non-fiction

What’s in a Name? – Letters, Sounds, and Associations

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l-still-life-with-roses-and-anemones

You know Juliet’s famous question and answer:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

True, it would, but on the other hand, if a rose went by the name ort[1], it might not seem to smell as sweet – you purchase a dozen red orts for your love; life is certainly no bed of orts; may I introduce you to my fiancée, Ortmarie?

Because I’m so attuned to the auditory essences of words, it sometimes surprises the combination of sounds parents choose when naming their newborns.

Take the name Michaela Loeb Krawcheck, for example.

Although Michaela’s a lovely name and Michaela Krawcheck’s okay, the first and last names don’t meld well the the spondaic middle name Loeb. It’s too much of a mouthful. Plus, your tongue has to go on a rollercoaster ride up and down the palate to spit it out.

No doubt Loeb is a family name, and homage is being paid.  Here’s an alternative: Lila Loeb Krawcheck.  Or ditch the Loeb and go Americana with Michaela Lou Krawcheck, or if that’s too low rent for your taste, Michaela Louise Krawcheck.  If my last name were Krawcheck, I might go all out with Michaela Loquacia Krawcheck, copping a rhyme with the twin trisyllabic first and second names.

Now, you’re talking.

However, most people are more visual than auditory, and of course, most names have origins, which people may be interested in karmically copping, e.g., Lucas = light-giving, as in lucent (or Lucifer).

adam-naming-the-aimals

Here’s a small sampling of newborn names that are trending in 2016.  First, let’s check out female names cited by the website baby center.

Romance is on the rise:  Amelia, Olivia, Gabriella, Ariana, and Camila are hot names for newborn girls in ’16.  Very Shakespearean.

What I call soap opera names, gender-neutral surnames, remain popular. Among them Addison, Brooklyn, Peyton, and Sydney.  These names suggest old money, whether there’s any or not.

One last trend features rather old-fashioned names like Sadie, Ruby, and Hazel, which is interesting because my grandmother was named Hazel, and she had two sisters, Ruby and Pearl.  No Sapphires, however. I certainly hope girls who receive these names are blessed with beauty.  A homely Hazel or sadsack Sadie might be better off as an Addison or a Brroklyn.

Okay.  What’s happening on the Y-chromosome side of the ledger.

Switching to the mom 365 website, we find they actually have the boys’ names ranked according to popularity.  Here’s the top ten: Noah, Liam, Mason, Michael, Elijah, Jacob, Ethan, James, Aiden, Benjamin.

What in the world are Michael, Jacob, James, and Benjamin doing in there?  I know some Mikes, Jims, Jakes, and Bens, though I suspect that none of these names will be shortened if the school where I teach is any indicator.  Michaels are not rare there, but you’ll never encounter a Mike under 30.

Of all the names I ran across in my cursory research, the hot trending name that most caught my eye was Jagger.  It sounds cool.  It conjures cavorting Mick.  But, like I say, make sure it goes well with the other names.  John Jagger Jones sounds a lot better than Jagger Tate Garbowski.

Oh yeah, here are a few names not trending in 2016:

Jezebel

Lucretia

Ellie Mae

Hulga

Adolph

Ebenezer

Esau

Onan

nvbqtf

[1] Actually, ort is the Anglo-Saxon word for table scrap.

Doddering Hippies, Tattooed Millennials, and New Born Babes

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shark-close-up

Five years ago when I was a younger whippersnapper in my late fifties, for Fall Break, Judy Birdsong and I rented a house in Saluda, North Carolina. That was the weekend when the brilliant South Carolina running back Marcus Lattimore blew out his LCS, a seeming disaster that had me rending my garments and sending bootless cries to deaf heaven. Given the travails we’ve faced in the last two years, the sorrow I suffered over Lattimore’s not–anywhere-close-to-life-threatening injury seems a colossal waste of my precious time and a lesson in the importance of perspective.

The very next weekend, our hometown, the City of Folly Beach, celebrated Follypalooza, one of the frequent offseason festivals when the authorities close off vehicular traffic on Center Street. Follypalooza provides an opportunity for local businesses in the offseason to replenish their depleted coffers as daytrippers promenade up and down the boulevard drinking beer, purchasing sidewalk prepared food, and listening to various bands playing jazz or rock from strategically placed makeshift stages.

band-full

In the week between the visit to Saluda and the celebration of Follypalooza 2011, I had written this rather unkind comparison of the two resort communities:

Saluda’s affect – if you can use that word to describe a town – is the complete opposite of Folly’s tawdrylite.  Saluda is your great aunt Christina, once a formidable beauty, now a graceful matron, whereas Folly is your second cousin Brandi who sports a giant Minnie Mouse tat on her shoulder and way-too-short cutoff jeans that slice into her thighs.

However, we wouldn’t want it any other way. As my late mother used to say, “It takes all kinds to make the world/Variety is the spice of life.”  So during halftime of the South Carolina UMass game yesterday, a glorious, crisp, sun-splashed Day of Saturn, my spiritual advisor James T Crow and I walked the six blocks from our homes to Center Street to check out the festivities.

headed up Huron to Center Street

headed up Huron to Center Street

One unfortunate change from the Follypalooza of five years ago is that to imbibe on the street, you have to purchase a wristband ($2), which means standing in yet another line. The nice, chatty first grade teacher in charge joked about not feeling compelled to have me extract my wallet to provide proof that my date of birth was sometime before 22 October 1995.

waiting in line

waiting in line

As I stood in line, Jim rustled up some barbecue, and we met at the Jack of Cups where we had a front row seat for the bucking shark ride.

outside the Jack of Cups

outside the Jack of Cups

Yes, there were a few young kids, a sprinkling of teens, a fair share of tattooed millennials; however, the vast majority of sybarites were old enough to have AARP cards in their wallets, and I witnessed – and what a sad sight it was – doddering hippies, you know men with shoulder length white hair, dressed in tie-dyed t-shirts, wobbling along at a slug’s pace.

old-hippies

My mind wandered off to the nursing home of my future, and I pictured myself among wizened hippies trading stories about how in college they drove halfway across the continent to Mardi Gras while tripping on windowpane acid. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was once their dearest slogan, but as Ulysses once said to Achilles, “Time hath, me Lord, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms to oblivion.”

Yet as Jim and I were preparing to leave, with these melancholy thoughts darkening my day, I bumped into a former student and her mother, a former colleague, pushing in a stroller their son/grandson “Prince Henry.”

prince-henry

Prince Henry

Ah yes! Let’s focus on the positive, not the negative. Let’s quit wasting our precious time lamenting the rightful inevitabilities of existence and enjoy the bright sun, the crisp autumn day, the deep blue sky.

Go Gamecocks.

The Pea Brains of the South

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51kdl6fwrhl-_sx326_bo1204203200_Ladies, gentlemen, bulldogs, and babies, I’d like to introduce you to Henry Heppleworth, a product of the brilliant comic imagination of my expat pal, Charlie Geer, author of Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.  Do yourself a favor and cop a copy here.

Charlie and his wife Concha, who live in Andalusia, Spain, visited Judy and me last summer during an extended stay in Charleston, and I passed along to Charlie a copy of WJ Cash’s The Mind of the South, a fascinating, intuitive study of that section of our great nation that Winston Churchill called “a minstrel show wrapped in an episode of Hee Haw inside of a Euripidean tragedy.”

Yesterday Charlie sent me a link featuring Henry with this message:

[The clip is] Heavily inspired by The Mind of the South, for which I thank you dearly. The clip started out as satire, but is starting to feel like tragedy [. . .] The original script was much more nuanced, but alas, there’s not much room for nuance on YouTube. Hopefully future installments will redeem Henry in some way, once he understands he’s been used and abused by the people he votes for.

So without further ado, dig it:

 

mind-of-the-south

The Road to Tusheti

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Another terrifying post from my deadpan boy Ned.

kingofnowhere's avatarKing of nowhere

Things weren’t exactly off to a hot start. I was waiting at the square at the Isani metro stop, sitting as far away from the homeless as possible. And the stray dogs. It was early, around 7:10, the guide wasn’t supposed to meet me until 7:30, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone besides him. I was tired—I’d been on the road almost a month, and even a private room isn’t the same as your own bed. I looked up and saw a drunk and tough looking man approaching. He was a taxi driver and wanted me to ride. “Rustaveli 10 lari,” he said.

“No, I stay here,” I replied, overly enunciating.

“10 Lari, Didube.”

“I wait for tour. Tusheti.” It didn’t really bother me that he approached. Rather, it bothered me that he was trying to charge me three times the local rate. You can argue double is…

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Fun Enough Outings Near Charleston International Airport (CHS) for Those Too Impatient to Wait Two Hours for a Delayed Flight in a Soul-Slaying Cafeteria-Like Space Where You Can’t Purchase Alcohol

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Chances are if you’re waiting at the so-called International Airport in Charleston, SC for a loved one’s arrival from a cancer treatment junket in Houston the day after you discover water dripping from a lighting fixture over your breakfast bar (the consequence of two tropical storms within 6 days having bitch-slapped[1] the barrier island you call home), you might come to the conclusion that your karma sucks, that the odds of your loved one’s arriving on schedule are about the equivalent of Donald Trump’s announcing he’s dumping Melania for Caitlyn Jenner.

if only

if only

And in my case, you’d be right.

Of course, I could have just sat there among those perhaps Pentecostal women in their fusty Little House on the Prairie outfits and watch them stare into their cell phones, or I could decide to make Amoretto Sours out of lemons, to grab the jazz combo by the horns, to get the hell out of there.

It was 7:30, and the flight was now rescheduled to arrive at 9:00.

Go west, Old Man.

map

Okay, here’s my advice if what happened to me last night happens to you.

Exit the airport and head straight past the Boeing plant, past the 526 on-ramps, straight on International Avenue towards Montague. Keep going until you see the first brightly lit strip shopping center to your left located on Tanger Outlet Boulevard.

That’s where we’re headed, to La Hacienda, specifically into a small barroom inside the restaurant.

the bar inside La Hacienda

the bar inside La Hacienda

I sat in the fourth stool from the left.  Two stools over sat a diminutive African American who reminded me of a hatless Thelonious Monk and to my right stood a tall Ricardo-Montalbán-looking cat who was drinking one of these:

cerveza-rita-small-corona

I ordered a small Dos Equis on draft and paid in cash.  Thelonious was reading a newspaper, working on some chips, the bartender conversing with Ricardo in Spanish, so I decided to leave my beer on the bar and boogie over to Mr. K’s Used Books and Music, conveniently located two stores down.  The joint is brightly lit yet cavernous, feels more like a library than a bookstore.   I found the non-fiction section and bought a copy of David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

Back at the bar, Thelonious had been replaced by a different African American, a handsome twenty-something wearing a baseball cap cocked to one side and sporting gold caps on his front teeth.

So I reclaimed my seat and flipped to an essay entitled “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle.”  The essay is about Sedaris refusing to change seats on a flight to Raleigh as a favor to a woman “wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs” so she can sit with her husband.  The woman is the opposite of gracious. Once in the air, she takes off her shoes, and Sedaris, who’s doing the Saturday Times crossword, notices “her toenails were painted white and each one was perfectly sculpted.”

Eighteen across: “Not Impressed.”

Eleven down: “Whore.”

I wasn’t even looking at the clues anymore.

I chuckled a couple of times, but when I hit this paragraph, I let loose one of my godlike laughs:

It’s always so satisfying when you can twist someone’s hatred into guilt — make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.  The problem is that it works both ways.  I’d taken this woman as the type who arrives late at a movie, then asks me to move behind the tallest person in the theater so that she and her husband can sit together.  Everyone has to suffer just because she’s sleeping with someone.  But what if I was wrong?  I pictured her in a dimly lit room, trembling before a portfolio of dimly lit X-rays.  “I give you two weeks at the most, the doctor says,  “Why don’t you get your toe-nails done, buy yourself a nice pair of cutoffs and spend some quality time with your husband.  I hear the beaches of North Carolina are pretty this time of year.”

The fellow with the baseball cap to my left said, “You sho seem to be having fun.”

“This book’s hilarious,” I said.

Just then my cell rang.  The scoop with Judy, my beloved, is that even though an hour ago her flight was circling Charleston, it had to turn around to refuel in Charlotte.  She was calling me to let me know they were getting ready to take off for the thirty-minute flight.

“But I’m having fun at La Hacienda,”  I whined.  “Why don’t you just take a cab home?”

She laughed.

“I’ll see you in about half hour,” I said.

The man to my left said apropos of nothing that he had beer at home but no liquor and that he just wanted a taste of liquor before he went home.  He was drinking something cranberry-colored in a short glass.

I asked the bartender, who called me señor instead of sir, for the tab and told him to add the fellow’s drink to it.

“Thank you,”  my friend to the left said.  “That’s a blessing.”  He shook my hand with the lightest of handshakes.  He finished before me and tapped me on the shoulder to thank me again as he walked out.

I asked Ricardo what he has drinking, which was essentially a margarita getting slow-dripped by a pony Corona.  It’s delicious,”  he said with an elegant  Spanish accent.

“Well, so long,”  I said once my Dos Equis was history, having successfully resisted the impulse to say “adios.”

When I hit the airport the arrivals sign now said the flight would arrive at 9: 30, but just then I got the text “landed.”

So I waited for Judy, who eventually appeared, wearing her wig, trudging exhaustedly.  Over at the baggage area stood the five pioneer-clad sect members.  I told one of them that my wife could literally see the island where we live when the plane turned around to head to Charlotte, that it was like a Marx Brothers movie. They found the entire episode amusing and were happy now that Emily had joined them.

And Judy’s bags were the first two off.  Maybe our luck was changing.

[1] I’ve searched the Dewey Decimal System of my pre-digital vocabulary for a better descriptor than bitch-slapped, but pounded, drenched, scraped, etc. seem too much or too little or too inappropriately concretely rake-like, so I’ve opted for an admittedly sexist cliché rather than going with the weaker synonym backhanded.

A Guided Tour of Last Night’s Insomnia

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Insomnia by ~diablozz

Insomnia by ~diablozz

On the Sunday night before the Monday morning of my return, given that I had missed seven consecutive days of school, I could have predicted that when I lay me down to sleep in my half-empty bed, I would suffer a potent spell of insomnia.

My wife and I had been on a medical junket to Houston, Texas, where she received a PET scan, an MRI, an extra-scheduled brain MRI, and subsequent “lumbar puncture” (née spinal tap). Add to that existential dread the students’ missed work, the now screwed-up syllabi, my dislike of grog-producing sleep aids, and insomnia was, as Richard Nixon once said, a foregone conclusion.

When that switch goes off in my head and those darkened corridors become suddenly illuminated and I’m instantaneously wide, wide awake, I don my imaginary Sigmund Freud mask with its glasses, white beard, and cigar. A re-visitation and evaluation of recent dreams is in order.

Dream 1: During my absence the government has constructed a road that runs through the marsh and river that are in essence my back yard. So long serenity; hail ceaseless traffic. [Interpretation: cancer invasion].

road-in-marsh

Dream 2: I’m at a family reunion where my mother and father are among the quick, and some female baby relative cousin is screaming her head off — no one can quiet her — so I pick her up to see what I can do and discover that feces is flowing lava-like from her dripping diaper onto a Persian rug, so I hand her off to my mother and grab rags and paper towels and try to sop up the diarrheic outpouring. [Interpretation: cancer has shitted on our lives].

Dream 3: I’m in some exotic location in the South Seas where a swimming pool overlooks the most pacific of Pacific seascapes. I’m having a conversation with two of my former students, Allen and Willy Hutcheson, and Allen is telling me about his life when I detect some commotion in the pool. I look down and see a dead Macaw lying at the bottom, which I know will upset Willy because he is an ornithologist, but then there’s this terrible thrashing, and low and behold, an exotically neon-hued very alive crocodile has replaced the dead parrot. [Interpretation: sigh].

croc-in-pool

Okay, perhaps a different mental activity might be in order.

This is probably stupid, but when I have these spates of insomnia, I create overly metric nonsense verse, stupid adult versions of nursery rhymes, and the following is what I came up with last night, and I share it, not because it is any good at all, or even particularly clever, but because of where it leads us next.

Dr. John and I

shared a piece of apple pie

baked by that angel grandma

Chloe of Senegal

who is as scrawny

as the doctor is brawny,

though if I weren’t

bound by rhyme

I might opine

that big-bellied would be better

to describe a waistline so unfettered.

The Great Dr. John, aka Mac Rebennack

The Great Dr. John, aka Mac Rebennack

This exercise leads me to think about English, that hybrid language with its blunt Anglo-Saxon roots, supple Norse syntax, and treasure trove of French words. We’re talking here the assimilation, not of immigrants, but of invaders, yet Anglo-Saxon girls married Vikings, their offspring married Normans, who ate poultry instead of chicken, the combination of the three languages creating such a wealth of ways to express ourselves.

Scrawny, brawny – a potent spell of insomnia . . .

[scrawny – probably from Old Norse skrælna to shrival]

[brawny – from Old French braon fleshy or muscular part, buttock]

[potent – from Latin potentem powerful]

[spell – from Old English gespelia – a substitute, shift work, continuous stretch]

[spell – from Proto German spellam “report, tale, fable. ” From c. 1200 as “an utterance, something said, a statement, remark”; meaning “set of words with supposed magical or occult powers, incantation, charm, first recorded 1570s; hence any means or cause of enchantment.” (Oxford Dictionary of Folklore via Online Etymology Dictionary)

I think of the ad in Back of the Boy’s Life magazines I read when I was a Cub Scout, the ad with the 98 pound weakling sharing a beach blanket his a buxom companion, their outing spoiled by having sand kicked in their faces.

“Hey, you pathetic emaciated excuse for a hominid,” ejaculates the muscular ruffian.

“Hey, you scrawny bitch,” spews the rock-hard bully.

shapeimage_2

And these thoughts of assimilation lead me to think of how many Muslims I saw in Houston, all the women in hijabs, both at the Galleria Mall and at MD Anderson, one woman sitting in the hospital in a black niqab but also wearing a mask beneath the veil to ward off infection, and then there was the Iraqi veteran who had worked as a translator for the US Army and who was now working as a concierge at the Wyndam Suites, and also we met with a former student and his Pakistani wife, their marriage being the first non-arranged union in the history of her family, and she told Judy and me that even as a coed at the University of Georgia her curfew at her home in the summertime was seven p.m. and, oh boy, a yawn, a good sign, my body hinting to just breathe, and maybe the mind will empty if I pay attention to inhalation and exhalation, if I just let go and allow the swirls of grey behind my eyelids to take whatever shape whatever.

The Pros and Cons of Traveling Alone

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Guest blogging from my younger son the linguist, an argument for why traveling abroad solo is the way to go.

kingofnowhere's avatarKing of nowhere

img_0672 Lana in Tuscheti, Georgia

Every time I get ready to go on a trip, people inevitably ask me, “Who are you traveling with?” I tell them that I’m going alone. Their foreheads usually wrinkle, and a look of pity settles on their faces. “Oh,” they say.

I always clarify, “I only travel alone; I never let anyone go with me. You meet more people that way.”

Then they usually say something like, “That makes sense,” in a skeptical tone of voice.

I know. I get it. it’s scary to travel by yourself. It can be difficult (though many worthwhile things are). People often make excuses or don’t think they’re brave enough to do it.  Women always tell me, “Well, you’re a guy—it’s easier and safer for you.” And I’m sure they’re right, but I’ve met plenty of travelers carrying two X chromosomes, and none of them got raped OR murdered.

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Negril, Jamaica, Meets Houston’s Galleria

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post_display_cropped_open-uri20131213-887-4127i6

Seven Mile Beach, Negril, Jamaica

I can’t precisely tell you the last time I had stepped into a mall. I suspect it had been at least twenty years. I remember taking my sons to the Citadel Mall Christmas shopping for their mother, Judy Birdsong, when they were ten or so, but nothing after that comes to mind.

Frankly, malls give me the heebie-jeebies. If I need to go shopping off-line, despite the horror-show parking situation, I drive downtown to King Street in Charleston, SC, fifteen miles from where I live. Even though we’re dealing with some of the same stores, King Street doesn’t throw me into a state of deep depression. The capitalistic concentration isn’t quite as claustrophobic, not as stultifying. So the other day when the other Judy Birdsong, our Texas friend who shares the same name with my wife,* was giving us a tour of her hometown Houston and asked if we’d like to visit Houston’s mega mall, the Galleria, we demurred, which delighted the Houston Judy because “malls are just not [her] thing.”

*It’s a complicated but interesting story you can read about here.

I can, however, tell you the last time I was in Negril, Jamaica; it was June of 1986. It was Judy Birdsong’s and my second visit to that funky north shore village, and we were shocked how much it had changed in the three short years we’d been there. What hadn’t changed, however, were the swarms of street entrepreneurs, eager to trade money or sell you a carved coconut head or some ganga, mon,

couples-swept-away-negril

Constantly being besieged by and saying no to very pushy people is exhausting. You try, of course, to avoid eye-contact, which means you stare straight ahead and miss out on peripheral pleasures. Finally, someone at our hotel shared the secret of street-hawker repulsion. You simple say, “Winston’s my man. He’s taking care of me.” You see, Winston is a common name in Jamaica. Any number of hawkers are named Winston, so when you say Winston has you covered, they immediately cease their spiels.

Please note that the very first sentence of this post uses the past perfect tense “had stepped” because, despite a lifetime of dissipation, I do remember the very last time I stepped into a mall. It was yesterday. It was the Galleria. The hard drive of of my MacBook Pro had followed Lady Chablis into the dark realm of non-existence on 8 September 2016. The closest Apple Store to our airbnb was located at, you guessed it, the Galleria, so we ubered over, and the nice people at the Apple Store repaired it while we strolled around the mall.

lady-chablis-microphone-650

RIP Lady Chablis

Perhaps it’s the fact that on-line shopping is driving these businesses out of business, but now several of the establishments position very attractive women outside their doors who rather aggressively engage you by handing out samples of lotions, etc. Lined up in their miniskirts, these women brought to mind the way old movies portrayed red light districts. Though no one actually shouted at me, “Hey, sailor,” I was being solicited literally right and left.

So I started behaving like I was in Negril, staring straight ahead, frowningly shaking my head no until I heard a young woman say, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s not about a sample.” So we stopped. Her smile was at least 100 watts. “I bet I can guess where you’re from,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re from Australia.”

Judy and I both laughed, shook our heads no.

“Where’re you from?”

“Charleston, SC.”

“Great. What brings you to Houston?”

“Cancer treatment,” Judy said.

The smiled dimmed to about 10 watts. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Here’s some samples. They’re all natural. Come back if you like them.”

“Thanks.”

Anyway, it seemed, except for the sales staff, we were the only Anglos in the Galleria, and it also seemed that Muslims and Asians outnumbered Latinos. I don’t know if this distribution has to do with the demographics of Houston or that Anglos do their shopping on-line or these newer immigrants enjoy basking in the seeming prosperity a mall exudes.

I just wish there had been an equivalent of “Winston has me covered” I could have used there.

galleria-houston-300x350

The Galleria, Houston Texas

 

Adventures at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center

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md-anderson-logo

We’re staying on the fringes of a section of sprawling Houston called “the Medical Center,” our neighborhood a disjointed hodgepodge of highrises, some aesthetically interesting, others not so much so.

2016-08-31 14.33.48

View from our hotel window

However, we’re not visiting Houston to take in its architectural wonders; we’re here seeing medical wonders. Today Judy has an appointment with T-cell lymphoma guru Dr. Michelle A. Fanale, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the best in the nation. The series of buildings that constitute the Anderson complex is extensive, impressively massive, each adorned with the red-slashed cancer logo.

Our hotel, Wyndham Suites, is a mere 15-minute walk, so we hoof it through the blistering heat, sweat streaming from under my fedora. Judy has wisely ditched the wig, opting instead for a pastel aqua green headscarf that makes look like a lovely lean tropical Muslim.[1]

2016-09-01 12.46.23

As we drop into Anderson Café for breakfast, I practice my hobby of late, trying to ascertain who has cancer and who doesn’t. It’s harder than you might think. In the misnamed café (think cafeteria) I see no scarf-wearing or hatted women and only one ashen-faced fellow with the telltale baseball cap, though many people seem to have locomotion issues, and more than a few suffer severe obesity.

Once we’ve dumped our trash, we board the B elevators and shoot up to the Lymphoma/Myeloma center and have a seat and wait until Patricia, a smiling 50-something African American invites us into her office to process Judy’s admission. Patricia’s absolutely delightful, chatty, sincerely interested in us. As she goes over scads of information while Judy electronically signs permission after permission, I ask her if she’s a native Texan.

She theatrically bats her eyes. “Yes sir. Do you detect a hint of a drawl?”

She’s never been to Charleston but has been to North Carolina, where her Marine son was stationed. His wife’s from Virginia Beach, so she has been “to that beach.”

“I’m hoping you have some grandchildren,” I say.

Her eyes light up as she broadly smiles. “Eight,” And she was recently with all eight in Gatlinburg, which “was just breathtaking.”

The absolutely best news is that because Judy has met her deductible, 100% will be covered by our insurance.

“That’s the one good thing about having cancer,” Judy says.

We return to the seating area and another woman, a Latina, comes up and introduces herself as a sort of concierge. I mention that rumor has it that there’s a bar in the hospital, and she happily informs me that it’s true and that she’s glad to see I have my priorities right. She hands us her card and is off.

Once Judy has her vitals recorded, we enter the examination room where I continue to grade essays electronically. We meet our head physician’s nurse and someone shadowing her. Both are young, black, friendly but businesslike.

A brisk knock and a nurse practitioner enters, a husky young man around forty or so whom I deduce is Hawaiian because of his appearance and the fact that he greets people with “aloha.”

He has Judy give an oral history from the original discovery of the original tumor in July 2014, up through the reoccurrence in March of this year, all the way to last Thursday’s biopsy. These are painful recollections, especially the last five months.

Our next visitor is physician who has Judy sign forms giving permission to use her “fluids and tissues” for research. She’s probably about our age, short and rotund with curly black dyed hair.

“Forgive me if you can’t understand my English,” she says. “It’s Egyptian English.”

We assure her we can perfectly understand her. She asks Judy if she’s Lebanese, says she looks Lebanese, and goes on to add that even though Egypt has 7000 years of civilization, the Lebanese are more forward thinking. “They’re open,’ she says, “more progressive” – she rolls her r’s. “Now they’re just killing each other.” I mention that I hear it’s worse now that Mubarak’s gone.

“Yes,” she says. “It would be nice to have Mubarak back. It’s hard to run a country. You need to know what you’re doing.”

I mention Mr. Trump, and she smiles without comment and after a few minutes leaves us once again alone., assuring us that Dr. Fanale is a genius and that full recovery is possible. “You have to be strong,” she says. “I just had heart failure last week, and look at me. I’m strong.”

More essay grading.

Finally, Dr. Fanale arrives with a clipboard and an offered hand. She explains to us that because we don’t have a baseline PET scan to compare the latest growth that we need to have tests run tomorrow and from there decide to continue the present course of treatment (ICE with a future allo stem cell transplant) or not. She mentions several alternate options running off a list of polysyllabic drugs. She strongly suggests we have the theoretical stem cell at Anderson because they do hundreds a year and have specific knowledge of T-cell lymphoma reactions, which may differ from other cancer patient’s reactions.

“Well, I was just told you are a genius,”  Judy tells Dr. Fantale.

“I don’t know if I’m a genius,” she replies, “but I am an experienced expert in T-cell lymphomas.”

* * *

We’ll meet her again on Wednesday and discuss the results of the tests and treatment strategies.

I won’t say I left the joint upbeat, but it’s gratifying to know that several other options exist other than the one Judy has been following.  It also occurred to me that at least at MD Anderson immigration seemed to be working just fine.

Now, it’s time to snag Uber, hightail it to Kroger’s, stock up on some beer, and suffer through the Gamecock opener.

[1] As anyone who has traveled with us knows (right Beth Hudson Clifton), Judy has an aversion to taking taxis, so don’t blame me for making her walk half a mile to seek cancer treatment.

 

“The Progressive Shifting of the Social”

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On Saturday nights in the little living rooms of my youth, my family huddled around our black and white television to watch Sheriff Matt Dillion engage in gunplay so civilized that it seemed as if the Marquis of Queensberry presided over Matt’s confrontations with that neverending stream of cold-blooded killers. In each episode, the two antagonists would politely pace like duelists to settle questions of good and evil according to who possessed the better reflexes and aim.

Would the avatar of law-and-order prevail over the sadistic child slayer, or would the sociopath triumph and therefore enjoy the freedom to continue his chosen lifestyle of plunder and mayhem?

If we weren’t watching television, we listened to my mother and father tell the tales of their youth, the old man regaling us with Depression era stories of Spring Street when the Jenkins Orphanage band was in full swing. We learned about some woebegone junkie called Paregoric Annie who haunted my great-grandfather’s pharmacy on the Corner of Spring and Ashley. She periodically visited peninsula drugstores begging for opiates, which Great Grandaddy generously donated, like the rest of his competitors, on a rotating basis. Despite the entertainment Charleston’s two channels provided, the old oral Southern tradition remained dominant.

Jenkins Orphanage Band, date unknown

Jenkins Orphanage Band, date unknown

The public school I attended generally reinforced these prejudices. Our South Carolina History text blamed the “War Between the States” on unfair tariffs and sympathetically portrayed the rise of the Klan as a sort of necessary reaction to the injustices of Reconstruction.

Thus, the inculcation of culture was passed from generation to generation without very much outside influence.

The times, however, have changed, as Dylan prophesied they would a half a century ago.

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As any adolescent psychiatrist worth her weight in Adderall knows, once a child reaches middle school, his peers influence him much more than his parents. The same might be said of the media with college-aged kids, young adults, and couples with young children – media influence them more than traditional family mores.

Grandaddy’s biblically based view of homosexuality gives way to Oprah’s open-mindedness. What my mother once derisively termed “shacking up” is more and a more a sanctioned step on the pathway to matrimony.

Our choices are directed less and less by traditional knowledge and more and more by elements captured here and there in the media [:] How to eat properly, how to stay young and healthy, how to bring up children [. . .] The present governs our relationship with the past. We keep only that part of the past that is convenient for us, only what is not in flagrant contradiction to modern values, personal taste, conscience. No collective rule has value in itself any longer if it is not expressly recognized by the will of the individual.

Gilles Lipovetsky: The Empire of Fashion

I’m not arguing that abandoning the deep roots of tradition for the ephemeral cartoon bubbles of sitcom morality is necessarily a great thing, nor does Lipovetsky:

A preference for provisional arrangements is winning out over fidelity, superficial commitment over motivation based on belief. We are embarked on an interminable process of desacralization and desubstantialization of meaning that defines the reign of consummate fashion. This is how the gods die, not in a nihilist demoralization of the West and anguish over the loss of values, but in small jolts of meaning. Not in the morosity of Europe, but in the euphoria of fleeting ideas and actions. Not in passive disillusionment, but in hyperanimation and temporary highs. There is no point in weeping over “the Death of God” : God is getting a technicolor, fast-forward funeral. Far from engendering a will to nothingness, the death of God carries the desire for the new and its excitement to extremes.

What I will argue is that among America’s youth that the old ways are not their ways, and ubiquity of internet access bodes poorly for the traditional Republican Party as the majority of their constituency shuffles off to their appointments in Samara.  Also, changes are afoot on the Democratic side as the young Sanders’ Brocialists push the Democratic ever more leftward.

Or as Springsteen put it in “Independence Day,”

Because there’s just different people coming down here now and they see things in different ways
And soon everything we’ve known will just be swept away.