for Henry, Jack and Navi
I’m in Brooklyn for my first grandchild Henry’s first birthday, rushing along a main street in Greenpoint, where he lives with his parents, Joey and Craig. I’ve just left yet another optometrist who says he can’t replace my lost contact lens unless I plunk down cash for a complete eye exam. Though I have a recent prescription from my doctor in Vancouver, it doesn’t include a recommended name brand like the Americans require.
“There’s got to be a way around this,” I think, slightly blind with more than mere frustration. It’s noon, the streets are bustling with shoppers, and I’m going as fast as my clogs will let me. I’m late to babysit Henry.
Just when I start to think about how he’s on the verge of walking and that I hope he doesn’t fall too much in the process of learning, I hit a patch of black ice on a corner ramp and go flying on all fours, to land kissing the cement.
Suddenly I’m a baby again. Even if I can’t remember what it was like originally, now it feels humiliating to fall—to quite possibly be seen as drunk, clumsy, old and helpless. I want to lie there bawling about the indignity of it all and from the searing pain that shoots through my ankle and my wrist.
Within seconds a construction worker from a nearby site appears to give me a hand up. He says, “Yesterday, exact same spot, someone else fell, imagine that, two people in two days.”
“Full moon,” I say and force myself to walk away with a straight back as if nothing had happened.
Craig searches in the freezer for a couple of bags of vegetables, which I apply to my wrist and ankle and after ten minutes I’m fine enough to take care of Henry for the afternoon.
That evening I’m walking with Joey, who is pushing Henry in his stroller along the same main street, and I fall again. I wish I could say it was in the exact same spot as before, because then I’d make sure to tell the construction worker about it the next day. But it’s at another ramp at another corner, with another patch of black ice and the street is now packed with people shopping not for lunch but for dinner.
I feel the same twist in my ankle, which was probably weak from the first fall, the same impact to my wrist, trying once again to break my fall. Joey has never seen her mother sprawled out like this and is in a flurry to help me up.
I try to laugh it off and when I get back to my apartment in Carroll Gardens I put ice on my hand, which seems the only thing still hurting this time. Within an hour there’s a furious egg sitting on my wrist.
The next morning, remembering all the Canadian cautionary tales about American medical costs, in particular the legendary five-hundred-dollar bill for an Aspirin someone was given at a hospital, I call the company from which I bought traveller’s medical insurance. After stipulating what they’ll cover (x-rays, yes, casts, yes, surgery—call first), they instruct me to go to the nearest hospital, which they say is twenty miles away.
Noah calls from work and tells me about a hospital which is only a few blocks away. A minute later Sarah phones and suggests I take a taxi. But I decide to walk and by the time I get there my ankle is throbbing. I try to call the insurance company again to tell them my ankle might need some medical attention too, but cellphones don’t work in this part of the hospital, the emergency room is packed and I don’t want to risk missing my turn by leaving the area.
At “Reception” I’m told, “It won’t be long.” An hour later at “Triage” after listening to the nurse calmly tell her colleague about the patient who had just tried to kill her, I notice she’s wearing the same clogs I’d had on when I’d fallen. I’m in rubber boots today. She smiles knowingly: “Clogs are good for indoors only, never on ice,” and points to the cast on her hand. She’s half my age; this doesn’t bode well for me.
After taking my vital signs, she tells me I’m being fast-tracked. Maybe it’s because it looks like there’s now a ripe tomato sitting on the top of my hand near the egg on my wrist—with a couple of slices of bread it would make a full meal. I sit down beside a couple who are fuming about their long wait. They tell me, “For our next emergency we won’t come back here again.” An hour later, I’m called to “Registration” and after being asked for the standard information, the next question is, “What religion are you?” I’m too rattled to ask why it matters. Maybe I’m looking really old, really sick, on the verge of dying. I mumble, “None.”
A half an hour later I see a doctor who is wearing a yarmulke. “I’m here because I’m a klutz,” I tell him. “In all my years of practising I’ve never heard anyone say that.” I’m glad to give him a new experience—he looks, like his colleagues in Emergency, exhausted and bored, as if they could all use something new.
I’d really like to talk with him about another emergency today, about how Israel is pounding the hell out of Gaza City in these final days of Little Bush’s term in office. But he pre-empts any real conversation between us with his curt question, “Are you pregnant?” and then, sensing my delight that my recently cut hair must have taken years off my looks, he adds, “I have to ask men that too.” I’m speechless.
An hour later after a series of x-rays I’m back in his office and he tells me, “It’s only a bad sprain.” “I’m supposed to have osteoporosis, but look I fell twice and nothing broke!” I boast. The doctor says, “Maybe you just didn’t fall the right way.” This doctor is a real downer. He puts an arm brace on me to keep my wrist immobile and gives me a tensor bandage for my now very swollen ankle, but promises not to mention it in his report because that might invalidate the original claim. (In the end the hospital will bill the insurance company twelve hundred dollars just for my wrist.) Thanks to the fact that the woman in charge of “Discharge” is missing from her desk I’m spared another procedure that would have taken another hour. I have indeed been fast-tracked: the whole thing in only four hours. I’d been sure I’d be there all day.
I hobble happily out of the hospital, work up the nerve to scribble a brand name on my contact lens prescription, and try at yet another optometrist. This one looks at the brace on my arm, squints at the prescription, and then gives me a couple of samples. I’ll be able to see properly again—maybe I’ll even be able to see the black ice next time.
On the radio at my apartment I hear there’s been a plane crash in Manhattan. My first thought is “another 9/11,” because that possibility still beats palpably beneath the surface of New York City. But this time the blame goes to the geese that had flown into the motors of a jet airplane.
A little boy who’d witnessed the incident from his mother’s car is interviewed. He’d said, “Look Mummy, a plane is landing on the river.” The extremely skilled and self-possessed pilot, “Sully” Sullenberger, had apparently instructed his passengers, “Brace for impact,” and then smoothly landed the plane on the Hudson River.
I turn on the TV to watch as the 115 people emerge from the plane and stand on its wing waiting to be rescued by nearby ferries. It’s the coldest day of the year so far, eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, and everyone is shivering. But no one has died, and there was only one minor injury.
From their speakerphone, Kelly says, “Already they’re calling it a ‘miracle.’ Soon they’ll be selling holy water from the Hudson River.” “They were terrorist geese,” Daniel comments. With my good hand I wash out a pair of wool socks and fall asleep listening to them steaming on the radiator.
A week later I’m on my way to watch the Obama inauguration with Henry because I want to be able to tell him some day we shared this moment of history together. At the subway station two very large middle-aged women are blocking my way. They are so engrossed in their conversation they’re walking at a snail’s pace.
Even if my ankle weren’t sore and I could dart in front of them, I’m chicken to do it. But the woman wearing the “Wrestle Mania” logo in big sequins on her jacket hears my timid “excuse me” and says, “Oh, sorry for dawdling, it’s just that I’m so excited. My husband’s being inaugurated.”“Your husband? He’s mine!” I pitch back. “We’ll share him,” she says.
By the time I get to Henry he’s had his morning nap. Except for “hi” and “duck” he speaks in his own language, but today everything he says seems to be “Obama.” He still crawls, but likes it when we do our tentative stroll around the room. I walk slowly behind him, my knees almost touching his back, his arms are raised above his head, his hands firmly gripping mine. There’s no chance of him falling without my rescuing him first.
At noon Joey puts the TV on, and Henry, agog at the flickering images, leads me over to it and clings to the small set for support, barely obscuring it, he’s so small himself. Henry’s a friendly soul and likes to engage with everyone in sight. Seeing Obama’s hand on the screen he reaches out to hold it.
When the band plays “Hail to the Chief,” clutching the TV set Henry starts to sway and bounce up and down. He’s dancing. If we’re fearful that in our hopes of him we’ve raised Obama too high and don’t want him to fall, we’ll all just have to hold him up. We’ll all learn to walk together.