I wonder how many people remember where they were on their birthday three years ago? I can. Vividly. I was in an ambulance being transferred to the VA rehabilitation hospital in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. I was tetraplegic. A fall on my back paralyzed me from my shoulders down. My prognosis was: patient would never walk again. If someone had told me that three years later, thanks to the incredible medical, nursing and therapeutic staff at the VA hospital in West Roxbury, my wife and I would be celebrating my 82^nd birthday visiting my son in Dublin, Ireland, I would have asked them to stop toying with me.

I recently read an article in the New York Times intended to advise people on how to be resilient in the face of catastrophic injury. There was a list of things to do, such as practice optimism, don’t personalize your misfortune, remember your comebacks, support others and so forth. None of these struck me as being helpful. It was the kind of thing that I would expect to find inside a fortune cookie. However, one item struck home: Go out of your comfort zone.

I had become quite comfortable in my apartment. My wife no longer needed to be with me. I could walk with the help of a walker. I could pretty much do what I did before my accident, only a lot more slowly and always with the strain on my body playing like a basso ostinato.

 On the beach at Wicklow, Ireland

 One day I decided that I needed to move outside my comfort zone.  I don’t know why. I certainly wasn’t thinking, “I need to go outside my comfort zone and mingle with optimistic people.” Going to the racetrack would have filled that bill; not a trip to Ireland. The best I can think of is that I double dared myself and, like a child, I couldn’t back down.

Then I started to worry. How would I manage a six-hour flight? Would I be able to use the restroom? I can’t walk without the help of a walker? Would it fit in the aisle? What about the hotel? How would I get there once I landed? In my comfort zone, I use a motorized wheelchair along with an accessible van. Could I find one in Ireland? Worse still, my wheelchair weighs 432 pounds. Could I even think of transporting it? Suppose it broke down? You can’t push 432 pounds.

From left to right: Benjamin Keyser, Beth Keyser, my wife, Nancy Kelly,
and me at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Ireland

To make a long story short, I did, indeed, move outside my comfort zone and, quite frankly, it was uncomfortable. I slept on a regular bed for the first time in 3½ years. Getting up in the morning was hard. I could barely take three steps before I had to sit down and wait out the aches. My decision to take a manual wheelchair turned out to be wise. And thanks to the good sense of a Dublin Airport car rental clerk, the car I had chosen was replaced by one that I could actually get into.

The bottom line was the trip was uncomfortable but affirming. What do you know? I could do it. I’ll do it again. Next year I will go to Copenhagen. I have a friend who lives in Tucson, Arizona. He invited my wife and me for a visit. I think I’ll go.

As for Dublin, I had the good sense to visit the Guinness brewery where they have a bar, the Gravity bar, located in the Storehouse five stories up where you get a 360° view of Dublin and the best Guinness in the world. That was worth the trip.

I have been hors de combat for over three years now. This blog has been silent. I have no doubt everyone has given up on me. That’s okay. Completely understandable. However, I have a good excuse.

I’m off to Ireland in a week. This will be the first time I have traveled in  three and a half years. What makes this trip different is that this time I’m going to do it in a wheelchair. I wish that were  a stunt. It’s not.

I’ll let you know how it went.

Jordan and The Blindfold Game

Al Khazneh glimpsed for the first time
 (photograph © 2014. Nancy Kelly)

Here’s a game I like to play. I blindfold myself. It is a magic blindfold. When I put it on, I think of a country, any country. Say, Italy. Then I think of the one thing I would like to see in that country if I only had the chance to see one thing. Suddenly, that thing materializes before my blindfolded eyes. I can look at it as long as I want. I can walk around it. It is as if I am wearing a silken version of Oculus Rift HD. Here’s the kicker. I can only do this once with each country. Once the blindfold is off, so are all bets. Italy is forever off-limits to the blindfold game.

Moral: choose carefully.

When I tried to get my wife to play this game, she refused.

“I won’t narrow a country down to a single thing,” she insisted.

“I know. I know,” I cajoled. “But just once. What would it be for Italy?”

No use. She wasn’t having any of it.

That surprised me. I didn’t find it hard at all. Here’s my starter list:

•       Australia          =         The Sydney Opera House
•       Bali                  =         Mt. Agung
•       England           =          Rembrandt’s Titus, Dulwich Picture Gallery
•       France             =          Monet’s Les Nymphéas, Musée l’Orangerie in Paris
•       Italy                 =          Michaelangelo’s Pietà, St. Peter’s in Rome
•       Peru                 =         Machu Picchu
•       Spain               =         The Goya Room, El Prado in Madrid 

I have added a new item to the list. It is different from the others. It is not a thing. It is a moment in time. What I would give to be able to relive that moment.

Nancy and I have just returned from Jordan. We saw the citadel and the amphitheater in Amman, the Roman ruins at Jerash, the Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, the River Jordan, the site of John’s baptism of Jesus, the Red Sea and Mt. Nebo with its hazy glimpses of Jericho and Jerusalem in the Promised Land.

But the one thing that blew them all away was a single sight, a glimpse that happens only once and then, like a first kiss, is gone forever. It is when you see Al Khazneh “The Treasury” for the first time as you walk through the narrow slot canyon that leads to old Petra.

The pathway into the ancient city is roughly a mile long. It takes you through a winding siq whose twisting red and white sandstone walls could have been designed by Salvador Dali. They undulate wildly as you pass between them. In some places where the opening is less than ten feet across, they draw you in. They mesmerize you. You are in some kind of fantasyland. And just at that moment when you are ready to give yourself over completely to the beauty of the natural, a narrow slit in the passageway opens up just ahead. Through it, as if you were peeping through a keyhole, you see an 82ft wide and 128ft high four-column facade complete with corinthians like those at Jerash, pediments and a large pedestal mounted urn at the very top. The contrast is wrenching. You are in the middle of a natural phenomenon of great beauty, a narrow snake of a canyon, and then, quite suddenly, someone has switched channels. It is as if some supernatural Monty Python has declared, “And now for something completely different.”

That to me is the heart of the Petra experience, that out-of-body sensation of man-made order superimposed on nature at her wildest. That first glimpse is enough to justify coming this far.

It is the blindfold moment.

The Broken Finger of Fate

On February 11 at about 3pm in the afternoon my wife and I made a fateful decision that would effect the rest of our lives together. It was a cold afternoon. The temperature was somewhere around 16ºF. The wind made it feel like 7ºF. We had been to visit the Peabody Essex Museum’s Impressionists on the Water. We had lunch at Rocafella’s. I had a chicken breast stuffed with artichoke and coated with maple syrup. The waitress wanted to know what I thought of the coating. I told her I liked it. That was a lie. It was too sweet. But I never tell wait staff what I really think. Why would I want to make them uncomfortable? What are they going to do about it? What could anybody who gets paid $2.13 an hour do about it?

After lunch we walked back to the open-air garage. My car was on the top floor. We entered the building and were immediately presented with a decision.

“Shall we walk up or take the elevator?” Nancy asked.

“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s better for us.”

Boy, was I ever wrong.

I made short work of the five flights. But as soon I stepped through the doorway out onto the roof, fate made its cruel and unexpected move. There was a curb just beyond the doorway. It never occurred to me that one would be there. Why would it? It wasn’t as if there was a sidewalk and a street. The architect wanted that extra step. Who put that idea into his or her head? Who knows how long that curb had been lying there in wait for me?  It doesn’t matter. I missed the curb and instantly lost my balance. I lurched forward. I tried to run in a vain effort to get my legs back under my torso where they belonged. All I succeeded in doing was driving my left arm and shoulder even harder into the concrete floor.

I could feel something warm running across my forehead, behind my ear and into my hair. It turned out to be blood from a gash over my left eye. My left arm was completely numb. I raised it as if I were giving a Nazi salute to the sky, all the while yelling, “My arm. My arm. I can’t feel my arm.”

Three women were just ahead of me. They saw it all happening. I think of them now as Norns. They kept chanting, “Shall we call 911? Shall we call 911?”

Nancy said no, but they called anyway. I could hear one of them say into her cellphone, “I’m a bystander.”

It sounded to my half-working ears like a political statement.

I asked the Norns what I should do about the blood on the floor. They told me not to worry.

“The rain will wash everything away,” they said like good Norns would.

“They don’t think I’m taking this seriously enough,” Nancy said as she drove me to the infirmary at MIT.

Yesterday, I had day surgery at Mt. Auburn Hospital. It turned out I had broken the 3^rd metacarpal in my left hand. The hospital staff, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the anesthesia nurses, the operating room techs and surgical nurses, the clerks who took my Medicare and Medicaid numbers—in other words, everybody I came in contact with at that hospital was marvelous. I mean here it is the day after surgery and I’m typing with both hands.

I remember two things about my blood pressure. On the Friday three days before the operation the pre-surgical nurse took my blood pressure. She put the cuff on my left arm, the one that was hurt. She said my BP was a bit high. It was 139 over 86. She seemed a bit concerned. I said I could fix that. She put the cuff on my right arm. I meditated. This time the BP was 120 over 72.

“That was awesome,” she exclaimed. I am pretty sure she was impressed.

“Will I become a hospital legend?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “A lot of people can do that.”

When I was wheeled into the operating room on Tuesday morning, my blood pressure was 200 over something. Nothing awesome I could do then. They weren’t bothered.

As I rolled into the room, I was making small talk to make myself feel better. I said I got the impression from watching Grey's Anatomy on TV that all doctors and nurses in a hospital slept around and that the patients either got better or died. The anesthesiologist said that the program got the medicine wrong, but everything else was accurate.

“Only nobody sleeps with the patients,” I remember saying. Then someone put a mask over my face and then someone said, “It’s all over.”

And, indeed, it was.

Here are the results. You can see the break in the photo on the left. Just click on the picture. Do the same on the right. You can see three screws putting the bone back together. It looks like a solid bone with three screws in it. I mean how good can you get?

 

Broken 3rd metacarpal on my left hand

Rebuilt 3rd metacarpal

I said at the start that my decision to walk up the steps rather than take the elevator would effect my wife and me for the rest of our lives. What was I thinking of?

Airport metal detectors. What a drag!

My Madeleine Moment. January 23, 2014

Boundaries have always had a mysterious allure for me. I remember once driving across the United States with some friends. I was 15 years old at the time. We were a group of five Boy Scouts who had decided to see America in six weeks. We traveled in a red 1947 Pontiac convertible and pitched a tent every night along the way.

1947 Pontiac Convertible like the one that took me 6,000 miles around the USA

When we crossed the Continental Divide, the hydrological divide of all the Americas, where water on one side eventually flows into the Pacific while water on the other reaches the Atlantic, I insisted that we stop so that I could spit into both oceans at the same time.

It presaged another event 57 years later when I went to Uganda. The equator passes through that country and our guides, Cliff and Ben, made sure we crossed it. The three of us sang a song there. Cliff was in the northern hemisphere, Ben in the southern and me in both.

Cliff on the left. Benjamin on the right

I remembered that moment, though it took me a whole day and night to do it. I was on my daily walk when I saw a car pull into a parking place across the street. The nose of the car was parked in Somerville, MA. Everything else was in Cambridge.

Car straddling the city line between Somerville and Cambridge, MA

A wave of sadness passed over me.  Why should that have happened?

I slept on it. This morning I am writing about it. The man on the left side of the photograph is Cliff Kisitu. He is dead, killed in a tragic accident in Uganda while he was scouting new locations. I wrote about it in my book I Married a Travel Junkie. And I have blogged about him here.  If you click on the video, you will get a sense of what a terrible loss his death was.

So here I am looking at a car straddling the boundary between Somerville and Cambridge. A wave of sadness passes over me. I feel compelled to take a photograph, though I haven’t the slightest idea why, not until this morning when I remember the moment when Cliff and I straddled a boundary.

In A La Recherche du Temps Perdu Marcel Proust describes a moment that has become iconic in western literature. It is, of course, the madeleine moment. 

...when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreay day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin...I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savors…

The mind is a funny thing.

Magical Thinking: January 4, 2014

I revisited the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. last November with two friends from Holland. It was a sightseeing trip. It seemed like the right kind of New Englandy thing to do.  Author’s Ridge is world famous for being the last resting place of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, Little Men and little else. Ralph Waldo Emerson is there, too, as is Nathaniel Hawthorne and, of course, Henry David Thoreau. What could say New England better than Author's Ridge? It is the literary version of the 1985-86 Boston Celtics.

Walking along the path that takes you from one gravesite to the other, it is not hard to pick out the famous authors from the less famous relatives that lie beside them.  The reason is detritus.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

The Ralph Waldo Emerson memorial boulder (photo above) is topped with rocks that visitors have obviously put there and, if you double-click on the photograph, just above the plaque with all the vital details, you will see a collection of small change.

Emerson isn’t the only one to receive such largess.

Henry David Thoreau's Grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

At Henry David Thoreau's more appropriately modest headstone (photo above), there are ballpoint pens, money, pine cones and more rocks. Visitors have even left messages. The large eggshell blue stone in the photograph above is inscribed with a quote from Walden Pond. It says:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to ink it onto that stone. I wondered why? I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine.  He gave me a very sensible answer.

He said, “People find it impossible to accept death. So they engage in all kinds of death denial behavior, like leaving messages, money and writing implements at grave sites.”

The idea is that these are things that you do with the living; i.e. give them money and pens and send messages.  If you do the same to the dead, then they won't be dead, will they?  It is a kind of magical thinking.

The practice goes way back. I wrote a blog about the terracotta soldiers of Xi’an City in Shaanxi Province, China. You can read about it here. The incredible 6,000 man army was meant to serve Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China (247-220BC) in the next world. Or think of the tomb of Tutankhamen. It was filled with artefacts intended to allow the boy king to live in the next world the way he did in this one. Among the artifacts were four canopic jars, one each for his liver, lungs, stomach and intestines.  It was reasoned that he would need these to survive in the next world.

In his autobiography Undiluted Hocus-Pocus (Princeton University Press, 2013) Martin Gardner described his belief in God in these words: “There are no proofs of God or of an afterlife. Indeed, all experience suggests there is no God...My faith [is/SJK]...a lasting escape from the despair that follows a stabbing realization that you and everyone else are soon to vanish utterly from the universe.”

That's what the terracottta army, all those canopic jars and the ballpoint pens on Henry David Thoreau's tombstone have in common. They are an attempt to escape from the despair of vanishing utterly from the universe.

Or as Woody Allen once said, "I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear."

More Perks

Floppy Disk Car

One of the dangers of walking in my neighborhood is not the smiler with the dagger under his cloak. Rather it is the anonymity of the unexpected. Take this automobile, for example. I almost passed it by. It was parked along Oxford Street and I almost missed it. Thank goodness I didn’t. The owner has decorated it with old floppy disk sleeves. That is clever enough. But look at the color pattern.  That shows a real coloristic eye. I'll bet the owner (or owners) dress well. It must have taken a lot of moxie to do this to your car. Just click on the photo and take a look at the blank space where one of the sleeves has fallen off. Some kind of epoxy has been applied in a spiral pattern to make sure the sleeves stayed put. You can forget about the original finish. You can also forget about any trade-in value. Whoever this person is, thanks for the gift.

Why the Lobster?

Here’s a second gift. I have passed this camper several times. What caught my eye was the plastic lobster wedged in against the water tank at the back. At least I hope that is a water tank.  Not a good idea to store fuel in there.  Sometimes when I pass the parked Chinook, the lobster isn’t there. But most of the time it is. What is that all about?  Is it a signal?  Is the owner telling street buyers that there is a fresh stash of lobster meat onboard? The license plate indicates that the van has come from Colorado. A long way from home. Also a long way to go for fresh lobster. So is the owner telling us that he'd walk a mile for a lobster?  No, that can’t be it.  If it were, the plastic lobster would have been sitting up there on the dashboard of his car right next to the plastic Jesus. The plain truth is I don't have a clue what that lobster is doing there. As Yul Brynner sang in The King and I, “Is a puzzlement.” If I had to guess, though, I'd say that the owner is a fan of David Foster Wallace and is doing homage to his great collection of essays Consider the Lobster.  Wallace would be pleased.

One of my favorite surprises while walking I found in the quadrangle at the Harvard Law School, the one next to Langdell Hall. At the west end of the quadrangle is a statue. I am unable to find a plaque indicating its name or the artist. It vaguely resembles a Louise Nevelson, but I am doubtful. In any case that isn’t why the statue caught my eye. Usually, one thinks of objects casting shadows because of light shining from behind. But the statue has taught me that the wind can also cast a shadow. A few weeks ago—it was November 24, 2013 to be exact—the day was very windy with gusts up to 40mph. I didn’t go walking on that day. The temperature was in the 20ºs and the wind chill factor brought it down to somewhere in the 10º range. I stayed home. But the next day I went walking.  Much to my delight I came upon this scene. The wind had blow the leaves around the edges of the statue casting a three dimensional shadow along the ground.

 

Shadow of a sculpture cast in fallen leaves

Going for a walk in my neighborhood can be like going to a birthday party where it's your birthday.