The Surgery Chronicle

We’ve all had terrifying major surgery postponed at the very last minute. So few of us are willing to tell our stories, however, that the experience has remained under the social radar, kept in the closet with our bell bottoms and our demented yet lovable uncles.

My story begins, as so many do, in the formative years from age 35 to 55. Spinal stenosis and herniated discs in my neck caused a slow increase in pain and great diminution of mobility and dexterity during those years. I’ll gloss over the opportunities and joys this presented me with this example. When I could no longer use my right hand to operate my computer mouse, I learned to mouse left-handed. After my surgery, of course, I became ambimoustrous.

The surgical fix required fusing eight vertebrae in my neck into a single structure and strengthening the thing with two titanium plates. It also involved cutting out portions of four of those vertebrae, turning the traditional donut-shaped 'O's into cleverly fashioned 'U's.

The Anniversary from Hell

My wife and I suffered our fifth wedding anniversary many years ago.It’s a wonder we and our marriage survived. The anniversary was not, of course, designed to be a disaster. It began as a slow descent into forgettable and gained momentum into unpleasant before careening downhill into catastrophe.

We had spent the week before the anniversary in a lovely cottage on Captiva, an island off the coast of Florida. Although situated at the back of a parking lot, the cottage was close to a lively center of activity: steel drum bands; great restaurants; charming walks amidst beautiful scenery. We didn’t do a lot of cooking, but did enjoy our time both in and out of the cottage. For instance, as a challenge for the week we decided to sample the key lime pie at every restaurant on the island and believe we successfully met the challenge.

The culmination of the vacation, including the anniversary itself, was to be attendance at a sports car race, the 12 Hours of Sebring, on a converted military airport just outside the town of Sebring, which was located smack dab in the middle of the state. I had called ahead to make reservations at the historic hotel in the center of town and for dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. (I should have had an inkling of the looming trouble when the restaurant’s manager seemed surprised that I wanted to reserve a table.)

Always There

Washington at Valley Forge, freezing cold but up spoke George, he said, “Bo doh de oh, bo doh de oh, doh.”

As I changed my infant son’s diaper, I’d sing this song to him. It had many lyrics, most of which didn’t make any sense at all. But I’d sing it through and then, when we were both clean and fresh, I’d hold him in my arms and I’d say, “I love you; I’ll take care of you; I’ll always be there when you need me.” This was our ritual, carried out a few times every day until he was old enough to recognize the song. He’s thirty two years old now and he can still sing it all the way through.

The Two Car Garage

My father was an old world craftsman, not in the sense that he created exquisite furniture for people who had been born into “the purple of commerce or who had risen through the ranks of the aristocracy.”(see Wilde, Oscar) No, he was a craftsman in the sense that he tried to make whatever he needed out of whatever he had on hand.

 I remember many happy childhood hours with my little hammer, straightening nails that he had ripped out of old boards. I don’t think I ever saw a box of store-bought nails or screws in my father’s workshop. We didn’t make trips to the lumber yard; we scrounged.

 We were a two-car family saddled with a single car garage. My father decreed that we would house both cars in a garage.  The obvious solution for a typical American family would be to tear down the puny little unacceptable single car monstrosity with the double doors that you had to get out of your car to open and replace it with a modern two-car edifice with a remote-controlled overhead garage door.

 My father’s solution was to saw through the peak of the roof from front to back and continued the saw cut directly down the back wall. With the help of a few cousins imported for the occasion, he then moved half of the garage outward to rest on a makeshift foundation he had constructed, mostly from concrete blocks. As most of the cousins held up the roof, some of them joined my father in splicing extensions to the beams upward to form a new, higher peak. (Are you getting this?)

How I Met My Wife

If my daughter’s friend had not thrown up, I would have met my wife in July 1993.   As it happened, however, I didn’t have a first coffee date with her until February 1994.  I guess I need to back up a bit.

Sometime in 1991 (the years from 1990 through 1992 are a bit hazy in my memory) I was divorced and found myself with a great big bulls eye on my chest, the target of  unseemly largesse among a few of the unattached women in my church.  They offered everything I might need: casseroles delivered; someone I could talk with; home cooked meals; tickets to the symphony (actually, one ticket and companionship); housecleaning; furniture shopping and arranging; most things a wife would provide. (In a couple of cases, I think, everything a wife would provide.)  Now, I’m not generally all that desirable and I found the situation pretty creepy and so managed, on principle and without exception, to avoid being the recipient of any of it.

Then there was Susan.

Paul Newman: Role Model

Paul Newman is my role model.  Although he is no longer with us, I frequently find myself asking the eternal question: What would Paul do?

I know that many people admire him for the great work he did to increase the variety and availability of salad dressings in the United States. I'm sort of an oil-and-vinegar kind of guy, though, and so his contributions to lettuce enhancement do not move me as much as they do others.

I took Paul as my role model on a brutally hot day in the summer of 1997. He and I were both trapped among a horde of auto racing fans in a small converted pasture somewhere near Columbus, Ohio. Temperatures were flirting with 100 degrees. The humidity was so high we could have used waders. More than 100,000 people were competing for the three portable toilets on the site and the ChampCar race was about to begin.

The Napkin Diaries

First, a confession.  I never buy pocket-size Kleenex. I know I am contributing to the demise of the Union of American Facial Tissue Workers, which is a subsidiary of the Congress of Home Paper Product Laborers, and throwing a lot of people out of work, but I can’t help it.  It’s hereditary.  I learned at my mother’s knee to be ready for any emergency by filling my pockets with paper napkins from restaurants.

 Generations on my mother’s side have been restaurant napkin hoarders.  Worse!  They used their ill-gotten paper products to filch other restaurant offerings. For instance, my mother couldn’t resist a restaurant bread basket as long as she had a napkin in her purse.

Hijinks in the Paint Factory

Many would say that the backbreaking, repetitive work in a grimy, overheated, dimly lit paint factory isn’t fun. These poor benighted souls were clearly not in my cohort of toilers on the four to midnight shift in the Cleveland, Ohio Glidden Paint factory in the summer of 1962. Since I was one of the lucky few to have been vouchsafed that opportunity, let me tell you of some of the hijinks that filled our days. I was just out of high school and I spent that glorious summer in the factory, dreading the impending drudgery of college.

We arrived just before 4:00 pm, clocked in and paid little attention as our shift boss read carefully and thoroughly, taking as much time as possible, the work orders that we were to fill. We then positioned the paint can filling machines under the proper paint tanks and adjusted them to fill pints, quarts or gallons as required. This took us until 5:00 pm when our supervisors left for the day.

Once alone, we rushed to the windows to ogle the secretaries leaving the administration building across the parking lot. For some of us, these lithe beauties represented our past. For me, a kid not yet eighteen, they represented an enticing future.

The Blue Box

I’ve got a little blue plastic box that holds some of the detritus of my life. It contains a jumble of small objects that, for some reason or other, I decided to keep and shove into the box. It’s about five inches by eight inches and about three inches tall. I have no idea where this box came from or how long I’ve had it, but it must have been around for many decades at least.

 The items in the box are fragments of memory, sometimes sharp edged, sometimes dulled beyond remembrance, of what I used to be and, in some cases, still am. They bring forth flashes of times otherwise lost to my memory. I’m surprised by some of the things I’ve found, amused by others and perplexed by many of them. Among the items are:

Jane's Bike

Many years ago, I spent a Saturday afternoon with my young daughter and pre-teen son in the park across from our apartment in Evanston, Illinois. My son and I played manly games of nonsense and my daughter made a great effort to learn to ride her new bicycle. (Why the bike didn’t have training wheels is a mystery lost in time.)

She was extremely focused and very determined to learn. She’d take a couple of turns of the pedal and then put her foot down to stop the tilt to the side. Over the course of the afternoon she made little progress. It was always: two pedal strokes and a foot put down to stop the bike.

I tried to help by holding the seat and walking/running next to her, but she would have none of it. She wanted desperately to learn by herself. So I became a cheerleader, telling her that if she kept trying that hard, she would surely be able to ride her bike by the next day. She worked at it, without success, until dusk.