Mother's Bunion

I wondered if maybe I should end my whole blog with me on Simon’s roof with the daisies. Now I am in Perth, Ontario. The clouds in the sky seem close to the ground. My mother is waiting to get her bunion chopped off her left foot. I am not certain that chopping is the right word.  If it were my foot, I would not get it done, though if you’ve seen my feet, you might conclude that I am not the best judge of feet. As she prepared for having a foot cast, my mother was even more hyperactive and erratic than usual. One minute she is boiling the corn for dinner and before I know it she is out in the garden, planting a periwinkle.

This morning after I finished yoga, there was wild rice boiling on the stove and my mother was throwing in a load of laundry. Moments later she is up in her bedroom doing yoga. My parents aren’t together, but they both do yoga. If I was their teacher, I would tell them both to soften their breaths. Their exhales sound heavy and strained, as though they have grief around their hearts. Probably they do have grief around their hearts. Who doesn’t.

My mother turns on the French radio to help accentuate her yoga practice. I can still hear her heavy exhale. I walk past her bedroom. Now yoga is over, but the radio still plays. In the bathroom, my mother is frantically brushing her teeth. It is exactly the sound of enamel wearing down. My mother walks out of the bathroom. She is dressed in jeans and a t. shirt. Her socks are white with hot pink toes and heels. She folds forward in one more yoga pose and lets out one more grief-filled exhale.  

Pre-surgery, my mother is forbidden to drink coffee. She feels this is entirely unmanageable. We agree that half an inch is okay. I consume several inches. These days I wake up to a black wall. Coffee is the only way forwards.  

Other things on my mother’s list: plant a peony, run the dogs, don’t burn the rice.

She takes the dogs out for a run behind Perth’s Nursing home near a place called The Garden for the Blind. There the flowers are supposed to smell particularly good. As you pass by certain areas, a voice talks to you about plants. I stay at home and eat granola. Despite my several inches of coffee, I still leave the rice on for too long. It sticks to the pot and smells a bit burnt.

There is no time for the peony. Guiding the two dogs on leashes, I walk my mother halfway to the hospital. Her bunion doesn’t make her limp, but she says it’s impossible to buy shoes.

“This’ll just be an experiment on how I deal with pain.” I am curious to see how the morphine goes.

At noon I drive down to the hospital. To save on parking, I try to find a space on the street I grew up on. Mary Street. My grandmother’s name is also Mary. The only spot is between two cars. I have always been terrible at parallel parking and so instead I drive around some more. I end up parking in front of the funeral home beside my old high school.  

The surgeries are backed up. Two different knees need scoping. Plus the surgeon will have to have lunch at some point. I love how the O.R. is labelled “Operating Theatre.” Very reassuring. Outside a man is sitting and flipping around on his I-pad. The surgeon comes out to show him a picture of his wife’s esophagus. I guess she choked on a fish bone.  The fishbone wasn’t there anymore but it left a little scar. Where is the fishbone now?

I ask the surgeon with the esophagus photo if I could go see my mother. He says he will ask the nurses.

“It’s the nurses who run the show,” says the man with the I-pad. He’s a retired doctor.

“I love doctors,” I tell him. “And nurses. I used to want to be a nurse, but my fine motor skills are not that good.”

“Really?” he asks. He sounds surprised, as though I look like I radiate intricate agility. But I don't. When I lived with the Boatman sometimes, somehow, I would get peanut butter on the walls. Left over from breakfast or washing dishes or who knows. Back when I used to consider becoming a nurse, we used to joke about me being in the operating room. “Who got the peanut butter on the heart?” the Boatman would say.

“But I used to be quite good at bowel routines,” I tell the retired doctor. This is true. I was excellent.

I can hear my mother’s voice from behind the double doors.

“Can I just talk to my daughter?” she asks, almost shouting. I open the double doors. My mother is wearing a blue hospital gown and puffy blue hat. In permanent marker, someone has drawn an arrow pointing to her left foot. That’s a good idea. Remembering your left and right is tricky.

At this point the bunion will probably not be chopped off until three or four p.m.  I receive orders to go home, and turn the air conditioner on for the dog.

“You know how to do that, right?” asks my mother. My mother looks a little bit like Jane Fonda. Tiny, blonde, feisty. She is chatting with all the other patients who are for their turn in the theatre. She’s the only one who’s upright.

“It’s a party in here,” she says. I tell her I know how to turn on the air conditioning, and that the hats are very nice. On my way out, I see a woman with a walker. Her spine is curved permanently forward, so that she stands in an upside down L shape. When I get home, I eat a small handful of burnt crunchy wild rice.

At 3:30 p.m., the chopping is all done. I ring the buzzer to the operating suite. The doors click before they open, both at once. It feels a bit like the Wizard of Oz. For a brief moment, it occurs to me that they might have messed up, and my mother will meet me with only one foot. Well, I have friends with less that two feet. Everything turned out fine. My mother looks fine, but her eyes are a bit puffy.  Her foot is vaguely wrapped in what looks like a white version of one of those fluffy blue hats.

"Hi," says my mother, and hops into the wheelchair.
 "Bye Leslie," she calls out to the nurse. 
"It's Wendy," says the nurse. "You'll have fun tonight."
"Wendy," says my mother. "Hahaha."

We go to the drugstore to get Tylenol threes. My mother is enamoured with all of the vitamins. Centrum for Women 50+ is on sale. She puts a box in her lap. Then she asks me to wheel her around the shelf where there are laxatives, and birthday cards. I take my blood pressure. It is within the optimal range.  The drugs are ready, and we wheel to the car. I put the free parking token into the wrong slot. Instead of forking over the four dollars, my mother recommends I return to the pharmacist for another token.

"Four dollars is half a bottle of wine," she says. Apparently, wine is cheap in Perth Ontario. 

"Way to go," says the pharmacist when I ask for another token. As I fumble with the slots, my mother and I laugh and laugh.

I turn onto Drummond Street. My mother raves about the general anaesthetic. Despite her disdain for excessive alcohol and all things marijuana, it seems she is a fan of medically induced comas. 

"Oh Erica, it's beautiful," she says. "If that's what death is like, I'm all set."


The End.

Now my mother is in bed. With her foot elevated, she chats relentlessly on the phone. The small black dog is curled up in her nook beside the fire place. The big white dog is sprawled across the bathroom floor, next to the toilet.

Small Black Dog





Large White Dog

 

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I Let Go, by Erica J. Schmidt

 Me on Simon's Roof with Daisies

Locks and Keys
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two



Rideshare, Sterilization and Doughnuts

I once knew a guy named Benjamin Tracey. In his early 20’s, Benjamin Tracey worked with kids in social services. He felt traumatized by the epidemic of people who used their bodies to make children but didn’t have the skills or resources or kindness to take care of them.

“We need a program to stop cruel and incompetent people from having children. If they agree to get sterilized, they get 35 bucks. Then, after the procedure, we’ll take them to Tim Horton’s and we’ll buy them a doughnut. Any doughnut they want.” According to Benjamin Tracey, this is how eugenics should work in Canada. With doughnuts.  

Doughnuts. Which one would you choose
Doughnut Photo Courtesy of my friend Shayna
She likes to buy doughnuts on Sundays 

The rideshare van from Toronto to Montreal always stops at a Tim Hortons just past Pickering. I don’t know why it stops so early. It is barely an hour out of the city.

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to get a spot in the ten a.m. ride share van. The  pick-up is at the Pizza Pizza near Sheppard-Young subway station. The van is late. A woman wearing pink jeans and a red jacket seems very anxious that they have left without her.

 

“Where is my ride-share? Can I use your phone?” She is carrying a couple of shopping bags. Underneath her red jacket, she wears a t. shirt with an enormous, glittery can on it.  The cat has terrifying turquoise glitter eyes and fur. Its paw is patterned in red sequins. The woman’s name is Irena.

 

I volunteer to sit in the middle seat, at least for the first half.

 

“Where’s the seatbelt?” I ask. The driver points to the ceiling. I attach the belt across my torso but can’t figure out how to make it hold my waist.

 

“Guess that’s just the middle seatbelt,” says the guy beside me. He is dressed all in blue and looks as though his name might be Michael. On his knee, there’s a brown baseball cap with the word OBEY on the front. Finally, I figure out that you can keep pull seatbelt in a very specific and special way, it will attach on the left and contain my waist. Now I don’t need to white knuckle the whole 401. That said, my driver seems to text quite a bit. It is kind of like driving in India, though because Ontario is much less magical and spiritual, I feel significantly less safe.

 

I open the ziplock bag containing the marijuana macaroon that a childhood friend has given me for the road. For a moment, I wonder if it has an obviously foul smell to it. Then I realize that in fact, the smell comes from the tiny white dog who silently sleeps in its fabric blue cage in the back seat. The owner is significantly larger than her dog, but she too makes no noise.

 

The macaroon is oily. Its effect is not profound. I lean back in my seat. The left half is two inches back from the right. The blue Michael dude curls up on his blue pillow against the window. Irena rotates her torso to the right, impeding on a quarter of my ass space. She breathes heavily as she looks out the window, sipping a Merit Selection peach cocktail that contains 20% pure fruit juices. We pass several trucks filled with concrete.

 

Pickering reminds me of swim meets and Timbits remind me of Monday night band practices. I played the trombone and our music teacher Mr Hurd was nice enough to bribe us with timbits Sometimes we would get timbits on the swim team, but if an important swim meet was coming up, all chocolate and doughnut products were forbidden. Apparently doughnuts take at least three days to digest. Seems a bit risky.

 

At the Tim Hortons, I think about Benjamin Tracey and the sterilization and the doughnuts. I do not buy a timbit. Neither does Irena. She cracks open another peach cocktail juice box and stands beside the drive-through menu, gazing at the red and orange images of fresh fruit smoothies. I nibble a little more of the oily macaroon. I thought that being high would be more fun. Maybe I am too hungover. The dog owner walks the tiny white dog around the parking lot. Blue Michael smokes a cigarette with the driver and complains that he can’t sleep. The driver complains that he’s sick of driving.

Back in the car, Blue Michael gets to work on his computer. Vigorously, he types green letters onto a black screen. On the right side of the screen, windows keep popping up. Janet has a party, the window announces. Janet looks like a 2-dimensional human Barbie. There is a long red rectangular box where you can click, Yes, I am attending, or No thanks. Another window pops up. Angela will be at a golf club cocktail. Will you attend. Won’t you attend.

Although we are barely halfway, we stop again at the Freshmart convenience store and Esso gas station in Kingston. I pee several times, each time taking note that if the washroom cleanliness does not live up to my standards, I will be rewarded with a free container of air freshener. Love from Esso. Our driver leaves to pick up the other driver at the mechanic’s. The white dog is still in the car and his owner seems a bit disappointed. Blue Michael sits on the edge of the curb, his ass crack ever so generously peaking out from his blue jeans. Nobody seems to worry that the driver could very easily keep the dog and the stuff and leave us stranded at the Kingston Esso station. Irena asks to use my phone a whole bunch of times. She calls her son but there is no answer. Afterwards she offers me white chiclets from Israel. I mix them with my Excel Whitening Bubblegum.  






Chiclets, courtesy of redstone foods.





The new driver finally comes back with the car. I remember him from the time I went to Toronto to visit Benjamin Tracey four years ago. His name is Johnny and he wears a hat.

 

“Please make sure you have your seatbelts on,” he tells us. He only texts once or twice. Nobody volunteers to switch with me and take the middle seat.  There is construction on the 401 so we drive along the St. Lawrence. In the front seat, an Indian business man examines his Excel spreadsheets. He has the loudest, most obnoxious ring tone ever and people call him all the time. Irena eats a bag of chips. She offers me some but my mouth is still full of bubble gum and chiclets.

 

I look at the Thousand Islands and turn on Dan Savage’s sex podcast. Dan offers cures for Cunninlingus Lockjaw and says that continuing to sleep with your ex-husband is not a terrible idea.  Having an ex-husband sounds so grown-up. The Boatman and I were never married, and so we never got to have a divorce. I close my eyes and imagine the cells of my knees and my thighs dissolving into the crooked lumpy seat. My neck feels very stiff. I keep thinking about my cells. Soon I feel a pressure building at the base of my nose between my eyebrows. I wonder if I have suddenly become so aware and intuitive that my third eye is awakening. It then occurs to me that the pressure is from my enormous white sunglasses.

 

Irena nudges me and asks if she can use my phone again. I help Irena text her son and tell him that we will be in Montreal at 3:45. She is impressed by how fast I can text.

Valleyfield, Saint-Anne De Bellevue. The van rolls in to Montreal at 4:04. Irena’s son is waiting for her. The small white dog is let out of its blue cage and onto Sainte Catherine Street. All over Montreal, delighted people carry baguettes, eat frozen yogurt and drink beer on patios. There are no doughnuts in sight.

 The End.

This is not fiction. Benjamin Tracey really invented sterilization with doughnuts. I take zero credit for it, though I changed Benjamin Tracey's real name and I think that I did an excellent job.

Once Benjamin Tracey also wrote a play about a tennis game. The backhands and the lobbing and the missed serves reflected some couple’s relationship. Simon used to say that I was like an eight-year old sore loser tennis who cried when she didn’t get her way. Simon isn't alive anymore. 

Very Attractive Photo of Me and My Sister.
You'd be extra lucky to land us in your rideshare van.

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I Let Go

Vipassana Diaries: Bus
Poopy Mango Babywipes, and the First Day of Christmas (almost contains nudity)
Day Trip
Selfies on the Happy Stairs (contains doughnuts)
Selfies with Brownies (self-evident)