Doña Quixote make-overs that-did-not-take against the background of more serious affirmations of entropy

Featured image: Peter made the AI image from a news photo of the mess after the Wildwood election rally. He added 2 items from other rallies: a red hat and an abandoned flag. Doña Quixote with broom shows her hubris by imagining that she still can contribute to setting right our sociopolitical mayhem. Isn’t it time for her to just give up?

The electioneering photo serves as a mere metaphor for what is happening in our country today. My heart is heavy from the undoing of social support structures, scientific knowledge, and—most of all—common human decency. However, I have to (first?) focus on sorting out messes closer to home. As the Apostle Matthew records in chapter 7 of his gospel, verses 3-5, Jesus says, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Dear revered Teachers of mankind, as Ye no doubt already knoweth, the beam in mine own eye is the overweening confidence that I can still make over anything at all. Even the small things in my own domestic sphere. But I have to believe I can. Which proves that the beam in mine own eye is a cedar of Lebanon, known for its longevity, height, and durable wood; large forked dendritic branches, and rough and scaly bark, that together guarantee the woodchip-blinding of even the keenest seeker of wisdom.  Seeker I am, but still far short of the Holy Grail. Including—first of all—finding urgent help for my own worn-out body.

Statuette of an old woman with Parkinson’s disease, Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (after 1895), plaster

In general, the need for a make-over can come from a situation you can either learn to live with or plan your way out of; or from a condition that howls for help and is at the same time more resistant to efforts at improvement. The second is the kind sprung upon me one morning about 5 weeks ago when a sudden intense pain thwacked my left hip and lower spine when I stepped out of bed. I had no advance warning of the calamity about to happen: I got up, my hip joint buckled, would not cary my weight. I grabbed the bedside desk not to fall all the way down, sat back on the bed. After some minutes of gently rubbing the spot, I was able to stumble along, a permanent grimace on my face from the pain and constant pins and needles tingling their way to my foot. I spent days resting on the bed or couch. The pain messed with my head: I often did not make sense or get my facts and dates straight. After some days, Peter started calling in the medical profession: he organized a series of magical appointments: my family doctor, a doctor of osteopathy (DO). An X-ray, non-opioid prescription pain meds, a steroid shot in my hip, an MRI appointment for later—all between a Tuesday and a Friday.

The shot gave me great relief (though not a fix) for about 10 days. Afterwards, my leg balked again, the pain was back with a vengeance. My doctor’s non-opioid pain meds made no difference. Sadly, there was no point in going to the doctor again, not yet—a month to go to the MRI scan, the average wait for the first available slot. I was to see my DO again after the results were available. I rested again. At the same time, Peter got a horrendous cold that went to his chest. If misery loves company, we had it: I parked myself on the couch with a footstool, Peter sat nearby, breathing air from the humidifier. By time he was better, he had to go for his monthly painful shot in each eye for his macular degeneration. A few days later, both of us had a regular eye doctor appointment: Peter for his glaucoma check, I just for a regular exam (or could our excellent but humorless doctor possibly comp me with a fix for my cedar of Lebanon?) When we left for the eye doctor, I barely managed to walk to the elevator, to the underground garage for the car.  At the doctor’s office, Peter used valet parking and wheeled me in. When we got home, Peter decided my pain needed attention. Now. He got me a follow-up appt with my DO to discuss the pain, a virtual meeting the same afternoon. She gave me a new new “stronger” non-opioid pain prescription. In addition, she said I now needed an MRI of my lower back in addition to the one for my hip for which we’d waited so long.

Frida Kahlo’s 1940s The Dream (The Bed) depicts herself sleeping under a yellow blanket in her wooden four poster bed adrift in a partly cloudy sky. Recumbent above the bed’s scaffolding, “a skeletal form wrapped in wires with dynamite stuffed in the hollow of her bones, her head laid on two pillows just like Kahlo’s. She holds a bouquet of flowers. As Kahlo sleeps, vines and leaves creep from the embroidered roots at foot of her blanket and over her form, embracing her shoulders and the sheets around her.” On November 2o (yesterday for me), it was sold by Sotheby’s for $54.7 million. The buyer is not yet known.

Peter called the scheduling office to fit both MRIs in the same slot. Not enough time had been booked when he’d made the first appointment. Besides, my insurance had to first approve the second MRI—normally that would be done within two weeks. We’d just have to wait. But Peter does not take NO for an answer. He charmed the MRI scheduler with his humor and laughter, asked him to plead with our insurance. We got the go-head he next day. The MRI scheduler’s triumph inspired him to get me a double-MRI appt for the next day! We went on Friday, wheelchair routine repeated. The results and my doctor’s verdict will have to wait for another blog posting. In the meantime, Peter AI’d his vision for my recovery.

To keep up the hope of future medical help, I try to dwell on things that are still right in my life: I live in a comfortable, beautiful  place, I have medical insurance, I have friends, I live near my children and grandchildren, I have a husband straight from a Place of Love. Sometimes I still have the wherewithal to work on a project that allows me to fix something that bothered me visually and psychologically. Sometimes words still return to me and I can write away my somber thoughts.

Some weeks before my back pain imprisoned me, I started second-guessing a make-over that I’d set in motion about a year earlier by deciding to grow out my hair. To help me deal better with my alopecia. I would wear a chic hat on my unevenly outgrowing hair. When my grey tresses started showing beneath the brim, it would form a soft, fuzzy, witty, Einstein-reminiscent shape that would fetchingly frame my cheeks. Well, it did not. My hair visible from a hat appeared even more thin and spare than before. I was a failed fashionista. My feeling of failure reminded me of an art piece I had come across during that time. When I first saw Jane Alexander’s Council with emblem (2025), I laughed. I checked it out again. The figures seemed to be aliens who had misunderstood the clothing conventions of the planet they planned to visit. Like I often felt with my ragged hair.

An installation by South African artist Jane Alexander titled Council with emblem (2025). I showed it to Peter, saying : “This reminds me of some of my regrettable fashion make-overs.” We both laughed. I would later learn that my humor completely missed the mark about the exhibition’s tone.

Well, if a make-over did not work, there was always a do-over. But my assymmetrical, combed-to-one-side-top and shaved-on-the-sides former hair style had problems too. Bald patches showed on the sides as well as the top. Quod erat demonstrandum, the overall effect of longer hair was not an improvement in looks. It had been much harder to care for. Washing and letting it dry before putting on my hat (to prevent a hat ring) was tiresome.   The longer strands hooked onto and pulled out my hearing aids and earrings. Something had to change: so the other day I got dressed—my just-washed hair at its best under a favorite hat—and told Peter about my dislike of the long style and how difficult I found my hair. When I asked what he thought, he said, “It does look a bit scraggly. And I have always loved your short hair.” I had it cut the very next day. When I returned from my stylist, he said, “You look so young!” The man knows how to bypass my prefrontal cortex and go straight for my amygdala!

With my new short haircut, my alopecia bald patches are again clearly visible. I have decided that evident flaws are not as important as being able to keep my grooming easy enough not to stress me out. (Peter already helps with my earrings—I can’t see the ear-holes and my hands are so unsteady that I keep dropping the butterfly backs.) Besides the relative ease of my shaved-on-the-sides short hair, I like my style for its “honesty.” A bonus is that I can keep wearing my lovely hats!

It is inevitable that make-overs, no matter how all-encompassing, can never outwit the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy, or disorder, of a system that is open to the everyday world can never get smaller. Ice melts, food rots, houses get messy. An unkempt room has higher entropy because there are many more ways for things to be out of place than for them to be perfectly ordered. It takes energy and effort to create order out of havoc. History abounds with examples of extensive construction projects that do not survive: think of the Twin Towers, the destruction of the White House twice by fire, most recently the demolition of the East Wing. My concern, though, will focus strictly on my own domestic sphere.

Sally with Things on Strings (2004), Joy Adams

A make-over with which Peter and I lately had success was refurbishing the container garden I’d been maintaining on our balcony that had given up the ghost. There went what would be my last living-plant outside garden. Although our stoep was a very scaled-down version of my former access to a succession of suburban gardens, my pot plants made me feel connected to the landscape and the cycle of the year. We’d moved from Roberta Street to Wilmington Flats during the fall of 2018. Peter would help me set up the pots in the spring but I wanted to put together a focus-point out our new sliding doors. We bought small outdoor chairs and I repurposed a small drinks table. I gathered all kinds of natural materials to decorate a branch pruned from one of Marissa’s trees. Eventually Peter would add Christmas lights.

In the spring, I started gathering perennial- as well as seasonal pot plants and hanging baskets.

Eventually, three large hostas became the mainstay of my installation, which flourished in the almost total shade on our balcony: they did well in the summer; and were hardy enough to withstand the Utah winter.

After doing well for about 5 years, my hostas rather suddenly succumbed to Utah’s increasingly thermometer-busting temperatures. Under heat stress already, they could not withstand a gnat infestation and sap-sucking lice that must have come from a new plant or in a bag of bad soil. I tried every bit of advice about watering and non-toxic pest killers from gardening blogs. After about 2 years of partial victory, though, the leaves shriveled up and turned white. I would have to start from scratch. But I no longer had the physical strength or mental stamina to do so. I have learned to listen to my psyche’s cries of alarm when things get too much for me. At our Roberta Street house before we moved into our flat, the same kinds of harbingers warned Peter and me that caring for the house and garden were no longer a mood-enhancer. It was time to move. Having made Roberta our own for ten years and then having to leave awakened a congruity that still disheartens me. Roberta had been my favorite of all the places we’d lived but it was also our home where I’d  first learned the name of my confusion and memory loss. Moreover, Roberta Street was the garden in which our grandkids grew up.

As for the dearly departed balcony garden, I would have to find a way other than live plants to make it over as a different suitable foreground to the unsurpassable splendor of nature’s tiny forest in our back yard, Hidden Hollow. I decided on recycling the rusted painted metal objects I ‘d used before on the stoep, acquiring some more well-worn second-hand pieces, and using them with other out-door-hardy tchotchkes as well as dried natural materials to effect an acceptable change.

Above: The weathervane behind the middle pot, which we’ve had for some years, is supposedly made after a design by Benjamin Franklin. It twirls madly in the wind of the seventh (top) floor, throwing light patterns off the glass balls at the top.  2), At the far right of the photo is a wind spinner that Peter helped me cobble together from 2 other spinners that had broken or otherwise become disfunctional.

Above: The left-most pot on the balcony is positioned in front of a metal cross with roses that I’ve had for many years. 2), Round things fill out the top of the pot.

Above: For the middle container, I found a green metal pot with large painted flowers that I got from an internet vintage store for the make-over: it already has lovely rusted areas. It’s surrounded by some of the weathered wood pieces I’ve had around for previous garden incarnations. The orange doodad on the frontmost piece of wood is a metal ant that Newton and Cheryl gave me for my birthday!

Above: The right-most pot is rimmed with a dried protea-wreath: in spring, I like to buy one fresh for my soul—when I can afford it! In winter, I’d put its dried remains outside to crown one of the then still hibernating hostas we. For my make-over, I bought a thin, rusted metal vase-with-flowers from an online vintage store and, after Peter had fixed a post to it, “planted” it at the center.

My final make-over in this post returns me to the entropy in our socio-political world. At this stage of my life-span and state of health, I can no longer be an active activist. I cannot write letters, go to protests, or challenge the police even if something terrible happens right before my eyes. When I was younger and we lived in apartheid South Africa, I “stood up to the man” once or twice. (I wrote about it Memory’s Last Breath.) But that doesn’t really count, because I was never in serious danger. I never was a dedicated activist. South African artist Jane Alexander, in contrast, practiced what would be long-term protest against apartheid from an early age: she responded to the system’s injustice via various art forms, including figurative sculpture, photomontages, photography, and video. Her installation Council with emblem (2025) that made me laugh, consists of 5 different pieces:   —

The group depicts the custodians of apartheid, showing their own dehumanization as an effect of enforcing a fascist policy

While still at the University of the Witwatersrand as a fine arts student, Alexander rose to international prominence with her Butcher Boys(1985–6) , a sculpture group depicting victims of apartheid. Three horned life-sized figures sit pensively on a bench. They have big black eyes but no mouths, holes for ears. Their backs are split open exposing bone. They are grotesque yet vulnerable, without a clear identity.

 

In recent work, Alexander has shown the aftermath of apartheid and pointed out global analogies in relation to migration, political and cultural conflict, and resistance. In the United States, too, artists have been at the leading edge of anti-war-and other sociopolitical resistance protests since before the Declaration of Independence.

A silversmith by trade, Paul Revere also produced copperplate engravings for different books and causes that supported the nascent Patriot movement, consisting of colonists who rebelled against British Rule and supported the American Revolution. Revere’s most effective piece of anti-British propaganda was a full-color rendering of the 1770 melee that came to be known as “The Bloody Massacre,” which broke out after British troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd of rabble-rousing Bostonians. Revere’s one-sided depiction lit a flame under the Patriot cause and stoked anti-British sentiment throughout the restless colonies.

 

David Becker’s American Headbag (2025) depicts the American flag refashioned into a suffocating head bag. It is part of an art movement Fall of Freedom, launched yesterday, Nov 22, 2025, in which galleries, museums, libraries, comedy clubs, theaters, and concert halls across the country host exhibitions, performances, and public events that channel the defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. Its goal is to celebrate the artistic expression of experiences, cultures, and identities that shape the fabric of our nation. “Art matters. Artists are a threat to American fascism.”

Art, of course, cannot prevent episodes in history that put large swaths of the world’s inhabitants at odds with our environment, our government, our fellow citizens. So it has been from the first recorded times onward: the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh—even rock art before writing—tells us so. During some periods of time, a Zeitgeist arises that breaks through the chaos to create peace. But order is never guaranteed. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us so.

 

The question remains as to what someone like me, struck by old age in brain, mood, and body, can do to contribute to the changes every American desires. I believe that no matter what political party we support, most of us know people who may have voted differently from us, but who are still the friendly, considerate neighbors we’ve known for many years. I want my contribution to be the beaming of friendliness, good behavior, smiles, greetings, listening, and loving to everybody I come across whenever possible. If I come across rudeness, I want to not be confrontational or angry, but just walk (at the moment “limp”) away and go about what I’d set out for.

 

For my soul, I want to dwell on and accept a reality of physics: entropy happens. The fact that an individual even notices it, is a sign that you’re still part of the living world. Life, above all, is the only natural force to decrease entropy: from plants to humans, we who live generate energy from the sun, our food and drink, with which our genes arrange our leaves, flowers, organs, and other body parts in orderly fashion. No matter how diminished we are, if we retain some reason and love we can use our available energy to each make our small environment a happier place. If we’re lucky, our environment can encompass the wider world. Thus spake Doña Quixote, the same Doña who wants to beam out love but can sometimes not even be civil to her husband, her emissary from the Place of Love. So she beaches herself on the couch with a mess of pillows and blankets to relieve her leg pain and meditates on the Second Law of Thermodynamics.