Thursday, May 23, 2024

Our Secret Rendezvous

 It isn't the extraordinary things -- the breakthroughs, the awards, the dream vacations. It isn't even the special moments we knew we were falling in love.


Those are our memories and they remain intact, as vivid as ever.

Rather it is the ordinary things that we did almost without thinking that have been stolen from us. This came to me as I rode masked in a car through my old neighborhood one day on the way to the neurologist.

(NOTE: I published this in the early stages of the pandemic. It still feels relevant four years later.)

There was that one special cluster of wisteria under a tree. A lone hummingbird usually was hovering among the flowers as I passed. I'd stop and it often rose to greet me, face to face. It became our secret rendezvous.

There was the house that always seemed to be under construction. A large truck was parked in the driveway; the workers went in and out of the site through an opening where the garage door used to be. I'd always stop to chat with them.

"Buenos dias hombres. ¿Cómo es el trabajo?" "Hola tio. Lamento que nuestro camión esté en tu camino. Usa tu bastón!"

There was the cafe where I used to order tuna melts. Now we were getting close to the office. There were the benches where my work friends who smoked would gather on breaks.

I love people who smoke. They remind me of my Dad.

There is the corner where I turned to get to the office. Every morning at 9:25 sharp, the UPS delivery truck arrived. Also at 9:25 every morning, I arrived.

As I swiped my ID badge to enter the front door, other colleagues would often be arriving. I enjoyed holding the door open for them.

Many hours later, I would reverse my route and return home.

It was all so simple, so thoughtless; it's just how I passed my days.

But on this particular day in the car, I was just passing through. My son had set up the appointment for me because he felt I was still too weak and frail from my illnesses to perform any but the most basic of tasks. 

Meanwhile, I'd developed the idea that I was like an onion and it was quite an elaborate identity, with layers and layers of complexity. 

I asked my son on our way to the neurologist if I should tell her about the onion. He said, "No, Dad, let's save that one for another day." At the meeting the doctor administered the cognition test -- the same one they gave me at the hospital many times.

My score, she reported, was 100 percent.

She explained that I'd had a stroke and that I had symptoms, including tremors, consistent with Parkinsonism. That is why my hospital doctor had prescribed carbidopa levodopa.

I loved the sound of that drug, carbidopa levodopa. I used to play with the nurses when they brought it to me. "Can you say that quickly six straight times?"

"Carbidopa levodopa carbidopa levodopa carbidopa levodopa carbidopa levodopa carbidopa levodopa carbidopa levodopa."

They all could do it and they looked really lovely to me, the women and the men, as they spoke that poetry. Most of them wore a far-away expression as they did it.

***

That particular day, as it happens, was to be last time I drove along that route. So it was the end for the wisteria, the hummingbird, the workers, the benches, the smokers, the UPS truck and my ID badge.

It was not, however, the end of the carbidopa levodopa.

There are millions of people like me who have been missing the things we used to do, however mundane, due to this Covid-19 disruption. For us, it is not only a time of remembering but also a time of reinventing our lives.

Now I walk through a new neighborhood, with wisteria, hummingbirds and different people than I'd greet before. It's pleasant; I'm fine.

But I'm one of the lucky ones, with family, resources and the recent return of my health. The disproportionate pain inflicted by Covid-19 is to the poor, to minorities. This tells us nothing about Covid-19, but volumes about the nature of our society.

Decades of activism by my generation have sliced away a small portion of the poverty and racism we discovered in our youth, but much work remains. That there are people in my country who pretend to care about these realities but support politicians who demonize the poor and minorities through cruel fantasies like "massive voter fraud," which is a lie, saddens me.

That there are people who think that it doesn't matter that a man in power repeatedly used his money and access to sexually abuse women saddens me.

That there are people who support a coward, an obvious bully, a man who abuses other people from behind his shield of bodyguards, saddens me.

That there are people who don't care that such a man attacks my colleagues in the press who are only doing their jobs saddens me very deeply.

That there are people, many people, who buy his bullshit, saddens me, and yes, even angers me.

I didn't devote 54 years trying to practice socially responsible journalism and survive a stroke for it to come to this.

So yes I am nostalgic, I'm wistful, I miss what I've lost. But that stroke didn't kill me. 

And I still have my voice.

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