Florida to Brooklyn

I got back from Florida, that land of lizards in bed with you, and came right to Brooklyn with my 'driver' (what the old ball-‘n-chain calls himself these days.) It was hard to leave my sister still so laid up but maybe l’ll be back there soon since her groom is having major surgery at the end of June and who will help Nan while he’s in the hospital?  She’s not supposed to put any weight on that her foot full of busted bones each no thicker than the bamboo skewers that come with your shish kebab.  “You can walk in your cast that weighs 12 pounds,” they told her “but you have to keep your toes in the air at all times.” Try it. Try it for five minutes, your heel down and your toes in full foot-cramp salute and see how your back and your leg muscles feel. By 7:00 every night she had her head in her hands, just hanging on for bedtime.7:00 was the hour I got the dinner on. It’s the hour that marked the arrival of  Nan’s daughter Grace, all legs and long blond hair and just the ghost of the freckles that made her look as a child like a female Tom Sawyer. She was the first baby I ever fell in love with.Not much to say yet in old Crooklyn, to reference that awesome Spike Lee movie. We came here to see our boy who now lives in this borough so full of energy and a certain indescribable grace and a great day lies ahead for us I know; but right now my thoughts are still in Florida with Nan, and her Chuck, with the girl we once called Gracie, and the little lizard that kept me company on my breaks.Here at the top?  Nan with Grace at 18 months, the latter an unstoppable force of nature even then, And below here they both are now below. Back tomorrow with all new adventures, less about me and more about the world. Happy Saturday, ya’ll!

My Sister Myself

I’m in Florida with my sister Nan who snapped all the metatarsals in her foot when she whanged it in a fall. She was always thin and delicate. Even as a grownup she’d be subjected to idiot waiters pinching her arm at the table and saying “SOMEONE needs dessert!” (“Someone’s not getting a tip!”  Nan would counter with a big smile.)The mean boys in her Sixth Grade class used to hoot, “Sheehy! Go back to your toothpick factory! “ (Our maiden name was Sheehy.)Nan was the resident expert on grownups secrets when we were kids. She was on to that whole birds-and-the-bees thing by Third Grade and used a fake name to send away for pamphlets about it. She held these Sex Ed seminars for me and my stuffed animals. “OK here’s the deal,” she would say to us all: “Girls get this thing called their periods at 12 or 13. Boys get theirs later, more like at l9 or 20…”Well she was right about most of it anyway.She let me come down here as soon as I heard about this new fracture. She’s had the awful ‘super-virus’ known as MRSA three times already and in 2008 got a cut on her foot that caused her tto spend four months in the special costly five-times-a week, three-hours-at-a-whack hyperbaric chamber. It saved her foot if not her life. This break is on the same foot so we’re crossing our fingers that surgery can be avoided since hospitals are real breeding grounds for MRSA these days.I came to cook and keep her spirits up so we’re eating like mad and hitting the wine a little and talking about the fun we had when we were young. She composed a song about aging on her way to sleep last night and promises to write out the words for me. It’s to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA” she says and if I know Nan it has a little swearing it but will be so funny you can’t help but laugh, like with that thing Mark Twain said when they asked him how he liked the opera. (Do you know it? Write in if so!)In the meantime that’s Nan on the left in this goin‘-on-an-overnight-hike picture, the year she was 12, with her best friend and cousin Mary Lou beside her. It’s how I see her still, young and wiry with the same look in those blue eyes always a little naughty, a little sad.I sure hope she gets better soon.

AWAY FROM HER & THE CAT SHAMPOOS

I’m away from her now, home again in Boston, and my big sister Nan is still in Florida; still in that Boy-in-a-Bubble world that this MRSA infection has put her in, where she can’t even take shower on account of the crucial porthole the hospital opened up in her arm. Since her week-long stay there in mid-June she's only been allowed to have little kitty-baths  - and this in a household where the real cat showers daily.

Nan and Chuck designed their bathroom in such a way that instead of a curtain the shower has two walls made of chunky glass tiles, which the cat scaled one day to oversee Chuck in his ablutions. Now Chuck is crazy about this animal and so “asked” him if wanted a little spray to the face and what do you think, the cat loved it. He now BEGS for out-and-out shampoos, complete with an Irish Spring lather-up to the head and ears. It must be like getting massage for us humans, or even massage with the special dessert thrown in for the folks who go in for that sort of thing because this cat just adores Chuck now, and follows him all over the house thanking him and licking him and sleeping in his truck when he can't get at his lap.

Nan named the cat when he first wandered into their yard as a homeless kitten. Duke she dubbed him, like they called John Wayne because little as he was he had that certain leadin'-with-ma-big-wide-shoulders-style swagger - or anyway he had it before a kitty stroke a couple of springs ago rearranged his posture some. Now he wears his head in this permanent cocked angle so now Nan calls him Two O’Clock. “Hey, Two O’Clock!” she’ll call out when he slinks by. The cat pays her no mind though; he’s too busy following Chuck, hoping for more shampoo and lap-dancing.

If you read the post underneath this you know that I went down to Florida to help Nan and Chuck as they weather this summer of Nan's sickness. This past Monday she let me go with her to the clinic that houses the Hyperbaric Chamber she must lie in for two hours every day because its oxygen-rich environment promotes healing in her foot, the site of this grievous infection. The thing looks like a big Tylenol capsule and she eases into it after the handsome tech Brian takes her vitals. On Monday he closed the cover and there she stayed, for a little over two hours before the doctor undid the dressing and looked at her poor foot, which even inside the bone is infected with this highly resistant staph infection capable of claiming your toes, your feet, your limbs and even your life.

I meanwhile sat stunned in the waiting room. I looked at the big live oak tree outside the window, wearing its Spanish moss like the torn lingerie the young Elizabeth Taylor wore in all those movies where she was for sure SEXUALLY AVAILABLE but strictly in that violet eyed upper-class British accent way.

I looked at the other clients waiting their turn, the woman who gave birth ten days ago and is one big open wound in the C-section area and so has to come have that seen to, poor dear, falling asleep in her chair.

And I brooded over the thought of what it costs to come here: a whopping $4500 per session and even with Nan's insurance she still has to pay $150 per. That will have been five days a week times ten weeks and well, you do the math.

And yet still she smiles and makes her funny remarks. She introduced Brian to me as "the Crypt Keeper" for example. He didn't mind. He gets her. He just smiled his nice smile and undid the blood pressure cuff around her little arm. "Wave to your sister," he said and she did that and he closed the lid and the session began.

Recipes for Healing

THIS IS NAN ON THE LEFT, WITH COUSIN ELEANOR

I’m in Florida, the land of scooting lizards and drinking water that smells like a swamp - only here at my sister Nan’s house Nature is banished. Her husband Chuck saw to that: he built this place five years ago and all night long the ceiling fans turn in rhythm with the comforting rumbles of the seeming dozen of systems all working to keep thing cool, dry and varmint-free.

The two of them were five years into their marriage when they came here. Chuck’s beautiful wife Betty had died of cancer and Nan’s high-energy husband Tom had died of a heart attack. Tom was one of the only two men I have ever known who would smoke while downhill skiing off the trail. He also would eat six raw hot dogs, chased by six-hard-boiled eggs, chased by a pint of ice cream. Nan and their 15-year-old daughter Gracie suffered so much when he died, as did the four wonderful kids from his first marriage all in their 20s, that tender and precarious decade.

Now Nan is suffering again: For the third time in four years she has a MRSA infection and this one is bad. She wants me to do a kind of 'public service' column about MRSA and I can try to do that as soon as I get home to Boston, but right now it's 8am and I'm sitting in this lovely tree house of a home on the bayou and the fans are turning and Nan is quietly infusing herself with the killer antibiotic Vancomycin, the only drug at all shown to be effective against this methycillin-resistant staph infection.

She has an opening in her arm where the PICC line enters, then heads north, then south again and straight to her heart. (The abbreviation stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter.) It’s very important that that site remain clean and a wound care specialist comes every day to look both at it and at her foot, where the infection began. It’s in the bone still, even these seven weeks into treatment, and everyone is praying she can keep her toes. At one point they thought the foot was even a goner. At its worst Nan says it looked like a shark had bitten her. It was raw and open, pulsing and red.

She wouldn’t let me come until now. “I'm fine. I have Gracie,“ she emailed me the one time. “I have Chuck.” But every single day she has to go for what could end up being nine or even ten weeks to lie for two hours each time in the Hyperbaric Chamber which is said to speed healing. And then there are the doctor’s appointments. And Gracie couldn't work from this house forever. And on the phone once Chuck said in a very small voice, “I’m just having a little trouble with the meals."

So I got on the plane the second Nan gave me the green light. I here came Thursday at 4:00 and I will leave tomorrow morning at 10:00 and in that time I have made a Chicken Cassoulet meal and a heart Meaty Loaf meal; an old-fashioned Roast with Pan Gravy, and a Baked Ziti that would feed a dozen; a hot Pear, Pork and Arugula Dish with Walnuts and Bleu Cheese and a Chopped Broccoli Salad with Bacon Bits Cheddar and Red Onion. Yesterday I went to the Winn-Dixie and bought ten Tupperware containers and today I will start freezing it all, because they have barely made a dent in it, natch.

It’s funny though: I’m just looking at this list to see that that while the Pork and Arugula Salad is a new favorite of ours everything else has meaning: The Roast with Gravy and the Zesty Meat Loaf were our Mom’s specialty. My girl Annie-the-chef told me to make the Baked Ziti and sent me down here with the recipe that bears her quirky stamp (“Mix the whole mess up in a bowl...”) The Chicken Cassoulet is our cousin’s Carolyn’s specialty and the Cheesy Broccoli Salad is Cousin Eleanor's. I’m pretty sure Eleanor herself is coming at the end of August. I know Cousin Sheila arrives in just two weeks. My girl Carrie is sending a CD and a book down. And faithful-hearted Cousin Mary Lou calls and calls, expressing love and compassion though Nan is too weak yet to tackle a phone call.

Dodson is a beloved honorary son of David and me and he might as well be son to Nan and Chuck too for how they love him and his new bride Veronica - just as much as we do. They came here to Tarpon Springs from Sarasota just for the day Saturday and just sat with us on our couch. We are all on the couch it feels like. We are together in spirit, and hoping for our miracle.