I’ve been waiting for La Rad to post a comment to the Hemingway story, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen, so I’m moving on.

---

Susan, Larry, Robert, Diane, Katherine, Matt, Emma

---

As I was driving down Central St, I passed by neighbor, Joy. I waved and then I pulled into my driveway. As I got out of my truck, I turned to see Joy had made a u-turn and pulled in behind me. I walked up to her and said,

“We got your grandsons. Another great Christmas card.” (Her daughter has three blonde boys, each a year or two apart, the oldest must be about ten.)

“I didn’t like Kyle’s smile but..”

“Come on, Joy, you’re a nitpicker. It wasn’t as perfect as last years and …”

“A professional took that one.”

“With the sand dunes and the boardwalk and the beach plums?’

“And that boardwalk has special meaning to Bob (her husband), it’s where he grew up.”

“I didn’t know that. And how did you like our Christmas card?”

“Next time I’m going to put a note in mine nagging you for yours.”

“Believe me, you’ve brought it up so many times, your card already comes with that note.”

The last time I’d talked to Joy was right after Patti died and we’d both, then, caught up on family matters. At some point, we always talk about the two widows, Mary and Dolly, who used to live between us. I’d walk through both yards to get to Joy and Bob’s.

“I guess you heard about Dolly?” My Two Neighbors and Parting Company

“No, I’ve been meaning to visit her again (In the nursing home behind Emerson Hospital).

“Dolly died. She finally got to go to her daughter’s in Texas, but she lived only three months.”

“Three months?”

“She had cancer, but no one knew it. At least she didn’t suffer much.”

“And, Mary, is she still in the same nursing home?”

“Mary doesn’t recognize anyone anymore.”

by Harold Bloom

 

Frank O’Connor, who disliked Hemingway as intensely as he liked Chekhov, remarks in The Lonely Voice that Hemingway’s stories “illustrate a technique in search of a subject,” and therefore become “a minor art.” Let us see. Read the famous sketch called “Hills Like White Elephants,” five pages that are almost all dialogue, between the young man and her lover, while they wait for a train at a station in a provincial Spanish town. They are continuing a disagreement as to the abortion he wishes for her to undergo when they reach Madrid. The story captures the moment of her defeat, and very likely the death of their relationship. And that is all. The dialogue makes clear that the woman is vital and decent, while the man is a sensible emptiness, selfish and unloving. The reader is wholly with her when she responds to his “I’d do anything for you” with “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking.” Seven pleases are a lot, but as repetition they are precise and persuasive in “Hills Like White Elephants”. The story is beautifully prefigured in that simile of a title. Long and white, the hills across the valley of Ebro “look like white elephants” to the woman, not to the man. White elephants, proverbial Siamese royal gifts to courtiers who would be ruined by the expense of their upkeep, become a larger metaphor for unwanted babies, and even more for erotic relationships too spiritually costly when a man is inadequate.

From the book’s preface:

There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you’re fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you’re alone, going on without further meditation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in your friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

by Harold Bloom

 

Frank O’Connor, who disliked Hemingway as intensely as he liked Chekhov, remarks in The Lonely Voice that Hemingway’s stories “illustrate a technique in search of a subject,” and therefore become “a minor art.” Let us see. Read the famous sketch called “Hills Like White Elephants,” five pages that are almost all dialogue, between the young man and her lover, while they wait for a train at a station in a provincial Spanish town. They are continuing a disagreement as to the abortion he wishes for her to undergo when they reach Madrid. The story captures the moment of her defeat, and very likely the death of their relationship. And that is all. The dialogue makes clear that the woman is vital and decent, while the man is a sensible emptiness, selfish and unloving. The reader is wholly with her when she responds to his “I’d do anything for you” with “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking.” Seven pleases are a lot, but as repetition they are precise and persuasive in “Hills Like White Elephants”. The story is beautifully prefigured in that simile of a title. Long and white, the hills across the valley of Ebro “look like white elephants” to the woman, not to the man. White elephants, proverbial Siamese royal gifts to courtiers who would be ruined by the expense of their upkeep, become a larger metaphor for unwanted babies, and even more for erotic relationships too spiritually costly when a man is inadequate.

From the book’s preface:

There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you’re fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you’re alone, going on without further meditation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in your friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

Ernest Hemingway

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

‘What should we drink?’ the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

‘It’s pretty hot,’ the man said.

‘Let’s drink beer.’

‘Dos cervezas,’ the man said into the curtain.

‘Big ones?’ a woman asked from the doorway.

‘Yes. Two big ones.’

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’

The girl looked at the bead curtain. ‘They’ve painted something on it,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’

‘Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.’

‘Could we try it?’

The man called ‘Listen’ through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

‘Four reales.’ ‘We want two Anis del Toro.’

‘With water?’

‘Do you want it with water?’

‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘Is it good with water?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘You want them with water?’ asked the woman.

‘Yes, with water.’

‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.

‘That’s the way with everything.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’

‘Oh, cut it out.’

‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’

‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’

‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’

‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’

‘I guess so.’

The girl looked across at the hills.

‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’

‘Should we have another drink?’

‘All right.’

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

‘The beer’s nice and cool,’ the man said.

‘It’s lovely,’ the girl said.

‘It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,’ the man said. ‘It’s not really an operation at all.’

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

‘I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.’

The girl did not say anything.

‘I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.’

‘Then what will we do afterwards?’

‘We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.’

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

‘And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.’

‘I know we will. Yon don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.’

‘So have I,’ said the girl. ‘And afterwards they were all so happy.’

‘Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’

‘And you really want to?’

‘I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.’

‘And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?’

‘I love you now. You know I love you.’

‘I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?’

‘I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.’

‘If I do it you won’t ever worry?’

‘I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.’

‘Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t care about me.’

‘Well, I care about you.’

‘Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.’

‘I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.’

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said we could have everything.’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘We can have the whole world.’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘We can go everywhere.’

‘No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.’

‘It’s ours.’

‘No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.’

‘But they haven’t taken it away.’

‘We’ll wait and see.’

‘Come on back in the shade,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t feel that way.’

‘I don’t feel any way,’ the girl said. ‘I just know things.’

‘I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do -‘

‘Nor that isn’t good for me,’ she said. ‘I know. Could we have another beer?’

‘All right. But you’ve got to realize – ‘

‘I realize,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t we maybe stop talking?’

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

‘You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘ that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.’

‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.’

‘Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.’

‘Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.’

‘It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.’

‘Would you do something for me now?’

‘I’d do anything for you.’

‘Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?’

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.

‘But I don’t want you to,’ he said, ‘I don’t care anything about it.’

‘I’ll scream,’ the girl siad.

The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. ‘The train comes in five minutes,’ she said.

‘What did she say?’ asked the girl.

‘That the train is coming in five minutes.’

The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.

‘I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,’ the man said. She smiled at him.

‘All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.’

He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the bar-room, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

‘Do you feel better?’ he asked.

‘I feel fine,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.’

Matt sporting his new leather jacket and one of about fifty Italian silk ties his Aunt Joan sent him.

By Dan Downing (aka smiling)

The Elegant Christmas Brunch at Kibbe’s two Saturdays ago is worth re-celebrating.
Memorable highlights:

– Individual menus on which the usual suspects mark their eating preferences and hand to short-order-cook Adam for processing.

– Inimitable Kibbe presentation, complete with take-home nips for the guys and Christmas Tree bells for the ladies.

– Schreib on a roll of hilarious one-liners, undoubtedly aided by his new Peruvian hat, egged on by Fan Jan, and laughed at by all.

– Q objecting to his wife and everyone else’s abuse.
***Photo Censored***
– Ginger giving Dan the double-fingered salute (mouth shut, gums still sore from surgery) in response to Dan’s email about flossing better, thereby elevating their relationship to a new level of intimacy.

Hurrah for an emerging Christmas tradition that’s quickly replacing those boring Camping dinners!
Michael sent me this photo, his favorite, of his lovely and long-suffering wife, Diane. Look closely at her socks.

By Dan Downing (aka smiling)

The Elegant Christmas Brunch at Kibbe’s two Saturdays ago is worth re-celebrating.
Memorable highlights:

– Individual menus on which the usual suspects mark their eating preferences and hand to short-order-cook Adam for processing.


– Inimitable Kibbe presentation, complete with take-home nips for the guys and Christmas Tree bells for the ladies.


– Schreib on a roll of hilarious one-liners, undoubtedly aided by his new Peruvian hat, egged on by Fan Jan, and laughed at by all.

– Q objecting to his wife and everyone else’s abuse.
***Photo Censored***
– Ginger giving Dan the double-fingered salute (mouth shut, gums still sore from surgery) in response to Dan’s email about flossing better, thereby elevating their relationship to a new level of intimacy.

Hurrah for an emerging Christmas tradition that’s quickly replacing those boring Camping dinners!
Michael sent me this photo, his favorite, of his lovely and long-suffering wife, Diane. Look closely at her socks.

Following up on the last entry:

From the University of Kentucky Department of Entomology

The Japanese have used insects as human food since ancient times. The practice probably started in the Japanese Alps, where many aquatic insects are captured and eaten. Thousands of years ago, this region had a large human population but a shortage of animal protein. Since the area had an abundance of aquatic insects, this food source became very important for human survival. The Japanese still use insects in many recipes. If you were to go to a restaurant in Tokyo, you might have the opportunity to sample some of these insect-based dishes:

hachi-no-ko – boiled wasp larvae
wasp larvae

zaza-mushi – aquatic insect larvae

inago – fried rice-field grasshoppers
Grasshopper

semi – fried cicada
Cicada

sangi – fried silk moth pupae
Pupae

Most of these insects are caught wild except for silk moth pupae. They are by-products of the silk industry. Silk moths are raised in mass for their ability to produce silk. The larvae, the young silk moths, produce the silk. Once they pupate, they can no longer produce silk and are then used as food.

From the unposted rakkity Japan Chronicles
Mike,

Don’t post this around mealtime.

Today I dispersed my food items from the warming cabinet onto a tray without looking carefully at the contents of the dishes. After I had started chowing down, I looked more carefully at the strange things on one of the plate (see attached photo). Had I actually eaten one of those? They look like bugs! Nahh..couldn’t be. 

Mukul sat down, and I asked him what they were. Insects, maybe? He said, “No, if this were India, I would say yes, but in Japan, I don’t think so. We can ask Shibasaki san tomorrow what they were.” Mukul ate them with gusto.

Even with his example, I couldn’t eat any more. I was sure those little tendils are legs or antennas. And are those little beady eyes? Maybe if they were fried and battered, or saute’d in dark chocolate,
I would go for them. But not as they are. Maybe Peter can illuminate me about their vegetable nature..

rakkity shamaru

From the unposted rakkity Japan Chronicles
Mike,

Don’t post this around mealtime.

Today I dispersed my food items from the warming cabinet onto a tray without looking carefully at the contents of the dishes. After I had started chowing down, I looked more carefully at the strange things on one of the plate (see attached photo). Had I actually eaten one of those? They look like bugs! Nahh..couldn’t be. 

Mukul sat down, and I asked him what they were. Insects, maybe? He said, “No, if this were India, I would say yes, but in Japan, I don’t think so. We can ask Shibasaki san tomorrow what they were.” Mukul ate them with gusto.

Even with his example, I couldn’t eat any more. I was sure those little tendils are legs or antennas. And are those little beady eyes? Maybe if they were fried and battered, or saute’d in dark chocolate,
I would go for them. But not as they are. Maybe Peter can illuminate me about their vegetable nature..

rakkity shamaru

Mike,

Is this a suitable subject for the blog. You be the judge.

I was doing my weekly clothes washing and happened into the men’s room next door. Pushed open one of the stalls and nearly fell backwards in astonishment at what I saw. See attachment.) I hadn’t seen one of these since ’72 in Indonesia, where they probably have them still. I checked the other stalls here and in the computer buiding, and there were the usual modern electrically-heated (I kid you not), super-efficient appliances.

So why is this relic still around? My guess is that some of the farm boy students or, maybe, some of the more ancient astronomers, don’t know what do do with the new-fangled things, and they resort to the old standby (squatby) that the Shoguns used.

Your faithful reporter on Nobeyama trivia,
Shamaru

Editor’s note: Ed’s either in the air or back home by now.

This is an overly long saga about my broken finger. I’m calling it a saga because it began at Saga-Man’s house. Mark Queijo can drive to the local drugstore to buy dental floss and return with a publishable memoir. In fact, he can’t drive to the drugstore without coming back with some kind of this-could-only-happen-to-me tale.

****************

Logging day at Mark Queijo’s country estate follows a well-established routine. Every family member and every friend with an arm to twist arrives after dawn and chooses a specific task. Topple trees, tumble cut logs to the log splitter, split those logs, burn brush – anything but stand around and supervise.

Mark’s wife, Jan, and I manned the log splitter. Though a frighteningly powerful machine, the splitter is a safe tool because it minds its own business. Circular saws have a habit of snuggling up against their owners but this thing is like a one-command genie out of the bottle. Issue an order, stand back, and watch its piston driven wedge effortlessly cleave logs that would dull Paul Bunyan’s axe. As Jan says, “I feel so powerful.”

For a while there, we were quite a team. Our voices smothered by engine noise; Jan and I communicated at first by hand signals. I’d drop a log in front of the iron wedge, she’d engage the lever that would send the wedge forward, and I’d signal when to release and retract it. We’d both grab the oak sections and together we’d heave the halves at Mark’s feet where he’d stack it as cordwood. Soon Jan no longer needed hand signals and the wood it-was-a-flying off the splitter. We were a flawless team until I reached to rotate a knotted log as she engaged the lever. My left ring finger snapped like a sun-ripened pea pod.

****************
I arrived home with my left hand in a bag of ice and Diane insisted she drive me to the emergency room. I shrugged her off (like she needed another afternoon in a hospital?), slipped into a warm bath, then dressed in decent clothes and packed Ed’s most recent book loan – “Ice: Stories Of Survival From Polar Expeditions” – and two New Yorkers. I hoped to be home by dinner.

But this was my lucky day. My competition for the medical staff’s attention was an eleven year old hockey player with a head injury. I thought surely my bent finger would take precedence over his vomiting and even if it didn’t, I’d be home in an hour. Sure enough, moments later I sat talking to the pretty, Eau de Something Erotic-smelling x-ray tech, lead apron still on my lap.

“You’re all done.” She said. The x-ray’s readable. I’ll walk you back to your room.”

“How about my finger? Is it broken?”

“You know I can’t answer that.”

“Doesn’t hurt to ask.”

“No it doesn’t,” she smiled. As we neared my room she said, “You know I’ve got a friend who’s going to split logs this weekend. She thinks nothing bad can happen. I might show her your x-ray.”

I read Ed’s book until the emergency room physician, reserved, Germanic Margaret entered. She ordered a finger splint, explained why she thought I’d need a pin or two (“The way it flopped over.”), and quizzed me intently on how the injury occurred. You see, she too intended to use a log splitter over the weekend. Suddenly log splitters are as common as vacuum cleaners. She also referred me to Dr. Jeffrey Brown, a plastic surgeon. Dr. Brown, I remembered, saved Adam’s routed finger. Whereas others would have lopped the tip off, Dr. Brown shaped the mushy flesh like wet clay, and today Adam has a fully functional middle finger.

****************

Jeff’s a handsome guy at six feet tall, with traces of gray in his brown hair, and a solid frame that suggests daily workouts. We quickly developed a good-old down-home rapport. We talked about the mellow Midwest – he’s from Michigan – his family, his Christmas plans, the book I brought with me ( “Ice”), hardy folk of yore, the weather on the Great Lakes, college football, and what to do about my finger.

“You pin it or you plate it. A plate will allow you to bend your finger and use it right away. However, I don’t have experience with plates that small. I’m not sure they are even appropriate in this case, but I could refer you to an orthopedic surgeon.”

I mulled that one over for about three seconds. Not only had Adam raved about him, but the ER nurse had hollered, “He’s good,” as I turned to leave.

“A referral would mean I’d have to start all over, which means waiting around for another appointment, all with no guarantees. I’ll stick with you and the pins.”

****************

The pinning process was a rather casual event. The day surgical suite required only that I remove my shirt. A Johnny covered my pants and booties my work boots. And like my knee scope, I was fully awake, but without the cozy Valium blanket. Jeffrey numbed my hand by injecting it with Lidocaine in four different places. As I lay on my back, arm outstretched, the surgical nurse bathed my hand in Betadine, Jeff responded to my earlier statement, “We could do this at my house.” “See, this is why your kitchen wouldn’t work. The procedure’s messy and we need an x-ray machine””

With a numb hand (And believe me, this is just like dentistry. Until they drill into you and there is no feeling, you’re never really sure you won’t leap out of the chair or in this case, off the table), Jeffrey pulled the end of my finger back in place – I felt the tugging on my arm – drilled into my finger – I heard the whirring – and inserted two pins.

“Okay, maybe not my kitchen but how about my shop? It sounds like I’m at work.”

Jeffrey and his assistant chattered throughout the procedure. I heard constant updates about how things were going and believe me, it didn’t sound good until the very end, when Jeff said, “That’s perfect.”

“Aaah, Dr. Brown, I hate to tell you this, but if the homeowner’s around I say the exact same thing. I don’t care if I’ve hung cabinet doors upside down. Half the job is how you sell it.”

His assistant offered, “You’re a woodworker right?”

“Yep.”

“How does within a thirty-second of an inch sound?”

“Like it’s time for me to go home.”

****************

In spite of the perfect x-ray and the proclamations from all, when I returned the next week for my first office visit, and the splint was removed, my ring finger looked like it was in love with my pinky. It had turned around to face it’s new friend and bent over as if to give it a hug. By my description, you’d a thought there would be no discussion about repair. Break it and re-pin it. However, we debated for so long, I finally said, “Okay, Dr. Brown, in my line of work if there’s a question about the quality of a material, or the design of a project, I’ll say to the homeowner, “If it were my house… .” How about if it were your finger?”

“Let’s get a second opinion.”

****************

Dr. Feldman, an orthopedic surgeon, saw me later that same day. In sharp contrast, he is thinner and darker than Dr. Brown, without the Brad Pitt short hair look, but he’s equally personable. We talked about frivolous lawsuits, malpractice insurance, comparisons between carpentry and orthopedic surgery, how different his practice in Lowell is from his wife’s in Concord, growing up in Newton, living in Carlisle and my finger.

“It has to be re-done, but you know, we don’t get too many shots at this.”

I laughed – two plain-speaking regular-guy surgeons in a row. How could I be so fortunate?

“I wouldn’t be worried about this finger if I hadn’t already done this.” (I held up my right hand showing him the missing top of my index finger and the thumb that bends only with help).

“Who would you like to do it?”

I wavered. I hoped to retackle this project with Dr. Brown, but Dr. Feldman reminded me of the basketball player who demands the ball in crucial situations.

“Dr. Feldman, I should know the answer to this, but why was I referred to a plastic surgeon in the first place?”

“Jeff works on hands too, but I do more of them. I only do hands.”

“Then when can you do mine?”

He put his head in his hands and hesitated, “ I think I can do it tomorrow.”

“I hate to keep making comparisons between your profession and mine, but when pushed, I always promise more than I can give. Deep inside I know I’ve shoved out of my mind the six other reasons why it would be impossible.”

“Give me your number and if I can’t I’ll call you tomorrow.”

****************

My second pining in two weeks took place the next day as promised. So close in time leaves room for nothing but comparisons. Lowell General’s approach is crisper than Emerson’s – similar operating rooms, but the staff felt more caffeinated. After Staci, the OR nurse, swaddled me in that fresh-out-of-the-oven warm blanket, I drifted off. As I do in the dentist chair. It’s something about the prone position that puts me to sleep.

“Mr Miller … Mr. Miller.”

I opened my eyes to see Dr. Feldman hovering over me.

“What?”

“Were you up all night?”

“No (Actually I had been but I couldn’t think fast enough to simply say yes.) but how often does someone tuck you into bed? With a warm blanket no less?”

“You mean your wife doesn’t do that.?” It was a rhetorical question which didn’t need answer. He was laughing too hard to hear me anyway.

Dr. Feldman removed the two pins Dr. Brown had inserted and drilled one right down the center of my finger, through both joints to where the tip of the pin just kissed the knuckle joint. I’d been peacefully zoning in and out, but he snapped me back to the present.

“Raise your right hand.”

“You talking to me?” Remember they also tent your head so there’s a certain feeling of remove.

“Who else would I be talking to?”

He wanted to compare my two hands. I opened and closed my right hand and he looked to see how my fingers lined up. Dr. Feldman then tore a hole in the blue blanket and raised my left hand so I could see it. He twisted my wrist this way and that, asked me to straighten my fingers and then make a fist.

“How does your finger look to you?, ” he asked

“Straight,” I answered.

Behind Dr. Feldman hung a screen with my latest x-ray. The pin almost perfectly bisected the first two digits in my ring finger.

“How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Place that pin so perfectly? My friend, Adam, is the best woodworker I know and he couldn’t have done that with a clamp, a drill press and nothing at stake.”

“What can I say, I’m good, but there’s one more thing I could try.”

“No, let’s call it a day.”
****************

I’m not dragging this on much longer. The night before my office visit after the second pinning, I removed my splint to see my ring and middle finger lining up like pickets in a fence. Rather than write about that visit, I’m ending with an email from Bill Lewis, longtime friend, sometime camping partner, and the missing character in “Cheers.” Bill could have occupied the bar stool between Norm and Cliff. Anyway, he’s on our email distro list, so he gets sporadic updates to which, curiously, he rarely replies.

Mike,

I sometimes feel out of the loop with a lot of what you guys are doing, but let me see if I get this straight. You were out chopping wood‚ with Q’s wife, and when she pulled the trigger, you got a broken finger. This has started an on-line dialog between Mark and Jan, presumably because they no longer talk face to face. You get an x-ray showing chopsticks protruding from the afore-mentioned digit, looking more like an apprentice carpenter gone wild with the nail gun than something done in a Boston hospital.

The worry in the whole situation centers around your ability to play the dealer in some sort of low rent ESPN Texas Hold tourney, with no one mentioning the obvious fact that a more clean cut would have given you a pair of halves.

Meanwhile, the banter continues in a syrupy cyber exchange that sounds about as sincere as a Shoe Box Get-Well-Soon card. Even if I got a few facts jumbled, be sure you know that even Bill Lewis cares.

Bill