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May 30, 2001
Into the house comes the annual New York magazine Best Doctors issue, just as the issue proclaiming the best restaurants, the best dry cleaner, or the best pedicure does. While I am loathe to admit that I will slavishly follow their suggestions regarding restaurants, stain removal outlets, or who best to commit the aesthetics of my extremities to, I find their doctor list lacking. None of my favourites are on it. I was curious as to their methodology when choosing these great providers and came across the phrase "a cross-checked compendium of referrals, in which doctors rate their peers." It has a dubious tone. Never ask a doctor about a doctor, ask a patient; or ask a doctor who asks their patients about other doctors. I wanted to share my list because something in me has grown weary of the appropriation and dissemination of "the best of " everything through the normal channels. I wanted to sing the praises of the people who make the vagaries of health tolerable to me and to many others. The people who are too busy seeing human beings and gathering anecdotal wisdom to be writing papers involving clinical studies; the men and women who know how to hold out the sponge along the marathon route but don't stuff it down your oesophagus; the doctors who still know what diagnosis means; the ones who know that the quality of your life is not the same as the length of it; the practitioners who know when to stop and when to go.
Dr. Michelle Alpert: Family (family being whatever you choose to make it) Medicine, Infectious Diseases and the woman with the most infectious laugh in Manhattan. Knows how to be a doctor and a friend.
Dr. Deborah Coady: Gynecologist. A woman who readily acknowledges that being a woman has its bizarre aspects but somehow makes it seem fine as evidenced by the tilt of her head.
Dr. Busell: Hematologist. A brilliant doctor if your blood is funky and a man recently educated in bed side manners by a patient's father wielding a scalpel. You no longer encounter endless waits in his rooms and the scars on his face have healed nicely.
Nurse Practitioner Weisz: Family Practice and Infectious Diseases. A woman possessing a fabulous brain, great legs and good ears.
Dr. Liz Greenberg: Chiropractor. Can resolve anything related to the spine and is your single best defense against computer shoulder.
May 23, 2001
We are the insomniac household, tossing on our expensive mattress like tide washed pebbles. Insomnia, initially at least, always fires me into a pleasant state of mild mania coupled with an invasion of thoughts that in nature fall somewhere between the regular thought and the dream. Last night I became fixated on an old thought of mine, and hardly an original one, but one I have a tenderness for. It consists of the notion that the emmigre, on departing, actually bifurcates leaving behind her another self to live out that non-departed fate. James Joyce, of course, ran away with the thought in the form of Leopold Bloom. Anyway, it persisted with me all night like a dream that informs your whole day. Perhaps it was the visiting friend; perhaps we're still giggling, still dancing in subterranean nightclubs, and still dating distracted and reticent men. Once, in Dublin, a couple of years ago I went to the theatre, a theatre I had frequented pre-departure. On this occassion I was alone and felt slightly self-concious about returning here and knowing that I would encounter old aquaintances. I had the distinct feeling that my other self had been religiously attending this theatre in my absence. I never go to the theatre in New York. Is this an exclusively Irish condition, the twinned citizen? Somewhere in the constitution it states that you cannot give up your citizenship, even if you choose to do so; you can be a dual citizen but can never renounce your Irish passport. Proprietary, reassuring, and understandable in view of our habit of departure.
May 22, 2001
Yes, you get used to it: the office. The getting used to, our remarkable forte; our grievous loss. At one desk a man, who physically resembles the great Irish political hero Charles Stewart Parnell - and apparently shares some of his personal problems - is conducting his divorce and custody battle in hushed tones over the phone. This renders the xerox machine dangerous territory and I feel both thrilled by the voyeuristic opportunity and embarassed that I am partaking, however peripherally, in the denoument of this man's family life.
Punctuation marks of brief pleasure provide fuel for enduring the day and the week: lunch at the coffee bar of Sant Abroeus on Madison Avenue, standing, to counteract office bottom. The best cappucino in town, mouth manageable sandwiches, and the illusion that one might be in a European capital. The five o'clock escape, the Friday escape, interregnums made bliss by the desert of office life. The Upper East Side, the diametric and diagonal opposite of the Lower East Side, here one is rendered a perpetual tourist by the availibility of museums, the park, a variety of cocktail outlets, consumer items completely out of one's league, and the potential for chance encounters with benign strangers.
Later, May 22, 2001.
In trying to assess why I was reduced to a sentimental heap after an evening in the company of an old friend visiting from Dublin, I began wondering about the nature of those old friendships that are no longer sustained by intimacy and long periods of time spent together but that still take up huge shelf space in terms of emotional volumes. B. and I spent the wildest and most gleefully hysterical years of our girlhood together. Our estrogen fuelled adventures began over an influenza epidemic in boarding school at the age of twelve. We were the last to contract it and spent two weeks with raging fevers entertaining each other with stories of our families. It appeared that we shared certain peculiarities as far as family went, an odd mixture of the Bohemian and the Victorian that was markedly different from our other contemporaries who were the daughters of farmers and doctors and other pillars of a dwindling Irish Protestant society.
I don't recall that we laughed when we met last Saturday. We were notorious for our laughter, likely to implode at the most inconvenient of times, indeed suffering many punishments for our shared indulgence. We were able to transport ourselves into a state of breathless intoxication merely by looking at each other. We also enjoyed similar bouts of intoxication on witnessing a good sunset.
Maybe I just miss her. Or miss being a girl. Or both.
May 09, 2001
Flo used to say to Clive, "Oh, that awful woman in the blue dressing gown was here this morning." Flo was about ninety and Clive was about thirty. Clive and his boyfriend lived in her house and took care of her until she died and now they live in the house. What she didn't, or perhaps did know was that the awful woman in the blue dressing gown was Clive: pre-cigarette, pre-toast (served with a toast rack) and tea and the vague laundering of the self that takes place in incredibly cold English houses. Anyway, I thought of the story because I feel like I have been the awful woman in the blue dressing gown all winter. She appears to have left.