FrankenFoot Follies

Pain has a way of twisting your every thought in its direction.  It sucks the freedom and life from your brain and lungs.  Living moment to moment on narcotics, snapping out of the haze long enough to figure out if it has been 6 hours so you can swallow down some more pills, is the only way to survive the intense and constant blowtorch heat, set on high, and aimed at the inside and outside of the foot.  The swelling hurts as the skin almost bursts.

Five weeks have passed since going under the knife to correct my feet.   All this improving would be encouraging if the results still didn’t look like a red, mismatched angry club.  “Whose toes are those?”  Yucka-munga.

My first post-op visit was a few weeks ago.  The soft spoken surgeon came into the room and made the mistake of asking me (a south-side girl from Chicago) how it was going.  “Well, Doc.  This thing is a real Bastard.”   A little daunted, he replied, “Well, I’m glad I didn’t call you the first week you were home.”   My reply?  “Damn straight.  I might have called you a Bastard, too.”  We both laughed (as I sat there wanting to stab his eyes out with a steak knife.)

Bunion surgery is not for sissies.   Wait too long, and you get the added pleasure of having so much damage done to your foot that they have to break a couple of toes, shorten them, and plate the base of your foot.  Five screws, a rod, a plate and seven more weeks of crutches until I get to have the other foot “repaired”.

The thing I hate most is talking about it…like old people coffee-klatching at McDonald’s at 6 a.m. with nothing better to do than discuss their bowel movements, joint pain, and hemorrhoid medications.  Forgive me, my brain has been hijacked.

Salmon Pursuit

GO BIG OR GO HOME;  We Are In It To Win It

My son, Adam, will be featured on six episodes of Pursuit TV next year, participating in salmon fishing tournaments in the Great Lakes region where the stakes are high, 12′ waves are real, and men smell like onion armpit after a day of battle on the water.  Captain Adam will have a camera crew on board to film all the action on his boat, “The Pole Dancer”, a 32 foot Boston Whaler.  There will be close ups and monologues and lots of fishing frenzy as he fights harder to survive the competition than the fish.   Mother Nature will be up to her old tricks, there will be mechanical conundrums to solve, and 300′ lines to track where the unexpected is expected.   He is already growing a nasty beard so he can be a real shrimpin’ boat capt’n.  Damn you, Duck Dynasty!

We upped the fear factor by trading our old, red Ford F-350 pick up truck for a dual axle F-350 4X4 Diesel King Ranch with all the trimmings.  First impressions are everything and the thing is obnoxious.  When this tricked out baby rolls into the marina to dump his boat, the other fisherman should hit their knees and pray or  just throw their gear overboard and call it a day.  Some may pee their pants.  That’s the goal, anyway.

Keep your fingers crossed that the fish are biting, the skies are calm, and everyone in the tournaments gets lucky a time or two…on or off the water!

Scooter

I knew better than to show my hot rod to the boys.  Unfortunately someone had to assemble it so I was in a sticky position.  My foot is broken and reconstructed…so I need a knee scooter.  I’m totally dependent for the next 12 weeks on these clowns and they took advantage of me by suggesting all the ways they were going to “trick my ride”.   These were threats, really.

Bryce wants to get a customized license plate for the back that reads:  CLARISSE  and put hand lotion in my basket.   Adam wanted to switch the handle bars to “ape arms” so I could ride chopper style.

Then they had to take it for a TEST DRIVE around my kitchen.  OMG     Bryce tried popping wheelies and Adam was cornering on two wheels. Both broke the speed limit.   I was informed that when I was done with it, THEY were going to break it in right on the farm.   Am I going to Hell if my thought was, “Good.  Maybe one of them will break a leg?”

My doctor called me a week after surgery to apologize for not calling sooner.  He asked how the foot was doing.  I told him that it was a real bastard and he is lucky he didn’t call earlier because I would have called him a bastard too.  We both laughed.  (As I secretly wanted to stab his eyes out with a steak knife.)

If the truth be told, these two “clowns” have taken amazing care of me as much as it kills me to admit it.  Bryce has done all the farm chores every morning without a complaint. He even went to the grocery store and came out with lots of good surprises!   Of course, this year the barn water is frozen so he has to hoof it all the way to my kitchen sink to retrieve water for the chickens and goats.  It doesn’t help that we have been hovering around zero degrees.   On the big day, Adam was nominated to take me to surgery and wait for hours and then take his “in the bag” mother home.  I was drooling and practically comatose.  He fetched me all my needs the first few weeks.

I’m lucky to be surrounded by such wonderful men but don’t think for a minute that I am going to let on.

Kupiec Farms

Facts of Life

Whittled away by cancer, he keeps a white bed sheet over his head, like a ghost, so that no one will discover him in bed, dead.  He hasn’t eaten in days; he just can’t anymore.  His daughter arrives at the care facility and gently whispers to the tiny sheet in the bed, “Dad, wake up.  I’m here.”  He whispers, “So I ain’t dead yet?”  “Nope, you’re not that lucky,” she says.  He pops down the blanket, looks at her and says, “This is bullshit.  Why ain’t I dead yet?”  They both smile.  She kisses the hollow in his cheek.  And so begins another day.  And so it goes; this dance.  His journey.

When it is over they will both only remember the good times.  She will think back to their summers together, floating in an aluminum boat.  She is wearing her big straw hat and watching him catch fish after fish with a simple hook and a couple of crawlers.  Chihuahua!   Her mind will drift to Disney World, a month ago, when they were both Goofy.   He will be right beside her as she dreams.

Oh, time…sweet time….the double edged sword.

Sweet Surprises

Jennifer lives about 30 miles away and called on Saturday to say she had a surprise for me, “Come to Brighton.”   An hour later I was lunching at Panera Bread with my daughter and her steady, Will.   I cleverly worked them both over for clues and hints.  Shamefully, I tried blackmail.  “If you don’t give me a clue, I’m going to write about you in The Painted Post.”

We slurped the last of our tomato soup and piled back into the car.  Will headed eastward.  I’m thinking…Novi?

Then it dawned on me…THE NOVI PET EXPO!

Nailed it!

It was so sweet of them to think of me and make an outing of it together.    We spent an afternoon watching dogs jump into a 35′ long swimming pool, run agility courses, and saw all the critters who found their forever homes.  It was a special day.

Back at home, I went upstairs to change clothes.  On the bathroom counter, our housekeepers had left this note.  Another great surprise!

Dream On

Could there have been a better time to be a teenager than when Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic album came out?  The Nuge wasn’t far behind with Stranglehold and ballads by Elton John killed the charts.  Candle in the Wind…they don’t write them like that anymore.  Then there was the Zeppelin movie.  Robert Plant sang and Jimmy Page played.  Mix in a little Jimmi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.  Boy, was I lucky to see these standard artists when they were up and coming.

We were the generation after the 50′s fins, when stripes and powerful engines ruled the streets.  My boyfriend had a Mustang Cobra and it was the bomb.   I smoked cigarettes, drank Boone’s Farm Strawberry wine, skitched behind cars in the winter, and cussed like a sailor.  I was 17, young and dumb and full of fun.

Memories are what makes getting older worth it.   What I wouldn’t give to go back and see a Farrah Faucet poster hanging inside a boy’s school locker or mood rings for sale on a gas station counter,  or (too much) blue eye shadow.  Yes.  I said it.  Blue eye shadow.  We were all too cool for school.   Smoking in the boys’ room, ditching classes, and drag racing was about as naughty as it got.  We wore bell bottoms and skin tight tops that snapped together at the crotch.  Our hair was big, our dreams were big, and Elvis was still in the building while John Travolta made the white polyester suit famous.

Archie Bunker ruled the airwaves, microwave ovens were given away by banks as incentives to open savings accounts, and the pill was new on the market.  Dolly Parton was a regular on the Johnny Carson Show and Saturday Night Live premiered.  Starsky and Hutch solved crimes, Fantasy Island was on every Friday night, and long distance phone calls were still expensive and rare.

This past weekend my mom came over from Chicago, with my two aunts and cousins.  We sat around the table, talking about family, old times, and shared grandma stories about grandmas who left us too soon.

I’m feeling nastalgic and grateful to have these women to share my life and memories with!