The Full Glass

It was john Updike’s birthday Tuesday, and how could I have missed that fact, he being a fellow Pisces and I owing such a debt to him for teaching me to 'tell'what I see.Look at the words of the narrator he gave life to in his story "The Full Glass,"  published in The New Yorker in 2008. I loved it so much on first reading it, I scanned the whole thing so I could keep it always.It begins “Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately"  which seems so sad now because the man who created this piece never saw 80. He was dead less than a year after its publication.Then further down on that first page:

Now that I’m retired…I watch myself with a keener attention, as you’d keep an eye on a stranger who might start to go to pieces any minute. Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eyedrops and about to take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full. The rational explanation might be that, with a left hand clutching my pills, I don’t want to fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass with the right. Still, it’s more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with most pleasures levelled out of it, in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me, before I sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement (my wife’s idea, now that I get foot cramps in bed, somehow from the pressure of the top sheet), along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye. In the middle of the night, on the way to the bathroom, my eye feels like it has a beam in it, not a mote but literally a beam—I never took that image from the King James Version seriously before….

and then, of that one glass of water...

That healthy sweet swig near the end of the day has gotten to be something important, a tiny piece that fits in: the pills popped into my mouth, the full glass raised to my lips, the swallow that takes the pills down with it, all in less time than it takes to tell it, but tasting of bliss.

From there he goes on to describe the bliss he felt as a young person, who  woke up inside his life and like any person does and takes joy in all five of his senses.I read Rabbit Run when I was 12; it’s how I found out how sex works.But it wasn’t the sex that kept me reading. It was always the way he made you see what he was describing; the way he made you feel you were right there beside the characters he was moving through their own special world. A letter carrier who passed me crossing the street said it, when he saw me in 1990 toting my brand-new copy of his autobiography  Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike. “Hey I read that!” that man called out to me is we passed each other on the crosswalk. "That John Updike can make even psoriasis sound interesting!”He  sure made the world interesting for me. I told him so in a fan letter I sent along with the story I had written of my mother’s sudden death. I was responding to one of his short stories, again in The New Yorker, that was very obviously about the death of his own, real, mother. He wrote me back four days later , on a postcard, with a remark so kind that more than two years later when I was writing my first book I wrote a second time to ask if I could use his quote on the jacket ."Ok on the quote.  Good luck with the book," he wrote back, again by postcard, again not four days after I wrote him.He was like that is all I can say: generous, and decorous and kind. The world of letters is surely the poorer without him.Take six minutes and read "The Full Glass" now why not, which now, five years after publication, is available for anyone, just by clicking here.

Live and Learn

What’s Ok to say and what isn’t: only you can o decide. I love the informality and immediacy of the internet, all those people out there saying just how they feel. It’s like the opening scene from “City of Angels” where Nicholas Cage and Andre Braugher stand on a tall building listening to the thoughts of the little humans below. (They’re angels, see. Then one of them falls in love with Meg Ryan before she had her upper lip plumped up this scary way.)Take a crack like that: it’s everyday parlance here on the net where people are always exclaiming over Before and After shots of the poor celebrities. I'd totally take a shot like that here, but I wouldn't dream of doing it in the weekly column I write - partly because I consider it a privilege to appear in the paper every week and partly because such remarks seem too... well, hurtful. I also don’t use the word 'fat’ in my column or  refer to the 'Christmas cards' we 'all' write or speak about when you go 'upstairs' in your house.  I’m done leaving people out by acting like everyone is thin, and Christian, and has a whole house instead of an apartment or a rented room. I’m just very careful – in the paper.But here? I act like it’s all harmless jauntiness. Or I did until yesterday when I got an email reacting to the photo I had just posted of a person with psoriasis. Look back and see. I was saying basically “Awesome medical anomalies!” “Awesome video of a surgeon’s implements probing around like the delicate feelers of an insect!”  But the man who emailed me opened my eyes:“Dear Terry,”  he began…

Thanks for sharing with your readers a 'great'  picture of psoriasis.  Unfortunately, a real person was in that photo, and for that person, psoriasis is anything but great.  More than a quarter of a million people in Illinois, including many children, have psoriasis or its counterpart, psoriatic arthritis.  All of us with psoriasis need more medical research, affordable treatments, and greater understanding in the meantime.  If interested, you can learn more at our website below.Thanks again for your coverage of this incurable immune system disease.Michael Paranzino, Psoriasis Cure Now, P.O. Box 2544Kensington, MD 20891 Kensington Maryland  http://www.psoriasis-cure-now.org

My cheeks burn to read such a mild response to my unfeeling remarks. Guess now is as good a time as any for me to mosey over to this psoriasis site and start getting schooled. It's so true: we live and then (one hopes) we learn.

Frame o' Reference

We see the world only from our own point of view, no doubt about it. Yesterday when I was writing about AAA, I figured the whole world would know I was talking about the automotive and travel outfit. But when I Googled it to get the logo what came up right in the top row but the picture on the left of somebody’s  operation! Those two thingies that look like shoehorns hold back the tissues so the surgical team can really dig in. And the shiny red bulge? That’s the inside of the person's glistening pink insides.I looked around the website this picture was from and learned what these three little A’s stand for. The answer:  Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm which happens when the big vessel that supplies blood to the abdomen, pelvis, and legs becomes abnormally large and/or balloons outward. Your aorta leaves your heart, see, then ascends, arches, and descends through the chest until it reaches the diaphragm where it passes the diaphragm and continues down the abdomen. Then it splits to form the two iliac arteries that go to the legs. Basically it looks like a little dancing man. Well, a dancing man with no head and no arms. This information was followed by some riveting Q and A, including the tantalizing question “What's inside an aortic aneurysm?” (Answer: a laminated blood clot layered like plywood if you can picture it.)But I also found on the same page all these great pictures of medical conditions. I saved this eyeball for you to see....as well as the this one showing the heart break of psoriasis as the old ad used to call it..But best of all I found this video of the actual  procedure and all I can say is the phrase “Tripe A” will never again bring to mind tow trucks and flat tires. Amazing![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSPo6SwZbAg&feature=related]