Instructions for Opening the Heart

“How’s Walter?” I asked her on the phone. “He’s goooood.” She drawled out the word, indicating a more measured response. “We opened his chest today to look at his heart and lungs. It was amazing.” Cadaver lab was humming with murmured activity. Physician Assistant students began with small-opening incisions -- a forearm to look at muscles and tendons, a calf to see tibia and fibula connectors -- working their way up to more major organs. Today was Cardio-Vascular. Next week -- the brain and all its complicated grayness. Jenny had her new lab coat on. It was a Christmas gift, a cool Grey’s Anatomy brand jacket with a streamlined fit and better pockets. She was the first of Walter’s cohort to grasp her scalpel, creating a neat French-door over Walter’s sternum. There, like a muscular prize, lay his oversized heart. “Here are the aorta and the ventricles,” the professor intoned flatly. “Note the size of the organ. Its overly large circumference indicates what?” Jenny raised her latexed hand. “Considering his obesity, he most likely suffered from hypertension and hypertrophy,” she ventured, fairly sure of her diagnosis. “His heart had to accommodate his issues by growing larger.” The professor nodded. “That is most likely the case,” he agreed. “This patient may have been a good transplant candidate.” While Jenny was pleased with her correct answer, she also noted how her own heart raced during this class procedure. She, and her two lab partners set to work dissecting Walter’s various cardial chambers. Jenny could not help but look into Walter’s face, imagining him as an actual person with an actual life. Bad heart and romance jokes elicited giggles and groans around the lab. Walter’s chest was finally sutured with large novice stitches. They covered Walter and picked up their backpacks. As they filed out of the lab, Jenny took note of her own beating heart. “I will never take this for granted again,” she thought.

The Souls of Shoes

They are lined up on low Ikea shelves in the cluttered mudroom, spilling everywhere onto the floor. Every person living here kicks off their shoes upon entering. Each pair is a portrait of its owner, and it is effortless for me to identify them correctly. Outward or inward pronations are as much giveaways as is style. Only Jina walks that way, hah! Since Daniel began working as a vet tech, he opts for medical Crocs, once a nerd style he would have shunned. Kalia’s tiny size five-and-a-half thrift store finds are a given.


In elementary school, I would doodle my classmates’ shoes in the margins of my marble notebooks. Since penny loafers were the uniform shoe, there was little variety in the Bic sketches, yet still, I could later identify each classmate by their shoe drawing. I did this for a couple of years. Was I working through something, or just bored? Not part of the popular crowd, this exercise allowed me clandestine entrée into the rarified atmosphere of the truly cool. Own their shoes, own them.


There are a number of shoe sayings. “Walk a mile in my shoes.” “Put yourself in my shoes.” “If the shoe fits . . .” And Cinderella’s, “One shoe can change your life.” There are more -- albeit fairly obscure sayings. When insisting fame had not muddled her sense of self, Oprah Winfrey famously stated, “I still have my feet on the ground. I just wear better shoes.” How is it that our shoes have taken the lion’s share of apparel metaphor? Shirts and pants? Dresses? Socks? Jackets? Not by a long shot. Are our shoes really a mirror to something deeper within us?


At the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum on the western flank of Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, there is a huge and eerie pile of shoes on display, taken from the feet of Jews on their way to the extermination camps. For survivors, bare feet conjured seared memories of the Shoah.


My barefootedness is not anything like this. On the contrary, It is a declaration of freedom, and even, maybe, a form of rebellion. I walk barefoot around the house, no matter the temperature. I like the feel of wood and tile and rug. If I must wear something, I prefer sandals and flip flops. When I was a child, we called them “thongs,” a term I can no longer use because of its other connotation. I wear flip flops well into winter, along with my down coat and double-wrapped scarf. It is a call of the wild, a spit into the wind. Defiance of weather’s strictures and society’s norms.


Yes, shoes are identifiers. “Give a girl the right pair of shoes, and she can conquer the world,” Marilyn Monroe had famously said. 19th century Irish labor organizer and feminist Mary Harris Jones (we know her as “Mother Jones”) wrote, “My address is like my shoes. It travels with me.” I imagine Jones’ sturdy oxfords, soles worn to nothingness, marching, traveling, stomping her feet in frustration and determination.


Shoes take us wherever we are going. They dance with us, run with us, march with us. They skip along with our childhood games, ski and skate down mountains and across frozen lakes. They supply support as we age, and often follow us into the ground, as if we might need them as we step onto the shores of heaven.


We know, of course, that shoes have soles. Why the homonym? Are they windows allowing us to peer into our deeper selves, our proverbial souls? Monroe, Winfrey, Jones and Cinderella might think so. If I brought this idea to my children, whose jumble of shoes hold court along the mudroom floor and Ikea shelves, they would surely smirk and return to their eye-roll-default setting of “mom is hopelessly ridiculous.”


Except Daniel. He wouldn’t think that at all and, later, over an excellent coffee, he would confide that he has often thought in similar metaphoric fashion, except with hands. “ Look at people’s hands and form judgements,” he says. “Their movement, the way they hold a pen, or type, or smoke. Thumbs, knuckles, nails, and all, a person’s hands speak their own language and cannot lie.” I agree with my son. It’s odd that it is not feet that we speak about, but shoes. Shoes and hands. Palms and soles. Speaking the language of our own souls.

Herbie

His head was down when he sang, as if that were helping him reach the really low notes of his bass part. Yet despite the solemnity of most of the choral music rehearsed every Wednesday night and performed every Sunday morning, Herbie's robust renditions always carried hints of pirate drinking songs. "Yo ho, yo ho, O Holy Night for me! Herbie played piano with the same gusto, turning every hymn Joplinesque, his meaty hands bouncing off the keys like fleas in a circus.
   
His day job was equally enthusiastic. As the dean of the law school at Hofstra University, he was often tapped to deliver public addresses to faculty, potential benefactors and students alike. Humor always won out, albeit enunciated in the most academic of speech. He was loved by his students and respected by his colleagues.

I sat in front of him in choir, the only other prematurely white head of the bunch. Although his generous profile was entirely different from my slight one, we were green-robed doppelgangers, separated at birth, my alto-with-an attitude to his boom-box bass, pun masters and pet lovers.

Herbie passed away a couple of weeks ago. I miss his voice, his grin, his bearded face and hair and hands. When I reached for my green choir robe on the rack, I pushed past his, a bit more rumpled than mine. His spot in the loft was left empty, as if we all were hoping to hear that unmistakable voice ringing through the veil.

Cicadas and Stars

August nights are made of nostalgia. The crickets and cicadas sing the same songs I remember from my childhood and the lightening bugs (that's what we called them) dance and flicker to the music.
I am lying on my back in the backyard. Dusk has made way for dark and the heat of the day bows to breezes coming from the Sound, a few miles away.

The grass is wet from the sprinkler, but I don't mind. My hair is wet anyway from the shower and my pajamas will dry before bedtime. Stars are beginning to appear, and I can name a whole bunch of them. Like the cicada song, the stars have also been my companions through all my years.

Who made the summer night? Why does it seem so full of magic? I stay still while the world slowly transforms from one thing to another. Is God part of this? "There was evening and there was morning . . ." -- that's what the Bible says over and over, seven times. Did Abel and Cain play outside after dinner?

I relive in my mind those nights of stars, of the ice cream man ringing up the street, the whistle for dogs to come home and children to be in bed.

The Graduate

Most people graduate from college in their early twenties. This was my original trajectory too. But circumstances and life choices sent me in other directions, and that elusive degree faded into the background while family and children took center stage.

I had always wanted to return to school. As my kids grew, I found many practical excuses to put it off. Finally, as my marriage ended and my life took new and unexpected turns, I found the fortitude to go back.

I started my new college career at Nassau Community College (NCC) in 2012. Hurricane Sandy disrupted my first semester, and despite its ensuing turmoil, I persevered that fall semester. Since my basic required classes needed fulfilling, I found myself in two math classes and two science labs. Ugh!

As I continued, I realized English was my real love, and I took as many writing and literature classes as I could. In the spring of 2015, I graduated Summa cum Laude from NCC. My Associate’s Degree, coupled with good grades and my being awarded the State University of New York's Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence offered me several continuing ed options. I was accepted into Queens College’s prestigious Transfer Honors Program and gratefully accepted.

In the fall of 2015 I started classes at QC, working toward my English major. While I took all requisite English classes, I also found room for other forays. Painting. Drama. Anthropology. Urban Studies. Creative Writing. Spanish. This colorful array of subjects added depth and breadth to my educational experience, and while I was mainly focused on my declared major, I discovered many, many pertinent tributaries within these other classes.

I did well at QC. My lowest grade was a B+ in Spanish -- a class in which I worked hard, whose professor was a motivated young woman named Ruth Rodriguez. Profesora Rodriguez was well into her first pregnancy when she taught my class, and, understanding my aging brain’s weakness for short-term memory, offered a number of extra credit options to bring up my grade. A week and a half before our final exam, Profesora Rodriguez went into labor and gave birth to a fine baby boy named Octavio. Several days later, we were shocked and saddened to hear that Profesora Rodriguez passed away, after suffering a post-partum stroke. A number of us went to her funeral services and did our best to comfort her husband, another QC professor. Sitting for her final, reading her questions, hearing her voice over and over -- surreal and heartbreaking.

The seasons turned and the campus took on the hues of autumn, winter, spring. The campus hawks flew around the quad, perching within close proximity, reminding me that flight and freedom were within my grasp.

My final semester was stressful. I was in the second half of my Honors English seminar. Theses were due and the final exam loomed as a daunting shadow over everything. I concluded with an A+ on my thesis and High Honors on my final -- better than I had expected. Our Honors Conference was great -- each of us presented excerpts from our theses and sat in panels to answer all manner of intellectual questions. Two weeks before graduation, I was informed by the Advising Department that, because I had 56 credits at QC instead of 60, I was not eligible for any honors designations. Together with my advisors and the college’s Vice president, we fought the ruling and, on the very morning of the honors Baccalaureate ceremony, I received my formal invitation to participate. Such drama, I could do without!

So, I graduated Summa cum Laude, a designation that stands as testimony to years of hard work, and many late night papers.

In years past, whenever I would visit my kids at their respective college campuses, I always envied the atmosphere there. I longed to walk the quad, study in the library, get coffee from the dining hall Starbucks. Now I have done these things. And while that magic dust may have eluded me when papers were due and exams loomed, I must say that I loved every minute of my college career.

My white head was singular at graduation. Still, I felt an integral part of my cohort. My school friends -- brilliant all -- worked and walked with me throughout this journey, never thinking less or more of me than any other classmate. How wonderful. That black cap and gown, those honors stoles and ropes were worn with a grateful pride I had not yet felt in my lifetime. I am a college graduate. And I have to pinch myself each time I think of it.

Graduation Day

I am graduating from Queens College next month. My bachelor's degree is 44 years in the making. I finished high school in June of 1973, and since then, my life has taken me on a roller coaster ride of twists, turns and unexpected bumps.

Yet, here I stand. Next month, I will don that black robe and mortarboard, a red stole and various honors ropes and tassels as I march with hundreds of my (way younger) peers onto Queens College's grassy quad. This journey, from 1973 until now has taken me on a safari. I started and stopped college. I joined a religious cult and spent the better part of 30 years adhering to its strictures, including a marriage to a fine man who became father to our five amazing children. My sexual identity, always in the back of my mind, came to the fore, and I finally came out. While this was surely a rough part of the safari, I emerged with no regrets and a renewed sense of self, of motherhood and of professional potential.

So, here now, I stand. This particular achievement (my graduation) will be attended and celebrated by those who matter, and I am totally stoked! On that day I will don black robe, mortarboard, red stole and various honor ropes and tassels. I will not only reflect on my own journey, but the varied path of my young cohorts who have striven to stand with me on this day. We have striven, we have searched and we have emerged unto this day victorious.

I may possibly be the oldest graduate to stand on the quad on that day. But we all stand together. Amen.

Hair of the Dog

In all the corners
she remains
tumbleweeds of tangled fur
black, mingled with grey and dust

I find her dancing across the tile floor
even as I jump to scoop her up
spending a moment before
placing her in the bin.

Sixteen years of such furballs
of tail chasing and doing
the "crazy dog"
sixteen winter snowy romps
summer sprinkler leaps and flips
autumn walks on wooded trails

I see her next to each growing child
our sentry at the window
our pillow, our timekeeper
our puppy.

Sammy just now left us.
Yet, in all my
corners

she remains.