Weekend Update:
Peg Leg
It’s taking a while to get back down to earth. I’m still spinning in Mad Men orbit, having watched the new season’s second episode twice, something that I haven’t done since the show’s introduction last year. I’m glad that I did, because I caught a lot of things that I didn’t quite get the first time around. That’s partly because the volume was a little too low, and partly because I was trying to decide on what to do about dinner — at ten o’clock! I was also a bit twitchy about recording the show so that Kathleen can see it when she gets back from Maine.
“…when she gets back from Maine.” That sounds so Mad Men. Well, perhaps not; perhaps it sounds like the sort of thing that Mad Men is making me remember. What’s ringing in my mind like the inexplicably unanswered telephone in the first set is the nasty repartee between Joan and Paul after Paul’s party. Paul (Michael Gladis) wants to know what Joan (Christina Hendricks) said to his black (!) girlfriend. Joan does not answer the question, but for the first time in the show, she looks uncomplicatedly pretty. If the language were a bit artier, we’d be talking Shakespeare or Molière or maybe Elektra. Maybe you had to be there, but I was there.
At brunch this afternoon — a grand event at the Brasserie, at which Ms NOLA and M le Neveu finally met my son-in-law, and, incidentally, we celebrated Fossil Darling’s birthday (some say he’s a Twentieth-Century type of guy, while others say he’s a Twenty-First-Century type of guy, but I say that he’s just a century old) — at brunch, the conversation turned to how Senator Kennedy has demonstrated how knowledgeable he is about cancer, now that he’s got it himself, after the horrific cancer experiences undergone by both of his children. LXIV reminded us that Teddy’s son had to have a leg amputated. The table fell haphazardly silent, everyone lapsing into his or her own thoughts. After a moment or two, I almost unconsciously asked — aloud — the question that struck me as most interesting. “I wonder if you can still get a peg leg.” General shock and awe: Megan’s head almost tipped into her bowl of fruit. Everyone told me what a horrible person I am &c. (When I repeated the remark to Kathleen later, she couldn’t get over the “fact” that she was married to a monster. I think she was just trying not to laugh.) This is why I was so preoccupied last fall by the possibility that I might have Asperger’s Syndrome. I didn’t ask the question to be funny. Like everyone else, I’ve been seeing a lot of prostheses in the paper, and, doubtless because my life is largely behind me, it hit me at the restaurant that, if I were faced with the what-do-we-do-now replacement type of situation, I’d go for the peg.
It didn’t help when I added that I wouldn’t want a wooden peg, not in this day and age. Something in “resin.”
I repeat: I didn’t say any of this to be funny. That I said it at all may be grotesque, but it is what I was thinking, altogether ingenuously. (I happen to know enough about disaster, by the way, to realize that, if I really were in a “replacement type of situation,” my decision would probably be more mainstream.) I didn’t and don’t mean to be snarky or ironic or “witty.” I was aware that my remark was shocking, but that’s not why I was thinking it. I’d have been perfectly happy if, instead of storming me with invective, the table had taken up the question, which still seems to me to be a good one.
The question being: do you have any say in what the doctors decide to do to you? Or does undergoing a trauma turn you into a helpless victim? Don’t answer that. It’s still early days. A hundred years ago — even that recently — there were no choices. Doctors did what they could to keep you alive. Now, however, you have choices. And, being a Trauma Victim, perhaps you’re not equipped to make them. But we’re adapting, at the usual snail’s pace.
Which reminds me of a later conversation. Ms NOLA and M le Neveu came back to the apartment for a cup of tea, and we fell upon talking about reading Proust. Ms NOLA has decided that she must — and M le Neveu has agreed to accompany her. Lydia Davis’s translation of Du côté de chez Swann was mentioned. I thought how simple it was for me, thirty-odd years ago. In those days, if you couldn’t read Proust in French, you read the translation by C K Scott Moncrieff. That was it. Just as, if you wanted to read The Tale of Genji, you read Arthur Waley — also published by the Modern Library. If there was something defective about the translation, it wasn’t your fault. Nowadays, it would be. And not only that: Moncrieff/Kilmartin covered the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu. Today’s reader might feel diminished by a world in which Ms Davis didn’t translate Le côté de Guermantes as well.
Why can’t I be (happily) shocked?
Until jumping below the jump, I wondered why the title, “Peg Leg”, and guessed it might have something to do with Mad Men’s Peggy, who bore a surprise child in the last episode of Season One after not realizing she was even pregnant. There was no hint, in episode one of Season Two, that the event had taken place, prompting me to discover “Free on Demand” and discovering, much to my joy, that I can download and watch past episodes. I was reminded, upon reviewing the Peggy episode, how brief and brutal the hospital scene was. And I’d missed the first one of this season and was dejected to think I’d have to watch it on my sister’s tiny kitchen TV on which she’d dutifully recorded it. I have yet to enjoy last night’s second episode, but you’ve whetted my already panting appetite, and I will probably watch it twice as well. I retired early, thinking I’d load up on sleep for the week ahead. Alas, an unusual afternoon expresso dashed those hopes, and I tossed fitfully all night. Anyway, I would have taken up your peg leg discussion, RJ; and given that I couldn’t, I do appreciate the questions that arose, particularly about free will in a medical emergency. Peg leg? Chemo? Mastectomy anyone?
Peg Leg : Dear RJ tells readers I am a century old and some days, hey, I feel that way.
I did come of age when doctors were highly respected and people did what they said. There were no second opinions when I faced ear surgery at age 11 : we were told by the most prominent ENT doctor in New York that I needed surgery, and that was it.
And three decades later it was the same : told by the chief of Head & Neck at Sloan Kettering that I needed sinus surgery, I went along. What he did not tell me (as his associates did, two days before admitting me while taking pictures of my face and getting me to sign releases) was how dangerous, even life-threatening the procedure might be, or that there was the possibility of severe disfigurement. I was in such shock that it short-circuited my ability to question what the surgeon was about to do. And I dutifully appeared on time, had the surgery, which was invasive, yes; but successful and not disfiguring. Yet I have always been a bit unsettled by my acquiesence and the entire experience. I have been back for three more, far less complex, surgeries there and did my homework before each one. But still, my generation had a simple faith that doctors knew best. But I wonder.