Cataract doc gives me a good report - Back to artwork - Poem: Song of the Crickets

Hello again, Frank! He has blue eyes. We had a great talk when I went in this morning. Back-to-back surgeries, I said, must be very stressful.

Not at all, he said. I could do them all day long. I'm totally relaxed.

I told him the story of Thomas Starzl, MD, the father of transplantation, who was so terrified that he would harm a patient when giving them a new kidney or liver that he reviewed all his notes the night beforehand.

Frank said he'd quit being a surgeon if he ever felt that way.

It's dealing with the patients, he said, that's the most stressful part of his job.

He works out to get rid of stress.

He told me the operation was a great success. Since I'm a glaucoma suspect, he had told me the operation might help this condition.

It did. My pressure went from 22 to 16. 

He told me to get reading glasses that are 2.5 magnification, so as soon as my appointment was over, I pulled out of his driveway, after saying goodbye to Marion, the coffee lady, made a left turn down York Road, and drove to the CVS in Warminster.

Bought the cheapest glasses I could find. I think they were $20. 

Painted them with my sister Donna's paints she left here. Exceedingly difficult.... all those tiny dots.

I paint on my screened-in back porch. I was dripping sweat. At first I thought I'd go nuts cuz I wasn't listening to music, but then I lost myself in the intense concentration of painting.

Since my paints were out - I keep them in a huge green Kremp Florist bag, I decided to work on a second project.

At the Village Hardware Store in Hatboro, PA, I bought a blah-looking welcome mat since mine is fraying.

It don't look too blah now, does it?

I was just gonna write "Welcome" but it came out too high up, so I needed two more lines of squiggly-painted print.

Man, was I tense when I squoze it on!

Back to my regimen of eye drops, taken to prevent infection and inflammation. Created this map, which is like a pill box.

Ate at mom's.... Ellen made a meatloaf, mom made her famous pea soup... and when I left I picked these purple verbenas from the front walk.

The top sunflower bloomed today.

Dr Clark and I talked about yesterday's surgery when I sat there for FIVE HOURS waiting for my 'lens insert' - or intraocular lens - to arrive.

Although Clark's office had ordered it correctly, FedEx screwed up and it arrived in Washington DC.

Clark profusely apologized and said he really appreciated my patience.

He said he wasn't gonna let me leave the Abington Short Procedure Unit until the lens was inserted. My eye was all gooped up with drops and gels. I could barely see out of it and I couldn't read.

I felt like I was in prison.

The following poem is dedicated to my friend Ed Quinn. He and his family are vacationing in Maine.

SONG OF THE CRICKETS

This time last year
as the poppies burst on their stems
the three of us went to Maine.
You could say we took Maine by storm
but that wasn’t quite it, driving up the coast
that never did appear
for the new road swung back too far.
But we knew it was there,
the coast, somewhere.
My son told me later
it was only on my account,
that he and Sarah decided
to come along at all.

I unlocked the door of the motel
and put away our things,
our hairbrush and deodorant,
contact lens case and tour guides,
laying them on the dresser
and television set,
opening the blinds so we could see
what Maine looked like.

It was the dinner hour.

They were ready to start watching
television right away,
as soon as they’d checked the drawers
for things left behind.

There were about a hundred channels up for grabs
and they wanted to go through them all,
all one hundred,
to find a movie that
suited them both,
I was like that once.

They were tired and bleary-eyed.

I put the key in my pocket
undid the chain
and went outdoors into the state of Maine.
A car whizzed by on some road out front,
a road we’d turned onto from the larger road,
the road that never did meet the sea.
So much for picture postcards of
lighthouses and lobsters.

Then I heard it:
the cry of the woods
a trembling rising roar
that soared toward the darkening sky:
a switch turned suddenly on.

I stood at the door,
the white washcloth smell of the room
clinging to my hair.
I listened to what seemed to be
the first crickets I ever did hear -
ancient, spindly, gathering in prayer
from vast empty spaces
impossible to get to,
impossible to find.

I went in to get them,
the boy and the girl,
serene and barefoot,
their hair illuminated by the glow of the screen.
They were watching as two men in a bar
clinked glasses, neckties loosened,
while the two of them, the children,
hooped with their quick, you’ll-see laughter,
a knowledge of plot complications
I never could grasp,
certainly not now,
wanting so bad to break into their blue martini heaven
their barefoot bliss
to tell them of my find,
nothing more than crickets chirping in the field beyond,
crickets chirping in the night.