It is July’s swan song today — or, more to the point, here in Iowa, July’s cicada song — the bugs, those buggers, take your pick, in their way, their accustomed way, claxoning mid-summer and providing point to this summer’s counterpoint of unexampled heat.
Two days earlier, on the 29th, and sixteen years before, my father was his own cicada, his own last summer, his life, that day, that very dawn, at an end, his song — his song, all but ignored, as it rep-ratcheted, trilled, rep-rubbed to an end…an early end.
A date, sure, on a calendar, of course, on my calendar.
And, in my case, my mind, the morning I could never again say, “Hi, Dad!”
“And did I tell you, Dad? I love you.”
"That I loved you then. "
"That I loved you always. "
"Always, Dad. "
And, sixteen years later, who could have imagined this.
That, this, that dead man’s oldest son, then a writer, would now be a physician, a physician teaching, each day, other physicians. That that same man’s youngest son would also now himself be a physician. The two of us carrying forward all we learned before.
The hurt then.
The love mostly now.
And, sixteen years now to the day, I am in Kansas City.
At this, the annual medical student conference.
Me, a physician.
Thinking of my father, my father, my dead father these sixteen years later.
And me laughing.
Me laughing with students.
“Yes, this is a great program,” I say, my eyes hiding my life, my pain, this day. “Yes, the residents are terrific. Yes, the faculty are all you could ever hope for. And, yes, you, you, belong here.”
And, yes, me laughing.
Even as I try to hide what I cannot hide.
Me, again, laughing.
“Yes,” I’d tell then, if they’d asked, reading my eyes.
“My father died sixteen years ago, this day, this very day, this very morning. A phone call. A phone call at four-thirty. Yeah, Eastern Time. Me in Vermont. A phone call from two brothers at a phone in Seattle. ‘He’s gone,’ one brother tells me. 'Dad’s gone. Few minutes ago. Gone. Maybe it’s for the best.’”
For the best, maybe.
But my father, my father, is dead and lost to me and anyone near me.
And, yes, yes, I still hurt, yes…I still hurt.
And you don’t know that. It’s not your fault, I know.
But still, I hurt, I hurt…
And no one in Kansas City knows to care. And I’m now in Kansas City.
And, yes, in this sea of med students, residents, most young, most so very young, all with lives to live, with lives so much to live, I’m alone.
So alone.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Saturday, July 24, 2010
My son, our son…
My son, our son, Brendan, who for almost three years had been in New Orleans, doing what he, by himself, could do to help those he can to recover from Katrina, is now in Haiti.
Keep in mind that when he went to New Orleans, this parent’s advice was pretty much limited to, “Watch your ass.”
“Yeah, Pops,” I think he, hardly convincingly, told me then.
And then there was that bullet.
That bullet.
Shattering the drywall, only inches above my son’s head in the shower, while my son, my loved son, himself showered.
And, then, more bullets.
In rooms below.
In the very same apartment. From somewhere in the street. From somewhere in the street that might have, could have, killed my son.
My good, my loved, my second son.
And now Haiti.
“Watch your ass,” I tell him again on the phone.
“Ten days, Pops. Ten days, I’m off to Haiti,” he tells me.
This, the reckless son.
He, as a boy, given to barreling full-speed down a Vermont dirt-road hill on a bike, his mother holding her breath behind him, his father never knowing until years later.
He, who, as a kid, saw an electrified fence and saw an opportunity for a charge, even if it meant putting his stream of pee in the line of fire.
He, who showed up for his college graduation road-rashed—chin, legs, arms—after doing a handlebar-sault racing, pre-grad, post-alcohol, to a bar.
And now Haiti…
Keep in mind that when he went to New Orleans, this parent’s advice was pretty much limited to, “Watch your ass.”
“Yeah, Pops,” I think he, hardly convincingly, told me then.
And then there was that bullet.
That bullet.
Shattering the drywall, only inches above my son’s head in the shower, while my son, my loved son, himself showered.
And, then, more bullets.
In rooms below.
In the very same apartment. From somewhere in the street. From somewhere in the street that might have, could have, killed my son.
My good, my loved, my second son.
And now Haiti.
“Watch your ass,” I tell him again on the phone.
“Ten days, Pops. Ten days, I’m off to Haiti,” he tells me.
This, the reckless son.
He, as a boy, given to barreling full-speed down a Vermont dirt-road hill on a bike, his mother holding her breath behind him, his father never knowing until years later.
He, who, as a kid, saw an electrified fence and saw an opportunity for a charge, even if it meant putting his stream of pee in the line of fire.
He, who showed up for his college graduation road-rashed—chin, legs, arms—after doing a handlebar-sault racing, pre-grad, post-alcohol, to a bar.
And now Haiti…
Saturday, April 17, 2010
17 April, These Years Later
Again, and, for me, the 59th time, the calendar has turned to April 17th, and this time a Saturday.
Eighteen years ago, on a Friday, a very good and Good Friday, Karen and I welcomed Dónal, as in Dónal Óg (Dónal the younger, in Irish), the lad who to this day remains the youngest of our brood.
We lived then in northern Vermont, and it snowed the night before what would be this particular lad’s birthday.
By itself, that would not have been a problem, given that his birth, like that of the other four before his, was planned. As much as anyone can plan, anyway, a home birth. With a midwife doing, well, the midwifing.
But again, it snowed. And it snowed. And still it snowed. All through the night.
By the time the midwife and her assistant arrived, it had taken them an hour or more longer than the usual hour to get to our home from theirs, and by then there were eight inches of new snow on the ground.
But, happily, they arrived—arrived, as it turned out, much sooner than would this latest son, who, let’s face it, saw fit to yo-yo on his umbilical cord for many of the delayed hours of his eventual 14-hour entrance to the world.
Now, do keep in mind that Karen and I back then were no strangers to long labors.
After all, our first child, our very first child, Declan, said hello only after 43 hours—yes, 43 hours, as in, yes, 43 hours—of labor.
To this day, I tell anyone who will listen of the walks that Karen and I took during those ineluctably memorable 43 hours, walks along the mostly wooded Potomac bike trail in Alexandria, Virginia, where we then lived.
In the course of those walks (again, we’re talking 43 hours of labor—yes, 43 unforgettable hours—and lots of walks), any number of folks, whether jogging, walking or cycling, passed us. And many of those folks had to be witness to Karen—the breadth of her belly signaling her obvious condition and her just-as-obvious distress—doubling over with contractions, me at her side, both of us in the woods, either and both of us far, far from the hospital at which any of those witnesses would have assumed we belonged.
So, go ahead.
Imagine yourself as one of those joggers, your earbuds plugged then into your pre-iPod Walkman, and you, skipping footfall by footfall, along that path, only to see this all-too-evidently gravid woman hunkered over in pain on your jogging path, your jogging path, deep into the woods, nowhere near a hospital. And all at once you’re thinking, “What the hell is that woman doing here, and what’s with that guy holding her hand and now and then cradling her shoulders and telling her to breathe, just breathe!”
I joked later—and have done so many times since—that our first son, sensing his parents’ liberal proclivities (remember, this was 1982), was braced, arms and legs akimbo in utero, vowing, “Reagan’s president. I’m not coming out. I’m not coming out until the odds are in my favor!”
But we’re talking April 17th now, in 2010 now, and we're talking the fifth of those five kids.
That kid, that son, that youngest and good son, Dónal, did, indeed, enter the world on a cushion of eight inches of snow—and, yes, in mid-April and in northern Vermont—did have those hands that touched him first be those midwives’ hands, did do without a first name (another story in itself, especially then, especially in wee Peacham, Vermont) for a week, maybe more, did become the occasion for evening meals for at least a week, maybe more, from the same neighbors who wondered after the kid’s name, and to whom, to this day, Karen and I are still grateful.
And now that same Dónal is eighteen—that son, our youngest son, is eighteen.
And Karen (forgive me, Karen, for reminding you of the painfully obvious) and I are eighteen years older than we were then.
And, God, we were so young then: you, Karen; me, Karen; the other and older kids, Karen.
But this piece is meant for that son Dónal, born this April 17th, those 18 years ago.
Born into a family that already included, besides Karen and me, four other children, all born at home, all, to some or greater extent, schooled at home. And that Dónal, from the start, a child gentler on his parents than those before, whether because of his own nature or that of his parents, already denatured by his older siblings.
In the end, what needs to be said is this and only this: that this child, while fifth in line—and without in any way taking anything away from any of his other siblings—has, mostly, on every and any day, brought joy to his mother and his father.
And for that, Dónal Óg, your mother and I are grateful. So very grateful, even as we wish you joy and love on this, your one and only 18th birthday.
© 2010 Dónal Kevin Gordon
Eighteen years ago, on a Friday, a very good and Good Friday, Karen and I welcomed Dónal, as in Dónal Óg (Dónal the younger, in Irish), the lad who to this day remains the youngest of our brood.
We lived then in northern Vermont, and it snowed the night before what would be this particular lad’s birthday.
By itself, that would not have been a problem, given that his birth, like that of the other four before his, was planned. As much as anyone can plan, anyway, a home birth. With a midwife doing, well, the midwifing.
But again, it snowed. And it snowed. And still it snowed. All through the night.
By the time the midwife and her assistant arrived, it had taken them an hour or more longer than the usual hour to get to our home from theirs, and by then there were eight inches of new snow on the ground.
But, happily, they arrived—arrived, as it turned out, much sooner than would this latest son, who, let’s face it, saw fit to yo-yo on his umbilical cord for many of the delayed hours of his eventual 14-hour entrance to the world.
Now, do keep in mind that Karen and I back then were no strangers to long labors.
After all, our first child, our very first child, Declan, said hello only after 43 hours—yes, 43 hours, as in, yes, 43 hours—of labor.
To this day, I tell anyone who will listen of the walks that Karen and I took during those ineluctably memorable 43 hours, walks along the mostly wooded Potomac bike trail in Alexandria, Virginia, where we then lived.
In the course of those walks (again, we’re talking 43 hours of labor—yes, 43 unforgettable hours—and lots of walks), any number of folks, whether jogging, walking or cycling, passed us. And many of those folks had to be witness to Karen—the breadth of her belly signaling her obvious condition and her just-as-obvious distress—doubling over with contractions, me at her side, both of us in the woods, either and both of us far, far from the hospital at which any of those witnesses would have assumed we belonged.
So, go ahead.
Imagine yourself as one of those joggers, your earbuds plugged then into your pre-iPod Walkman, and you, skipping footfall by footfall, along that path, only to see this all-too-evidently gravid woman hunkered over in pain on your jogging path, your jogging path, deep into the woods, nowhere near a hospital. And all at once you’re thinking, “What the hell is that woman doing here, and what’s with that guy holding her hand and now and then cradling her shoulders and telling her to breathe, just breathe!”
I joked later—and have done so many times since—that our first son, sensing his parents’ liberal proclivities (remember, this was 1982), was braced, arms and legs akimbo in utero, vowing, “Reagan’s president. I’m not coming out. I’m not coming out until the odds are in my favor!”
But we’re talking April 17th now, in 2010 now, and we're talking the fifth of those five kids.
That kid, that son, that youngest and good son, Dónal, did, indeed, enter the world on a cushion of eight inches of snow—and, yes, in mid-April and in northern Vermont—did have those hands that touched him first be those midwives’ hands, did do without a first name (another story in itself, especially then, especially in wee Peacham, Vermont) for a week, maybe more, did become the occasion for evening meals for at least a week, maybe more, from the same neighbors who wondered after the kid’s name, and to whom, to this day, Karen and I are still grateful.
And now that same Dónal is eighteen—that son, our youngest son, is eighteen.
And Karen (forgive me, Karen, for reminding you of the painfully obvious) and I are eighteen years older than we were then.
And, God, we were so young then: you, Karen; me, Karen; the other and older kids, Karen.
But this piece is meant for that son Dónal, born this April 17th, those 18 years ago.
Born into a family that already included, besides Karen and me, four other children, all born at home, all, to some or greater extent, schooled at home. And that Dónal, from the start, a child gentler on his parents than those before, whether because of his own nature or that of his parents, already denatured by his older siblings.
In the end, what needs to be said is this and only this: that this child, while fifth in line—and without in any way taking anything away from any of his other siblings—has, mostly, on every and any day, brought joy to his mother and his father.
And for that, Dónal Óg, your mother and I are grateful. So very grateful, even as we wish you joy and love on this, your one and only 18th birthday.
© 2010 Dónal Kevin Gordon
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Go figure…
Ah, health care. And, as a physician, a family physician, I should care.
And I do. I truly do.
In fact, more than ten years ago, back in rural Vermont, I was even then mindful of those who hadn’t what I had.
And, yet, I was then a freelance writer, not a physician, buying health insurance at the going rate, even if the going rate then didn’t compensate for the fact that I was relatively young and healthy, as was my wife, Karen, and our five children.
Truth is, we cost good ol’ Blue Cross nothing, not one cent, over some 15 years, and all the more so given that all five of those children were born at home, with midwives in attendance, midwives whom Blue Cross would not acknowledge as professionals, let alone cover.
Consider this: Karen and I paid cash for each of those five births, some $1,200 or so each, covering both prenatal care and delivery, this despite making the monthly Blue Cross premium, month after month, year after year after year.
But, had Karen had the usual prenatal care, with an OB doing the deal for thirty-something weeks, and then the delivery and then the post-partum visit, at, let’s say two or three times what a midwife would have charged for the full Monty, Blue Cross would have obliged, or mostly obliged, at least insofar as its “prearranged” contract with that OB, a dollar figure always lower than the billed figure (yet another inequity in a health care system rife with inequities) for those with insurance.
And, get this, had Karen had the C-section that her first 43-hour labor would likely have bought her, we’re talking beaucoup bucks, to the tune of maybe $10,000 or more that Blue Cross would merrily have paid the OB, the hospital and anyone else with a hand stretched in our direction.
Yet, none of that takes into account the $50,000 that health care cost my family over a three-year period in the late 1990s.
I’m talking premiums, deductibles, co-pays, in a span that encompassed an ectopic pregnancy, our daughter’s hospitalization for an asthma exacerbation, my own then and still inexplicable health problems, another child’s visit to the local ER, and so on.
We had that money then, only because, as a freelance scribbler, I worked hard to keep a cushion against what I, preternaturally Irish, saw as the inevitable rainy day. Even so, those health care bills those three years wiped us out, to the penny. And afterwards I worked, day, night, weekends, for another three years, to build that cushion back.
A decade and more later, no one is better off.
Not me.
Not you.
Not any of us.
Even I, now a physician, am no better off, health insurance-wise, than I was as a freelance writer ten years ago.
I still have the same kind of health savings account, then called a medical savings account, with the same $5,000 family deductible. The only thing, if anything, that is different, is the premium, which, I think, and if I remember correctly, is, believe it or not, lower today.
Still, a decade later and not much difference.
And the fact that the last ten years transformed me from a freelance writer, fortunate enough to afford health insurance, to a physician, arguably even more fortunate, matters little.
I am, as much as any employee anywhere, at risk of that single silver bullet, in terms of uncompensated health care, let alone the bullet to the heart that some catastrophic event might occasion.
Ah, America!
Home of the free…land of the brave…
A country, at least in terms of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, of equals.
But, of course...not.
I have health insurance. Someone else has more. Somebody else has less. And all of us who have, pay the price for those who have not.
That is what it is.
In the end, given any amount of health care costs, the patient with no health insurance will pay nothing, even after any number of attempts on the part of any collection agency. And you and I and anyone else with any semblance of health insurance will pay more, our premiums, in part, going to cover the pseudo-inflated cost of our own health problems — and, by extension, the uncompensated cost of any and all uninsured patients seen in that hospital or the nearest, this clinic or the one down the street.
So, yeah, what a country.
The richest in the world, able to fund one war, or multiple wars, even on spurious reasons, on the spur of any moment, even at the cost of debt passed to our grandchildren, and likely to our great-grandchildren.
But wave even a dollar in the direction of universal health care — a right, a human right, let's face it, in any country, let alone this, the most prosperous on the planet — and you can expect a tea bag up ‘side the head, a tea bag tagged with the words, “socialist medicine.”
And yet we, those tea partiers and we teed-off partiers alike, spend the most on health care and, for our money, come up short, in terms of quality care, at thirty-something worldwide for the dollar spent.
Hmm-m…
Go figure…
And among those figures are the nearly 50 million fellow Americans — one of every six of us — who tonight sleep without health insurance; who tomorrow may use the emergency room for routine primary care, and who the next may find their homes, their families, their futures hostage to a hospital bill they can never pay; 50 million fellow Americans who are, there but for the grace of a job and for job-related health insurance, you or me or anyone you or me may now or ever love.
© 2010 Dónal Kevin Gordon
And I do. I truly do.
In fact, more than ten years ago, back in rural Vermont, I was even then mindful of those who hadn’t what I had.
And, yet, I was then a freelance writer, not a physician, buying health insurance at the going rate, even if the going rate then didn’t compensate for the fact that I was relatively young and healthy, as was my wife, Karen, and our five children.
Truth is, we cost good ol’ Blue Cross nothing, not one cent, over some 15 years, and all the more so given that all five of those children were born at home, with midwives in attendance, midwives whom Blue Cross would not acknowledge as professionals, let alone cover.
Consider this: Karen and I paid cash for each of those five births, some $1,200 or so each, covering both prenatal care and delivery, this despite making the monthly Blue Cross premium, month after month, year after year after year.
But, had Karen had the usual prenatal care, with an OB doing the deal for thirty-something weeks, and then the delivery and then the post-partum visit, at, let’s say two or three times what a midwife would have charged for the full Monty, Blue Cross would have obliged, or mostly obliged, at least insofar as its “prearranged” contract with that OB, a dollar figure always lower than the billed figure (yet another inequity in a health care system rife with inequities) for those with insurance.
And, get this, had Karen had the C-section that her first 43-hour labor would likely have bought her, we’re talking beaucoup bucks, to the tune of maybe $10,000 or more that Blue Cross would merrily have paid the OB, the hospital and anyone else with a hand stretched in our direction.
Yet, none of that takes into account the $50,000 that health care cost my family over a three-year period in the late 1990s.
I’m talking premiums, deductibles, co-pays, in a span that encompassed an ectopic pregnancy, our daughter’s hospitalization for an asthma exacerbation, my own then and still inexplicable health problems, another child’s visit to the local ER, and so on.
We had that money then, only because, as a freelance scribbler, I worked hard to keep a cushion against what I, preternaturally Irish, saw as the inevitable rainy day. Even so, those health care bills those three years wiped us out, to the penny. And afterwards I worked, day, night, weekends, for another three years, to build that cushion back.
A decade and more later, no one is better off.
Not me.
Not you.
Not any of us.
Even I, now a physician, am no better off, health insurance-wise, than I was as a freelance writer ten years ago.
I still have the same kind of health savings account, then called a medical savings account, with the same $5,000 family deductible. The only thing, if anything, that is different, is the premium, which, I think, and if I remember correctly, is, believe it or not, lower today.
Still, a decade later and not much difference.
And the fact that the last ten years transformed me from a freelance writer, fortunate enough to afford health insurance, to a physician, arguably even more fortunate, matters little.
I am, as much as any employee anywhere, at risk of that single silver bullet, in terms of uncompensated health care, let alone the bullet to the heart that some catastrophic event might occasion.
Ah, America!
Home of the free…land of the brave…
A country, at least in terms of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, of equals.
But, of course...not.
I have health insurance. Someone else has more. Somebody else has less. And all of us who have, pay the price for those who have not.
That is what it is.
In the end, given any amount of health care costs, the patient with no health insurance will pay nothing, even after any number of attempts on the part of any collection agency. And you and I and anyone else with any semblance of health insurance will pay more, our premiums, in part, going to cover the pseudo-inflated cost of our own health problems — and, by extension, the uncompensated cost of any and all uninsured patients seen in that hospital or the nearest, this clinic or the one down the street.
So, yeah, what a country.
The richest in the world, able to fund one war, or multiple wars, even on spurious reasons, on the spur of any moment, even at the cost of debt passed to our grandchildren, and likely to our great-grandchildren.
But wave even a dollar in the direction of universal health care — a right, a human right, let's face it, in any country, let alone this, the most prosperous on the planet — and you can expect a tea bag up ‘side the head, a tea bag tagged with the words, “socialist medicine.”
And yet we, those tea partiers and we teed-off partiers alike, spend the most on health care and, for our money, come up short, in terms of quality care, at thirty-something worldwide for the dollar spent.
Hmm-m…
Go figure…
And among those figures are the nearly 50 million fellow Americans — one of every six of us — who tonight sleep without health insurance; who tomorrow may use the emergency room for routine primary care, and who the next may find their homes, their families, their futures hostage to a hospital bill they can never pay; 50 million fellow Americans who are, there but for the grace of a job and for job-related health insurance, you or me or anyone you or me may now or ever love.
© 2010 Dónal Kevin Gordon
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Last lion…
And, so, Ted Kennedy has at last caught up to his loved brothers.
For those of us for whom the saga of the Kennedy family has signposted our lives, the passing of this, the youngest of the four brothers, is a kind of dead end. For even if another Kennedy picks up the torch, it will be the torch of a new generation and not the same as that torch passed so long ago to a new generation.
For me, my life, my young life, is backlit by the memory of my parents sinking a Kennedy sign into our front yard in Bayside, New York, in the fall of 1960, announcing to our neighbors my family’s allegiance to a Kennedy, another Irish Catholic like ourselves, even as my mother’s parents, as Irish as us, continued to toe the Republican party line.
By 1972, by the time I could first vote, there was no Kennedy on the ballot, two brothers by then dead by bullet, the next and youngest, the now-dead Teddy, not yet ready for prime time. Nixon, despite his peace-candidate pretensions, was never an option, and I cast my first presidential ballot for George McGovern, the McGovern button on my shirt prompting a Nixon exit poller to remark as I walked by, “How does it feel to vote for a loser?”
Come 1980, and Teddy runs, and falters and falls. And those of us who knew, who remembered, picked up the torch, only, let’s face it, to falter ourselves.
We get Reagan for our troubles, then Bush the elder, the younger still wet with inexperience in the wings, his own eyes, alas, even then bug-eyed on the stage.
The Clinton interregnum would do little to advance the Kennedy agenda.
After all, there was too much to buy in the ‘90s, let alone on into the Bush redux years of the early 2000’s. And to buy was to help the economy. Forget what was needed, whether for yourself or for society, when you could all too easily get what you wanted. Gas back then was cheap, so tank the family in a high-above-ground SUV. Why care about mileage or any pre-9/11 notion of dependence on foreign oil? Hey, we’re Americans, aren’t we, and who’s going to tell us how to live? Certainly not some Arabian sheik, let alone a granola-cruncher back home. Want a house beyond your means? No problem; some bank somewhere will give you a loan. Can’t afford whatever it was you wanted that particular moment? Hey, so what was plastic for, anyway?
As for health care, the self-proclaimed cause of Ted Kennedy’s life, either you had it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, too bad; it’s the American way, isn’t it? I’ve got mine, and if you don’t have yours, well, that’s not my problem.
Then Bush-the-encore rolls into town.
And suddenly it’s a snap to find and fund a multi-billion-dollar-a-year war, necessary or not, for year after year, thanks to a little Cheney sleight-of-hand, even as the Bush minions preach a decidedly unEmersonian self-reliance to the home front.
Health care for all? Hell, it’ll break the budget. Shore up social security? Oh, we’re good for another decade or so, if not more. The banks, the stock market, the insurance industry? And, man, all at once we’re talking a big Texas whoa. As in whoa, whoa! As in hands off, back away, who needs government regulation? The banks, the market, the insurance companies will take care of themselves.
And they did.
And here we are.
And there, there, the torch lies…
For those of us for whom the saga of the Kennedy family has signposted our lives, the passing of this, the youngest of the four brothers, is a kind of dead end. For even if another Kennedy picks up the torch, it will be the torch of a new generation and not the same as that torch passed so long ago to a new generation.
For me, my life, my young life, is backlit by the memory of my parents sinking a Kennedy sign into our front yard in Bayside, New York, in the fall of 1960, announcing to our neighbors my family’s allegiance to a Kennedy, another Irish Catholic like ourselves, even as my mother’s parents, as Irish as us, continued to toe the Republican party line.
By 1972, by the time I could first vote, there was no Kennedy on the ballot, two brothers by then dead by bullet, the next and youngest, the now-dead Teddy, not yet ready for prime time. Nixon, despite his peace-candidate pretensions, was never an option, and I cast my first presidential ballot for George McGovern, the McGovern button on my shirt prompting a Nixon exit poller to remark as I walked by, “How does it feel to vote for a loser?”
Come 1980, and Teddy runs, and falters and falls. And those of us who knew, who remembered, picked up the torch, only, let’s face it, to falter ourselves.
We get Reagan for our troubles, then Bush the elder, the younger still wet with inexperience in the wings, his own eyes, alas, even then bug-eyed on the stage.
The Clinton interregnum would do little to advance the Kennedy agenda.
After all, there was too much to buy in the ‘90s, let alone on into the Bush redux years of the early 2000’s. And to buy was to help the economy. Forget what was needed, whether for yourself or for society, when you could all too easily get what you wanted. Gas back then was cheap, so tank the family in a high-above-ground SUV. Why care about mileage or any pre-9/11 notion of dependence on foreign oil? Hey, we’re Americans, aren’t we, and who’s going to tell us how to live? Certainly not some Arabian sheik, let alone a granola-cruncher back home. Want a house beyond your means? No problem; some bank somewhere will give you a loan. Can’t afford whatever it was you wanted that particular moment? Hey, so what was plastic for, anyway?
As for health care, the self-proclaimed cause of Ted Kennedy’s life, either you had it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, too bad; it’s the American way, isn’t it? I’ve got mine, and if you don’t have yours, well, that’s not my problem.
Then Bush-the-encore rolls into town.
And suddenly it’s a snap to find and fund a multi-billion-dollar-a-year war, necessary or not, for year after year, thanks to a little Cheney sleight-of-hand, even as the Bush minions preach a decidedly unEmersonian self-reliance to the home front.
Health care for all? Hell, it’ll break the budget. Shore up social security? Oh, we’re good for another decade or so, if not more. The banks, the stock market, the insurance industry? And, man, all at once we’re talking a big Texas whoa. As in whoa, whoa! As in hands off, back away, who needs government regulation? The banks, the market, the insurance companies will take care of themselves.
And they did.
And here we are.
And there, there, the torch lies…
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Putting on the Ritz, I mean, the Marriott…
At the risk of sounding Andy-Rooney-ish, it is, I think, perplexing that Marriott, where I stayed a week and more back, while on business in Kansas City, should have found some reason to have outfitted my room with a catalog pitching its “collection.”
Certainly, that catalog begs questions on many levels: Is it, for example, worth the proverbial paper it was printed on and the consequent damage to the environment, both on the front end and the back? Who at Marriott ever dreamed that those visiting its hotels would have a sudden and overwhelming compulsion to rush home to redecorate their homes á la Marriott? And if any Marriott visitor ever did succumb to such urge or desire, why?
Nonetheless, if, by some quirk, or, more correctly, some outright and utter suspension of all reason, I ever wanted to sleep at home on the same bed I had once slept on in Kansas City, that very bed — I’m not kidding — is only a catalog-click away. I could even order the “complete bed package,” replete with one of four “signature bed dressings,” one of them dubbed, after Marriott’s leader, the JW (we are, after all, talking “signature” bed dressings). But why stop there, when I could easily add a duvet, pillow and bed linens, each reproducing, down to the very last stitch, the furnishings that made my Marriott room my so-very-home away from home.
But there’s more, as they say in the ad trade…
My telephone or online order could also include a shower curtain to match the one in my Kansas City Marriott bathroom, not to mention towels, oh, excuse me, “towel therapy,” the better to enhance the aromatherapy products and the shampoo and conditioner, which, in the catalog’s words (who could make this up?), have “developed a cult following.” (Me? I’m holding out for the chocolates-on-pillows cult, or maybe the cult of free cable-TV previews, or even the cult of ice-down-the-corridor.)
But if, like me, you’re still not convinced, still thinking that maybe this Marriott thing is not the thing for you, then go ahead…go ahead and imagine yourself lounging in your Marriott robe, sipping tea from your Marriott tea cup, the room’s ambience enhanced by a home diffuser wafting notes of lemon verbena, thyme and lavender. And whatever you’re now thinking, if it’s not enough to make you want to plunge right now into your Marriott-inspired bed décor for what the good folks at Marriott promise will be “a transcendent sleep experience,” well, then, maybe, just maybe, you’re not Marriott material.
As a former advertising copywriter, I know what it is like to have to write such drivel and to feign accountability, if not outright pride, when submitting copy to the client. And, yet, here I am a career later, confronting in that catalog a vision of my former self and realizing, again, the Newtonian/Pavlovian knee-jerk action and reaction that animates our economy: some of us sell; most of us buy. And that is, still is, all these years after I abandoned that career for another, what makes this world of ours go ‘round, maybe even more so, given Marriott’s assumption that I, or anyone, for that matter, could ever want what Marriott passes for wares.
Certainly, that catalog begs questions on many levels: Is it, for example, worth the proverbial paper it was printed on and the consequent damage to the environment, both on the front end and the back? Who at Marriott ever dreamed that those visiting its hotels would have a sudden and overwhelming compulsion to rush home to redecorate their homes á la Marriott? And if any Marriott visitor ever did succumb to such urge or desire, why?
Nonetheless, if, by some quirk, or, more correctly, some outright and utter suspension of all reason, I ever wanted to sleep at home on the same bed I had once slept on in Kansas City, that very bed — I’m not kidding — is only a catalog-click away. I could even order the “complete bed package,” replete with one of four “signature bed dressings,” one of them dubbed, after Marriott’s leader, the JW (we are, after all, talking “signature” bed dressings). But why stop there, when I could easily add a duvet, pillow and bed linens, each reproducing, down to the very last stitch, the furnishings that made my Marriott room my so-very-home away from home.
But there’s more, as they say in the ad trade…
My telephone or online order could also include a shower curtain to match the one in my Kansas City Marriott bathroom, not to mention towels, oh, excuse me, “towel therapy,” the better to enhance the aromatherapy products and the shampoo and conditioner, which, in the catalog’s words (who could make this up?), have “developed a cult following.” (Me? I’m holding out for the chocolates-on-pillows cult, or maybe the cult of free cable-TV previews, or even the cult of ice-down-the-corridor.)
But if, like me, you’re still not convinced, still thinking that maybe this Marriott thing is not the thing for you, then go ahead…go ahead and imagine yourself lounging in your Marriott robe, sipping tea from your Marriott tea cup, the room’s ambience enhanced by a home diffuser wafting notes of lemon verbena, thyme and lavender. And whatever you’re now thinking, if it’s not enough to make you want to plunge right now into your Marriott-inspired bed décor for what the good folks at Marriott promise will be “a transcendent sleep experience,” well, then, maybe, just maybe, you’re not Marriott material.
As a former advertising copywriter, I know what it is like to have to write such drivel and to feign accountability, if not outright pride, when submitting copy to the client. And, yet, here I am a career later, confronting in that catalog a vision of my former self and realizing, again, the Newtonian/Pavlovian knee-jerk action and reaction that animates our economy: some of us sell; most of us buy. And that is, still is, all these years after I abandoned that career for another, what makes this world of ours go ‘round, maybe even more so, given Marriott’s assumption that I, or anyone, for that matter, could ever want what Marriott passes for wares.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
“To be Irish…”
Once upon a distant midnight, Karen and I and our eldest, then-toddler son, Declan, then one-and-a-half, shared a bed — no apologies, we were then (not surprisingly — five home births, 50 kid-years of homeschooling) of the family-bed persuasion, a persuasion, which, given that we eventually had those five children, most of whom are now in their 20s, we eventually and successfully got over.
But at the time, back in 1983, that family bed occupied one corner of an upper bedroom in the hillside farmhouse in which we lived, some eight miles west of then-undiscovered Dingle, far out on the tattered western edge of Ireland, within sight, on any rare clear day, of the ever-roiling Atlantic. In fact, we lived close enough to the ocean, that any gale commanded notice, that night as on any night in coastal Ireland.
But the gales that night really did mean business. So much so that on this particular night — the night after the day our landlady’s son-in-law had replaced several of the window panes in our bedroom, the putty still not yet set — we three cocooned in the bed in the room, Karen and I listening to the wind test the newly repaired windows, Declan, a good baby, snug and snoozing between us.
But I’m talking gales, as in winds shrieking and unstopped by any speed bump of an island anywhere between Nova Scotia and Ireland. Gales that could, and did, strip leaves overnight from otherwise verdant trees, that soaked to the fibers rooftops long wetted by storms long spewed by that very same ocean. Gales that pummeled windows, like those that aired that Irish bedroom of ours. Gales which, that same night, would memorably blow out those newly replaced window panes.
Now, almost 26 years later, all this still makes for a good story.
But to Karen and me, to recall this story is to again hear wind screaming through that old farmhouse’s unsealed cracks and uninsulated walls, to hear rain lashing against the windows and against the wet putty of those window panes, to hear those panes shattering on the bedroom floor and then to hear rain stitching the very floor, the wind all at once funneling through the emptied mullions and firing rain like bullets. And all the while, all three of us — mother, father, son — huddled against the wind, against the cold, against all that anyone ever born Irish always knew an ocean could do.
And, the next morning, calm, a beautiful, beautiful calm.
And I would again have lit the cooker, that morning, as on many morning in Ireland, a cooker stoked with coal, the better to warm the kitchen, not to mention heat any needed water. And Karen might again have done a wash, that day, as she did on so many days, with that same heated water, in that kitchen’s sink, the laundry scrubbed against an old-fashioned washboard, then rinsed and dried afterwards on a line outside, in a wind by then soothed to a breeze and hardly a wind at all.
And all of us, Karen, me, Declan, youngest brother Patrick, would have then made our way through another day in Ireland, me scribbling for clients back in the States; Karen doing the more important work of mom-ing baby Declan; Patrick, then a ninth-grader, off at the local Christian Brothers school in Dingle, his own day made more difficult by the fact that his classes were all taught in Irish Gaelic, with no accommodation whatsoever for the English-speaking Yank, and his own Irish limited to that taught him, of romantic necessity, by his Irish girlfriend.
Had any one of us needed to go somewhere near, we would have walked, since we’d no car, and we’d have used the stroller to haul whatever needed lugging (you’d be surprised how many bags you can sling on one of the umbrella models of those days). And if we’d had to go farther? We’d have joined the regulars, of course, on the twice-a-week bus to Dingle, among those regulars the nonagenarian, his thumb thumbing the near end of his walking-stick, who, that summer, lamented that wet summer, and who later made his way into a poem I wrote (see below).
There, in Dingle, we’d buy whatever we couldn’t buy — including Wellies at a pub along Green Street, a pub that doubled as a hardware store, and socks at a clothing store that doubled as a pub — at the one-room, one-counter grocery in Murreagh nearer our home. And, memorably, on one of those days, as we walked from home in Kilcooley to the bus-stop at Murreagh, maybe half a mile away, the gales again nail-gunning a horizontal rain, we passed a couple of soaked-to-the-skin road workers digging a ditch at the edge of the church at Ardamór, their work overseen, for lack of anything else to do, by a long-retired mailman known locally, and famously, as Paddy the Post.
Glancing up at us as we approached, Paddy pinched the brim of his cap, the better to hold it against the wind and rain, smiled into the weather and bellowed over the howl of the gale, “It’s a wild one, isn’t it?”
That night Patrick would have struggled through his homework in his own bedroom, no doubt spending much of his time trying to decipher the gibberish of the Irish he heard against the little Irish he knew. Karen and me would likely have sat in the sitting room, with no television to entertain us, only a radio, the room itself warmed only by a turf-and-coal fire, the air alit by the various voices of Radió Telefís Éireann, or RTE, the government-run radio station, some of those voices in Ireland’s assimilated English, the rest in the native Irish.
But back to where I began…
“To be Irish…”
Is something I have known since I was a child.
My name alone a kind of tribal tattoo. Dónal. The name, when said by anyone Irish, mellifluent, the first syllable drum-struck by its long “o” and spilling into the musical second, lesser note. Dó-nal, “world-mighty,” in its Anglicized translation, even if the name pre-dates anything any later tribe, whether Scots or English, ever better embellished. It is, therefore, what it is and always was, before the Scots ever tacked a “d” to the end or the English determined some Anglicized translation: Dónal, plain and simple, Dónal.
And, were there any doubt of my lineage, my father was another Dónal and his two brothers were Kevin and Seán; my great-grandparents, on both sides of my family, had called Mayo, Sligo, Tipperary, Longford and Cavan home; my own children bear the names of Declan, Brendan, Siobhán, Tiernán and Dónal, the last one Dónal Óg, or “young Dónal,” the better to distinguish him from me, Dónal Mór, or “Dónal the greater (or, more to the point, older).” And I, after those intervening generations, had been the one, the only one, albeit briefly, to again bring my name to ground, to very green ground, by moving back to Ireland.
“To be Irish…”
If you know history, is to know suppression, if not outright oppression. Is to understand the loss of language, culture, faith, history. Is to till the earth, but not own it. Is to raise crops and livestock, but to die, horribly and by the hundreds of thousands, for the lack of those very things. Is to suffer the insufferable, until finally some voices became a chorus, became a crowd, became an insurrection, became history.
“To be Irish…”
Is also to know that there is nothing in life that is to be taken for granted. That what you have today, you may not have tomorrow. That anything lived or loved can also be lost — and eventually will.
“To be Irish…”
Is, in the words of the late Irish-American politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” And, the part Moynihan left out, to know that the very same world will, in the end, also make make your heart.
*Once again, the vagaries of Blogspot, at least insofar as I can fathom them, do not allow me to preserve the architecture of a poem. Suffice it to say, that there are some missing indents in the following lines, but you, proverbially, will get my drift:
Language Lessons
(Ceachtanna Teanga)
“Never, he breathed,
his smoker’s thumb burninshing
a blackthorn pinched between the knobs
of ancient knees.
“Never a summer like this. Not
in my ninety-five years.
Rain curtained the windows
as he spoke, purling
in the bus’s slipstream, as one white hand,
flushed from its perch, fluttered briefly
with regret, then settled again
on its blackthorn roost, and blue eyes,
swimming in a century of memories,
slid slowly from mine to the floor.
In air electric with Irish, his English
seemed all squawk and sputter, though
his wool coat, peaty with rain, held
its own in the lingua franca of the nose.
What little I knew of the old words
I understood. That a bus
was not simply a bus.
That the stopped burr of Donald
was not the liquid lilt of Dónal.
That no round-voweled potahto plucked
from Kentish loam would weigh so heavy
on the page as any tongue-tripped práta.
That there was, in fact,
a lunacy in Lúnasa that mere August,
in all its English augustness,
would never quite convey.
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