Red Eyes, A Niece, And A Son

I could tell you: I’m OK. I got through the eye surgery, managed to lose the prednisone drops that would spur healing, went back to the ophthalmologist, got another prescription, and then went to get it filled at the pharmacy. So that should have been easy, but guess what? The system refused to pay—which means that whoever designed the computer system that CVS uses had decreed: it was too soon to refill the prescription. So that meant either paying 90 bucks for what is the smallest bottle of eye drops visible without microscopy or going without.

Do I have to tell you what I chose?

“Dammit, Marc, spend the 90 dollars,” said Lady yesterday, as she was looking at my reddened, inflamed, I’ve-just-been-sobbing-my-ass-out-of-my-left-eye-exclusively eye. So I’ve learned: most of the time, the stuff people say to you is stuff you should listen to. Next step: a trudge back to CVS.

The pharmacist was good enough to try to get the insurance company to pay for the medicine, which meant that she spent ten minutes giving information into a machine. “Pharmacy,” she announced. “Inquiry,” she continued. “Declined,” she announced. I waited until the system had decided a person was needed; the person, obviously peering at the equivalent screen that the pharmacist had seen, gave the same answer: declined.

It would have been easy if it had just been about the 90 bucks. In fact, it was more: I was buying drops for my eyes when in fact I was suffering from drops in my life.

Consider, we are animal people, Mr. Fernández and I, and our aged cat—now requiring a special diet that of course no one but Mr. Fernández can administer—is hanging to life by a thread, or rather, by the special love between Mr. Fernández and Kitty. So we’ve had no vacation for a year.

Noise—constant noise, from the reconstruction of the street outside, and from the sculptor above. Oh, and did I mention that a piece of the balcony above us fell and was found on the sidewalk? We replaced our balcony five years ago: the upstairs neighbor has allowed hers to rot in the salt air.

What I am telling you—or trying to—is that a man can be maddened by a swarm of gnats as much as by a Cyclops. And so I bought the drops, put them in, felt relief, and went to bed, thinking that the issue had been dealt with. Had it?

Evidently not, since I woke up at three in the morning, shifted restlessly in bed for four hours, and then fell asleep as the morning radio trumpeted the morning’s bad  news. I then slept until eleven, awoke, felt guilty, felt a pain in my left side, and felt an incredible tension in my left trapezoid. It was not a muscle, what I had had between my neck and my shoulder—it was more like one of the steel cables of the Golden Gate Bridge.

My mind was busy telling myself that everything was fine; my body was screaming that it was not. So my mind decreed: time to take two extra-strength Tylenol. You—smarter than I—will know that it didn’t work.

“Hey, guess what!” said Lady, “Montalvo is back helping me in the kitchen!”

Interesting news, since I had been speaking to Lady and Naïa the day before, and had asked whether she had seen Montalvo. “Yeah,” she said, “and he was demanding his job back! But how can I give him his job back when I laid down ONE rule: don’t go into the kitchen! And twenty minutes later? I caught him walking out of the kitchen! So how can I give him his job back?”

“He’s oppositional, just like Naïa,” I tell her, since the two of them have been doing her—do I have to make clear that it’s Naïa’s, not Lady’s? though come to think of it, it’s both—homework. Well, it was a throwback to happier days, when Naïa absorbed her education while flopped on a sofa, instead of sitting at a desk. But the question was: what were three causes and effects of immigration.

This is why I can never be a teacher, since I cannot do what Lady did: search the book, come up with three causes, feed them to Naïa, and check to make sure they were regurgitated correctly onto the paper. What do I have to do? Well, my first thought was to tell a story: a man I knew was fleeing his home in the Dominican Republic, and had managed to cross the deepest waters of the Atlantic Ocean in a ten-foot wooden boat holding twenty people. In fact, the depth of the Mona Channel was the least of the problem: the fact that it was shark-infested was of more concern. So he arrived—as many, many do not—on the beach in Puerto Rico, where a man had arranged to pick him / them up, and take them forty minutes away to the Dominican part of San Juan. And was this all part of the deal? No way! It was a hundred bucks a head.

It’s a story that I, at least, find compelling. The man crowded with strangers into a boat, was he aware that going home was not an option? However long it took to straighten out his immigrant status, the likelihood that he would miss the births, the deaths, the big and the small moments that are family—well, it was almost certain he would. And how much had he paid to renounce all that? Depends—not much in my money, but several years of selling fake cigars to gullible or just worn-down tourists on the beach resorts for him. And that was, OK—if not 24 / 7, at least 12 / 7.

My problem as a teacher? Answers don’t interest me, which is why I was stopped completely when it turned out that one of the reasons for migration? Drought!

Then I figured it out: for hunter / gatherers, drought would be a very compelling reason to move elsewhere. But Naïa is a 12-year old girl living in Puerto Rico, so her chances of running into a tribesman hunting water buffalo? Not so great.

Well, the homework was done, so at last I could ask her what I really wanted to know: what was the difference between “affect” and “effect?” It’s every English teachers’ pet peeve. Fortunately, Naïa has excellent parrying skills.

“One is spelled with an “e” the other with an “a,” she informed me.

“Excellent,” I told her, “and what is another difference?”

“One is used in one way in a sentence, the other in another way,”

“Completely correct,” I told her, “and I wonder, in what way do you use the one and in what way do you use the other?”

“Differently,” she said.

“Naïa, put you name on your homework,” said Lady, who, though a poet, still can step into the territory of mother on occasion.

“On the top right-hand corner of the paper,” I told Naïa, since that’s what they always told me, and since they were still teaching ridiculous facts like drought spurring migration, I figured the right-hand corner thing still held as well. Who knows, maybe she would have gotten points taken off for misplaced identity?

Naïa, of course, turned her paper sideways and wrote her name down the left-hand side of the paper.

“Oppositional,” I told her.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said.

“Exactly,” I told her, and then went on to say, “and yes you do.” Then I went on to say that the 90-dollar eyes drops were working.

“Remarkable,” said Naïa, “since that’s what they’re supposed to do, right?”

Well, that meant I had to tell her what they told me, which was:

1. keep a civil tongue in your head
2. don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs

So Lady went off with Naïa to deal with the next thing—there’s always something—and I went off to play the cello—this time at the front of the store, not the back. And today, of course, I woke up feeling like hell, but cheered by the fact that Montalvo, my son, had been restored to where he should be. Lady, with perfect poetic logic, had told him absolutely NOT to step out of the kitchen!

“Lady was really firm with him, so he’s like a little puppy, told not to come out of his corner,” whispered Sunshine, after I had loudly protested that I was being ignored.

OK—I sometimes think it’s “abandon sense, all ye who enter here,” but I also think it’s excellent, because if I wanted Starbucks? Guess what—there’s one two blocks from my house.

And so Montalvo is restored, or redeemed, and the world is partially where it’s supposed to be, but it’s not, since I am listening to Brené Brown for the umpteenth time and not finding anything to write about, since who can possibly want to hear what I think about The New York Times, which is eager to tell me that the Republicans are going to install the famous pipeline and dismantle the EPA at the same time? Anybody out there? Drop me a comment, and I’ll be happy to straighten you out….

So the world is not OK, since my neck is screaming and my stomach is groaning, and all I can do is think: why do I feel so horrible? And why am I listening to Brown talk for the zillionth time about vulnerability? That’s when I see my young son playing the guitar, and when I realize—can’t I be vulnerable, too?

So he’s giving me a backrub, or rather, cutting his hands on the steel ridge that is my shoulder and then he says, “you know what gets me through? We’re an absolutely miniscule part of the universe. Think how many trillions of years old the earth is, and we live—what?—maybe eighty? Think of the enormous space in the universe, and how small our personal worlds are. All we have to do is be happy, and in the moment….”

Well, I think that’s what he said, but can I be sure? No, because I’m crying, and he asks me why, and I tell him, though it’s hard, because guess what? I’m a shame man, not a guilt man—which, if you know Brené means that I think what I have to admit is bad because I am bad, not because it is bad. And so what’s so horrible?

I want recognition.. I want to give a TED talk that will go viral and sizzle the minds of men and women, all of whom will say utterly nasty things in the comments section of YouTube, but not to worry, since I’ll pay—just as Brené does—somebody to read them for me!

“Why do you want that,” sputters Montalvo.

“Who’s the guy who wants to win the Nobel Prize,” I tell him. “And it’s great to wake up and say, ‘I don’t care what the world thinks of me,’ but guess what? I put a lot of time and a lot of energy into this, and fuck art for art’s sake!”

It’s out, it’s said. I ponder—I can feel guilty, I can feel shame, or guess what? I can just sit down and do what I do.

Which is what I’ve done….

“Love you,” I tell Montalvo, as he passes by.

“Me too,” he tells me.

Oh, and the neck?

Much better!