Different Slants

When the senior doctor (and the fourth person) finally had the opportunity to read my x-ray results and came in to discuss things with me, he informed me that I had two broken ribs.  He seemed incredulous, having heard from the earlier doctors how much pain I was experiencing, and no sleep, and then he asked me, with that exasperated tone people reserve especially for idiots, 

“Why did you wait a week to come to the hospital?  You might have had a punctured lung, or worse.” 

I thought to myself about how much work I still had remaining to do, those last three days I had to empty out my store.  I had deliberately left the hardest task for last, because I didn’t want to do it at all.  Disassembling a ten foot wide, eight foot tall rack, that only used ten square feet of floor space but held, incredibly, four thousand copies of Life Magazine from the Sixties.  I was proud of how well I’d used the limited storage space, and how durable the rack was, but never dreamed that one day I’d have to remove it.    

But to make that storage capability possible, I used two inch thick shelves, many steel brackets and a bracing buttress to keep the whole wall of Lifes from falling on the steel shelving two feet away from it.  It was very hard to build and, even if I felt fine, it still would have been very strenuous to take apart.  But I didn’t feel anywhere near “fine” and it took me two hours to salvage all that wood, instead of about thirty minutes.  I ended up drenched and exhausted. 

I thought about the thousands of pounds of lumber I had to load into trucks those last days, aided by several people who volunteered to help me do what I couldn’t do alone.  One of them, interestingly, was the president of my synagogue, evidently a hands-on guy, Mike Rosen, who spent long hours sliding the twelve to sixteen foot long shelves into the truck while I did my best to stack and sort them for unloading while staying inside of the truck. This was the morning after the accident.  It hurt to stand and it hurt to breathe.  But I had so much hard work to do.

I was still unaware of my broken ribs, but Mike could see how much difficulty I was having carrying the long planks to the truck, so he suggested that he do that part while I sort the planks by size, and not have to lift so much.  I looked at the guy, an executive who travels the world for a national company, and whom I assumed lifted nothing heavier than a laptop and a cup of coffee while flying over the continent.  He was only a bit younger than I was, so I told him my concern was that he might have a heart attack from the sudden increase in work, and I wasn’t kidding.  People do what they do, and I didn’t want someone to die while helping me. 

He told me not to worry about him, that he works out in a gym on a regular basis and besides, he rightly pointed out, while matter-of-factly looking on either side of him and then facing me in the truck, 

“Who else do you have to help you?  I don’t see anybody else, Bob, so…let’s get this job done.”

 I felt chagrined that had I underestimated him and what he was capable of doing, as if he didn’t already know his own limitations.  The job was grueling, took hours to do and he kept at it until we had moved every piece. 

Then I turned to the exasperated and obviously impatient doctor and said, simply, 

“Doc, I didn’t have the time.” 

He shrugged his shoulders at such an idiotic (to him) attitude, and then he explained to me what I could do about the terrible chest pain.  But I wasn’t listening.  Hearing my own illogical words made me drift off and think about how things really were , that I was no self-sacrificing hero, that I was…normal. 

I thought about small business people everywhere who worked under terrible conditions, uninsured, in pain and unpaid, just to keep their doors open another month, another week, another day.  I thought that it must be very hard for both employees and professionals alike to understand the why of it.  That I’m not so special. 

There were tens of millions of people just like me, everywhere, spread across my fractured country.  

The battered casualties from a manipulated economy. 

People who want to control their own fates, no matter how much it costs them, in time, money and sometimes, blood.  A sense of driving our own destinies and not being subjected to someone else’s arbitrary whims–that was what fueled us, day after day. 

I thought, we are tough people, men and women, in all the ways a person can be tough.  That we will rise again, millions and millions of us, from the wreckage of our businesses: 

Welders, small repair shops, carpenters, artists, writers, mechanics, farmers, medical clinics, churches, temples, child care people, gardeners, printers, beauty shops, tailors, collectible stores, craft shops, quilters, designers and uncountable innovators…who hire people and make this country not only survive, but grow stronger, because of their unbreakable faith in themselves, even if nobody else ever understands what compels them to stubbornly be that way. 

The powerful desire to be independent will drive a man to keep on, relentlessly, when many others will fall away, seeing only the risk of tomorrow and nothing long term.  I am just one of those millions, and I couldn’t live my life any other way.  I will start over, and I will succeed. 

And mister, don’t you dare to doubt me. 

Our country will recover.  We are stronger than any recession. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

I snapped out from my indignant reverie, probably only seconds of real time, and refocused on the annoyed doctor droning on, and who was writing a prescription for some new kind of powerful pain killer.  I took the script, thanked him, got dressed and walked out of that place. 

Then I filled the prescription of which I was unaware had this side effect, sometimes, which caused me to have powerful paranoid hallucinations for the next two nights.  Terrified, I threw out the rest of the pills and, resigned to my situation, laid on my back every night for the next six weeks, waiting for my body to heal itself.  Betsy, the beagle also waited, patiently, to snuggle up to me again.  The long nights crawled by. 

Eventually, by mid-October, I was fine.  I decided to avoid ladders…but, just for a while.