Memories by HenryM

IT WAS A WEEK AGO (A WEEK AGO!) that I saw Halloween decorations out. Big, lighted orange things on a home’s front lawn, announcing to all and sundry that they needed to get a life. To go to the trouble of putting out Halloween decorations six weeks before the day in question is more than I can handle. It’s a ridiculous holiday to begin with, when people send their children out to go door-to-do...

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO NOT EAT DONUTS (in Old English: doughnuts). Yet I resist, I resist with all my might. It’s not fair that such pleasure should be so bad for you. Driving home from the gym, where I turn left to get home, if I just went a half mile further up the highway, there is a wonderful donut/ice cream shop there. I have been in there two or three times, days when my defenses were destr...

MY POSTING HAS BEEN OFF due to brief illness and two days hospitalized for dehydration, but I’m home and fine now. I got the usual blast of bureaucratic absurdities while in the hospital, many of them hilarious. My arrival in ER, after the usual wait, began with an EKG. Not only did it show my heart was fine, but the operator said “That’s the prettiest picture I’ve seen in quite a while.” Notwi...

My first UC hospitalization was in upstate New York in a hospital that must have been a relic from the 19th Century, grim as it was. They installed me in what was called a semi-private room, a euphemism if ever there was one. A room is either private, or it’s not. A never-ending string of other patients funneled through the room during my one and one-half months there. I remember only one: a mi...

Every fourth morning, I spread what I need upon the bathroom sink to change my appliance. It is routine, calcified over time into ritual. Each time I follow exact procedure, identical movements. It’s as if muscle memory takes over; conscious thought becomes secondary; I am an automaton. There was a time in my life when this sort of habitual activity was the exception, my work days busy with the...

From the fourth grade on, I worked. Job upon job, plus school which, as we know, if done right, is work too. I didn’t stop until I was seventy-five and, even then, it was with mixed emotions. Of course, as the great Lily Tomlin once said, the problem with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat. So I came to regard retirement as time to hang it up, box it up, and give it up: h...

The word OSTOMY has a derivation, just like other words. Many objects are named after the inventors: Louis Daguerre the daguerreotype, Rev. Sylvester Graham the graham cracker, the Earl of Sandwich for the common luncheon favorite, and Bill Gore for Gore-Tex, to give just a few examples. But I’m guessing that most of you were unaware that the ostomy was the invention of the once infamous French...

MY AFFLATUS TODAY: THE DIVAS THAT HAVE ALWAYS FASCINATED ME. Diana Ross, Renée Fleming, Whitney Houston, Shirley Bassey, to name a few prominent ones. Then add Aretha Franklin, Maria Callas, Patsy Cline, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, all golden voices. Does one have to have a great voice to become a diva? Ask Janis Joplin, or Cher. All these ladies have the ability to enthrall an audience, and th...

Morning is for walking. At 6 AM, before breakfast, my ostomy has yet to initiate the incontinence that affects the remainder of my day, and the outside temperature has yet to become unbearably warm and humid. As I exit the front door, my cat’s complaints about what I have spooned into his bowl for his breakfast is soon replaced by the avian applause raining down from the trees to greet the hour...

During my second UC hospitalization, which lasted three and a half months leading up to my ileostomy surgery, my grandparents were there in the hospital with me every single day, ministering to my needs, bringing me things, schmoozing with the nurses to get them to see me as a real person and not just another faceless patient.My grandparents died when I was a young man, and I have always missed...

A native Floridian, I spent fourteen years in rural Utah because it is beautiful there. Our home was at one corner of the vast and desolate Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. One day we drove into the Monument and stopped to hike Lick Wash, which included a stunningly narrow slot canyon. A slot canyon is a rare formation, the result of the combined forces of wind and water on sandston...

About seven miles or so west of Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, there is a magnificent trail that I have had the good fortune to have followed on more than one occasion. It proceeds from a wide stand of juniper, cottonwood, and mahogany-barked manzanita, up into a wonderland of towering and oddly shaped sandstone hoodoos in arid, wide-open, desert-like surroundings. It is a climb, cresting, a...

Ostomy people, as we are all painfully aware, must watch WHAT they eat, HOW they eat, HOW MUCH they eat, and WHEN they eat. Some foods may present digestive issues, others may produce the dreaded belly putters, while some induce what I discretely refer to as “the trots.” Importantly, I will rarely eat anything after dinner, and certainly not within an hour of bedtime. Yet, my own personal dilem...

A short drive from my house is a nice walk leading to a lake. I park my car and cross a field before heading into the woods along a wide path leading to a point where the trail splits off in two directions. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” said the great philosopher Yogi Berra. The two choices are either clockwise, or counter-clockwise, around the lake. I go left and immediately ...

PEOPLE WHO CAN PLAY A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT are to be envied. Not being able to play one is one of my life’s regrets. It’s second on the list, right behind never having made love to Marilyn Monroe. But anyway, I would like to have played the violin, or the cello. Those musical instruments produce such heavenly melodies. When my oldest daughter was seven, we started her with piano lessons. I decide...