just thinking

Some people have dates that mean something to them, touch them in some way. Last week, January 23 and January 24 were a binary for me, dates circling around each other since before my memories. On January 23, 1947 I came home, I was in sixth grade at Cove School with Mrs Bowen as our teacher, came home from school and stood in the kitchen as our maid, always a Black woman who looked after us at home while Mama was at work, asked me, "Did you know your grandmother died today?" Mom, my father's mother, was my most loved person in life. I remember breaking into tears, and I remember the lump in my throat and chest that were there for months. 

It was the day before my sister Gina's ninth birthday, so

January 24 also shares in the dates meaning to me. Gina died at age 83 in October 2021 as the result of injuries and complications when her motor home rolled and disintegrated on State Road 20 north of Lynn Haven. Gina and I had the usual sibling rough places growing up and into life, which I think we both worked at smoothing over, and there's an empty space that can't be filled. 

Dark predawn on January 24, 2011, a bitter cold winter day in Cleveland, Ohio, I roused and took a long, hot shower washing with the medicinal soap the Clinic had given me to use before my open heart surgery early that morning. It's a morning I remember. 

With a coterie of friends and loved ones, still dark out, we boarded the campus trolley for the short ride from the hotel to the heart institute. I waited only a few minutes before an attendant arrived with a wheelchair and whisked me away to the prep room. An attendant came in and asked, "Would you like to see a chaplain before your surgery?" I said, "No thank you, my priest is here!" Obviously astonished, she said, "Aren't you from Florida?" I said "Yes, I am." She persisted, "You are from Florida and your priest is here?" I said yes, he is. 

Another attendant came in and said, "Take off everything but your birthday suit, lie down on the gurney, and cover with the sheet." Thinking I might get a smile out of her, I asked, "Shall I keep my birthday suit on?" Grim and serious, she repeated, "Take off everything but your birthday suit." She then shaved me from toes to neck with an electric razor that kept taking little nips out of my skin. 

A few minutes later, Fr Steve came in and offered, almost apologetically at doing this with fellow clergy, that he'd brought the chrism, olive oil for anointing, that had been consecrated by the bishop. He said, "You don't have to do it if you don't want to." I said, "Do it!" It isn't everyone whose priest is with them for their open heart surgery a thousand miles from home, but Father Steve was there. There are Times in life that one never forgets.

Linda came in last, then, with me aboard, the gurney was rolled away through double doors into an enormous passageway. I was covered with beautiful, soft, warmed wool blankets, and clutching my bottle of nitroglycerin tablets, which I was used to slipping under my tongue several Times a day to stop the sharp angina pains. With a very high ceiling, the corridor was wider than a highway, with high, wide double sliding doors all along. The attendant parked my gurney outside one of the doorways, brought me another hot blanket, and wished me well. 

For the next half hour or forty-five minutes, I lay there watching and waiting as medics in their various colored jackets passed by, and as huge machinery was rolled down the hall and into various rooms, OR, operating rooms they were. I never needed the nitrostat, and I was calm as could be, aware that this morning was my one and only chance at continuing my life, and the surgeon had assured me that his record was over 95% success! 

At some point various kinds of the heavy machinery were wheeled into what was to be my OR. During that, a physician came, introduced himself as my anesthesiologist, and gave me an injection through the port, I think in my right arm or wrist, he said, to relax me. 

I kept warm and snug, rehearsing each of the several dreams I'd planned to have while I was deep under the anesthesia. One was about Saturday morning liberty at Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, the fall of 1957. After inspection, liberty would be declared and I would make my way from the naval base to the ferry landing and ride the Jamestown Ferry across. On the Jamestown side,  Linda would be waiting with our green 1948 Dodge sedan, and we would drive across the high, scary Jamestown Bridge on the west side of the island, and resume our honeymoon in wonderful  Kingston, Rhode Island. It was a happiest Time of life for me, and I'd saved it all up to go there again during my down Time asleep in the OR.

In Time, someone came out, opened one of the sliding doors wide, and pulled my gurney into my OR. My team of doctors and nurses were standing on the other side of the room in conversation. I recognized my chief surgeon as one of them, he was the head of cardiovascular surgery for the Clinic, and had done this dozens or hundreds of Times, including on princes and kings from around the world.

Whoever wheeled my gurney in asked if I could ease myself over onto the stainless steel operating table. I expected it to be startling freezing cold, but it was warm. That attendant covered my modesty with a cloth, then injected something else into my port, and within a second or two I had sailed away to another world that wasn't even darkness, it simply was not, and neither was I. 

Some hours later I came to the surface thinking I was drowning as tubes were dragged up my throat and I couldn't breathe. Opening my eyes, I saw smiling faces, including grandson Nick, who turns forty years old this week, and I remember exclaiming, "I'm alive!!"

It was in the midst of Stoppage Time for me, between Regulation Time and Plus Time. Over the next couple of days I realized that I'd had none of the dreams I'd saved up. And that because, as I found out, in deepest anesthesia we are as near to death as it's possible for the human body to be - - no senses, no feelings, no awarenesses, no thoughts, total oblivion, no memories, no hopes, no dreams. Even the brain shuts down. In fact, my chest had been cut open, my heart lifted out for renovation, and my body was kept alive on the heart/lung machine. 

That was on January 24th, my sister's 73rd birthday. My first full day home back at the Old Place in Panama City, Gina came over with a sack of oysters. I opened and ate a few on the back porch, as we talked. Light conversation as usual. Our first heavy conversation was the day, several months later, when Mama was dying in the rehab center, in hospice care, and Gina arrived at the facility's front door just as I was leaving. We stood there at the door and had a couple hours of conversation in which I heard the other side, Gina's experience that we had grown up in totally different families, with totally different mothers, me in her eyes the doted on Favorite, and Gina, with Walt, but Gina especially, always Other. 

Gina and I continued the conversation over the next several years of her life, including when I visited her in hospital while she was there for heart issues, and we talked about how it had been for us growing up. That conversation, of inestimable value to me, is over forever. And I was the last person to have a short but sensible conversation with Gina in the OR after her accident and just before she was airflighted from PC to Pensacola, where she died a couple days later. As I say, she was 83. Last week she would have turned 87. There's this empty space.

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Dear friends were so life-saving for me leading up to and away from my visit to Cleveland Clinic in January 2011. I am alive because of them, their generous lovingkindness. My January 24, the binary 23Jan24 is other, though. Every year.

For life and loves

RSF&PTL

T89&c

pic: snapped from 7H porch. I don't feel obliged to print pictures that go with my blogpost for the day. this blogpost, my first in several days, will be left up a few hours then moved to archive. 

two-twenty-three AM, Thursday, 30 Jan 2025. more dermatology surgery on my face, appointment at eight o'clock this morning. not worried this Time because the site for cutting is far from my eyes. early mug of decaf hot & black along with a Thomas' English muffin toasted crisp, smeared with cream cheese, and capers spooned over then pressed into the soft cheese: what's the deal? I love caviar, and years ago at the Old Place I used to order caviar from Russia now and then; but anymore, black capers is as close as I'm going to pay for caviar, which even at this late age of life would be a guilt trip, nomesane? life, like math, is fun and good!