The leaves were all rimed with frost this morning on our run, which was 5.6 km, although I have no idea what time I made, as I was wearing no watch and have very kindly donated my phone to Matthew for three weeks, because his phone has died, and he can get another one in the first week of December which is when we are due for an upgrade.
He told me that not having a phone made him feel as though his daemon had been cut off. (Anyone who has read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials will understand, as each character in those books has a wonderful daemon in the form of a companion animal, like a jaguar, or a moth, or a ferret, which is the manifestation of the person's soul.) Which is a little scary, that these little pieces of technology which connect us to one another are SO important to teenagers.
The only time I thought I might miss it was if I broke down on the highway, but then someone would certainly stop soon enough to help, so I would be fine. A few years ago I had a flat tire on the highway, and pulled over to change it. Before I even had the boot open to get out the jack etc., two men had stopped their cars to offer help. When I told them thank you, I was fine and accomplished in changing tires, having been Jack Radford's daughter, they nevertheless absolutely refused to let me do it, and actually helped one another, although they were perfect strangers, to change my tire in record time, rather like the mechanics in the pit stops during car races.
So my poor Tim has become a monster. He has so much sun damage (actinic keratosis) from growing up in Kimberley in South Africa with a very fair skin, that the dermatologist suggested a cream be used for at least two weeks which targets all the spots, turns them into lesions which then take a few weeks to scale off and leave the skin better than before, and cured. The other method that can be used is to burn off each spot individually, over time, with liquid nitrogen. This is the method I would have chosen for myself. What he chose is basically topical chemotherapy.
Tomorrow is the two week mark, and for about ten days his skin has been raging and red, and he feels as though someone has sandpapered his face. The first couple of days that it looked so awful I actually felt so guilty, like such a bad person, because even though I was trying really hard, I didn't like him very much, or have much sympathy. But then my wise young daughter Jess pointed out to me that part of what you love about a person is related to their looks in no small way, no matter how much you might deny it, and also, that if you have lived with this person for 26 years it is naturally difficult to come to terms with him suddenly looking like a leper. My horrid feelings ended with me confessing them to Tim, after which I felt much better about myself and about him, although he probably didn't for a while, poor man.
He has been sequestered, working alone from home all week, his family his only social contacts, which doesn't help matters very much, as we are such social creatures, needing work and other kinds of interactions to feel ourselves fully human. But he must be a very strong character, to look at himself in the mirror like that and still be more-or-less alright. I would just go to pieces, I think.
I can't wait for the time to go past, all the lesions to scale off and heal, when he will be my own familiar husband again, Rodin's John-the-Baptist, the beautiful boy I first saw in the Nombulelo Staffroom in 1984.
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