Adventures in Microsurgery or I've got a Hole in Me Pocket

  

            This happened in April.

 

            I was lying on a table, and there was a woman standing on either side of me.  The one on the left side was instructing the one on the right, who held a needle, how to fold a napkin in a particular way in relation to it.  The needle-wielding lady was a young nurse in training, and before the coaching started (“fold it this way, not that way!”), we had exchanged a few gentle words about finding the vein, and whether the same needle would be used to both extract blood and deliver intravenous fluids.  She said it would be.  Now I was a bit concerned, listening to the rather harsh, admonitory directions being given.  Was the young nurse up to the task?  And more to the point, why was my eye surgery the occasion of this practice session?

 

            When I first entered the room, there seemed to be at least 10 people buzzing around—why did this procedure require so many participants?   Two people introduced themselves -- the surgeon who was the MC of the show, and his Fellow, an ophthalmologist who had been at my consultation with the surgeon 2 months earlier.  The Fellow poked her head into my line of sight (such as it was) and asked if I remembered her.  How difficult it is to recognize anyone with a surgical mask on!  And how sad it seems to me now, given what they were about to do to me, that they weren’t addressing me by my first name. 

 

            I had not been told about the many things that were now happening.  When the anti-clot balloon was attached to my right calf, I said, “My circulation is very good!” but no one paid any attention.  Of course, this was a medical school, so the nurse training was a commonplace – but they might have warned me.  Now that the needle had gone in, I was unable to think anything else about why so many people were involved, or what each of them was likely to bill me.   

 

            Just before entering my sedated “twilight” state, I heard several people asking, “where is the tissue?”   After which I was happy to hear it was located.  This answered a burning question that had dogged me since I was first diagnosed in January with a full-thickness macular hole.  At that time my Albany Retinologist referred me to the hospital in NYC because my hole was special, or more especially hopeless, given the deterioration of the eye in general.  It was explained that I should take this expensive trip to NYC because he had studied with a Doctor-Scientist there who specialized in these holes.  And most excitingly for me, his former teacher would use an amniotic membrane to close the hole, the latest thing in eyeball technology.

 

            Back then, I went home with my seeing husband-- and I should say right now that I am so fortunate to have one, considering how every dilation leaves me blinded-- and immediately googled the Doctor-Scientist and found a paper in which he reported his findings from working on cadavers.   So very reassuring to know the procedure was successful on dead subjects.  

 

             At our consultation in February, we learned my new doctor would not commit to the exact procedure he would use to close my macular hole.  There are a few techniques, mostly developed in the 2000’s and 2010’s, which my local Retinologist might have used himself.  The most popular one involves using a piece of the existing macula.  As for the new tissue technique, my surgeon said he had not yet published his report on any of the 13 live people he had operated on.  [His notes from this meeting, under “Suggestions”, say: “Myopic macular hole OS. Recommended PPV/membrane peel/possible hAM graft.”]   At this single preparatory meeting, he didn’t discuss much of the What or How.  I missed seeing the model of the eye, the stretch of the macula, the failure of the vitreous (“FTMH; Myopic maculopathy; Vitreous syneresis; PVD; Pavingstone degeneration; NS”).  What was he actually going to do to fix this thing?  He didn’t say.  The notes also discuss the OD, my right eye.  That one didn’t seem to be doing so hot, either.  We asked how improved my vision would be after the operation, and he said (with grim satisfaction, it seemed to me): “this is a salvage operation”.

 

            We went home to google “Vitrectomy” and watched some stultifying videos to prepare for the worst—which turned out to be better than what was done to me.  In these videos, three holes were drilled into some poor schmoe’s eyeball, so that a camera and a couple of microsurgery tools could be inserted.  One was a kind of vacuum, to remove the vitreous. At the end of some kind of “staining” and “flap” articulation, a gas bubble was blown in there.  I steeled myself and tried to think objectively about it.

 

            Two months later, I found out in a post-op exam that they drilled five holes in my sclera.  I still don’t know what each one was for.  But I remember that after the first 2 hours of the procedure my sedative wore off—that is, while the operation was still under way.  I saw white gauze out of my better eye, and there was a profound silence.  I panicked and labored to speak, working against the oxygen tubes in my mouth and nose.  I mumbled foolishly, “Is it over?”  to which my surgeon sternly replied, “Don’t talk!”.  Now I started to imagine I could feel some kind of scratching in the back of my eye, some tinkering going on back there.  This was somewhat distressing.

 

            They finally wheeled me out, back to the private room where my husband was dutifully waiting.  He commenced a friendly banter (see: flirting) with the nurse who stayed with me.  When after an hour the intravenous was finally removed and I was allowed to get up to use the bathroom (lots of bladder pressure from all that intravenous fluid), I felt a very wet sleeve of my operating gown and saw it was soaked red from my blood.   This nurse was clearly distracted from properly bandaging my arm.  Throughout my hour-long wait, the poor woman kept looking uselessly into the corridor, where we could all hear my doctor issuing instructions.  She clearly hoped my surgeon would come to speak with me.  When he didn’t come in, after some more joshing and joking, I was stood up, dressed, and told to keep my head down.   We inched back to our hotel.

 

            There is a euphemism for this recovery period—it’s called “positioning”.  You may ask, why can’t they just call it “face-downing”?  I know why.  It’s to keep the mostly female, mostly elderly patients in a cooperative state.  When I had my February consultation, I asked how many days I’d have to spend face-down.  He said six.  That’s 6 days of having to sleep face-down (donut extension to mattress, like a massage table), and keep the head down 90% of the waking hours.  Then, after those six days expired, I expected relief, but was told “another seven”, but with a small concession, I could sleep on my right side (only).    Then after that week I asked again, and was told, “until the bubble dissolves”.   

 

             Again, I recommend having a Seeing Husband for this process.  There are just too many things you can’t do if you keep your head down.

 

            There’s a whole industry sideline to surgical supplies, “Vitrectomy equipment”, and I found my supplies on Ebay and Amazon, trying to save money by avoiding purchasing new, or renting at more than $100 a week.  I spent most of my money during the week in NYC at a hotel in Washington Heights because I didn’t want to travel away from the doctor after this weird procedure, only to travel back a week later for the post-op exam.  As it turned out, when we finally drove away from the frenzied mean streets of the city, I discovered it was completely nauseating to ride in a car with my head down.  We stopped a few times at rest stops where I guzzled Coca-Cola and paced the perimeter of the parking lot looking as if I had lost something on the ground.

 

            There are also articles by Ophthalmologists in which they report that it is undetermined whether face-downing is even necessary.

 

            The bubble became tantalizingly small on the 17^th day and vanished on the 18^th.  I lifted my head and was told I couldn’t exercise.  It was OK to walk, so I started taking regular 5-mile walks.   In four days, it will be a month since the operation, my MH eye is not seeing well (some peripheral vision but no center focus and a general dirty-window view) and I’ve been told not to expect much improvement for months.

 

            Of the general population, 0.3% develop macular holes.  Of these, 80% are women.  Why is that?  

 

            I have a follow-up exam on May 10^th.

Asylum Seeker

            You must remember that during the last two decades of the prior century, Union Square was between jobs.  It had finished its long stint as a mustering grounds for labor protests, and it had not yet begun its new life as a perennial Green Market for the One-Per centers and a watering hole for their attenuated fashion models. 

            Those flower beds that are blooming today  —see over there, for instance, where the Japanese tourists are taking pictures –so vibrant with renewal, broadcasting their glowing yellow and purple buds;  they were just dark swards with straggly weeds, littered with crushed beer cans and mysterious devices related to the after-dark activities of the park-dwellers. 

In those days, the park had plenty of benches but nowhere to sit.  This was because one couldn’t very well sit with a wino or a drug addict.  But even if there was nobody on the bench, you still didn’t want to sit with whatever it was that they left behind.   And it’s easy to recall the residents, rousing themselves from their beds behind a bush or tree to tail an unsuspecting visitor as she meandered thoughtlessly along the paths.  The stalker would just wait until their mark sat down on a bench and opened a book.  He would then approach and strike up a conversation such as:

  “Hey, what’cha readin’?  Sorry to disturb ya, but I jus’ came into the city from New Jersey this mornin’, and I was gettin’ my coffee at one of these carts, ya know, when some bastard grabbed my wallet and ran!  Ya know what I mean, I got exactly twenty cents in my pocket now, I can’t even get back on the subway, man.  You look like a nice girl.   I need the 80 cents, ya know, a measly 80 cents, can ya help me out,  please?  I really don’t feel too good, I left my medicine at home,  I feel really bad –don’t I look bad? –think I gotta go to the hospital soon…  my wife, she’s pregnant,  she’s sick too…my little babies at home are waitin’ for me, I really need to get there, ya know?...  Hey! Wait! where ya goin’?  I haven’t eaten in three days !.. 75 cents! …. 60 cents !  aw come on, can’t ya help a guy out?...    Jesus Christ,  what a bitch …”

            Pretty soon the park would morph from providing this sort of experience,  vaguely threatening and guilt-producing,  to another kind --  to provoking basic wonderment about all the good things that life has to offer : flowers, a café, clean seats, and a dog run.  We’re just not sure where the original residents went.

Just so, there was a sea-change in the life of my good friend Faith Elfenbein, who happened to work on the square and ate all her lunches in the park, carefully avoiding the less palatable corners.  On the North side of Union Square stands an impressive 15-story beaux-arts building which during this time held the offices of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS for short.  They are a Jewish organization funded by other Jewish organizations, with a venerable history of helping resettle survivors who were liberated to the Displaced Persons camps in Europe after the end of WWII.   By the Fall of 1988, my friend Faith had been working there for a couple of years, but now she was itching to leave.

            Faith was part of a group of eight recent college graduates who were hired to process refugee documents during the dawning period of Glasnost.   These innocents, not one over 25 years old, were holding B.A.s from good private colleges, where they majored in languages or history.  None of them spoke Russian;  but their boss, ten years older and a Yale graduate, spoke it excellently.   They were each given a windowed private office around the perimeter of the floor.  They were not trained to be social-workers, but their clients would often start crying in their offices.

            In the center of the office was a warren of desks for the female clerks, former citizens of the USSR.  They would sashay through the office in a miasma of fragrance, sparks seeming to fly from the effects of their tight, sequined clothing under the fluorescent lights.   Faith and her cohort depended on their services, because they interpreted and delivered fresh wire reports from the transit offices, handed cases to them, and took on the occasional emergency translation.         

            The Russian refugees were held in INS limbo at transit points in Vienna and Ladispoli, which is outside of Rome, while HIAS and the Joint Distribution Committee worked with them on their applications to the State Department.  In these documents claiming religious persecution, they were asked to detail the anti-Semitism they experienced;  they usually described how they were not admitted to University or refused a position in their field, or told painful stories about wide-ranging discrimination and being refused medical care.

[I should mention, there were Iranian refugees as well as Russian.   The Iranian Jews had harrowing stories about escaping through Pakistan, and Faith appreciated her role in their resettlement.  They also showed up in her office and complained that their carpets were seized by Customs.  The relatives often thought they needed to bribe her.  Most of Faith’s job was with the Russian cases, so let’s just ignore the Iranians for now.]

            The HIAS administrators at the transit locations were supposed to encourage immigration to Israel, but it seemed to Faith as if most of them were choosing to come here, instead.   There were government subsidies in both places.   Here, however, none of the subsidy was available if a first degree relative was a US citizen,  in which case, the entire application was thrown out.   Faith’s job was to break the unwelcome news to the relative (usually a son or daughter) that they would have to attest to providing financial support themselves, else their relative would be sent to Israel. 

            These situations were rare.  Most of the time Faith’s job, for which she earned less than 20,000 a year, meant she had to interview the local relatives in order to learn whether they could provide housing and food, while the culture-shocked immigrants took English classes and looked for work.  The first step was to meet them in person. 

            One Wednesday morning, a thirty-five year old man named Boris Levin came to see her.   His bulky long-shoreman physique took up most of the space in her office; she offered him the armchair facing her, and he settled most of himself into it.  He then leaned to his right, supporting his chin in his open hand;  his wet, redly drooping eyes, shadowy beard, uneven haircut and mismatched shirt and vest gave him a sensitive, rumpled look.  He might not have slept last night.  Faith steeled herself for the ordeal : by means of poky, intrusive and occasionally embarrassing questions, she must gauge his ability to house the refugees. 

            “Mr. Levin, I see you arrived in 1985, so how have you been doing?”

            He fell back in his chair, and folded his hands in his lap.  “Miss Elfenbein.  You must know from that folder in front of you, we had a terrible time getting the exit visas.  And then, we spent four months in Ladispoli.   It is not to be believed what we went through with the government, how hard it was, you see I am only half Jewish—but my wife, she is totally Jewish.  They really gave us a hard time.”  He looked accusingly at Faith, as if she had personally wrought the bureaucratic delay that kept them back in Italy.  He picked up some paperclips that were lying on the desk and started rubbing them together between his thumb and pointer finger.

            Faith moved on to the next question.  She inquired, “Are you working?”  Boris looked down at the paperclips in his hands, and his breathing became more labored.  Finally he looked up at her again.

            “I had some construction job for a few months, but it wasn’t steady.  The boss, he takes so much time to fight the tickets downtown, the violations you know, that we don’t get to work on the site very much.”  He started chaining the clips together.

            “What will happen when your sister Faina and her husband Arkadiy arrive in New York, with their children Tanya and Leonid?  Can they stay with you until they find an apartment?”  She tried to sit up straighter. “How big is the apartment you share with your wife on….”  she looked down at the case and leafed quickly through a few pages:  “.. West 7^th Street, Brooklyn?”

            “Oh, our apartment is very small,” said Boris lugubriously, looking around her office as if he might find a floor plan on the walls somewhere that he could use to demonstrate this fact.

            “Yes, but how many bedrooms?”

            “We have two bedrooms.  I live with my wife and her mother.  It is very crowded.   We have asked for Section 8 housing for my mother-in-law, and I am hoping we get this before Faina and Arkadiy come.  My wife’s mother, she is really very sick.”  He let out a long sigh then, and the cigarette stench of his breath filled the little office.   “We are hoping HIAS will help them. “  The Russian pronunciation used four syllables instead of two, so the name came out as “he-aah-se”. 

            Boris wanted to help his sister.  But not everyone was as welcoming.  After all, in most cases it wasn’t the same thing as taking in a Holocaust survivor in 1945.  Imagine yourself in their shoes, if you were called out of the blue to put up a crowd of refugees in your home for an uncertain period of time.  If you hadn’t seen the poor schmos in ten years, but you were raised together in the communal apartment, one kitchen for five families, learned math in the same classroom, ate kasha varniskas together, married sisters – then it was a walk in the park (just not Union Square, of course).   You’d swear anything to get them into the country.   But if the applicants who named you were distant cousins who cheated you out of your birthright back in Vladivostok, or they were the sons of your Father and one of his other three wives who you never liked, well then, fugeddaboudit.

            For Boris, Faith could ask for a grant—it was to her discretion, and there was no technical background check into assets.  She made a civilized inquiry and trusted the response.  Since most of the relatives were recent immigrants themselves, they had no money and were still struggling with English.  Also, without the retaking of difficult qualifying exams, doctors and engineers could not resume their professions.  One woman, Galina, helped Faith understand the problem, when the interview began as usual with the question of employment.

            “I was a doctor in Kiev!” Galina leaned forward, gripping the edge of Faith’s desk and widening her eyes in fury.  “And now, look at me! I have to beg to be a laboratory technician.  I’m forty years old, it is much too late for me to do a residency and qualify here to be a doctor.  The test is impossible.”

            “Oh, how terrible,”  Faith vaguely commiserated, “Perhaps if you could train to be a nurse?”   This suggestion was received with the scorn it deserved, from someone who was on track to be a doctor from the age of twelve.

            “I am Phd in microbiology, you know what that is ?”

            Faith regarded her blankly.  Galina was certainly unlucky, but perhaps inclined to look on the dark side.

            “Are you preparing for the exam? “  Faith innocently inquired of someone else, an engineer.

             The man looked at her pityingly.  “You cannot imagine this kind of exam, what it is, the questions are harder than they are for Americans.  They are purposely making the test harder for us.”  Faith was sympathetic.  It seemed possible that a test for foreigners would be made so that only the most brilliant would pass and be entitled to pick up their lives where they left off, like a kind of ‘no-compete’ clause attached to their entry visas.

            There were some terrible, fatal delays, sometimes due to simple bureaucratic lethargy, the papers not being pushed fast enough.  Faith received wires about people becoming gravely ill, reports about the deaths of people in their 70’s or 80’s who, after waiting 20 years for exit visas, were now unable to go any further than Europe.

            In the beginning, as a trickle of families seeped out of the USSR, this long-awaited release of refuseniks was universally  greeted with cheers.  Many of them were academics and famous activists, and Faith relished reviewing their case files which often held copies of articles and pleas for their liberty from famous people.  But by 1988 the sheer volume of asylum applications had so encumbered the agency that you could say it changed the tenor of refugee status. 

            What might have been heard in the beginning as a touchingly sensitive piece of klezmer (by Sakharov and Sharansky) enjoining the West to recognize their right to worship god and Torah as generations before them had practiced their religion, now sounded more like a cacophony of Slavic pop songs, each vying for Nationalistic attention and Section 8 housing.

            As Boris pointed out, occasionally a case was held up when the petitioner could not provide enough supporting documents – birth certificates, USSR ID cards that stated “Jewish”--  to the Joint Distribution Committee.   When this happened, the relatives felt free to tell her, “Miss Elfenbein, you are a Nazi!”   The Georgians cajoled, the Ukrainians disputed, the Latvians complained, and the White Russians asserted that they were in fact, one-eighth Jewish.  “If it’s good enough to keep us out of the University, it should be good enough for you!” 

            The floodgates had opened, and a deluge washed over New York City, running downstream to Brighton Beach. 

            Faith got to know some of the lawyers at HIAS.  One of these, Jane, was often going to court to plead a complicated immigration case.  One day Faith went to ask her a question about citizenship, and found her packing her briefcase.

            “Who are you defending today?” Faith asked, expecting to hear a matter concerning an indigent, famous Russian applicant.

            “A Cambodian who came here illegally.  The Khmer Rouge killed his family.  I think we’ll get him refugee status.”

            Faith didn’t know much about Cambodians, but she understood that the NGO had a minority of non-Jewish cases that it was required to take, because it received federal funds.  “How many Cambodians does HIAS take on in a year?”

            “We had five this year”  Jane replied.   This was compared to thousands of Russian cases.

            “Can you explain to me what the preference is for Russians ?” Faith asked.  “Most of the people I see here are not especially religious, they just chose to come here rather than Israel because they want to make a buck and they still want to belong to a ‘Super Power’. “

            “It’s the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, it’s a type of trading sanction.”   Jane looked around her desk, moved a few piles of paper around, and handed Faith a journal with the heading, “UNHCR Report”.    She said, “This explains about the Cambodians.  See you later!” and hurried out the door.

            Faith took it back to her desk and read it from cover to cover.  It was published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  The cover story was about the genocide in Cambodia -- %21 of the population was killed between 1975 and 1979 --  and 100,000 people were still being held in camps in Thailand.

            Faith began to see the whole refugee-visa operation as a political maneuver by the United States.  The religious-persecution refugees she was processing were economic migrants.  Not all, but most.  They wanted to play the game of Capitalism for the high stakes;  they knew it would be harder to become rich in Israel, and it was certainly more dangerous to live there.  She fully believed that they deserved the freedom to emigrate—they even might deserve to come to the US—but she couldn’t see how her work could qualify as a humanitarian mission.

            Her father, an engineer, showed her some Assembler code which he used to program hardware.  She could follow the explanation;  she understood how the registers worked,  how a byte contained bits.  Based on this, he urged her to learn a computer language.  So she enrolled for Cobol classes at night at the City College that was up the street from HIAS.  She had to matriculate as if she were studying for another bachelor’s degree, even though she already had one from Barnard.

            She met Denise Gonzales in one of these classes.   Denise was already a programmer at a Brokerage firm.  She said she was taking the class because she already knew the subject.  This was a new concept for Faith, who thought education was for expanding her mind and not for confirming things she already knew.

            Denise showed Faith her left hand, on which sparkled the biggest diamond ring Faith had ever seen.  Denise had a new boyfriend, a broker, but there was some problem with his ex.

            “What do you know about Small Claims court?” she asked Faith.  “His fiancée is suing me for this ring,” Denise seemed a little defiant.  Faith had no experience in legal matters.  This engagement ring must have been returned-- surely it wasn't stolen ?  She was too shy to ask about it.  

               Then Denise revealed a core issue troubling her. “He’s Jewish.  do you think he’ll marry me? “   Faith hesitated to give an opinion.  She regarded Denise as incredibly lucky to be six inches taller than herself, to have long legs, an ivory complexion, a fine straight nose, and large violet eyes behind big-framed glasses.  Faith was exhilarated to meet such a beauty—but how much luck should one person have?  How fair was that in the overall scheme of things?   It disheartened her to think that yet another Jewish man would not be available to her.  “Sometimes they do” was the best she could offer, although this boyfriend’s history was a negative indicator.

            Denise gave Faith the key to her economic future.  “I was a secretary at Merrill Lynch,”  she told Faith.  “They gave me a test and that’s how I became a programmer.  See if you can get one at a bank, I know they have programs in other places.  I’m making twenty-six thousand, and they’re paying for my bachelor’s degree.”  In gratitude, Faith showed Denise how to make a flowchart to solve logical problems.  She then spent a few days at the library researching banks in New York, got the addresses for technical recruiters, and sent out thirty letters inquiring about whether a novice such as herself could be accepted into their technology training program.  One of them sent her an invitation to take the exam.

            One month later, there she was, cooling her heels in the HR waiting room on the fourteenth floor of the American Trust Bank.  Faith had been finger-printed and urine-tested, she had been photographed and presented with a badge.  It wasn’t such a bad picture, either, since her hair wasn’t flying off at odd angles and her nose didn’t look too bulbous.   She couldn’t have been happier.

            She was sitting leafing through the  Annual Report and admiring its production values, when her new boss walked in.  “Are you Faith, our new Programmer-Librarian?” asked the diminutive, curvy blonde with a wide, sunny smile.  “I’m Diane, the project leader for BAI.  Are they all done with you here ?”

            “Yes, they’ve finished” said Faith, pulling out her badge to show she had received the official passport.  She was measuring Diane and thought she might be just a tad less than five feet tall without her heels.

            “Shall we go?  Can I carry something? ” asked Diane.  Faith was briefly juggling her accessories – a bulky attaché case in her left hand, and a plastic bag full of her sneakers in the other.  Her stepmother had recommended the attaché as part of her Dress for Success regimen, but the case would have been empty without the Annual Report she had just shoved into it.

            “No, I can manage.” she told Diane, and followed her out of HR.  Stomping along behind Diane’s practiced, dainty walk, Faith reflected that her own shiny synthetic suit from Macy’s couldn’t compete with the tailoring in front of her, a suit which must have come from Brooks Brothers.

            They whisked their cards through the turnstiles and boarded an elevator headed for the fourteenth floor.   She studied her face reflected in the elevator doors, and exulted over her arrival in Corporate America.   After her exhausted, striving campaign to get this job, she had high expectations.  It must first of all compensate her for having exchanged a life of meaningful, socially productive activity for the soulless business world.

            

Learning to Speak

Sadie adored the wallpaper. It had a pattern of Scooby Doo and Daisy Duck on a blue field. She would lie on the bed as close as she could get to the wall, which was always very cool given that the walls of the house were brick, and by pressing her cheek against it one of the Scoobies would get much, much bigger and take up all her eye could see. She almost fell into the crack between the bed and the wall. She did this long before she was diagnosed as myopic, or maybe just a year or so before she went to get her glasses with the striped frames.

She also loved her bookshelf, so high above her and closely loaded with tomes of fairytales, mythology with beautiful pictures, and more difficult books that had many sections all about the same story. Her mommy still provided the regular bed-time fare of Cat in the Hat, but she also knew all the pictures in Dr. Doolittle, and one day soon she’d be able to put those words together.

When Mommy and Daddy had parties in their sunken living room, her daddy played the guitar and sang songs about ladies from Winnipeg and terrible punishments for wandering folk singers. Once she crept downstairs to see what all the noise was about, and her natural Shirley Temple impersonation (as her grandma called it) was roundly appreciated by the guests. “Sadie, what chair does he mean?” one man asked her at the end of a long song mostly concerning a man killing his lover. “the electric chair!” she promptly replied, sending them rocking with laughter and nearly spilling their drinks. She wondered why giving the correct answer was so amusing to them.

She didn’t like the way her head hurt when her mommy combed her thick, curly hair, but it was the first step before she could put on the cowgirl outfit and boots, before she could pick up her horse and ride, put on her ten-gallon (1-gallon) hat. She would also stare at her mommy getting dressed to go out, always smelling of strong perfume and wearing heavy jewelry; she guessed rightly that this was her mommy’s favorite time, too.

Mrs. Stokes came over almost every afternoon to give her cookies and milk and to see that Sadie took her nap—which was always a time of resistance. Sadie would pout, and complain that her big sister was exempt. “Why doesn’t Diana have to take a nap? It’s not fair!” And Mrs. Stokes would just smile with the endless patience given her by years of looking after other people’s children, and say, “Sweetie, Diana is almost five years ahead of you! Diana’s doing her homework ! You should be happy to nap, I know I would be.” But Sadie’s little brow came down in her most scowling face, even seriously looking like a tantrum was coming on. No crying around Mrs. Stokes, though. Tantrums were saved for the teenage babysitters, who were more easily overpowered.

Instead of napping, Sadie would have liked to keep playing with Diana, who built whole highway networks out of building blocks. Mommy didn’t see the point of Barbie, so very often the girls would get little Corgi cars as gifts, miniature models of the real automobile that they would drive on these highways. Sadie had one in her collection that could be traced to a book, it was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and had wings. She also had a James Bond Jaguar, which had a little button to expel the driver into an arc’d trajectory, most satisfyingly onto the carpet for as many times as she wanted.

One day she pretended to be napping, and instead snuck into her sister’s room. Diana’s room was clearly off limits to her, which made it that much more exciting to look around when no one was looking. The wallpaper had flowers, and there were shelves of glass animals just at Sadie’s nose-level. Her favorite was a blue horse with yellow eyes and red hooves; quite definitely made of glass, but which somehow always smiled a gamine grin at its beholder. “This horse should be mine” she thought to herself; it was just unfortunately stabled in Diana’s room, and needed her to visit and groom it. She also felt pretty warmly about a little pink ceramic pig, which had flowers dotting its back.

The bedroom was on a corner of the house and got a lot of sunlight. She reached up and took the horse over to the window, where she held it in a spotlight of slanting 4:00 sun, turning it around in her hand until a spark was kindled in the place she expected its heart to be. Then she went back to the shelves, reached up to replace it, and knocked the pig over. Instead of squealing, it broke into shards of pink ceramics, Sadie stepped back to survey the damage and thought maybe she should go back to her napping pose as quickly as she could. There was something awkward about her situation, but she wasn’t sure what might ensue, better to take up a position that was originally intended to last the afternoon.

Sadie studied her wallpaper until her mommy and sister came home from wherever it was they had been, they hadn’t explained it to her. She listened to Diana coming upstairs and into her room, she heard the dismayed cry, and then her sister’s running back downstairs and her mommy trying to soothe her tears. It was something terrible that had happened! She got up from her bed and edged her way to the head of stairs, where she heard the following exchange :

Her mommy said, “Mrs. Stokes can’t have done that, I’m sure!” and she could hear Diana, just bawling away over the pig. Sadie came downstairs and watched them from the door of the kitchen. Finally, her mommy decided that Mrs. Stokes had broken the delicate animal while cleaning the shelves. She watched her mommy ask Mrs. Stokes about it, she heard Mrs. Stokes deny that she was in any way involved in the murder of this pig. Sadie saw Mrs. Stokes take a sideways glance at her, as she stood uncertainly in the doorway sucking her thumb. But she could not pronounce the words that would have told the truth, and Mrs. Stokes was blamed.

Soft Serve

Soft Serve

I was just putting the finishing touches on a spreadsheet purporting to show how I’d saved Grinnel a chunk of change, when I heard my buddy in the adjoining cubicle banging some desk drawers around. I turned to see him tossing files into the garbage, and piling his family pictures and chotchkes into a box. “Hey, what’s up?” I asked in alarm, although I had an idea it had something to do with this morning’s client. He stopped the frenetic activity just long enough to give me the hairy eyeball. His curly mop was sticking to his forehead, and his nose looked like it had been recently blown.

“Giscard D’Estaing just gave me the boot!” he stage-whispered at me, smirking and thumbing over his shoulder to the corner office. Giscard: that was our moniker for the manager of this department. He’d earned it by suggesting that every woman on the floor was hot for him, and by his strange substitution of French for some everyday words-- like when he’d say, “that report on Kimmerling’s last shipment has to be sur mon bureau by 3 pm at the latest”. We’d always snicker as he walked away, “trez bee-yen, mun seenyure !” and guffaw into our rancid coffee cups. I knew Giscard was mean, but would he really do this to Rick, our loyal, if a bit lazy, but not more lazy than the average employee, Grinnel’s Funnel Shops clerk?

Grinnel’s was a distribution point for soft ice-cream makers, both assembling and distributing them. My job was to use a 1950’s algorithm to calculate what new parts we had to order after receiving requests begging for them from the vintage assembly floor (the manager wasn’t so old, but the operation sure was). The calculation had something to do with current inventory – I wasn’t using the Just-in-Time method, rather the Just-to-Keep-Them-Off-My-Back method. It was this fancy accounting, explained in the fanciest terms, that kept me on Giscard’s Favorites list.

But Rick’s job was more grueling than mine. He was a ‘relationship manager’ who handled client calls, often fielding complaints about the operation of the machines. In this way he had to balance the customer service we so brilliantly supplied, with his own weak-kneed ego. I encouraged him to have them make love to him by the end of these conversations, but it didn’t always go so well. That morning I had heard him say, with some emphasis on the wrong word, “Then get your own fucking State of the Art Mr. Softee replacement !” to a client who must have been a roadie, as we called those trucks. I was just happy to know that somewhere in America, an annoying jingle had been stilled.

I jumped on this recent memory. “Did it have anything to do with the Roadie call you got this morning?”

“Nah…..” Rick looked deeply into the box he was loading, as if the answer were in there among his Plexiglas Number One in Customer Service awards. “Mike, it’s just too messed up to go into right now. Suffice to say, the Master doesn’t want to see my face on these premises again. You get yourself over to the house tonight and we can cry into our beers about it”. And like the laborer he was, he shouldered the box and headed over to the elevator. I watched him drive away in that car he bought last month, wondering how much of it he still had to pay for.

By now the rest of the floor was standing around staring over their cubicle walls, itching to ask me what had happened. I identified them easily as creepy coworkers who relished the misfortune they narrowly escaped, which Evil had magically skipped over them and landed on Rick. So I announced purposefully, and in a 360-degree manner, “Mind your own business, idiots.” and they servilely sat down again.

That night I went around to his house. Merrill opened the door, a cute little girl in sweats and her super-straight hair held back by bandanna – well, you might say not so girlish now that she must be in her 40’s. Money doesn’t seem to have affected her choice of career (music teacher) or her mode of dress, so I reasoned that Rick’s job loss wouldn’t unduly strain their relationship. “Glad to see you, Mike” she said, without looking very glad at all. I said, “Grinnel’s won’t be Rick’s last job, I guess” and she answered, “Let’s hope not, it wasn’t my choice for him in the first place.”

She led me into the living-room, where I noticed the cat curled up on the piano bench and newspapers all over the coffee table. Rick was sitting staring at the TV while not seeming to really see the basketball game being broadcast. He turned it off when he saw me, and offered to get me a beer. I declined, saying “Sure kid, but first tell me what happened to you-- I’ve been hatching all kinds of ideas all day and fighting off the press”.

Merrill arranged herself in the window seat, hands in her lap and an unnaturally patient expression on her face. I took a seat on the couch next to Rick, who started to explain. He seemed kind of stupefied, but he’d clearly been processing his change of fortune over the last few hours and was ready to report.

“I got a phone call this morning from Curtiss Cookies, that store in D.C. that signed our contract in November, but refused the maintenance agreement. Remember them?” I nodded to show that I did, although I wasn’t as interested in his arrangements as he supposed. “Well, since they didn’t buy the maintenance, they didn’t clean it right. And since they didn’t clean it right, it started cranking out powdered shit instead of soft serve. Herbert, the guy who owns the place, called up this morning and had the balls to blame me!”

“But you’re not responsible for it, since they didn’t ask for maintenance.”

“Right, but then they claimed the machine wasn’t even installed right, so I had to pass that on to Giscard.” The cat, a great over-fed, brown-and-white marbled thing, had leapt off the bench and glided over to Rick. Rick started stroking it therapeutically, until we could all hear it gutturally purring.

“Giscard came out to my desk to find out what happened. Now I hear they’re planning a lawsuit-- one of their customers got sick and is suing them, so they’ve turned around and sued us. You know, you may lose your job, too!”

I received this news skeptically. Grinnel’s needed me to keep manipulating the inventory. “Rick, it doesn’t sound bad enough yet, what am I missing?”

Then he nodded his head down, pursed his lips and stared at me over the rims of his glasses. “So Giscard came out to me and told me that stuff about the lawsuit, and then he said, like we had been best friends for years and were just shooting the breeze over a hard case, ‘did you ever meet Herbert’s wife, Bette ?’ and of course I did, six months ago you know, we make these contracts in person, we inspect the shop and vet the number of machines we can sell them.

“It was a slow day at Curtiss. She made me go behind the counter with her and gave me a taste of their stuff from the old machine, and it was pretty good. Chocolate with almond sprinkles I still remember! That Bette, she wouldn’t leave me alone—while I stood there licking the thing she kept getting real close to me, talking about Herbert’s sad sack business deals and how she could make a profit if he just stayed out of her way. Then she really came on to me, talking about my hair cut and shit like that, playing with me. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”

I chanced a look at Merrill. She was still stolidly sitting in her seat with a neutral expression.

“I told Giscard right away, hey-- Bette’s a looker and sick of Herbert. And that was it, an hour later he called me into his office and told me it was over. Turns out I needed to keep my mouth shut about our clients, since Bette had told someone else – I found out later he meant his wife, that this shop is gonna fail because of this ice cream machine I sold her.

“And then 10 minutes later Sal comes over, and tells me this Herbert is Giscard’s wife’s brother. So I’m supposed to believe the brother-in-law asks him to fire me for not selling them a maintenance add-on?! I don’t believe it. I think Herbert’s got a good reason to suspect Bette’s fooling around, and Giscard fired me because he’s the one she’s fooling with”.

I said I’d take that beer now. I thought I could work this to Rick’s advantage, but we’d need Bette’s cooperation and a labor lawyer.

Raising their Voices

Dies Irae, Dies illa!  The Latin exhortation echoed thru the soaring apse. Rows of chest-swelling singers, expressions consistent with the words they sang, looked fiercely at the woman who jabbed her baton in the air and hopped up and down on the balls of her feet. All their attention was fixed on this very short woman : Day of wrath, day of anger; who thinks to herself, we have been listening to this for centuries and damn if it still isn’t one of the most heart-stopping moments in music.

They were sweating in the August morning heat, faces shining with the effort to stay on tune and in tempo. Tenors perhaps a bit weak, but three or four basses making good. So even if they didn’t sound professional, Merrill believed they were ready. The Requiem called for the sweetness of newborn innocence, followed by an awakening to all the evil in the world, and ending with a triumph over that evil. It was really happening, she was sure that this time the devil had been summarily routed.

She had held a series of auditions which had yielded a couple of sopranos pure enough to belt out et lux perpetua, and a set of altos who typically declined to sing tenor. The real tenors were always straining to reveal their inner Pavrotti.

A trained voice came from a busty 30-ish blond woman, who was sporting tight denim and a blinding collection of crystals and sequins. She contradicted Merrill's expectations by singing a surprisingly accomplished Medieval French song; but she then asked, “will we be doing any new music?” by which Merrill supposed she meant Adams or Reich or something along those lines, so she just said, “Mozart Requiem. Can you come back on Friday, please?” which fortunately she did: she came back in another distracting ensemble, but sang like an angel and so was quickly assimilated.

They wouldn’t be having the Vienna Philharmonic with them, either. There would be only 2 rehearsals with the local professional musicians, and only piano accompaniment until then. Her assistant scheduled the bona fides and made sure they cleared it with their unions and that their dues-portion was implicit in the fee. This assistant, Clara, her right and left hands come to think of it, took care of 4 first violins, 4 second, 5 violas, 2 french horns and the rest. Merrill personally saw to the hiring of professional singers for the solo bits. An ethereal soprano, boyishly handsome tenor, and robust bass had been signed-- Clara officiating over the contracts. These singers were almost nobility,  running all day between opera auditions and teaching gigs,  still expecting their big break to come from other more important performances.  As Diva and Divos, they would have to attend only one rehearsal.   That’s why they did the classical repertoire, because these Mozart bits were imprinted in singers DNA, so truly they didn’t need to practice their entrances. Moreover they were relieved not to be subjected to the cacophony of community chorus past the minimum requirement.

It was a late-summer performance evening. Tickets had sold at the door to the upholders of Culture in the town, a respectable showing that filled the pews with the educated and the religious. The vast protective space stretching between those in the pews and those in the choir, ensured that any motivations for attending were unimportant. For the most part the audience sat in politeness, straining their necks to see the beautifully attired, locally famous soloists who sat patiently with hands folded in their laps. Now the oratorios came and they stood up, this was a chance for the rest of the choir to stop rustling their scores and allow the silences between the phrases to be heard. Here were the fruits of their labor : a trumpet playing out and joined serially by the bass, tenor and soprano soloists, Tuba mirum spargens sonum, and then all three stars joined to agree,

A trumpet, spreading a wondrous sound

Through the graves of all lands,

Will drive mankind before the throne.

On their background mounts, she could see the choir enraptured by this harmonization, this sudden statement of Truth that would bring the audience to tears.

The late afternoon sun was still illuminating the stained-glass windows, and the dust motes in the upper reaches of the church also had their infusion of light, so that an ambient presence (Mozart?) seemed to be in there with them. Recordare, Jesu pie / Remember, blessed Jesu, That I am the cause of Thy pilgrimage, Anyone not so moved must have been checking their email, not listening with ‘open heart’ as they say in yoga practice. For this was a meditation across time; generations had heard the same story and derived their meanings from it. We were only waiting for these instructions, she thought to herself, holding ourselves ready for the expression of it to others.

Yotvata

On the Kibbutz the volunteers were treated with benignity. Sometimes they served as a distraction for marriages that were getting ground down by habit and routine. They provided new intrigues for the community, or worse, caused episodes of domestic violence that pulled in the local police. They could embarrass the kibbutz.

But the volunteers were almost always nubile Scandinavian Hebrew stutterers, willing to accept the original radicalism of the settlers and happy to work at menial jobs that the Members no longer felt obligated for. The Members felt their cherished ideals had been realized a long time ago, and they were content now that other people, either the tourists/volunteers, or salaried men from the surrounding Arab villages, could clean the toilets, pick oranges, and look after the original Founders who were now forgotten in their old-age home and only brought out on special occasions commemorating National This or That Day.

An English volunteer named Sarah arrived in April of that year, and an American named Caroline came in June. They had been assigned to Yotvata, a real factory-town type of kibbutz in the southern Negev, on the border of the Sinai near Eilat, that produced the most delicious yogurt and cheeses distributed all over the country. Because it was a relatively young kibbutz that ran a lucrative business, and because it had been founded by English-speakers, the whole package made a fine impression on a young woman who might decide to stay -- who might actually find a man there and produce more Members for the kibbutz (of prime concern since many of the young people had lost the revolutionary ardor of their grandparents and were mostly leaving for Tel Aviv). Of course Sarah didn't care which kibbutz she was assigned to, she had been jobless for 2 years in Manchester, so that now it just seemed miraculous that an adult could join a society that would look after all her physical needs, and demand so little in return. She only mentioned to the Association coordinator, “you mean I won’t be milking cows? “

But when Caroline arrived in the volunteers’ trailer compound in June, she said to herself, "What a motley crew of rejects from their own countries!". There was a pair of young attractive Swedish women, but there was also a surprisingly old American man in his early 30’s, who had been a roadie for the Rolling Stones. He held court and the others fawned. He professed to being more Jewish, in the sense of knowledge and observance, than was probably the case. There was also a smallish, dark, oily-skinned South American man who wanted to sleep with her on the night of her arrival; he seemed a sybarite and could not positively be interested in her for anything else. And there were other assorted Searchers, she would compare experiences with them over Maccabee beers in the bomb shelter that was fixed up for that purpose, with U2 blaring out of the sound system every night.

Caroline didn’t meet Sarah because Sarah was no longer there. Shortly after Sarah started in the volunteer group she had met a kibbutznik named Mike and set up house with him. They were just then discussing a trip to Manchester to introduce him to her family. Sarah’s non-Jewish blondness and bubbling enthusiasm had attracted enough attention so that she was absorbed effortlessly into the stream of the community. The kibbutz management was stroking her and her fiance, petting them with encouragement so that they could become future managers of the factory. Mike was not religious enough to care that she wasn’t Jewish, and he had excelled at University without wanting to abandon Yotvata. Sarah had a job in the little Kibbutz grocery store, a trusted position at the cash register-- fortunately not a new skill she had to learn.

Caroline reported to her work in the parking lot of the factory. She wondered, where did the dairy come from ? All she knew was the source of the plastic crates, the holders for little yogurt containers 10X10 that made up her job. They came off big semis; and she had to load them on hand-trucks so that they could be loaded onto two conveyor belts that started out there in the lot. As she stood in front of the belts, in a miasma of hot, sweet yogurt smells, a truck was on each side of her. She had to take a crate in each hand and push them onto the belt. She had to do this for the entire work shift, lasting 3 and a half hours. Her glasses steamed up, her thin arms were shot thru with fatiguing strain, she had plenty of time to muse about why she had attended an Ivy League college. After the first day she felt like she had been on a canoe trip and paddling in the wrong way. As she lay on her back that night and listened to the drunken crew outside her trailer, she couldn’t feel her hands although there was a dull pain radiating somewhere in her right shoulder.

The summer in that oasis was predictable, it never rained during the season. In her free hours after dinner, Caroline liked to walk down the sandy sidewalks to the end of the road, past the cultivated cactus landscaping and beyond the final street lamp to the darkness of the desert that was wrapped around the ordered little houses and meeting halls. She hoped to see Ibex or some kind of dramatic fauna (were they even in Israel? she wasn’t sure and wanted to visit the little library tomorrow). The neat border of sidewalk and the lamplight might have warned them away. There was an incongruous silence over the hills of sand and stone that she strained to see into, a holy emptiness out there that pricked her breath and almost sucked her off the corner.

A problem with the desert was the sand tracked into her trailer every day, the impossibility of ever sweeping it all out again.

Washington Commons, Sunday afternoon

He was smoking a fucking cheroot. At least that's what drew her attention to him at the adjacent picnic table, where a soft conversation was conducted aimlessly among the only 3 smokers in the courtyard. She wasn't sure which was the worst aspect of this social visit to a neighborhood hangout -- smokers, dogs, or babies (there was a kind of kindergarten in the furthest corner, a natural antipode to the Smoking Table). In this scene she wasn't remarkable for scribbling in a book, since facing her on the far side was a couple conspicuously quaffing and reading guide books ("Let's Go Brooklyn"?). She hoped the smokers would beat it; cigars are not as cool as they think.

He has to spit, too. That's part of the cheroot-toking mystique. What's mostly a gas is just watching people without the benefit of sunglasses, since it's not really a sunny day for shades, and she never minds staring around herself out of the coke-bottom glasses directly from a vantage point aged by 20 years. And the smokers left, and the Stout was delicious.

Three toddlers continued unrestrainedly racing up and down the entrance ramp, completely ignorant of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She wondered for a minute if anyone would steal her front bicycle wheel; pretty soon she would stop locking the bike altogether, just to see. She was a rich woman in her own estimation, who could afford to lose a bicycle. She could imagine the excitement of something sexier. Which thought might have ended her reverie... except for the squealing of the youngest patron, and the realization that the child-centered crowd behind her had ordered a pizza or similar and were settling in for good, effectively bringing an end to her interest in this particular watering hole (during the daylight hours, anyway)

Focus

For example there are about eight measures
of grueling difficulty in this Study
so
committing to memory, give them 40 minutes a day,
at least 5 minutes per measure -- that's a stretch for concentration
but my teacher signals that this is the way, else it can't be done

If for many weeks I were thus devoted to groping the keyboard,
blind to the written music but
still able to feel the intervals,
am I guaranteed to be brilliant?
Bending all efforts towards the sound of beauty, of perfection and
then, hear that true and precisely aimed labor bringing dreamlike Chopinesque returns

And, apres un succes fou with this Etude -
can I turn it into a paradigm case for my other thing
that needs more care to sacrifice. so many hours per day
of the same execution with such pure attention
to gain me entrance to another mystery?

Best Intentions

Some folks we know are environmentalists. They acquire property around their house in New England as it becomes available, so that both foxes and foxglove can run free. They must own about 20 acres by now. Their dog has escaped close encounters with a bear, and they wish to acquire infrared night-vision military binoculars so that they can spy on a Great Horned Owl. Their house is reached via a long dirt road. I once contributed to Greenpeace on their behalf.

They are retired academics now, having taught the sciences for many years. But they are still politically active, attending protests to keep big-box stores away from their township and promoting world peace in general. They are physically active, even into their seventies (and soon eighties), kayaking until the knees needed replacements, and climbing mountains in state parks when the rocking chair and a good book might seem more appropriate for their time of life. Emeritus activities included building a Bog Walk for their community, furthering their neighbors knowledge of the ecosystem. They were also instrumental in encouraging older people to become disciplined students, through an institute for continuing education at their university.

Besides the climbing, snow-shoeing, paddling etc, they would frown on ingesting huge amounts of fat and sugar. They are vigilant of their own health, and aware of the obesity epidemic in this country.

So why did they send us a tower of sugar and fat ? The packaging for this tower was immense, endless amounts of paper stuffings and empty spaces in more and more boxes, the thing was a bottomless never-ending pile of nested cardboard, filled with packages of candied popcorn, buttery cookies, chocolate truffles-- not one but two packages of each. We don't have children, we are middle-aged in our 40's and 50's. What were they thinking? The company to blame is Harry & David, although to be fair ( ? ) there are less deadly things available in their catalog - like boxes of fruit.

How do we react when we don't celebrate Christmas or Hannukah, and we are preserving our health? What is the purpose of this gift and how do we react when we see them contradicting their own principles?

Similarly we received a book from them for our birthday that was another weird negation of their lifestyle. They are feminists - at least they are supportive of their two grown daughters who are gay and are also activists for women's equality. For my birthday they sent me a novel that was a cheap kind of Harlequin romance. It had a misleading cover, so perhaps that was the issue-- and it also had blurbs on the back that indicated some matter involving Shakespeare. But it was nothing more than crappy writing and some very aggressive marketing, plus jacket design. If they had opened the book and read a paragraph, they might have realized the tawdriness of the story and generally poor quality of the thing. I once discussed Theodore Dreiser with them, but since they are scientists, perhaps they don't have any time for literature.

These two "gifts" have led me to ask : who do they think we are ?

Bike Riding on November 2

That helmet sure was tight
keeping my brains toasty under cap and ricochet-protection
I launched into the flow of a pre-Thanksgiving day
thankful for sparse traffic

Not so bitter the darkness of dawn
still a considerate Tuesday morn
Nose running, feet pedaling and
heart pounding over Roebling's bridge to
Toil and struggle with small measure of success, my paycheck

Bound Brook is Calling

She wanted out of it, and the best way to be out of it was to turn the phones off.  It might give the impression of anti-sociality, or desire to get off the Grid -- she was not angling for a unibomber position in any case-- but it was the right thing to do.  She hoped that by becoming inconveniently unavailable, they would see that being on call 24X7X60 was an unfair proposition.  In view of her real mortality and lack of remaining days, her sleep was becoming sacrosanct and this strategy was the forgone conclusion to her years of labor for the Man.

The apartment's landline was equipped with a 'Block' to eliminate repeated solicitations from well-meaning (or not) arts organizations and welfare societies, but this technique would mean she would never get the call again, which was much too final for this situation.  For the Indian calls, the 'Do Not Disturb' mode sufficed.  They would call in the middle of the night and it wouldn't ring: so that whatever little problem had surfaced and attracted the attention of the call center in Bangalore, she could continue in her dreaming state.  In the morning she could see who she had snubbed by checking the digital history.  On this particular morning, she saw that "Bound Brook NJ" had called at 2 am and she felt a mixture of shame and triumph over the Corporate animal that tried to rob her of her sleep and clutter her brain with its trivia.  After all, they were lying.   They were not in Bound Brook.  What was the point of this subterfuge?  It was like renaming Calcutta to Kolkata, but without removing the Colonial after-taste.        
      
The other intrusion on a decent, peace-loving life was the buzz and jazz of the cell phone.  She had easily turned it off, but detested turning it on again and getting the call alert.  Besides "Bound Brook" (which by the way, was a charming little town in New Jersey that is on the way to somewhere else), there would likely be a slew of messages from her superiors wondering what was going on.  The answers to these calls would determine whether she could be gotten out of it once and for all, or whether they would be pacified and just keep holding the rope and circling, yanking her around to deal with the next business exigency, all of premium importance and priority.  Never mind that the rest of the country was mostly impoverished by their business rules, or that the unbridled push towards Globalization was sending unemployment statistics north of ten percent.  She read the reports of middle-class slide into lower-class, she looked at the number and thought it might swell by 1 or 2 after she was done with this campaign.   Perhaps she would move to Bound Brook; or was that Bangalore?
  

Short pieces in imitation of D H Lawrence

The Beekeeper in Park Slope
The Beekeeper is a kind of Placekeeper
Self-sacrificing sterile worker bees are foraging in public places
In rusty dumpsters
In proximity to rats
The Beekeeper is bereft--will they return?
  Or will they do the robbing dance
It is completely natural

The buzzing in my ears is the message
that they are returning to the Beekeeper
His colors are drawing them
The magnetic fields are drawing them
They circle back, with news of sweet sources
They are home


Family
To raise a child
from complete dependence to human self-reliance
provokes regret for the marching of time
  from girlhood to womanhood from boyhood to manhood
we are still debating
whose child is this

Aging
I am aging
I sat in the bright light today and aimed the mirror into the sun
revealing a wrinkled throat that I knew might be there
I just hadn't looked in a long time
In the same way, I hadn't examined age and its imperatives

Restoration : The Loop

I deleted this contribution a week ago,when I thought it was too (in)sensitive.  Based on gathered intelligence, D and I have apparently weighed in with their neutral approval, so I am re-posting.  Since I know now that I don't want to be ostracized, I am going to work on a complete fiction next.   Friends are too important.  Plotting and designing 'real' interaction is much harder than simple memoir, this was always the easiest exercise.
The plane was half-empty. A baby got on with us and we eyed it warily, but it took a seat up front and must have slept, which was only natural on a 6:40 am Saturday flight.

With the hour we gained going west to Chicago, we were almost lively getting into the cab at O'Hare and heading for the Harmony rehab center. Our cabbie was from Mogadishu, and his unsentimental attachment to his newly minted US citizenship was refreshing (although unlike taking a ride in Phoenix, we did not ask to see his ID). He was dreaming about a new career in real estate. So at least in Chicago there isn't any regret about leaving the old country-- probably because back home is a place teeming with corruption and murder.

The accident occurred three weeks ago. At the Harmony, our friend D has a private room and is lying in bed, but preparing to go to physical therapy, where they will help him walk again after both his femurs were crushed.. He skillfully transferred himself from bed to wheelchair by means of a board, and we rolled /shuffled out to the hallway. Every other patient is in a wheelchair too-- except that D is 30 years younger than them and a lot more animated. I find myself looking around for more motorcycle accident victims, because I think he must be lonely.

The therapist is a no-nonsense Indian American woman, and D is enthusiastic up until the point of grimacing, doing everything to rebuild his strength. Darling joins the therapist in her duties, sort of like a Teachers Assistant, which she seems to enjoy. There are no props, but a series of exercises done in supine position appear to be the most grueling. There is a nerf-target board that looks like fun, but I restrain from freeloading on D's rehab.

D's wife I and son F arrive, and they prepare for what has become the culinary rescue operation, for lunch and dinner is not edible at Harmony. Darling and I are ready to start helping in any way we can-- that is, idiosyncratically, in our way. We are not family, but D and Darling go way way back to some cheap but sociable apartment in this Uptown neighborhood, where they celebrated nothing with potlucks and D stayed up late even until dawn, reading tomes of philosophy and impressing the hell out of Darling. After a run to Wholefoods and bringing back lunch, we pile into I's Corolla and drive back to their home.

After the accident it was pretty clear that their home for the last 10 years, Condo-up-the-Stairs, would not be an appropriate home for D upon his release next week. I and F are in the process of planning a temporary move to Rental-by-the-Lake. Preparation must include securing the condo premises which may lie empty for 8 months. Darling is handy and the front door is falling off its hinges. He will fix door and unplug a sink. He will also put oil in the tank of the Corolla which has been running around town on empty with scary warnings appearing on the dashboard. I have an urge to give financial advice, which I mostly suppress since it's probably a rude thing to do, and I abhor chaos which is also my general impression of the place. I and son F are in their routine. This routine involves a great amount of compensating behavior and adjustment due to F's diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Even without this diagnosis, I would probably regard the average 8-year-old with confusion. My adequacies do not include childcare, but no one ever asked me about it and I've been able to reach the age of 48 without this skill. It's almost as if I attended a Kibbutz school from the early days of the Movement, that assumed the kids would live in the Children's House and they would never be under foot or heard from unless expressly requested to participate, so that we can all get on with the work of building the New Society. I also enjoy all things Victorian.

I tried to speak with F -- but he was inculcated by the rule book. An example is our discussion of the charming, purring football-shaped piebald cat, Tooze (Twos? never saw it in print). I thought the cat would be a good opener for my relationship with F, and remembering their previous cat from 10 years ago, I offered "I remember Pickles". But F replies, "We don't talk about Pickles, Pickles is dead". This is a real conversation stopper and I say that's silly, of course you talk about people and loved ones who are dead. But F has read the rule book and we can't proceed. After some desultory talk about Harry Potter -- they are on the bookshelf, he says he has read 4 of them-- I repair to the back room that smells like a kitty litter tray that hasn't been cleaned in a month.

Sunday is moving day, and savior friend P comes by with his wine van. P is a robust former singer (tenor?) who used to wait on tables with Darling in their days of menial servitude. This is a kind of reunion, they didn't know eachother well back then, maybe 15 years ago, but they recognize eachother now. It is a good thing too, because they must schlep futon frames and cabinets and futons and boxes down the outdoor back stairs, during a 90+ degree afternoon. P is not the complaining type, however, unlike me. I refuse to do this kind of thing, since I am a Princess. I spend the time stuffing some bags, and asking I what sort of little tasks I might take on, which turn out to be the afore-mentioned kitty litter tray and some mopping up in the kitchen. I am also able to stand around with the van at Rental-by-the-Lake while everyone else goes up and down in the superduper wheelchair-accessible elevator, bringing stuff up to the 9th floor apartment. I never see any cops, I never have to move the van: Chicago is easier than NYC in this respect.

On Sunday night Darling and I have amazing Vietnamese dinner in Uptown and visit the Green Mill, where we hear a swell Hammond B3 played by the prototypical blind man, accompanied by a young guitarist. I swallow a couple of white russians which went along with the venue.

I caught the bus on Monday afternoon and headed south to East Wacker, where we had a $127/night room at the Hyatt. Darling stayed behind to finish multiple trips to plumbing suppliers and finalize the sink repair. The hotel was cavernous, one of these soulless high-rising conference centers cum convenience spot, a stone's throw from Millenium Park which was really Grant Park or I don't really know because I wasn't there long enough. On the 31st floor there was a view of the adjacent gym roof pool. Some spiders were idly spinning their webs, up there in the ether, summarizing the entire experience of anomie and simple dizziness. I had no idea how to escape in an emergency.

With a few hours to spend on my own, I rushed to ... the nearest cafe for a 3 pm lunch. This turned out to be the luxurious Tavern on the Park, on Randolf, where the waiter quickly identifies me as a hungry middle-aged female tourist with money. This is immensely satisfying in a 21st century way, it is more Henry James than Saul Bellow.

After this outdoor meal of roasted veg /mozarella sandwich, marinated in my stomach with fancy Chardonnay, I went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit at the Art Institute. This had traveled from MOMA but typically I missed it in NYC. Mr. Cartier-Bresson really lived the life away from home! Brilliant. Get the catalog when it goes on sale.

The rest of our trip was unexceptional, except that our good friend C solved Darling's greatest computer problem by turning it off and on. C knows his Apples, he has networked them and can find the power button.

Reunion in Stony Brook

Our dresses were sparkling, chosen for the bling-image we wanted to project, while we secretly celebrated the fact that we were still alive 30 years after graduating from High School. We wore silver high-heels and carried gold bags. Some of us, out of habit, wore an excessive amount of makeup.

We pumped the arms of boys who were now a bit paunchy and had wallets full of children (and a few grandchildren, too). We misapplied "boy" in this case.

We approached perfect strangers with the opener, "do I know you?" which was frequently wrong, and we thought we actually hadn't changed all that much ourselves. For the week leading up to the event we imagined a re-enactment similar to the ones conducted by Civil War enthusiasts, a re-creation of battlefield surges and losses with other people in similar uniforms. These field exercises had dogged us even into our late forties: we were not popular enough, we did not have the coolest friends, we didn't have the nerve to approach whoever was necessary for a happy existence. We died a social death.

It was silly but it was part of memory. A telescoping memory narrows our view, as if we are a general surveying the field during the re-enactment from a great temporal distance.

A Day in the Country, July 4 2010

Everyone I know can leave everything behind and spend some money to go somewhere. This is a story about how hard it is for us to actually do this.

We really do have the resources to spend our weekends doing something besides sweating at the dining room table typing on a laptop (expect 97 degree heat today). But the requirements of the business do not allow for abandoning our responsibilities for more than a day. We were granted this day, yesterday on July 4th, to visit the country. Since I also have some work to do on 07/05, this seemed a good idea and manageable time if we left very early in the morning.

So we rose around 6:30 am and got our water-containers together, maps and printings so that we could go to, variously (1) Storm King sculpture park, south of the Catskills (2) Dia Beacon, a big-format contemporary art warehouse, just across from Newburgh, and (3) Olana, Frederic Church's house that he designed, just South of the town of Hudson. Church's house was my original goal, and I am a fan of Cole, Durand, Church and the whole Hudson River School thing, which goes back to 1860's or so, preceding American Impressionism and true plein-air painting. But Darling wanted us to hit other spots as well, and given a whole day ( ! ) well, why not? Darling agreed that we should aim first for Olana because we needed a formal tour to see the house and maybe we could beat the crowd.

A breakfast at a roadside diner is absolutely necessary for any road trip, and so about an hour into the trip we stopped outside of Newburgh for pancakes and omelette. Before I could tell what was happening, we read a good portion of the Sunday Times and drank 3 cups of coffee. Time to go! No.... after merging back onto the NYS thruway I was chided for forgetting to suggest we fill up on gas here in the cheaper boonies. We exited again at Saugerties. This was the time for gas and cleaning the windshield and checking the oil and checking tire pressure. Not sure why this couldn't be done the day before, but sobeit.

Small problem, no gas station in Saugerties had a working air pump. This entailed more touring of the beautiful Catskills, on and off the thruway. Note that we were on the West bank of the Hudson, Highway 87, not the scenic 9G on the East bank. When we find an air pump, we receive a call from our friend, the wife of a man who is dying at home in Brooklyn. The hospice workers have left and it is time to go say goodbye to him. We are in the Catskills, instead. We will come tomorrow, we tell her. I don't hear this conversation, Darling is on the phone with her.

We didn't get to Olana until 11:30. Normally this is perhaps a 3 hour trip nonstop so given our feast at the diner we were maybe an hour behind my internalized schedule. There was no tour for us until 1 pm, so we hiked on their little trails which now terminate on route 9G. I'm thinking, 1 pm, 1/2 day in the country over, man!

Olana was quaint and filled with all the Church's objet d'art, gathered from a lifetime of travel ( ! just rubbing that in for me) to the Syria, Persia, Mexico, Jamaica etc. He actually went to Petra on the back of a camel, but Mrs. Church declined. I was reminded of the Feminist costume exhibit I saw the Met, where they had a series of Victorian "sports" outfits for the wealthiest women. They had Tennis suits, Golfing suits, Riding suits. Where was that Camel ensemble? Would she have gone if she had something to wear??!

OK, good show. Great View. took some pics. Time for lunch! Let's go into Hudson, just 3 miles up 9G.

At American Glory BBQ, I order a shandy (super, lemonade and beer to ease my sun-stroke), and a Crab burger. Darling watches his diet assiduously, and orders the "smokehouse salad", but please, without the Ranch dressing. $12 salad arrived with wilted greens and a few cucumbers. Discussion ensues with Nicole, who must have just graduated 11th grade yesterday and was shrinking from Darling's explanation of the absurdity that his salad had nary a piece of chicken, or any other attraction, for $12. Although menu asserted that chicken was part of the deal, Nicole said that would be another $4. More discussion with Manager. Chef also came to visit. Nicole has made a mistake, possibly because the request to omit dressing. OK, Darling thinks my crab burger is great, he'll have one of those instead. Many minutes go by... they are preparing a catering delivery and loading a car out front... Darling goes up to Manager and asks about burger, we get it right away.

OK, time to go! Our day in the country is wasting. Oh, it's 3:15. When does Dia Beacon close? "Let Nicole earn her tip", but poor Nicole is still shrinking from us and brave manager instead gets us the telephone number. Great! 6 pm closing time, we can make it. I pay the bill with cash. I note approvingly, Manager comp'd us our drinks.

The 94 Saturn no longer breathes cool air for us on these unimagineably hot days. The bridge on 9G is out, just below Olana, so with the complications of detours in Germantown, we decide it is fastest to go back onto 87 for the 1.5 hour trip down to Beacon. It is HOT... windows must be open, so we cannot hear the radio. Sun is beating down on me in the passenger seat, I am clothed in bug and sun-resistant hiking pants, elastic at the ankles. Now I put on the long-sleeved white shirt and my boating hat (with chin strap so the wind doesn't pull it out the window). I think of my outfit at the end of the line of those elegant women, in the Metropolitan Costume exhibit. The sport in this case is "Riding in the Saturn".

I am falling asleep... I begin to fear that Darling will also fall asleep and we will crash on the NYS thruway. So I start singing. Our friend who is going to leave this earth comes to mind and the only songs I can think of are ineffably sad ones from Carole King. Darling asks for Sandy Denny's song, the same one my cousin wanted played at his funeral, I just can't remember and so now instead of sleeping I am crying.

We finally get to Beacon, around 5 pm, I have been baking in the Saturn and brain is like toast. Can't wait! fabulous large-scale work by Richard Serra, a whole room of Agnes Martin, crazy big works by those 'Earth" sculptors etc. Oh my, why is my bag so light, here's my camera, here's my sunglasses case, here's my.... where is my wallet. Oh. My wallet is not here. It is on the table back at the American Glory BBQ in Hudson.

Darling disappears because he doesn't want to deal with my fit. It is a very controlled fit, I go into the museum and distractedly realize I have no money for admission. But I still had the cell phone. Darling had bought us the tickets and was in the other building. After meeting him I go to the counter and say, in my most ingratiating way, please look up the phone number for this BBQ joint in Hudson, I left my wallet there. Charming people at Dia, armed with number I am able to get Candace at the restaurant and tell her we'll be by in perhaps 3 hours. Meanwhile, we have 1 hour to tour Dia. Bruce Nauman, etc... very calming for someone without ID.

At 6 pm, discussion with Darling about what to do, cannot face route 87 again and it is 100 degrees in the car without a/c. Must take route 9G, scenic route recommended by AAA. I will drive, Darling! It's my fault! Yes, adjust the driver's seat, and locate the clutch which I haven't put my foot on in many many months. Right. Car starts when clutch is depressed. But wait, no license, it's in Hudson. Can't drive after all. But we need ice coffee.

Darling stops at a bar. No (of course) they don't have ice coffee. Try the Stewarts, up the street. Stewarts has two youths working behind the counter. They will not start filling an order until at least 4 customers have given theirs. They are very confused by the request to pour ice coffee with ice and milk, No Sugar, No Whipped Cream. Small child is screaming in the background, fat lady next to us gives identical ice-cofee order and so, 15 minutes later, I get mine and tell Darling there is sugar in it. Oh, the girl at the counter says to us, it's in the formula. Well, Darling says, I want my money back. Down the road a bit, the town of Wappinger Falls is really shut down-- it's July 4th! The McDonalds ice coffee is terrible. I feel responsible, I left my wallet on the table at American Glory. Some kind of poetic fate here on July 4th.

Darling drives us back to Hudson, but this time along one of the most scenic routes in America! there's FDR's place, in Hyde Park ! (next time) There's a Vanderbilt mansion! (next time) and the Rhinebeck Fair in Dutchess county, it is fabulous. Why did we ever suffer on route 87, I cannot think. After the detour in Germantown, through some lovely farmland, I remember the Sandy Denny song, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, and I croak this out while we pass Olana again.

Back in Hudson, I retrieve wallet (conceivably an embarrassing moment, given our salad-hour and Nicole's possibly getting fired for it) and walk around so-called business district. Very sad, many formerly beautiful buildings about to fall down and several tatoo'd types prowling the sidewalks and living in these ramshackle buildings. Dinner? no, let's get on 87 and go home, it's 8:15 pm

Miraculous ride, Darling has the energy after our marathon day in the country to drive straight thru. We survive the traffic in the Bronx and Queens. Happy July 4th !