Injury and Healing

One month ago today, my beloved Babs fell and broke her arm. The injury was serious enough to require three hours of surgery to pin back together one bone, and replace the end of another. Her arm was opened from an inch above the elbow to four or five inches down the forearm. After four days in the hospital, she came home.

Then the real ordeal began. In a follow-up doctor visit, the wound was found to be infected, an infection which eventually turned out to be a resistant strain of staph. Another surgery, re-opening the wound to clean it, another four days in the hospital.

The fall that started all this was only a few feet, following a trip over either her foot or mine as we walked together on a smooth, carpeted surface. The cost is staggering, and the second round of bills haven’t even come yet.

People who say health care reform is unnecessary need not chime in here.

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for October 22, 2009 is:
rugose • \ROO-gohss\ • adjective

*1 : full of wrinkles

2 : having the veinlets sunken and the spaces between elevated

Felix’s Example Sentence:

Photographs of W.H. Auden late in life show an exuberantly rugose face, each gully scored no doubt by forces of poetic inspiration – or perhaps many too many pints.

Did you know?

“Rugose” was borrowed into English in the late 17th century from the Latin adjective “rugosus” (“wrinkled”), which itself derives from “ruga” (“wrinkle”). One descendant of “ruga” that you’ll probably recognize is “corrugate,” which initially meant “to form or shape into wrinkles or folds.” Another, which might be more familiar to scientists, is “rugulose,” meaning “finely wrinkled.” In addition, there is the noun “rugosity,” which can refer to either the quality or state of being full of wrinkles or an individual wrinkled place.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 28, 2009 is:
chauffeur • \SHOH-fer\ • noun

: a person employed to drive a motor vehicle

Felix’s Example Sentence:

As my grandmother Phyllis aged, a decent concern for her safety, not to mention that of other drivers, prompted my father and me to become her chauffeurs for grocery shopping, trips to the hairdresser, doctor, dentist and other places.

Did you know?

Here’s a hot tip about the origins of today’s word: the first chauffeurs were people employed to stoke a steam engine and keep it running. The literal meaning of the French noun “chauffeur” (from the verb “chauffer,” meaning “to heat”) is “one that heats.” In the early days of automobiles, French speakers extended the word to those who drove the “horseless carriage,” and it eventually developed an extended sense specifically for someone hired to drive other people. It was this latter sense that was borrowed into English in the late 19th century. Incidentally, the French word “chauffeur” derives from the same Anglo-French word that gave English speakers the verb “chafe,” and ultimately can be traced back to the Latin verb “calēre” (“to be warm”).

Great-Grandmother Dance

“Dance” was the name by which her grandchildren and great-grandchildren called my Great-grandmother Rose Jones Lancaster Love.  Dance was the only great-grandparent I recall knowing, I was sixteen when she died. She had married young, nobody knew exactly how young, for the exact year she was born she never revealed. A tiny, stooped little lady who was kind, but nonetheless formidable.

Rose Jones Lancaster Love

She gave us the run of her house when we visited, exacting proper behavior and  requiring picking up after ourselves before we left. The only picture I have of Dance appears here, from perhaps the mid-nineteen forties. Well into her old age she could do embroidery, needle work and made cozies of thread for the cocktail glasses which were brought out for the adults on every visit. I have been told by my parents that one drink was all they got from Dance, but it was invariably robust to the point of lasting throughout dinner.

Dance had no toys for children in her house, but she did have a large poker set complete with several sets of cards, and many poker chips. We busied ourselves with building card houses, stacking chips like trees or bushes grouped around the pasteboard constructions.

When the houses collapsed, we built them again, or played made-up games of cards. Occasionally we might forget ourselves and throw chips at each other, but one piercing look from Dance’s keen and unclouded eyes brought us up short.

The clean-up process was quite educational, as it happened, since the decks of cards had to be grouped into complete decks by suit and color, including the pattern on the backs, which were different for each deck.

Dinner was always formal, sit down with the children at the main table. We were always interested in the buzzer concealed beneath the carpet by Dance’s chair, ready to be pressed to summon Gussie, the cook, from the kitchen with the different courses. We never quite dared to press this buzzer ourselves, though. I don’t think my grandchildren would be similarly deterred.

Dance grew up in the piney woods of southeastern Georgia, near Folkston, close to the Florida line, just to the east of the Okefenokee Swamp. I never knew this until much later in life. Odd to find it out, as the comic strip Pogo was one of my favorites, and I am sure discussions on the comics would have been interesting, although not so much to Dance. Her family had a turpentine business, tapping pine trees for sap, distilling it into turpentine and selling it to various customers. Dance was visiting a school friend in Chattanooga when she met George Dent Lancaster, and in due course married him. Her first child, Marshall, was born in 1898. My grandmother Phyllis was born in 1901. When it came time to record her birth for her tombstone, her second husband, Walter Love and my grandmother computed her likely birth year as 1878. That would have made Dance 83 when she died in 1961. A good old age for someone born in the South under Reconstruction, in depressed times.

George’s story is more detailed, and more lively. I will get to my Great-grandfather in another post.

Generations

Moving through the third childhood of my family, starting with my own, then my children, now my grandchildren, I watched a softball game last night. Our granddaughter played a kindergarten level game with other little girls, some even smaller than she, some bigger. She was serious about her game. Her father was the same. I was not, in my time, but did show up. Apart from being unable throw, catch, bat or run well, I was a natural. Now I benefit from the enthusiasm of both my granddaughter, and my son before her.

The Springs of Grief

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

from Spring and Fall: To a young child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The above lines more and more come to mind as I grow older. In the natural course of a life, you encounter oftener the deaths of those you know the older you get. First the older members of your family, grandparents and great uncles, and their coevals, die. Since you are likely to be young when those older folks die, you may not mull over the implications of their deaths and your reactions overmuch.