January 24: cheese grits, Gina, Cleveland Clinic & Grover

 

Cheese grits this morning, leftovers from Tuesday supper; enhanced with extra Swiss cheese, dashes of Tabasco, and a chunk of cornbread crumbled and stirred in thoroughly. Second mug of hot & black. Seriously did I consider making a grits sandwich, but don't need the extra bread.

Mama used to tell me about Kahn's Delicatessen, at lunch break walking distance when she was in school at her business college in Pensacola in the early 1930s. For 15¢ a roast beef sandwich, or chicken salad; maybe 12¢ for tuna salad, pimiento cheese, or egg salad; but for 10¢ a dime you could get a baked bean sandwich or coleslaw sandwich that was packed high and just as filling. Mama had a steno pad (two-column) and could write in shorthand faster than I could talk. When I was a boy she also had a stenograph machine that printed a tape just like an old fashioned adding machine. 

While our father was at sea with the Maritime Service during the War,  Mama worked at insurance offices downtown, first Black Insurance on Harrison Avenue, then Howell & Connor on 4th Street. I was probably goody-goody-two-shoes, but Gina and Walt got in all kinds of trouble playing around loose downtown while Mama was working. We nearly always had a maid to look after us at home, but sometimes not, and my siblings might go to Mama's office, then be set loose to play in McKenzie Park, the block off Harrison. One day a man came into Black Insurance holding a soaking wet child by each hand: they had gotten into that large goldfish pond that used to be a centerpiece in McKenzie Park, and he'd fished them out and brought them to Mama. 

Our growing up years, Gina and Walt were a team, seemingly always up to something, some kind of innocent childhood mischief that kept parents in a dither. Never party to it, not part of their goings on, I was a loner and liked it, and Gina once told me that while our father was away it was clear that if Mama wasn't there I was in charge and they had to do what I said, which they did not like - - part of that hour-plus conversation at the door of Community the late spring early summer of 2011. She reminded me that one way I controlled them was by telling them that if they didn't mind me, Governor Rufus Fox was coming to arrest them and they'd go to the Reform School in Marianna.

Yes, the mind wanders, why am I here. It's 2024, Wednesday, January 24th: it's Gina's birthday, she would have turned 86 today. Mom, our paternal grandmother, died 77 years ago, January 23, 1947, the day before Gina's ninth birthday, a different set of memories for me, and I have no idea how Mama dealt with both major events in the household, but I'm sure she made sure Gina had a birthday celebration.

January 24th is also a day of mine: in early predawn this day in 2011, I rose, showered and shampooed thoroughly over and over again with the special medicinal soap they provided me, then a crew of us went outside into the bitter, snowy darkness, boarded the Cleveland Clinic campus trolley for the Heart Institute for my open heart surgery. 

Thirteen years ago: the "ten year warranty" on my valve replacement, other valve repair, and multiple CABGs, that seemed so long at the Time, expired three years ago, but I'm still going strong. 

Memories of that expedition include so very many dear people who did so very many things to make it come together for me, giving me life that was running out!! Years ago special friends told me to knock it off, that they'd all been thanked enough, so I won't try to name everyone, though each face is in my mind and heart this morning! What I'll do is remember the end of that Time and the beginning of Plus Time - - 

Leaving the trolley, entering the waiting room, there for a few minutes, then an attendant coming for me with a wheelchair. Wheeling me to the prep room. The prep tech telling me, "Take off everything but your birthday suit and lie on the gurney." With some pathetic attempt at humor I asked, "Shall I keep on my birthday suit?" She retorted humorlessly, "Take off everything but your birthday suit." So I did, and got shaved from feet to chin with her maladjusted electric razor that kept taking a nip out of my birthday suit. 

Once she was done and I was under warm blankets, a nurse came in and asked, "Would you like to see a chaplain before you go into surgery?" I said, "No, thank you, my priest is here." Obviously astonished, she said, "Aren't you from Florida?" I said, "Yes." She said, "You're from Florida and your priest is here?" I said, "Yes, he is." Father Steve came in, said, "I brought the consecrated oil, but you don't have to do it." I said, "Do it." He did the laying on of hands with prayer for healing and anointed my forehead with the sign of the Cross. Linda came in last, and then watched as the gurney was wheeled away through the double doors, down a hall, and out into the hugest corridor I've ever seen, surely as side as Harrison Avenue between 4th Street and Beach Drive is now, and easily a twenty-foot ceiling. 

Lining the corridor: enormous sliding doors, behind each an Operating Room. The attendant parked my gurney outside my OR, made sure I was covered with warm, heated blankets, and left. For half or three-quarters of an hour, I lay there clutching my little brown bottle of nitrostat, watching as monstrous machines were wheeled into my OR, and my surgical team began arriving. At some point a physician came and told me he would be my anesthesiologist and would begin with an injection of something that would relax me. 

Someone else came and put more warm blankets on my feet. In due course a medic came out, wheeled my gurney into the OR, up next to a stainless steel operating table that looked freezing cold, and asked me to slide myself over onto it. Pleasantly, the table was warm. I glanced across the room, where the rest of my team were final prepping, the anesthesiologist injected something else into the little port in my arm, and I was gone.

Material I have read has told me that being under deepest anesthesia is as close to death as it is physically possible for a live person to be. There is no sense, no senses, no feeling whatsoever, and there are no thoughts whatsoever, even the brain itself is senseless: all my dreams that I had worked up to dream during surgery - - zip, zit, zilch, nil, nothing, not blackness, not even oblivion. I now know what death is like, been there and back, and this is my day. January 24, 2011. Peace! 

RSF&PTL

T88&c

Joe brought me Patty's teddy bear, whom I named Grover because we were in Cleveland. Never mind that Cleveland wasn't named for President Grover Cleveland, but for a General Cleaveland, whose name was shortened to Cleveland so it would fit on the masthead of the Cleveland newspaper. 

Pax