You Like Me! You Like Me!

In 1979, Sally Field won an Oscar as Best Actress for "Norma Rae." Five years later in 1984, she won again for "Places in the Heart." This was quite an accomplishment for a woman who had started her career on TV playing such demanding, serious roles as "Gidget" and "The Flying Nun." At the 1985 Academy Awards she delivered what has become one of the more memorable acceptance speeches in recent Oscar history. "I haven't had an orthodox career," she said, "and I've wanted more that anything to have your respect. The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can't deny the fact that you like me right now, you like me!" The speech is remembered for its goofiness more than anything else; it was reminiscent of a small-town girl gushing over the blue ribbon just won by her prize heifer, Daisy. It wasn't classy. It wasn't "Hollywood". It was just real. And sincere. I've always identified with that speech. When my album "Legacy" was released in 1986, I really didn't care too much about how much it sold. Aren't I a great businessman? I was more concerned with the reaction I'd get from my peers. I wanted to know what other musicians, composers and lyricists thought of my work. I started in the music business as a drummer who was mediocre at best, and a large part of my reason for making "Legacy" was my insecurity about my abilities as a self-taught songwriter who never even learned to read music. I'd been writing lyrics since camp and I always knew I was pretty good at it, but I had never written my own melodies as well. I wanted to be taken seriously by others because in my mind my insecurities didn't allow me to take myself seriously. So: what does this have to do with my recent tribulations? Glad you asked. Apparently when I got sick, word got around. Close friends as well as people I barely knew started crawling out of the woodwork to wish me well. While I was in the ICU breathing through a hole in my neck, depressed enough to occasionally think about why I didn't just pull the damn thing out and simply fade away, I made it clear that I didn't want any visitors outside of my family to come and interrupt my orgy of self-pity. I couldn't make that happen...people showed up anyway. When I couldn't communicate by phone because I hadn't yet been given my Passy-Muir* valve, people called anyway. The Orthodox Jewish community is quite remarkable that way. We tend to share each other's joys but more importantly, we share each other's sorrows and challenges as well. During my stay at Columbia Presbyterian and later at Silver Lake, I learned that people all over Flatbush were reciting Tehillim and Mi Shebairach** for me. For me! Have you any idea how heartening that was? Have you any idea how uplifting? To this day folks come up to me on the street and tell me that they had had me in mind during their prayers. Recently I've been feeling that for someone who's always tended to be somewhat high-profile, I've kind of fallen off the radar of late. Apparently, people still care; you like me! You like me!

* Passy-Muir valve = a small, plastic apparatus that allows trach patients to speak.

** Tehillim and Mi Shebairach = "Tehillim" refers to Psalms,

"Mi Shebairach" is a short prayer for someone who is ill.

The Flying Nun (1967-1970)

Mazel Tov!



Menachem

Meira

Baby Lieberman



I believe my latest posts have been a little on the morbid side. I mean, come on, "I see dead people?" Twice, yet?? Isn't that a bit much? Well, today was a special day. Feige gave birth to a healthy 8.5 lb. bouncing baby boy.  On Babby & Zeidie's (L"HBCL"C) anniversary.  On Veterans' Day. And while I have every intention of getting spiritual and philosophical once again as I've been wont to do lately, this time it will be in a positive, lighthearted vein. I'm even gonna refrain from making any "vein" jokes, even though I'm sure I could think of a few. For months I've been telling anyone who'll listen that two things got me through my darkest hours in the ICU and beyond: I wanted to be at Menachem's Bar Mitzvah and I wanted to meet Meira in person. I firmly believe that those two goals were the psychological glue that kept me from falling apart. More than once. Well, I held my fifth grandchild today and it was just delicious. So I got to thinking: why did I have only two goals? I should have had oodles! See Menachem get married. And Avi. And Ester. And Meira. And little whatshisname. Why not? How about watching my grandchildren raise their children? At least the ones that aren't named Y'rachmiel Shraga Feivel (who would do that to a kid?!). Am I asking too much? Do I dare think about seeing my great-grandchildren under the chuppah? You know what? I'll leave it up to the Boss. I'll try to be good and see what happens. I'll reiterate a point I've made several times: I try and remember to thank G-d for every new day, for every new lungful of oxygen, for every step I take. I'll let you in on a little secret: I haven't felt 100% okay since I got sick. Not once. Sometimes that gets me angry and sometimes I get the blues. A day like today, a day when I can hold a tiny, sleeping miracle in my arms, reminds me that sweating the small stuff is simply a waste of energy. It's all good, dear readers...it's all good.

I See Dead People, Part Two

 

Haley Joel Osment
and Bruce Willis in
"The Sixth Sense"

I moved on October 3rd. I had moved all my stuff out of my apartment while I was staying with Chayie and Dave and put it in storage. That was a helluva lot cheaper than paying rent on my old place, and the consensus in the medical community was that as far as I was concerned, that apartment was uninhabitable anyway. The guy I hired to do the move was a man named Milton Thompson whom I'd used several times before. He's always been reliable and cheap, a great combination. Once again he moved me efficiently and affordably, this time to a Public Storage facility on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. So I've been in my new apartment for five weeks and change, and I finally finished unpacking. For those of you out there who might be uninitiated, I collect turtles. No, not live ones, silly, figurines. I have wood, metal, ceramic, glass, crystal, stone and I'm sure a few materials that I haven't mentioned. They range in size anywhere from half an inch to I guess about 15 or 16 inches. A lot of them are quite fragile, so they need to be packed carefully as well as unpacked carefully. And there are approximately 500 of them! So that slows things down considerably. Another reason it took me a while to unpack is simply that I'm not as fast as I used to be. Heavy boxes are a problem. I huff and puff a lot. I tire very easily. But now that I'm done, the place looks great, except for one thing. You know those blankets that movers use to cover furniture? Well, I've got a bunch of them. You see, I didn't use Mr. Thompson to move me from the storage place to this apartment. I used the son-in-law of a friend. So I have all of Mr. Thompson's blankets. And they're big and bulky and all over the place. I'd been meaning to call him for a while now to have him come and pick them up, but I never got around to it. Until yesterday. A woman answered his cell phone, which was pretty odd. I asked for Mr. Thompson. "You want Mister Thompson?" Um, yes, I said, Mr. Thompson. "I'm sorry," she said, "Mr. Thompson is deceased." Say WHAT?! Now let me tell you a bit about this guy. He was a very nice man from Barbados so he had that charming Caribbean accent. I always figured him to be around my age. He was strong as an ox. He would show up with two or three strapping young guys and he would more than hold his own, shlepping tons of furniture. He wasn't just there as a supervisor; he worked his butt off. It turned out that the voice on the phone was his daughter. He died two weeks ago. Massive heart attack. Never had a heart condition. He was sixty-one. I think this one effected me even more than Luzer at Orange Findings. Luzer had cancer. People in the best of health get cancer, at any age. Strong, vibrant, healthy-as-a-horse people are not supposed to just drop dead. So, being the newly minted spiritualist that I've become, the musar haskail* here was crystal clear to me. Nothing very profound, just another little reminder from G-d:

                                                             There is no "supposed to."
                                     There is no rhyme or reason to many aspects of our lives,
                                                          or, for that matter, our deaths.
                                                        When it's our time, it's our time.

I'll end this with some lyrics from the song "Dust in the Wind":

Don't hang on,
Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky,
It slips away,
And all your money won't another minute buy.
Dust in the wind,
All we are is dust in the wind.
Dust in the wind,
Everything is dust in the wind.

* Musar Haskail = Moral of the story.

I See Dead People, Part One

A few weeks ago my watch stopped. I always buy Timexes. I'm not sure of the spelling, but I always buy them. I think (read: hope) that even if I was a gazillionaire, I wouldn't spend $25,000 on a Vacheron or Patec Phillippe. A $40.00 Timex works just fine. Well, because I spent most of my adult life toiling away in the jewelry industry, I just could not bring myself to go to some local jeweler and let him charge me $20.00 to change the battery in a $40.00 watch. So I pried open the back, took out the battery, brought it to Radio Shack and bought a replacement for about five bucks. Piece of cake. Then I came home and totally screwed up trying to put the darn thing in. I couldn't get it to make contact and then I couldn't get the back to close. I guess my plans to become a master watchmaker will have to be put on hold indefinitely. I needed to go into the city to run some errands that week anyway, so I figured I'd bring the watch in to my old buddy Leva the watchmaker. He always charged me $5.00 to change a battery. I also brought a few other watches that weren't working. When I got there he commented that he hadn't seen me for a very long time, was everything okay? That's when I told him about the year I've had (of course you know I'm the shy, reserved type who would never, ever have brought it up had he not asked me, right? Right??). That's when he asked me if I had heard about Luzer. I didn't know who Luzer was. In the booth right next to Leva in the jewelry exchange there's a company called Orange Findings. They sell findings (earring posts, prong settings, bezels, etc.) to jewelers. I've bought some little pitchifkes* there over the years, so I knew all the guys there. I always assumed that they called it "Orange Findings" because one of the people there, presumably an owner, was a redhead with very orange hair. He was a chassidic guy who was very knowledgeable and helpful. Well, it turns out that his name was Luzer. In all the years I'd been coming there, I never knew his name. So I told Leva no, I hadn't heard about Luzer, what about him? That's when I noticed Luzer wasn't in his booth. "he die," said Leva in his heavy Russian accent. I was floored. Leva told me that Luzer was 56 and had been sick for a while. He used to come over to Leva's booth and literally cry to him that he was going to die. And he did. As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, almost everything that happens to me lately I interpret as some kind of message from above. Why did my watch happen to stop on that particular day? Those batteries last a very, very long time. And why did I mess up changing the battery and therefore have to go to Leva? Was it because G-d wanted me to hear about Luzer and count my myriad blessings? Well, I know what I think...what do you think?

*pitchifkes = um, a yiddishism that's hard to translate. I guess the closest would be small, mostly insignificant things.

Dr. Millenium Pepsodent*



No, this isn't really him, just a reasonable facsimile.

One fine day in Mount Sinai, a young man in a white labcoat wandered into my room. We chatted for a while and we just hit it off. His name was Dr. Millenium Pepsodent.* He was Puerto Rican so we obviously came from extremely diverse backgrounds, but somehow we had a lot in common. He sat down and we talked about our respective depressions and how we both felt that we had messed up our lives. "But you're a doctor!", I said, "and if you're practicing at Mt. Sinai, apparently a good one, and a successful one, too." He explained that he's been depressed as long as he could remember. He got really lousy grades in college and ultimately wound up going to Guadalajara, Mexico, one of the real cesspools of the medical school world. I told him that I heard that in Guadalajara you had to run around in the street to catch your own dogs to experiment on. We had a great time just shooting the breeze. I said that when (if?) I got out of the hospital we should go get a cup of coffee or maybe a beer. He said that the supermarkets in Mexico only sell liquor till 3:00 PM so after that he had to do his drinking in bars. But the bars close at 2:00 AM, so after that he had to resort to drinking rubbing alcohol. When I asked him if it was dangerous he said no, and that it kinda tasted like vodka. So he thought he might have been just a tad out of control, and that was why he had stopped drinking. I thought that that had been an excellent decision. This was the guy that asked the following day to be my attending physician. I knew I was in good hands. In all the time I knew Millenium, I think he performed exactly one medical procedure on me. He took arterial blood for blood gases. I was beginning to think he was an imposter who wandered in through the emergency room. He came to see me a few more times after that and sat down, put his feet up on my bed and shmoozed with me. Sometimes it was actually about my illness. I liked him a lot. Despite being quite disturbed, he was extremely bright and actually had pretty much my twisted sense of humor. He gave me his cell phone number and we vowed to keep in touch when (if?) I ever got reasonably healthy. I wasn't sure that he was an actual doctor until I got home from the hospital and found a copy of the bill that he had sent to Oxford for some obscene amount for sitting and entertaining me. Am I too old to go to medical school?

*Definitely NOT his real name!

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

                                                                                         I met a doctor at Mt. Sinai during my first B.I.T.R.* who was a very nice, very young, very friendly guy. We hit it off immediately and became good buddies. In fact, he asked to be assigned to me as my attending physician. I decided to write a post about him, detailing some of the personal stuff we shmoozed about. Then I realized that there was a possibility, albeit remote, that by doing so I could get him in trouble. So being the nice guy that I am, I called him (he had given me his cell number). I explained that I had a blog and that I wanted to include him. I offered to send him a draft of the post before I actually put it online. I said I wouldn't use it until he okayed it. I emailed it and waited for a response. Nothing. I waited some more. Still nothing. After a while I texted him. No response. I left a message on his voicemail. No luck. Okay, I thought, he's angry. I waited and waited and waited and never heard from him again. I was surprised because he really didn't seem like the type of guy who's feathers would be ruffled so easily. I was also disappointed because I really liked him. All this took place back in July. Well, just for fun I texted him again last week: "Are you still mad at me?" Here's his response, verbatim: "I was never mad, dude. I just was very busy and couldn't tell u it. Hey I got some things to do but ill call u later." I was so happy that he called me "dude". No one has ever called me dude before. It made me feel cool for about twenty seconds. Then I realized that this guy texts like a fifteen year-old girl, right down to his atrocious grammar. Then I remembered that he was once in charge of my medical care. Then I thanked G-d for not only letting me survive my pneumonia, but letting me survive my doctor, too.

PS  His post will follow.

* B.I.T.R. = Bump In The Road

Guacamole Brain

I think I've mentioned in a previous post that when I started coming out of my induced coma at Columbia Presbyterian, the world was a brave new place.  I have since discussed this phenomenon with my neurologist, because I'm convinced that some of the symptoms are still present, albeit not as severe (perhaps I'll discuss that in a future post).  He's pretty sure that my brain suffered some oxygen deprivation while I was sedated, but that there will be no long-lasting ill effects.  During that twilight period when I had opened my eyes but had not yet shaken off all the effects of the sedation, I couldn't tell time, but it was more than that.  I looked at my watch as a curiosity.  I knew its function, but I couldn't quite figure it out.  There were these hands and they were pointing to numbers and I knew they all had significance but somehow I couldn't piece all the information together and know what time it was.  My cell phone was even worse.  I think I knew what it was for, but I had absolutely no inkling how it worked.  Then there was my handwriting.  I've always been proud of my handwriting.  It's big and bold and flashy and masculine, and usually it's actually quite legible.  When I woke up my beautiful handwriting had gone AWOL. It might have been a function of how incredibly weak my arms and hands were physically, but suffice it to say I could barely produce recognizable letters. 

     There were also things floating around in my head that made so much sense, that were so crystal clear to me, I was amazed that I had never realized them before.  To wit: making Aliya*.

This epiphany was with me from the moment I opened my eyes.  In fact, it might have been there even before I opened my eyes.  I knew clearly that I needed to make Aliya and knew also that as soon as I was well enough, that's exactly what I'd do.  There was no equivocation.  There was no maybe.  I was moving to Israel.  I wanted to be in Jerusalem.  I wanted to be near Nuchi.  Don't know who Nuchi is?  Sorry, that's for another time, another blog, perhaps.  My point here might be difficult to convey, but what I'm trying to say is that this thought was more than a thought: it was a revelation, an obvious truth, a foregone conclusion. 

     Then there was Carol Burnett.  Carol Burnett? Yes, Carol Burnett.  I was watching Channel 13 (public television) one night and there was a special on Carol Burnett.  They had old clips of her show interspersed with interviews of Carol and the major cast members: Vicky Lawrence, Tim Conway and Harvey Corman.  It was suddenly clear to me that Carol Burnett was the most talented person who ever lived.  Did you know that her daughter, Carrie, was a drug abuser as a teen and died of cancer at thirty-eight?  In my oxygen-deprived little brain, that made Carol more than just a performer; it promoted her to almost saintly status.  Her daughter's death added a dimension of pathos that had me absolutely convinced that Carol Burnett was a goddess.  I remembered watching her with Frenchi back in the 70's and laughing along with the rest of the country.  I silently resolved to write her the Mother of all Fan Letters when I got home. 

     Oh, and the info-mercials!  Thank G-d I didn't have my credit card; I would have ordered EVERYTHING!  There was one in particular that I remember quite vividly: it was a collection of 70's music.  It ran the gamut from Janis Joplin to Joni Mitchell, from Joe Cocker to James Taylor.  I'm sure it must have had some kind of special offer attached to it as well that I can't recall ("order in the next fifteen minutes and you'll also receive this beautiful ginsu knife!").  Anyway, I absolutely knew that I couldn't live without it!  

     Well, my cyber-friends, here I am, all these months later, and I haven't moved to Israel, I haven't written to Carol Burnett (and I no longer think she's a goddess) and I'm surviving just fine without Janis and Joni and Joe and James, thank you very much.  But I'll let you in on a little secret: I kinda miss those feelings of absolute clarity I had when I was semi-conscious.  I don't think I've ever felt that positive about anything before, and probably never will again.  And that's a little sad, isn't it?

* Making Aliya = Moving to Israel