At the knee of her writer mother, Nora Ephron was taught the secret of the writer’s life: Everything is copy. She learned this sufficiently well to get a best-selling book and Meryl Streep movie out of a humiliatingly unfaithful husband.
On this principle, though on a far more trivial scale, instead of mining the rich lode of venality, sedition, and egomania that characterizes the democracy-threatening events of the day, I am here to turn my last unforgettable week into copy.
Seven days ago, after a minor league freeze, my wife strolled around the corner in the early morning hours to do fifteen minutes of exercise, slipped on a patch of black ice, and broke her right kneecap into several shards. Two men working on the adjacent house helped her to her feet —or foot — and assured her (incorrectly) that everything would be fine.
She foolishly took them at their world and tried to tough it out for a day, using a cane to attend a funeral no less, then graduated to a walker and ice packs. By the next day her knee was swollen to the size of a black-and-blue cantaloupe, and I put my flat feel down. Off to the orthopedist we went after the kind of pathetic wheedling needed to get a rapid appointment in our health care system, so much better than Canada, France or Britain.
Once there, we got to see a PA rather than a man wth a medical degree and soon the X-rays told the tale. With luck, eight weeks with the leg immobilized in a mummifying black rubber cocoon with a steel spine up the hamstring will permit the piece to knit back together. Without luck, surgery.
This was surprising because men who earn their daily bread with sharp knives are rarely known to pass up a chance to profitably use them. But the reprieve may be provisional. This week we will be off to another venue for a CT scan, and then the following day back to Ortholand where the bone whisperers may get a second chance to prescribe the knives.
I am worried because there may be a localized epidemic of this sort of thing in the neighborhood. Sometime ago, our friend across the way was walking her dog, went down, and had to keep her foot immobilized for sometime. My daughter, around Christmas, came out of a store talking on her phone, performed the same trick, and wound up in a Frankenstein boot for weeks.
And shortly after our mishap, a second neighbor came to the door to offer sympathy.
Her arm was in a sling from a break in her humerus, which is clearly no joke. Get it? She slipped on a floor she had made so clean as to be slick as ice. All of which provides plenty of useful healthy living lessons. Avoid dogs and the walking thereof. Never exercise or shop. And clean only sparingly.
Meanwhile, the victim spends her days on a walker and psychotropic drugs shuttling between bed and couch. Her daughter has taken a week of family caregiver leave from her job, a nice benefit rarely offered in my day. She and I are cooking up large pots of freezable Mexican, Cajun, and all-American stew-like substances to get us through the next week or two. Then friends of the invalid arrived with even more provender.
The victim has become the Dowager Duchess of Downton. The caregivers are strictly members of the below stairs staff, assigned to the scullery work, buttling, and chauffeur duty. Get me a glass of water. Yes, milady.
At first I feared the two girls might use their downtime for yet another viewing of the six-hour Colin Firth version of “Pride and Prejudice,” but instead the patient decided now was the time to find out what all the buzz was about concerning “This Is Us.” My counter-argument, in favor of something a bit grittier such as “Marseilles” or “Tin Star,” was voted down by an overwhelming 2 to 1 margin. Direct democracy is a bitch, and in this case I believe there’s some sort of gender bias going on. But mine is not to reason why, mine is but to watch and cry.
So I have spent the last three days in the presence of two women in full binge mode. Thus far, we have plowed through the complete first season’s eighteen weepy episodes. And another eighteen loom in my near future. Since “This Is Us” is the work of many of the same people involved in “Thirtysomething” and “Brothers and Sisters,” I realize I have suffered through a cumulative eleven seasons and 213 episodes of family travail.
If I were going to be lying on the sofa for eight weeks in an immobilized state, this might not be the way I would chose to cheer myself up. But, in this time of red and blue division and polarization, maybe it’s encouraging that we can all care about the struggles and triumphs of the flawed, uplifting, annoying, but endearing Pearson family.
Even with its substance abusers, blue collar strivers, upscale compulsives, black and white brothers, overweight sister, dying biological father, it is a far better crowd to spend binge time with than the competing TV spectacle of the Potus family. It is the difference between heart and bile. So, crank up Season Two, and let the sobbing begin.