Reading: Keri Hulme, The Bone People

Moving: walked 2.7 mile

Watching: sogginess

Listening: Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (tape 4)

10 April 2001: Ulna

Today is Tuesday, 10 April. You'd think I might have noticed Yet Another Calendar Mesh last week, because Patrick Sonnier was executed on Thursday, 5 April. The year that happened was 1984. On Tuesday, 10 April 1984, while riding my bike around Old Lyme, I fell and broke my right ulna. That is the reason my first journal entries ever, written later that month, feature such poor penmanship. Tonight I am going to call my mother and report that I am okay. I mean, if I am, I'll tell her that.

I doubt I still have the Purina freebie calendar that was the medium of the first record I wanted to keep, to remember 4-ever. I had ungainly crushes on a senior boy and a junior boy and for a while I noted in the one-inch-square boxes of the calendar grid any interaction I had managed to finagle with them. I do still have the notebook whose end pages I appropriated for my first complete sentences of a journaling nature.

So I broke my arm. I skidded in sand and fell to the left and broke my fall with my right. I was near Ferry Road, not far from PGN, so I remounted my bike and pedaled thither one-handed. I was a mess of sand and tears and rent clothing, and I walked, head high, into the stacks to ask the page (there were two, of whom I was the other) to unbutton the gauntlet of my shirt so I could wash my hands and get the sand out of my skin. She asked no questions and did so. As I washed up in the little office at its combination mini-fridge and sink, the various librarians and volunteers came in to check on me. One suggested I should call my mother, because that fist-sized lump growing on my arm just above my wrist probably indicated I had a broken arm. This I was reluctant to do.

But I did.

She got off work immediately--I don't remember which ogre she worked for at the time but not one that prevented her from leaving when her fifteen-year-old daughter had broken her arm--and brought me first to her GP in Saybrook, who didn't even have an X-ray apparatus but confirmed that yep, I was busted, and thence to Middlesex in Middletown, twenty miles away.

You would think that such a hospital would specialize in transgender counseling and surgery, but no.

The orthopedist on call in the ER I immediately loved, Dr. Sweet. White-haired (both on his scalp and the tip of his nose) and venerable, his bedside manner put me at ease. I remember little of my time in the ER. I do remember that a mother brought in an eighteen-month-old girl with a broken leg that had gone untreated all day--the mother said it happened in the morning, maybe, and here it was late in the afternoon--and my mother and I got very quiet as we leapt to judgmental conclusions. I remember that receiving the local anesthetic hurt worse than anything else I have ever felt, before or after, and that my mother cried watching me sob and contort, and watching her cry made it worse. I remember not quite being able to believe the doctor's assurance that for my arm to have been set without the local would have hurt worse.

We were done and gone before sunset: we stopped at school for all my books, in case I couldn't make it to school the next day, and I saw some classmates still there after tennis. Within two weeks I had had surgery to set pins through my thumb and elbow, to hold the broken bits of the bone apart so that my Smith fracture could knit, and a new cast that no one signed, as everyone had signed the first one--this enthusiasm thrilled me--and the thrill had worn off (for everyone else if not for me). So I wore a dingier and dingier cast for the next six weeks, blank except for the sketch of the fracture Dr. Sweet inscribed and two notices I asked my librarian friends to write. The first question I wanted to be able to answer was how ("I fell off my bike") and the second one, a few weeks later, was how much longer ("Sometime in June"). As I stamped books and their cards with due dates and patrons' card numbers, when newbies would ask how or regulars ask how much longer, I would raise my plastered, bent right arm to their eye level so they could read for themselves.

I remember nothing about the surgery, of course. I remember wondering how long I could fight the general anesthesia (I think I counted from 100 down to 94 or probably 96). I remember, clearly, worriedly, that waking from the anesthesia I was crying. When a nurse realized I was waking, she said, "I'll go get your mother," who was waiting immediately outside, but I protested no, no, no, I don't want her to see me like this. The nurse assured me that people respond differently and some people laugh and others cry and it means nothing at all; but I have always taken it to mean that, deep down, and as much as I try to mask it with flippancy and aggressive extroversion and an outrageous laugh, that I am, deep down, subconsciously, when all is said and done, a deeply depressed/-ing person.

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Speaking of which, I'm having trouble sleeping. I haven't had since grad school. RDC would scoff at this symptom, because he is amazed at how quickly I fall asleep. I do continue to fall asleep easily, but lately when I wake up at 3 or 4 I cannot get back to sleep. I am used to being disturbed when RDC gets up at night to pee, and when I've drunk enough water sometimes I need to get up in the night too. Lately I've been waking up on my own, not prompted by my bladder, and stayed that way.

Last night I was reading The Haunting of Hill House in bed. Bright, eh? This weekend, perhaps prematurely, I swapped the storm windows for screens. The butterfly bush in the northeast corner of the house is in its spring growth spurt, and now its longer branches scrape not glass quietly but screen skritchily. And RDC is in Toronto or Boston. Sunday night I slept happily in moonglow; last night was cloudy and reading Shirley Jackson isn't conducive to leaving shades open anyway. Jackson, skritchy branches, alone. Oh, and did I mention that when I came upstairs at 9:00 after watching "The Sopranos," Blake freaked out in the kitchen, generally not a scary place, but whose wide window is uncovered. (Note to self: blinds for kitchen and sunroom are priority before summer.) I turned on the outside light and saw nothing but the blossoming nectarine tree dozing in the breeze. I put my buddy to bed, put myself to bed with my book, fell asleep in about 40 pages, and woke at 4:00 after my usual--and this is another thing--bad dreams.

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Blake likes the kitchen. It's the only windowsill he's allowed these days. I was about to write "he's allowed anymore," an upstate New York regionalism I picked up from Richard Russo and noticed again in William Kennedy's Albany book. Isn't "anymore" used only after a negative clause? We don't live in the castle anymore. (I have Shirley Jackson on the brain.) I'd say that's correct if not formal English. It implies we once lived in the castle but do so no longer. Whereas the regionalism I've read goes something like this: Anymore, we don't live in the castle; or We live in the castle anymore. The latter sounds like the castle is named for a raven. Using it after a positive clause sounds wrong to me, like a valid regionalism that only sounds right in that area: the lawn needs cut, the laundry needs wash. Ooo, the laundry needs wash anymore.

Anyway, Blake likes the kitchen. He likes the windowsill, whose tile is easily cleaned; he likes the cupboards where he can go spelunking; he likes the pantry where his seedballs are kept, except on those dire occasions when I lean into that pantry not for a seedball but for a broom, which are the Wands of Death in his puny little mind. So for him to freak in the kitchen, to get all tall and watchful and tensed to flutter away, was scary.

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I wear contacts maybe three or four days a week. I try for MWF and glasses TRSS. Yesterday I didn't walk to work because I was so tired, but Trey (formerly Isosceles, formerly TDT) was so busy we didn't do weights, and then I didn't Nordic Track when I got home. Today, therefore, I walked. Today being Tuesday, I wore glasses. When I got outside I realized it was beginning to rain, a misty rain. I debated, then told myself it would be a good lesson and way for me to appreciate what I have (which is contacts sometimes) and walked out.

Just as annoying as ever.

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When I got home from work, three of my seeds had sprouted! Two plum tomatoes and one cherry. Seven days, just as the packages said. I sang to them. My little babies.

When I talked to my mother she suggested using Miracle-Gro and I said no, I am trying to remain organic. When I think of the white sneezy powder she used to dump on her tomato plants, I wonder what I ingested. Oh, but I didn't like tomatoes when I was a kid. Good.