September 2004 Archives
Later that night I went through boxes and boxes of old stuff that is stored in my brother's musty old room in the basement. I found my grandma's wedding ring in a little cardboard box in one of the drawers of my old jewlery box. With it was the handwritten note that she gave me when entrusting me with her ring. I cried so hard.
My grandma died yesterday. Mary Jo Garlich. Nana. Though her name is actually Mary Wilna, everyone called her "Jo" - a nickname she acquired while at beauty school in Minneapolis in 1929. They would do roll call by the girl's last names, and her maiden name of Johanson stuck.
She was 95. My little old Nana.
I am on a plane right now, waiting to take off towards Minnesota, flying courtesy of the "breavement fair." A phrase only to be uttered in hushed tones. The idea of a bereavement fair is somehow very reassuring to me. It maintains my hope for humanity that it is assumed, in this profit-driven world, that if a person's grandma dies she should be able to get on a plane the next day and not pay what everyone else pays. It is understood that this person must be treated kindly and gently. It is understood that it is important for this person to get home soon to be enfoled in the arms of family.
Its kind of nice. Its also not really that cheap, but whatever.
Nana. The kindest, most generous person I have ever known. She once agreed to give my brother Michael her favorite rocking chair, just because he asked for it. He was kidding, of course. She was extremely easy to tease. We used to take turns saying things like "Nana, I think Joanne is hungry." Because she would immediately begin offering my sister Joanne all kinds of snacks. "Oh, Joanne!" It would then be Joanne's job to thoroughly convince Nana that she was in fact very full and didn't think it would be necessary to pop a bag of microwave popcorn. Nana wouldn't rest until she was convinced that everyone within her reach was full, that they knew where in the fridge they could find a pop, and that they were finding something nice to watch on the tv. Then Joanne might say, "Nana I think I heard Michael say that he was thirsty." "Oh, Michael!"
Oh, Nana.
Its sad that I won't get to see her again. Its sad that she's gone, my only grandparent on this continent, but its ok. Its what she wanted. She was old and ready, and sharp until the end. I find myself thinking about weird things, though. What should I wear to the funeral? Maybe blue, 'cause that's her favorite color. Am I going to look stupid when I cry?
Is it weird that I just put a picture of Nana as the wallpaper on my cell phone? A perverse way to honor the dearly departed, but its this amazing picture of her in a little purple mu-mu making one of her "poker faces." Nana has never understood the concept of a poker face, despite being an avid card player, and instead has a series of funny faces that she pulls on command.
Here are Nana's 3 poker faces:
1) puffing her cheeks out
2) squinting one eye and cupping one hand to her ear as if she were an old deaf man
3) flipping her tongue against her lips very quickly
Sometimes she'll throw a new one in there to mix things up. I think I caught a new, never-before-seen pokerface when I snapped that cell phone picture. She is sitting very upright and squinting her eyes and laughing at the same time.
I also think of Nana getting cremated. Is it happening right now? Her soft little body, the one she always joked about being too flabby, consumed in flames and reduced to charred ashes. Is it happenng now?
I think about how I can't for the life of me remember where I put the ring she gave me as a teenager. Her wedding ring. Fused with the engagement ring my grandpa Al, who I never met, gave her in 1939 while she was still working at her beauty shop - Jo's Beauty Shop - in Pipestone, Minnesota. Could I have lost it? I am a horrible person. The first thing I do when I get home will be to search the house until I find it, most precious ring.
Oh, Nana.
Please do not ever watch the show Medical Investigations. It is stupid and ridiculous and is clearly only capitalizing on the nation's current obsession with medical crime dramas. But this time its not just one crime, or one patient; the safety of the entire nation is at stake, and the show will not let us forget it.
It mades it debut last night after the season premier of The Apprentice, which I unfortunately misssed. Instead, I caught the opening scene of M.I., which featured a very intense and angry looking blond man who was watching his son suck at little league baseball. Then the man got a phone call, then the man gave some very intense advice to his son at the plate, then a helicopter picked the man up practically in the baseball field, and then his son hit a home run.
Who is this man? Apparently he is the leader of an elite team of doctors who work for the government. He is also a domineering asshole controller who looks like a complete psycho even though maybe he is supposed to look ruggedly handsome and who is in charge of making split second decisions and giving orders to his team-mates, also very smart doctors, without saying anything nice or positive to them, because "someone needs to make the call." But I think he's supposed to be a compelling, complex, human character, as evidenced by his touching (and vaguley creepy) interaction with his son.
Who are these people working for? I guess the government? The NIH? I think they must have said it, but everything was happening at ultra-action speed, so the reasons anybody was doing anything was too difficult to follow. The only thing we the audience knew, was that there were blue people turning up everywhere. And that was bad. Very bad. Bad enough to panic and yell at people and make a lot of cell phone calls and fly around in a helicopter and sick your sassy PR lady on the press to illegally block any investigation by locking a reporter in the hospital basement.
This show is going to bomb. Somebody somewhere combined all of the marketable features of shows like CSI and Cold Case - aka the fast decsion making, problem solving, fancy medical/criminal technology, and eerie reinactments with wavy ghost people, and forgot to add any compelling reason why anyone should care about any of the characters. I guess they figured that if they make the plot seem important enough, we won't notice the ridiculous and destracting side-plot, the fact that the main character is an evil robot, and their inability to even attempt to rationally explain the case at the end. Why were the people blue? Why were the people fucking blue, you morons? They threw out a lot of fancy medical talk that amounted to sheer babble because IT DIDN'T MAKE SENSE.
I hate that show.
The Veteran's Administration Hospital. Where they admistrate veterans. Or administer to them. It's long stark, blank hallways. It's forrest green laboratory furniture. It's rooms filled with subtly flickering flourescent lights embedded in mottled drop ceilings. It's slow computers. It's old office chairs, worn and stained, patched with duct tape. It's dark, windowless patholgoy resident's rooms with its ancient brown, creme, and orange-themed microwave with the broken handle.
The V.A. recently sent out a memo to all of its employees. Among other things, it announced that from all incoming residents must report to be finger printed. To ensure the safetry of our nation's veterans. This doesn't directly affect me, because even though I rotate through the V.A., I am technically employed by the OHSU hospital system. But it does seem a bit odd. This institution, as well as many other such governmental emmisaries, is in a bit of a budget crunch, for obvious reasons.
Right now the V.A. is in a hiring freeze, so they won't hire any other people, even to replace employees who have quit. The hisotechs in the path department dropped from 4 to 2 recently, with out any reinforcements in sight. This is also the same V.A. that can't afford to buy a second dictaphone for the pathology gross room, so now only one person can tackle the pile of biopsies and other human bits, even if there are other people sitting around checking CNN news in the break room. But apparently there are enough funds to pay for the extra time, energy, and person-power involved in finger-printing the hundreds of new residents. This will clearly stem the tide of terrorists that are currently infiltrating the ranks of our nation's young doctors. Their goal: to quietly invade hospitals across the nation and perform dastardly acts of cowardly evil on 75 year old Korean war vets.
"You wanted the oriental chicken dinner, Mr. Arndt? Well, I am putting you on a low-sodium vegetarian diet!" "I'm sorry, is that blood pressure cuff too tight? Well, how's that, Mr. Dofelmire? Huh? How do you like that?"
With each black-inked finger pressed firmly and resolutely to that blank white paper, the Veteran's Administration is shaking its fist to the sky and shouting, "Take that, Osama!"
I am on vacation! I am taking advantage of the three day weekend, and of my new I-don't-have-to-study-on-the-weekends lifestyle, to visit my good friends Ritchey and Andrew in their new home in Santa Cruz. It has been so amazing.
Yesterday we walked for hours on the beach, and I got a very intense sports bra sunburn that will be with me for months. We also paid a visit to the sea lions that live under the big warf that juts out from the beach. Sea lions are incredible creatures. They are like gigantic dogs, with their big old soft dog faces, and their dog voices barking, and their dog mannerisms. But their dog faces are attached to this weirdly long smooth water body with webbed flippers that seem kind of ridiculously close together in the back. They are the most graceful creatures in the water, but then they hurl their enormous hulking bodies out of the water and can barely move. You can't help rooting for them. Spread out along the wooden planks under the warf, it seems like they spend most of their time napping and sighing, and occaisonally wake up to yell at eachother or push eachother off the planks.
We spent a lot of time with this one smaller, younger sea lion who had been trying so hard to get up onto this low plank. He was clearly exhausted, and most of his attempts only resulted in him straining his neck desperately onto the wood and sinking back into the water. We decided it was because the other older seals didn't teach him how to jump out of the water properly. So we proceded to coach him, very encouragingly and enthusiastically. "You need to get your arms up there!" "That's not the way to do it, little guy!" "Try building up some momentum!" And then he did it. After so many tries. It was so triumphant.