December,
2006
Greetings. I hope
that all is well with you.
Dickens got it right when he wrote the always-apropos
opening line of A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. We had them both in the last 12 months. Pat had medical issues last December (worst),
we spent 4+ months in Scotland and traveling in Europe (best), and Krystin
ended up in intensive care in a Paris hospital and has been contending with a
combination of diabetes and an eating disorder ever since we returned from
Scotland in May (worst). For those few
of you who were the involuntary recipients of weekly emails from Scotland
while we were there, I will not include a recap of our experiences. For those of you who were not, and who I
think might be interested, I include separately the collected and
slightly-rewritten version of those messages.
* * *
But
first, a few leftovers from 2005. One of
the more interesting parts of our stay in Tuscany in October, 2005, was a visit to a
winery. I suppose anyone who thinks
about it would realize that wine (or whisky or scotch or gin) is made in very
large casks. Until one sees such a cask,
however, it is difficult to realize how large they are. The ones at this vineyard each held 9,000
bottles of wine. I wonder, however, if
the same flavor comes from these large casks as one would get from a small
cask—the amount of wood exposed to the wine, per gallon of wine, is much
smaller than in a small cask. After the
tour, the winery provided us one of the most spectacular lunches we shall ever
have. The entire group of us who were
staying at the villa—I think there were 13 of us—had gone on the winery tour
and then sat at a linen-covered table with the usual array of silver and
crystal. The lunch was outside, nestled
in the hills of Tuscany,
on a perfect autumn day, and there were no bugs. The meal was exquisite.
The
other note is the Brancacci Chapel in the Santa Maria del Carmine church, which
we saw in the course of touring around Florence. It was striking, especially the difference in
the paintings of Masaccio and Masolino in the same chapel. (I think the single greatest intellectual
difficulty I had when we saw the many works of art in Florence
and Rome was
the lineage of the artists: Giotto
taught Masolino, who taught Masaccio, who taught . . . . . Somewhere Michelangelo and Raphael come in
here. There were so many great Italian
renaissance artists that it seems to me impossible to keep track of them
barring a full-time many-year study of the art.
I suppose that’s why there are art historians.)
* * *
I was astonished at the reaction to the memorial statement
I wrote for my father and included in my letter last year. One friend specifically called to tell me he
thought it was one of the best things he had ever read. Several went out of their way to email me to
say how splendid they thought it was; one said she was in tears by the time she
got to the end. Several others spoke to
me when they saw me to tell me how much they liked it. I must have unwittingly touched a chord in
people, because I certainly didn’t think anything about it except that it was
my recollections of my dad. I think I
was as glad that the world still holds pleasant surprises for me as I was at
how positively people reacted.
* * *
As for the worst of times (1): We had in our family (what appeared to be)
another brush with death in December, 2005 (and while it turned out not to so,
I didn’t know that at the time). Pat has
had abdominal/groin pains for a couple of years. She—we—hoped that the hysterectomy in May,
2005, would get rid of them. It
didn’t. After that operation, she had a
series of tests—MRI, CT scan, colonoscopy, ultrasound—to try to locate the
source of the pain. Nothing showed up
abnormal. On a Friday in mid-December,
2005, another ultrasound revealed a “mass” on one of her ovaries. Her gynecologist (also her surgeon) didn’t
like the look of it because it wasn’t showing up as a cyst or something harmless. So she told Pat she wanted to get it out of
there—and she wanted to do it quickly—primarily, we think, so that Pat would
have time to recuperate before having to get on a plane for Scotland, not for
any medical reason. Moving so quickly,
and rearranging her schedule for Pat, was extraordinarily nice of her.
Pat and I met with the surgeon on the following Tuesday;
the surgeon seemed quite upbeat and her only concern was whether Pat would be
able to fly on January 6. I was somewhat
encouraged, but I suspect that surgeons, like anyone else, don’t want to think
about the unpleasant possibilities and would rather focus on the positive,
especially when she didn’t know what she would find. She had scheduled the surgery the day after
the meeting.
So we had six days to fret, between the first ultrasound
and the scheduled surgery. I probably
worried more than everyone else. It
seemed to me the possible range of outcomes was “really nothing” to
life-threatening or life-terminating cancer.
I remembered a judicial rule for evaluating cases involving free speech
enunciated by Judge Learned Hand: the
courts were to take into account “the gravity of the evil, discounted by its
improbability.” That is, the greater the
danger the speaker advocated, the more permissible it is to restrict the
speech. The poor analogy here was, for
me, that even though a devastating outcome was not likely, the “gravity of the
evil” (for me and our family) led me to worry a great deal.
Fortunately, when the surgeon came to see me after the
surgery while Pat was in recovery, she said it had gone perfectly and that it
did not appear that the lesion was cancerous or life-threatening—and that, in any
event, whatever it was was gone as a result of the surgery. As a friend of mine put it in an email to me
the day after the surgery, “now you can relax and enjoy life again.” He hit the nail on the head with that
comment.
I commend these threats (whether real or perceived, there
is no difference) to your family members if you like distraction from your job,
sleeplessness, emotional heartache, upset stomach, and more gray hair. If you don’t, avoid such situations. I suffered all of these effects, in mild
degree (mild only because they were mitigated by the fact that Pat and the
surgeon were so certain of a positive outcome).
* * *
As for the worst of times (2): On November 1 I told Elliott it is said that
into every life a little rain must fall. Most of us are constitutionally able to deal
with the occasional shower, but few of us are equipped to handle a torrential
downpour. It seemed about then we had a
torrential downpour. Krystin was in the
hospital for much of the time after we got back from Scotland; during her stay, her
mental condition, and her ability to eat, spiraled downward. To add insult to injury, at that point in
late October our cat Bela was sick, Elliott was sick, Pat had decided to get
rid of our (4th) second dog, and we were all greatly stressed by
what was going on with Krystin.
Upon
return from Scotland,
we and Krystin knew she had to get serious help—medical and psychiatric or
psychological—to deal with her diabetes and eating. In short summary, the medical folks concluded
(and Krystin agreed) that she had been using insulin as a weight-control
device: if she didn't take a lot of
insulin, she could eat like a horse (because insulin is the substance that
allows body cells to absorb the blood glucose created by our body from the food
we eat). Unfortunately, not taking
enough insulin has bad effects.
The short summary of events from June to December is that
Krystin was in an eating-disorders program at Methodist Hospital,
then moved to a residential eating-disorders program in the far suburb of
Chaska, the Anna Westin House. She
"flunked" the Anna Westin program (they couldn't deal with someone
who could not or would not eat), so ended up back in Methodist, including with
a feeding tube for a period. Krystin was
very depressed, not surprisingly. The
Methodist people finally (to put it bluntly) just gave up on her—they decided
she was doing well enough on eating that they would release her and see what
happened. All this took about 3-4
months, so it was early November when she came back home. During this period, of course, we were doing
a lot of driving to Methodist and to Anna Westin, but we and she were fortunate
to have a lot of friends and relatives come to see her off and on during these
events.
She wasn't "cured," however, and still wasn't
eating enough (although she was making an effort). So we explored other programs, and November
30 Pat flew her to a place northwest of Phoenix
for a 60-90-day stay. It's a
"ranch" where the girls/women do horses while also receiving
counseling and therapy. There are a
couple of differences between the Arizona
program and the Anna Westin House that we like.
First, they have the girls active and doing things (horses) rather than
just sitting around all day. Krystin had
no stamina whatever by the end of her stint with Methodist and Anna Westin
because she'd not been doing anything physical—this a girl who'd been walking
all over Europe and Edinburgh
the first part of the year. Second, they
don't require monitoring in the bathroom and elsewhere (I understand why Anna
Westin folks did that, but it sure seemed creepy to me). Third, they're much more relaxed about
food—on the theory that if they make food the center of attention, it remains
the center of attention for the girls, whereas if it is secondary to living a
life, it's less important. As I compose
this, Krystin has only been in Arizona
for a few days, but her first impressions are very positive and she's
optimistic this will do a lot to help her.
Pat's had a much harder time emotionally dealing with
Krystin and her problems than I (and Elliott) have. I don't know if that's because there's a
difference between us and the distaff side, or if it's particular to our
personalities, or it's an attribute of mothers more than fathers, or if there's
some other reason. My temperament (and
Elliott's even more so) is pretty difficult to upend; that is less true for Pat
and Krystin. So we've had to work out
those differences as we move (stumble?) from event to event.
For now, however, we are keeping our fingers crossed for
Krystin.
P.S. The 4th
second dog is gone, which has made our house much calmer. She was an extremely sweet dog, but
high-demand and very active. Pat just
couldn't give her the attention she needed and decided her attention had to be
focused on Krystin, not on training a dog.
Bela recovered and seems to be doing fine. Elliott recovered (but keeps coming down with
colds!).
(More
than) enough of the medical crises.
* * *
Electronic databases are wonderful things (1). After receiving 3-4 fund-raising letters from
Oregon State University addressed to my dad, to whom they were appealing as an
alumnus, I finally found a name and emailed a chap at Oregon State to explain that
(1) my father was deceased and (2) as far as I knew, he had never set foot in
the state of Oregon, much less obtained a degree from OSU. I did receive a very apologetic email back,
to their credit, explaining that they had my dad in their database as a 1955
graduate of their College
of Engineering. The letters did stop.
Electronic databases (2).
For the last two years, Elliott has been deluged with college recruiting
and admissions materials from all over the Midwest. Somewhere, someplace, someone has his date of
birth about 3 years earlier than it is.
He had not even entered high school when the mailings began coming. I finally sent an email to the Director of
Admissions for the Twin Cities campus of the University when Elliott received
material from the U of M; he called me a couple of days later to tell me that
admissions recruiting had gotten very aggressive in the last 10 years and that
even his office now normally begins sending some materials to 10th-graders. But he agreed that Elliott was bit
young. I assured him that Elliott would
give the fullest consideration to the University of Minnesota.
. . .
* * *
A message on how to celebrate the holidays, and life in
general, came from my sister-in-law last winter. "Life should NOT be a journey to the
grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved
body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the
other, body
thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!" I am inclined to agree, especially after our year.
thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!" I am inclined to agree, especially after our year.
Despite the gloomy aspects of the year, however, it
wasn't all bad. Living abroad for 4
months was a wonderful experience; we recommend it for everyone.
Elliott at age 16 remains a great conversationalist and great
kid to have around, although he likes to spend a little too much time on the
video games and not quite enough time on the school work. We spent any number of hours while in Scotland, and
since, discussing politics, history, science, religion, aging, grammar, music,
technology, and you name it. Now, if we
could just get him to clean up his room once a month or so.
As the late Joel Tierney, long-time University Attorney,
once told me about writing, "brevity is blessed." (I never seemed to be able to take the lesson
to heart.) While not brief by the
standards of most end-of-year letters, this one is brief by mine, as you all
know. And so it ends.
Have a good year.
We will be in touch.
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