A Biomythography - Note 4
by Secret Hippie
Eating a Bowl of Ants
People say that they're a delicacy.
That's what I was told when I was growing up. I didn't know enough to ask questions like, "Who says that?" or "How do you know?" Apparently, someone my parents met when I was seven in College Park had eaten chocolate-covered ants once or said he had. They had reportedly tasted mostly like chocolate. I can believe that.
It's easy to accept because I, too, have eaten ants. It wasn't because someone offered them to me. They weren't chocolate covered or anything nice.
The reason I ate ants is that I got up really early in the morning.
It was four o'clock. I was thirteen, so I was hungry. That's pretty much how I would have to describe the whole year. If I had to recap the age of thirteen, I would say 'hungry.' Now, if you asked me about age twelve, I'd have a hard time deciding between the words, 'horny,' 'surprised,' and 'embarrassed.' But by the time I was thirteen, 'hungry' was a constantly-relevant word.
This was the kind of hunger that could get me up without really opening my eyes. As a sort of zombie, I rose before thinking. My limbs went into action. My feet carried my stomach upstairs to the fridge. The rest of me went along because my stomach had taken over when all the other organs were asleep.
This wasn't a one-time occurrence. This wasn't even a once-per-week occurrence. This was a routine and the rest of me watched my arms and knew what we were going to do. We, the stuff that made up my loosely organized self, were going to grab the first thing that seemed the right color. Orange was usually good, the color of cheese slices, of carrots, of cold pizza, of well, sometimes, an orange or a tangerine but those were fine. When reflexes drive you to food, orange is a good color. Late at night, you might eat a strip of an orange peel in your sleepy-eyed haste. You might not care.
There were no ants in the fridge. They weren't wearing bright orange life jackets or swimming in the orange juice, either. No, I ate ants because we were out of cheese slices.
No cheese. I grunted and searched the sliding drawer.
No cheese. I flapped my hands through the shelves.
Milk. My left hand found the jug handle.
"Uh." My arm, or maybe my stomach, pulled out the cold, slick plastic container. I dropped it on the counter, spun around and reached for the cereal boxes. Grape nuts, no. Corn flakes, ugh. Honey-Nut Cheerios, fine.
Fine. I threw some cereal into a bowl, poured the milk, and started eating. After a while, I sat down. Because I was tired.
At the bottom of the bowl, there were some burnt bits. They tasted funny. I rose, poured more cereal, poured more milk, and faced the pantry door. The pantry was a closet shelf, really. The door was brown. Brown with wood grain.
The new cheerios started out tasting okay. But after a while, there were a lot of little black bits and they spoiled the sweetness. I thought about putting sugar on my cereal but I was too tired. I just wanted to get to the bottom of the bowl.
Spoonful after spoonful. The crunchy bits weren't great.
After a little while, I noticed the black specks in my bowl were wiggling. I woke up enough to actually look at them. Then I remembered that some of my bites of cereal had been wiggling, too.
I had another few bites. More wiggling. I put my face closer to the bowl and stared at the black lumps. They were ants. Big ones, too, not the little teeny ants that are hard to see. These were big enough for you to see the fangs on their faces. Most of them were dead. I don't know why. Maybe cheerios aren't good for ants. Maybe they had drowned in milk. Anyway, they weren't putting up much of a fight.
I'd already eaten a bunch. So now I had to decide: should I continue eating them?
While I decided, my hand and my mouth kept shoveling cereal. I mean, they were under orders from my stomach. With a sigh, I considered putting raisins in the cereal. That way I wouldn't notice the ants so much. As an alternative, I could find the sugar. But I had looked into the sugar jar the other day and found ants in it. Anyway, I was tired. While I was thinking, I got to the bottom of the bowl.
The bottom was just black with ants. There was nothing else, especially after my last two spoonfuls. And I thought: that's a lot of ants. And then: am I wasting food? If I don't finish my ants, am I a bad person?
It took me a few sighing breaths to decide. No, we hadn't paid for the ants.
A couple of hours later, when I marched up the stairs to have a third bowl of cereal for breakfast, I sifted out the ants at the start. The bottom of the box was mostly a pile of large, black insects but they didn't have it all to themselves. There were still a few cheerios.
Every ant looked fat and full. None of them tried to hang onto an O as I pushed them off my dry cereal.
The third bowl tasted great.
Stories on life, death, enlightenment, zen buddhism, religion, philosophy, stoicism, meditation, daoism, kindness but not meekness, and samsara.
Sunday, October 31, 2021
Sunday, October 24, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 226: Biomythography - Note 3, Save the Cat
A Biomythography - Note 3
by Secret Hippie
Not What it Sounds Like:
Saving a Cat from a Burning House
For fifteen minutes, I took apart my IBM PC 286 in order to put more RAM chips into it. When I had the RAM inserted, no bent pins this time, I partially re-assembled the computer. I blew a spritz of compressed air over the stainless steel, black-baked wafers, and green substrate.
by Secret Hippie
Not What it Sounds Like:
Saving a Cat from a Burning House
For fifteen minutes, I took apart my IBM PC 286 in order to put more RAM chips into it. When I had the RAM inserted, no bent pins this time, I partially re-assembled the computer. I blew a spritz of compressed air over the stainless steel, black-baked wafers, and green substrate.
When I hit the power switch, my system booted up. Finally, I had 2 megabytes of main memory. That was all I wanted to see. On the way to shutting down, though, I decided to test the modem by connecting to a couple of my favorite local BBS sites (bulletin boards, which were full of online chat, risque pictures, amateur writing, and games with primitive graphics). My phone connection was fine. I read up on the latest local computer news. Then, barely, I resisted the urge to stay up all night with games and turned my system off.
Even though the next day was free with no grad school classes on the schedule, I wanted to keep my sleep pattern adjusted to lights out before sunrise. That made class attendance easier.
When I threw myself on my twin bed, I noticed the smell of burning plastic. It didn’t mean much to me. Our next-door neighbors burned piles of trash sometimes. Plus my father always, really always, kept cigars burning around the house, sometimes two or three steaming away with the coals forgotten and nearly cold.
On the rare occasion when there was nothing melting in an ashtray, a stray breeze could push old smoke around the house and make me think someone was burning trash again.
When I woke in the morning, the air was smokier than ever. That was odd. I had heard my father go to bed before me. I hadn’t noticed him getting up but it was a workday for both of my parents. They couldn’t be in the house.
I wandered around to make sure neither of them had taken the day off. When I trudged upstairs from the basement, I noticed a haze of smoke in the kitchen. It was in the dining room, too. In fact, the further I looked in the house, the more I noticed the haze. Squinting down the longest upstairs hall revealed a silver mist. On top of that, I heard a faint buzzing sound. It wasn’t natural.
I marched through every room but I couldn't find out where the fog was coming from. The air smelled stronger upstairs, too, sort of metallic and burning rubber.
Passing through the hall, I heard the faint whining sound again but I didn’t locate it.
Finally, I went back downstairs and got to work. I had to. The grad classes had projects due and I had writing that wouldn't wait. To my surprise, though, my computer wouldn't turn on. It was dead. I clicked the switch a dozen times to be sure. I re-seated the power cable. I popped the surge suppressor. I tested the outlet with a lamp. It was working.
“Damn.” This seemed like sort of an emergency.
So I headed back upstairs. I marched around growing more mystified and more frustrated. Eventually, I decided the silvery mist was real. It looked darker than it had earlier. Also, I located the faint buzzing sound. It was coming from the smoke detector. Due to its feeble battery, it had pretty nearly given up the ghost. But not quite. If I put my head next to it, I could tell that the sound was definitely from the dime-sized speaker.
I decided to go outside and see if anything made more sense from there.
Out the front door and about twenty meters into the yard, since it was a big yard, I turned around. There it was – billows of smoke. Okay. My parents’ house was on fire. Gray clouds puffed from the east side of the house. Not from the chimney, which was fine and clear. Just from one side. Something over there was really burning, probably in the attic.
All my training flooded back to me and I discovered that it was, basically, no training. I had been in fires before, though, so I had memorized the basics.
1) Save the people
2) Call the fire department
3) Leave the building until the fire fighters arrive
So I looked around. My parents' dog had died the year before. There was no one but me and the cats. It was time to give the old heave-ho to our feline force.
“Come here,” I said and made the kissy noises my mother gave them when she had cat treats. There were no animals in sight. I crouched down anyway and put out my hand. “Come on now.”
A moment later, the grandmother cat strode into view. She muscled across the carpet to me, arthritic but strong. She was small and she was smart, about twenty years old but not senile. She ruled the house. In fact, she had been the head cat for at least five years. Once I got her out, that would set the tone for the others, I figured.
When I picked her up, she pushed her head against mine. When that wasn’t enough, she pushed again from my cheek to my neck. It was the kind of affection she gave when she knew she was getting a treat. But I walked her out the front door and put her down on the porch. I didn’t hand out any treats.
“Sorry.” Immediately, I pulled the screen door closed. She sat down on the porch and gave me an offended look.
It didn’t take long to find the next cat, a sixteen pound tom. Hands full, I opened the screen door with my foot and swept him out onto the porch.
“Damn it!” The grandmother cat darted back inside and ran away.
Fortunately, she was old and didn’t bother to run far. While she paused to clean herself, I scooped her up. I elbowed through the door and put her down at the bottom step of the porch. She growled as if I’d I'd betrayed her.
“Oh, come on! The house is on fire. Can’t you smell it?” I pleaded. Then I found another cat, put it outside, and stomped the ground in time to prevent the grandmother cat from going back in.
“Hah!” I grabbed the next cat and paused as I headed out the door. I couldn't see the grandmother cat anywhere. Had she retreated under a bush to sulk? Maybe.
Anyway, there was a fire. I had to keep moving. I pushed the screen door, leaned down with the cat in my arms, and … the grandmother cat darted in out of nowhere.
“Okay,” I sighed.
I stomped around the porch to prevent the next cat from trying, closed the door, and gave up on our pets. The only phone in my parents house was the hallway phone next to the front door. I picked it up and called for the fire department.
“Did you get everyone out of the house?” the lady dispatcher asked.
“There’s just me.”
“Do your parents have any pets?”
“I’m still working on the cats.”
She told me, as I expected, to get everything living out of the house.
Even though the next day was free with no grad school classes on the schedule, I wanted to keep my sleep pattern adjusted to lights out before sunrise. That made class attendance easier.
When I threw myself on my twin bed, I noticed the smell of burning plastic. It didn’t mean much to me. Our next-door neighbors burned piles of trash sometimes. Plus my father always, really always, kept cigars burning around the house, sometimes two or three steaming away with the coals forgotten and nearly cold.
On the rare occasion when there was nothing melting in an ashtray, a stray breeze could push old smoke around the house and make me think someone was burning trash again.
When I woke in the morning, the air was smokier than ever. That was odd. I had heard my father go to bed before me. I hadn’t noticed him getting up but it was a workday for both of my parents. They couldn’t be in the house.
I wandered around to make sure neither of them had taken the day off. When I trudged upstairs from the basement, I noticed a haze of smoke in the kitchen. It was in the dining room, too. In fact, the further I looked in the house, the more I noticed the haze. Squinting down the longest upstairs hall revealed a silver mist. On top of that, I heard a faint buzzing sound. It wasn’t natural.
I marched through every room but I couldn't find out where the fog was coming from. The air smelled stronger upstairs, too, sort of metallic and burning rubber.
Passing through the hall, I heard the faint whining sound again but I didn’t locate it.
Finally, I went back downstairs and got to work. I had to. The grad classes had projects due and I had writing that wouldn't wait. To my surprise, though, my computer wouldn't turn on. It was dead. I clicked the switch a dozen times to be sure. I re-seated the power cable. I popped the surge suppressor. I tested the outlet with a lamp. It was working.
“Damn.” This seemed like sort of an emergency.
So I headed back upstairs. I marched around growing more mystified and more frustrated. Eventually, I decided the silvery mist was real. It looked darker than it had earlier. Also, I located the faint buzzing sound. It was coming from the smoke detector. Due to its feeble battery, it had pretty nearly given up the ghost. But not quite. If I put my head next to it, I could tell that the sound was definitely from the dime-sized speaker.
I decided to go outside and see if anything made more sense from there.
Out the front door and about twenty meters into the yard, since it was a big yard, I turned around. There it was – billows of smoke. Okay. My parents’ house was on fire. Gray clouds puffed from the east side of the house. Not from the chimney, which was fine and clear. Just from one side. Something over there was really burning, probably in the attic.
All my training flooded back to me and I discovered that it was, basically, no training. I had been in fires before, though, so I had memorized the basics.
1) Save the people
2) Call the fire department
3) Leave the building until the fire fighters arrive
So I looked around. My parents' dog had died the year before. There was no one but me and the cats. It was time to give the old heave-ho to our feline force.
“Come here,” I said and made the kissy noises my mother gave them when she had cat treats. There were no animals in sight. I crouched down anyway and put out my hand. “Come on now.”
A moment later, the grandmother cat strode into view. She muscled across the carpet to me, arthritic but strong. She was small and she was smart, about twenty years old but not senile. She ruled the house. In fact, she had been the head cat for at least five years. Once I got her out, that would set the tone for the others, I figured.
When I picked her up, she pushed her head against mine. When that wasn’t enough, she pushed again from my cheek to my neck. It was the kind of affection she gave when she knew she was getting a treat. But I walked her out the front door and put her down on the porch. I didn’t hand out any treats.
“Sorry.” Immediately, I pulled the screen door closed. She sat down on the porch and gave me an offended look.
It didn’t take long to find the next cat, a sixteen pound tom. Hands full, I opened the screen door with my foot and swept him out onto the porch.
“Damn it!” The grandmother cat darted back inside and ran away.
Fortunately, she was old and didn’t bother to run far. While she paused to clean herself, I scooped her up. I elbowed through the door and put her down at the bottom step of the porch. She growled as if I’d I'd betrayed her.
“Oh, come on! The house is on fire. Can’t you smell it?” I pleaded. Then I found another cat, put it outside, and stomped the ground in time to prevent the grandmother cat from going back in.
“Hah!” I grabbed the next cat and paused as I headed out the door. I couldn't see the grandmother cat anywhere. Had she retreated under a bush to sulk? Maybe.
Anyway, there was a fire. I had to keep moving. I pushed the screen door, leaned down with the cat in my arms, and … the grandmother cat darted in out of nowhere.
“Okay,” I sighed.
I stomped around the porch to prevent the next cat from trying, closed the door, and gave up on our pets. The only phone in my parents house was the hallway phone next to the front door. I picked it up and called for the fire department.
“Did you get everyone out of the house?” the lady dispatcher asked.
“There’s just me.”
“Do your parents have any pets?”
“I’m still working on the cats.”
She told me, as I expected, to get everything living out of the house.
“It sounds like, by the time you finish, the fire truck will be there. They’re on the way from Poolesville.”
“Great!”
“Great!”
With a burst of energy, I captured the grandmother cat as she hid from me between boxes under the sofa. After that, there was only one more animal to find and somehow I managed. I was working on the house plants (also living things, after all, so they don't like getting burned up) when the fire trucks arrived. They had brought two, I noticed, a big one and a small one. That seemed like overkill. Then, to complete the set, they drove up an ambulance a moment later.
“Are you the owner?” A man hopped down from the passenger side of the big truck.
“Um.” I tried to explain that I was a graduate school student living in my parents’ house.
“Same thing,” he said, waving off further explanation.
The fire fighters seemed like regular guys to me. They were pretty genial, each and every one, but they were competent with fires, especially the veterans in the crew. Their chief asked me to lead them around the house and show them the possible sources of the fire. I did a lot of explaining. Fortunately, the dispatcher had told them nearly everything I had told her so I didn’t need to repeat myself much.
“Well, first thing,” said the chief. “We’re going to have to cut the roof.”
I experienced a flash of alarm about explaining this to my parents. “Do you have to?”
“Yep. It’s standard.” He gestured to where we were standing. “I really shouldn’t be having my men walk through without that. It’s supposed to come first. But you seem to be doing okay.”
“Well, then you have to.”
“I should warn you, it’s going to make things look worse. The air inside here will actually be better. It’s going to make things safer. But to you, it’s going to look alarming.”
For another twenty minutes or so, I moved pets and plants (including the grandmother cat one last time). After that, I carried out my computer and parts kits, even though it was probably too late for them. I couldn’t really make myself believe that the smoke had damaged them permanently. I carried out data disks. I moved the old CP/M computers.
A couple of times, men stopped by to ask where me where things were in the house. One of them was the chief.
To make sure I was still allowed, I said, "Do you mind if I keep moving stuff out?"
A pair of the fire fighters walked by. The chief patted the closest one on the shoulder. In retrospect, this crew chief was only thirty years old, if that. But he was in his element, calm and happy to talk.
"Yep. Keep going. If you feel bad, get out. Otherwise, we’ll ask you to come with us sometimes and point things out."
The cats had long ago gone into hiding in the bushes around the house. Although I searched for a few seconds, I didn’t see any of them. On one of my trips to the front yard, though, I noticed that the fire crew had finished cutting the hole into the roof. What the fire chief had warned me about was spot on. The hole made things look way, way worse. There was more smoke than ever. It billowed out in thick, dark clouds.
By that point, our activity had gathered a crowd. I was surprised to see so many people, actually, nearly a dozen, because my parents didn't have many neighbors. There was a football field or more between houses and many of the lines of sight were blocked by forest.
The smoke looked dramatic, though. It really had gotten worse, I judged. The fire, regardless of whatever weird way it had started, was getting stronger.
"You're not supposed to go back into the burning building!" someone called, a neighbor. I looked at her hands. She was wringing them. It’s not often you actually see someone do that.
"Well, the fire fighters are letting me." I didn’t know what to tell her. It wasn’t like I intended to stop. Everything that I could take from the house was an item that potentially didn’t have to be destroyed by the firemen or the fire.
My neighbor, though, seemed more than worried. She was scandalized by the fact that I was pulling out all of my parents' possessions and putting them on the lawn.
“Are they supposed to let you do that?” she said.
“I guess I could ask again.”
As I strolled through the house, the crew chief pulled me aside and said, "Where is the switchbox?"
"For electrical power?"
"Yeah.” He snorted. “We need to shut it down."
I forgot about any other questions I might have had and led him to the switchbox in the basement. To my surprise, smoke was now visibly wafting down the hollow shaft in the wall above the switchbox.
"Uh huh," he said with a half-smile, as if this confirmed something. "Can you hit the main breaker?"
"It'll turn off all the power in the house."
"That's the idea."
"You're not using any?"
"Not any more."
With that, I turned and shut off the house power. We went our separate ways for a few minutes. At some point, I started lingering on my parent’s front lawn. I had run out of possessions I could easily move. It seemed crazy to pull paintings off of the walls. It seemed trivial to rescue the vacuum cleaner.
That’s why the chief marched out to find me on the lawn.
"We found the source of the fire." he announced. "We had to go into the attic. Then we blocked airflows and watched what happened. It's an electrical fire."
"But I didn't see anything."
"Electrical fires are inside the walls, sometimes. We found the wall that's warm. It’s hot, actually, really hot in places. When we turned off the power to it, the fire kept burning."
"Oh, shit."
"We're cutting into that wall right now. I just wanted to warn you. We're going to take care of it and really put it out. But it's going to ruin the wall."
I watched black smoke continue to billow out of the hole his men had cut into my parents' roof. All of this had gone on without my parents. But it was their house, their stuff. Now that it was under control and I had time, I was going to have to call them.
"Well, you've got to, right?" I said.
He knew what I was thinking. "Right."
"Okay, then. Thanks."
That evening, with holes in the wall and the roof, with some of our family possessions destroyed, and with the wind picking up, I sat down with my parents to re-tell them the events from beginning to end. They had heard from the fire department. They had called their insurance company. They gotten out tarps for me to put over our furniture still sitting on the lawn. They had strategically closed doors and taped plastic barriers over holes. It had been tough few hours.
“Are we missing any cats?” my father asked.
“I got them all outside.” We all turned to look at the grandmother cat. She was sleeping on the sofa. “I don’t think they’ve all come back inside but they were all safe today.”
“You didn’t bring in all of the plants.”
“Well, they’re the one type of thing that won’t get ruined it if rains on them.” Plus I was tired.
“Huh.”
My mother nodded. “They can stay out overnight, Bob. The plants will be fine.”
“Are you the owner?” A man hopped down from the passenger side of the big truck.
“Um.” I tried to explain that I was a graduate school student living in my parents’ house.
“Same thing,” he said, waving off further explanation.
The fire fighters seemed like regular guys to me. They were pretty genial, each and every one, but they were competent with fires, especially the veterans in the crew. Their chief asked me to lead them around the house and show them the possible sources of the fire. I did a lot of explaining. Fortunately, the dispatcher had told them nearly everything I had told her so I didn’t need to repeat myself much.
“Well, first thing,” said the chief. “We’re going to have to cut the roof.”
I experienced a flash of alarm about explaining this to my parents. “Do you have to?”
“Yep. It’s standard.” He gestured to where we were standing. “I really shouldn’t be having my men walk through without that. It’s supposed to come first. But you seem to be doing okay.”
“Well, then you have to.”
“I should warn you, it’s going to make things look worse. The air inside here will actually be better. It’s going to make things safer. But to you, it’s going to look alarming.”
For another twenty minutes or so, I moved pets and plants (including the grandmother cat one last time). After that, I carried out my computer and parts kits, even though it was probably too late for them. I couldn’t really make myself believe that the smoke had damaged them permanently. I carried out data disks. I moved the old CP/M computers.
A couple of times, men stopped by to ask where me where things were in the house. One of them was the chief.
To make sure I was still allowed, I said, "Do you mind if I keep moving stuff out?"
A pair of the fire fighters walked by. The chief patted the closest one on the shoulder. In retrospect, this crew chief was only thirty years old, if that. But he was in his element, calm and happy to talk.
"Yep. Keep going. If you feel bad, get out. Otherwise, we’ll ask you to come with us sometimes and point things out."
The cats had long ago gone into hiding in the bushes around the house. Although I searched for a few seconds, I didn’t see any of them. On one of my trips to the front yard, though, I noticed that the fire crew had finished cutting the hole into the roof. What the fire chief had warned me about was spot on. The hole made things look way, way worse. There was more smoke than ever. It billowed out in thick, dark clouds.
By that point, our activity had gathered a crowd. I was surprised to see so many people, actually, nearly a dozen, because my parents didn't have many neighbors. There was a football field or more between houses and many of the lines of sight were blocked by forest.
The smoke looked dramatic, though. It really had gotten worse, I judged. The fire, regardless of whatever weird way it had started, was getting stronger.
"You're not supposed to go back into the burning building!" someone called, a neighbor. I looked at her hands. She was wringing them. It’s not often you actually see someone do that.
"Well, the fire fighters are letting me." I didn’t know what to tell her. It wasn’t like I intended to stop. Everything that I could take from the house was an item that potentially didn’t have to be destroyed by the firemen or the fire.
My neighbor, though, seemed more than worried. She was scandalized by the fact that I was pulling out all of my parents' possessions and putting them on the lawn.
“Are they supposed to let you do that?” she said.
“I guess I could ask again.”
As I strolled through the house, the crew chief pulled me aside and said, "Where is the switchbox?"
"For electrical power?"
"Yeah.” He snorted. “We need to shut it down."
I forgot about any other questions I might have had and led him to the switchbox in the basement. To my surprise, smoke was now visibly wafting down the hollow shaft in the wall above the switchbox.
"Uh huh," he said with a half-smile, as if this confirmed something. "Can you hit the main breaker?"
"It'll turn off all the power in the house."
"That's the idea."
"You're not using any?"
"Not any more."
With that, I turned and shut off the house power. We went our separate ways for a few minutes. At some point, I started lingering on my parent’s front lawn. I had run out of possessions I could easily move. It seemed crazy to pull paintings off of the walls. It seemed trivial to rescue the vacuum cleaner.
That’s why the chief marched out to find me on the lawn.
"We found the source of the fire." he announced. "We had to go into the attic. Then we blocked airflows and watched what happened. It's an electrical fire."
"But I didn't see anything."
"Electrical fires are inside the walls, sometimes. We found the wall that's warm. It’s hot, actually, really hot in places. When we turned off the power to it, the fire kept burning."
"Oh, shit."
"We're cutting into that wall right now. I just wanted to warn you. We're going to take care of it and really put it out. But it's going to ruin the wall."
I watched black smoke continue to billow out of the hole his men had cut into my parents' roof. All of this had gone on without my parents. But it was their house, their stuff. Now that it was under control and I had time, I was going to have to call them.
"Well, you've got to, right?" I said.
He knew what I was thinking. "Right."
"Okay, then. Thanks."
That evening, with holes in the wall and the roof, with some of our family possessions destroyed, and with the wind picking up, I sat down with my parents to re-tell them the events from beginning to end. They had heard from the fire department. They had called their insurance company. They gotten out tarps for me to put over our furniture still sitting on the lawn. They had strategically closed doors and taped plastic barriers over holes. It had been tough few hours.
“Are we missing any cats?” my father asked.
“I got them all outside.” We all turned to look at the grandmother cat. She was sleeping on the sofa. “I don’t think they’ve all come back inside but they were all safe today.”
“You didn’t bring in all of the plants.”
“Well, they’re the one type of thing that won’t get ruined it if rains on them.” Plus I was tired.
“Huh.”
My mother nodded. “They can stay out overnight, Bob. The plants will be fine.”
Sunday, October 17, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 225: Biomythography - Note 2, Revisionism
A Biomythography - Note 2
by Secret Hippie
Accidental Revisionism
by Secret Hippie
Accidental Revisionism
Rarely do I remember how different things were. Coca-Cola, when I was nine years old, was so fundamentally different that I enjoy my occasional flashbacks to 'the best soda I ever had.' The event took place after I swam until I was exhausted, begged for vending machine money, and drank a small bottle of soda.
That's a tangible thing. Plus, there's evidence of the drink formulas from various eras. That's why so many people in our society remember the taste once being better despite Coca-Cola ads claiming otherwise. Less tangible and less easy to recall, I think, are the past contexts of our lives like those revealed in the terms we used. Some of them were regional sayings. For instance, I grew up oogling girls.
That was what the old men said. And I definitely did it. I liked to watch girls. Talking to them was more difficult. Sometimes I would freeze up completely. But I could half-close my eyes and just watch. Or watch with my mouth hanging open.
The term was pronounced oogling as in googling or "oooo, look at that."
Later, I learned that the dictionary said this was ogling. It was officially spelled differently and pronounced differently than I thought. (Whoever wrote the dictionary probably said, "oh, look at that.") Nowadays, the oogling form is gone entirely. It's been replaced by the official dictionary decision, at least in my region of the country. But oogling was a better word. You could just hear and almost see the wide-open eyes implied by it, the sheer dumbfoundedness in someone’s face.
Another term that was stolen from our colloquial history, was "yadada yadada." Somehow, perhaps from my friends using Yiddish slang, I started saying “yadada yadada” in place of “and so on, and so on.” I think my changeover to "yadada yadada" happened when I was around thirteen.
There was a childish joy in saying a string of nonsense syllables and having everyone know what you meant. No one could define “yadada yadada” but everyone smiled and nodded at it.
In the late 1980s, though, after I had been spewing out my multisyllabic nonsense for over a decade, a new TV show came out that re-set the standard phrase. That show was Seinfeld. Suddenly, people started to look at me funny when I talked to them exactly as I always had before.
I actually had a few friends try to correct me. At this point, I may not have owned a television. But I was forced to learn about the show Seinfeld. Because whenever I said yadada yadada, which was often, I would get an involuntary education on how funny this program was.
Everyone loved it. I hadn’t seen it and already I hated it.
At this point, I wonder if anyone remembers that "yadada yadada” once existed. As far as I can tell, there's a lot of revisionism about the past that isn't deliberate. It just happens. Everybody backfills their memories with wrong stuff from television shows. ads, or current cultural norms. Little snippets get left out of our national or regional stories. Elements of personal contexts get lost.
Gone forever or radically changed are oogling, ping, flannel cake, twilight, wampum, sneakies, catfish, mixed marriage, sick, thongs, and so many others, yadada, yadada. You know what I mean.
That's a tangible thing. Plus, there's evidence of the drink formulas from various eras. That's why so many people in our society remember the taste once being better despite Coca-Cola ads claiming otherwise. Less tangible and less easy to recall, I think, are the past contexts of our lives like those revealed in the terms we used. Some of them were regional sayings. For instance, I grew up oogling girls.
That was what the old men said. And I definitely did it. I liked to watch girls. Talking to them was more difficult. Sometimes I would freeze up completely. But I could half-close my eyes and just watch. Or watch with my mouth hanging open.
The term was pronounced oogling as in googling or "oooo, look at that."
Later, I learned that the dictionary said this was ogling. It was officially spelled differently and pronounced differently than I thought. (Whoever wrote the dictionary probably said, "oh, look at that.") Nowadays, the oogling form is gone entirely. It's been replaced by the official dictionary decision, at least in my region of the country. But oogling was a better word. You could just hear and almost see the wide-open eyes implied by it, the sheer dumbfoundedness in someone’s face.
Another term that was stolen from our colloquial history, was "yadada yadada." Somehow, perhaps from my friends using Yiddish slang, I started saying “yadada yadada” in place of “and so on, and so on.” I think my changeover to "yadada yadada" happened when I was around thirteen.
There was a childish joy in saying a string of nonsense syllables and having everyone know what you meant. No one could define “yadada yadada” but everyone smiled and nodded at it.
In the late 1980s, though, after I had been spewing out my multisyllabic nonsense for over a decade, a new TV show came out that re-set the standard phrase. That show was Seinfeld. Suddenly, people started to look at me funny when I talked to them exactly as I always had before.
I actually had a few friends try to correct me. At this point, I may not have owned a television. But I was forced to learn about the show Seinfeld. Because whenever I said yadada yadada, which was often, I would get an involuntary education on how funny this program was.
Everyone loved it. I hadn’t seen it and already I hated it.
At this point, I wonder if anyone remembers that "yadada yadada” once existed. As far as I can tell, there's a lot of revisionism about the past that isn't deliberate. It just happens. Everybody backfills their memories with wrong stuff from television shows. ads, or current cultural norms. Little snippets get left out of our national or regional stories. Elements of personal contexts get lost.
Gone forever or radically changed are oogling, ping, flannel cake, twilight, wampum, sneakies, catfish, mixed marriage, sick, thongs, and so many others, yadada, yadada. You know what I mean.
Sunday, October 10, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 224: Biomythography - Note 1, Missing Pennies
A Biomythography - Note 1
by Secret Hippie
Missing Pennies
When I was 23 years old and living in western Massachusetts, I made $7000 that year. I saved $1000 in my bank account. I was living a stoic and buddhist life. Or, if you prefer, I was cheap and dead broke.
Another financial landmark that year came when, during one month, my bank statement was off by a penny. I did the math. I checked it several times. The bank had made an error in its favor of one penny. I was mad.
But I didn’t complain
The next month, the bank statement was off by a penny again. The mistake was in the bank's favor. And now I thought that it was deliberate.
I knew that I should complain. I drafted a letter about the problem but I didn't know where to mail it so I kept it for a visit in person.
When it happened for the third month in a row, I was so mad that I had to go to the bank and show them the error of their evil ways. I walked up to the teller window with my paper statements in hand and my complaint letter, signed and dated. I showed the bank teller how the withdrawals and deposits didn’t add up right. The bank teller was very polite and agreed that it looked odd but he said he might not be able to do anything about it.
The teller took my information and promised that, if the bank was at fault, I would be rewarded. Weeks went by. I didn’t hear anything from the bank. Then my bank statement arrived. It had $20.03 extra in it.
The bank had returned my three cents and given me a twenty dollar reward. Or had it? Someone in the bank had been pulling a penny skimming scam. I had to wonder if I had complained to the person who had been pulling the scam. In that case, he must have thought to himself, how much does it take to buy off a person who notices a penny missing each month? Probably twenty bucks.
And he was right.
Sunday, October 3, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 221: Wake for Robert Gallagher
Wake for Robert Gallagher
Part I, Introduction
Part II, Childhood and Adolescence
Part III, The Student
Part IV, The Teacher
Part V, Parenting Examples
Part VI, Grandparenting
Part VII, Greater Families
Part VIII, Forever Goodbye
Part I, Introduction
Humor Crusader
In Recognition
Part II, Childhood and Adolescence
Elmira and Baltimore
126th Signal Service
Simple Codes
The Arrival of Black Jack
The End of Black Jack
Part III, The Student
Getting Into College
Visit to Europe
Crazy Roommates
After College
Jobs and More Jobs
Part IV, The Teacher
Overseas
Buying In
To Moscow, With Love
Inside the USSR
The Soviet Way
Tea, Shchi, Trapeze Artists, and Hula Hoops
Second-Half Teaching
Part V, Parenting Examples
A Young Father
Remembrance for His Uncle
A Growing Father
Parenting in the Neighborhood
Parenting through College
The College Drive
Part VI, Grandparenting
Advanced Degrees of Support
Catching Ill
Retirement
Full Time Grandfather: Odin
Full Time Grandfather: Dva
Full Time Grandfather: Tri - Radio
Full Time Grandfather: Tri - Morse Code
Part VII, Greater Families
Part VIII, Forever Goodbye
Sunday, September 26, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 221.42: Wake for Robert Gallagher, Part 42
Robert Gallagher, Wake
After the Wake
For the first weeks after my mother died, my father made it clear that he wanted to die, too, right away. My wife and I came to an agreement to bring our kids to see my father as often as possible. Showing him that he had grandkids was our strategy to discourage his ideas of suicide. However, with three kids who had to be in different places for different activities every evening, it was difficult. By the second week, we knew that not everything could be canceled or postponed. Sometimes other parents and kids were depending on us.
Fortunately, the planning for my mothers wake took over. Wrangling the legal details and the logistics of inviting people gave my father a challenge that he could meet. As he received phone call after phone call, he discovered that my mother had a lot of friends who remembered her, even if they had worked with her fifteen years ago, even if they only knew her from a YMCA water fitness class, or even if they didn't know her family but saw her obituary in the paper and wanted to be there at her remembrance.
“Jenny’s children are coming,” my father told me. We could tell he was looking forward to that. By Jenny's children, he meant my cousins on his side, all of them older than me. “Probably Gary and Sue. Definitely Annie. It sounds like Jim will fly up from Texas.”
“Even Jim?" I couldn't remember the last time we'd seen him.
“Will Mark bring his family?” My mother's youngest brother was someone whose company he enjoyed as well. While my mother had been alive, we had seen Mark often.
“Of course.”
Together with my wife, we made a list of all of the friends and family who would be coming to the wake. At my father's insistence, I rented out a nearby recreation center to host them.
"Because I can't travel far," he said. "Besides, if it's close to the house, it'll be easier for you when you set up."
Left unspoken was the problem posed by the house. At this late point in his collecting or hoarding things, none of us could conceive of an attempt to clean it for guests. It didn't seem realistic.
Our list reached over seventy people. When the day came, some of the visitors cycled in and out of the wake and didn't stay long. Most of them sat at their tables for hours, though, and the most important of those were our friends. Many of them arrived early to lend a hand. We needed their help. Mark's family leaped in, side by side with us. And Kyllian and Adam tackled a couple technical jobs on the spot. They saw the needs and acted. Without them, I would have had to choose to do either one of those jobs to the exclusion of everything else.
The talks around the tables of our rented hall weren't limited to my mother, of course, not for the entire four hours. But my father was pleased that so many people were willing to talk with him about her. People approached him who he hadn't seen in years or who he had never known. He was as alert and energetic as he'd been for weeks.
In the end, though, he was tired. He sat down for the last forty minutes to watch us clean up. With a few grandkids along, he allowed himself to be led out the glass doors and toward his car. I sped up to walk ahead of the crowd. It was a surprise when someone started calling for me. I turned. I saw a few people standing in a circle. One of them was staring at me. Then I looked down and saw my father lying on the asphalt.
He had stepped from the curb and fallen.
That's how we spent another evening in the hospital. This time, we learned that he had broken his collarbone near the right shoulder. He had already been hoping to die after the wake. This only seemed to strengthen his position, emotionally. It was time.
Nevertheless, a month later I dropped by on another of my weekly visits to check on his healing. He looked better than he had in a long while. Although his right arm was still in a cloth sling, he had improved in the use of his left hand. He motioned for me to stroll with him out onto the porch.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to light the cigar," he said. I had previously refused to help him with that.
On a stool on the porch, he had put a glass ashtray. He'd rested cigars on three of the four ashtray corners, each of them in a different state of decay. With his left hand, he picked one up. It was trailing a wisp of smoke. He puffed. The coal of his stogie glowed. Grey vapors billowed from his lips. He coughed.
"Help me sit down for a minute." He gestured to his green, wrought iron lawn chair.
"How do you get back up when I'm not here?" I asked. My hands found it hard to get a grip on him that avoided his collarbone, right arm, and shoulder. His left arm felt thin. His body seemed brittle. When I let go an inch too early, he fell into his seat with a huff.
"Getting back up is easier," he said. He slumped into a position of comfort. Some recent memory made a flicker of doubt pass through him. "When it's not, I yell for your brother. If he doesn't come, I find a way anyhow."
My expression must have looked doubtful.
"Usually," he qualified.
When I checked the other porch seats, I found that the front one had a stain that smelled like dog urine. The other had enough fur to knit a dog but I opted to sit in the fur. Before I could ask more questions about his health or my brother, my father launched into the topic of Orioles baseball. The team had gotten a new manager, Buck Showalter, and it seemed to have become instantly better with the same lineup of players.
"I remember going to a minor league game with you," he said. "Was it Frederick?"
"Yeah, the Keyote mascot waved at us. We almost caught a foul ball." That last part wasn't quite true although I had shield him from two looping fouls.
"I liked that more than I thought I would," he admitted. "It was up close. I could see. The sounds were clear, too. That helped. But I don't think I'll ever go to a game again, not in person."
Even half an hour before first pitch at the Keys Stadium, he had barely made it down the steps to his seat. Attendants had rushed to help. After the game, we had been forced to let everyone else go ahead of us. My father had barely made it back up even with three stops to sit on benches along his way.
"The Orioles have a couple of those minor leaguers now," he said approvingly. "They're on the roster."
He lured me into talking about sports for half an hour. We recounted the preseason football games so far. His enthusiasm for Baltimore and for the University of Maryland pulled me in. Besides, he deflected my questions about his health whenever I tried to steer the conversation back to it.
After his cigar died out, the fumes faded from the porch. The mosquitoes started to find me. I killed one on my shirt. He nodded and laughed.
"I'm immune," he said. Whether it was the cigar scent or something else about him, he was right. He never seemed to pick up mosquito bites. "For me, it's not a bad time of year to be outside."
"I need to go in."
"You could start smoking," he suggested.
"Ha ha. Do you want help out of the chair?"
"I guess I'd better." He leaned forward as I approached. Lifting him out was easier than getting him into place. A hand to his left shoulder was all it took. He felt like paper. My pull backwards was just a touch too fast. "Ow. Easy, easy."
"Sorry. Are you still okay?"
"Sure."
"What about your other shoulder?"
"The collarbone keeps healing," he told me. He lifted his right arm, still in the sling, to show me. "Funny, isn't it? I didn't want it to heal. Didn't care. But the doctor says it's better. And I can tell, it's better."
He seemed surprised. I was, too. Even though he didn’t seem to have much of a will to live, his body insisted on healing.
"It's the way of things," he said.
After the Wake
For the first weeks after my mother died, my father made it clear that he wanted to die, too, right away. My wife and I came to an agreement to bring our kids to see my father as often as possible. Showing him that he had grandkids was our strategy to discourage his ideas of suicide. However, with three kids who had to be in different places for different activities every evening, it was difficult. By the second week, we knew that not everything could be canceled or postponed. Sometimes other parents and kids were depending on us.
Fortunately, the planning for my mothers wake took over. Wrangling the legal details and the logistics of inviting people gave my father a challenge that he could meet. As he received phone call after phone call, he discovered that my mother had a lot of friends who remembered her, even if they had worked with her fifteen years ago, even if they only knew her from a YMCA water fitness class, or even if they didn't know her family but saw her obituary in the paper and wanted to be there at her remembrance.
“Jenny’s children are coming,” my father told me. We could tell he was looking forward to that. By Jenny's children, he meant my cousins on his side, all of them older than me. “Probably Gary and Sue. Definitely Annie. It sounds like Jim will fly up from Texas.”
“Even Jim?" I couldn't remember the last time we'd seen him.
“Will Mark bring his family?” My mother's youngest brother was someone whose company he enjoyed as well. While my mother had been alive, we had seen Mark often.
“Of course.”
Together with my wife, we made a list of all of the friends and family who would be coming to the wake. At my father's insistence, I rented out a nearby recreation center to host them.
"Because I can't travel far," he said. "Besides, if it's close to the house, it'll be easier for you when you set up."
Left unspoken was the problem posed by the house. At this late point in his collecting or hoarding things, none of us could conceive of an attempt to clean it for guests. It didn't seem realistic.
Our list reached over seventy people. When the day came, some of the visitors cycled in and out of the wake and didn't stay long. Most of them sat at their tables for hours, though, and the most important of those were our friends. Many of them arrived early to lend a hand. We needed their help. Mark's family leaped in, side by side with us. And Kyllian and Adam tackled a couple technical jobs on the spot. They saw the needs and acted. Without them, I would have had to choose to do either one of those jobs to the exclusion of everything else.
The talks around the tables of our rented hall weren't limited to my mother, of course, not for the entire four hours. But my father was pleased that so many people were willing to talk with him about her. People approached him who he hadn't seen in years or who he had never known. He was as alert and energetic as he'd been for weeks.
In the end, though, he was tired. He sat down for the last forty minutes to watch us clean up. With a few grandkids along, he allowed himself to be led out the glass doors and toward his car. I sped up to walk ahead of the crowd. It was a surprise when someone started calling for me. I turned. I saw a few people standing in a circle. One of them was staring at me. Then I looked down and saw my father lying on the asphalt.
He had stepped from the curb and fallen.
That's how we spent another evening in the hospital. This time, we learned that he had broken his collarbone near the right shoulder. He had already been hoping to die after the wake. This only seemed to strengthen his position, emotionally. It was time.
Nevertheless, a month later I dropped by on another of my weekly visits to check on his healing. He looked better than he had in a long while. Although his right arm was still in a cloth sling, he had improved in the use of his left hand. He motioned for me to stroll with him out onto the porch.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to light the cigar," he said. I had previously refused to help him with that.
On a stool on the porch, he had put a glass ashtray. He'd rested cigars on three of the four ashtray corners, each of them in a different state of decay. With his left hand, he picked one up. It was trailing a wisp of smoke. He puffed. The coal of his stogie glowed. Grey vapors billowed from his lips. He coughed.
"Help me sit down for a minute." He gestured to his green, wrought iron lawn chair.
"How do you get back up when I'm not here?" I asked. My hands found it hard to get a grip on him that avoided his collarbone, right arm, and shoulder. His left arm felt thin. His body seemed brittle. When I let go an inch too early, he fell into his seat with a huff.
"Getting back up is easier," he said. He slumped into a position of comfort. Some recent memory made a flicker of doubt pass through him. "When it's not, I yell for your brother. If he doesn't come, I find a way anyhow."
My expression must have looked doubtful.
"Usually," he qualified.
When I checked the other porch seats, I found that the front one had a stain that smelled like dog urine. The other had enough fur to knit a dog but I opted to sit in the fur. Before I could ask more questions about his health or my brother, my father launched into the topic of Orioles baseball. The team had gotten a new manager, Buck Showalter, and it seemed to have become instantly better with the same lineup of players.
"I remember going to a minor league game with you," he said. "Was it Frederick?"
"Yeah, the Keyote mascot waved at us. We almost caught a foul ball." That last part wasn't quite true although I had shield him from two looping fouls.
"I liked that more than I thought I would," he admitted. "It was up close. I could see. The sounds were clear, too. That helped. But I don't think I'll ever go to a game again, not in person."
Even half an hour before first pitch at the Keys Stadium, he had barely made it down the steps to his seat. Attendants had rushed to help. After the game, we had been forced to let everyone else go ahead of us. My father had barely made it back up even with three stops to sit on benches along his way.
"The Orioles have a couple of those minor leaguers now," he said approvingly. "They're on the roster."
He lured me into talking about sports for half an hour. We recounted the preseason football games so far. His enthusiasm for Baltimore and for the University of Maryland pulled me in. Besides, he deflected my questions about his health whenever I tried to steer the conversation back to it.
After his cigar died out, the fumes faded from the porch. The mosquitoes started to find me. I killed one on my shirt. He nodded and laughed.
"I'm immune," he said. Whether it was the cigar scent or something else about him, he was right. He never seemed to pick up mosquito bites. "For me, it's not a bad time of year to be outside."
"I need to go in."
"You could start smoking," he suggested.
"Ha ha. Do you want help out of the chair?"
"I guess I'd better." He leaned forward as I approached. Lifting him out was easier than getting him into place. A hand to his left shoulder was all it took. He felt like paper. My pull backwards was just a touch too fast. "Ow. Easy, easy."
"Sorry. Are you still okay?"
"Sure."
"What about your other shoulder?"
"The collarbone keeps healing," he told me. He lifted his right arm, still in the sling, to show me. "Funny, isn't it? I didn't want it to heal. Didn't care. But the doctor says it's better. And I can tell, it's better."
He seemed surprised. I was, too. Even though he didn’t seem to have much of a will to live, his body insisted on healing.
"It's the way of things," he said.
Sunday, September 19, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 221.41: Wake for Robert Gallagher, Part 41
Robert Gallagher, Wake
Goodbye to Ann, Part II
In early May of 2013, my mother got out of a twelve hour surgery to remove scar tissue in her stomach. That scarring came from mis-aimed radiation therapy.
My father tried to visit her but he couldn't make it every single day, so I doubled up on the visits. During lunch, I drove from work to the hospital. Every weekday, I stopped in to talk with my mother. Usually, I added a Sunday trip with my family.
"Well, they tell me I have pneumonia," she said. "It's not good."
The amount of time she spent in surgery may have been critical. Twelve hours is a lot for someone with a pre-existing lung problem.
"Can you tell me if I'm on antibiotics?" she asked.
"Okay. Yes." After I walked around the room and checked her IV drips, I could see that she was on a steroid and an antibiotic. Her resting heart rate was high. She had received an insulin shot and was due for another one soon.
During my first few visits, my support role for her was to gather the information that no one else had conveyed yet. As she grew more lucid, that aspect of the visits faded. At the same time, the nurses started asking me to help my mother eat food. (For days, my mother would only sip Ensure. When I got her to eat ice cream, it was a breakthrough.) The staff also came over to ask about my mother's family. She had gotten mysterious phone calls, probably from her brother Johnny, but he wouldn't leave messages.
"We had to put mittens on her," a nurse told me after a few days. "She keeps having panic attacks and pulling on her cords."
"Why is her white blood cell count so high?"
"She has an infection." My face must have done something because the nurse followed with, "We don't know the source of the infection. We're looking."
The staff doubled up on antibiotics. They sedated my mother, too, and left her unconscious for a day in the hope of speeding up her recovery. It seemed to work. At the end of the week, my mother no longer needed to be intubated. The nurses had figured out my mother's hearing problems, too, and were trying to work around them. My mother was frustrated and sent me off with a directive to get her hearing aids, which my father wasn't able to find on his own. She gave me very specific directions.
On Wednesday of that week, my father talked to Kaiser Permanente. They agreed on a plan to move my mother in about a week's time. She would go from Holy Cross hospital to a rehab facility.
On the same day, Dr. Zhang at Holy Cross came in during my visit.
"If your mother wants to leave for rehab," he said. "She must be able to eat and drink. She's still being fed through a tube. She can't go. Do you understand? We must wait. She must work hard."
"Absolutely." It was obvious she wasn't ready. She couldn't eat and she couldn't brush her teeth.
That's why it was a shock to visit the next day and find that Kaiser had moved my mother to a different bed in the same room and also prepped her for another move.
"Isn't this too early?"
During the window of my visit, I personally got a call from Kaiser Permanente. Jocelyn from Kaiser told me that the next move wasn't within Holy Cross but was in fact a transfer to the Genesis Layhill Center. The insurance company was cutting out the doctor's planned week of hospital recovery and sending my mother to rehab.
That night, while I wasn't there, the company transferred my mother to Genesis Layhill. I got a call the next morning.
"Your mother is doing very badly," said the representative from Genesis Layhill. "Very, very badly."
"What are you doing about it?"
"We have transferred her back to Holy Cross." He sounded angry. "She will be there soon. You should try to meet her."
From that point on, the battle changed from getting healthy to staving off death. Holy Cross hospital put my mother back onto a respirator. Within a day, they moved her into the CCU, the cardiac care unit, because her previous respirator was not enough. My mother needed a pressure respirator to help pump her lungs.
Moving her onto a pressure respirator meant stopping her oral medications. During my visits, my mother took off her respirator mask to talk with me. That seemed a little risky but also like a good sign. Obviously, she could move her upper body well. She said she liked listening to me read her get well cards to her. One came in from her sister Lois that day and a bunch more came from Johnny.
"She seems like she's happier," my brother said. He and my father walked out of the building with more bounce to gaits.
"Yeah, her symptoms are stable."
"She's in less pain," my father added.
We all felt better than when my mother had arrived back at Holy Cross and needed critical care. In a few days, she had recovered from her near-death. On the other hand, her health was still not back to where it had been before the aborted transfer. The physician in charge, Dr. Zang, had a timetable in mind. My mother was no longer on it.
The next day, we skipped seeing her. Other family members visited to keep her company. Then, on Memorial Day, Diane and I drove down to Holy Cross.
When we came in, the staff seemed shocked and dismayed to see us.
"You just missed her," a nurse blurted.
"What do you mean? Has she been moved again?"
This time, the woman hesitated. She searched our faces for understanding.
"She was removed from oxygen. She didn't last long."
It took me a moment to understand. The hospital decision to remove her oxygen seemed so out of place. But they had done it. We arrived at 11:03. But at 11:00, a doctor had pronounced her dead.
We went in to see her. My mother's respirator and monitors had been turned off. The nurse told me how they had turned up the opiates. The drip that had been set up to slow and stop her heart was still in her arm. My mother had felt no pain, they said. Around her, I could see that someone had set up soothing music. The television screen showed a nature scene. Staff had drawn the curtains in the window opposite to leave the room in shade.
We stayed for a while. Our friends Richard and Andrea Price came. They offered to pick up our kids and bring them to my father's house, which seemed like a good idea. Lois, Mark, and Nattipa came, too. They had been planning a visit. We tried to make calls to folks who couldn't get to Holy Cross.
"Your mother wanted her body donated," my father told me over the phone.
Goodbye to Ann, Part II
In early May of 2013, my mother got out of a twelve hour surgery to remove scar tissue in her stomach. That scarring came from mis-aimed radiation therapy.
My father tried to visit her but he couldn't make it every single day, so I doubled up on the visits. During lunch, I drove from work to the hospital. Every weekday, I stopped in to talk with my mother. Usually, I added a Sunday trip with my family.
"Well, they tell me I have pneumonia," she said. "It's not good."
The amount of time she spent in surgery may have been critical. Twelve hours is a lot for someone with a pre-existing lung problem.
"Can you tell me if I'm on antibiotics?" she asked.
"Okay. Yes." After I walked around the room and checked her IV drips, I could see that she was on a steroid and an antibiotic. Her resting heart rate was high. She had received an insulin shot and was due for another one soon.
During my first few visits, my support role for her was to gather the information that no one else had conveyed yet. As she grew more lucid, that aspect of the visits faded. At the same time, the nurses started asking me to help my mother eat food. (For days, my mother would only sip Ensure. When I got her to eat ice cream, it was a breakthrough.) The staff also came over to ask about my mother's family. She had gotten mysterious phone calls, probably from her brother Johnny, but he wouldn't leave messages.
"We had to put mittens on her," a nurse told me after a few days. "She keeps having panic attacks and pulling on her cords."
"Why is her white blood cell count so high?"
"She has an infection." My face must have done something because the nurse followed with, "We don't know the source of the infection. We're looking."
The staff doubled up on antibiotics. They sedated my mother, too, and left her unconscious for a day in the hope of speeding up her recovery. It seemed to work. At the end of the week, my mother no longer needed to be intubated. The nurses had figured out my mother's hearing problems, too, and were trying to work around them. My mother was frustrated and sent me off with a directive to get her hearing aids, which my father wasn't able to find on his own. She gave me very specific directions.
On Wednesday of that week, my father talked to Kaiser Permanente. They agreed on a plan to move my mother in about a week's time. She would go from Holy Cross hospital to a rehab facility.
On the same day, Dr. Zhang at Holy Cross came in during my visit.
"If your mother wants to leave for rehab," he said. "She must be able to eat and drink. She's still being fed through a tube. She can't go. Do you understand? We must wait. She must work hard."
"Absolutely." It was obvious she wasn't ready. She couldn't eat and she couldn't brush her teeth.
That's why it was a shock to visit the next day and find that Kaiser had moved my mother to a different bed in the same room and also prepped her for another move.
"Isn't this too early?"
During the window of my visit, I personally got a call from Kaiser Permanente. Jocelyn from Kaiser told me that the next move wasn't within Holy Cross but was in fact a transfer to the Genesis Layhill Center. The insurance company was cutting out the doctor's planned week of hospital recovery and sending my mother to rehab.
That night, while I wasn't there, the company transferred my mother to Genesis Layhill. I got a call the next morning.
"Your mother is doing very badly," said the representative from Genesis Layhill. "Very, very badly."
"What are you doing about it?"
"We have transferred her back to Holy Cross." He sounded angry. "She will be there soon. You should try to meet her."
From that point on, the battle changed from getting healthy to staving off death. Holy Cross hospital put my mother back onto a respirator. Within a day, they moved her into the CCU, the cardiac care unit, because her previous respirator was not enough. My mother needed a pressure respirator to help pump her lungs.
Moving her onto a pressure respirator meant stopping her oral medications. During my visits, my mother took off her respirator mask to talk with me. That seemed a little risky but also like a good sign. Obviously, she could move her upper body well. She said she liked listening to me read her get well cards to her. One came in from her sister Lois that day and a bunch more came from Johnny.
"She seems like she's happier," my brother said. He and my father walked out of the building with more bounce to gaits.
"Yeah, her symptoms are stable."
"She's in less pain," my father added.
We all felt better than when my mother had arrived back at Holy Cross and needed critical care. In a few days, she had recovered from her near-death. On the other hand, her health was still not back to where it had been before the aborted transfer. The physician in charge, Dr. Zang, had a timetable in mind. My mother was no longer on it.
The next day, we skipped seeing her. Other family members visited to keep her company. Then, on Memorial Day, Diane and I drove down to Holy Cross.
When we came in, the staff seemed shocked and dismayed to see us.
"You just missed her," a nurse blurted.
"What do you mean? Has she been moved again?"
This time, the woman hesitated. She searched our faces for understanding.
"She was removed from oxygen. She didn't last long."
It took me a moment to understand. The hospital decision to remove her oxygen seemed so out of place. But they had done it. We arrived at 11:03. But at 11:00, a doctor had pronounced her dead.
We went in to see her. My mother's respirator and monitors had been turned off. The nurse told me how they had turned up the opiates. The drip that had been set up to slow and stop her heart was still in her arm. My mother had felt no pain, they said. Around her, I could see that someone had set up soothing music. The television screen showed a nature scene. Staff had drawn the curtains in the window opposite to leave the room in shade.
We stayed for a while. Our friends Richard and Andrea Price came. They offered to pick up our kids and bring them to my father's house, which seemed like a good idea. Lois, Mark, and Nattipa came, too. They had been planning a visit. We tried to make calls to folks who couldn't get to Holy Cross.
"Your mother wanted her body donated," my father told me over the phone.
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 221.40: Wake for Robert Gallagher, Part 40
Robert Gallagher, Wake
The smell of a lit cigar wafted up the stairs. I followed it down to a grey haze. When I reached the landing, I saw a bright beam shimmering through the cracked-open library door. I swung the door wide. Fumes billowed toward me and I met the full effects of the fog. It felt like I had spent hours in the pool as a child and saw mists and rainbow halos around every light. The cigar smoke wasn't chlorine but it reminded me of my hazy upbringing.
"Oho!" my father said. He sat upright in his chair. "What brings you here?"
He put down his plate. He had been eating plain toast.
"There was an accident on the highway," I replied. I gestured for him to remain seated. He ignored me and made room to rise. "So I turned onto the back roads. I was driving sort of close to here. I thought, why not take Black Rock?"
"Well, that's nice." He finished brushing his pants. He wiped his mouth.
"I can only stay a few minutes."
"Fine. I just woke up, anyway."
One of the luxuries of my father's retired life was that he got to make his own schedule. Now that my mother was gone, he felt no constraints. He slept more or less randomly.
"How have you been?" I asked. It had been a week since I'd called.
"Can't complain." He wobbled to his feet. His right hand shot out and grabbed the back of his chair. "Doesn't matter if I do. No one listens."
"Last time, you said that you fell at the bottom of the stairs." Although I hadn't seen it, the image rose to my mind of him lying on his back on the landing.
"That was weeks ago." He chuckled.
"Well, I was wondering about your feet."
"They feel okay." He shrugged. "Of course, I can't feel them, not really. But I do look at them now and then. They seem fine enough."
He wore special shoes, which were padded sandals with velcro straps. They didn't help much. Maybe they kept his circulation nearly normal, maybe not. None of us in the family knew it, of course, but he was a few months away from another fall. It would be his last.
He would land on his hip and break it.
I would meet my father and brothers that day at the hospital, where we would debate intensely with doctors. One of the surgeons would turn out to be a former student of my father's. That would change the conversation. The hospital would agree to operate. They would let us wait in the hospital, too, for the procedure to finish.
In fact, my father would get through the operation perfectly well. His deterioration came from the opioids they gave him, which slowed his digestion a day later. This was something that had happened to him before. Sepsis had set in, fifteen years earlier, when he had the first occurrence. A surgeon at Shady Grove had removed the section of his intestines that had died. The next day, his vital signs improved and he was ready to walk. At the time, I had thought the intestinal sensitivity was a complication of his diabetes but I was never sure.
After the hip surgery, though, his health plan sent him to rehab. At the rehab center, the staff gave him more opioids. Again, a section of his stomach shut down. And nothing that his family had to say could persuade the medical staff to ease off the morphine. When my father got sepsis, we couldn't persuade the staff to remove the section of intestine. They didn't feel he would survive the surgery. Maybe they were right, too, but not removing the dead section meant they had determined that he would die of the sepsis.
The general staff reaction to his circumstance was to turn up his morphine dosage. They raised his levels of painkillers for two days until he lost consciousness for the final time, still in pain.
So at their ends, both of my parents died due to multiple causes yet the foremost and most literal cause for both of them was painkillers shutting down their bodies. Each time, the hospital staff made the decision. We in the family were not consulted. It's also hard to see how the patients could have been conscious enough for a doctor to talk to them without us.
But in the library, in the November of my visit due to a traffic jam, we were half a year away from all that.
"I usually get up to watch the evening news," he said. He fumbled with the remote control. He was trying to turn down the volume out of politeness. I had been ignoring his show so completely that I didn't notice until he shut it off. "Lately it's been so depressing."
At the time, the new anchors kept showing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. They also talked about mosquitoes spreading the Zika virus and creeping north. Ryan Lochte had lied about getting mugged at the Olympics and he was still apologizing. Donald Trump had won the election for U.S. President but there was an investigation of the Russian influence in the voting. Police shootings of unarmed citizens were coming out on phone videos. Pokemon Go players kept wandering into traffic and a couple of them got injured trying to catch a Squirtle.
"How can people be so stupid?" he asked.
In the dimness of the basement lights and cigar smoke we talked about the Russia problems. Those, we thought, were the least stupid. I had a computer security perspective. I had seen plenty of Russian cyberattacks. My father had his past NSA experience. He still thought in terms of the Soviet era. That was starting to seem more and more relevant to us both.
"I had a joke book," he said. "Did you take it?"
"No." My head rose as I recalled some of the home-grown Soviet gags. I had read them over and over. He had found a good collection in a Russian specialty shop back in 1972. "You still have it here somewhere."
We wondered where the jokes had gone as we walked around his library. Instead of his Russian books, I kept finding his math, computer, and philosophy texts.
"It's been a long time since you tried to quote Aristotle to me," I observed as I thumbed through the pages of Rhetoric and Poetics.
"Ah, I don't even like him."
"Really?"
"Socrates was better. And Plato, because he wrote about Socrates. But Diogenes was the best," he said. "Looking for an honest man. The older I get, the more I sympathize with that. Virtue is revealed in actions, not in theories. That's what he claimed."
"Didn't he disrupt Plato's lectures?"
"He teased Plato. Mercilessly. And he mocked Alexander the Great. To his face!" His chuckle ended in a sigh. "I couldn't live in a barrel, though."
"Oh, here's Dylan Thomas. 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'"
"I don't want to talk about that," he told me.
"Okay."
We walked among the books of the library, tapping our fingers on the titles or pulling them out for a look. We saw Does it Matter? by Alan Watts and The Way of Zen, also by Watts, followed by a stack of Golden Age of Radio magazines. My father still had his copy of The Science of Logic by Hegel. He owned The Republic by Plato. A row of 1950s-era philosophy books rested underneath a shelf of 1970s high school math texts in faded blue and grey.
My father put his hand on a trade paperback of Man and His Symbols by Karl Jung. He pushed aside a stack of TV Guide weeklies to read the full title. On the other side of the room, between cigar boxes, I found the Collected Confucius and a pair of science fiction books that I thought I'd thrown out.
"Oh, Twilight Zone," my father said next as he picked up a videotape. "I forgot where I put these."
"Did you bring them down to watch them?"
He shrugged. "I'm not sure."
He set the tape down on his pile.
"What are we looking for?" he asked.
"Russian jokes."
At the diagonal corner of the room, my father picked up a faded, green-backed Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas but he put it back down. On my side, I found a heap of Science News Magazine issues pressed between textbooks. Next, bound in hardback leather, lurked The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. We had never talked much about it. I gather he didn't think much of Kant. Beside it sat The Wisdom of Kierkegaard. After that came a shelf of Gunsmoke tapes in VHS format, still unopened.
"It's a small book with a white cover and blue lettering," I remembered. There had been a matryoshka doll on the cover, I thought, inked in blue and red.
"What is?" My father was holding a box of cassette tapes and reading the label. "Burns and Allen. I forgot about these."
He couldn't forget the comedy routines, so I knew he meant only that he had forgotten to transfer that particular run of tapes onto CDs or re-record them into some other format.
"What did George Burns say near the end?" he wondered to himself. "It was something like, 'I'm very pleased to be here. Let's face it, at my age I'm very pleased to be anywhere.'"
"Hah, Burns and Diogenes."
"That's right. 'I was brought up to respect my elders, so now I don't have to respect anybody.' That's Diogenes."
"That's Burns, isn't it?"
"You know what I mean." He waved the red and silver cardboard box. "What are we looking for?"
I checked the clock next to his chair. We had been browsing through his books for twenty minutes. I hesitated as I recalled how our search had started.
The Library
The smell of a lit cigar wafted up the stairs. I followed it down to a grey haze. When I reached the landing, I saw a bright beam shimmering through the cracked-open library door. I swung the door wide. Fumes billowed toward me and I met the full effects of the fog. It felt like I had spent hours in the pool as a child and saw mists and rainbow halos around every light. The cigar smoke wasn't chlorine but it reminded me of my hazy upbringing.
"Oho!" my father said. He sat upright in his chair. "What brings you here?"
He put down his plate. He had been eating plain toast.
"There was an accident on the highway," I replied. I gestured for him to remain seated. He ignored me and made room to rise. "So I turned onto the back roads. I was driving sort of close to here. I thought, why not take Black Rock?"
"Well, that's nice." He finished brushing his pants. He wiped his mouth.
"I can only stay a few minutes."
"Fine. I just woke up, anyway."
One of the luxuries of my father's retired life was that he got to make his own schedule. Now that my mother was gone, he felt no constraints. He slept more or less randomly.
"How have you been?" I asked. It had been a week since I'd called.
"Can't complain." He wobbled to his feet. His right hand shot out and grabbed the back of his chair. "Doesn't matter if I do. No one listens."
"Last time, you said that you fell at the bottom of the stairs." Although I hadn't seen it, the image rose to my mind of him lying on his back on the landing.
"That was weeks ago." He chuckled.
"Well, I was wondering about your feet."
"They feel okay." He shrugged. "Of course, I can't feel them, not really. But I do look at them now and then. They seem fine enough."
He wore special shoes, which were padded sandals with velcro straps. They didn't help much. Maybe they kept his circulation nearly normal, maybe not. None of us in the family knew it, of course, but he was a few months away from another fall. It would be his last.
He would land on his hip and break it.
I would meet my father and brothers that day at the hospital, where we would debate intensely with doctors. One of the surgeons would turn out to be a former student of my father's. That would change the conversation. The hospital would agree to operate. They would let us wait in the hospital, too, for the procedure to finish.
In fact, my father would get through the operation perfectly well. His deterioration came from the opioids they gave him, which slowed his digestion a day later. This was something that had happened to him before. Sepsis had set in, fifteen years earlier, when he had the first occurrence. A surgeon at Shady Grove had removed the section of his intestines that had died. The next day, his vital signs improved and he was ready to walk. At the time, I had thought the intestinal sensitivity was a complication of his diabetes but I was never sure.
After the hip surgery, though, his health plan sent him to rehab. At the rehab center, the staff gave him more opioids. Again, a section of his stomach shut down. And nothing that his family had to say could persuade the medical staff to ease off the morphine. When my father got sepsis, we couldn't persuade the staff to remove the section of intestine. They didn't feel he would survive the surgery. Maybe they were right, too, but not removing the dead section meant they had determined that he would die of the sepsis.
The general staff reaction to his circumstance was to turn up his morphine dosage. They raised his levels of painkillers for two days until he lost consciousness for the final time, still in pain.
So at their ends, both of my parents died due to multiple causes yet the foremost and most literal cause for both of them was painkillers shutting down their bodies. Each time, the hospital staff made the decision. We in the family were not consulted. It's also hard to see how the patients could have been conscious enough for a doctor to talk to them without us.
But in the library, in the November of my visit due to a traffic jam, we were half a year away from all that.
"I usually get up to watch the evening news," he said. He fumbled with the remote control. He was trying to turn down the volume out of politeness. I had been ignoring his show so completely that I didn't notice until he shut it off. "Lately it's been so depressing."
At the time, the new anchors kept showing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. They also talked about mosquitoes spreading the Zika virus and creeping north. Ryan Lochte had lied about getting mugged at the Olympics and he was still apologizing. Donald Trump had won the election for U.S. President but there was an investigation of the Russian influence in the voting. Police shootings of unarmed citizens were coming out on phone videos. Pokemon Go players kept wandering into traffic and a couple of them got injured trying to catch a Squirtle.
"How can people be so stupid?" he asked.
In the dimness of the basement lights and cigar smoke we talked about the Russia problems. Those, we thought, were the least stupid. I had a computer security perspective. I had seen plenty of Russian cyberattacks. My father had his past NSA experience. He still thought in terms of the Soviet era. That was starting to seem more and more relevant to us both.
"I had a joke book," he said. "Did you take it?"
"No." My head rose as I recalled some of the home-grown Soviet gags. I had read them over and over. He had found a good collection in a Russian specialty shop back in 1972. "You still have it here somewhere."
The Soviet Union started to crack down on drinking while on the job. An official assigned to handle it entered one of the industrial plants where the problem was said to occur. He asked a worker,
"Could you do your job if you drank a cup of vodka?"
"It would be a little difficult, but I suppose I could."
"Could you do your job if you drank two cups of vodka?"
"I probably could, yes."
"Could you do your job if you had three cups of vodka?"
"Well, I'm here, aren't I?"
We wondered where the jokes had gone as we walked around his library. Instead of his Russian books, I kept finding his math, computer, and philosophy texts.
"It's been a long time since you tried to quote Aristotle to me," I observed as I thumbed through the pages of Rhetoric and Poetics.
"Ah, I don't even like him."
"Really?"
"Socrates was better. And Plato, because he wrote about Socrates. But Diogenes was the best," he said. "Looking for an honest man. The older I get, the more I sympathize with that. Virtue is revealed in actions, not in theories. That's what he claimed."
"Didn't he disrupt Plato's lectures?"
"He teased Plato. Mercilessly. And he mocked Alexander the Great. To his face!" His chuckle ended in a sigh. "I couldn't live in a barrel, though."
"Oh, here's Dylan Thomas. 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'"
"I don't want to talk about that," he told me.
"Okay."
We walked among the books of the library, tapping our fingers on the titles or pulling them out for a look. We saw Does it Matter? by Alan Watts and The Way of Zen, also by Watts, followed by a stack of Golden Age of Radio magazines. My father still had his copy of The Science of Logic by Hegel. He owned The Republic by Plato. A row of 1950s-era philosophy books rested underneath a shelf of 1970s high school math texts in faded blue and grey.
My father put his hand on a trade paperback of Man and His Symbols by Karl Jung. He pushed aside a stack of TV Guide weeklies to read the full title. On the other side of the room, between cigar boxes, I found the Collected Confucius and a pair of science fiction books that I thought I'd thrown out.
"Oh, Twilight Zone," my father said next as he picked up a videotape. "I forgot where I put these."
"Did you bring them down to watch them?"
He shrugged. "I'm not sure."
He set the tape down on his pile.
"What are we looking for?" he asked.
"Russian jokes."
At the diagonal corner of the room, my father picked up a faded, green-backed Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas but he put it back down. On my side, I found a heap of Science News Magazine issues pressed between textbooks. Next, bound in hardback leather, lurked The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. We had never talked much about it. I gather he didn't think much of Kant. Beside it sat The Wisdom of Kierkegaard. After that came a shelf of Gunsmoke tapes in VHS format, still unopened.
"It's a small book with a white cover and blue lettering," I remembered. There had been a matryoshka doll on the cover, I thought, inked in blue and red.
"What is?" My father was holding a box of cassette tapes and reading the label. "Burns and Allen. I forgot about these."
He couldn't forget the comedy routines, so I knew he meant only that he had forgotten to transfer that particular run of tapes onto CDs or re-record them into some other format.
"What did George Burns say near the end?" he wondered to himself. "It was something like, 'I'm very pleased to be here. Let's face it, at my age I'm very pleased to be anywhere.'"
"Hah, Burns and Diogenes."
"That's right. 'I was brought up to respect my elders, so now I don't have to respect anybody.' That's Diogenes."
"That's Burns, isn't it?"
"You know what I mean." He waved the red and silver cardboard box. "What are we looking for?"
I checked the clock next to his chair. We had been browsing through his books for twenty minutes. I hesitated as I recalled how our search had started.
"Sneaky Russians," I said. I was looking at the table next to his chair, where had had his plate with two pieces of toast. Next to it sat his can of diet coke. On the other side of the chair, beyond a stack of magazines, he kept his dark green, glass ashtray. He had set his cigar into it. The ember had died out and turned to ash. "But I should let you get back to your breakfast and news, I guess."
Sunday, September 5, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 221.39: Wake for Robert Gallagher, Part 39
Robert Gallagher, Wake
Goodbye to Ann, Part I
"Meet us at the hospital," my father said.
"Meet us at the hospital," my father said.
Those were my instructions when I called to let him know I was bringing their grandkids over. He informed me that, no, he would not be at home. The pain my mother had been feeling for the past weeks had gotten worse. My brother and father had taken her to the doctor. The doctor, seeing her in pain for the third or fourth time, had sent her for a consultation.
"We had to come home for an hour because I forgot my medicine. But we're headed back. You should visit us. Your mom would like it."
Forty minutes later with my wife and kids in the car, I arrived at the healthcare center. We walked in to find my father and brother sitting in the waiting room on padded vinyl chairs. I hadn't seen the place for a decade. The slightly-faded salmon walls seemed odd. I guessed they had been re-painted. The partly antiseptic smell in the hallways felt familiar, though. I glanced around. My mother was nowhere to be seen.
"They keep saying they'll send her out," my father complained, "but they keep sending her for more tests instead."
For this visit, we had planned in advance. We had coloring books, novels, homework, and games for the kids. In between the sessions of childcare, the adults could talk. The only topic we cared about was how long mom had been in pain. My father said it had been at least a year. He suspected more.
"Because Ann never says anything," he sighed. "Now that she's saying something, I'm afraid it's really, really serious."
After only another forty minutes, a doctor came out. He wore his dark, straight hair parted to the side. His hands came out of the pockets of his white, lab coat as he strode forward to greet us.
"Who is next of kin?" he asked. "Are you all related?"
We took a moment for introductions. It didn't take much longer than that for the doctor to notice our impatience. He paused for effect. We all fell silent. He got to the point.
"We don't see a relapse of the cancer," he admitted. His tone grew darker. "But the CT scans of her abdomen look odd."
"The radiation." Three of us had the thought at once. The doctor gaped the adults around him. He hadn't expected that his view would be so widely anticipated. He recovered a moment later and nodded sagely.
"We want to do a very small surgery to look at what's causing the pain." Unconsciously or not, he made a small incising motion with his right hand. "Do you know what a laparoscopy is?"
We groaned. It wasn't good news. But as we exchanged glances, we realized it wasn't the worst, either. That would have been cancer. A laparoscopy was the next logical step. The main risk to my mother during it would come from her lungs. Her previous doctor had said he didn't want to send her into any procedure that required anesthesia. Her breathing rasped from the fungal infection she'd gotten in her portable classroom years ago. A short surgery, though, might not carry too much risk for her.
"I suppose that you do know." The doctor seemed wary of us. "It's the least invasive way that we can look around. It's possible that there is some scar tissue left over from her last surgery. That was what, four years ago?"
"Yes."
"And it may be binding parts of her organs together. That would cause her discomfort." He sounded like he was developing a slight drawl. His understatement sounded confident.
"You know about her lungs?" my father asked.
"Tell me about her lungs," the doctor said.
After more talk about her medical history and her diagnostic tests, the medical team at her health center put her on their schedule for surgery in two weeks. Soon, they realized that her pain meds weren't enough to let her move. Since she was bed-ridden, they bumped up her priority. To six days. It caught the family by surprise. Everyone agreed it was probably good, though, especially my mother.
For once, the procedure was so routine that I didn't bother to take off work for it. My mother went into the operating room at noon. At one in the afternoon, I called to check on her.
"She's not out yet," my father said. "I don't know what's going on."
What was going on was that the laparoscopy had found so much damage, so close to the incision, that the surgeons decided to operate. They had to remove the scar tissue. I kept calling the health center to get updates. By the third call, a nurse had told my father what was going on and that the procedure would take a few hours.
"I didn't bring enough medicine to stay here all day," he replied.
"You might as well go home and have dinner," the nurse told him.
"We had to come home for an hour because I forgot my medicine. But we're headed back. You should visit us. Your mom would like it."
Forty minutes later with my wife and kids in the car, I arrived at the healthcare center. We walked in to find my father and brother sitting in the waiting room on padded vinyl chairs. I hadn't seen the place for a decade. The slightly-faded salmon walls seemed odd. I guessed they had been re-painted. The partly antiseptic smell in the hallways felt familiar, though. I glanced around. My mother was nowhere to be seen.
"They keep saying they'll send her out," my father complained, "but they keep sending her for more tests instead."
For this visit, we had planned in advance. We had coloring books, novels, homework, and games for the kids. In between the sessions of childcare, the adults could talk. The only topic we cared about was how long mom had been in pain. My father said it had been at least a year. He suspected more.
"Because Ann never says anything," he sighed. "Now that she's saying something, I'm afraid it's really, really serious."
After only another forty minutes, a doctor came out. He wore his dark, straight hair parted to the side. His hands came out of the pockets of his white, lab coat as he strode forward to greet us.
"Who is next of kin?" he asked. "Are you all related?"
We took a moment for introductions. It didn't take much longer than that for the doctor to notice our impatience. He paused for effect. We all fell silent. He got to the point.
"We don't see a relapse of the cancer," he admitted. His tone grew darker. "But the CT scans of her abdomen look odd."
"The radiation." Three of us had the thought at once. The doctor gaped the adults around him. He hadn't expected that his view would be so widely anticipated. He recovered a moment later and nodded sagely.
"We want to do a very small surgery to look at what's causing the pain." Unconsciously or not, he made a small incising motion with his right hand. "Do you know what a laparoscopy is?"
We groaned. It wasn't good news. But as we exchanged glances, we realized it wasn't the worst, either. That would have been cancer. A laparoscopy was the next logical step. The main risk to my mother during it would come from her lungs. Her previous doctor had said he didn't want to send her into any procedure that required anesthesia. Her breathing rasped from the fungal infection she'd gotten in her portable classroom years ago. A short surgery, though, might not carry too much risk for her.
"I suppose that you do know." The doctor seemed wary of us. "It's the least invasive way that we can look around. It's possible that there is some scar tissue left over from her last surgery. That was what, four years ago?"
"Yes."
"And it may be binding parts of her organs together. That would cause her discomfort." He sounded like he was developing a slight drawl. His understatement sounded confident.
"You know about her lungs?" my father asked.
"Tell me about her lungs," the doctor said.
After more talk about her medical history and her diagnostic tests, the medical team at her health center put her on their schedule for surgery in two weeks. Soon, they realized that her pain meds weren't enough to let her move. Since she was bed-ridden, they bumped up her priority. To six days. It caught the family by surprise. Everyone agreed it was probably good, though, especially my mother.
For once, the procedure was so routine that I didn't bother to take off work for it. My mother went into the operating room at noon. At one in the afternoon, I called to check on her.
"She's not out yet," my father said. "I don't know what's going on."
What was going on was that the laparoscopy had found so much damage, so close to the incision, that the surgeons decided to operate. They had to remove the scar tissue. I kept calling the health center to get updates. By the third call, a nurse had told my father what was going on and that the procedure would take a few hours.
"I didn't bring enough medicine to stay here all day," he replied.
"You might as well go home and have dinner," the nurse told him.
Sunday, August 29, 2021
Not Even Not Zen 221.38: Wake for Robert Gallagher, Part 38
Robert Gallagher, Wake
The Strategy
"Oh, it won't be in there," my father said. He put a hand on the doorway next to him and stepped down to join me in the room.
"Okay." I pushed. The drawer closed with a rattle.
The shelving around me had once been a set of drawers and a filing cabinet. My father had stitched them together with a structure of particle board painted in primary colors. Between his creation and a teak desk stood a stack of particle board shelves, all painted white, piled together to the same height as the filing cabinet. Along the surface sat plastic containers full of rubber bands, staples, and caramel cream candies.
"What are you looking for again?" he asked. He leaned against the other set of filing cabinets near his sliding back glass door.
"I've got to take down some tree branches. You had a blue saw for it."
"You mean a pruning saw?"
"I guess so."
"And it's not in the shed?"
This was a set of questions that threw me because I wasn't sure if the curved saw I wanted was a pruning saw, really, or I should call it something else. Anyway, I had walked through the front shed. I hadn't recognized anything I wanted.
"Probably not? Because I didn't see it."
There was a second shed but it was sort of a mystery to me, a two story monstrosity that held mostly spare lumber, plus a third shed, newly built, that provided space for the riding mower.
"Well, I can't have used it for years." He shook his head.
That seemed right. I turned and crouched next to a tall, cardboard box. It held about eighty plastic bag clips. They were the kind with magnets on one end so you can stick them to the fridge when you're done. Why he had eighty of them in translucent green, orange, blue, and red plastic, I had no idea. He'd found them on sale somewhere, maybe. He had put two screwdrivers in the box with the clips. I fished out the screwdrivers in case I could find a better place for them.
"I can't really keep my arm over my head like that," he continued. "Not to cut a branch. It's my shoulder."
"Oh, yeah." My eyes scanned the desktop and low shelves for more screwdrivers. After a few seconds, I gave up. "How is that healing?"
"It isn't. But I can't complain." He put a cigar in the corner of his mouth and chuckled. "No one listens if I do. Anyway, age is a case of mind over matter, right?"
"If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter," I chimed in as we finished the saying together.
My father had repeated the punchline hundreds of times. Mostly, I hadn't known that he was quoting Jack Benny. The saying had become part of him, like his fingers or his beard or cigar. He always had it handy. Given his shoulder problems, though, he was certainly right about not cutting any tree branches during the last eight years.
His guesses about where he had put his not-yet-rusted saws seemed suspect. They could be anywhere.
Idly, I strolled across the aisle to one of the other desks. It held rows of shelves, this time full of books and cassette tape boxes. Most of the boxes were empty. I tugged on the desk's top drawer. It squeaked open to reveal a pair of books about radio dramas, a few unlabeled cassettes, and a book about carpentry with a bent cover, probably from someone like me looking through and then closing the drawer on it.
"You mother probably used the saw last," he said. "Did you ask her?"
I hadn't because she wasn't the one who kept the collections of tools. But he was right. She had probably been the one to take it. She would have put it in a logical place or slipped right back into the spot where she'd found it. She might even remember where that was.
"I'll get her." The drawer jammed when I tried to close it. I tried again. Now I could see why someone had slammed it on the carpentry book. "Hey, I forgot. Mom told me to ask you about making a will again."
"Now why would she say that?" His voice sounded sarcastic and annoyed.
"I can't really keep my arm over my head like that," he continued. "Not to cut a branch. It's my shoulder."
"Oh, yeah." My eyes scanned the desktop and low shelves for more screwdrivers. After a few seconds, I gave up. "How is that healing?"
"It isn't. But I can't complain." He put a cigar in the corner of his mouth and chuckled. "No one listens if I do. Anyway, age is a case of mind over matter, right?"
"If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter," I chimed in as we finished the saying together.
My father had repeated the punchline hundreds of times. Mostly, I hadn't known that he was quoting Jack Benny. The saying had become part of him, like his fingers or his beard or cigar. He always had it handy. Given his shoulder problems, though, he was certainly right about not cutting any tree branches during the last eight years.
His guesses about where he had put his not-yet-rusted saws seemed suspect. They could be anywhere.
Idly, I strolled across the aisle to one of the other desks. It held rows of shelves, this time full of books and cassette tape boxes. Most of the boxes were empty. I tugged on the desk's top drawer. It squeaked open to reveal a pair of books about radio dramas, a few unlabeled cassettes, and a book about carpentry with a bent cover, probably from someone like me looking through and then closing the drawer on it.
"You mother probably used the saw last," he said. "Did you ask her?"
I hadn't because she wasn't the one who kept the collections of tools. But he was right. She had probably been the one to take it. She would have put it in a logical place or slipped right back into the spot where she'd found it. She might even remember where that was.
"I'll get her." The drawer jammed when I tried to close it. I tried again. Now I could see why someone had slammed it on the carpentry book. "Hey, I forgot. Mom told me to ask you about making a will again."
"Now why would she say that?" His voice sounded sarcastic and annoyed.
"Because you don't have one?" I slammed the drawer shut.
"It doesn't matter." He tucked his unlit cigar into the corner of his mouth. "She'll outlive me."
Although a radiation technician had nearly killed her, my mother had gotten emergency surgery to help her recover. She made it through the next surgery and the next, too. She'd emerged stronger than ever from the chemotherapy and she seemed to be in remission.
"It doesn't matter." He tucked his unlit cigar into the corner of his mouth. "She'll outlive me."
Although a radiation technician had nearly killed her, my mother had gotten emergency surgery to help her recover. She made it through the next surgery and the next, too. She'd emerged stronger than ever from the chemotherapy and she seemed to be in remission.
At this point, my mother had been healthy for three years. In contrast, my father kept losing eyesight to burst blood vessels in his eyes. His right foot had lost sensation. Diabetes had claimed part of his left foot. It seemed reasonable to think that my mother would inherit everything. That's why he didn't feel any need to write a will. There wasn't much to inherit, anyway, besides his share of the house. Paying down the mortgage would become my mother's worry, not his. She could have a will written up when he was gone, if she wanted.
“Maybe she won't outlive you by much,” I ventured.
“Your mother and I talked. I don’t know why she keeps bringing this up.”
“Maybe she won't outlive you by much,” I ventured.
“Your mother and I talked. I don’t know why she keeps bringing this up.”
We looked for more tools. At least, I did. My father seemed to be browsing through his candy and his cigar collections. Behind a waist-high shelf, I found a hammer that belonged in the shed. A few minutes later, I found a rubber mallet.
With nowhere else to place the tools I was finding, I put them back in the box with the plastic clips. That made me wonder if this had all happened before. Someone else had found tools and decided the box was convenient.
"Oh, there you are, Bob." My mother opened the kitchen door next to the carport door. She stepped down onto the landing to grab a copper-bottom saucepan.
"We were just talking about you, Ann."
She paused, hand on the rack of pans.
"Mom," I called, "where is the blue hand saw?"
"The one I use for branches?" She gestured to the back yard. A moment later, she moved her saucepan from one hand to another. "I cut the overhang off a tree last month. I put it right back in the shed."
"But ..." That meant I'd walked past it somehow.
"Told you," my father said.
My mother nodded and stepped back into the kitchen. She closed the door behind her. I picked up a handful of tools that I thought I could return to the shed.
"Leave the hammer," my father told me.
"But."
"And the mallet. I use that mallet."
"What for?" I thought of it as a tool for putting tent pegs into the ground and not much more.
"I can't remember. But I use it."
After I put them back roughly where they had been before, I noticed tins on the shelves next to them. They had once been full of potato chips, some of them. Others had originated with butter cookies. He had repurposed them for collections of things. And they had lids. The lids were probably hard for him to close.
"Okay." Putting things back where I had found them always seemed okay. Sometimes the places even made sense. That's why I knew I could count on the blue saw to be in the shed, even though I hadn't found it the first time. My mother put things back. She was reliable that way. "Wait, dad, didn’t mom tell me a couple of years ago that you were making a will?”
“Yes. I had a lawyer.”
"Right, the guy in Poolesville." I had never seen the man but my father had shown me a draft of the document. There had only been two pages to it. "What happened?"
"He died. Cancer."
"Oh." After I put all of the tools back where I'd found them, I rose and started the walk through the carport to the back door. "Do you want a reference to another lawyer? They make computer programs, too. Do you want me to get you a program to fill out the will for you? I mean, you can have any strategy you want. Mom just wants you to have one."
He gave half a laugh.
"My strategy is not to die," he said.
With nowhere else to place the tools I was finding, I put them back in the box with the plastic clips. That made me wonder if this had all happened before. Someone else had found tools and decided the box was convenient.
"Oh, there you are, Bob." My mother opened the kitchen door next to the carport door. She stepped down onto the landing to grab a copper-bottom saucepan.
"We were just talking about you, Ann."
She paused, hand on the rack of pans.
"Mom," I called, "where is the blue hand saw?"
"The one I use for branches?" She gestured to the back yard. A moment later, she moved her saucepan from one hand to another. "I cut the overhang off a tree last month. I put it right back in the shed."
"But ..." That meant I'd walked past it somehow.
"Told you," my father said.
My mother nodded and stepped back into the kitchen. She closed the door behind her. I picked up a handful of tools that I thought I could return to the shed.
"Leave the hammer," my father told me.
"But."
"And the mallet. I use that mallet."
"What for?" I thought of it as a tool for putting tent pegs into the ground and not much more.
"I can't remember. But I use it."
After I put them back roughly where they had been before, I noticed tins on the shelves next to them. They had once been full of potato chips, some of them. Others had originated with butter cookies. He had repurposed them for collections of things. And they had lids. The lids were probably hard for him to close.
"Okay." Putting things back where I had found them always seemed okay. Sometimes the places even made sense. That's why I knew I could count on the blue saw to be in the shed, even though I hadn't found it the first time. My mother put things back. She was reliable that way. "Wait, dad, didn’t mom tell me a couple of years ago that you were making a will?”
“Yes. I had a lawyer.”
"Right, the guy in Poolesville." I had never seen the man but my father had shown me a draft of the document. There had only been two pages to it. "What happened?"
"He died. Cancer."
"Oh." After I put all of the tools back where I'd found them, I rose and started the walk through the carport to the back door. "Do you want a reference to another lawyer? They make computer programs, too. Do you want me to get you a program to fill out the will for you? I mean, you can have any strategy you want. Mom just wants you to have one."
He gave half a laugh.
"My strategy is not to die," he said.
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