Sugar times

Richard
Sugar times
Coffee Plantation, March 16, 2007

I’m alone one night watching Field of Dreams on TV. As my blood sugar drifts down, the movie becomes more and more profound. Death isn’t the end! We’re too bounded by reason to catch the shafts of light all around! I look up from the screen and see the living room through a fish-eye lens. The bookcase is swaying, the arm chair mumbling quietly to itself. My hands are attached to extremely long, rubbery strips, and the hairs on my arms, light brown and silky, are beautiful and mysteriously meaningful. A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, splashes onto my thigh, and ripples like a droplet on the surface of a pool. And I think—very slowly and with a smug smile that signals danger—I’m having a really low blood sugar.

I find myself in front of the refrigerator with the door open. Cold air moves across my skin. I’m slick with sweat, just sweating all over, and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to eat. I bite off some cheese (bad idea, it has no effect on blood sugar), and I grab a container of orange juice and gulp (good idea, sugar galore). Ten minutes later, I feel normal again and watch Kevin Costner meet his dead father in a cornfield. He’s stiff, and James Earl Jones is a blubbery fool encountering dead baseball players. I, too, feel wooden and spent, ejected from my field of dreams.

In one rather precariously low sugar, while Suzanne, my wife at the time, was handing me a glass of orange juice and waiting for my jumbled speech to mean something, I was convinced that time was running backwards. I could swear that everything had already taken place—a sustained sense of deja-vu. I said, “I've just drunk the OJ” and “How come time is going in reverse?" If you've seen the film Memento you'll remember that the main character goes around without any operating memory and has to piece together what’s happened to him from notes he leaves on his body. As he constructs and reconstructs this knowledge, the story is revealed to him (and us) in reverse. My experience felt like this, and the odd sense that it engendered—you feel ahead of the game, hence the oily smile—stayed with me for days.

I understand these moments are tricks of blood sugars, but I see them, nonetheless, as special mental abilities. I'm not saying time was really running backwards, rather that I enjoyed the sights and sounds as you might a journey to the Arctic or the Amazon, even though you would not always want to live in these extremes. How many Richards am I? In the rhythm of sudden sickness and rapid recovery, I experience little deaths and rebirths many times, even in one day. The return to a sense of self not shaken in the fist of either a high or low sugar is sweet in the same measure as altered states are illuminating. I feel hopeful as I reassemble the fractured parts of me, languid on a couch, the littlest hairs on my body feeling air moving on them. I am small and excited, ready to evade repetition. Think on!