CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY NINE: PAIN AND GROWING UP REPUBLICAN

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY NINE: PAIN AND GROWING UP REPUBLICAN

Still 2015. Still Florida. Still hot. Still me. Houston is beating up on Florida State, as I put my fingers to the keyboard this humid afternoon on  December 31. Four crackerjack books came from Sondra today – way to start the New Year. Now I have Brooklyn, Spotlight, a Maeve Binchy novel (Echo?) and a series of stories from Theroux. Oh, she sent a box of See’s Candy too. Everyone knows about my sweet tooth – I have truffles from Barbara and Louisa, See’s from Sondra, and I myself have filled the larder with more M and M’s and mini KitKats. Sonja also brought a container of white chocolate covered nuts and pralines. Enough! Dentist appointment on Monday – not kidding. 2105 will be remembered as the year of the dentist for me, Dr. Bennett, the “gentle dentist” of Key Largo, and the innovative endodontists Ken Grossman (Key Largo), Dr. K (Kansas City) and Jeannette Kern (Monterey). That’s what I get for two years of tooth neglect. Damn you, Dr. Stein, for suddenly retiring in 2013. I pick doctors younger than I, for the most part, so I won’t lose them to retirement. I had not anticipated his desire to retire early. Guess I’ll have to go with the 30 and 40 year olds and hope they don’t decide to change professions, as Dr. Cunningham did (dentist to watercolorist).

Still Alice. Did you see this film starring Julianne Moore as a brilliant woman who learns she has early onset Alzheimer’s or dementia? She was a highly successful professor at a top academic institution, and the smartest person her husband knew. And as the dementia progressed, she remained “still Alice”, while unable to deliver her scintillating lectures or sometimes not remembering how to get home after a run. I remember Abbie Lou Williams, my 78 year old artist neighbor in Carmel Highlands in the 1970’s, who would be telling me a great story, then halting, as she was losing her train of thought and forgetting the rest of the story. At this point, she would always say: “It’s hell getting old.” I heard the utter frustration in her voice and empathized to the extent that I, in my 30’s at the time, could imagine forgetting a great story in the middle of it. Now I can imagine it, and I hope that I can have the mental acuity of my mother at 99 years of age, remembering everyone and everything – well almost everyone and everything. Some things should be forgotten, or at the very least neglected, kicked to the curb, boxed up and closeted – you get the point. They say we humans don’t remember pain. That was true for my March hospital stay this year, primarily because I was supersaturated with opiates. However, I clearly remember the three weeks of withdrawal in April – worst three weeks of my life. Who was that cadaver staring at me from the mirror? Would I ever want to eat anything ever again in my life? Good times.

Today my new physical therapist, Lisa, stated “You never complain, do you?” That comment would surprise the Admiral, who believes I complain too often – not about pain, but silly things (to him). When I have pain, I sometimes let out an “Owee!”, which I have no control over. It’s pain to brain to mouth: “Owww!” Then I move on, usually doing something to ease the pain. Right now I was feeling  pain in the remaining part of my tibia of my right leg, so I removed the prosthesis to continue writing. According to the PT, if you feel pain in your prosthesis, it’s time to take it off to avoid blistering or rupturing the skin. Because if you do that, you can’t wear your prosthesis. And trust me, it’s not easy to spend your life hopping around on one leg. It’s hard to get up stairs that way, hard to get on and off the boat, and generally hard to get anywhere without falling or at least worrying about falling. So for all you new amputees starting out, remember, if there’s pain, take off the prosthesis. I was reading one of the amputee websites to find out what a good fitting prosthesis is supposed to look like, and I didn’t find very much useful information on that subject, just that you have to keep working with your prosthetist to “get it right”. “Getting it right” is elusive, especially when the bone at the end of your shortened leg is prominent and tends to start hurting after a relatively short amount of walking. Gee, it sounds like I’m complaining. Well, I’m not, I’m explaining. I’m trying to share my experience, so that amputees and prosthetists who read this (and their families and friends) know the importance of a good fit and keep working on their limbs until they have one. I did learn from the website that a prosthesis usually lasts three years. This is somewhat alarming, since Terri told me that certain scrooges in Congress have written and introduced a bill that would limit a Medicare recipient to one prosthesis per life. I guess their mothers and fathers do not have artificial limbs. Or they are just plain idiots – penny wise and pound foolish. I’ll go with the second choice.

Speaking of just plain idiots, I feel a political rant coming on. I grew up in a Republican household, and I remember when the honest Republicans threw out the corrupt Democrats in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Gordon Payrow, the Republican candidate for mayor, always wore a white suit, in case you had any doubt who the good guy in the race was. And he won – the voters threw out the corrupt bums so that our mayor in shiny white suits could clean up the mess at City Hall. I guess he did. It was an unusual victory, given the number of Democrats in blue collar Bethlehem, the company town of Bethlehem Steel. This experience was formative for my early political leanings, in that I thought that Republicans were progressive do-gooders with pure hearts and Democrats were out to steal the public’s money and feather their own nests. What happened to those Republicans? Is John McCain one of the few remaining good guys? Or did he feather his own nest with so many houses that he can’t even remember how many he now owns? I know, I know, he married a very wealthy woman, but that’s certainly a form of nest-feathering. And where does he stand on women’s rights?

 It’s not easy to remain in the Republican Party and support an Equal Rights Amendment or women’s rights to reproductive freedom. I bet H. Gordon Payrow, Jr. would have supported women’s rights, although I don’t ever remember him talking about that in the 60’s and 70’s. And you know what? Now that I read back on the mayor before Payrow, one Earl E. Schaffer, a Democrat, I read about his  positive vision for Bethlehem, with more parks and a government complex – and not about any corruption during his 12 years. Hmmm. Was I being sold a bill of goods by Republicans back then? Oh dear, how impressionable we are in our teens. And how strong is our parents’ influence on our politics. I remember that whenever Wellesley polled students in presidential election years, it was significant that the freshmen usually voted the family party line (mostly Republican),  but the majority of seniors voted much more independently from their families’ political affiliations. Sure, not all Republican Wellesley women became Democrats during their four years in college, but a large number did – and  Independents, of course – that middle ground between leaving the family and striking out on one’s own. My parting from Republicans came in the summer of 1966, after I had worked for Ed Brooke for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts. I was with the Wellesley-Vassar Washington D.C. Internship Program and I had the misfortune of choosing to work for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. A more paranoid group of politicos I had never met. I wore a pin “Mob Rule” to work, and the people I worked with thought I was a spy for the Democrats. I wish I had been. I could have told the Democrats they had nothing to fear, at least based on the ineptitude and drinking penchants of the folks I worked with. Still, they had their secret weapon, Richard Nixon, who was making a comeback even then, after the Goldwater debacle. Richard Nixon, there’s a moderate Republican – but steeped in paranoia. After that summer in the Republican frat house called the RCCC, I decided to opt for a party that did not appear to have such paranoid delusions. And for the most part, I have been happy ever since as a Democrat, although my economics are socialist. Before there was Bernie Sanders, I was decrying income inequity, particularly in our sex-segregated labor market. You can call me a one-issue voter, if  you really think that supporting equal rights for more than half the population, and more than half the registered voters, is a narrow single issue. End of political rant.

The fan just died. I have to go out on to the deck to get some fresh air. Please have a safe and sane New Year’s Eve. Root for the underdogs and everything will be okay.