BALL, FLAG, TREE…

 

Seventy-four years young, in Argentina, I now have to renew my driver’s license yearly. I won’t tell you how many years young my wife Virginia is, but we both end up in the same line at the DMV every year.

Getting your license renewed in Argentina is nothing like getting it renewed in my native US, where, in a lot of states, you can even do it by mail, and where always-on-the-road seniors would consider it age discrimination if they were asked to jump through any more hoops than the average middle-aged driver.

Well, here in Patagonia, as I say, renewal for us older drivers is yearly. And the prerequisites are numerous. First, the car you’re driving to the DMV has to have passed inspection at the Technical Verification Center. The computers there always end up turning up something or other: a poorly regulated handbrake, loose muffler, a millimeter too little tread on a tire, a faulty bushing in the front-end suspension, a stone-pit in the windshield, a less than enthusiastic turn signal…something. And until you go to a mechanic, get the nitpicking thing fixed and go back for re-verification, you can’t renew your license.

Once that’s done, you go to the DMV. There, they very amiably ask you a lot of probing questions about your age and retirement status. Then they take a picture of you, ask if it looks okay to you (let´s face it, at this age, any picture is simply as good as it gets), then they send you to another office where they give you an appointment for a few days or a week hence to take the driving test.

In the meantime, you get sent out on other missions. First, you have to go to a service payments center and pay the license fee. The cashier there also checks to see if you owe any tickets for infractions anywhere else in the country, and if so, you have to pay them before you can renew your license. You have to then take proof of that license fee back to the DMV.From there, you have to go to the offices of the local municipal traffic court. There, they scour computer records to see if you have any outstanding infractions, and again, if you do, you have to pay them. Without the traffic court certificate showing that you’re infraction-free, you can’t renew your license.

That done, you have to go to one of two medical services, tell them you’re renewing your license, and hand them the corresponding form from the DMV. You’ll be asked to wait and then will be called one at a time into a series of consulting rooms, where you’ll need to pass an eye test, a hearing test, a clinical test and a psychological test. If you don’t pass any or all of them, you can’t renew your license. 

Now, after a morning of doing all these things leading up to the medical exam, I don't know how I got out of my psych test without a straitjacket yesterday.  I had been messing around with the mechanic and technical verification for three days when we started the actual DMV process. I told Virginia after we finished with our traffic court adventure that I didn't really  want to do the medical yesterday, since it was already 11:30am and I was pretty sure the medical service closed sometime around noon.

But she insisted. We live more than twelve miles from town, and she figured that, as long as we were in town, we might as well get it all over with in one day, so all we would have pending was the driver’s test.  I had bank business to take care of before the banks closed at one, so I wasn’t very convinced, since I had to go someplace else and collect some money before going to the bank.  

Virginia, meanwhile, went on ahead to the medical service office alone. She called me while I was collecting the money for the bank, and said there were few people at the service, and that she'd already taken a turn for me so I should hurry up. It was after twelve, and, as I say, the bank would be closing at one. I said I had to get to the bank and deposit the cash. She said the medical place would close at 12:45, and I should get over there right away.

Irritated and nervous, I rushed to the medical office. I got there sweating and out of breath and prayed they wouldn't do the clinical first because I figured my blood pressure  would be through the roof. Virginia was in one of the rooms doing one of the exams. As soon as I sat down, the psychologist stepped out of her room and called my name. I was thinking money, bank, closing time, etc. when she said, “Do you have the form?”

“Form, what form?” I thought, and figured it must be something they had given Virginia at the reception desk. “Sorry, doctor,” I said. “My wife got here before me, and she must have it.”

“Who's your wife?”

“Virginia Mel.”

“Stay here, I'll go find her,” and off the psychologist  went.

All of the sudden, Virginia bursts into the room and says, “It's this form!” holding  a paper in front of my face. “The one they gave you at the DMV!” I apologize profusely to the shrink, explain that I'd been confused as to which form they were talking about, while Virginia goes back to the consulting room she'd come from. I say, “I've been running around town taking care of all sorts of nitpicking things all morning and am a little on edge, sorry.”

The psychologist says not to worry about it, just to relax, but I’m so irritated by now that I’ve been buffaloed into doing this today that my hands are shaking. The woman says, “Okay, let's begin. I'm going to give you three words, and I want you to memorize them. I'll ask you to repeat them later. Ball, flag, tree.” I nod. “Repeat them please.

“Ball, flag, tree.”

“Good. All right. What day is it?” Suddenly, I panic, “What the hell day is it??? Think, Dan, think!”

“Wednesday?” I venture. “Yes, I think it's Wednesday.”

“And the date?”

“October...October...hm...30th? No wait, October 31st.”

She nods, says, “Right date, but it's Thursday.”

“Oh okay. Sorry, it's been a busy confusing week.”

She nods dryly, with a deadpan expression, and says, “What are the three words?

Shit! What are the three freakin’ words? Wait, Dan, calm down. Think!

I say, “Ball, flag, and....ball, flag, and, um...”

“All right,” she says, “write a sentence. Any sentence that comes to mind.”

So what do I write? Hoy es miércoles. (Today is Wednesday)! And even as I'm handing it to her, I'm thinking, “No, you imbecile! It's freakin’ JUEVES (Thursday).”

Then, suddenly,  I shout, “Tree!”

“What?”

“The other word, ball, flag, TREE!”

“Oh right, muy bien. Okay now, see these geometrical figures.” I nod. “I want you to draw them freehand as exactly as you can.”

Now, I've never had any clerical ability. Maybe something to do with my more or less secret dyslexia. But it's the part of intelligence tests where I always end up looking like a moron. So, now I start laboriously sketching the two interlocked figures, and the more I mess with them, the worse they get. When I’m finished it looks like the work of a mentally challenged kindergartner.

She looks at it, hesitates, looks at me,  then looks down again and writes something on the form. Then, she looks up again and says, “What were the three words.”

“Tree...flag...um...(BALL, you freakin’ idiot, BALL!), ball.”

She nods. stamps and initials the form and hands it back to me. When I get outside, I’m relieved to see it says “APTO” (Approved). Virginia is relieved as well. “Wow,” she says, “the shrink looked worried when you sent her to find me.”

Nothing to worry about,” I lie. “I passed with flying colors.”

 

A BRAND NEW WORLD

Since last Thursday, I’m living in a brand new world.

Over the course of last year and the year before, I had three surgeries on my left eye. One on the retina, one to remove a cataract the first surgery caused, and a final one, a laser procedure, to improve the results of the first two. 

Suddenly, I had a left eye that could see quite well. At that time, that was a major advancement. But after that eye healed—the cataract operation was more traumatic than normal because of the previous retinal procedure and because the cataract had been in there so long that it had grown tough and hard to remove—the lens prescriptions the surgeon wrote me were less than effective for reading, and for writing on the laptop, which are my principal activities. But when I complained about this, the surgeon gave me another eye test and insisted that, with corrective lenses, I was seeing “one hundred percent in both eyes.”

The guy who turned me on to the nature of the problem was the optician, who is a highly experienced professional. I went to him to see if I could finagle a more powerful mid-range prescription for my computer glasses. He refused, saying, “The problem you’re having isn’t one that can be solved with more augmentation. It’s that your left eye is now almost perfect and your right eye requires a plus-4.75 augmentation. I think that’s causing you to have a problem of focus.”

In other words, it wasn’t that, “with corrective lenses, I was seeing one hundred percent in both eyes,” but rather that, with glasses, I was seeing one hundred percent with each eye. I just wasn’t able to focus when I put the two together.

I took this theory to the surgeon who scratched his chin and said, “Hmmm, yes, maybe. But the prescription I gave you is correct.”

So for a while, more than a year, in fact, I took that to be the new norm. I was just never going to see correctly again. It was what it was and I’d have to live with it. Part of getting older. I should be grateful, I told myself, that my vision was, at least, now close to perfect in one eye.

But, I being me, I decided to go back to the ophthalmologist I’d had prior to the three left-eye operations. She said the eye that had been operated on was doing quite well and that I’d recovered almost twenty-twenty vision in it. Other than a remaining small distortion from a defect in the macula that the retina operation had failed to correct, that eye was seeing as well as it possibly could.  “Actually, she said, for long-distance vision, you see better with no prescription than with the slight augmentation you have in your glasses now for the left eye. As for the other eye, the plus-4.75 prescription I was using was correct, but she wanted to run more tests.

So I had another appointment with a colleague of hers, who moved me around from one machine to another, showing me all sorts of light shows and running a tomography scan. Then, I got sent back to her. “That eye,” she said, “has a pretty major cataract. That, combined with your need for such a high augmentation in that eye, and the fact that the other one has almost perfect vision…well, I’m not surprised you’re having trouble seeing properly. That cataract should be operated on and a lens put in. You can take these results back to your surgeon, or, we can operate here.

“Let’s do it,” I said, “and the sooner the better.”

Within a week, I had an appointment with their surgeon, who was also the head of that ophthalmological institute, which was named after him.

I quickly learned that, besides being a crackerjack eye surgeon, Patricio, the doctor, is also a people person. He’s interested in everyone else’s story, and has a whopper of his own. I knew right away, from his accent in Spanish, that he wasn’t originally from Patagonia or from Buenos Aires. Patagonia is in southern Argentina and his accent was definitely from the north. Tucumán Province, it turns out, a lush, green place known as “the garden of the Republic.”  I later found out that he, like myself, has lived in Patagonia for nearly thirty years, but, fortunately for me, divides his professional practice between the ski resort town near my home, and his own province in the north.

He also picked up on my accent in Spanish and asked where I was from originally.

“The US,” I said.

“I know a bit of the US,” he said. “Where abouts?”

“Ohio.”

“That’s in the north, right?”

“Yes, just below Michigan and between Pennsylvania and Indiana. Borders on the Ohio River in the south and Lake Erie in the north.”

“Which city?”

“Well, I’m not from the city. I’m from a small rural town.”

“Oh? What’s it called?” he asked.

“Wapakoneta.”

“Say again?”

“Wa_pa_ko_ne_ta.”

“A Native American name, of course,” he said more than asked.

“Exactly, I said. “It was the chief council house of the Shawnee Nation, before the whites screwed them over, went back on a reservation deal, and marched them off to Kansas. The tribe is now based in Oklahoma and numbers less than eight thousand today, I think.”

“I’ve been to Oklahoma!” he said. “Tulsa.”

One small step...Neil lands on the moon

“Other than that, Wapakoneta is famous for pretty much only one thing,” I said. “Being the home town of Neil Armstrong, the first…”

“The first man on the moon!” he broke in. “Of course, I know who Neil Armstrong was!”

Turns out eyes aren’t Patricio’s only interest. He is also a knowledgeable aerospace enthusiast and a civil pilot himself. In that regard, he said, “When we have more time, I’ll tell you about how my flying and Tulsa are connected.”

Neil's mom, Viola...I was her paperboy

For right now, however, he was fascinated with every detail I could tell him about Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong and Ohio’s history in aerospace. I told him every anecdote I knew—the Armstrong Museum, the bike Neil rode to deliver papers and save money for flying lessons, the legend about his having a pilot’s license before he could drive a car, his adventures as a test pilot and America’s first civilian astronaut, and so on. I also told him about how Neil had played basketball with my Uncle Don in high school, and how I’d been Neil’s mother’s paperboy, how she’d invite me in on cold winter days to warm up and have some hot chocolate, and how she’d let me hold a scale model of Neil’s X-15 rocket plane, “if I was really careful with it.”

The doctor was spellbound and added stories of his own from his aerospace research. And that led us to talk about the Wright Brothers, my visits to Kitty Hawk when I was in the Army, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, UFO research…

Only when we were finished with that conversation did we talk about my eyes. He patiently explained that when one eye is twenty-twenty, if the augmentation needed in the other eye is anything over plus-3.00, “The brain simply can’t compute it,” he said, “and there’s no way that the eyes are going to function correctly together. The good news is that the retina, macula and eye in general on that side are in great shape. I can operate on that, put a good lens, like a Bausch and Lomb, in there, and you won’t need glasses except to read.”

Patricio scheduled me for the operation just three days later. His assistant gave me a regimen of eye-drop applications for that morning. I began with that early since it’s a long drive to town. My wife, Virginia, drove me and as she did, I kept checking my watch and applying drops as required. 

We arrived more than an hour early. I talked to Patricio’s assistant. She said I should do one more application of one of the eye-drops and three more, one every fifteen minutes, of the other kind. That one was to dilate my pupil. While I was sitting there, my optometrist passed by, said hello, then laughed and said, “Your pupil’s this big,” and she made a circle with her two hands about the size of a saucer. “Good luck!” she said and slipped into her consulting room.

One after another, patients were being called into the operating room. One about every half-hour to forty minutes. While one was being operated on, another was being prepped.

The doctor was running a little late. After three procedures on the other eye, it should have been a walk in the park for me, but I’m always antsy before a medical procedure, and especially anything to do with my eyes. My surgery was supposed to be at ten-thirty, but it was well after eleven when my name was called.

A very nice young woman, masked up and in operating room garb, led me into what was, basically, a one-person, pocket-sized eye clinic. It was modern, bright, immaculate and fully equipped with ultra-modern gadgets. She showed me into a dressing room with a comfortable armchair, invited me to strip to my underwear, and left me with a folded pile of things that included a disposable hospital gown, a hairnet and two similar nets to cover my feet.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to get you,” she said amiably.

When it was time, she led me into a miniature operating room that truly looked like it belonged to an aerospace enthusiast. As soon as the doctor saw me, he said, “Dan! Good to see you! Climb up onto the table and we’ll accommodate you.” As the two women assisting him adjusted my head in a kind of restraint, strapped a blood pressure cuff on my arm and helped him disinfect my face, which I had already washed thoroughly with iodine soap, and place a surgical drape around my eye—there was no IV sedation drip as in my first two operations—he was regaling the two women with all of the Armstrong anecdotes that I’d told him the day before. He also told them about Wapakoneta, about Ohio, and about everything he could remember from our earlier conversation.

As one of the women was dripping local anesthetic into my eye, the doctor said, “So, I told you I was going to tell you how I ended up in Tulsa. What I didn’t tell you is that it was also where I accidentally met up with Obama.”

And from that moment on until the operation was done, Patricio was storytelling nonstop. I kept wondering, “How does this man do it?!” Telling stories, one after another, while handling such a precise operation. The only answer seems to me to be that he’s a genius and an extraordinary eye surgeon.

“So anyway,” he said, “there were three of us flying some Cessnas from the US to Argentina. Tulsa was a logical rest and refueling point. So we land in this small Tulsa airport. I found the security quite lax for pilots…Dan, you’re going to feel a little pressure now, but you shouldn’t feel pain—if you do, let me know…So we go into this room where there were maps and a screen with flight route and weather information. There was this index with details on every airport in the world! Really incredible stuff…A little pressure again now, Dan…So we’re there basically playing. I mean there’s nothing there we really need. It takes a while for us to notice this guy who’s standing by the door, obviously waiting for us to be done. His uniform was razor sharp, and he had close-cropped hair and a carefully trimmed mustache…Look down, Dan. Good…And he just stood there politely waiting his turn. You know who it was? Obama’s pilot!

“We had no idea the president was coming to that airport. Outside now, there was a big military escort and a motorcade maybe two hundred meters long on the tarmac. It seems the US presidency has several planes. This was a small jet, not the huge Air Force One Boeing 747 that most people think of as the president’s plane…Okay, roll your eyes up now…Good…

Obama - presidential plane 

“Seeing us there with our mouths hanging open, Obama took a minute to say hello. The entire contingent was super polite and amiable, and the following morning, when we went back to pick up our planes and move on, you never would have known that the president of the United States had been there the day before. Not one vestige of his passing remained. I’ll never forget it.”

I said, “I don’t think anything would happen like that now. Obama was a very special president.  And with Trump? Well, they’d probably have had the three of you on the ground with your hands behind your heads.”

“There.” Patricio said, removing the drape from my face. “You’re good to go! Sit up on the edge of the table a minute before you get up. Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” I said.

“So, no more glasses for you except to read. It’s probably a little blurry now, but you can tell, right? You can tell how much better you’re seeing, can’t you?”

“Amazing!” I said. “Thank you, Patricio.”

“Don’t mention it. My assistant will take you back to the dressing room now. Great talking to you, Dan!” he said, as if we’d just had coffee together rather than my having had eye surgery.

After I put my clothes back on, I had to go down a narrow corridor past the ceiling-to-floor glass wall of the operating room to get to the entrance. As I passed, the surgeon, who already had another patient on the table, waved and called out, “Chau, Dan! Talk to you tomorrow.”

Outside, the receptionist scheduled me for a post-op check-up the next day at one. Virginia and I left the clinic and went around the corner to a coffee shop for an express and croissant. I kept my dark glasses on—polarized clip-ons that I’d attached to a frame from which I’d removed the lenses—because my pupil was still dilated and the light flooded in. But already I was amazed at what I could see. I found myself reading my phone without glasses and the details of everything I saw were sharp and clear. When we returned home and I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time, and I was amazed to see that my eye wasn’t even red—the other eye had been red for days after two of my earlier surgeries. In fact, looking at the two eyes together, I’d never have guessed which had been operated on.

Not wanting to strain the eye, I left my phone in my studio and stayed away from my laptop. I had a nap and then began an ever-decreasing routine of eye-drop applications that is to last about three weeks.  But that night I found myself watching TV without specs for the first time since I was twelve. I was amazed at how much light there was in this new world, how much detail, how different colors and textures were. It was like an old-age miracle. No, it was an old-age miracle. A few months before, I’d been worried about whether I could pass the eye exam to renew my driver’s license. Now, I figured, I could pass a pilot’s license exam without glasses.

For twenty-four hours, I simply enjoyed being able to see. To see every detail. To see the tiny leaves on bushes and plants, to see the texture of the cloth of my shirt to see light and color the way I recalled them in my early childhood memories. The world was no longer a toned-down sepia place, but bright surroundings with a varied palette of amazing hues.

After more than six decades of a life in which the first thing I did in the morning was put my glasses on and the last thing I did at night was take them off, it was downright strange not to be wearing glasses. But good strange. By the next day, I was getting accustomed to having twenty-twenty vision and loving it. “Today we’ll go in the truck,” I told my wife, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Age 12 with my first specs

As soon as I was called into the surgeon’s consulting room, I shook his hand with both of mine and said, “Before anything else, Patricio, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for this gift, this miracle that you’ve given me. I’ve worn glasses since I was twelve and before that, I had a lot of trouble in grade school because no one seemed to realize that I couldn’t see. It wasn’t until I got my first glasses that I saw, for the first time, what chalk actually looked like on a blackboard. So this, for me, is incredible, to be able to see, and see twenty-twenty, without glasses…well, you can’t imagine what it means to me, especially at seventy-something. So, thank you, it’s an invaluable gift.”

He was visibly moved. He checked the eye and pronounced it a total success.

I said, “How soon can I start reading and writing again?”

“Right now!” he said. “Let’s just check to see what prescription you’ll need for your readers.” He did a quick eye exam and gave me a prescription.

“But I want you to be able to work right now, so, you know these throw-away glasses they sell in Walmart or the pharmacy? Get yourself a pair of plus-twos until the optical shop finishes your prescription ones. Those should work just fine for you.”

First grade. That's me, clear at the back, just left
of Miss Long, the teacher. I would get bored, because 
I couldn't read the board or reading charts, so I talked to my
neighbors instead. Miss Long said I was "too talky" and 
seated me as far back as possible. Sitting at the back, I was 
basically blind to anything that went on up front.
Not exactly an auspicious start to grade school. 

He then told me to come back in a week. But then he asked me something else about Ohio, I asked him about Tucumán, then it was politics, then back to aerospace and Neil Armstrong, and just when I was about to leave, he asked how I ever came to live in Argentina…and that’s a long story.

Outside, my wife was getting worried because it was taking so long. She asked one of the staff, who have been in and out of the consulting room a few times since I’d arrived. “Oh, they’re all done with the eye exam,” she said, “they’re just in there chatting.” And gave Virginia a knowing look like, “This could take a while.”

This morning I was thinking, as Rubén Blades sings in Pedro Navaja,
La vida te da sorpresas
Sorpresas te da la vida, ¡ay, Dios!
Or in other words,
Life gives you surprises,
Surprises life gives you, oh Lord!

And you know, some days, you discover it’s not all downhill from here.

 

RETURN TO THE FOLD

 

This is an excerpt from my as yet unpublished novel entitled The Process.

It is a passage from Chapter 5 – Return To The Fold.

 

On my twenty-eighth birthday, Doña María presented me with a Miraculous Virgin Medal. It was decidedly elegant—a small, meticulously engraved oval shield, with the image of the Virgin, arms outstretched as if gesturing her flock around her, to the shelter of her flowing robe. The medal was made of fine silver and hung from a strong but exquisitely crafted Paraguayan silver chain. The gift was to be worn, she made it clear, not shut away in a drawer somewhere.

I remember being  grateful and moved by the gesture, knowing as I did what sharing her faith meant to Doña María. But at the same time, I felt called upon to have a lengthy discussion with her concerning all the reasons why I should not wear a Catholic religious medal. I was, I explained, born of a Protestant family that would be hurt to see me using a Catholic symbol. Since when, she wanted to know, did I worry about my family's happiness. If I were so concerned about it, I would be living in the United States, not thousands of miles away.

 I went on to say that the long and the short of it was that wearing the thing—although I appreciated the thought more than she would ever know—meant that I believed in what it stood for, the organized Church, that I had faith that the Virgin was capable of guiding and protecting me. I explained that I simply wasn't convinced that this was true. To start with, I wasn't even sure I could believe in something as unlikely as the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.

At first she listened with patience and urged me every so often to make an effort to believe until I actually did. But this last statement she considered an affront to the Virgin and she wasn't about to tolerate it.

“¡Basta! ¡Basta!” she hissed. I'm in no mood for blasphemies.”

Realizing I had upset her, I placed my hand over the back of hers where it lay on the glass-topped coffee table in the patio. It was there, over a demitasse of her deliciously strong coffee that she had presented me with the gift.

“Doña María,” I said, “please try and understand. I'm not a complete heathen. I believe in...I don't know...something. Cosmic forces, the release of some spiritual energy into the universe when we die. Ectoplasm or whatever. I think I may even believe in contact between mortals and spirits that have crossed over into another dimension. I believe in the forces of good and evil and the power of the spiritual over the physical. But I just can't translate those beliefs into something as imperfect and intrinsically corrupt as organized religion and certainly not into a system as authoritarian, repressive and narrow-minded as Roman Catholicism.”

 “You make it sound so monstrous! For me, my church is such a beautiful, wondrous place. Do you know the comfort religion can bring? The strength it can offer? The shelter it can provide? Why, I think I'm beginning to feel sorry for you. Don't make me pity you, Carlos!”

“I'm not un-spiritual, María,” I offered rather condescendingly. “I'm not anti-religion either. That's precisely what I'm trying to tell you. Religion is whatever works for you, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. What works for me is all very personal and intimate and yet somehow universal because I think that the different expressions of religion, as suggested by the hundreds of varieties of organized congregations, are all signs of belief in one and the same thing—the existence of something superior to us, or rather something superior to this existence as such.”

“Of course, but an organized church with studious leaders provides a vehicle for learning, an authority to instill discipline. We can't go around thinking ourselves so smart and superior that we can guide ourselves.”

“And you'd entrust that job to somebody else, just because he wears his collar backwards.”

“No. Because he has the studies and knowledge I don't.”

“You don't really believe that, do you, María? Why, you must be one of the most well-read and intelligent people I've ever met. I'm sure you know more about your own faith than the majority of the priests you've known. You must question many of the things they try to blindly feed you, don't you?”

 “Such as?”

“Such as, such as all this business about an idyllic heaven, a fiery hell and that universal waiting room called purgatory. You can't really believe it! Not an intelligent, worldly woman like you. It's just a lot of cock and bull made up by the ancient high priests to scare the ignorant into doing the will of the Church and the will of the kings of those times.”

As I spoke, ranting on about the domination of the ignorant through the corruption of religious beliefs at the service of politics, she sat shaking her head sadly, almost imperceptibly. When I had finished, she sat, hands folded on the patio table and looked me in the eyes.

“Carlitos,” she said, “Everybody knows that many priests are corrupt and ignorant. It is up to each one of us to separate the grain from the chaff, to seek out the ones who are truly called to their vocation, to find the ones who are capable of leading us, elevating us to a higher plane, understand?”

I nodded but started to protest saying, “But what about...”

She held up a staying hand. “Listen Carlitos,” she went on, “Everybody knows that the government of the Church is not always on the level, that there are clerics that steal and cheat and defraud and break their vows by abusing the confidence of their followers and failing to maintain themselves aloof of the weakness of their own flesh. But they are no more the Church than I am. The Church stands alone, perfect and indestructible, no matter what a handful of bad priests may do. Because the Church is the expression of the Trinity and the priests, no matter how high some of them may reach, are no more than mortal beings, who, like all of us, will answer for what they do when they meet their Maker. I go to church to establish communion with the Church itself not the priest, you see?” Then she wagged her finger in my face and sternly admonished me, “As for that business about not believing in heaven, hell and purgatory, young man,” she warned, “I hope, for the sake of you and your immortal soul, that you are not in for a terrible surprise! In the meantime, make me happy, Carlitos, humor me. Wear the medal, for me.”

I stood up and went around to the other side of the patio table, bending to kiss her cheek.

“No. I won't wear it for you,” I said. “I'll wear it for me, because you gave it to me, and because it is charged with all the love and good luck I know you wish for me as your daughter's husband.”

She smiled up at me, squeezed my hand and said, “I wish those things for you because you are my daughter's husband, but also because you have become my son, Carlitos.”

It was not, of course, the last time we would clash over religious beliefs. One such encounter was caused by my insistence on treating the Miraculous Virgin Medal as no more than a good luck charm. It wasn't as if I went around rubbing it in on purpose. But it was obvious in at least one thing I did, which, for Doña María, was unforgivable. I had long worn a charm on my key chain. A footloose and much-loved great-uncle had given the charm to me when I was twelve. He claimed he had gotten it from an Indian diablero in the Arizona desert and although I sometimes found that hard to believe, it was a story that charged the little figure with adventure and psychological power. The charm was made of silver and turquoise. It was a totem of some sort, used, my uncle claimed, in the famous sun-dance ceremony of certain southwestern tribes. But for me it was loaded with something else—the magic that would never let my uncle settle down, the itch that kept him moving, the energy that made him yearn to know what lay over the next rise or around the next bend in the road. Every time I looked at it I thought of my uncle the incurable wanderer, switchblade in his hip pocket, duffel on his shoulder, making his way as best he could, from one strange place to another, trying to soak up a commonsense education in the backwater towns, hard-living waterfronts, wide-open countryside and adobe pueblos, from coast to coast, across America, back and forth, to and from wherever his cash for a bus ticket would take him, or as far as a hitched ride lasted. It was a beautiful little piece of jewelry—simple, small but weighty for its size, pleasing to the eye.

I had always worn it on my key chain because I had never worn anything around my neck. But the Miraculous Virgin was to be worn, as per the giver's instructions, as a necklace, so that the medal hung close to one's heart. It sounded logical enough, and I thought I might as well concentrate all of my good luck in the same central location. So I slipped the little totem onto the chain with the Virgin and hung both around my neck.

At first the chain was a constant presence that at once comforted and irritated me. But it wasn't long before the necklace with its two amulets became so much a part of me that I would have felt naked and unprotected without them. It was many weeks after my birthday, when the medal and totem were as familiar to my body as a mole or a birthmark, that Doña María noticed for the first time that the Virgin was no longer alone on the chain. It was a particularly sultry Sunday forenoon and I was sitting shirtless in the patio wading through the Clarín's weekend supplements as María, Mo and Magda made ñoquis con tuco in the kitchen. About half an hour before time to eat, María brought me an appetizer of salted anchovies, hard cheese and a glass of ice-cold white wine to tide me over. It was as she was setting the snack on the glass patio table and I was thanking her for her thoughtfulness that she saw the totem hanging with the Miraculous Virgin from my neck.

“¿Qué es eso?” she asked sternly, the pleasant, motherly smile of a moment before draining from her face.

“What?” I asked, oblivious to the now familiar amulets and wondering if perhaps there weren't an ugly spider or a cockroach crawling on me, given the look of disgust on my mother-in-law's face.

“¡Eso!” she hissed, pointing at the charm on my chain.

I tucked my chin and followed the tip of her finger to my chest. I picked up the charm between my thumb and forefinger and held it out toward her.

“This?” I asked, as she visibly recoiled from the totem.

“Sí, eso.”

“It's an amulet, a good luck charm. My favorite uncle gave it to me when I was just a young boy.”

“Take it off.”

I stiffened. “Why should I?”

“Because it doesn't belong there.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn't.”

“But it means a great deal to me.”

“It has no place there next to the Virgin.”

“It's a religious symbol.”

“It's a pagan image and it's a sacrilege for it to be there with Her.”

“This totem was as much a symbol of strength and power for the Indians as the Virgin Mary is for you.”

“¡No digas estupideces!  Take that trinket off my chain.”

“Your chain? I thought this was a gift. If it's borrowed, I'll give it back.”

“Don't be an idiot, Carlos. Just do as I say before your disrespect comes back to haunt you.”

“Oh come on, María. Let's not start with the hocus-pocus because I don't believe in it and you know it.”

“Then you don't need that macumba around your neck.”

“Right. I don't. Not either one of them.”

“¡Basta!”

“But I like them there because two people I love gave them to me and because I think they'll bring me luck.”

“¡Basta! ¡Basta! I had that chain and medal blessed and took them to the image of the Virgin myself and I think I deserve better than to have them associated with a pagan image.”

“What makes the Indian religion any less respectable than Catholicism?”

“¡Basta!”

“What's going on here? Stop it you two.” It was Mo. She was standing in the kitchen door looking out into the patio as if she were a stern mother come to break up a fight between two squalling children.

“Pero nena,” her mother cried, “look what he has on that chain with the Virgin!”

“Hey,” I said throwing up my hands, “if she wants her medal back, she can have it.”

“¡Cállense los dos! Mamá, mind your own business. You gave him that medal, now it's his to do with as he pleases.”

“But nena...”

“But nena nothing. Te jodés for giving it to an infidel.”

“Look,” I began, “I don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings, but...”

“And you shut up too, Chaz. Why do you have to be such a big baby? If you see that it bothers Mom for you to wear that stupid totem on the same chain with the Virgin, what would it hurt you to take it off?”

Doña María and I sulked a little at the beginning of lunch, but I had my shirt back on so that the totem was out of sight and soon we were back to normal. To save face, I continued to wear the two amulets together under my shirt, but took off the totem any time I went shirtless where Doña María might see me.

I soon began to realize that by wearing the Miraculous Virgin Medal I was becoming part of a kind of secret order, an unchartered, unspoken union of souls including Doña María and a number of her oldest and dearest friends, all of whom wore the Miraculous Virgin around their necks and believed fervently in its special powers. Although María had a myriad of wallet-size reproductions of saints of every sort under the glass of her night-table and desk, in her purse and in small frames on top of her chest of drawers, the Miraculous Virgin was the only one with which she appeared never to be offended, discouraged or down-hearted.

Doña María's own Miraculous Virgin Medal was a heavy gold one, oval-shaped like mine, but about the size of an American fifty-cent piece. It hung from a thick golden chain around her neck. The medal had been a gift from her father-in-law to see her through when she was carrying Mo. It was a difficult pregnancy, the last few months of which she spent nearly bed-fast. She nearly died in labor. The idea of the gift her father-in-law had given her was to make sure that she didn't die and María was convinced from Mo's birth on that it had, indeed, saved her life. If it hadn't been for the Miraculous Virgin then, Doña María once reminded me, I wouldn't have had a nagging mother-in-law to worry about, but then neither would I have had a wife, since Moira had come with the cord around her neck and probably would have suffocated before they could save her.

Doña María lived the last twenty years of her life troubled by cardiac insufficiency, a condition which, other than being somewhat careful not to overexert herself, she did relatively little to remedy. She liked her wine with meals and she wouldn't hear of cutting down on salt or red meats, although she had always been moderate in the amounts of everything she ate and drank, since she was more than a little vain about her ever-trim figure.

About five years after Mo and I were married, Doña María had a massive coronary. She was, fortunately, at home with Magda and Alfonso at the time and they were able to get her to the hospital quickly. By the time they got to the emergency room, however, the doctors could hold out no hope for her survival. When Mo and I arrived at the hospital, we were told that Mo's mother was not expected to last the night. One whole wall of the heart had been destroyed and it had not been a strong heart to begin with. Doña María was in such bad shape that even her closest relatives had not been permitted to see her, despite the boisterous protests of her three children.

Seventy-two hours after she was admitted to intensive care, we were still in the waiting room awaiting word of a turn for the worse while praying for a miracle. Most of that time, the Miraculous Virgin was warm in the palm of my hand and a silent prayer kept running through my head: “If you're real make a miracle. Do it for her, the one with the faith, not for me.”

At one point we got Alfonso and Magda to go home, telling them that if there were any change we would let them know right away. Shortly after they left, a nurse came to my exhausted wife and said her mother had asked repeatedly to see her.

“I'll let you in,” the nurse said, “but you have to promise me you'll only stay a few seconds. The doctor ordered no visitors and it could cost me my job if they find you there.”

Mo grudgingly nodded and followed the nurse down the corridor. When she returned she was sobbing softly and said, “She doesn't even think of herself when she's dying. She asked if we were eating all right and said we should go home to sleep, that it made her nervous to think of us out here all the time.” Then she added, “Go in, Chaz. She didn't even ask about Alfonso and Magda. She just insisted on seeing you.” I looked around for the nurse. “Go on,” Mo said firmly. “She knows what's good for her. Go see her. She's asking for you.”

I had to duck the nurse twice before I could get down the passageway and into the room. But there was no observation booth looking into the room as in some of the more modern intensive care wards. It was just a small, hospital-green, cell-like, private cubicle with a bed and a monitor and nothing else to get in the way of the cardiac team in the highly likely event that they should have to respond to an emergency.

The patient looked very small and frail in the high-mattressed bed, which was rolled up so that she was in a semi-sitting position. The monitor's fluorescent-green face shone from a little shelf over Doña María's head. It blinked with comforting regularity and bleeped softly each time it blinked.

Despite her reported condition and obvious pallor, María's head snapped enthusiastically toward me as soon as I entered her room.

“¡Hola, Carlitos!” she chirped cheerily, as if she were seeing me walk right into her own patio, where she was just about to serve up a few strong mates.

I smiled a restrained, concerned smile and placed my hand over hers where it lay in a loosely closed fist outside the starchy white hospital sheet on her stomach. A heavy golden chain spilled out of the fist and meandered over hill and dale of the sheet like some volatile, auric liquid that had escaped her grasp.

“Listen to me, Carlitos...” she began, but I put a finger to my lips to silence her.

“You should be resting,” I whispered, giving her hand a gentle squeeze, my mind inescapably tuned to every nuance of the monitor's bleeps.

“I'll have plenty of time to rest once they've nailed me into the box,” she snapped. “Listen, Carlos,” she said, and I listened, although all I could really think of was the doctor saying she could die at any moment, “I'm worried about you and Moira.”

“Worrying about everybody but yourself is how you got here,” I said.

“Bueno, basta,” she said, “I'm in no mood for lectures from upstarts. I only asked for you to come in because I want you to take Moira home.”

I was looking at the patient with real amazement now. This was a woman with what the doctors described as a semi-destroyed heart. A woman who was expected to die of coronary thrombosis and infarct at any moment. And yet, her voice and manner carried the same matriarchal authority as ever and her eyes were clear and sharp and willful. This didn't sound like somebody at death's door and I was beginning to feel that my usually skeptical view with regard to doctors and their prognoses was well founded. I had expected to find someone hanging onto life by her fingernails, fighting for breath and filling the room with the eerie sound of her death rattle. Instead I found the same strong woman as always, her fears and pain under control, her act together, directing family business even from her sickbed.

“They told me that Alfonso and Magdalena had gone home to rest and that relieved me somewhat,” Doña María went on, “but now I want to know what you and my Moira are still doing here.”

“We're just here in case you need us,” I whispered.

“Need you? Why would I need you? Are either of you doctors? Ha! I wish one of you were a doctor. Maybe this family would have a chance to generate some wealth for a change.”

“You're exerting yourself, María. I'm leaving now.”

“Yes. Do, and take Moira with you. Go home. Eat. Rest.”

“You're the typical cardiac patient, María. Always fretting about something or someone. Why don't you try to clear your mind for a minute or so and get some rest yourself?”

She cast her eyes downward in a little-girl-shy gesture that was typically contradictory in her. She was at once stubbornly authoritarian and coquettishly coy in dealing with others—a carrot-and-stick ploy that helped her impose her will.

I bent and kissed her forehead and turned to leave the room, but her stern voice stopped me at the door. 

“Carlos, “she called, “take Moira home right now! Do you understand?”

I smiled weakly and shrugged.

“Carlitos, please. If you want me to get well, take her home. She doesn't look good at all. I'm worried about her. She needs to eat and get some sleep.”

Still I didn't say anything.

“You won't miss it, I promise,” she said with an ironic grin.

“Miss what?”

“My death,” she said good-humoredly. “I promise I won't die until you've both rested, bathed, eaten and come back, and I don't want to see either of you here until at least tomorrow morning. I'll still be here. You have my word.”