We will not have to wear a dead person’s teeth; Comforted by my drugs, I fell asleep
The snow muffles everything. The putter of neighbors’ snow blowers clearing driveways, the scrape of plows, the crunch of cars creeping cautiously south on Lake Avenue, toward downtown. My seat on the bus gives me a high vantage point from where I watch my neighbors struggle from beneath the previous night’s snowfall. A few cars are stuck in the piles created by the passing blades of the city trucks, particularly at the end of residential streets at Lake Avenue. People who live on the streets, and people in other cars, lend a shoulder and shove them on their way. The cedar trees in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, and the stone saints with their upraised arms, are draped in robes of snow. A man leans on his shovel at the end of his driveway, looking pooped, while holding his black-and-white spaniel on a red leash. Closer to downtown, small groups on break huddle outside the doors of the Eastman-Kodak offices, indulging in their minor vice, cigarettes.
The bus fills unusually slowly on the ride downtown. First there are three of us, then four, five… eight, nine… No one is going out unless they have to get to work. None of my fellow passengers comments on the snow outside. This is Rochester. These big snowfalls happen three, four times a year. We know it’s out there. You deal with it.
This is my first day back at work after three days of being flattened by a serious cold. I couldn’t do anything. Nothing got done, nothing got created. I couldn’t read because my eyes were blurry, I couldn’t write because thoughts wouldn’t stay in my head from one end of a sentence to the other. I listened to the radio a lot. The non-commercial stations. This morning, before I left the house, my friend Rick was on WRUR, filling in for my friend Scott. That’s right, I have two friends. Today would have been Johnny Cash’s 78th birthday, and Rick was playing three hours of mostly Cash, or other musicians playing Cash songs. It was terrific. The last three days have been nothing, except for terrific music on the non-commercial stations. That’s one cool thing about this city.
So after three days of doing nothing else, and before I was to finally return to work, I stepped outside this morning and shoveled the front steps, and then began on the driveway. I cleared about two rows of snow, about 18 inches deep, before I quit. It was a lot of snow, but last week I could have cleared it all away in an hour, with just a break or two. But today, I had no strength left. No energy. I’m a big, healthy guy, but something I couldn’t even see had taken that away. I thought about all of the old people, and the sick people, who were just like this, except they will never get better. Something they couldn’t even see – time or disease – had taken it away from them. I left the house dressed in black, in honor of Cash’s birthday, hoping that my neighbor Pat would get to my driveway this evening with his snowblower.
Something else I learned from the last three days: maybe you already knew this. There’s nothing on TV. It’s not baseball season yet, and I don’t know how to use the DVD player. I watched the Food Channel, mostly. Tyler Florence made some incredible-looking beef tacos. Then Thursday morning, I tuned in C-Span for Obama’s health care summit. I watched the entire thing. All seven hours. It was a different political debate, invigorating. I eagerly looked forward to the post-summit analysis on MSNBC, which was supposed to start at 9 p.m.
The Winter Olympics were running a little late, so I caught the Canadian women’s hockey team receiving its gold medals after having defeated the United States. It was very sweet. I read later that the Canadian women went back on the ice afterward and smoked cigars, drank champagne and tried to drive the Zamboni machine. Now that’s an Olympic event I would have watched. Some Olympic officials sniffed that the party wasn’t very respectful of the Olympics, but what did they expect the team to do? They’re hockey players, they had just won a gold medal.
MSNBC’s health summit wrapup arrived, and to my dismay the virtually insufferable Chris Matthews was hosting the program. The first bit of video that he offered was of Senator John McCain prattling on about “People are angry. We promised them change in Washington.” McCain was apparently unaware that having a bunch of legislators sitting in a room, in front of TV cameras, being forced by the President to actually tell the American people where they stood on issues, is in itself a breakthough. Obama brushed McCain aside as you would a fly with the comment, “Let me just make this point, John, because we’re not campaigning anymore. The election is over.” It was funny, but hardly one of the significant exchanges of the day, in my judgment.
If you didn’t know it before, it should have become clear by Thursday afternoon: The Republicans want to kill health care reform. They don’t care that 30 million Americans are without health care. Pundits like Matthews predicted the summit would be political theater and, oblivious to what actually happened, they continued that story line afterward. The Democrats, probably knowing bipartisanship will never happen, were nevertheless the adults in the room, trying to mend fences, offering substance. I sensed that Obama was trying very hard to steer the debate toward facts, make something positive happen. He was irritable when the conversation devolved into politics and procedure, quick to challenge what he felt were incorrect statements, and encouraging when real ideas were exchanged. He would have considered any glimmer of hope as a positive move. The Republicans responded with tangents and lies.
I thought about that this morning, as I watched my neighbors struggle out of their houses. The Republican leadership is like this snow storm. It makes life difficult. We must deal with it. Shovel it out of the way. Put a shoulder to the task. We know people in need are out there. Thirty million of them who need health care, or health care that will actually work. We must deal with them. Among many compelling anecdotes of Americans in need of health care was this oddity told at the summit by our Congresswoman, Louis Slaughter:
I have a constituent that you won’t believe, and I know you won’t, but her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit. Do you believe that in America that’s where we would be?
Is this really happening in America? Yes, every hour, every day.
In his very fair summation of the evening, Obama recapped the positions he thought the two parties shared, and the differences. And he pointed us to the future: Health care reform will happen. We will not have to wear a dead person’s teeth. Comforted by my drugs, I fell asleep.