A fiction writer invents people and events. One kind of invention is taking a minor character created by another storyteller and imagining a life for him or her outside the pages of the original story in which that character appeared. For example, the brief mention of a wife in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is the basis for Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-gazer (2005). Other  examples abound in fan fiction on the internet.

A fictional character whose backstory seems to intrigue writers is Mary Bennet, the plain and bookish middle daughter in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, of whom Austen writes in chapter six, “Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.” Ouch.

Mary, of course, represents in Austen’s book the plight of women of the time who could not find husbands—which might be partly why Mary fascinates readers in an era where women can do very well on their own without having to latch on to another human being just to stay alive. In “There’s Something About Mary” (The Atlantic, August 19, 2016), Megan Garber shares a list of books by modern authors who have been compelled to give Mary her own story: The Independence Of Miss Mary Bennet, (2009) by Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds; The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet’s Pride and Prejudice (2014) by Jennifer Paynter; The Pursuit of Mary Bennet (2013) by Pamela Mingle; A Match for Mary Bennet (2009) by Eucharista Ward, a Franciscan nun; The Other Bennet Sister (2020) by Janice Hadlow.  

Hadlow’s novel, told in third person limited point of view, gives the reader Mary’s thought processes but nobody else’s—and, for an intellectual and self-flagellating character like Mary, those thought processes are painful. Hadlow lets Mary walk with eyes wide shut into one unhappy situation after another, especially in the beginning when Mary retains the personality given to her by her original creator and is still being smothered in the bosom of her family. Fortunately, within the pages of The Other Bennet Sister, Mary Bennet blooms into an imperfect but fully fleshed human being as she climbs, chapter by painful chapter, into self-awareness and a life of her own.

Part One of The Other Bennet Sister shares Mary’s perspective on her growing-up years in the Bennet household. She is closed-off, battened-down, raised by her indifferent father and bitter mother to hide her feelings and to be as invisible as possible. Her longing to be loved is palpable on the page, but nothing she can think of to do earns her a crumb of affection. She is her mother’s whipping boy, her father’s burden, and her sisters’ constant embarrassment. As far as Mary’s family is concerned, she is a figure in the background of a section of wallpaper hidden behind a cabinet.

Hadlow writes that Mary, “had been told so often she was a failure that she had come to believe it. A woman with her disadvantages did not deserve to wear handsome clothes. Nor was she entitled to enjoy the other pleasures that made life worth living—love and affection chief amongst them. From these too she was excluded, and nothing she had told herself would change this or make the slightest difference to her future.” A third of the way into the novel (by the time Part Two comes along), readers might want to leap into the novel and rescue Mary from her family. I did. Yet for all her family's cruelty, part of Mary's problem is her own blindness about her failings—yes, of course, they do exist. Mary’s painful lack of awareness is demonstrated in her singing in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. 

Part Two of Hadlow’s novel begins two years later. Mary’s sisters are married, Mr. Bennet is dead, and everyone has decided that Mary must be her mother’s companion for the rest of Mrs. Bennet’s life. Both women will reside with the eldest Bennet sister, Jane Bingley, and her husband. But beaten-down Mary cannot bear up under the vicious remarks of Jane’s sister-in-law, Caroline Bingley, who also lives at Netherfield. Mary escapes to Elizabeth’s rich home with Darcy at Pemberley, but feels out of place there as well. Eventually, Mary evades her family altogether and begins a prolonged visit back to her childhood home, Longbourn, which has been inherited upon Mr. Bennet’s death by Mr. Collins (the braggart Mary once thought to marry) and his wife, Charlotte.

At Longbourn, Mary establishes what she sees as an intellectual friendship with Mr. Collins. They are kindred spirits, both intellectually and emotionally, for Mr. Collins, like Mary, was unwanted by his parents. Mr. Collins says, “My father was a bitter and disappointed man. There were many things that made him angry, but chief among them, I fear, was myself. He made it plain enough I was the worst of the many vicissitudes life had inflicted on him. He told me often enough I was worthless, and I soon learnt to take myself at his evaluation.” Thus, at a stroke, Hadlow provides a pitiful backstory to Austen’s ridiculous caricature, making Mr. Collins three-dimensional and, at the same time, revealing to the reader that parental disdain is exactly why Mary, too, has such a low opinion of herself. Mr. Collins says, further, “I was stiff and odd and awkward. No matter how I tried, I always struck…the wrong note.” This is Mary’s problem as well, and very soon thereafter, Mary is cordially invited to leave the Collins household by Mrs. Collins, who is jealous of the accord between the two misfits.

In Part Three, Mary rattles off to her mother’s brother in London, where she finally experiences for the first time in her life what it is to be a member of a family to whom she is not a burden. Like a wilted, battered flower thrust back into a vase, she soaks up the Gardiners’ affection and advice. When Mrs. Gardner takes a dowdily dressed and reluctant Mary to a dressmaker, Mrs. Gardiner says, “I am very far from suggesting a woman is to be judged solely by how she dresses…[but your appearance suggests you] dress as you do because you do not believe you deserve anything better; and in doing so, you communicate that low opinion of yourself to everyone who sees you.” For the first time in her life, Mary connects her outward appearance with her inner self, and she allows her rich sister Elizabeth to pay for flattering new clothes. In addition, Mary decides to change her attitude along with her wardrobe, to “open herself up to the possibility of happiness.”

Naturally, Mary’s new outlook and appearance attract the kind of attention she never expected—the attention of eligible prospects for matrimony—and Part Four brings Mary’s awakening to a “happily ever after” for which this prickly, intelligent, independent soul is ideally suited, a happily ever after that allows her to be completely herself.

The Other Bennet Sister is a delightful first novel, whether one has read Austen or not, whether one appreciates Austen or not, whether one is an ugly duckling or a swan. Highly recommended.   

On my desk sits a little round clay pot glazed mint and pine green. It’s about the size of a mug, but it has no handle. Whoever crafted this pot walked into her studio one day with a mind to make something. Her hands pinched and pulled, and when the pot was shaped, she glazed and fired it and put it on the shelf...and then she threw down a fresh lump of clay and started the next pot.

She didn’t know that her little green pot would come to me, that it would become a receptacle for a handful of Irish coins and three tiny packets of jawbreakers.

Writers are potters. We pinch and pull stories into existence. We research why and how and wherefore. We invent people and events. We comb and winnow. We put our own lives into our stories, which makes our stories true…ish. In  a 2007 TED talk, Isabel Allende quotes a Jewish saying:

Question: What is truer than truth? Answer: The story.

Outside the honesty of story, however, truth is relative, evident in the political posturing our nation has been mired in for at least the last ten years. A “truth” for a Democrat is not the same as a “truth” for a Republican. One wonders if there is a truth that is true for all. Can we all concur that the sky is blue? Can we unanimously affirm that water is wet?

Maybe we can agree that "history is written by the winners"—although admitting that requires us to admit that we are flawed, because winners don’t always tell the whole truth. Winners decide what to include and what to leave out in the story of their win. They aren't likely to reveal the ugly things they might have done to come out on top.

“History is written by the winners” is a theme embedded in Neither Wolf Nor Dog, a film adapted from the novel of the same name by Kent Nerburn. The story follows a white author who is drawn into contemporary Native American life in the sparse lands of the Dakotas. It features conversations with a Lakota elder on the tragedies experienced by his people and the lessons of his life. Filmmaker Steven Lewis Simpson shares truths about Native American life that go beyond the two-dimensional portrayal of Indians that most whites have been raised with. At one point, the elder, Dan (played by 95-year-old Dave Bald Eagle) says, “When white people won, it was a victory. When we [Native Americans] won, it was a massacre. When they fought for freedom, it was a revolution. When we fought for freedom, it was an uprising.”

Victory or massacre? Revolution or Uprising? Depends who’s telling the story.

Without a doubt, whites brought disaster to indigenous peoples in the Americas. My mom was a history teacher, so I learned pretty young about America’s deliberate extermination of Native American people and cultures. I know that for decades the media deliberately portrayed Indians in a negative way to validate what whites had done and were doing. Then and now, when I asked why this was done to Native Americans (a question elder Dan also asks), the answer I got was generally a variation of, “Yes, it was terrible. But there’s nothing we can do about it now,” which isn’t a why, it’s an after-the-fact defense of the indefensible, probably what they’ll say when the last iceberg melts and coastal cities all over the world disappear under twenty feet of water. But I digress.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog shares a truth that needs telling, but my mind kept snagging on the film’s bias. I know viewers are supposed to mourn what has been lost/stolen, and I do. I've read Louise Erdrich, Tommy Orange, Cherie Dimaline, others. One of my favorite Star Trek episodes when I was a kid was "The Paradise Syndrome," wherein an amnesiac Captain Kirk finds happiness for the first time in his life with people modeled after Native Americans. As a kid who was worried about pollution, I loved that Kirk found a home with people who revered the earth. As a girl crushing on boys, I loved that Kirk found true love with the kind of warm, funny, nurturing woman I hoped I might become one day.

Star Trek's producer, Gene Roddenberry, said of this episode, "Our story here is whether a Herman Melville theme, i.e., modern man finding his 'Tahiti,' that natural and simple and happy and untroubled life all of us dream about some day finding—and having found it and having held it in his hand, he learns he's incapable of closing his hand around it and keeping it because all of us are innocent prisoners of our own time and place." An opposing view of the story, according to Daniel Bernardi of San Francisco State University in "Star Trek of the 1960s: Liberal-Humanism and the Production of Race," is that this Star Trek episode leans unacceptably on the romanticized "noble savage stereotype."

Stereotype? Unattainable dream? Can both be true?

Of course. A culture can't be put on a plate, garnished with parsley, and served up with a note that says, "this is IT." There are nuances. If you grow up in a culture, you understand it better than outsiders, yet there are aspects of every culture that don't make sense even to people on the inside. The point is, no account of a culture can be accepted as the pure, unvarnished truth since it is fallible human beings who chose the words/pictures/stories that convey that culture. In addition, no culture in the world is or was or ever has been all good or all bad.

Some indigenous tribes in the Americas tortured captives to death, but other tribes adopted captives who didn’t want to return to white culture when they had the chance (Mary Jemison, who will appear in the fourth installment of the JEM series, is one of them). Some Christian churches in Europe provided sanctuary for fugitives, while others supported the Inquisition. Some pre-Civil War Americans in the North helped slaves escape to freedom; some pre-Civil War Americans in the South punished recaptured slaves with maiming and death. It’s not the color of people’s skin that makes them just or unjust, it’s what they have learned. It’s the content of their character. It's fear. People who oppress others are afraid, afraid to learn anything new lest they learn they're not superior after all, afraid to open their hearts to The Other even though people who let others in are richer for it.

The idea that history is written by the winners isn’t new and isn’t only a matter of race. It’s conveyed in Frederich Schiller’s play, Mary Stuart, about the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary is imprisoned in England, supposedly for the murder of her husband but actually because she claims a greater right to the throne of England than its possessor, Queen Elizabeth the First. (The 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots tells this story.) When Elizabeth makes the decision to execute Mary, she is careful to establish plausible deniability so she can be the Last Queen Standing with minimal fuss. Elizabeth’s historians side with her, of course, which is why, for centuries, Elizabeth has been remembered as a legendary monarch while Mary Stuart has been remembered as a plotter and something of a tart.  
 
At a less imperial level, a child who has a conflict in school and tells his parent it’s his teacher’s fault has learned to portray himself as a victim. When the parent speeds to school to savage the educator, he or she often learns that the darling snowflake told only part of the truth to show himself in a better light:

Occasionally, a conflict viewed from different angles doesn't show a clear winner. Recently in my neighborhood, a man walked into his neighbor’s yard and cut down a mulberry tree that annoyed him, a tree whose branches he had been hacking off for years whenever they encroached over the property line. When the person who owned the tree expressed outrage that the tree had been cut without permission, Paul Bunyan said to the tree owner, “I told you this summer I was going to cut down that tree, and you told me not to get myself killed.” In Paul Bunyan’s view, this exchange gave him permission to cut down the tree. In the view of the homeowner, Paul spun a passing joke over a fence into permission to trespass, vandalize, and lie. Two versions of a single event equaled the end of a twenty-year friendship. Everybody lost.

Nobody owns all the truth there is, and nobody can change a day once it’s on the shelf. We can only throw a fresh lump on the wheel and try to make tomorrow more balanced and more true than today.

"Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost." ~ Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto 1

PART I: A bump in the road
 
Until last month, I’d spent only four days in the hospital in my whole life: two when I was born and two when my son was born. But at the end of January, I ate some bad hamburger and experienced the usual symptoms  of food poisoning. A week later when my symptoms persisted, I thought I might have picked up a bug. By the time a friend insisted I see a doctor, I’d been spending an inordinate amount of time in bed with my dog’s head on my belly.  
 
I didn’t avoid medical intervention because I’m afraid of doctors or lack insurance but because I usually let my body sort itself out. Nevertheless, on February 13, 2019, I asked my neighbor to let my dog out if I wasn’t home by suppertime. I drove myself to Urgent Care, where three different people asked me the same set of questions. Within twenty minutes, a nurse wheelchaired me to Emergency.

They drew blood. I was ultra-sounded externally and internally. I was CT-scanned in a giant doughnut. I watched the clock, thankful I’d seen to my dog’s needs. The cats would be peeved to eat later than usual, but they would be fine. If I’d known how much later it would be, I’d have left their bag of food on the floor.

In Emergency, I tossed and turned on a hard cot. Finally, an angry OBGYN doc came in and said, “Why do you have pain at a SEVEN, as bad as having a baby, for one month before you come in? Your white blood cell count is 22,500!”

I squinted. Who are you and why are you mad at me? “What’s normal?”

“Five-thousand to 10,000! You have an infection!”

Why was he so angry? I said, “Well, first of all, it hasn’t been one month. It’s been fifteen days. Second of all, I didn’t come in immediately because I thought it was food poisoning or the flu.” He palpitated my painful belly and huffed out. A nurse stuck an IV line in my elbow and started a saline drip.

What on earth is going on? I would have asked more questions if I hadn’t needed to close my eyes for two seconds.

When I opened my eyes and saw daylight, I couldn’t believe it: I’d been in the ER all night. My poor critters! The angry OBGYN came back. “We are sending you by ambulance to Marshfield” (the mother hospital of the clinic in which I’d spent the night). Marshfield was ninety miles away.

“What?” I shook off my morning fog. “Why?”

“There is a mass in your abdomen, but I am not a surgeon. I don’t want to try to do a biopsy and then have to send you ninety miles for emergency surgery.”

“When will I go?”

“In about twenty minutes. We already ordered the ambulance.”

Let me interject a pertinent fact: I do not own a cell phone. I have a list of phone numbers hanging on my kitchen wall next to my old-school telephone. The only person who knew I had gone to the clinic was the neighbor I’d asked the day before to let my dog out at suppertime. The only phone number I knew by heart was my son’s.

There was a phone on the wall in my ER room but no phone books in the entire clinic. I dialed the only number I knew. “Honey, it’s mom. I’m being taken by ambulance to Marshfield for emergency surgery.”

“Wha…WHAT?”

Shoot. I woke him up. “It’ll be OK. Get hold of J. and ask her to take care of the animals.”

“I don’t have her number! Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. Friend J. on Facebook and tell her. Call Uncle D. and tell him what’s going on. I’ll be fine. Just, please, handle this for me.” There was a commotion in the hall. I looked up: the ambulance guys were standing in the doorway. “I have to go. I love you.”

They strapped me to a gurney, bundled up my clothes, and loaded me into the ambulance. I was starting to stress out about my animals and my students. How could I tell people what was going on? How could I pay my medical insurance premium, due in six days—the bill was at home.

It was a long shot, but I asked the ambulance driver to stop at my house and grab my laptop. “Please!” I begged. “It’s right on the way! I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t have any way to communicate with anybody. I have animals.”

When the ambulance turned off the main drag down my street, I nearly wept. We rumbled along for one block, and then I said, “My house is in the next block. I can get out and run in.”

(I was dressed in a hospital gown, attached to an IV, and strapped to a gurney. Temps were in the twenties with two feet of snow on the ground. My boots were in the bottom of my bag of clothes. Talk about being out of it.)

The driver said, “I’ll go in. It’ll be easier.” I gave him my house key and told him where the laptop lived. I forgot to tell him about my dog, who must have been scared when a stranger came in instead of me. (Of course she knew I was just outside. Dogs always know.)

The driver emerged. I thanked him for ten minutes, and then I clutched my laptop in the freezing cold back of the ambulance for nearly two hours. When we arrived in Marshfield, we drove past a cemetery across the street from the hospital, a practical if macabre real estate decision.

I was transferred from gurney to bed, and the painful IV jammed into the soft flesh of my elbow was connected to a saline drip. I immediately tried to get my laptop working, but I could not connect to the hospital’s temperamental wi-fi. When my surgeon came in to introduce himself, he sliced through the barriers between my laptop and the hospital’s internet.

Then he told me what was going on. "You have a tubo-ovarian abscess,” Dr. L. said. “We have to remove it.”

“OK,” I said. I had no idea how rare tubo-ovarian abscesses are in women my age (12 percent of cases) or how serious they are. Now I do.

A TOA is a puss-filled sack attached to an ovary. It develops when bacteria from the lower genital tract migrate to the fallopian tube and ovary. If the abscess ruptures (as happens 15 percent of the time), sepsis occurs. That’s when the body’s immune system stops trying to fight an infection and starts attacking the body itself. Sepsis kills. Prior to the advent of broad-spectrum antibiotics and modern surgical practice, the mortality rate associated with TOA was approximately 50 percent or higher. Even if a TOA doesn't rupture, 30 percent of TOAs are malignant. My tubo-ovarian abscess was the size of a stuffed baked potato, which is a way nicer thing to look at than an actual TOA:

Dr. L. continued, "We have to check adjacent organs for cancer. We may have to do a hysterectomy as well."

“Cancer.” “Hysterectomy.” If I were a younger woman who dreamed of more children or who hadn’t gone through menopause already, I might have been distressed about losing my lady bits, but now I told my surgeon, “Go ahead, take it out. If that’s going to be the source of problems for me down the road, might as well take care of it now.”

He said, “We’ll see what we find when I operate. I’ll remove the abscess and send it to the lab. And we’ll go from there.”

Was I worried about cancer? No. Worrying doesn’t change outcomes, it just wastes energy people need to deal with whatever obstacle they’re facing. For me, it’s more productive to gather as much information as I can so I can choose the best course of action. If my operation revealed I had cancer, I would deal with it, one step at a time, and I would come out the other side of it wiser and healthier. If cancer treatments didn’t work, I would die. Worrying wouldn’t change either outcome.

We’d have to wait and see.

PART II: Where am I?

I arrived at Marshfield Medical Center at noon on Valentine’s Day and spent the next three days hooked up to two IV lines: one fed me a steady drip of saline and the other dripped antibiotics to kill the bacteria in my blood. Thanks to the saline, I had to visit the lavatory once an hour, rolling my IV-pole sidekick along with me.

My primary caregiver was a traveling nurse from Michigan. Z. spends roughly 12 days a month in Marshfield on alternating weeks. It was my good fortune that her week in Marshfield coincided with mine. If I could have created the perfect nurse for my hospital stay, I couldn’t have done better than Z. From the moment I arrived, she seemed to know the right emotional approach to use with me: patience, humor, and matter-of-factness. For the first hour of my stay, I pounded on a laptop arranging for the care of my animals, my students, and my family—while Z. quietly focused on caring for me.

You’ve got to be a different breed of cat to be in a helping profession. Focusing on humans with all their complications and faults is hard work. Very little is predictable from day to day. You have to be ready for anything but ready to punt if something happens outside of “anything.” People in the helping professions work too hard for too little, but they are on the front lines of the truest, deepest human experiences: birth, sickness, death, first love, parental separation—you name it—so by another measure, they are richer than kings.

They go the extra mile. It’s a little, silly thing, but even though I had showers in the hospital, I could do nothing about my hair. Without intervention, my hair lies flat as a wet rug. My family and friends were an hour and a half away. The hospital had no hair products whatsoever. But on Monday morning, my Z. handed me a tube of hair gel she’d bought for me over the weekend so I had one less thing to stress about. What a gal.

And what a chameleon: an older woman in the next room didn’t quite know where she was. I heard her quavering voice ask unintelligible questions and Z.’s patient, loud, and clear answers over and over: “You’re in the hospital” or “We are making you better” or “What can I get for you?” I asked Z. if it was hard to adjust her demeanor for different patients. She said, “No. I know what they need. I meet people where they are. With some people, like you, I can have a normal conversation. With others…I have to keep it basic.” As a retired teacher, I understand "meet people where they are."

A hospital is a weird place for lives to intersect. It’s a place where life begins. Where it ends. Where comedy and tragedy randomly swap places. It’s a place where life doesn’t flow at its normal, leisurely pace. A hospital hurls people, ready or not, toward Inevitable Conclusions.

Since I didn’t know whether I had cancer, I was mindful of Inevitable Conclusions just before dawn on my first morning in the hospital when the phlebotomist came to draw blood. My window faced east. In the distance, the rising sun was turning the sky all shades of glorious. Z. came in and asked if I wanted her to close the curtains so the sun wouldn’t be in my eyes, but I said, “Who knows how many more sunrises I’ll get?” She left the curtains open.  

Over the long weekend, I choked down bites of hospital food and met with hospital personnel, all of whom had agendas: one gal wanted to plan my eventual departure for home. One wanted to set up medical power of attorney so everybody had a road map for my departure into the hereafter. The infectious disease doc who was superintending my antibiotic regimen wanted to get me out of the woods ASAP because he was flying to Thailand in a couple of days to teach missionary doctors how to treat tuberculosis. Dr. T. wore a dapper bowtie and called me “professor.” He knew after talking to me for two minutes that I liked my facts neat.

On one of the days he came in, Dr. T. sat between my bed and the window as the sun was coming up. He said, “You’re sitting in a strange position. Are you in pain?”

“No. I can’t see you because the sun is directly behind you.”

He got up to pull the drape. He turned on the lamp, perched on the edge of his chair in a pose, and said,

“How’s that?”

“I think you’re ready for your close-up.”

Despite flashes of fun, being in a hospital isn’t. In a hospital, you can’t do anything free and easy. If you want a shower, you have to ask for it. You have to evacuate your bladder and bowels into a plastic contraption called a “hat” that fits over the toilet bowl and saves your excretions for divination ceremonies downstairs in the lab. If you normally drink three cups of coffee in the morning, you have to order all three at the same time.

For me, the worst thing was tripping the alarm on my bed at night whenever I heaved myself up to go to the lavatory. I’d shift, the bed would shriek, and pounding feet would thunder toward my room. I got scolded for trying to pee in private, but they re-set the alarm every time. If I could have reached the shut-off button without tripping the alarm, I’d have turned it off myself.

PART III: Going under the knife

My family drove all the way to Marshfield the day before my surgery. We signed medical power of attorney forms. I included a caveat on mine: “Artificial life support of any and all kinds may be provided so long as there is a reasonable hope/expectation that it will not be required indefinitely; if there exists a reasonable expectation that I will recover, keep me plugged in. If, however, a vegetative or similar state precludes any hope of recovery, turn out the lights.”

Later that day, sudden, stabbing pain above my abscess curled me into a fetal position. They whisked me out for another CT scan and put me on an immediate NPO diet (nothing by mouth but ice chips) in case they had to do surgery then and there. The pain turned out to have been caused by air bubbling merrily in my compromised belly.

I know. Weird. Carbonated beverages have air bubbles. Beer has air bubbles. Fish tanks have air bubbles. Kids blow bubbles. But when bubbles form in a place they don’t belong, they hurt. Since I couldn’t take painkillers by mouth, they decided to shoot Fentanyl into my IV.  The cessation of pain was nearly instantaneous. I said to Z., “I can feel my skin.” Pain-free and a little loopy, I gnawed ice chips until I fell asleep.

In the morning, one more ultrasound gave my surgeon a green light for surgery. I crunched ice chips for breakfast and lunch and went down for surgery prep in the afternoon. The OR prep nurse chatted me up but neglected to do some shaving that would have saved me a tongue-chomping yank when the post-op nurses had to change my dressings. When I told the nurse I was a writer, a man behind the curtain in the cubicle next to me announced, “Hello Ms. Green. I am Alden Carter.”

Alden Carter. Author of Wart, Son of Toad. Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Walkaway. Up Country. Winner of six American Library Association awards. I babbled a fan-grrl greeting and squeezed his toe on my 114th toddle to the ladies' room.

Eventually, somebody shot Happy Juice into my IV, and I was wheeled into oblivion.

When I woke up the next morning, my throat was dry and sore because I’d been intubated. I was catheterized. Two plastic bottles shaped like grenades collected fluids from long skinny tubes that began in the cap of each grenade and ended inside my body. A plastic bag of blood hung on an IV pole, a narrow red line snaking from the bag to my arm.

My energetic surgeon bounced in. He said he’d removed the abscess along with my uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. They hadn’t found any cancer. His finger tapped his orders on the white board: “Walk 3X today!” He was going skiing in a couple of days. As he left, I somewhat envied his brisk pace and the skiing in his immediate future.

For me, the next two days were brightened by suppositories, Heparin shots, grenade emptying, blood draws, and leisurely strolls with my walker around the nurses’ command center. On one of my walks, a nurse gestured at my walker and said, “That’s how you get out of here.”

By February 20, equipment began to disappear: heart monitor. One of the grenades. One IV, then the other. On my last night in Marshfield, I woke up an hour before dawn soaking wet: the last grenade was leaking. Two nurses came to clean me up. I apologized for the mess, and R. said, “Oh, this is nothing. This is a Two, not close to the worst.”

“What’s the worst? What’s a Ten?”

“Death.”

I said, “You mean, you go into a room and find a patient dead?”

“Yup.”

“Is it hard to get over something like that?”

“No. It happens.”

Nurses amaze me. First, anybody who wants to be a nurse must do incredibly difficult academic coursework. On the job, nurses deal with meds management and bodily fluids and people in pain. On top of that, they must be stoic enough to accept Inevitable Conclusions without being crippled by them. They do this for years.

On the third morning, my surgeon said I could go home at noon. I telephoned the friend who’d agreed to come and fetch me. I felt every bump in the road on the way home, but it was grand to sleep in a bed without an alarm. My dog was happy to see me, and for the next handful of days, she was a gentle and easy walker, although she must have wondered why we weren’t going on the marathon walks she was used to.

My stitches came out on March 11. A secondary infection that set in a week later should be licked by the end of March. All that’s left of my bump in the road is an eight-inch scar, a slight absence of internal organs, and six things I learned:

1. You will come back to yourself after surgery, but your body will heal before your mind does,

2. It does not lessen you as a human being to ask for help.

3. Some people will help even if you don’t ask.

4. Good and bad things don’t happen to you because you deserve them. Things just happen.

5. If somebody offers to pray for you, say YES. Some folks scoff at “thoughts and prayers” because that phrase has become synonymous with “not gonna lift one finger to change a bad situation.” Some folks credit prayer when it seems to have made a difference but get mad at God when it doesn’t. As for me…people prayed for me. My abscess was not cancerous. I am healing. It could have gone another way. It didn’t. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.~ Heb.11:1

6. The world is a kinder place than social and other media lead us to believe. My third hospital stay  taught me I need to pay less attention to problems I can’t fix and more attention to my blessings:  Family. Friends. Healing. Compassion. I need to be grateful for good food, robins, melting snow, sunshine.

I need to pet my dog a minute longer than I think I have time for.

I need to let the good in.

 The Wife starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce resonates.

It's the late 1950s in sexist America, before Title Nine, before the Women's Movement, and before the Equal Rights Amendment. Before Vietnam, the moon landing, Flower Power. A woman's primary role is to marry, bear children, and support her husband.

The main character, Joan Castleman (Close), a student at all-female Smith College, falls in love with her writing professor and ends up breaking up his marriage (although, as we learn later, if it would not have been Joan, it would have been someone else, for Joe cannot keep his pants zipped). Joan marries Joe, and she makes a Solomon-like choice shortly thereafter: give her art over to him so it can live rather than put her own name on her work, because doing so would mean nobody will read it (“Don’t ever think you can get their approval…the men [are] the ones who get to decide who gets to be taken seriously” Elizabeth McGovern’s character tells Joan).  Joan is neither Joe’s first nor last extramarital affair, but she sticks with him through subsequent affairs because the only way her novels can live is if she lets her husband publish them under his name. Joe’s own work is pretty pedestrian, although he does serve as Joan’s editor. He also takes care of the children and keeps the house while Joan spends eight hours a day in “his” office banging away on a typewriter.
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Over the years, as accolades pile up for Joe’s brilliant work, self-effacing Joan learns to anticipate Joe’s needs even before he’s aware he has them. She is elegant and graceful, and she always says and does the right thing, allowing extremely narcissistic and needy Joe to pretend he’s the genius in the family. Then Joe wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, and they travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. Joan must carry on her role as loyal, supportive wife, even though the praise for Joe’s brilliant work rightfully belongs to her. Watching the subtle twists of mouth and momentary fiery glances from Close makes it hard to tear your eyes away from her when folks are lavishing praise on Joe.

Christian Slater plays a journalist who sniffs out the truth that Joan denies because it would destroy Joe’s unearned reputation and jeopardize his (her!) prize. Close's real-life daughter, Annie Starke, plays Young Joan in flashbacks.

Regarding Pryce’s character, Joe Castleman—I kept thinking, “How would it be to be a serial plagiarist? To take credit for somebody else’s work, to accept praise for something you didn’t do?” Even though Joan’s secret role as the actual writer in the family would be hard for me to play, at least she gets to do the work in the first place, whereas vain, egotistical Joe…can’t. He is a hack that Joan spends her life propping up. Plus he’s a big baby about everything. I would have walked out on him, but Joan is a far better, far more patient person than I.  She endures Joe for the sake of her art. Like thousands of people, Joan has decided, “For the sake of this, all the rest.”

If you are a writer who has given up a great deal for your art, you may see yourself in Joan. If you have ever been in a relationship where you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your partner, you may see yourself in Joan. If you want to see an Oscar-worthy performance with nuance in every glance and twist of the mouth, Glenn Close as Joan is worthy of your time.

The film first showed in Toronto, and Benjamin Lee of The Guardian did a dandy interview with Close, which includes an interesting insight into her (arguably) most famous role, Forrest in Fatal Attraction: “That character had a lot of secrets, but there’s no way for the audience to know what her past was. It’s only hinted at when she looks at him giving the bunny to his daughter and then throws up in the bushes...a psychiatrist said if she was molested at an early age, and what she was made to do made her gag and throw up, then that’s her trigger. Someone who’s been abused like that has absolutely no self."

The Wife got an 84 percent  approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I thought most of the tomato reviewers were too hard on the movie. Maybe I just appreciated it more because I write, so I get it. Roger Ebert reviews the film here, but it's best to see the film for yourself.  Close was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance, and we'll find out on February 24 whether she takes the Oscar home.

My Grandma Bessie had twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Grandma’s oldest was born nine years before the Crash of 1929; the youngest was born a year before the United States entered World War Two. So, most of Grandma’s children—my dad’s brothers and sisters—were home for most of the Great Depression (1929-1939).

Grandma’s husband refused to accept help of any kind from the government, including food for his children—a well-meaning neighbor once brought over government surplus food because he knew my dad and his siblings were hungry, but Grandpa made the man take the food back.

So, Grandma had to find a way to feed and clothe herself and her husband and all their kids. Grandma raised chickens, grew vegetables, and made dresses for the girls out of flour sacks. The family was so poor my father was not allowed to play outside in the winter because he did not have snow boots--he didn’t even have shoes.

The five-room house that this 13-person family lived in had two bedrooms upstairs. All five girls slept in one bed in the smaller 8X8 bedroom and all six boys slept in two beds in the (slightly) larger adjoining bedroom. Grandma and Grandpa slept in a tiny room off the living room. All day long, Marshall worked the farm while Bessie cooked, washed, cared for children, and made meals out of raw air and hope. They had an outhouse but no bathroom.

Then, one day, Grandma got a strange request from a neighbor.

The neighbor was wealthy. She had nice dishes and nice furniture. She kept a tablecloth on her table. She dressed smartly. But she was poor in one respect: she had no children. This wealthy woman took a shine to four-year-old Betty who had blonde curls, blue eyes and a big smile, just like Shirley Temple. The wealthy woman’s request of my grandma was this: “You have all these children and I have none. Won’t you let me have Betty? She will want for nothing.”

Before I tell you what Grandma said, let me ask…what would you do? Would you think about the easier life your little girl would have if she lived in a wealthy home, especially considering the hard times that Betty and her family were enduring in 1938? Would you take pity on this childless woman and gift her with a small part of your bounty so the rich woman could know the love of a parent for a child—so she could feel down to her toes the bond that changes your very soul and makes you a better person?

Would you consider how your other children would benefit once Betty was gone and there was more food and more flour sacks to go around? Would you say to yourself, “Giving her away would be better than making her suffer along with the rest of us”?

My Grandma knew her Bible inside and out. She knew the story of Solomon, the wise king of Israel, who in I Kings 3:16-28 was asked to decide a difficult case:

     Two harlots lived in the same house, and each bore a son. One child died, so the mother of the dead
     baby stole the living child and replaced it with her dead one. The second mother recognized
      immediately that the dead baby in her arms was not hers. The women came before Solomon so he
      would decide which of them had the right to the child. Solomon asked for a sword and offered to
      cut the baby in two and give each woman half. The thief-mom said, “That’s fair,” but the baby’s real
     mother said, “No! She can have him,” whereupon Solomon gave the baby to the mother who was
      willing to give him up rather than allow anybody to harm a hair on his head. 

Does this story illustrate that a parent should be willing to give up a child out of love so the child can have a better life as some insist? As my Grandma’s wealthy neighbor insinuated?

No. The story of Solomon's wisdom illustrates that a parent’s love for a child supersedes time, space, borders, governments, prison camps, and for-profit corporations. It shows that a parent who loves a child and a child who loves a parent never stop grieving when they lose one another. They never forget. According to psychiatrist James Gordon, founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in a 22 June 2018 piece ("How the Stress of Family Separation May Permanently Damage Migrant Children") in Rolling Stone, "Having been deprived of people who love you and take care of you, that's something that's there and it doesn't really go away."

My Grandma refused her wealthy neighbor’s request, and she kept her Betty away from this woman from that day forward. For my Grandma, and nowadays for other poor parents who love their children, to give up your child voluntarily is unthinkable, but to have your child stolen is unimaginable.

I guess Grandma knew that. I guess that’s why she refused to give up her child, even though that meant Betty would grow up eating corn mush at a crowded table with her family rather than growing up eating whipped cream with a silver spoon from a crystal dish and wondering how her brothers and sisters were doing.

Wondering when her mother was going to come and get her and bring her home.  

My friend and I went to see Book Club yesterday because of the cast: Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, and Mary Steenburgen, veteran actors all. We figured no matter how silly the premise (Fifty Shades of Grey changes their lives—really?), these actors would elevate the material. If either of us had read Fifty Shades, we might have appreciated the movie more, but….

Sure, we laughed. How could we not with Diane Keaton doing a riff on her endearing Annie Hall shtick and Candice Bergen’s expressive eyes telegraphing her true feelings while her beautiful face maintains its composure?  The other two leads didn’t have much to work with. Jane Fonda's powerhouse talent, in particular, was not needed to play this character, who is pretty much a Barbie with brains. Mary Steenburgen’s character is so fired up by Fifty Shades that she slips Viagra into her husband’s beer. My friend and I were so horrified that a wife would drug her own husband without his knowledge or consent that we were yanked completely out of the story. Just because a woman turns the tables doesn’t make drugging a person OK, and it especially doesn’t make it funny despite (because of?) the husband's unnatural tumescence.

Craig T. Nelson plays Steenburgen’s husband. He dug in deep to play a recently retired man trying to figure out who he is. Andy Garcia, Keaton’s love interest, played a pilot rightfully charmed by her. Don Johnson played a gent with whom I'd certainly take a long walk on a beach. The male characters in this movie, generally speaking, are appealing human beings. The settings are California gorgeous, and everybody in this movie has plenty of money.  

Unfortunately, the screenwriters (Erin Simms and Bill Holderman) laboriously place ridiculous obstacles in front of our heroines’ slog to romantic fulfillment: obstructive daughters who treat Keaton like she’s about to go into a nursing home (I whispered to my friend, “If my kid treated me like that, I’d tell him to take a hike”); Fonda’s unwillingness to accept true love lest it break her comfy routine of sex-without-strings (and her subsequent weep fest after she rejects her lover?—puh-lease!); Bergen’s slacking off on her job as a federal judge because she’s busy with a dating app (really?); Steenburgen’s increasingly (and embarrassingly) desperate attempts to get her husband “in the mood.”

What bothered us most of all was the screenwriters’ basic premise that no woman of any age is complete without a man. Once the characters started reading Fifty Shades of Grey, even their decades-long friendship orbits the book like sad little satellites unable to escape its gravity. They seem not to be interested in anything else in their lives—not being a judge, running a hotel, maintaining a healthy marriage, adjusting to a death. Naturally, in this world, events in the wider world do not exist.

Worse, the screenwriters suggest that the characters shouldn’t have cared about any of those things in the first place because sex is Ground Zero, The Be All And End All Of life, Where It’s At, apparently the message of Fifty Shades of Grey as well. OK, OK—I’m here because of sex, and so are you, and so is my son, but is that all there is? Gotta say no.

My friend and I decided this movie is like a fancy dessert that's delightful to try, but it’s not something you want to eat every day. Please pass the meat and potatoes.

A local venue in my town holds a once-a-month adult storytelling event in its art gallery/meeting space. Each storytelling session asks grownups to tell stories on a theme: October’s theme will be Halloween/scary stories; I suppose  November’s will be stories on a theme of Being Thankful (or maybe overeating); December is likely to feature holiday stories (although that could be overeating too).

September being the month when kindergarten through college students go back to school, last night’s theme was “school/learning/teachers.” Four featured storytellers performed.  At an open mic session after they spoke, attendees were invited to tell their own stories. As a former  teacher, I had a lot of stories, but my ingrained inclination is to let the “kids” go first, so by the time five impromptu storytellers spoke, the evening was over. I did not tell my story last night, but it’s on my mind, so here goes:

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a teacher. When my cousins and siblings played “school,” I stood at the front of the class and gave them assignments. I portrayed a teacher in a high school play. As a high school senior, I worked as a teacher’s assistant in the junior high. The teacher turned over her class of seventh-graders to me to teach for eight weeks. It seems astonishing now that a teen-ager would have been given that much autonomy, yet Laura Ingalls Wilder taught in a one-room schoolhouse from age 15 to age 17,  so it’s not like the right person can’t teach, regardless of his or her age. I taught Greek mythology to my class of seventh-graders, and they loved it. They loved me. My mentor said, “You are a born teacher.”

But I saw how my mom, a history teacher, barely got her shoes toed off every day after school before collapsing on the couch for an hour-long nap before she made supper. She graded papers late into the evening after we went to bed. I did not want to live perpetually exhausted and a slave to my job.

So when I graduated from college, I did not graduate as a certified teacher. I headed off to New York City with a hundred dollars in my wallet and a fuzzy plan to make a big splash doing something in journalism or publishing, or maybe acting. I lived in the East Village. I went to museums. Auditioned. Wrote. Made friends. Spent my first Christmases away from home.

And yet, even though I loved living there, I skated on the surface of New York life because, deep in my heart, I knew this magnificent city was not where I was supposed to be. When I looked out my bedroom window at brick and mortar rather than at trees and grass, I knew I belonged in a greener place. I knew I needed to set down roots where my roots could grow. But I didn’t know where that might be.  

One day, I flew down the steps of my apartment building on Fourteenth Street on my way to work, but when I got to the front door, a drunk was passed out across the threshold. I knocked on the inside of the door. I pounded. I yelled. He didn’t move.

I clicked the latch open and shoved. Finally, the drunk moved enough so my messenger bag and I could slip out. I strode toward the subway, late for work—and then I stopped, thinking, How can you leave a human being passed out and helpless? I ran back.

The man was still passed out. His clothes were filthy. His white hair was a mess. He stank. He had one of those noses severe alcoholics acquire over time, spongy and red and huge—think W.C Fields. I said, “Excuse me—can I get you some help? Do you want me to call somebody? Where do you live? Hello?”

He opened the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, the same shade as the blue morpho butterfly but even more intense. He moved lips like two purple slugs. Drool spilled down his chin. He opened his mouth and said, “Brrbcckkkkgg.”

Loud and slow, I said,“ Do you want me to call an ambulance? The police?”

Comprehension glimmered in those astonishing eyes. He said, “Gbblllsshzh. Bzzuh.”

He was so drunk he couldn’t talk. When he laid back down, I shrugged and went to work.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and my thoughts ultimately jelled around one idea: Blue Eyes had once been somebody’s baby. He’d been somebody’s little boy. He’d sat in somebody’s classroom. Hadn’t anybody cared about him? Hadn’t anybody made him feel he deserved better than ending up passed out in a doorway? Hadn’t anybody made him feel like he mattered?

And how many other blue- or green- or brown-eyed children in the world didn’t feel like they mattered? Could I help any of them? How?

People toss around the word “epiphany,” but as sure and bright as the sun coming from behind a cloud, I knew what I could do for these somewhere, someday kids I hadn't met yet: I could be their teacher.

I returned to the Midwest to earn a certificate to teach and got a job as an English teacher. Like my mom, I worked after-hours at my kitchen table: I filled big boxes with papers and dragged them home in a Radio Flyer, working literally one year at home for every five I spent in the classroom (yes, I did the math). And yet, despite all those years with students, I wasn’t certain I’d made the difference I’d hoped to make when I started.

That changed one day when I ran into a former student in the grocery store, a girl I’d had in class at the beginning of my career. When “Tiffany” saw me, she gave me a big hug. We chatted: she was the mother of two young adults; she liked her job; she and her husband got along. Then she said, “You know, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“At the grocery store?” I joked.

“No. When I took your stagecraft class, I wanted to kill myself.”

I sobered. “Wh-what?”

“I was planning to check out my freshman year,” she said.

A thick silence dropped around us.  The other shoppers faded. She continued, “I’d had it with everything. I didn’t want to be here any more. And then I walked into your class. You gave me jobs that I had no idea how to do and expected me to try them. If I screwed up, you helped me. You praised me. You made me feel like I could do stuff. Like I belonged.”

I said, “You did belong. You were my kid.”

“I know. Everybody was your kid. But the thing is, I didn’t want to check out after I met you. When you showed me I mattered to you, I started to matter to myself.”

My throat was so tight, I couldn’t talk. So I hugged her. As I drove home, I thought, Even if Tiffany is the only one, it was all worth it.

Educator and anthropologist Loren Eiseley (about whom pal Ray Bradbury said, "[His] work changed my life") tells the story of a kid who tosses beached starfish back into the ocean. The story has gone round and round educational circles to a point that it’s become something of an eye-roller. Stop me if you've heard this one:

Bottom line: teachers, you make a difference, even if you don’t see it, even if you’re exhausted and overworked and underpaid and never run into one of your grown-up former students in a grocery store.

You matter. Never forget it.