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In my last blog entry, I neglected to thank all those friends who came to see me while I was in the hospital and rehab center. In each, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, dressed only in a shapeless hospital gown with my no-butt butt hanging out the back. It’s interesting how quickly one looses one’s modesty under such circumstances. Visitors are a reminder of that other life we lead, from which we are temporarily divorced and to which we hope to soon return and are a much needed breath of fresh air. One of my guests even went so far as to suggest that my room in the rehab center needed some decoration, and brought on a subsequent visit a lovely plant and a small lithograph. How thoughtful!

It also occurred to me that I should have included the current outcome of my time incarcerated in our Great American Health Care System. My spine specialist, seen almost immediately after leaving the rehab center, x-rayed my lower spine, told me to throw away the brace and come back to her in 30 days when the compression fractures should be healed. Just don’t lift anything heavier than 20 pounds. Although my lower back aches most of the time and I take many seated rests during the day, I’m optimistic that when the fractures have healed, the aching will go away and I won’t need any further treatment. I saw my primary care physician – although I had to wait two weeks for an appointment – and he took over management of my various ailments as I had wanted him to do. On the presumption that my dizziness was actually caused by temporal, positional vertigo (although that had never been diagnosed), we discontinued my meclizine and the dizziness has not come back. Thank God for that! My doctor also referred me to a neurologist for consultation on the neuropathy in my feet. Of course his first free appointment slot is in the latter part of August. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to take the neurontin we presume at least lessens the pain. The pain in my gut continues but we presume it to be only sore muscles from my various falls combined with the traditional and ever present grumblings from my irritable bowel syndrome.

My physical therapy team, both Mary Sue in the rehab center, and Jason in my out-patient center, have each recommended – no, insisted – that I throw away my Crocs. They tell me Crocs provide absolutely no support for my feet and that my various falls in the last year are probably due to my stubbing my left toe and then losing the balance I might otherwise have with studier support. This is hard news. I’ve worn nothing but Crocs for years and as a result they have become a kind of signature, a trademark for my personality. Following their advice, I bought a new pair of sneakers that are comfortable enough in size 12, but hard to drag into and out of my car in that small crack allowed when the door is open. Parking slots do not provide enough room to make getting these gunboats in and out easily. In one recent case, I had to take the shoe off in order to get my foot through the small crack in the door. I guess this is a small price to pay for more support that might prevent another fall. I’ve stacked the Crocs in my closet but I haven’t yet passed them on to Goodwill or thrown them away.

All in all, I’m grateful to be recovering. It has been a very long six months. I can walk now without assistance (although not yet very fast, very far or for very long), drive my car and generally go about my usual routine. I’m not yet ready to stand long enough to prepare a dinner or brunch and so have not yet resumed my entertaining. I hope my friends will understand that when I do I may serve them a meal of Popeye’s fried chicken, cold slaw and a corn pudding. I think I could probably manage that.

Finally, my trip through the Great American Health Care System reminds me of the many years my aging mother spent in this strange land and has given me at least a glimpse of what lies ahead in my future. It’s not a pretty picture.

Stay tuned.

Monday, June 18, 2012A Trip to the Hospital


Because surgical replacement of my left knee five years ago went so smoothly and I recovered so quickly, I expected the replacement of my right knee, performed in the middle of April, to be equally benign. Wrong! My surgeon patiently explained that every knee is different and it soon became apparent that this one was not so happy to be sawed away and replaced by a shiny, new titanium device. I experienced more swelling and more pain, accompanied, strangely, by insomnia, which I’m told is normal after knee replacement but for which I was totally unprepared. Of course The American Way of Pharmacy came rushing to my rescue with two powerful drugs, one for pain and the other for sleep. Both were prescribed “as needed,” a license to take them whenever I thought it necessary. After surgery, happiness is having good drugs. Get well soon!

In the first week after surgery, when under the supervision of Stanley, my Slave-Driver-at-Home-Physical Therapist, I realized while doing heel slides, an exercise designed to increase my new knee’s flexibility, that my right heel was numb. I couldn’t feel anything. I was surprised but I didn’t worry. Like so many of us, I thought of it as just one of those things that would eventually go away. But it persisted and by the end of each day, the numbness would tear my attention away from The Evening News by spreading throughout my foot, and seeming determined to meld with my knee pain, it would begin to creep up my ankle and shin. It was very insistent. But I had a remedy. Gulping down my good old Tramadol dulled the pain so that it was bearable enough for me to go back to television. And then, when I went to bed only a few hours later, without realizing that the combination was dangerous, I took my ambien for a good night’s sleep. As a result of the power of these two narcotics, I fell on three separate occasions while getting up to go to the bathroom during the night. The last fall was serious. I couldn’t get back up and had to crawl on my bleeding elbows to drag myself from the bathroom back to my bedroom. In typical Harriet Craig fashion, I worried more about leaving a trail of blood on the carpet than I did about how I was going to get back up onto the bed. For a moment, I considered just lying there on the floor but decided I didn’t want to be found that way in the morning so summoned all my energy and cunning and managed to get back into bed. It was not an easy Friday night!

On the next Sunday morning, I awoke dizzy, so dizzy that it was hard for me to function. I skipped my usual breakfast at Jimmy’s so those of you who know me well will understand that the dizziness was seriously debilitating. This, too, will pass, I thought. But I was wrong, and finally, about noon, admitted that I had to go to a hospital. I didn’t want to call 911 because I knew the city ambulance would take me to Baltimore General Hospital, nearest to where I live, and a hospital with a very poor reputation. Or maybe it’s just bad karma. One of my friends had died there. So I began to call people for a ride, but it was such a beautiful day that all of my usual friends were outside, in the sun, and my phone calls to them for help went unanswered. After trying at least eight people, including all those who had said, “If you ever need anything, anything at all, just call me,” I finally found a friend at home who rushed to my rescue in his new Bentley and took me to the hospital where the knee replacement had been performed. (I wanted to be sure that falling hadn’t damaged the mechanism of the new knee.) I have to admit that despite the pain and dizziness I had a hearty chuckle driving up to the emergency room in the front seat of a Bentley instead of in the back of a Baltimore City ambulance. But thus, by going through the doors of the hospital’s emergency room, I entered the much vaunted American Healthcare System. Well, not so easily. While I was dizzily struggling on my walker toward the inevitable sign-in sheet, an African-American woman rushed by me, almost knocking me down, in her haste to be processed before me. It is said that competition is good for the enterprise.

So My Very Long Wait began at about two o’clock on this beautiful Sunday afternoon and was punctuated only by a few minutes to verify that I indeed had insurance – they won’t even talk to you without it – to take my medical history and to verify a list of my medications. When I finally saw a doctor, many hours later in a tightly antiseptic examining room, he asked me what had happened and I told him: knee replacement surgery, falling several times, neuropathy in my foot, dizziness, some pain in my lower abdomen and lower back. He was clinically absorbed but not particularly sympathetic. With my history of pulmonary emboli, and because I had a huge bruise on my forehead where I had fallen, he sent me for multiple CT scans: of my chest and head. More waiting for the machines to be available. Then more waiting for the results. Finally, after hours in my little room, with my poor driver-friend struggling unsuccessfully for comfort on the only, hard chair in the room, the doctor returned and told me he wasn’t admitting me. What? My friend and I were both incredulous. “Why not?” I asked.

He explained that every emergency room has a Lion at the Gate, someone with a green shade on his – or in this case, her – forehead who went over all the records of incoming patients to see if the preliminary examination produced facts that would enable the hospital to justify charging Medicare for that patient’s stay. My records did not. “How come?” I asked.

“Well,” the doctor said, “you have a whole host of symptoms with no underlying cause that we can see. And none of your symptoms justifies hospitalization.”

“But,” I complained, “if you send me home in this dizzy state, I could fall and do some serious damage, like break a leg.”

“Ah,” he said. And this is a direct quote, “They want you to break a leg.”

“What?” It seemed incredible, not only what he said but also that he had said it.

“That way,” he said, “when you return with your broken leg, you’ll have something we can readily treat and we won’t have to justify a borderline situation to Medicare.”

“I’m not happy about this,” I said. And I went on to protest mightily about the Lion at the Gate’s decision. Finally the doctor said he’d go back to the Lion to ask her if I might be admitted for observation. He explained that if within 24 hours, further examination could find something the hospital could treat, I’d be admitted. And if nothing became apparent in that period of time, I’d be discharged. With my agreement, he left me again, to go back to the Lion. Another long wait began.

Finally, about 10 o’clock that night – I’d been in the emergency room now since two in the afternoon – the Indefinite They (whoever that is) found me a bed and I was wheeled away from the emergency room and up into the bowels of the hospital to a regular room, leaving my poor friend with a terribly aching back to finally leave me and return home. And thus, by entering room 509B, I began The Great American Hospital Experience.

I don’t remember much about the next five days in the hospital. My sister in Colorado, once told where I was, called me, sometimes twice a day and said that in our conversations I slurred my words. So I guess I was pretty heavily sedated on dilaudid, an injectable pain medication prescribed on an “as needed” basis by a hospital doctor who was apparently taking care of me but whom I never saw. And I needed this dilaudid a lot for pain, especially at night when the neuropathy in my heel spread to the rest of my foot and eagerly crawled up my ankle, still determined to merge with the pain in my new knee. When combined with ambien, given to me at night for insomnia, dilaudid made everything in my field of vision just melt downward, dissolving into icicles of reality. Lovely, but also a little scary. I was also given meclizine for my dizziness – no one seems to know why it works - and neurontin, an opium derivative used to prevent seizures, for the neuropathy in my feet. Happiness is drugs. While you have them, enjoy what you see. .Just don’t slur your words.

I do remember being transported to different places in the hospital for tests: CT’s, for my head (to be sure I didn’t have a concussion), of my chest (to rule out a pulmonary embolism – I’ve had two), and x-rays of my new knee (to be sure I hadn’t damaged the mechanism). These tests showed some problems that prompted an MRI of my brain, which showed a “subacute infarct in the left paracentral area of my brain,” or in other words, a non-acute stroke, thought to be the cause of my neuropathy, and two compression fractures of my lower spine, on L-1 and L-4. I remember the two-man team that patiently tried to lower me onto the MRI table without success. The pain in my back was just too powerful. I had to wait until the next morning when, with the help of my morning dose of dilaudid, I could finally lie down for the test. I also remember a man coming into my room and measuring me for a brace designed to prevent further damage to my spine. It was a complicated and ugly rig of plastic forms, straps and Velcro closings that completely encased my upper body, with circular projections in the front that pushed on my chest to prevent bending. I was admonished to wear it any time I was out of bed. It made me look like a praying mantis in a Star Wars movie. I stayed in bed a lot just to avoid wearing it. I also remember guests, friends who came to bring me essentials from home – underwear, shaving cream, toothpaste, a good book – and try to cheer me up. It was a very emotional time for me. While I’m sure I was receiving excellent care, everything felt out of control, people coming and going, giving me drugs or designing a brace, no one telling me anything about the overall picture or explaining what the tests had shown. I never saw a doctor, only nurses, nurses’ aids and the lady who cleaned my room twice a day. I felt overwhelmed and inclined to tears. I remember a kind woman who came into my room and explained that she was with the “spiritual staff” of the hospital. Did I need any spiritual counseling? Oddly, the dam broke and I began to weep. She came over to my bed and just held my hand, a gesture that meant the world to me. How comforting human touch can be, especially when we don’t get it very often. When I got myself under control, she said she was going to mass and would stop in on her way back. What was my favorite color? I told her it was turquoise. When she came back, she gave me a beautifully crocheted prayer shawl in shades of turquoise, knitted by the women’s auxiliary of the hospital for patients who, like me, needed a little manifestation of help from God.

With the administration of these few tests and remedies, the hospital decided it couldn’t keep me any longer; there was nothing more their staff could do. I suppose the Lion at the Gate had a hand in this decision. So on Thursday, the amorphous they said they would move me to a rehabilitation facility. Where did I want to go? I had no idea, so I called my primary care doctor for his recommendation. He told me of a rehab facility in Mays Chapel, the only one he knew. And he signed off by saying, he would be in his office on Friday, but then gone for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, and good luck. It wasn’t a reassuring conversation. But knowing nothing of rehab facilities in the Baltimore area, I took his recommendation, the facility had an open bed, and I was strapped into a wheelchair and into a minivan and transported to the facility - $35.00 please, charged to my Visa card, and thank you – feeling very old and feeble indeed. Not a happy feeling.

At the rehab facility, I had an almost immediate run-in with the staff. My doctor in the hospital had said that since dilaudid was an injectable drug, which couldn’t be administered at home, we should find some other drug that could be taken by mouth. How about oxycodone? That was fine with me. However, when I got to rehab and asked, early in the evening of my first day, for some pain medication, the nurse told me that none had been prescribed. She could see that the dilaudid had been scrubbed and oxycodone added but my records also showed an allergy to codeine, an element in oxycodone so it, too, had been eliminated. Further, the pharmacy that served the rehab facility had made its last delivery for the day so I would have to tough it out for the night. She was sorry. I must admit to not being very kind to her. I was tired and confused and in a lot of growing pain and just lost it. I was not allergic to codeine; how did they get that impression? I was in pain and I needed medication. I didn’t care if the pharmacy had made its last delivery. Get in a car and go to the pharmacy yourself if necessary! Surely in their ample supply of medication they must have one oxycodone somewhere in the building they could give me. She was supposed to be taking care of me. Do something! She left to try to find a solution and about an hour later, I got my oxycodone, at some considerable cost to my reputation.

This run-in with the staff got me off to a bad start and those taking care of me avoided me as much as possible. One day I was taken by wheelchair to a room with a complicated scale that could weigh me in the wheelchair. In maneuvering me around to fit it onto the scale, the nurse pushing my wheelchair punctured a spot on my bare leg with a nasty pointed projection on the scale. My leg began to bleed, the blood running down into my sock. But the staff was concentrating on the scale, not my leg, and it was several days before a doctor noticed the spot and had a nurse clean it up and cover it with a band-aid. It was almost impossible to sleep. The staff turned the lights out in my room at about 8:30 and expected me to sleep. But the phones kept ringing at the nurses’ station, brang, brang, brang brang, brang brang brang, brang. Thank God for ambient! One night the nurse asked Ed, my companion in the room, a man about my age who had taken a pill he shouldn’t have had and had three strokes on the way to the hospital, if he wanted his sleeping pill now or later. “Now, please,” he said. The nurse left. A half hour later, he asked for his sleeping pill again and the nurse said, “We can’t give you any sleeping pills until after nine o’clock.” I wondered why they’d asked him if he wanted it “now” if it wasn’t possible to give it to him then.

On one of the first nights I was there, boxed in by a curtain separating me from Ed in the other bed in my room, I awoke at about two o’clock in the morning to some vague mumbling. A hand appeared on the railing at the end of my bed, followed by a ghostly lady in a wheelchair, obviously lost and wandering. As much as I could tell from her rambling to herself, she was focused on her brother who had taken all her money and no longer brought her coffee and doughnuts when he visited. She started to cry just as an attendant found her in my room and wheeled her away. Raising her arm and pointing her index finger upward, she looked at me and muttered, “You see what I mean?”

And then there was the pill controversy. One morning I was sitting on the john in the bathroom when there was a knock on the door. I opened it a crack to see the pill lady with the little plastic cup of my morning pills. By this time, I was cogent enough to wonder what they were. So I asked if she knew? She closed the door and said she would be right back. I finished in the john and went back to my bed. The pill lady came in a few moments later and asked if I’d taken my pills. I told her I had not. “Well, dey were right dere on dee table. They not there now. So you must have taken them.” All of this was delivered in a Caribbean accent that made it hard to understand.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but there were no pills on the table.”

“Yes. Dey was. I left dem dere. Right on de table! You took dem!”

“I assure you that I didn’t. There were no pills on the table, and I haven’t taken them.”

Angry now, the pill lady began to look around my room to see if she could find evidence that I’d taken my pills. She found a little plastic cup on the window sill, left over from some other pill time and seized on this as evidence that I’d taken my pills. “See here,” she said, triumphantly. “Here’s dee container. You’ve taken dose pills!”

At this point, my patience ran out. I assured her that she had not left the pills on my table, I hadn’t taken them and that the container she was holding as evidence was left over from some previous time. She reacted with anger and stomped out of my room. About an hour later, a different aide brought me my morning pills.

But that was not the end of it. A day later, the original pill lady came into my room and confronted me about the pills. “Why you say you not take dem?” she practically screamed at me. “Now I have to go downstairs to de boss’s office to esplane myself. You jess get me in de trouble! Why you do that?! But no amount of patient reconstruction of the morning, nor explanation that I hadn’t taken my pills, calmed her down. Finally a nurse came into my room and took the pill lady away. I was sorry to get her in trouble but I knew (from previous experience with my mother in a nursing home) that in order to enforce strict administration of medications, the pill lady is supposed to hand you the plastic cup containing the pills, wait to see that you swallow them, and take the plastic cup away.

After these several run-ins with the staff, I began to feel alienated from the circumstances, almost as though my body was there in the bed, but my mind was elsewhere, looking down on this pathetic situation. Meanwhile, my sister had been calling me every day, always asking how I was and wondering what she could do for me. Should she come to be with me? I assured her that I didn’t need that. But finally I told her it would be a great comfort to me if she would shake up the place by calling the head honcho and trying to get an overall picture of what was going on and what plans the facility had for me. When might I go home? A psychologist with a doctoral degree, my sister has an air pf prestige I knew the facility would honor. They would listen to her. She told them I was not senile, that I had not taken my pills, that I had run a multi-million dollar company and should be participating in whatever plans the facility had for me. As a result, the honchos called a plan-of-care meeting for the following morning, with the staff gathered around and my sister on a speaker phone. We all agreed that the facility really couldn’t do much for me except give me some physical and occupational therapy and that I should go home as soon as possible. After that, the staff treated me differently and I began to joke with them in order to keep the happiness ball rolling.

When this saga all began, I had been in physical therapy for my new knee for a week or so. The knee was so surprisingly flexible that Jason, my PT guy, didn’t even need to work on that, but concentrated instead on increasing my muscle strength around the knee and on my balance, both needed to help me walk normally again. The focus of the rehab staff was on getting me ready to go home so Mary Sue worked mostly on balance. I was not very good at it at first but after a couple of sessions, I had improved enough for her to take me outside to walk on both the sidewalk and the grass, which is a bumpy, less steady surface. I progressed quickly. In my first occupational therapy session – designed to help me perform practical chores rather than just improve on standing and walking – I readily took clothes out of the dryer, folded them and put them away in a chest of drawers, made a bed (giving the final pillows a jaunty, casual air), got pots and pans out of kitchen cabinets and moved plates and glasses to the dining room table. Chanteuse, the OT instructor, a happy, dumpling sort of African American woman, asked me what I would be cooking. I demonstrated how I’d put lamb chops in the broiler, pre-boil broccoli and then sauté it in a little garlic and olive oil, and showed her how I could roast vegetables or potatoes in the oven. She was captivated by the menu and asked me for my recipes. So I did well in therapy right away, in the very first session.

By Tuesday – I’d been in the rehab facility since Friday – I was angling to go home. I could move easily on my walker and didn’t really see what more the staff could do for me. Susie’s call had encouraged them to take me more seriously and I had begun to joke with them and call them all by name. Anne, the Charge Nurse, a large and imposing African American woman with an identification card around her neck, and one of those responsible for making the decision to let me go, told me, for instance, that she was open to a bribe but she was very expensive. I promised her the best chocolate cookies in the world and she laughed and said that would do it. But the facility kept me for another day and finally let me go on Thursday morning. It gave the facility at least one more night to charge to Medicare.

And they put me through two more PT sessions, pumping up that expense as well. In my final OT session, the staff couldn’t decide what to do with me. I had performed the OT chores so well, there was nothing more for me to demonstrate. Since they had seen me lifting weights with my right arm while I waited for them to work with me – I’d had a bicep tendon surgically repaired in January and was just working on my own to keep that area flexible – the OT lady said I could just lift weights. After I got started on my routine, she walked away to talk to someone and returned to find me lifting them too fast. “Slow down,” she said. “We have to kill a whole hour.” Charge that up to Medicare!

Finally all the papers were signed – including a contract I insisted on reading that made me responsible for everything if Medicare didn’t come through – by all the appropriate honchos and I called a friend to come pick me up and take me home. What a relief to be in my own space and free, at last, from the Great American Health Care Experience.

One of my firmly held beliefs is that as any organization grows, it has a tendency to emphasize form over essence or, to put it another way, the activity itself grows more important than the objective. Call it Cooper’s Law. I suppose it’s a natural thing. If you don’t (or can’t) know where you’re going, you just keep driving. Or, if you’re job is to make frames for a sofa, you’re not focused on what the sofa may ultimately look like. In an age of specialization, we’ve lost sight of our purpose, how our particular part of something affects the outcome. If your job is to administer pills, you’re not concerned about the patient’s getting well, or going home. That was certainly true in my case. Each person who came into contact with me was a specialist in whatever he, or she, was doing. Oddly, and this was very debilitating to me, none of them was concerned with the bigger picture. And equally oddly, although there must have been a doctor somewhere who was acting as a general contractor, he didn’t consult with me or keep me posted. Even so, I’m sure I got very good care – the best in the world so the politicians say – but I’m also sure that my experience demonstrates how the third of our budget for health care gets wasted.

Just two more things about this trip. First, after I left the rehab facility, I immediately consulted a spine specialist about my back. I entered her office wearing my brace and she asked me what that was for. To keep me from bending over, I said. I had been told to wear it any time I was out of bed. Take it off and throw it away, she said. It wouldn’t do me any good. It was just another $800.00 Medicare boondoggle. And second, I did bake and deliver the best chocolate cookies in the world to Ann. She wasn’t working that day so the cookies went into a file in the Great American Health Care System. I’ve never heard from them again.

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Once I had a Basement

As the calendar sped toward my moving date in mid-August, I gathered together my favored tchotskes and smaller paintings (objects that were especially fragile or precious to me) and took them to my new home in The Fitzgerald. On each trip I loaded as much as possible into my car, drove to the parking garage in the Fitz and carried these things, often in several loads, to my apartment. The good news about the apartment’s location is that it’s in the front of the building, with nice views up and down Mount Royal Avenue and overlooking lots of green space that surrounds the old Mount Royal Station, now a building rented for a dollar a year to the Maryland Institute College of Art, better known in the neighborhood as MICA. The bad news about the apartment’s location is that it’s at the opposite end of the building from the parking garage, with 150 paces – yes, I counted them – in between. I’m not sure what part of a mile 150 paces is but it seems like a lot. Three trips a day from the house to the garage and often as many as three trips from the car to my apartment with 150 paces in each direction adds up to a lot of walking and carrying. During this phase in my move, I lost ten pounds, not a bad return on what could only be called dull and boring exercise.

On packing day, the truck arrived at my house early in the morning. The crew was seriously distressed to see that I wasn’t yet packed. They had come to move me, a slip-up in the role of dispatch at 1^st Class Movers that didn’t inspire confidence in its service. But thanks to cell phones, we soon straightened it out. The guys had to re-maneuver their truck out of my parking lot, breaking a number of limbs on my cryptimeria in the process. About an hour later, the actual packing crew arrived, with a different but equally large truck and broke even more limbs, which I happily realized was no longer my problem. I’ve moved only a couple of times before but I’m always amazed at the ability of packers to so quickly and efficiently pull my surroundings apart and reduce my personality to the contents of dull, nondescript brown boxes. At the end of the day, the walls of the house, once laden with art, were bare and the surroundings I’ve loved seemed to sigh with their emptiness and loss. The next day, the movers came and the process of loading and then unloading droned on. I stayed in my apartment, directing traffic and telling the movers to put the sofa here, the wing chair there and the dining room table over there, in the corner by the windows. Then came the boxes, often carried one at a time, on the back of each member of the moving crew like a mule in a caravan, which had to travel its own path back and forth those 150 paces, with a crammed elevator thrown in. By the time the crew finished, late in the day, the men were exhausted and I was too tired to rummage for linens for the bed, simply sleeping on the mattress under an afghan, the only covering I could find.

The process of unpacking piles of boxes seemed endless, with mounds of packing paper and broken-down cartons rising up everywhere around me, like suds in a bubble bath, until this, too, could be dragged down the hall and into the elevator for its ultimate destination in the recycling dumpster in the garage. And yes, another 300 paces and two elevator rides for each load. There was so much refuse the building engineer had to schedule a special dumpster pick-up just to get rid of this offal from my move. As the contents of the boxes grew, I fought to find space in a small apartment for the contents of a medium-sized house. Every nook and cranny became important and although I had prepared for this transition – I’d had a yard sale, given many cartons of leftovers to Goodwill and sold or given away at least a third of my art; I’d even added shelves to the closets in the apartment and converted one closet to a pantry – there was still hardly enough space to hold my life. And no basement to contain those “other” things we always think we may need someday. But, finally, it was all put away. Even though my personality demanded a certain logic to this process, one of putting like things together, I still can’t find the corkscrew or the measuring tape or the Borden’s glue. Fighting an impulse to believe the moving crew guilty of leaving some of the cartons behind, I gave up the hunt, telling myself that these little essentials of my life would ultimately turn up. And they have.

After I found the pliers and the hammer and the picture wire, the greatest challenge to the arranging of my new home was deciding where the art would hang. I’d planned wall spaces for the larger pieces and even designated my new office, a small room in the middle of the apartment, as a place where the walls would be filled with the detritus of my life – awards, family portraits, diplomas, framed sentiments from friends and colleagues – but there was a lot left over. Ultimately, I had to hang art high and low, covering the walls like those in the Cone sisters’ apartment, although not, like theirs, filled with Matisses and Picassos. Much as I love my art, it will never hang in a museum. When I described this process and the results to a friend, he asked which Cone sister I was. Even though I’ve lost ten pounds, I had to answer, “Claribel,” for I could surely lose anther 20.

Within a week, I had the apartment in order, everything put away, the art hung and the lighting focused where it’s most effective. Some adjustments will of course be necessary – that little painting on the wall there will have to move down a couple of inches – but I’m now “at home.” Still, strangely, I don’t yet feel at home. While I’m very happy with the way the apartment turned out and pleased that, by and large, I’ve created a new environment with things I already had, and am surrounded by familiar manifestations of my personality, I feel a little strange here, somewhat like I’m living in a grand hotel. I guess it will take a little time to call it “mine.”

Years ago, an acquaintance with a somewhat acid tongue, and who had been in my house a few times, bumped into me at an art opening where she said, “Oh, Phil. How nice to meet you here. It’s the first time I’ve seen you without your living room,” a comment that’s a testament to my essential association, at least to some, with my surroundings. While she couldn’t say that now, I’m sure there will soon come a time when that sentiment will again be accurate, when I’m finally “at home,” at home.

Stay tuned.

Patrick and Lisa

I met Patrick and Lisa on a Sunday afternoon more than a year ago. Well, I didn’t exactly meet them – I didn’t even learn their names – but I did say hello, at a house open for sale in the neighborhood. I was considering putting my own house on the market and I wanted to scope out the competition. It was a nice house, with obviously new granite countertops, an immediately attractive feature, in the bathrooms and kitchen. But the house had an equally obvious disadvantage: a spiral staircase, which is discouraging to potential buyers with vertigo or those with small children. Or people thinking of having small children. An attractive young couple, Patrick and Lisa were prowling the upstairs as I was surveying the garden where I decided that my house was more saleable even though it didn’t have new granite nor Japanese stones oh-so-carefully-raked just beyond my living room windows. We left the house at the same time and on a whim, I said hello and asked if they were interested in buying a house. They said yes but politely refused my offer to show them mine because they said they were meeting someone and were already late. They smiled and thanked me for my courtesy. I smiled and said, as we do, “perhaps another time,” and we each went our separate ways.

“Another time” came sooner than expected. I decided to list my house and the first people to look at it were Patrick and Lisa, properly introduced this time by my real estate agent. They loved my house, she later reported, but they needed to sell their condo and were only in the preliminary stages of their search. A few weeks later, Patrick and Lisa returned for another look. They’d put their condo on the market and were now more serious about buying. They still liked my house, especially its easy access to the outside where Patrick liked to grill their dinners. But they couldn’t commit. The market wasn’t good – “it’s not a good time,” my agent said – and after six months, I took my house off the market. I lost track of Patrick and Lisa.

A year later, just this last May, I reconsidered. My knees were worse and I could no longer work in my garden. I had some trouble going up and down stairs. And the responsibilities of maintaining a house 35 years old grew tiresome. But the clincher was my learning that an apartment like the one I had wanted at The Fitzgerald was about to become vacant. The Fitz would hold it for only two weeks beyond the current tenant’s move-out date, which meant that at the most, I had a 30-day window of opportunity. I consulted a new agent to whom I explained that I would list my house with her but if I lost the apartment, I’d have to take the house off the market. Was she willing to take the house under those circumstances? She was. We agreed on a price, substantially below my previous one, but then, it’s not a good time. I asked my new agent if she could contact those who’d looked at my house before. She could, but none of them was interested. Well, how about Patrick and Lisa? My agent said they’d sold their condo but had decided to rent for a year. She’d lost track of them.

As you know, my house soon sold and only a week after a young woman looked at it, I had a contract. I rushed to The Fitzgerald and got the apartment I wanted. I went back to all my old plans for the apartment and started gathering together the things I’d need to convert a colorless environment – albeit one with granite counter tops – into one where I will hope to be comfortable and content. Among the changes was a plan for a wall of Ikea bookshelves in my bedroom. I bought the shelves and had them delivered to the apartment. As the men were leaving the building’s garage and consulting a map of the city, I asked if they needed directions to wherever they were going next. “Oh, no,” they said. They could find it easily enough. I went back to my apartment, admired the many boxes that were to become my bookshelves (all the while wondering if I’d bought the right finish) and drove back toward home. Coming down Lanvale Street, on my usual route, I could see the Ikea truck parked on Mason, at the edge of my townhouse community, obviously unloading another order. On a whim, I stopped to say hello to the men and to compliment them on their handling of my own delivery, thinking it quite a coincidence that they had just come from a place where I was going, to a place that I was leaving. Even stranger was seeing Patrick come out the front door behind one of the men. We said hello and I asked if he and Lisa and had bought the house. “Yes,” he said. Ever since seeing my house, they’d wanted to live in the complex and they’d been lucky to get this house at a price they could afford. Patrick explained that they were putting in an Ikea kitchen. “Where are you moving from?” I asked. And he answered that they’d been living in The Fitzgerald and he started to explain where the building was. We laughed at the coincidence that they were moving to where I’d been living and I was moving to where they lived. “You’ll love the building,” Patrick said. “We’ve been very happy there.” And I went home, to my house on Linden Green, marveling at the strangeness of the world.

My installer came to my apartment in The Fitz to put up the bookshelves and when he got to the last cabinet in the row, I realized it wouldn’t fit. I had measured the wall improperly, quite unusual for me, but due to a projection at one end that wasn’t on the floor plan (a poor excuse; I should have measured more carefully). So I went back to Ikea to buy a like cabinet but in a smaller size. While I was at the delivery-arranging service desk, I saw Patrick through a window into the return area. The paperwork necessary to my delivery and return was vexing the earnest young man from Ikea so while he was trying to figure it out, I went over to Patrick to say hello. He was as surprised as I was. “Didn’t you like your kitchen?” I asked him. That wasn’t it, he said; Ikea had delivered the wrong color. But how nice it was to see me, and how strange that of all the people at Ikea on a Saturday afternoon, we should run into each other. “And I understand you’re moving to The Fitzgerald,” he said. “Into what apartment?”

“432,” I said. He seemed shocked. “We live in 431.” And then he added, laughing, “This is really getting weird.” And I agreed.

Stay tuned

Be Careful What You Wish For

At times when I’ve had no plans for the weekend and am feeling just a little abandoned by not having been invited to some one of my friends’ dinner party, I plan a unique dinner party of my own. Unique in that it’s just for me. I buy something special at Eddie’s – maybe lamb chops or a crab cake – and plan a meal around that, with accompaniments like broccoli, roasted new potatoes with rosemary, a green salad, apple pie with ice cream. Before dinner, I have a very dry martini (shaken, not stirred) with olives, and turn on some music, maybe Bass Norton at the piano in the Savoy in London. On these occasions, I build a fire in the fireplace and take my martini and maybe some expensive cheese, like a French epoise, into the living room where, mellowed by gin and enveloped in Cole Porter, I sit in different places in the room, checking to be sure the order of things in the space is always pleasing, no matter where a guest might sit. Sometimes I make a small change by straightening a painting or moving some item to a different location. But usually, I find the room very satisfactory so I bathe in the ambiance and listen to the music until my martini is gone. Then I serve myself in the dining room, with the lights just so, candles on the table and a real linen napkin. I selfishly luxuriate in my house.

So I suppose it’s not surprising that as the house begins to come apart in preparation for my move to The Fitzgerald, I’m experiencing some melancholy wistfulness, a kind of what-have-you-done-Phil-feeling. I know I’ll miss the fireplace into which I’ve stared so many times in winter, wondering about my life, my past, my future. What’s it all about, Alfie? I’ll surely miss the two-track lighting system in the dining room, which has allowed me to produce just the right mood for so many dinner parties. And even though I can no longer get down on my knees for proper work in the garden, I’ll miss the daffodils and tulips in the spring, the chrysanthemums in fall and the rhododendrons that always wilt in the heat of August, telling me when the garden needs an extra jolt of water. I’ll be leaving all that behind. I tell myself this doesn’t matter and I’m sure, in time, it won’t. I’m moving on to a whole new way of living, maybe even a new life, surely a beginning, not an ending, and certainly not just a going-on. I tell myself that this is good, and I pack another box.

I’ve always thought the two most stressful times in life (at least for me) have been starting a new job and moving to a new location. I guess I’m now beyond a new career, or even a splinter of one, and this will probably be my last move. So I labor on, approaching the move as just one more project in a long line of projects I’ve undertaken in my professional life. Plan the bookshelves for the bedroom and buy them from Ikea. Arrange to have them delivered. Find an installer. Plan the lighting and see how much of my current track can be used in the new location. Find an electrician. Plan the shelving in my new pantry and ask my handy man if he will put that up. Plan where the furniture I’m taking will go in the new apartment; measure all the walls. Plan the distribution of my art: what to take and what to ship to auction. Find an auctioneer. Evaluate quotations from several movers and decide on one. Throw away what I can. Have a yard sale. Give what’s left to Goodwill or The Salvation Army. Notify so many people of my new address. Change my insurance. The lists grow longer. And at this age, I carry around bits of paper and a pen to make note of things to do that I will surely forget if I don’t write them down.

When I first thought of putting my house on the market, my real estate agent looked around my environment and said to me, “Be careful what you wish for. It might come true.” Okay, I got my wish. The house has sold. Now I’ll make a new wish, that I’ll be as happy at 1201 Mount Royal Avenue – although I’m sure in an entirely different way – as I have been here on Linden Green. Onward!

Stay tuned.

On the Road Again, Again

In early May, I stopped at The Fitzgerald, the apartment building where I had wanted to live, just to visit with the personnel in the office and maybe tug at my desire strings one more time. Or maybe my visit was just fate. But to my surprise, the office told me the apartment under the apartment I had wanted – it’s exactly the same size and layout but just one floor below - would become available at the end of May. But, they said, it was the last un-rented apartment in the building and even with a deposit, they could only hold it for two weeks beyond the exit of the current tenant. I gave them a deposit and decided to put my house on the market yet again.

I consulted a new agent, very highly regarded for success here on Bolton Hill, telling her I’d be happy to list with her but if I lost the apartment in The Fitzgerald again, I’d have to take the house off the market. Was she willing to accept such a challenge? We arrived at an agreement about payment for the new photographs to accompany the listing and at a listing amount that while more then ten percent lower than the price at which I had previously listed my house, we thought an acceptable compromise between her recommendation and my check book. Objections to the house before had been the dark colors I had painted the rooms to show off my art so she suggested I make an allowance for painting part of the contract. I consulted a painter or two and Jessica and I agreed on an allowance we’d build into the selling price.

Traffic was slow. It’s not a good time. Everyone says that. Not only is the economy really discouraging to the sale of real estate, but by the time the listing went on line, we had passed the prime selling season for houses here on Bolton Hill. Still, Jessica was optimistic and I went back on “show time,” primping my house for every potential showing and putting those toilet articles back in a box – this time a carton for unsalted butter - on the counter so I could quickly hide it underneath when potential buyers came through. It’s not easy living on a stage set. But there was no option.

By the middle of June, two weeks after the tenant at The Fitzgerald had moved out, the leasing office told me they couldn’t hold the apartment any longer. I pleaded with them but while they were sympathetic, they had their own pressures and in the end there was nothing they could do. I’m sure they were eager to reach 100% occupancy and “my” apartment was the only one standing in their way. I told them of all my efforts to move the house and crossed my fingers, hoping no one would show up at the apartment building interested in #432. Jessica went on double-time.

On Saturday, June 18, I was backing out of my parking lot when I saw a couple of young girls (maybe in their late 20’s or early 30’s, which, believe me, is young to me!) wandering around the lot looking lost. In my Good Samaritan mode, I reversed my progress and wound down my window asking if I could help them find something. One of the girls waved a piece of paper in her hand and said, “Oh, thank you. We’re looking for this house.” She pointed to the paper, which she stuck in the window of my car so I could read the address. And it was my house. I smiled and said, “Well, it’s my house. It’s for sale.” The one with the paper said, “Yes, I know. I’d like to see it.” I told her she could see the front and back but if she wanted to see the inside, she’d have to call my agent. And I gave her Jessica’s name and phone number. I didn’t take this chance meeting as anything serious. I returned to my list of chores: the grocery store, the laundry, the hardware store.

But you should never pre-judge a buyer. On Monday, Jessica called to say a client wanted to see the house. Could she bring the client by that evening? Of course. Any opportunity to sell is worth the shoving of the butter carton under the bathroom counter. When the doorbell rang, there was Jessica, with the two girls from the parking lot. “You’ve met Rachel and her friend before,” Jessica said. I was very surprised. We all smiled and I left the house, as is customary, to have a drink with my neighbor. Two hours later, when I went back to the house, Jessica was still there with Rachel. “Rachel likes your house,” Jessica said, with a big smile. They left and I went on to my usual Monday night TV routine. I’d had several such encounters before, both during this listing and the previous one, so I still didn’t take the “like” as meaning very much.

On Tuesday, Jessica called to say Rachel would make an offer. She didn’t know how much. I called The Fitzgerald to tell them of the development. No; #432 had not rented yet, they said, but they couldn’t hold it, even with a now very real prospect of selling the house. I waited for the offer. It came on Wednesday and was way below my asking price. Jessica said Rachel really liked the house and I should make a counter proposal, which I did. Rachel accepted it so by Thursday, we had a deal. A verbal deal. But nevertheless, a deal. I let The Fitzgerald know. They would prepare the lease and I could sign it over the weekend. But I still had no formal contract. Still, The Fitzgerald said, they couldn’t hold the apartment and if I wanted it, I would have to sign a lease over the weekend.

Surprisingly, particularly in this market, Rachel would pay cash for the house. So no appraisal by a reluctant bank would create a delay. At Jessica’s suggestion, I made a slight concession to the buyer for this. And, Jessica said, the deal could be quickly finished. She only had to get a contract written and signed by Rachel and me before the weekend. I’m not sure, but I suspect Jessica worked both night and day to make this deal happen. By Thursday night, we had a contract. But it was still conditional on a satisfactory inspection Jessica had scheduled for Saturday. And then on Friday, Jessica called to say that Rachel had consulted some of her friends, as all of us do, and had come to the conclusion that despite paying cash – or maybe because of it – she wanted an appraisal. Jessica would try to get an appraiser there before the weekend but she wasn’t optimistic. I informed The Fitzgerald and they told me, again, that I could sign the lease over the weekend. While I tried to sound encouraging, there seemed no way we could conclude this deal by then.

By some miracle, Jessica got the inspector and the appraiser to my house early Saturday. The inspector said the only thing wrong with the house was the systems, particularly the air conditioning, which was reaching the end of its life. The buyer wanted me to provide a two-year insurance policy against any failures. It would cost about $1000.00. Jessica agreed to pay half. We both wanted this deal. The house passed appraisal and on Saturday night, we had a signed contract, pending only a termite inspection. On Sunday, I signed the contract at The Fitzgerald. I couldn’t help thinking as I was signing the papers how strange it was that I had been the very first person to look at the apartments in The Fitzgerald when the rental trailer first opened a year ago – I had to wear a hard hat to visit the building and wires were still hanging from the ceilings in the corridors – and now I was the last tenant to sign a lease. I suppose life has a certain rhythm, even it we aren’t aware of it. So now, I’m really on the road again, yet again.

Stay tuned.

At Home Again: A Wrap-up

The destination that attracted me to this particular cruise was the transit of the Panama Canal but I found the actual experience anti-climactic, perhaps expecting too much or having read too much about the Canal from "The Path Between the Seas." The process of raising and lowering the ship through the locks was certainly interesting but I had been through locks before and there's nothing very mysterious about those mechanics. I was impressed,of course, by how tight the clearance is and by the electric locomotives that steady the ship as she passes through on what I was surprised to learn was her own steam. But more exciting was passing through the cut in the Continental Divide, the string of mountains that extends from Alaska to the south of Chile and realizing that men, using fairly primitive machines, cut through that immense mountain, moving all that dirt and rock aside, shovel-full by shovel-full (even if some of it was by steam shovel). Now that was really impressive!

I've traveled with Silver Sea before so the routine of daily life on the ship, and the luxuries that involves, was no surprise, but I was impressed even more than usual by the intimacy of the staff who grew to know us, and know our names, and seem to like us, very quickly. I learned at almost the end of the trip that Silver Sea takes a photograph of each guest and posts these in crew quarters so the crew can quickly identify us - depending on their memory (and whether we were memorable or not, and I like to believe that we were) - and the ship presents an award at the end of the cruise to the crew member who can remember the most names. Still, their friendliness and courtesy was outstanding.

As the cruise progressed, I was surprised to realize that I had chosen a cruise that I knew would go to so many hot places in the world when I also knew that I don't like it that hot (even though some do). But the ports were all interesting and we had a day at sea between almost every stop, which made it possible to recover from the burden of heat. I was sorry to have burned my legs so badly that I couldn't enjoy the sun, or the pool, but shade is not a bad thing at my age. And my legs are now slowly recovering.

I found the guests on this cruise friendly enough - almost anyone would speak to me if I spoke to them first - but as always happens when strangers are thrown together, they are much more likely to be open at the beginning than they are when the relationships begin to set and one becomes more reluctant to ask a stranger's name (or has forgotten it). Despite this, there wasn't anyone on the cruise interesting enough to me (nor, I'm sure, I to them) that I would want to pursue as a relationship. Oh, I have a few e-mail addresses and will send a few photographs to people who've requested them but by Christmas time, I'm sure I'll wonder who they are.

Now that I'm home, friends ask me the usual question: "What did you like best about the trip?" I always consider this a kind of shorthand for, "tell me something about the trip but not too much, please," and after all, they're interested, but only up to a point. It would be awfully easy to become boring. Usually my answer concerns some place I found fascinating or memorable. But this time, my most honest answer to what I found best about the trip was traveling with Ted and Bill, both lovely men who included me in their intimacy, left me alone with my solitude, and helped me up from the chaise on deck when I needed it. I loved sharing the experience with both of them.

I'll continue this blog when inspiration hits. I hope you haven't been bored by

Staying tuned.