David Lincoln Blankenship

My father said yesterday that he has trouble keeping secrets, and he doesn't understand why anyone would tell him a secret.

I have the same problem. Secrets cause stress, stress causes strokes.

On the first day of school, I keep thinking about the children who never where, who didn't get born. My wife is prone to miscarriages, and we've been trying to have another child since well before the stroke. We came close once.

Robin was pregnant. The child even had a name, David Lincoln Blankenship. My father's name is David but he doesn't have a middle name. Lincoln would let us call the kid Link, like the protagonist in Legend of Zelda.

That was my plan, anyway. It might have changed after the child arrived. We named Grace Beatrix because we were going to call her Trixie.

She doesn't like to be called Trixie.

We aren't even allowed to call her Gracie or my grandmother will hit us. She's surprisingly strong for an 88 year old woman.

Anyway, the child never arrived at least he wasn't viable when he did. One day I was cleaning the toilet and there it was, a fetus, about the size of my big toe and discolored. It's the single most traumatic moment of my life and I never told anyone, except maybe Robin. But it would have been months later when I was in the hospital, and had the Fountain of Truth pouring like a spigot from my lips.

The funny thing was, I had come so close to death that everyone in my family started to load me up with secrets, I guess so I wouldn't go to the grave without knowing?

It makes for a horrible family get together when you know things you aren't supposed to know. At my grandmother's birthday party I was sitting right between two people and I knew something about each of them that I shouldn't have. It made for a very unsettling dinner.

But back to the third kid. We're still trying, but we've officially retired the name David Lincoln. We're planning on Dorothy (my other grandmother) and Katherine (with a K, because Robin wants to call her Kat). I said that would be good because we could call her DK, and Robin said, emphatically, no video game names.

To which I frowned, emphatically.

My First Aniversary Celebration

This song holds a special meaning to me. Before the stroke I had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, and would spend most mornings with VH1 on the television keeping up to date.

After the stroke, while I was in the hospital, I missed all of the new music that came out. Not only that, my memory was iffy and I had zero retention. Even if I heard a new song it wouldn't "load" into my long term memory.

During the memory exercises in therapy at Cardinal Hill, I would cheat using my long term memory. I was supposed to read articles and then regurgitate the information, but it was hard for the therapist to find an article on which I wasn't already familiar. I can remember one time she gave me an article about the planet Saturn and I answered the questions, but then Robin pointed out to the therapist that I already KNEW everything about Saturn.

It became hard for the therapist to find articles on subjects which I wasn't familiar.

Robin helped a bit. She attended every one of my therapy sessions and would catch me when I was "accessing" my long term memory.

For example, when the therapist asked me to describe the sun, I said "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas," which impressed the therapist until Robin pointed out that it was a song by They Might Be Giants.

The song was stuck in my head for weeks after that. I filled up entire files on the patient computers at the hospital with the lyrics, over and over again.

If I hadn't had a stroke, I would have worried about it.

So anyway, music brought me back from the edge of the abyss, but I couldn't learn any new songs. After I got myself thrown out and was home, I might recognize a song on the radio but only because Robin had sung it repeatedly when she visited. Even then, I wouldn't know who sang the original song.

I spent weeks on the internet, matching songs to artists and then instantly forgetting. If it wasn't out before my stroke, I couldn't recognize it.

I made a determined effort to re-engage with music. I spent days watching VH1 in bed and trying to remember what I just saw. Then I heard Everybody Talks on the radio.

"I recognize this song," I realized (and probably said out loud).

It took me a few more weeks to learn that it was by the band Neon Trees but every time the song came on the radio, it made me happy. This was the first song I had learned after my stroke.

When it came on the radio last night on the way home from Whitaker Ballpark, it seemed fitting.

August 10 was the day I had my stroke so Robin wanted to have a party and celebrate. My mother had ticket vouchers to a Lexington Legends game that we hadn't used on an earlier date, so we sent out Facebook invites.

It was also Big L (the mascot's) birthday and they were having fireworks after the game. It seemed a fitting end to a year of misery.

The first thing that went wrong is that I didn't know what day it was. Friday sneaks up on me now, like a predator on an antelope. I never know what day it is.

When Robin left for training that morning she told me about the ballpark and that it was that night. It might as well been the first I heard of it.

My memory retention is still only so-so, and I was in bed sick all morning.

My mother sent everyone an email reminding them that we were going to the ballpark and asked me if my friend Rob was going.

He had been on the original guest list for the night we didn't go and he was the only one who had not RSVPed to my mother's Facebook invite.

I called him and we caught up. His son Avery starts preschool on Monday. He works weekends and couldn't make it, but it was nice to talk to him.

Robin had been driving around all day and she was tired by the time we arrived at the ballpark. I hadn't thought to grab my walker and I had broken my foot attempting to register at the Frankfort YMCA last week, so she made me ride in a wheelchair.

My wheelchair, the fancy one from Cardinal Hill with the seat cushion and the leg rests, was in storage way up high in the back where she couldn't reach.

She blamed her brother James for that. All I know is that it wasn't me.

We took my father's wheelchair, which he had given us when I first came home from the hospital. It has brakes that lock, but no very well. If I try to stand up out of it, and no one holds it, it rolls away. It wouldn't be my first choice for a wheelchair.

But it was all I had and Robin had a bad day and it seemed to cheer her up to push me in the wheelchair again.

And it got us in the handicapped seating, which at Whitaker Ballpark is directly behind home plate.

The usher was extremely nice and gave Grace a baseball. She got it signed by the mascots, Big L and Peewee. She didn't care about the players or the game at all.

The highlight of the game for her was when of the MacAttack dancers complimented her pigtails and asked her name.

She couldn't understand Grace (who turns shy when the focus is on her) so she asked me.

"Beatrix Grace," I said. "But we call her Grace."

"That's a very pretty name," the dancer said.

Grace blushed at the attention.

Robin took the kids over to the play area and bought Grace a baseball bat and ball set on the way back. She also bought Christian a ball.

He had already received a foam piece of coal emblazoned with a Friends of Coal logo. Everything at the ballpark had a sponsor. They still have the Herald Leader graphic of the dog with a newspaper in its mouth that they phased out years ago. They had an official announcement that they were phasing it out. That was years ago.

We attended a Monkees concert at the park when it was new. It was the first concert they ever had. Christian was a baby and we left him with Robin's parents. The ballpark has a display of homeplates signed by every musical act who has ever performed at the ballpark.

Robin couldn't believe how long it had been since we saw the Monkees. My mother vowed that she would never go see them again, that they were getting old and it made her feel bad to watch them on stage.

They just announced a tour, the first since Davy Jones died, and Mike is joining them. She's planning to drive to Cleveland and see them on my father's birthday.

Some things never change.

Especially at baseball games. They have Chik-Fil-A fowl poles and they donate money to the Boy Scouts. They run ads for the YMCA of Central Kentucky on the right fields view screen. During the fireworks they played "Sweet Home Alabama" and a song by Toby Keith.

They know their audience well.

As my mother pushed me back to the car, so we could spend the next half an hour in traffic, I reflected on many things, most of which were how much I appreciated Robin and all she's done for me.

As I climbed into bed next to her, she gave me a lecture about how hard the last year has been for her and she hoped I appreciated it.

I do, Robin, I do. Thank you.

Part Three

One would think that after one of the Stewart Home "kids" took a deuce in the pool that they would be my least favorite group to lifeguard. After they came back they were very apologetic and I enjoyed ligeguarding for them.

The autistic kids who would come in to swim laps were much worse.

I don't remember who they were or where they came from, but they weren't anywhere near as pleasant.

The Stewart Home always brought along enough supervision, but the autistic kids only ever brought two adults for three children. These were actual children, or at the oldest, teenagers. I remember that there were three of them, although the details of the third have left my memory.

The first was a black girl, I would guess between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. She would rock back and forth in the water until ten minutes before she had to leave and then explode into laps. She was mechanical and focused and easily the fastest swimmer which I ever guarded for.

The second was a male teenager who looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. I will remember him until the day I die.

I mean, I remember him now and I had a stroke. I even forgot the Down Syndrome kid dressed as a clown for a while, but I will never forget the autistic kid who looked vaguely like DiCaprio.

The woman who was in charge of him came running out of the boys locker room. She wanted me to go in and check on him, because I was male and she wasn't.

She seemed nervous.

I bounced into the locker room not knowing what to expect. I mean this was a YMCA where board members used to hang out in the sauna naked for hours at a time, and one time one of them came downstairs without putting his swim trunks on.

"Oops," he said. "I forgot to put on my drawers."

As I turned the corner into the locker room, I saw the boy on the other side of the showers. He was completely naked and completely erect.

He also had pulled some lockers loose from the wall and detached a water fountain.

I don't remember what happened next (I was stunned by the image of a naked, aroused autistic kid; nothing will hold after that sudden shock) but I imagine I told the handlers what he was up to in the locker room and she apologized profusely.

To this day, autistic people frighten me. When my wife worked at the Stewart Home, all the females were obsessed with babies. I was outside in the parking lot with my son in his car seat and the car was surrounded by girls going, "Baby..."

It was like something out of a zombie movie, except these were mentally handicapped individuals and not the undead. I did consider running them over with the car but only as a last ditch escape.

Robin came out of the building and shooed them away. I was glad.

The focus of an autistic person makes them freakishly strong and they make me nervous to this day.

The Frankfort YMCA (part two)

Part One

The Mike Kennedy scandal disillusioned me with the Y, but I still came back and worked some more.

I worked with the day camp at the Y and taught all of my sister's friends how to swim (but not her, as she likes to remind me). I worked with the kids from Montessori (the woman at the front desk called it "a damn hippie school") and the population from the Stewart Home.

The Stewart Home is a home in Frankfort for people with moderate to severe mental disabilities. My wife worked there for a while, and it's a pretty nice place. A lot of rich people send their children there and it's like a resort.

They take the "children" out on excursions. Sometimes they go bowling. Sometimes they come to the Y and swim.

One time they packed up in the middle of their session and hurried out without saying anything. I knew something was wrong so I checked the pool.

There was a turd on the bottom of the pool, right where the pool began to switch from the shallow end to the deep end. I notified my boss and attempted "extraction."

The pool had a net on a pole that was for this sort of thing, but since the turd was a sinker (i.e. it was on the bottom of the pool) the pole wouldn't reach.

So here I was, in the middle of the pool, up to my armpits in water, fishing out a piece of poo. Which would have been fine had it been a solid piece of poo. The moment I hit it with the edge of the net, it dissolved into a brown cloud.

So, now, here I was, in the middle of the pool, up to my armpits in the single most disgusting water ever. I was in a cloud of poo.

I notified the man upstairs, closed the pool, cancelled activities for the rest of the day and went home.

My (failed) trip to the Frankfort YMCA (part one)

I wasted today. I had such big plans and they all fell through.

I have been waiting all weekend to go to Frankfort with my father and join the YMCA. I worked at the YMCA since college, both in Frankfort and Lexington. I was put on the "do not rehire" list twice in Lexington, which is not an easy feat.

I trained as a lifeguard because my good friend Amy Farmer was teaching the class. Well, Amy and her mother were teaching the class. Her mother, Sueanne Armistead, was the main swim instructor for Frankfort. She took her job seriously.

She was a Lifeguard Instructor Trainer which means she could certify people to teach Lifeguard classes. She certified me as a Lifeguard Instructor, which meant I could certify other Lifeguards. She was the queen bee trainer for the region and years later, when we found out my friend Rob Rowe had never been certified as a Lifeguard Instructor, she called me on the phone and told me that he wasn't allowed to teach a class without me.

I managed never to tell him that, and this could be the first he hears of it.

Rob's boss had been a man called Mike Hagy who lied on his resume when they hired him as Aquatics Director. He said he was a Lifeguard Instructor Trainer when he was only a Lifeguard Instructor and he had trained Rob and another lifeguard to be Lifeguard Instructors but then he was submitting the paperwork under his name.

When Rob went to be recertified, he found out he had never been an instructor at all. He was devastated.

The Instructor Trainer for the Dayton area was angry at him. She made him come up and do remedial classes.

And she notified the national YMCA office and they contacted Sueanne and Sueanne contacted me.

Or she might have had Amy contact me, I don't remember.

Anyway, the point is, Rob thought he was doing me a favor by letting me help teach his classes when I had been ordered to help him by the regional trainer.

Rob was my roommate at the time so it all worked out.

Mike Hagy went to the Chicago area where he was eventually found out and charged with something. The last we saw of his wife she was working at a low end strip club in Lexington.

I moved back to Frankfort and worked at the Frankfort YMCA teaching swim lessons. Sueanne volunteered at the Y and was in charge of swim lessons. She had always been in charge of swim lessons. Amy told me one time  that she had to call her mother Sueanne because she wouldn't answer to any variation on the word, mom, because she had heard it too much.

The director at the Frankfort YMCA was a man named Mike Kennedy. He seemed dedicated - he was a father and a soccer coach. I used to brag to Rob that he always seemed to be in the building in the middle of the night.

He was arrested for taking young teenage boys to hotels and exchanging sex for jobs at the Y. He's in prison now, and I used to check on him to make sure he was still in prison.

He tried to appeal once by saying they mislead him about his chances of being found guilty. The prosecution released some more of the evidence, including that he had a locked cabinet in the basement where he kept naked photos of his victims.

That bothered me, because I had seen that cabinet. I had stopped one of the other guards from busting the lock on it. When I saw what had been in it, I internalized the guilt. I had to write a paper for one of my Journalism classes about why I wanted to be a journalist.

Because, I opted to show restraint instead of being nosy, and people got hurt because of it.

So now, as a rule, I am as nosy as possible.

Everything is not a tragedy...

That's what my wife said to me just now, everything is not a tragedy.

Except that it feels that way.

My father has redone the bathroom floor and I haven't had a shower all weekend. I knocked a pry bar on my foot and it hurt. I took a picture of C.'s room to post on Facebook, couldn't find the pink USB cord to connect the camera to the computer, borrowed a grey cord that fit the camera from my father and had to kick C. off the computer.

I told him all I needed was "ten minutes," except when I finally got the camera hooked in to the computer the memory was full.

I had to sit through a slideshow of the last year of my life, starting with the dead mouse pictures I took right before my stroke, going through Christmas and Easter and Elinor's recital.

And I say "finally" because before I could even look at the pictures I had to physically hook the camera to the computer, which isn't easy when you only have about fifty percent use of your right hand.

I turned the computer up on its end and found a spare USB slot (our computer has several spots that used to be USB slots but the sockets have fallen into the computer) and then I dropped the computer.

It only fell over, but that was far enough, apparently. The computer died and wouldn't come back on.

I had C. come in and turn the computer upright but it still wouldn't come back on. We tried the monitor cable and the power cables and finally as a last ditch attempt I unplugged the power cord from the back of the computer, plugged it back in and hit the power button.

The computer started back up. It whirred and came to life. I swear I didn't breath until Windows XP finished loading.

But it finally loaded, and I had to look at a bunch of pictures from when I first had my stroke and it depressed me.

I'm not usually one to get depressed, at least I wasn't before the stroke. The stroke took away all of my coping mechanisms. I can't hike, I can't swim, I can't even go shopping by myself.

In all of my first two decades of marriage I only contemplated suicide once and it terrified me. I immediately sought marriage counseling.

The last week I was in the hospital I thought about killing myself nonstop. If I hadn't been kicked out when I was, I might have tried to strangle myself with my belt. I wasn't quite sure how, but I had already decided to do it.

Which is why I worked so hard to get myself thrown out. Robin wasn't quite ready for me yet and it was uncomfortable but at least I'm not dead, which is what I would be if I had stayed at Cardinal Hill.

Anyway, C. just came in and reminded me my ten minutes is up, which depressed me even more.