Things Are Looking Up

Today, a miracle happened: I woke up in our new flat, stepped into the living room, the guest bedroom, and the study, and did not see a SINGLE cardboard box. Then I walked into the kitchen and saw . . . approximately 89 mostly flattened cartons jammed into the space between the wall and the refrigerator. 

So now you know how I spent my weekend.

But wait (I hear you thinking), how did we get from Patrick’s near-death experience to packing cartons?

In brief: On Sunday, January 27, Patrick had emergency surgery for an aortic dissection in Paris. He spent 38 days in the hospital, 15 of them in intensive care, and 11 of those on a respirator. What can I say? It was sheer hell. On March 5, he was transferred to a rehab facility near our house. That’s where he is now.

Meanwhile, we moved to a new flat.

Not to whine, but I haven’t had a lot of time to write blog posts. Now that we are more or less settled, and P is on the mend, all that is going to change. And when P comes home, which could be next week, I am going to not only write blog posts, but also finish editing David Rich’s revised edition of Myths of the Tribe, edit one or two other books, spray the corners of our new flat with a product called Bang, redo the shower to prevent falls, resume water aerobics, comb my hair more often, reglue several wooden chairs, and cook nourishing meals in our new kitchen.

The kitchen isn’t really a kitchen yet, but it does have a two-burner hotplate and a microwave, which is more than our kitchen in Arusha had.

Meanwhile, I have spoken with a Mr. Tyminsky about bathroom showers and kitchen stoves, and I have even been to a kitchen and bathroom store with my friend Mary, who knows way more about renovating a domicile than I do.

Henny Plunkett, from the Crossroads choral group, is coming to take the cardboard boxes this afternoon because she is moving back to England.

Spring is coming, the magnolias are blooming, and things are looking up.

Love, Sadie
PS: Tom drew the little elephant in the photo, many years ago, and made the frame out of a piece of cardboard from a Tanzanian brewery (Ndovu) and bits of pasta. Patricia Tobaldo, the Argentinean painter mentioned in Our House in Arusha, painted the big elephant and friends.

How to Ignore an Annoying Hospital Patient

If you, dear reader, should ever land in a French hospital, there is something you should know: The French health-care system, though one of the best in the world, is stretched very thin in places. One of those places is hospital staffing. So while you would undoubtedly be better off in a Parisian hospital than in, say, Bangladesh, you still might not get a bedpan when you need one. You might lie in bed, for hours, wondering if the frigging doctors and nurses even care whether you’re dead or alive.

One day I arrived at Chambre 44 to learn that my husband, who is very observant (he was a spy during the Cold War), had made a study of the ways in which French hospital personnel deal with this staffing shortage. The etiquette of ignoring a bedridden patient in France goes something like this:

Method No. 1: Avert your eyes. If you must pass by the open door of a patient who wants your attention (a patient who is not actually dying), keep your eyes focused firmly on your notepad or, if your notepad isn’t handy, your shoes. Walk quickly and purposefully, eyes down, until you are safely past the open door.

Method No. 2: If you can’t escape an encounter with a needy patient, explain that you have an even more urgent matter to attend to and promise to return in 10 minutes. Then go about your business and return when you can. Remember, time is meaningless to a hospital patient.

Method No. 3: Explain to the hospitalized person, in your sternest voice, that he is not your only patient. There are other patients who also have urgent needs. He must wait his turn.

Method No. 4: Be nice. Let him think that you are his friend, the only nice person in the entire unit. Do not tell him that you are only being nice because you have rented a vacation villa in Martinique for two weeks, you leave tomorrow, and you are hoping he will be gone by the time you get back.

This is why, after being the wife of a hospital patient for four weeks, I finally blew my stack.

I did not blow my stack at the nurses. I could see they were doing their best and that, were I in their position, the patient might not survive. I mean, it would be him or me. If I were the last nurse in the universe, and I were in charge of that hospital unit, anyone who couldn’t fire me would go straight to hell. That would be my approach to the situation. Starting with my husband’s horrible roommate, who shouted into his cell phone at 1 a.m., smoked e-cigarettes, and stuck blobs of chewing gum under the bedside table for the nurses to remove.

No, no, I blew my stack at one of the doctors. Not the nice one who brought Patrick a beat-up old wheelchair so he could escape his room for a few minutes, but the mean, nasty one who insisted that I leave the room when she came through with her tribe on their medical rounds.

“But I came to hear your report about my husband’s condition,” I explained, in my best French, which is pretty awful but not completely unintelligible.

“Madame, visiting hours begin at one.” The time was a little past noon.

“But I am here now.”

“You must leave.”

I turned to the patient. “Darling, do you want me to leave?” Patrick shook his head.

I turned back to the evil doctor. “He wants me to stay.”

“Madame Texier.” There followed more talk, in a very stern voice, about hospital regulations regarding visiting hours.

Well, I just refused to back down. As the argument continued, the five people trailing the mean doctor stared into space with their eyes unfocused, looking rather frightened. Finally, Patrick literally writhed, turning onto his side as if he were going to jump out of bed and try to escape, and cried, “Darling, it’s useless! It’s useless to try to talk to these people!”

Whereupon I left.

Later that day, I got an apology from the nice doctor on behalf of her colleague, and a much-needed change in the medical plan. The next day, the patient got his first shower in weeks. He perked up.

Right now, this minute, I have to start packing up the kitchen, and I don’t actually have time to finish this post. Let’s just say that I had another meltdown later that day, and then things started to get better. More to come . . .

Love, Sadie

PS The photograph shows an American Red Cross Hospital in Paris, I'm guessing World War I. No time to write a proper caption or credit or even figure out what the hell it is. The one Patrick's in is more modern.

Just in Case Your Aorta Cracks While You Are Living in France

Valerie trimming her father's beard in Marseille, a couple of years ago.

Let us hope that you never hear the words “aortic dissection” (“dissection de l’aorte”) spoken by anyone in the medical profession, but if you do, you should know that a crack in the aorta is a life-threatening condition; it must be addressed immediately if not sooner. The first thing to do, if you’re in France, is to call SAMU (pronounced “Samoo”) the French equivalent of 911. The French medical system will take it from there.

This is what Patrick did on January 25. I was in Vermont. The nurse who answered the phone when I called the hospital the next day reported that his condition was  “extremement grave.” Meaning “Look, lady, I don’t know where you are but you need to get here now.”

I was on a plane to France the next day.

I arrived to find my husband unconscious and hooked up to an astonishing number of machines. Beeps and blips and blinking lights and screens and tubes everywhere, and in the middle of it all, a puffy, funny-colored individual that I understood to be my husband.

Don’t ask me what the surgeons did to him; it is too complicated to explain. It involved lots of prosthetic bits and pieces, many arteries, several vital organs, and an incision that stretches across the patient’s entire abdomen and wraps around his side. It took seven hours. Closing the incision required some 200 staples. As Patrick himself said, many days later, “They almost cut me in two.”

The recovery unit’s chief honcho called the surgery miraculous. All of the doctors I spoke with seemed very impressed with themselves. I tried to show my appreciation, but it wasn’t easy. The patient himself, when he started to revive, did not seem the least bit appreciative. He seemed to be in agony.

Patrick was in the ICU for 19 days. He was then transferred to the cardiovascular surgery unit, where he has been for the past two weeks. Today he will be transferred again, to the nephrology unit. He has been lying on his back for almost 5 weeks, and his back is killing him. He is skin and bones. I do believe I could pick him up and carry him out of the hospital if I wanted to, and the irrational part of me (which is a rather large part of me at this point), would really like to do that. The irrational part of me would just like to wrap my arms around his frail little body and bring him home.  

Eventually, when the hospital is finished tinkering with him, he will go to a rehab center. I hope it is close to home. The daily round-trip to the hospital takes three hours, minimum. I keep thinking I’ll use the time to write, but instead I just stare out the window or fall asleep.

Two days ago a kind doctor rustled up an old wheelchair and Patrick was able to leave his hospital room without being on his back for the first time in 30 days. I wheeled him to the cafeteria where he ordered a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bottle of San Pelligrino. The next day I wheeled him to the hospital beauty salon for a haircut and a shave.

Do not try to call him. If you want to follow his progress, email me or check back here. I am in the middle of moving us to a new flat, surrounded by packing boxes, but I will do my best to keep you posted.

Love, Sadie

How a French Barge Cruise Is Like an African Safari

Let's just skip the part where I apologize for not blogging for the past two years, okay? Let's pretend I've been on a barge in Burgundy this whole time, far from a WiFi signal, because it's almost true.

In April, I took my first all-expenses-paid "fam" trip in over 20 years. On the last one, in 1996, I went to Tanzania, met a French safari guide, and married him. This is the danger of fam trips. They are either so wonderful or so horrible that in either case, you tend to lose your mind. In my case, it was wonderful, and the Frenchman and I are living happily ever after.

"Fam," as I'm sure you know from having read my book, stands for "familiarization." The people being fammed are often journalists, like me. Familiarized, that is, with the travel products that the sponsors of the trip want to sell. Luxury hotels, barge cruises, stuff like that.

Barges in Burgundy navigate on canals that were built 200 years ago—before WiFi, before railroads, before the telephone. The French were still using carrier pigeons to deliver the mail. I swear to God. In 1966, an Englishman got the bright idea of taking commercial barges, which nobody was using anymore, turning them into hotels, and floating them on various waterways in France. Today there are 75 hotel barges cruising European waterways.

With me on the barge trip was the French safari guide, now retired but still my husband and still French—the only Frenchman, as it happens, ever to have been a guest on the Savoir Vivre in Captain Richard Megret's memory. And Richard has been captaining the Savoir Vivre for something like 20 years. So either he has a really bad memory, or he was just kidding, or Patrick is a very exceptional Frenchman. I tend to think the latter.

This barge cruise lasted exactly one week, and the whole time, Patrick and I kept looking at each other and going, "This is so much like a safari."

1. The captain was adorable and laid-back and funny and a little bit weird, the kind of guy who makes you fall in love with him, or want to adopt him, or want to be him.

2. The French hostess and the British tour guide were beautiful and intelligent.

3. The Burgundy countryside was like something out of a movie. Example: a medieval castle on a hill with sheep grazing in the foreground.

You see where this is going, right? Replace the captain with Patrick, the barge with a Land Cruiser,  the sheep with impalas, the beautiful and intelligent hostess/tour guide with me, and voila: an African safari! But that's not all.

4. There were only eight guests on the entire boat. Something magical happens when your group is between six and eight. I can't explain it. A group of that size becomes like a family. I know that's a cliché but it's true, right down to the one family member who annoys you. Add to that the bonding experience of traveling through a foreign land, and it's no wonder that people exchange email addresses and get all teary when they say good-bye at the end.

5. Things happened that I cannot explain. I don't mean to get all woo-woo, but life has been different since those seven days, six nights on the Savoir Vivre. Better, somehow. Not because the cuisine was haute and the napkins looked like they'd been folded by somebody who went to napkin-folding school and graduated summa cum laude. And not because the countryside was beautiful, although that certainly helped. It's something about being with your husband, whom you met once upon a time in the Serengeti, and he's an old man now, chatting away in the wheelhouse with the young French captain, and the two of them are giggling and you have no idea what they're giggling about, some private joke. And suddenly you are deeply grateful for this day, this moment, this reminder that life isn't only work and toil and that there are lovely people in the world, yes, indeed, and some of them are right here on this barge, folding napkins, chatting with your husband, and doing everything they can think of to make sure you get a good feeling whenever you remember this day.

Still to come: A Vermonter in Burgundy; Sadie Does the Cotswolds; and more . . .

Further reading:
What a Barge Cruise Is, and Why Some Prefer It to a River Cruise (WendyPerrin.com)
European Barge Cruises That Are Anything but Boring (WSJ, September 6, 2019)
All about the Savoir Vivre from the Barge Lady Cruises website
Our House in Arusha (Kindle; $2.99)

Sometimes the Gates of Heaven Open

This quilt was made by my grandmother, Mabel Lamb Tucker.

If you have been following my posts on Facebook, you know that this past week I . . . 
   (1) Registered with the Editorial Freelancers Association in an effort to drum up some business now that my Year of Leisure is almost over, and . . . 
   (2) Posted about the Japanese art of sashiko stitching and a Gees Bend quilt made from polyester leisure suits.
   So perhaps you will understand when I tell you that I almost jumped out of my skin when the Editorial Freelancers Association sent me an email this morning about a quilt magazine that needs a copy editor to work remotely. I raced off a reply. The one I sent was more restrained than the one I wanted to send. Here's the letter I composed in my head before deciding to tone it down: 

Dear Quiltfolk,
Sometimes the gates of Heaven open and the universe answers our prayers. I would love, love, love to edit your magazine. Quilting is my new obsession—I would pay you to hire me if that made any sense at all. It is almost unbelievable that fate has brought us together—and yet it makes perfect sense! Okay, so you must be wondering who I am. First off, I come from generations of talented quilters. Amazing quilters. My grandmother, Mabel Lamb Tucker, made gorgeous quilts, which I slept under as a young girl, so quilting is in my blood. Furthermore, I am an honest-to-God copy editor. I have copyedited literally thousands of articles. Some of them were even about quilting because—ta dah!—I worked for Martha Stewart! God’s truth. Also, I see from your Web site that you are particularly interested in the stories behind the quilts. Me, too! In Vermont, my home state (land of many quilts!), I am known as the Story Lady. So you have to hire me. Please, pretty please, pretty pretty pretty please. Call so we can discuss!
Love and hugs,
xxxxxooooo
Sadie (aka Sara Tucker, author of An Irruption of Owls, a personal memoir in which quilts are mentioned SEVERAL TIMES!!!!)
P.S. Write back and I will send you photographs of my amazing collection of vintage French textiles.

Thank You, Alix Spiegel

One of the unsung heroes in An Irruption of Owls is a reporter by the name of Alix Spiegel. Alix was the author of a 2009 NPR report that helped solve a medical mystery in our family. The report, which was aired as a segment of "All Things Considered," was entitled "How a Bone Disease Grew to Fit the Prescription."
   My mother, Idora Tucker, was 86 and still skiing when she began taking Fosamax, on the advice of her new primary-care physician, who did not do a bone-density test. This was in 2005, several years after Fosamax, originally prescribed to people with osteoporosis, was approved for preventive care.
   Eighteen months later, my mother experienced crippling pain in both legs. It took eight months of hassling medical professionals for her to learn that she had stress fractures in both femurs. Nobody could explain why.
   By December 2009, when I heard Alix's report while driving along a Vermont highway, my mother had been trying for almost three years to understand what had gone wrong with her legs. The fractures had healed, but the episode had left her permanently impaired.
   An Irruption of Owls, which I wrote with my bare hands, was published in 2015 and I am embarrassed to say that I never thanked Alix for effectively solving the mystery that is the crux of that story.
   So thank you, Alix Spiegel, for using your investigative and story-telling talents to enlighten us about important matters concerning women's health. I'm sorry it took me so long.
   My mother's illness upended her life, and mine, and that of my very patient and obliging husband. Idora Tucker was a doctor's wife and very careful about her health. She did not accept her doctors' theories about what might have caused her bones to break, and she refused to take the narcotic painkiller that one of them prescribed. She was determined, as she said, "to get to the bottom of things." She wanted to know the truth.
   Today Alix Spiegel cohosts Invisibilia, an NPR program about the invisible forces that control human behavior—ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and emotions. I am her devoted fan.
   PS You can now download An Irruption of Owls for free from Smashwords. The book, which contains a chapter about my grandparents' run-in with McCarthyism, is my contribution to the resistance. I've also posted an adaptation of the chapter about my mother's illness on my brand-new website, here.
Above: An artifact of my father's medical practice, given to him by a drug salesman.

Les Baux-de-Provence: A Memoir

Les Baux-de-Provence, the childhood home of my mother-in-law, Mireille Davis Texier.

When my mother-in-law died in November 2016, she left behind a hand-written account of her childhood in Les Baux, the village that was her home from 1924 until the early 1940s. For the past two weeks, I have been transcribing her account, which is set down in a series of notebooks numbered 1 through 6.
   Les Baux occupies a rock outcrop above a plain that stretches to the sea. It is a superb setting, and the village is officially designated one of the most beautiful in France. Today, the upper village has only 22 residents—and an estimated 1.5 million visitors per year.
   My mother-in-law also left us a collection of diaries. On December 30, 2009, she wrote:
   “I have reread my memoirs, which are pretty sketchy. Valerie D. is going to help me organize them and make them easier to read. I hesitate to give them to Patrick, who won't be interested, nor Sara. They are too personal and too far removed for American readers.”
    I read this diary entry with a sinking feeling. I felt unbearably sad that I had let my mother-in-law down. Of course, she was incorrect in thinking her life story would be of little interest to others. Besides her children and grandchildren—not to mention myself—there are no doubt many people who would be interested in one of the few first-hand accounts of Les Baux written by someone who lived there before and during World War II.
    I think that when we lose a loved one, it is inevitable to feel regret, and to wish we had expressed our love more often. I wish I had transcribed Mireille's diaries while she was still alive. I wish I had been able to ask her a thousand questions about what she wrote. I wish I had transformed her notebooks into a beautiful printed book, with pictures, one that she would have been proud of. This is the task I have set for myself now.
    I have gotten really good at typing French accents—ç, à, î, é, and so on—on an English-language keyboard. I’ve learned some new vocabulary—the person Mireille refers to as “le Pillard” turns out to have been the village thief. I am learning more about Les Baux, which I have visited only once. It is a fascinating place, and my mother-in-law’s memories of her girlhood there are vivid and specific, a real treasure.