That Night

My first thought was "Now I've done it. I've finally done it." 

It was similar to the feeling I had at age 16 when I totaled the family car while making a right turn on red. That time, despite having crushed my parents' Vega to half its size, I was able to walk away uninjured ("Get out of the car! Get out of the car!" people were screaming.) This time, I could only acquiesce.

My second thought was "I have no idea what happened, but I appear to be in extremely competent hands." 

I remember the flashing lights of an ambulance and many hands on me and being on a stretcher, but I'm not entirely sure which of those memories took place on the street, which were in the ambulance, and which were of being unloaded at the emergency room. As things started to come together more, I knew I was in the ER.

By this time, I must have figured out I'd been in a bicycle accident. The last thing I remembered—as "memory" itself haltingly reformed—was leaving the office with my bike, walking it across L Street, and turning onto the bicycle lane. Or maybe it came back to me later. But that's the extent of the events preceding the accident that ever have come back.

I remember having a neck brace put on me and being reassured by someone that it was just a precaution, that I didn't appear to have a spinal injury. I was asked if there was someone they could call. I don't remember saying the words, but I apparently came up with my brother's land line, a number he'd had for more than 20 years (and that he's since changed; I do not know his new number by heart).

At some point, as medical personnel started stopping by, I found out I'd fractured my right elbow (I always say "fractured" instead of "broke" because that was the word first used in my presence), knocked out a tooth and maybe damaged more, and cut up my face. 

An ENT (again, who introduced himself as such, so I'll never forget his specialty) stitched up my face—two gashes around my right eye, one on my upper lip where a tooth or teeth went through. I'd never had stitches before (at age 52, never been treated in an ER, never spent a single night as a patient in a hospital). The sensationless sensation of thread being pulled through tissue and tugged was new to me; at the same time, it reminded me of numbed dental work—that impression of major construction going on not quite here but in a room next door, the mysterious vibrations and structural manipulations of space felt all too viscerally.

My brother arrived in the emergency room and told me D was on his way. I was calm (drugged), probably apologetic, definitely immobile, and appreciative of what felt like order around me. 

I'd be spending the night (no kidding), and we were waiting for a room.

My brother manned iPhone central at the foot of my bed in the ER, communicating with our sisters and with his wife. At some point, D arrived, smiling, tender. My brother, D, and me—the trio who'd been with my father when he'd died at age 92 a year and a half before. This was the first time just the three of us were together since that day in July 2012, though I wasn't thinking that then. (I'm thinking it now.)

My injured right arm rested painless and immobile in a splint or brace across my chest. At some point, I met the orthopedist who would operate the next day. A young guy in his thirties, as young as my regular doctor, whom I'd seen just a few days before for a checkup at which all was well.

All evening long, I listened to gentle information and was ministered to—my first experience with the utter surrender of control entailed in the receipt of trauma care. Somewhere down deep, grief and sadness awaited their entrance, as did patience and fortitude, Sharks and Jets on opposite wings. But for now, the only thing required of me was to wait.

Later that night, when I was settled (oddly content) in my hospital room and my brother and D had left for the night, I was near-dozing when another doctor came into the darkened space—a dentist (dental surgeon, it turned out), closer to my age than the young orthopedist. He was nice, had grown up in Washington like me, and we talked about the high schools we'd gone to. All evening at the hospital, despite having no idea what had happened to me on the bike lane, I'd been able to converse relatively lucidly with anyone who came up to my bed.

He touched my shoulder in a comforting way. He examined my mouth and told me a tooth next to the one that had been knocked out was compromised and would have to come out as well. I thought he was referring to an upcoming procedure, but he started jiggling the tooth right then with his bare hand. I said, "You're going to pull it out now?" Saying it was already crumbing in his fingers, he tugged, as if removing a splinter, and it was out, leaving the root behind.

He said, "We'll take care of you." Then he touched my shoulder again and said goodnight.

Fake and True

Dog walk, November 13

Walking Patsy on these autumn-dark evenings, I’ve already seen two Christmas trees in windows—the first on Monday, November 12, the second on Tuesday. Nothing last night, though Au Bon Pain was playing Christmas music yesterday at lunchtime. Tomorrow, November 16 (I checked), that radio station will start playing my least favorite kind of holiday music 24/7 through December 25. Just hear those sleigh bells ringin’.

There’s still some gold and rust and green jittering on the trees this afternoon, and the sky has unfurled a tightly woven blanket over the sun. I biked to work today despite the turn toward cold. It’s not even late fall, let alone Christmas—it’s just fall.

On Saturday my brother and sister and some of their family members will come for dinner at D’s house, as he and I will be in London next week. (Fortuitously enough, I happened upon a vegan restaurant hosting a Thanksgiving dinner on the 22nd—who knew?—so that's where you'll find us.) 

Saturday's party here will be our Fakesgiving—a term I learned yesterday, and love—with veggie pot pies, baby-kale salad, baked apples with mincemeat, and some other surprises in the works. This will be the first Thanksgiving since Dad’s death, and though he hadn’t attended in at least a couple of years anyway, I wanted to facilitate some sort of coming-together of kin. It’s a chance to say, in a way that in fact can be more celebratory than mournful: This is what it’s like now.

Christmas-creep is the opposite of now. 

 

Begin Agin?

If you glance over at my blog roll on the right, you’ll see something called Begin the Vegan, a very short-lived project I started when I went from vegetarian to vegan about two and a half years ago.

Ask me today what’s one of the things I’m most passionate about, among the most fun elements of my life, the subject that’s part of my consciousness pretty much every day, and being vegan—planning dinner, shopping for shoes, buying a rug, picking a shaving cream, and did I mention planning dinner? (I love to cook!)—would be at the top of the list. Yet I haven’t blogged about it since July 2010.

I knew it was perhaps overly ambitious to start a second blog when this one had just come back from a dormancy of 15 months (and has since endured another lapse of almost a year). But I was game to try, and for a few months it helped me articulate my feelings and discoveries about my dietary evolution—which have continued unabated since then (of course they’ve continued—they’re feelings!), though one wouldn’t know it. I just hate to think it appears I’ve lost interest.

What I’ve lost is the impetus, and the courage to start again with the very real possibility that I could stall once more. Then I’d have two sputtering engines in my literary driveway.

In the meantime, I might have written about a get-together with college friends a year and a half ago where I brought a delicious vegan cake I made in honor of our collective 50^th birthdays, and the first thing one friend said when she tasted it was “How many eggs are in this?” Or the next get-together with those friends earlier this year when I made the same cake (because one friend had missed the first gathering), and the cake was an embarrassing, damp-centered dud. But I bit my tongue and remembered Julia Child’s culinary admonishment from her fabulous memoir, My Life in France: Never apologize!

I could write about D., who has been nothing but accommodating as he himself has evolved to a mostly vegetarian diet since knowing me and a vegan-friendly (and appreciative) attitude toward my cooking in the last two to three years.

I could write about the fun (and frustrating—Candle Cafe, I’m talking about you) cookbooks and blogs I’ve discovered. (I’ve added a few of my faves to the roll here.) The things I’m willing to compromise on (ratcheting down to merely vegetarian when dining out with friends or as a guest at someone’s house, afternoon tea with D.) and the things I’m not (meat!). Or the fact that my sister and brother-in-law recently became vegan for reasons of their own and what it’s like to have compatriots in the family even as I try not to let others in the bloodline feel self-conscious about their own cooking, which I can still enjoy (see compromises above).

I could blog about all of this. But I haven’t even looked at Begin the Vegan in nearly two years, until today when I went there to see when my last post was.

So why am I blogging about it here?

New Yorker cartoon from NewYorker.com.