And Your Little Dog Too!

Greetings:

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After Coop d’Etat 2 (Part 2) there was a single comment:


Chip Duggan said...
Ok... all happy go lucky fairy tale comes true. i love it... I really do... but lets here the juicy stuff, disenchant us for a sec. Like, the hard times, I mean the really difficult times... you know the juicy stuff... Then you can go about how luck you two truly are... which by the way is really f@C!%&G lucky. Fairy tales do exist and its not a goal, you just are living it!

your son,

Chip


Can you imagine this? From your own son?! This was like Toto pulling on the Wizard’s curtain. I am the Great and Powerful Baron!!



Now somewhere there must be a burnt witch’s broom in exchange for this presumptuous behavior. Well, we’ll deal with the ‘broom’ later.

Interesting quote in the online New York Times today:

"People who have something really private to say probably shouldn’t do it in a text on their cellphone."
MARC ROTENBERG, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research group based in Washington.

So let it be known that Gini never chased me down the driveway waving a golf club but maybe in the past forty years there may have been three or four times when she might have had the urge. So yes, my son, there have been moments on the dark side. Some of them need to have their garments of embarrassment and shame shed before discussion but there is a chance that some of them may forever remain … private.

I know that because of “…fearing … that I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach” I have forsaken the lecture approach echoing with sentiments of “Don’t you make the same mistake!”. However, the humbling confession in a blog-like posture might be able to yield some perspective on disenchantment.


So here goes…


Charlie, Gini’s dad, was mentioned in the previous posting. Ann, her mom, had passed on several years before Charlie died. She had battled breast cancer for twenty years and finally succumbed. Gini has always been mindful of the genetic message that may have been transmitted to her.

We had only been married a year. The doctor’s report was handed across the desk for our perusal. Underlined in red was ‘malignant carcinoma’. Gini was not to escape. Dr. Henry P. Leis, in medicine’s Who’s Who and chief of breast surgery at New York Medical College, quietly awaited our response.

Gini had made a promise to herself after absorbing her mother’s experience. There would be no mascectomies … no disfigurement. A biopsy would be performed but even should it be malignant then nothing else but a lumpectomy would be done.

The discussion each succeeding night concluded in the same way. There would be nothing done besides the lumpectomy and I was not to exercise my legal right as husband to determine any other course of action upon learning of the biopsy diagnosis while Gini was on the operating table.

We tried black humor amidst the ambience of ‘Love Story’ to try and maintain our epicurean vector.

The morning of the medical procedure came. Gini was taken away. I sat there resolved to respect my wife but wishing I could live with betraying her for my own selfish reasons. Each hour passed, many hours passed, too many of them. I could not betray her. Que sera sera!

It was during these long hours that disenchantment took hold and sunk its claws into our psyche. It still was not easy to shake when Dr. Leis finally came to me in the afternoon and proclaimed, “Your wife is a witch! The incision bled like there was a malignancy but the cysts are benign and were removed.”

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Now let us fast forward to a much awaited opportunity of travel that Gini had provided. It was to be a trip to Mexico that included several days at a spa south of Mexico City overlooking a lake. However, Gini in her determined effort to be responsible and to try to be adult (at this point the garage had not been built), had scheduled an appointment with Ned Gordon, our lawyer. The purpose was to create our Last Will and Testament. We’re gonna do what before leaving? You’ve got to be kidding! And lo the documents appeared and were signed. Airport … ho!

Mexico was wonderful. The spa was amazing. I had not been treated like this since I was a baby and the swaddling clothes were a nice touch. We were aromated, massaged, reflexologized and cuticled until we were mush. It is also the one time when we can claim with recreational delight that the earth moved. We were resting and a mild earthquake rumbled and a rainbow appeared above the lake. Magic!

Our last night was celebrated with a romantic dinner. What was supposed to be a lingering glance suddenly became something else. Gini’s eyes rolled back as she fell to the table and then slumped to the floor. She did not respond to my pleas. She did not move further. Superstitious thoughts of having signed the wills rushed to my mind. Why wouldn’t she respond?

I yelled in Spanish for help and have someone call a doctor. Aid came and we were soon able to determine she was breathing. The doctor came to the conclusion that the circuit breaker labeled ‘Gini’ had flipped off but it was back on now and everything would be fine. Mexico… hmm … maybe some other time.

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Now from the point of view of a child (namely Chip) who knows what our relationship looked like. We will have to continually ask him to develop and refine a perspective. He did witness some rather adult partying and perhaps some hypocritical behavior. Which brings me to that burnt broomstick that I have presumed he has ceremoniously produced.



Perhaps our example was the subliminal rendering of “Surrender Chip”. Hard to say but it would be agreed that the development of the story of ‘The Party’ would prove stressful.

I was drooling over the sausages and peppers I was fryin’ up and getting ready to pop open a Sam Adams when the phone rang: “Dad I’m in trouble…” Every parent knows that these words are to be feared but must be met robustly.

We had purchased a home outside Keene as an enlightened way to avoid dorm costs upon resale. Chip had three roommates. They had a party. Over three hundred people came thanks to cell phones and the internet. The fire department came, The police came. The drug squad came. The media came. Our house was famous on Manchester’s Channel 9. Twenty six pot plants were found in Chip’s closet by the drug squad… two and a half hours before they got a search warrant.



The flying monkeys had landed. This was most disenchanting and family pride seemed vertiginous.

Chip will be clean and sober five years on December 11th. He has become an artist, a carpenter, a lover, a graduate student, a seeker, an outdoorsman, a good son. He can be very enchanting. Somehow he melted the witch with gifts that he always had but previously thought he was without.

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No one is infallible. No one is mistake free. No one has done it all correctly. Some are lucky.

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

Enchante´
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