One TIA followed by Hemorrhagic Anemia

Or This is too hard to write!

She has been writing and crossing out and re-writing and crossing out for six days. She wants to describe the two hospital stays she spent back-to-back, because they were strange and scary and interesting, but it keeps being boring and self-involved and a little like bragging (her blood pressure was WHAT?) and (she had THREE transfusions?!!). And then when she starts writing about how since she’s been home she hasn’t exactly come bouncing back, she can’t think how to describe this new kind of tired because her former tiredness, which she once described as like dragging a heavy tail, sounds too literary. But how do you describe what she can only call exhaustion? Damn. She throws up her hands. Maybe this is just one of those times that was interesting to live but dull to read about, and impossible to write. At least for her. So the hell with it. Let the writing sit there and maybe it will get better by itself.

She is going to make chocolate pudding. Two large egg yolks. The eggs are rather small so she breaks three of them into a coffee cup, taking two out of the cup perfectly, but the third has broken in the whites and cannot be successfully retrieved so she does what she can, and breaks another egg. At eighty-four, she knows there’s no such thing as too many egg yolks. She whisks them around in a small bowl for a minute or two, adds some cornstarch, whisks them around some more, then has to sit down. Standing on her feet for longer than four minutes is impossible. She pats her big dog. Good girl, she says.

She gets up to find the good cocoa and shakes some into a saucepan followed by several spoonsfull of sugar. She eyes it, drops a little more sugar in, stirs it. Then she adds half and half and the egg mixture to the saucepan, does some serious whisking, sits down again. She lifts one of the pages, puts it back. Counts backward from sixty by sevens. Gets up, puts the saucepan on the burner, medium flame, and stirs now with the big spoon her son made out of some material she has forgotten the name of. Beautiful spoon. The pudding thickens, thickens some more, and she waits for it to finish before she sits down, turning the flame off while it it sits on the stove. She licks the spoon, smiles. Delicious. Oh boy.

Where was she? Comparing her exhaustion to something. Okay. The other day into her head popped the impossibility of a city street with stoplights and buildings and everything else trying to move itself a quarter of an inch in any direction. And even if it could, what would its destination be? What a weird analogy, she thinks, wondering if analogy is the right word, because her brain is foggy from disuse, having “fallen into desuetude,”a phrase from somewhere sixty years ago swims back into her ken, as does that phrase “into her ken.” If she could choose the street that cannot move itself anywhere, what would it be? She just needs to put something into place so she can stop driving herself nuts..

8th Street from Fifth Avenue down to Sixth Avenue! The day brightens! Yes!

This is a very slim connection to her exhaustion but she grabs it happily. Because that is near where her family lived when she was in high school! Two short blocks to 8th Street. There were shoe stores and book stores and a place called Caviarteria which sold chocolate covered bugs and other odd inedible treats. She graduated from high school in 1959. After high school she went to Bryn Mawr College, got kicked out her freshman year for being pregnant, married the boy who did not get kicked out. They had three children. He was physically abusive and she left after eight years taking the children back to New York to live with her parents in their apartment near 8th Street. She would be looking for a place of their own.

The Paperback Booksmith opened on the corner of 8th street and MacDougal and she dropped in one afternoon fifty-seven years ago and wound up sleeping with the young man behind the register whose name was Will Quirk. Such a wonderful name. She still remembers how gently he brushed the cockroaches off his sheets before they lay down together, and although that’s all she remembers of their encounter, what a perfect memory it was for 1968.

She could leave it there but now she is on a roll, remembering Whelan’s on 8th Street and Sixth Avenue where later that year she would duck in at three in the morning and buy a bottle of Binaca to spray away all traces of her wild night before going back to her sleeping children and their built-in babysitters, her poor parents, whom she prayed were also asleep. She would, if she could, thank the exhaustion that led her to these memories of crazy vivid nights, not to re-live them, but to ponder them a bit. Although there wasn’t much to ponder, it was a time when she could do whatever she wanted to, get it out of her system, because her growing up time had been curtailed by a young marriage and motherhood. This may not have gone through her brain back then, because it was all about the urgency of the moment and what it offered. And she was lucky. The city and its people were good to her. Damn, she thinks now. I’m getting homesick.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with her hospital stays, or her exhaustion, but it really doesn’t matter as long as she thinks it does. A month from now, maybe she will be sorry if she puts it up on Substack, but for now, and for all sorts of reasons, both flimsy and justified, she is content with what she has written. Anyway, there is still the chocolate pudding! Scrounging around she has found some whipped cream and she transfers the pudding from the saucepan into her yellow bowl and drops dollops of whipped cream on top and vows to make something like this every night and eat it all by herself. She lifts a spoonfull of pudding and whipped cream into her mouth. Yum. Or maybe brownies tomorrow.

Photo by Cala on Unsplash