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Posts Tagged ‘New York’

The Land of How Many Lakes?

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 17, 2024| 2 Comments »

Along with a travel-size tube of lavender lotion, I crafted an eternity pearl necklace for her. Bob and I ordered tennis balls for her temporary/travel walker. Dr Jim arranged for a Fajitas and Margaritas lunch cruise on Lake Minnetonka and his friends threw her a celebratory brunch complete with her favorite coconut cake for dessert.

My big sister Kay turned 90!

We couldn’t have picked better weather for our visit to Minnesota. Dr Jim is the last connection our family has to the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and we all flew in like migratory birds last week from TN and NY. After Kay’s last fall, the one that broke her shoulder outside her Upper East Side apartment, she wanted to see her little brother ‘one last time’ and so we set up a Fall sibling reunion goal. We also thought we’d ‘help’ Dr Jim downsize into a pied-a-terre in the town of Excelsior.

But like most construction plans, his actual move-in date was delayed; birthdays however, arrive despite our best objections. Our Daughter-in-Love, Aunt Kiki, will turn thirty something this week. Ah, to be thirty again… The Bride received a blue Kitchen Aid stand mixer with a pasta attachment for her big day and mine will be the last of the September birthdays, a footnote to a momentous year.

According to my Native American horoscope, our September natal days come under the “Duck Fly Moon.” I’ve always called us Christmas Party babies, but maybe Autumnal Equinox sounds better? The Flapper introduced me to a book, “The Medicine Wheel,” about Native spirituality years ago. She was beginning her search for meaning, studying psychology and Buddhism. She spent her final years surrounded by sculptures of Buddha on the shore of Lake Minnetonka. With her two sons nearby, we would write letters to each other wondering about the state of the world.

This was the last time I routinely actually wrote letters!

First the Love Bug, followed by four more female Fall birthdays – 12 to 90 years old. We saw a family of wild turkeys crossing Dr Jim’s road. I glimpsed a white egret swoop into the trees behind his house. At least I think it was an egret, maybe it was a swan? We all saw loons floating on the lake. I remembered the whooping cranes flying south last month over Nashville after I read Margaret Renkl’s brilliant essay about blue jays and change. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/opinion/hope-social-problems-justice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LU4.kgtX.2sZHo4nF3YuS&smid=url-share

My sister Kay is an artist. Her beautiful paintings are hanging all over the country, including right here in my snug. She was a single mom and a lipstick feminist back in the 50s and 60s, a glamorous stewardess for National Airlines. At her interview she was never weighed or measured, simply hired on the spot! National’s base was in Florida, but she flew around the world a few times! I loved visiting her Manhattan apartment as a teenager, right up the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. We’d have lunch at the Madison Deli and she’d correct my country-bumpkin table manners at Lutece for dinner.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s can’t compare to her lifestyle then, and now she still walks with some help to Central Park nearly every day.. Kay taught me so much about life and love. As soon as I landed back home, I cleaned out the bird bath and replaced the small solar fountain. The cardinals and robins are getting used to the moving water, even guarding it at times. Our temperatures will be rising back into the 90s this week and I know our cardinal family will be sticking around, but we’ll be flying off again in a few weeks to France.

Happy Birthday Kay!

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EMTALA

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , on January 9, 2024| 5 Comments »

Happy New Year to you! We’ve been getting off to a good start this year. There are no resolutions to feel guilty about – “I am enough” may be my next best mantra. The Bride and Groom have returned unscathed and refreshed from a trip to New Zealand and Australia with the Grands. And the Rocker and Aunt Cait returned from the East Coast, totally missing that rogue wave in Cali. And if you’re wondering what book is on my 2024 nightstand, it’s a nonfictional look back at the Golden Age of abortion.

I’m not talking about the 60s. I’m currently reading “MADAME RESTELL: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist,” by Jennifer Wright. Madame Restell, who lived and worked in the mid-1800s, would advertise her services in all the New York newspapers. She had learned to compound a pill to regulate the menses with a mixture of essential oils and paint thinner. And if that didn’t work, for $100 she could terminate the pregnancy with a whalebone. Surprisingly, her patients lived! But male doctors at the time, who were still using leeches, were threatened by her success and fame.

Madame Restell was not a surgeon, in fact she wasn’t even French. She was an immigrant, a widowed mother from Britain who didn’t want to go into service for a wealthy family (and thereby have to give or sell her child away) or become a prostitute, often the only two choices of the day for women alone. She was an entrepreneur who wasn’t afraid to flaunt her wealth with a carriage decked out in the finest livery. The moral crusaders of the day found such arrogance and lack of shame intolerable. And so Restell found herself in court often, even serving a year in Blackwell Island’s notorious prison.

Ah, the good old days of a medical procedure that is as old as the oldest profession. And since SCOTUS overturned Roe, physicians in some cases are having to reevaluate their care of pregnant women. In other words, The Bride, who is practicing Emergency Medicine in a red state, may have to choose between saving a woman’s life and being exposed to liability, including criminal charges and loss of license. How could that be true? Enter “EMTALA;” a federal law that was passed in 1986 and is the bedrock for Emergency Medicine physicians everywhere. Surely this law would save my daughter from criminal prosecution?

EMTALA is short for the “Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.” Think about it, most doctors in their offices require insurance or payment up front before your appointment; this law requires ER doctors to treat everyone and anyone who walks through their doors – or rides through on a stretcher – regardless of their ability to pay. Ever since the Bride was a young girl, EMTALA has been the law of the land, just like Roe v Wade. ER docs are quick thinking, fast acting specialists who are not willing to wait for a team of lawyers or administrators to decide if a patient is worth saving because she happens to be pregnant!

SCOTUS is scheduled to rule on this “contradiction” in April… I refuse to hold my breath. Texas has already taken the lead in banning emergency abortions, so sorry, if you find yourself carrying an ectopic pregnancy in TX. Your state has sentenced you to a death penalty already if something should go wrong.

“In the early years of Madame Restell’s business, abortion was classed only as a misdemeanor if performed before quickening, around 20 weeks. Over time, the punishments grew, along with the risks. Madame Restell advertised not just her services but her belief in their necessity. Lifting passages from the social reformer Robert Dale Owen, she likened abortion and contraception to a lightning rod — an invention that was “unnatural,” perhaps, but sensible and lifesaving. She published letters from grateful clients, who proclaimed, “God bless you dear madam, you have taken off the primal curse denounced upon Mother Eve in Eden.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/books/review/madame-restell-by-jennifer-wright.html

Lightening rod indeed, from the 19th to the 21st Century and women are still left dying by the hands of red legislators. Today, a third of our country, religious zealots for the most part, because of certain SCOTUS selections, may get their way. It’s not enough for them to ban abortions and outlaw morning after pills as if it were the early 20th Century, now the GOP wants to prosecute the physicians. It’s not just the Ob-Gyns, it’s the ER doctors who are being asked to violate their Hippocratic Oath, and EMTALA.

Here is a throwback to the 80s with my little Bride in her Daddy’s ER.

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Love Hurts

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on July 25, 2023| 2 Comments »

Good Morning! The rain has stopped and brought us clean air (really, much cleaner air), sunshine and low humidity. So far, the “heat dome” hasn’t hit Nashville, let’s knock on wood. Also my glamorous, big sister, Kay, has flown into town from New York City. I’ve figured out that as we age our bodies don’t regulate temperature quite so well; as the globe heats up, we ‘senior’ humans are cooling down. So Kay is perfectly happy sitting on our shady, front porch in 80+ weather waving at all the neighbors passing by – young couples with a baby stroller and a dog or two, our friends Kristi and Jay, and an older woman with a cane and an outrageously big sun hat.

Kay is an artist and a southerner-in-training. She attended the Art Students’ League in NYC and had a side hustle drawing meticulous medical illustrations for Mt Sinai Medical School. She is one of the reasons I never even tried painting. Even her clothes are artistically curated. She’s not exactly Iris Apfel, but at 88 she will still turn a head on the street. https://www.advanced.style/

So of course, we had to take a trip to the Frist Art Museum this past weekend. “Storied Strings: the Guitar in American Art” was the main exhibition and we borrowed a wheelchair to make everything easier. Don’t forget, Kay is only six months post-op on her second hip fracture. She uses a cane for mobility, and/or a rollator for stability when she’s outside. We enjoyed looking at each painting and reading the accompanying descriptions. Women historically were not taught to play the guitar, but artists always loved painting the female form; so lush paintings of women posing with the instrument were common.

If you were to walk into any room in our house, you’d encounter one of Kay’s drawings, paintings or needlepoint pillows: a beautiful watercolor of our Rumson home with two Corgis in the yard; a pen and ink portrait of the Flapper; a still life of flowers in a Delft pitcher. Almost every soft surface in our house is adorned with a gorgeous Kay needlepoint. I have fond memories of the Bride learning to look at life through an artist’s lens in Aunt Kay’s apartment. I remember roaming around the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a girl with my big sister; it was just a few blocks walk down Fifth Avenue.

After the “Storied Strings” exhibit, we strolled through an installation about Beatrix Potter at the Frist. Potter was born into a wealthy English family, but because she was a girl in Victorian England her future was limited. Writing stories came naturally and roaming around the Lake District, today we might say “forest bathing,” lead to her career of illustrating and writing children’s books. She called herself a “country mouse” living in the city. Eventually she became interested in fungi, drawing some of the most tiny, intricate mushrooms known at the time…

I feel like a country mouse living in this southern city with my city mouse sister. We walk across the street to swim in the mornings; we drive to Thistle Farms like ladies who lunch; we Zoom with my big and her little brother Dr Jim. Last night I made a salad from summer squash, whole wheat orzo, lemon and feta cheese with fresh herbs. Only the rabbits had eaten all my dill, so we had to improvise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/grilled-chicken-zucchini-orzo-salad/

We’ve also been enjoying Bad Sisters on Apple TV. So when we walked into Thistle Farms gift shop, a safe place for abused and trafficked women that sells tee shirts proclaiming “LOVE HEALS,” I was only slightly surprised when Kay asked if they had a shirt that said “LOVE HURTS.” They didn’t. I explained to the young salesgirl that my big sister was visiting from New York City.

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