Carol Kirkpatrick, possibly the brightest writer I ever met in a writing group (proof positive being her ability to scribble out a pithy, brilliantly crafted story on the spot) had the additional charm of treating me to an oral history of Brooklyn whenever we walked its streets together. Combining warmth, depth, humor, and subtlety well into her 90s, she will always represent perfectly what I’d like to be when I grow up. My hope is to charm you with this sample of her writing:
All Good Things
Summer was unravelling into another autumn. The late August days were pristine, their crisp perfection a reminder that this couldn’t last. But I’d missed a large part of my usual summer at Grandma’s by being away at camp. That had been fun in its own way, but I missed the long lazy days at Grandma’s, spent mostly at the lake. Swimming and canoeing on the sunny days. Re-reading Nancy Drew books or reading A Tale of Two Cities or The Count of Monte Cristo with Grandma…or playing with Ana and Jeanne…if it rained. Now there weren’t enough days left…only about a week.
I wasn’t ready to go to school. I certainly wasn’t ready to go back for medical problems. But my foot hurt.
Grandma said it was all in my head. I was malingering. That’s a two-bit adult word for trying to get out of chores and get special attention for an illness that has already healed.
How many times had she probed my foot with a needle to remove the splinter from the wooden diving board? Dr. Brakey had come. He had squirted on something that he promised would put my foot to sleep so I wouldn’t feel pain. Then he had taken what looked like extra shiny garden shears and cut my foot open right there on the porch swing.
“For God’s sake, stop that!” I had shrieked as I reared up and kicked him with both feet.
“I’ve removed the dead tissue,” he told Grandma and me, waving something around that could be used as bait for deep sea fishing. “Keep soaking it for 20 minutes every two hours and give her these antibiotic pills every four hours, and call me every morning, and she’ll be fine in a couple of days.”
Grandma told him, “I’ll make her mustard plasters.”
“Fine. They’re good too,” he said as he packed up his butchery tools and left.
If you’ve never had a mustard plaster, think voodoo. Grandma took hot mustard, both flavor hot and temperature hot, and saturated a towel full of a big pile of croutons and/or breadcrumbs. Then she wrapped my foot in it and wrapped an old rubber bathing cap around the whole sticky mess to keep it warm. That’s supposed to draw out any lurking infection. (Sucking out poisons is fine, but did it have to feel so yucky?)
One morning Grandma had something new to report to Dr. Brakey. A long red line ran all the way up my left leg to the groin where a nasty looking multi-colored swelling was the size of a duck egg.
“Oh God, get her to New York immediately,” Dr. Brakey ordered.
Grandma was on the McCormick’s phone. Like most of the people in the little summer colony, she didn’t even have her own phone. After several long distance calls, to Dad in New York and to Uncle Henry who was a doctor in Philadelphia, the trip was arranged.
So we left Grandma’s house in Merriewold a couple of days early and went back to Forest Hills, New York to have me see a New York doctor. As usual I provided the en route entertainment by getting car sick. It seemed kind of strange to be pulling up to this new steep driveway but, as you’ve already learned, it was a strange summer. Mom and Dad had bought a new house.
They settled me in a small room off the living room and called Dr. Stumph. Not their college friend, Dr. Winfield Stumph, but his father, Dr. Conrad Stumph who had a way with difficult children.
Lean, dapper, and with a trim white beard, Dr. Conrad Stumph looked more like George Bernard Shaw than a pediatrician.
“I see you have a Chinese checker board. Want to play a game?” he challenged.
Smart ass doctor, I thought. Trying to use psychology on the kid. I’ll show him who can play Chinese checkers.
I must not have been paying attention because he won. And I was pretty damn good if I say so myself. Unbelievably, he won the rematch. When he won a third time I was willing to concede that this unlikely character knew a thing or two. (I later learned he’d spent years as a missionary doctor in China.)
But now we faced a medical crisis because Dr. Brakey’s treatment hadn’t come soon enough or been aggressive enough and the infection had spread. I risked loosing my entire left leg or my life. Dr. Stumph set up a field hospital then and there, drained the abcess, and gave me massive doses of the then new wonder drug penicillin.
I would need about six weeks of bed rest to recover, said Dr. Stumph. It is hard to imagine how I managed to comply with rules so alien to my nature, but I did.
It was lonely. So very, very lonely.
I had my Mom, my Dad, my brother and my dog Socrates. Socky stayed with me, day and night.
My school friend Lliana visited me and brought me homework assignments. Mom brought Gayle who lived in the next block for me to meet. And of course there were her friends.
But where were my friends from the old block? Joan’s family had moved back upstate. Arpy never came. Felix never came. Winifred never came. Leslie from outside Forest Hill Gardens didn’t come. Two blocks away and they wouldn’t come. Forest Hills Gardens people didn’t mix with people in the rest of Forest Hills and the outsiders didn’t come. They knew their place. It wasn’t Forest Hills Gardens. I was now a Forest Hills Garden resident and I would have to learn to live with its snobbishness and pretensions for the next eight years. Those years included 7th and 8th grades, all of high school, and my first two years of college.
