Oklahoma Dreaming: Gallstones and Weather

by Donna Schoenkopf

last time: tidbits

Okay, you've been wondering why I haven't written lately. I have a good excuse.

First, gallstones.

Got 'em out. Nowadays they make four small incisions (a quarter inch) in your abdomen and just fish around and eventually pull the gall bladder out through your belly button. Recovery was fast and pretty painless, ALTHOUGH they did kick me out of the hospital in LITERALLY one hour. I woke up in the recovery room with the nurse sitting me up and putting my shoes on. I was dingy and crazy and miserably nauseated. Somebody's gonna sue them if they don't allow a person to catch their breath before going home.

By the way, gallstones are nasty looking. I had between 60 and 70 of the little buggers. They look like rotten witch's teeth ... brown and black and hexagonal, kind of. Waxy, too. They are the result of too much cholesterol.

And then there was the weather, which is always part of the equation.

It has been an historical weather year here in Oklahoma. Did you know that the world doesn't just get hot with global warming, it also has wild extremes of weather? In fact, this ice storm can be directly attributed to a warmer winter than usual. (See An Inconvenient Truth for details.) We have just had the largest power outage in Oklahoma history. 635,000 people with no lights, or heat or TEEVEE!

Ice storms happen when it rains, then freezes. I woke up to an enchanted landscape. Everything was encased in ice. I mean everything. My car, for instance. It was entombed in a quarter inch thick covering, smooth and shiny as glass. My doors were frozen shut and the car antenna, which bends parallel to my car roof, had perfectly placed icicles attaching it to the roof of my car.

Everywhere I looked there were different species of trees with different designs of ice following every contour of every leaf and branch. Light bounced happily. Long, thin drooping branches of acacia shrubs were graceful, curved rods of ice. Autumn-dried maple leaves were ice lace fans. Lawns were collections of shards of ice, laid in vast, patterned carpets.

And then the trees started cracking. Loud screams came from trees all over town. I managed to pry my way into my car and took a slippery ride around town ... turn TOWARD the slide ... where debris from split trees lay splattered across yards and streets. Oklahoma being nothing if not respectable, it had good citizens out chain sawing and pulling massive tree limbs off the road. It was as though a bomb had gone off all over town. The trees which suffered the least damage were the oaks, although I did see a HUGE one, probably 100 years old, split to the ground, right down the middle, lying in three equal parts, like a pie chart. Sycamores took a real beating. I didn't see one that had survived. Their branches weren't made for heavy ice and tore from their trunks, but the beautifully patterned bark of those smooth limbs, creamy white with taupe mottlings, would have been grabbed and hauled to designer homes if they had lain in New York streets.

I drove over to Denny's restaurant after my sightseeing tour to get my first warm meal in 36 hours and saw a full parking lot and all seats filled, except the counter. We were all after the same thing. Lights, warmth and hot food.

I went to the counter and sat down between a handsome young black guy and a middle-aged white woman and said good morning. They both smiled back and said good morning cheerily and we were instantly a merry band of three.

The man was a truck driver. Lived in Las Vegas and was hauling furniture from North Carolina, where it was 75 degrees and as dry as a bone. He said even the river was very low and slow. He loves Las Vegas. Lots to do. And, wouldn't you know, he had lived as a child not far from the school where I taught in South Central L.A. His family is still at 80th and Vermont and I had taught at 61st and Figueroa. We BOTH from the 'hood. He was smart and sweet.

The woman was a California transplant of one year. She had bought a 70 acre spread between Meeker and Prague.

(Pronounced Prayg. Daughter Rebecca, grandson Jimmy and I had gone to Prague last summer to go to the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague church to get something magically holy for her boyfriend, Tom, to cure him of Lyme Disease. It didn't work. However, he IS making progress. As the sports announcer said at a Notre Dame football game years ago when the Hail Mary Pass didn't work in the last second of the USC-Notre Dame game, "Notre Dame's prayers are always answered, but sometimes the answer is no.")

ANYWAY ...

The woman said she was without electricity, wanted her bacon burned, and was tired of waiting for her food. She had a bunch of horses, cats, and poodles, and the automatic feeders for her outdoor animals that she had spent so much money on weren't working because all the power was out. She had fallen on the ice and had bought cleats for her shoes. I told her I wanted some, too. The guy at the other end of the counter with an empty seat between us, who was from Riverside, California, said you could just slide some socks over your shoes to keep your footing. I thanked him and he grinned and got up and left. He had no teeth. He was young.

The ice storm stopped work at Chigger Lake. Power was out and roads were hazardous. But the drywall got finished just before the storm hit. Jake, Peewee's son, did it. Jake does great work. It's smooth and clean and gorgeous.

Harlan, 75 years old, is doing the taping and bedding. Peewee says he's the fastest taper and bedder there is, and he's about the only hand-finisher around. People from the Country Club Estates WAIT for him, because he's famous for his work. He's handsome, quiet, erect and wears those stilts common to his occupation as though he were walking on water. I sorta fell in love with him at first sight.

But I discovered this morning, to my horror, that I had CONDENSATION. All the sliding glass doors were covered with slabs of moisture. The steel rafters dripped straight lines of RAIN across my floors. That could mean huge devastation to the drywall. Mold!! Mildew!! Surely the Mind of Man has solved this problem and all I have to do is go on the Internet to see how to make things right.

So I am now in the library using the computer and the answer is MAYBE a ...

DEHUMIDIFIER. I'll probably have to spend close to $2000 to buy a good one but it works in the summer to cool things off, too. (You know how nasty heat is when the humidity is high.) Also it helps with allergies. We'll see. The air purifiers I bought to use in my cat dandruff-infested, mold-infested duplex didn't work. THEY got returned Saturday.

And ...

VENTILATION. (Luckily I have proper window and door placement in my house!!!)

And one more thing ...

NOT LETTING THE CONCRETE GET WET. (Good luck on that one.)

So I called my genius son, Eric, who told me that the propane heater that Peewee had put in the house to dry out the drywall actually causes moisture to develop because propane's chemical nomenclature is H2OC4, or something like that, which means that when it heats up it releases ... WATER. Which Peewee also told me. They're just a couple of geniuses, those two.

The painters, Chris and David, will be here as soon as the taping and bedding are done. They came out to give me a bid and must have seen my Al Gore 2008 bumper sticker because Chris began a wonderful conversation with me about politics. He is totally on my planet and that's really not easy here in this state. We talked about the crazy gun law that's just been passed which allows virtually everyone to not only CARRY a gun, but to SHOOT whomever they want. And the miserable anti-immigration bill that just passed here is the most draconian one in the nation. Other repressive states are leaping to copy it. People are very afraid of "other." And in Oklahoma, where almost everyone is white and from one basic ethnicity, Latinos are very scary. Too bad.

ALSO, I have some major tax problems.... Huge. Since I received that lump sum from my retirement, my taxes have jumped up to the next rung, percentage-wise. My brand new tax man, Peewee's recommendation, will hopefully help. Don't get me wrong, I love paying my taxes. No, really. Taxes have paid my salary for many years, created the infrastructure that connects us and smooths our collective way, AND equalizes the distribution of wealth, always a good thing. BUT when Warren Buffett pays only 17.5% in taxes and I pay over 30%, there's something amiss.

So that's my excuse.

I knew you'd understand.

That's it from Chigger Lake.

next time: feeeeeeeeeeelings