Flu Season/Thanksgiving poem

Well, it's coming on Thanksgiving: 3/4 of my household has runny noses and the cases of the icks, and suddenly yesterday, for the first time in 30-something years, I have myself a raging ear infection.  What better to celebrate flu season with a poem (which is also a poem of gratitude).

Urgent Care

Yesterday, while you were dropping off the kids,

unbuttoning their coats, putting their lunches away, and 

while I was beginning my day with Dickens and Shakespeare,

Infection began to fill my ear like smoke billows in a glass,

curling around the canal and creeping farther and farther in,

until I could no longer hear.  At first, it was a mouth too close

to a microphone, the sensation of 10,000 feet up, when all sound

disappears into the body and one can only try to make sense of it.

But later, as you were talking with your coworkers about changes

in management, and as I was talking to

a student about time management,

the pressure became so great I thought the tiny hammer inside might rupture,

sound completely disappeared, and I worried.  I don’t really know what 

an ear drum looks like, but I kept imagining a rose,

scarlet and full, blossoming open and open until its petals bent backwards.

That, I thought, is what is happening in my ear.  

Look, I said to the doctor, it’s a tiny fist about to open:

a shrapnel pomegranate ready to burst.  And I can’t hear anything!

Welcome to my world, she smiled, the sides of her tongue trying to wrap themselves

around the ‘r,’ and I noticed that when she spoke, some consonants got stuck

in the back of her throat, or the hollow attic of her mouth.  

How’s the pain? she asked, her eye against the probe in my ear,

but I knew not to reply until she could see my face again, read

my lips.  I wanted to say excruciating, because what really hurt

Was the newfound sympathy I have for our infant son when his ears ache,

when he arches his back and writhes in pain, or for the deaf,   

captives of a soundless world where hands dance in tandem with mouths to mean.

And more, the thought of not hearing you tell me that everything will be alright,

in the silence of the night, in the stillness of the blue-black room, the boy in my arms,

your hands on my face, like the deaf-mute’s teacher.

In Cars

Never, ever let them see how badly you want the car, my dad had said back in 2003.  My mom and I were on our way to a dealership that was 20 minutes away from home, and because he somehow trusted that we were competent enough to buy a car without him (albeit armed with his advice), we went without him.  Don't tell them too much.  And don't negotiate until you know exactly what you want.  What my dad didn't know: that our car salesman, Jamie, was 28, had a jawline like Clark Kent, and chatted me up about music the whole time I test drove.  I might have fallen in serious love with him if my mom hadn't been riding in the back like a parochial chaperone.


So, in 2003, I drove off that lot with a brand-new, feisty Mazda Protege 5 and a serious thing for Jamie the Car Salesman.  Those of you who knew me in my single-girl, free-wheelin' days knew this car.  Despite my tendency not to love things, I loved this car.  My zippy little hatchback could fit into the tiniest street spots in Boston (where I perfected the art of the parallel-park), whisk a car full of gals up to the Green Mountains for a day hike, fit all the doodads and whatnots I picked up on odd road trips (e.g., a dresser, an amp, and an electric guitar I found at a weird antique shop in Maine), and brave the cobblestone backroads of Cambridge without nary a whimper.

To further eulogize, I once drove, half-undressed, in this car, 130 miles to blindly meet a date.  My date was from Manhattan; I was living in Boston.  We met in Connecticut, and I didn't want to rumple my very carefully chosen outfit.  Once I landed at our designated meeting spot, I stealthily changed in the front seat.  I have nothing to say for myself, except that yes, he looked great--no, actually--perfect-- online (and was a complete, sweaty, smelly mess in person), and my car listened to me gripe about my lack of foresight all the 130 miles home.  It's one of my less proud but more vivid memories I have in car-bonding, if such a phenomenon exists.

[I'm not one to personify cars, really.  I don't christen the cars I drive with names, though I don't judge those who do.  I'm still kind of horrified that I'm writing elegiacally for an object.  And goodness knows I've lost plenty more meaningful things, people in my life.  Please indulge me here.]

Our last trip together, from my house to the dealership, I wasn't sure either of us were going to make it: the Mazda bucked like a hungry stallion all the way down 590, stalled out on the exit ramp, and jerked and lurched her way down West Henrietta Road unless I could rev up past 3000 rpm.  When we glided into the parking spot in the dealership lot, I breathed a sigh of relief, and Mazda--well, she sighed her last breath.  (How she made it around the parking lot at trade-in time is anyone's guess.)  For the past several weeks, I was convinced that this car, in a Christine kind of way, knew that we'd soon be kicking her to the curb, so to speak.  Maybe she'd overheard us talking about how my son, who's still in a rear-facing car seat, was totally cramped between the front and back seats, barely able to straighten out his little legs, or that my daughter, who's in a front-facing car seat, could actually touch my arm with her foot while I was driving.  To the car's credit, it went down fighting.  The wild and carefree days of backroads adventures, blind dating misadventures, spontaneous road tripping and whimsical street parking had officially come to an end.

Which leads me to this:  I bought a new car today.  It didn't hurt that my husband was with me (and did most of the talking--a stereotype I'm only too happy to concede), that our car salesman, Emilio, was affable, a good listener, and not at all the suave-slick swindler Dad once warned about--AND from Pittsburgh, a true Yinzer right dahn to his "I rilly meant to g'awn into teaching once I get my loans paid ahhf" soul.  In this scenario, it was the salesman who did all the talking and had us in the palm of his hand, not because he begged our sympathies about his graduate school loans, but because he was simply honest and genuine--for a salesman, almost to a fault.

So I'm a Toyota driver now.  But if Jamie is to my Mazda what Emilio is to my Toyota, then the stage is set for a decade of... what?  What's the opposite of spontaneous road tripping?  Commuting?  Soccer-game shuttling?  The opposite of my Mazda, the symbol of my wanderlust, is to be found in this very reliable, safe, grown-up vehicle (yep, it's got the Bluetooth).  It's no Swagger Wagon, but to me, it's pretty close.

And so to ease, and maybe even offset the reality of this very responsible, adult purchase...

wait for it...


HEATED SEATS, baby.  YEAH!