tbentley.com

When articles like this seem sophomoric, moronic..that is, childish.

When I was about five or six, Mom took me on a trip downtown: that is, from suburban Des Plaines, Ill, into the Chicago Loop.  On a  bus.  This was before so many autos, and easier than the commuter train.

We got on the bus, took our seats.  Little me was looking around.  Suddenly I exclaimed in my piping, piercing little voice, “Mommy, why is that man black?”

A black man was sitting about four rows ahead of us.  My mother turned to me and said, quiety.,  “Well Tommy, that man’s skin is black, just like your skin is white.”

Tommy looks at her, looks down at his own bare arm, and says loudly, “My skin isn’t white–it’s orange!”

Two nesting pairs of Canada Geese,  and their gosslings (5 per pair, being a total of 10 goslings)

one nesting pair of Mallard ducks

brown-headed cowbirds

Blue Jays

Mating pair of Rufus Sided Tohees

Cardinals galore

Carolina Wren (2)

Grackles (too mang to count)

sparrows galore

hummingbirds

mocking birds

Okay, so I survived the coronary catheterization.  Surgeon agreed to enter through my wrist–although nurses insisted upon prepping my groin–and he found no problem.  So, $15,000 paid by Medicare to find nothing.

I was glad to see signs posted in the prep rooms, “It is OK to ask health workers if they have cleaned their hands”.  I asked, they said they had.  And I found no exceptions, but this:  a nurse came in, washed her hands, put on her gloves, then turned to a table and stuck her gloved hand into the pocket of her jacket, and took out a pen to fill out a form.  Fortunately, she didn’t  touch me after that.

None of them, on being asked, had ever heard of Peter Pronovost,

So I’ m cleared of coronart blockages.  So what caused my underlying condition?  $15,000 can’t tell.

Next Tuesday I go to the hospital for a coronary catheterization.  Below is a report from the Times on a protocol developed by Peter Pronovost, MD:

The intensive care units at nearly every hospital in Michigan participated — 103 I.C.U.’s.   What they had to do was use a five-point checklist to prevent infection when inserting the catheters.   The steps were:   Wash hands. Cover the patient with sterile drapes.  Clean the skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic.  Do not insert catheters into the groin area.  Remove catheters as soon as they are no longer needed*….“Within 3 months after implementation, the median rate of infection was 0, a rate sustained throughout the remaining 15 months of follow-up. All types of participating hospitals realized a similar improvement.”

*I’ll wear this on my chest.

From “Long Time Leaving” by Roy Blount Jr., quoting a woman he met while reporting a Klan rally:

‘You know the Jews don’t believe in Jesus?  That’s something I didn’t know till not long ago.  That kind of threw me for a loop’

Which put me in mind of a story about my grandmother Opper.  Boggin, we called her.  Boggin lived two doors up our quiet street, in a white-frame house with a basement that had both an ice box and wringer washing machine, a coal room, and a larder full of her own canned apples, peaches, and what not vegetables.

Boggin had a cleaning woman, who came in twice a week.  The cleaning woman, let’s call her Kathrin (since that was her name), was of German origin; she spoke with a thick German accent.  Not unusual in upstate Illinois, an area that had been settled, despite the French name of Des Plaines, by German farmers, toward the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Boggin was relatively liberal, for her age and time.  Both politically and religiously.  An Eisenhower Republican, I guess she’d have been. She didn’t let her prejudices show, though I’m sure she had some.  But as a Congregationalist who had married a Jew (Oppenheimer changed to Opper some time around the First World War), she really couldn’t afford prejudices.

She loved to talk politics with Kathrin, who was almost a Nazi throwback; Kathrin could rant, and Boggin would goad.  One day, they got into religion; the subject of Jews came up.  You can imagine Kathrin’s stand.  Finally, Boggin said, “Well you know, Jesus was a Jew.”

“Ach ja,” replied Kathrin triumphantly, “until he turned Cat’lic!”

It was a long weekend.  We piled into the remtal car, and drove north out of Manhattan.

But not to go to Woodstock.  Already we knew that was going to be mass confusion (by the time we were on the road, it was already impossible to get to the site).  No, we six young gay men were going to Vermont.  East Burke, specifically.

So we had our own Woodstock, right there in East Burke.  We thought about going to Woodstock, NY; but it seemed to us to be so totally, well, straight.

August 1969–this was just after the Stonewall riots.  Nothing loomed larger in importance, that gay lib; which is what we talked about, what we did, in Vermont, and could not have done in Woodstock.  It was simply so important to establish our identity as gay men, we were in the vanguard of that movement, and identifying with the great mass of young people, who were still floundering around, establishing their own identity–no, ours was a different cohort.

A year later, we were at the front of the first Gay Pride Day parade.