May 26, 2007--Saturday Story: "Crazy Rona"--Part One

Midnight Monday

My Darling--

Remember yesterday morning, looking out at the Sea from the edge of our terrace, the clearest day of this February visit, how you said, “If you wanted to commit suicide, this would be the place and the time to do it. To enter the Sea, just as it is.”

Tonight my deepest love is that time and that day.

I will be leaving to seek the final light, along the now moonlit path. I will be waiting for you then, over the horizon toward where Africa rests, where we began, exhaling now its Saharan sands toward Europe, coating our sun beds with the first brown rain of the year. Along the path that just this morning I said was only the sun’s reflection. You though knew it was more than just the mirrored sun but was phosphorescence full of ancient life.

The only question, then, is should I plummet South toward those African origins or North toward where we wandered. It comes to such a quotidian question. Like with which coffee should we begin the day—a cortado or a café au lait?

How did it finally come to this . . . ??


* * *

On my 60th birthday, Dr. Michael Weinstein did not send a card. Rather, he wrote:


1. Enter peritoneum
Midline incision / transverse incision

2. Mobilise caecum and terminal ileum
dividing lateral peritoneum clockwise and upwards
Dissect off right colon
Identify and protect the gonadal vessels, right ureter and duodenum

3. Divide bowel
Transilluminate the mesentry; ligate vessels close to origin (as close as possible) Place non-crushing clamps on transverse colon and ileum and divide bowel between crushing clamps


* * *

After five years, she emerged from the garment bag in which she had been living. She did come out for meals, to go to school, and occasionally to see friends; but whenever she felt lonely, which was often or fear, which was frequent, or was called “Crazy” by her parents, which was all the time, she retreated to the security and retreat that the garment bag provided.

She would unzip it, crawl in, settling herself on its bottom, then close it, and find comfort there as it swung gently, just off the floor of the closet, on its hooks.

* * *

During my only year at Staten Island Community College, I had became so interested in the world of community colleges and the lives of the students I had encountered there (including a series of affairs with both colleagues and, truth-to-be-told, students—a story perhaps to be told at a later time) that I wrote and published a book about community colleges (excluding the liaisons) and their place in higher education history, a book with a thesis so “revisionist” that some of the national community college leaders excoriated me in their published reviews, one even calling me a “left-wing subversive.” It could have been worse.

I brought that wrath down upon myself because I dared to suggest, actually claimed that the original Junior Colleges and their descendent Community Colleges were less Democracy’s Colleges, as had been boasted by their founders since the 1920s, but rather functioned as social safety valves, serving in fact to manage and control the aspirations of the children of the working poor and minorities—they opened their doors widely to admit all and proudly proclaiming that they were thereby offering opportunities to the marginalized; but, I attempted to show, those open doors soon became revolving doors as less than a quarter who entered ever managed to earn a degree much less experienced even a taste of upward social mobility.

Suffice it to say that the book, The Crisis of the Community College, and its “radical” theme propelled me into considerable notoriety, in the small world of traditional education historians. But to others who were looking for ways to change or overturn the system, I became something of a hot property, in demand as a speaker at progressive organizations and colleges across the country. So much so that this exposure eventually helped bring me back across the Verrazano Bridge, this time not to Brooklyn but rather to Manhattan, to New York University where I broke into higher-education’s big-time world when I landed a job as dean of its Evening College for Adults. Just at a time when NYU, like me, was aspiring to self-transformation. . . .

It is really rather simple, routine—how the body inevitably turns upon itself. You have had many hints of this, my dearest. You have seen me quivering at midnight, my pajamas drenched with sweat. You heard my predawn cries and did all you could to rouse me—from that tortured sleep and from my own fears and, yes, inaction. At the first symptoms I had simply given up—my life and my love. Not wanting to know the diagnosis, unwilling to fight for my life. All inexplicable. Yet now too late.

But it was not so simple, not so routine since I also betrayed you—my deepest love and closest friend. Threw all that away at the initial encroaching symptoms that to me foretold the end.

So while you fitfully rest I stand here at the Mediterranean’s edge, at the literal middle of the earth, composing this with more arrogant care than I have come to be worth, pretending that my plunge, my end will have lasting meaning. And that if you do not destroy this, as you instantly should, there will be curiosity and interest in what I had to say at my final moment. As if there were (or “was”?) something worth considering or my life had any meaning or . . . .

In his notes, Dr. Weinstein continued:


4. Form end to side anastamosis (along taeniae)
Close distal end of colon (by hand) or stapling device
Approximate ileum with colon and commence posterior wall by inserting seromuscular (Lembert suture)
Open colon along taeniae and insert full thickness absorbable suture
Continue to midline anteriorly and tie off sutures


To be continued . . .