years gone since that terrible day when he seemed to melt before my eyes, I see my husband emerging from his shroud, the stroke that nearly got him. He laughs, he works part time, he can walk, his shoulders are square and hard, he sits easily in regular chairs, much like he used to, his long legs strong and fine.

His remarks, as ever, catch me off guard, make me laugh as hard as I ever did. The two of us were watching our cat, Baby, decimate a door jamb with her needle claws and then wheel and attack our oldest and most put-upon cat. The Baby sank her little fangs into Lola's neck.

"Horror Baby," he said, rightiously aghast, and I cracked up.

Yeah, I thought. Horror Baby. Perfect.

It seems to me now that I've been throwed a lot. Smashed up a lot, tripped, and fallen all over the place. Even so, give me a cup of strong black coffee, a dawn light through my windows, the Horror Baby on my lap, and a chance to write a few words.

Give me all that and I'll ride the day like a pony.