Nurturing the Next Great Generation

Month: March 2019

A Walk in the Snowy Woods After the Brain Scan

The eye doctor looked at me clinically, calmly and said, “There does not appear to be any obvious reason why your 6th optic nerve stopped working. Could be just a…

The eye doctor looked at me clinically, calmly and said, “There does not appear to be any obvious reason why your 6th optic nerve stopped working. Could be just a virus and your vision will clear up on its own. But we’ll have to have an MRI done to rule out a brain tumor or stroke.”

This is the kind of thing one hears at the age of 59, a sort of welcome basket to 60 packed with nasty shit I don’t want to think about.

A week before the appointment, my vision had gone double. While driving, the right side of the road looked as if it were in the middle of the road at an angle. A person six feet away looked like twins.

I’ll admit that I’m a worrier.

As soon as the doctor said the word ‘tumor’ I was sure that was exactly what had caused the problem. A friend of mine had told me only recently that if I died today, I’d have lived an amazing life and should have no regrets—especially since I have three grandchildren. How prescient of my friend to predict my impending demise so accurately!

But kicking the bucket now was not, I told myself firmly, going to happen because I’d promised I would be there for my grandchildren for a long, long time.

You have to wonder how many people have similar objections to death, as if the Grim Reaper actually listens.

One minute we’re raising perfectly reasonable objections, and the next we find ourselves suspended in the air looking down at our bodies on the operating table, in the car wreck, or slumped at a restaurant table by the hidden bits of almond garnish we had told the waiter we were allergic to.

The MRI brain scan came out negative. Miraculously, my baseball-sized (it had actually grown to be larger than my whole head) tumor did not exist. Within two weeks my vision started to clear up.

When you hear the word ‘tumor’ from a doctor, though, you can’t ever fully forget it.

The word sticks to your consciousness as vigorously as any stage 4 glioblastoma grips your brain. Trying to force the fear out doesn’t work. What author Siddhartha Mukherjee called “The Emperor of All Maladies” rules the fretful underworld of our everyday existence, and the only way to deal with this reality is to accept it and let the fear flow out as quietly as it flowed in.

With this in my mind, I went snowshoeing in the Vermont woods today after a heavy snowfall.

Even with the snowshoes on, each step took me two feet down, and I began to sweat in the chill air as I churned deeper into the woods. Fresh deer tracks in the path showed they’d been there just before me.

I paused when I reached the Falls. In other seasons, this part of the brook is where water cascades over wide, flat rocks coated in thick green moss. Today, a gap in the snow showed only a peek of the rushing water beneath, and the sound of the water was muffled by the heavy snow that clung to tree branches like a thick white parka. I stood there, listening and looking at nothing, for a long while, until I saw with a start three deer leaping to the left and away up the hill, the sides of their faces and big bright eyes and their broad tan flanks one after the other visible only briefly between the trunks of cedar trees.

The cedar trees….the bark of cedar trees…I stared at the bark of the nearest tree and saw its dark brown color in stark contrast to the white snow all around, and noticed the texture of the bark, the pattern of narrow lines of vertical growth separated by troughs, and the way branches grew out of the bark as if they had muscled their way through a curtain, leaving semicircles of growth around them.

And then like a camera that zooms away from its subject, I took in the whole scene of cedar trees, dozens of them along both banks of the Falls, and the flowing mounds of snow around the base of their trunks, white snow that in the shade of the cedars became light and even dark blue, with the brown corduroy of the cedar trunks rising out of the blue and blending with the snow-covered boughs towards the thick canopy of branches above.

After a time—I can’t measure it in minutes—I trudged back out of the forest and came into the field by my house.

The sun was just starting to come out after the last remnants of storm clouds melted away, so here the snow was blindingly white.

I went inside and ate hot chicken soup by the fire.

#grandfathers #grandparents #NEK

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A letter hidden in a book for fifty years. An enduring sexual mystery.

In the post-World War II economic boom, America mass-produced many things, from cars to TVs and washing machines, but making babies was our most prodigious accomplishment. My parents gleefully did…

In the post-World War II economic boom, America mass-produced many things, from cars to TVs and washing machines, but making babies was our most prodigious accomplishment. My parents gleefully did their part in the baby boom production effort, with five of us boys born over an eleven-year period.

I use a euphemism like ‘production’ in relation to baby making because, like everyone else, I can’t bear to think of my parents having sex. But for the purpose of this story there’s simply no avoiding the word. My parents must have had plenty of sex, and my dad in particular found great joy in it for as long as he possibly could—certainly extending into his later life as a grandfather.

My mom, at that point, was not so interested; I know this because she would proclaim her disdain for sex publicly at the dinner table.

“I did my duty plenty,” she said, eyeing dad with unbridled disgust.

Just how interested was my dad in sex? After he passed away at the age of 92, I found out.

I was going through his extensive library one day and came upon a copy of Masters & Johnson’s book, Human Sexual Response, and as I leafed through the pages I was surprised when a letter popped out, and even more surprised when I discovered it was written to my dad from William H. Masters himself. The masthead shows that it was sent from the REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGY RESEARCH FOUNDATION in St. Louis, Missouri.

The letter reads as follows.

“Dear Mr. Page:

We are writing in response to your letter of inquiry dated January 19, 1975.

Regretfully, the monograph discussed in the text HUMAN SEXUAL INADEQUACY has not been published to date.

Sorry we can’t be of help at this time.

Most sincerely,

W. H. Masters, M.D.”

I stood in dad’s library holding the letter, stunned and curious.

My parents were 53 years old in 1975, probably at an age when dad was still raring to go in the bedroom. So, did he reach out to William Masters—in 1975 already considered a pioneering legend in the field of human sexuality—in a desperate attempt to fathom why my mom didn’t want to ‘do it’ any more? Or did he secretly have doubts about his own sexual abilities?

And perhaps the biggest question: What exactly did William Masters not know about sexual inadequacy, or what did he choose not to share with my dad?

The book that held the letter so tight for fifty years did not include any overt references to sexual inadequacy.

Although there were intriguing chapters such as (and I’m not making this up) “The Artificial Vagina—ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY.”

I can only imagine what my mom’s response would have been if she had learned that dad was reading the chapter titled THE REPRODUCTIVE VISCERA—THE VAGINA (page 233). Surely any desire she might have felt to ‘do her duty’ would have jumped out the window and kept on running.

Some mysteries are better off not solved.

ADDENDUM: My wife, who is my toughest and wisest critic, said of this story, “I like it, but what does it have to do with being a good grandpa?” The answer is that I think that we as grandparents are often in long-term relationships, and we can learn a few things about how our parents worked through their marital issues—or didn’t. Instead of having a typical blog that offers advice (“Five tips being a good grandpa!”), I’d much rather tell stories that are rich with the ambiguities of life and let readers draw their own conclusions.

1 Comment on A letter hidden in a book for fifty years. An enduring sexual mystery.

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