Tuesday, July 29, 2014

summertime

Dozens of white boats rocked on the blue bay, their masts pointing at the cloudless sky like uneven pencils in a cup. Inside the yacht club a few hundred people who had loved Ken listened to eulogies about him over the music of clanking chains and wavelets slapping fiberglass. 

As different as the speakers and their connections to him were, they described exactly the same man, a testament to Ken’s lack of pretense and refusal to mask up. The speeches were what you hope for (but rarely get) — touching, sincere, often funny, all Ken-centric. One described how he had died at home, at his desk, and that when Beth went upstairs and looked in, he was sitting up straight with his eyes open, and she immediately thought he was pulling one of his famous pranks, pretending to be dead. The first thing she said to his too-pale face was “Is this a joke?”

Like a bomb going off, his death stunned our summer and its shock waves broke our voices, stuck in our throats. There were many versions of Where I Was When I Heard the News; it was clear that most of us were stuck in the finding-out phase and hadn’t yet replaced surprise with grief.

Three thousand miles east on that same Thursday, Simone skipped happily ahead of her mother into the cabin where she would stay for the next month with three other 10-year-old girls and a counselor. Out the window next to her bed she could see the rest of the compound: the shore of a navy-blue lake, a dock of silvered boards, pine and fir trees shading more cabins, other summer girl campers hugging and squealing hellos, their legs bared to the mosquitos, cheeks and noses pink in the sun. She was excited to swim first thing every day before breakfast, like last year, to get better at waterskiing, to see her old and new friends.

This July and August are the knife’s edge between Maine and California, elementary and middle school, childhood and what comes next. Her flats are beginning to round. She can tell the One Direction boys’ voices apart inside a song on the radio. Soon she will be running, not skipping, pounding uphill to the next challenge, away from us, from me. She grows more sure-footed as I begin to limp, stumble. I forget words faster than she learns them. She plumps as I shrivel. Life can’t happen fast enough for Simone, and I would trade everything I used to think mattered if it would slow down.

Back in San Francisco the next morning, as his daughter was showing some prospective campers and their parents around and singing the praises of canoeing and washing your hair in the lake, Chris was driving to work. His summers are busy and full of travel; he was cramming before a trip and had headed downtown in the very early light, catching the timed greens block after block on California Street. His small SUV was crossing Franklin; there was a burgundy blur; his instincts screamed “go left,” so he did.

Two seconds. Two cars had met and smashed, shoved and spun, air bags deployed. The crash was loud; the whump and shatter, the concussive bang was heard for blocks. The air around them burned with propellant and hot dust and fear. Chris got out of the car, thinking it was on fire, then got back in, then got out again. The man who had barreled through the red light owned up without excuse, said that he was sorry and completely at fault. Phone calls were made, and cops came and tow trucks, names and details keyed in; people stared from cars that crept by, looking for blood or bodies.

The two men stood in the smear of broken plastic parts and underbody dirt on the asphalt, looking at the ruined front of the Honda, buckled back to the windshield, and the destroyed side of the SUV. By reacting to the oncoming car, Chris had presented his VW’s flank to the impact. Just behind the center door post, where Simone was usually strapped into the right rear passenger seat, was a crater.

The sorry man had run out of words, and the necessities were nearly completed. Chris looked away from the bent metal and into the man’s eyes and said, “I’m really glad my daughter wasn’t with me.” The man, without hesitation, said, “I am too. And mine too.” Chris nodded.

And summer goes on, with its noise and heat, sun and sweat, its cool water to splash in, with laughter for some and tears for others, some expected and just as many not, same as always.




Friday, July 11, 2014

i am so lame



Neither of my grandparents used a cane, I don’t think, nor did my mother, who was content to simply slink through her final years of boozy ill health. After brain surgery, my dad was in a wheelchair for a while but skipped the cane step, preferring instead to Frankenstein around from then on, lurching into walls and knocking over lamps.

People with canes, I used to think (if I ever actually wondered about it), were weak or frail (as if holding onto a cane would keep a brittle leaf of an old woman from being bowled over by a stiff wind) or slightly wobbly on only two legs (the reason stools have three). I assumed a grey-haired man would lean on a cane while wishing there were a bench nearby for a quick sit rather like a younger fellow might rely on a high counter with his elbows to give his back a rest. I imagined a cane was for boosting a heavily hunched person or steadying someone at a tilt, maybe for adding an inch to a too-short leg. People walking with canes were slow and they took up the middles of aisles, but they did so nicely. Using a cane, to me, was like wearing a badge of age-induced infirmity, of benign ricketiness. I had never associated any of the infirmities a cane-user might have with actual pain. It isn’t as though old people who use canes are wincing with every off-step as they tap-tap down the sidewalk. And if I had witnessed an occasional grimace, I figured, well, geriatric folks grimace about a lot of things because they can sometimes be cranky. It hadn’t seemed at all as if they were hurting, just slightly unsteady.

Then, in the last few years of her life, my stepmother Margery used a cane (and sometimes a wheelchair) for long stretches of time, sometimes months.  After her Billy (my dad) died, she lost her captive audience. A lifetime of smoking and asthma clamped down on her lungs and deprived her brain of oxygen. She had always craved attention and she knew that people with visible maladies got a lot of it. Also, although she wasn’t thinking all that clearly (what an understatement), she was adamant there wasn’t a thing wrong with her that some orthopedic magician couldn’t cure. Combining these things became a nightmare.

One of her ankles developed a probem that kept her from wearing shoes with high heels just after her 80th birthday. She found a surgeon who was doing  - revolutionary! first ever! – ankle joint replacements and signed herself right up. Then she had to have a new hip like all her friends were getting, despite the fact that both her hips were reasonably good. Then there were revision surgeries – do-overs – once on the ankle and twice on the hip, finding doctors farther and farther from her town who took her fudged/smudged intake history and didn’t bother to have a copy of her medical records forwarded to them. They operated on her again and again, as she insisted they must, although she had terrible pulmonary complications and a MRSA infection in the ankle wound that required three more hospitalizations. All of this plus: neither her ankle nor her hip was ever better afterward than it had been before. Her background as a nurse and her charm helped convince them, I guess, plus the ability to bill Medicare, the State of California retirees’ insurer and TriCare (my dad had been a naval officer) for all those fees. Stubborn, in denial about a long list of sad truths and suffering from increasing periods of hypoxia and dementia, when she wasn’t in a hospital room receiving visitors and flowers and cards like a queen in her audience chamber, she stomped around her little town, barging into people and whacking things with what she called her walking stick. A grande dame of a woman with bright blue eyes, a cute hat, a booming voice and a big cane making a Watch This entrance into a restaurant gets every head to turn, and she seemed to need that as much as – or more than - her next breath. I hated her canes and wheelchairs, symbols of her defiant and humiliating scenery-chewing, her irrationality and belligerence, her refusal/inability to still be the woman I had loved so much, the Before Bad Times Margery.

She died four years ago at the age of 88, and I’ve spent much of that time trying to forget what she looked like during the great decline so I could remember her, instead, doing her model-walk in some dishy outfit or dancing in a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots. Her loathsome cane went in the Goodwill pile when I cleaned out her condo for the new owners. I had turned 60 on my birthday in the spring of that year, and I didn’t think for one second about keeping it around just in case.

Fast-forward to last February. My left hip, an occasional annoyance for about a year, had become a continuous, increasing pain in my actual ass. Since I finally had decent medical insurance coverage without a zillion-dollar deductible (thanks, Obama!), I decided to have it looked at by the local orthopedic docs. A few x-rays, consults, cortisone shots, intensive physical therapy and some sudden (but not unusual, I’m told) deterioration of the remaining tattered scrap of cartilage in there, and I am on the surgery schedule in late September for a Total Hip Arthroplasty ‘cuz there’s nothing I like better than an acronym that sounds like a tongue/teeth mistake: THA.

I now have my own cane that is never farther away from me than an arm’s length. If I don't have it, I can’t move because – big surprise for me, the inveterate cane-basher – having a hip joint so bum it qualifies to be replaced by a mechanical substitute hurts like, well, a motherfucker.

It feels like there is a softball-size rotten tooth in my hip joint, a capsule of sticky inflammation packed with bits of broken glass way down in there. The ache reaches up and back toward the lowest curve of my spine and down to my knee, and on bad days and at night into my calf; it throbs with my heartbeat, fires into tendons and muscles, pinches nerves that scream. The bones themselves, femur and pelvis and tibia, grip the pain as if it is what glues their chalk together; it hurts from deep inside all the way out to the skin. It hurts so much that I move my leg – one degree of rotation, slide an inch left, then right – trying to find some position it likes, even though I know that moving it at all makes the pain worse; it is diabolical. I saw Words and Pictures, a movie in which Juliette Binoche plays a woman with rheumatoid arthritis who can’t open an Rx bottle of pain pills with her aching, swollen hands, so, her face a floodplain of tears, she smashes it with a hammer. It hurts exactly like that.

I take pills. Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory, at high (but allowable) doses was enough for a while. When it wasn’t, I took more and then still more until red freckles started appearing on my forearms and the backs of my hands, burst capillaries, and I knew I had to stop the triple overdosing. A couple weeks ago was a bad spell, and one night in bed I wondered if amputation was an option. I had taken an AI, then another full dose, then a painkiller, all without the slightest relief. I got up, took another painkiller and a random sleeping pill i scrounged from the back of the medicine cabinet, figuring that was way too much but if it took me down, at least I'd be unconscious when it happened. The next day I told the mirror: You have to drive and deal with Mack and All The Things, plus you're all too aware of how easily you could be an addict (and there are three months to wait), so big-time opioids are out. Last year Tramadol made me feel like I was on Mars so I wouldn't take it, but now I’m happy to go there on a once-a-day, timed-release ride. The normal-dose NSAID and semi-opioid, I hope, will hold me until mid-September when they nix the Naproxen for potential-blood-loss reasons. Those last two weeks might get ugly.

I rely entirely on my cane to get up out of a chair or the driver’s seat of my car. I lean heavily on it with my right hand whenever my left foot touches the ground. The cane bears my weight, holds me up, allows me to move. Without it, I couldn’t make it from my office to the kitchen. That's a long way from last January when I strode 30 blocks from the East Village to meet friends at a deli for lunch, loping happily along those New York sidewalks on a sunny winter morning. Now I sympathize with Margery’s disdain at having to wear what she called Buster Browns, but canes and flat shoes go together, not canes and high heels. I grumble but am resigned to plod heel-less until September.

The literature says severe osteoarthritis of the hip is caused by obesity or overuse. I prefer to think (those 20 pounds notwithstanding) that I put my hips to frequent and strenuous good use – dancing, of course – that has worn them out, and now it’s time to fix them and move on. To this end, I will even be a compliant and not-grouchy cane-user, but not on a $19.95 adjustable metal-and-plastic Made in China special from CVS, oh, no.

A lovely woman who makes custom canes out of strong, beautiful wood is designing one for me. The new cane will have a grip of tiger maple, shaped to fit my hand, that sits above a cocobolo collar and a padauk shaft. It will hold me up until my new left hip heals, and shortly after that (I have learned the miserable lesson of what happens when you wait too long) it will migrate to my other hand while the right hip is THA’d. Once I am fully bionic and back to my hip-swinging, heel-wearing, block-striding self, I plan to hang this beautiful cane somewhere in Casa de Swell as wall art.

Monday, July 7, 2014

so long, old friend

When I first knew him, his name was Mr. Wood and he was the quiet, serious criminal defense lawyer, up the stairs from reception, down the hall, second office on the left. On his desk were tidy fans of clipped-together papers, corners matched and edges aligned. He was tall and squareish, already losing his hair, and quite intimidating (though not as much as Mr. H) to an 18-year-old newbie file clerk in 1968. A few years later, after a boomerang to LA, I came back to 3200 Fourth Avenue as the firm’s bookkeeper for a year, and he was a little friendlier – they all were – but that’s probably because I was 24 (instead of a teenager), and I wrote the paychecks and opened the mail they obsessed over. I was answering the phones there during the receptionist’s lunch hour one day when Mack called for Mr. Wood and resurrected our romance that has now lasted 40 years, but that’s a whole different story.

In 1975 I became a court reporter, he was my first client, and his name changed to Ken. With a handful of exceptions, I reported every deposition he took until I retired, almost 30 years – cases for insurance bad faith, the tuna boat that sank off Central America, the badly injured boy who ran off a bus in the then-brand-new development of Mira Mesa that had no schools, the man who was electrocuted by SDG&E lines in his front-yard tree, business disputes, family estate fights, the whole crazy range of civil litigation. Working with him was a court reporter’s dream job – he spoke in these perfectly constructed sentences at a steady 200+ words per minute, politely controlled witnesses who wanted to talk on top of his questions and lawyers who were snarly. He was businesslike and direct and careful. He treated everyone with respect. He asked me how best to handle exhibits and did exactly as I suggested, wasting no time, leaving no knots to untie later. I can still see his lefty printing on documents, straight and sure black rollerball lines, EX and a number, upper right corner. It is his 4 without lifting the pen that I copied and make to this day. The real-time transcripts I produced during his depositions were almost perfect first drafts; I never ever worked for anyone who made a better record than Ken.

He was very, very smart without being a know-it-all. He could tell when someone was trying to play him in a case but never pulled stunts like that himself. He was professional without being stiff or arch; he was honest. He could be canny and had a great poker face when asking a loaded question. He was a far better lawyer than others who got a lot more ink, but he never shoved anyone aside on his way to the microphone or waved his own banner.

Ken was charming in a completely authentic way. And funny, with that big ha-ha-ha laugh and his gappy grin. He was a terrific storyteller, and he smiled with his eyes. I don’t think I have ever known a more genuine, un-phony man. He was kind, really kind, and he cared – frankly and forthrightly – about things and people that mattered to him. He loved his kids and adored – adored – his wife. I can see him talking about her and these sometimes romantic places they had been – he would wink and Beth would raise an eyebrow and give a little shrug.

There are a couple of Ken stories that outline him for me. 

Shortly after Mack and I were married in 1988 I invited 25 or so of our closest friends over for dinner and waded confidently into water way over my head. Amy and I were in the kitchen struggling to get the main course out. With time ticking away in the dining room, people rattling silverware and running out of small talk, I began to think I might panic. Just then, Ken came in, asked if he could help, didn’t wait for an answer, started slicing steaks and delivering plates to relieved and hungry people, doing what needed to be done, and saved my bacon. Long before that night, he got me out of a different messy jam that no one else would touch, and taught me a hard lesson about friendship. 

He liked to tease, usually in a funny, harmless way that might, at worst, make you blush, but once in a while he was as relentless as an older brother.

We had been on a road trip taking depositions in Miami, day after day of slogging through testimony and documents, evenings spent wandering through parking lots with a bunch of other lawyers trying to find stone crab. It was winter but sunny and warm in Florida. On the way back home, exhausted and cranky, we all flew to Dallas for a connecting flight, only to find that everything was delayed by a vicious snow and ice storm. Many hours later, finally in the jetway, I was stuck a half-step from the plane’s open door, wearing flimsy cotton clothes and a pair of sandals, with a 20 degree wind flinging ice shards at my foolish-beach-girl self. Wet and shivering in my seat, Ken in his, we took off into inky darkness, banging and shaking, the plane bucking like a rodeo bronco. I might have forgotten to mention to Ken that I wasn’t exactly a fearless flier, might have just offhandedly said that I didn’t love turbulence. As we lurched up, down and sideways, going from momentary weightlessness to G’s pinning us to our seats, he started making fun of how tightly I was gripping the armrests and how it seemed that the cat had got my tongue except for the occasional falsetto squeak. I wanted to punch him. Through clenched teeth I said, “Stop it! It’s not funny!” He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t make the turbulence stop, so I was just trying to distract you.” Staring down this sincere attempt by a nice guy who was just trying to help out, I think I hissed, “Well, it’s not working!!”

I missed seeing him at the memorial service for Jeanie’s mother last Wednesday, July 2nd, because I was putting Simone on a plane that was late. My dear friend Gail sat next to him and Beth and chatted about things that you chat about at a gathering after someone dies – other people who have died (one husband each, for Gail and another woman at the table), how people cope. Two days later – two more lunches later – it was Friday, the Fourth of July, and Ken died. This calendar blip, these three rectangles that say Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – when I see them on my computer monitor, I just shake my head: no, no, no. Why was the plane late? Why was there fog in San Francisco? Why on that day? I see Beth pretty often because we have lunch with a group every month and we had gone to a movie just a week before – the final thing I said, walking to my car, was, “Tell Ken we said hi!” – but I haven’t seen Ken in a while – a year? – and I can’t wish any harder that I’d made it to that memorial for one more smile and a hard shoulder hug. I wasn’t there because I must have been on Mars; that’s what it feels like, like I should have somehow known.

All weekend, since Friday, Mack and I have been looking at each other with these weird unblinking eyes (when I’m not crying) and saying things like, “I hope it was over in an instant.” I picture Steve Jobs saying he thinks dying is like flipping off a light switch: On, and then, a nanosecond later, not On anymore. If, instead, it involves being afraid and feeling pain, right now I would rather not know. I think of the hiking trip that Mack went on decades ago with Ken and Jim and that other friend whose name I can’t remember, how many times Ken told bits of those stories, how ridiculous and scary and hilarious it was, the trip and each repeat of its details – the marmot, Mack’s blisters and dehydration and borrowed boots, the Groucho Marx walk on the ridge. When we tell it the next time – and we surely will – Ken will be there, in the story, wearing a shirt that says, in faint little letters, “But I’m gone now.” 

It isn’t real for me yet, that he isn’t coming back. The more you love someone, the longer it takes for that to sink in. In the meantime, I’ll see him in every tall, bald guy wearing a plaid shirt and wire-rim glasses. I’ll wish, when I’m stuck next to some boring, superficial man at a dinner table, that Ken were there so we could have an actual talk about actual things. I know that there is no answer to Why Him and Why Now, that it isn’t any more complicated than that his heart broke on a certain Friday. I know that as much as his wife and children, his grandchildren and friends miss him, they – we – are all equally lucky that he was there, occupying these big, important places in each of our lives. And, finally, I know that the world would be a better place with one more Ken Wood in it instead of one less, that his death is, in ways as big as one of the mountains he climbed and as small as a salty tear, a tragedy.

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