dispatches from dallas: flying objects may be closer than they appear

My cousin Allyson was driving down the highway this afternoon, taking her infant son to his swim class -- it's never too early you know -- when a piece of pipe flew off a truck and struck her windshield. She watched as it tumbled through the air and toward her car, almost as if in slow motion.

"It's coming right at me," she thought. And, indeed it did.

It hit her windshield, right at eye level on the driver's side, shattering at least part of the window and sending glass flying all over her, all over the car.

"Never mind," she called to tell me hours later, "that I'm never without my sunglasses, but today I wasn't wearing them. I'm surprised glass didn't get in my eyes."

"I'm surprised," I said, "that you're alive."

"Yeah, that's what the guy at the Volvo dealership said, too."

When it happened, she didn't swerve.

"You didn't swerve?!"

"Are you kidding? At 70 m.p.h, if you swerve, you die." And then with a hero's modesty, "If you were in my position, you would have done the same."

She didn't even slow down. She just checked to make sure she hadn't been impaled. "Because you know, I saw that Oprah where that woman fell on a microphone stand from her balcony and didn't even feel it at first." And then she calmly reached over, picked up her cell phone to call her husband and kept on driving.

"Pull over," Matt told her.

"Why," she wanted to know, exhibiting the detached awareness only ever displayed by the protagonists in Anne Tyler novels, "so I can sit by the side of the road? If I'm going to sit anywhere, it might as well be by the side of a pool." And so she continued on to her son's swim lesson, as if nothing more than an exceedingly large and disgusting bug had sullied her windshield.

Perfect composure.

Matt, on the other hand, broke laws to reach her side. He burned rubber, as it were. Ran stop lights, stop signs, cared not one whit for the rules around pedestrian crosswalks or the niceties of the right-of-way. I'm sure he never so much as gave the wave to any number of unnamed Samaritans he cut off in his single-minded goal to reach his wife and son.

When he arrived, only then did Allyson allow herself the much deserved hysterical sob fest.

I have three thoughts about this:

First, it absolutely melts my heart that Matt risked life, limb and the wrath of the Dallas Highway Patrol for his family. I know. That's what husbands do. But still. It reminds me of why I should perhaps look into finding one myself. A good one, of course. None of those second-hand models with a fishing channel addiction and erectile dysfunction. No, I'd like the kind that shows up -- and in record time, mind you -- when I need to break down. (I wonder, do they sell those on Ebay?)

Second, God is good. (Now, God. . . about that husband on Ebay. . . ?)

Third, people will do absolutely ANYTHING to get mentioned in this blog. Ally, really, a flushed fish or a rogue vacuum would have more than sufficed.

a banner day

The previous one was just so loooooom-y.

It was making me feel all sorts of trapped beneath a large rock, hunched over and ducked under. Seriously, it was bumming me out. This one is much more Under the Tuscan Sun I think. Not that it was intended to be. Because if I had gone for Italian romance, without a doubt I would have ended up in another region and genre entirely. Asian horror or Icelandic tragedy maybe. Caribbean suspense perhaps. But certainly not Italian romance.

For the life of me, if I'd know where it was going I probably would have screwed it up -- such is my wont. But I didn't. So I didn't. Let go and let God as they say. And though that might be a bit over-the-top for a blog banner, you know, it'a metaphor. A little reminder. There are such things as happy accidents. And I just need to remember to let them happen more often.

- - -

Oops. . . sorry all. The old banner, here.

wherein jane must needs tell her mother

So, so much for brevity. Forgive me, but there's just not a good stopping place in the middle. Subsequent sections will be shorter, I'm sure. For those of you new to this, you might want to start with Jane Revisited, a.k.a. the beginning.


Jane could hear the phone ringing inside her apartment from the hall outside, and thought for the briefest of moments of letting it go. But then she remembered that the answering machine was on the fritz and that she hadn't gotten around to buying a caller ID-ready phone for the caller ID that she was paying too much for and that something about *69 was just creepy. So she dropped her bag, the mail she'd picked up from downstairs and her raincoat and dove for the door, unlocking as she shoved. Or rather, trying to unlock. But the door was stuck. Stuck stuck. As in not coming unstuck stuck.

"Crap."

Typical, she thought as she threw her shoulder into it. A small aggravation really, it only truly bothered her when footsteps on the stairs suggested a mass murdering rapist was on his way up or like now, when the phone was ringing.

"I must," she muttered to herself as she shoved, "get this," she gritted out, "fixed."

The sticky door was an unfortunate side effect of her unsuccessful bid for some Fung Shui-inspired good luck. She'd painted it red like they said, but all she'd gotten was a semi-permanent bruise on her shoulder from continued ramming into said red door when it was stuck stuck on humid days such as this and a note from her landlady saying she'd have to repaint before she left or lose her deposit.

"Open," she commanded one last time as it finally gave, causing her to practically fall inside as she tripped over the stuff she'd dropped at her feet. Leaving the door open, so she could see if someone tried to snatch her bag, she dashed to the couch where she'd left the phone.

It was her mother. She shouldn't have rushed.

"I was just about to call you," Jane lied.

"I know," her mother answered.

"Actually," Jane admitted in a sudden about face. "I wasn't. I wasn't going to call." Something in her mother's smug, I know striking her as uncomfortably presumptuous.

"Mm-hmm," her mother demurred.

"I wasn't. Really. I'm not in the mood to talk." Jane swung back to the door and picked up her belongings.

"Yes, dear. Now where were you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You had a doctor's appointment this morning. And then I never heard from you."

"So?" Jane threw her stuff on the couch and then bent to retrieve the mail, all of which had slipped to the floor.

"So, that appointment was hours ago."

"And?"

"And you always call after your doctor's appointments."

"I do?"

"You do."

"Why," Jane asked, not really expecting an answer. She sifted through the mail: a Chinese takeout menu, a flyer for a missing guinea pig named "Lloyd," a postcard with a lone American Indian in full war paint and three catalogues one called "Jellies & Soups," one advertising art supplies to stimulate your pet's inner artist and the last showcasing the weaponry of indigenous peoples.

"Why?" her mother said, "Oh, I don't know. I guess it's because I trained you to when you were little. Now you don't walk in your door without picking up the phone to call me. When you get back from the doctors office, you call. The movies? You call. The grocery store, the gym, a date. . . not that that happens very often."

"Mother, don't. . . "

"It's ingrained in you."

"Wait," said Jane, finally tuning into what her mother had just said. "You knowingly trained me to be co-dependent with you? Why would you do that?"

"Because I had to work when you were growing up and I wanted to make sure you hadn't been absconded with by some drunken child molester on your way home from school."

"Not that you could have done anything about it at that point," Jane said.

"You were very good about calling, so I never had to worry."

"Oh."

"And remember? I gave you that whistle to blow, if anyone should approach you."

"That makes me feel much better. I had a whistle as a surrogate parent. I'm surprised I didn't grow up to be a bird."

"Oh, stop it. No need to be so dramatic. It was different when you were growing up. It wasn't so scary."

"I guess."

"So?"

"So what?

"So why didn't you call?"

"I don't know that I want to tell you now. I'm kind of weirded out by my newfound co-dependency. And now that I've officially acknowledged the problem I feel the need to work towards breaking the habit."

"Don't be silly," her mother chided her dismissively.

"Seriously."

"Seriously. Where were you?"

"Seriously, nowhere. I just got back."

"But, I thought your appointment was this morning."

"It was."

"And you just got back."

"Uh huh." Jane dumped the mail on the coffee table.

"Well. . . ?"

"Well, what?"

"Well, where have you been?"

Jane walked over to the alcove off her living room and opened the window. It was a like letting in molasses, the air was so thick. She shut the window.

"They had to run some extra tests. That's all."

"Why? What's wrong?"

"Nothing much." Jane walked back through the living room flipping on the window unit air conditioner. And then she continued on, wandering through the arched doorway into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. Half a container of leftover coconut soup, an egg, a shrinking bell pepper. She closed the door, meandered back into the living room and threw herself on the couch.

"Nothing much doesn't take all day."

"Literally, it's nothing. They found nothing."

Her mother sighed. "What does that mean, you exasperating girl," she stated more than asked.

Jane took a deep breath. "I really, really don't want to tell you."

"You don't have an STD do you?"

"Mother!"

"Of course you don't. How could you? You haven't been on a date since what's his name."

"You know his name. And yes, I have.

"What with your friend Stephanie's cousin? He was twelve!"

"A very mature twelve!"

"It was their family reunion!"

"Must we do this?"

"No. If you'd just spit it out, then. . . "

"Theycouldn'tfindmyheart," Jane blurted. There.

"What do you mean they couldn't find your heartbeat."

"No, mother, you aren't listening. Not my heartbeat. They couldn't find my heart."

"Your heart."

"Yeah, I think I must have lost it," said Jane covering her head with a pillow.

"You lost it."

"I guess."

"You guess? You guess! Jane, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard! How do you lose a heart?!"

"I don't know, I just. . . "

"How could you be so careless? I've never understood it. I can never get you anything nice."

Jane sighed, got up and went back to the kitchen for a glass of water. "What are you talking about?"

"That nice angora sweater I got you last Christmas? Ruined in the laundry."

"It said you could wash it with like colors."

"It said no such thing." Jane leaned on the counter and toyed with the magnet poetry on her refrigerator.

frazzled frustrated

"Well, one of my sweaters did and I thought it was just the same."

"The car you got when you graduated from high school?"

un relent ing ballyhoo

"Can we not do this now?"

"Totaled!"

psycho

"Mother."

"After less than a month!"

help less

"Mom," Jane sighed.

"I'm just making my point."

"Yes, well, I'm not . . . for the 187th time there was a cat!"

hope less

"What did the doctors say?"

"Not much."

"Not much?"

"They said I was an astonishingly original specimen, never before encountered in modern medical science and they want to write a paper about me."

"That's it?"

it

"They said if they can figure out how I live without a heart it will open the door to recovery for a lot of patients with heart disease and all that research money could be siphoned to the kidney people."

The silence at the other end of the line spoke volumes. "Mom?"

"What," her mother asked slowly, evenly, "did they say about you?"

"They said I shouldn't leave the hospital."

"And you did anyway? I can't believe you."

"I didn't want. . . "

"Anything to get your way. You always have to get your way."

not always

- - - -

After promising her mother she'd call if she felt even the littlest bit ill, she went back into the living room and resumed her position on the couch, pillow on head. After a while, desperate for air, she turned her head. The postcard of the warrior Indian edging out over the lip of the coffee table caught her eye. She reached out, picked it up and turned it over.

Dear Jane, Sorry I've been out of touch. It's been a rough twenty years and I couldn't find a stamp. I hope you've been well. Drop a line if you get a chance.

Love,
Daddy

jane and the doc tease

So I have to apologize. After optimistically posting the first page of Jane I went home, re-read the rest and remembered why I didn't continue. I actually threw the pages across the room and then crawled under the bed with Fred to hide from my own mediocrity. But as my mother has always encouraged me to finish what I start, I'm going to try to press on. Truly, it's not something I've ever taken to heart, but it sounds good doesn't it? (Translation: don't hold your breath. All I'm saying is that I'm going to try.) My hope is that you won't hate it so much because you don't live in my head with my good friend self-loathing. Of course, there's got to be some re-writing, so the process may be a little slower and the posts a tad more brief than I first hoped, but that's okay because no one reads the really long blog entries anyway. Right? Right then. Here we go. Without any further ado, Jane and the Doc Tease:

Jane left the hospital AMA, against medical advice, signing her name at the bottom of the form with a flourish, enjoying the look of abject disappointment on the faces of the doctors.

"But you'll call if anything happens, right?" they asked, almost desperate.

"We're here if you need us."

"Please, come back immediately -- to this hospital -- if anything changes."

"Or if nothing changes."

"You should just come back. "

"You shouldn't leave."

"Can we have your phone number?" This last question asked in what could only be described as a whimper.

Jane had never felt so popular, so she graciously left her contact information, juxtaposing numbers here and there, just for fun.

The truth was, she was sick... sick of their poking and prodding, the smell of illness that seemed to cling to the white coats and stethoscopes, the rich color of her own blood that really didn't flow, so much as ooze from her arm without a heart to pump it, the whine of the heart monitor they insisted she wear in ridiculous compliance with habit and form. Really, what was the point? But she wasn't sick sick.

She was getting angry by the time she signed the form. "Where's my heart," she wanted to say, "Doctor, where's your hair?"

It was such a personal question: where's your heart? Not so much because of the object lost, but because of the act of losing. She hated losing things, almost as much as she hated being late. Both qualities belonged to people with flaky, flighty personalities. Jane, however, liked to think of herself as grounded and practical, so the question embarrassed her, forcing her to rethink her own picture of herself.

She wasn't a person who normally lost track of her possessions. Primarily because she never threw anything away. Her house was full of the detritus of years' worth of pack-ratting. The usual clutter, out-of-date magazines and solitary socks joined by old gas bills (some never opened), the toilet seat behind the bathroom door she'd replaced last year and the broken phone that she'd dropped in said toilet while describing the new seat to her mom.

Even broken, this stuff had to have value and she had a hard time letting go.

To be continued. . .

alec baldwin, three dates and a nubbin

About a year or so ago I was set up on a blind date with an artisan furniture maker named John, whose great claim to fame was that Alec Baldwin had recently commissioned a coffee table from him. Or rather, Alec Baldwin's designer had commissioned it. Alec Baldwin, I assume, paid for it -- indirectly, I'm sure -- but still. Somewhere in the world, Alec Baldwin's feet are kicked up on a coffee table designed and built by a guy with whom I shared too few, tiny plates of Spanish tapas and pretty decent conversation.

It is such a small world.

Anyway, a work friend set us up because we are the only two "arty" people she knows. (Her word not mine.) I don't consider myself arty. And frankly, I don't really go for arty when it comes to men. But John wasn't so much arty as unstarched, and unstarched is okay by me. Plus he worked with his hands and specifically with wood, which I think is very cool. Very masculine. Practical and sexy all in one. Also his name is John, like every one of my blood male relations and I don't like change. So things were looking good.

Of course appearances can be deceiving.

Yes, sadly, despite his woodworking ways, intrinsic John-ishness and two degrees of separation from Alec Baldwin, we only lasted a couple of dates beyond the first and I have to say that I use the word "date" loosely. In the junior high school sense of the word. In the group date sense of the word. Because, on our two subsequent so-called dates I spent more time with his friends than I did with him. Which was fine really, except that I have friends already and wasn't really looking for more, especially friends of the second-hand variety, even if they'd only been gently used. Second-hand friends have a way of wearing thin and tearing away easily when/if the relationship goes sour. I speak with no bitterness, but from hard-won experience. A little tip: foster those friendships after the ring is on the finger.

Be pleasant before.

Be friends after.

That said, I was being pleasant as I proceeded to devour an entire serving tray of Swedish meatballs while one female friend of John's cornered me to enumerate his many, varied and wonderful attributes. An expressive little thing, she was given to wild hand gesticulation, which in her case was particularly captivating because the ring finger of her married hand was no more than a vestigial finger nubbin, lopped off at the second knuckle. Now, I dare say an unacknowledged and unexplained finger nubbin is enough to distract anyone, but to make matters worse, this girl was wearing her wedding ring on the nubbin. And what with all the waving and the lack of a knuckle-stop (Wasn't she worried about it losing it?), I half expected the ring to fly off and hit me in the eye. I kept fighting the urge to flinch and duck.

Needless to say, it was very distracting, especially since the word "nubbin" kept repeating itself in my head, drowning out whatever she happened to be saying. I was desperate to know how the nubbin came about, but aside from it being horribly rude to ask such things, she wouldn't shut up long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.

But the brain is an amazing machine, as I've been learning due to my recent obsession with Scientific American Mind. And as it repeated the word nubbin over and over again, it was, of it's own accord, creating associations for the nubbin, cobbling together meaning, creating for the nubbin a raison d'etre. It was doing with the nubbin what it typically does with dreams. It was attempting to make logical sense of a disparate set of facts.

And this is what my brain deduced:

This girl was a friend of John the carpenter. Carpenters use sharp whirly-bladed tools. Those whirly bladed tools have been known in the past to sever carelessly placed fingers. This girl with her spastic hand-waving had certainly carelessly involved her finger in a carpentry accident. Perhaps while with John in his shop. And somehow my brain decided that she'd bravely taken his severing. Somehow. Somehow, she was nubbin'd by proxy. Her finger was the sacrificial Sydney Carton with no real purpose in life to John's finger's Charles Darnay. And John needed his Darnay so that he could complete the worthy task of creating a coffee table for Alec Baldwin.

I have to admit that the intimacy of that connection, signaled by the nubbin, made me a little uncomfortable. Suddenly I was the third wheel on my own date, which was confirmed when nubbin girl, too drunk to drive, her own husband long-gone from the party, asked John of all the many people she knew at the party for a ride home.

And suddenly I understood why she'd been so damn friendly all along. And why she'd stuck so close. And why John, for most of the evening, was nowhere to be found. And why all night she'd been waving that hand in the air, like she just didn't care if it flew into the crock pot of beef stew and was lost to her forever. And I wondered if her husband knew, too.

jane revisited

Some of you who know me in three dimensions have read this already, so to you some I apologize for being redundant. For the rest of you, it's the beginning of a story I abandoned when the chick-lit craze hit, because I didn't want to be a hack copycat writer. I'm older, wiser and less scrupled now, with no such compunctions. So I'm thinking of resurrecting Jane and helping her find that which she's lost. Maybe when I do, I'll finally figure out what I'm in search of myself. If you likey, I'll post subsequent "chapters" and maybe even write a few more. I make no promises, but we'll see. . .

Jane sat on the edge of the bed looking hard at the x-ray of her torso clipped to the light box three feet away. It was difficult for her to discern the tangle of organs, the edges of bone soft and shadowy, the wispy outline of her derma. It looked ephemeral and other­ worldly, a quick exhale and -- poof! -- it would all disperse like smoke. To her untrained eye, nothing appeared at all awry. In fact, she thought it was the best picture anyone had ever taken of her.

The doctors, however, had a different opinion. Apparently, her heart was missing. Missing. Not deformed, shrunken, clogged, strained, swollen, upside down or backwards, just. . . missing. Oh, they were quick to assure her that her other organs were in wonderfully present condition -- lovely lungs, a gorgeous spleen and the most perfectly matched pair of kidney's they'd ever seen. They even labeled her appendix, "cute," as if to make up for her prodigal organ.

Jane was grateful, she supposed, for their concern, though she had a sneaking suspicion they were less interested in her as a person than they were in the sum of her parts. She was, to them, a mathematical equation and her heart was the x. Still, they seemed to go through the motions well enough, which was as much as she ever really expected from anyone. At least they asked all the right questions, even if they didn't seem particularly interested in the answers.

"How are you feeling," they wanted to know.

"Fine," she answered.

"You aren't in any pain," they asked.

"Nope," she answered.

"You should know that you are very, very ill," they responded, slightly malicious, resentful of her blithe good health, despite her obvious infirmity.

"But I feel okay," she maintained. And then seeing their annoyance she added, "Maybe a little cold, though."

"Ahhh. . ." they nodded knowingly to each other, "That would be from loss of circulation to the extremities."

She could practically hear their sighs of relief at her admission, but Jane disagreed. It seemed to her that the drafty paper "gown" they'd forced her to wear provided little protection from the hospital's air conditioning. She wondered if the chilly environment was meant to stem the progress of disease through people's bodies and preserve what healthy tissue was left: Cryogenics-light, for the not-quite dead. She'd taken a breath to ask the question, but they were already leaving, muttering amongst themselves.

". . . Journal of Modern Medicine. . ."

". . . history-making case. . ."

". . . article I wrote, published last year. . ."

The bastards. They would be attaching their names to her condition before she could say patent law. The Drucker-Feingold Syndrome. The Feingold-Asner-Krikey Condition. If it were her anomaly, you'd think she'd get to put her name on it. After all, she thought indignantly, one should not have to copyright one's own heart.

She jumped off the bed, intent on venting her perfectly gorgeous spleen at them, but a sudden, surprising waft of cold air told her that the back tie of her gown had come undone.

To be continued: Jane and the Doc Tease