“Amputation is the only recourse we have. The surgery is underway now,” my father told me over the phone. It was June 1970, the summer before my senior year of college. My mother and I had been shopping for fabrics at a store near our small New Jersey town. She and I wandered up and down the aisles looking at bolt after bolt of glorious fabric. Taffetas, silks, organzas, cottons, wools—we both loved to run our hands over the material and feel the uniqueness of each weave. I was determined to sew some new skirts and dresses for all of the events planned for my final year of college. “I’ll need this for our fall formal—I can make it into a great dress with a high waist and balloon sleeves,” I gushed holding a pink crinkled fabric blend in my arms. “I’d like 5 yards of this please. And three of this one. And this is just for around the collar, so one yard will be fine,” I pointed and motioned to the lady behind the counter who was armed with thick glasses dangling around her neck on a beaded chain, a large pair of scissors in her right hand, and a long ruler. She cut the required amounts, we paid for our goods, and loaded down with fabrics—oh the clothing possibilities!—we left the store. Chattering and laughing we walked on the sidewalk heading home. At that moment, a distracted driver swerved his car onto the sidewalk, pinning my mother and me, like two bug specimens, against the brick wall of the building behind us. There was much confusion as he just kept ramming and ramming the car into us unable to distinguish forward from reverse. He finally stopped, and alerted by our screams helpers raced out from offices and buildings, calling for ambulances, trying to stop the bleeding, holding us steady. We both suffered many injuries. I had multiple casts on my legs, swollen and damaged arms and back, and I was bedridden for several months with some organ damage. “You will be fine. You’ll heal. But the internal scars are deep and dangerous,” they told me. My mother suffered most of all. She hovered between life and death for more than a week. When gangrene set in, her leg had to be amputated to save her life. My father called from the hospital to tell me. I was frozen—unable to speak, and unable to move from the pain and from the plaster that surrounded my shattered limbs. Over the next few months while I healed slowly at home, my mother went from one hospital to the next—recovering in stages from the physical trauma, and being fitted with one prosthesis after another to help her regain some mobility. By late August she was home, and I had been cut out of my casts and had begun to heal well. At the insistence of my parents, I went back to my college where everything, including the walk up three floors to my dorm room, became a challenge. I threw myself into my school work and into the social whirl around me, but I found it almost impossible. My legs and body were strong now and few visible scars remained, but I was losing focus in my studies. By second semester I was struggling to maintain emotional and mental balance. Things that had seemed shiny with importance now seemed dull and rusted. I went to parties and events with my patient friends and caring boyfriend and tried to find a measure of fun. But everything was difficult. Toward the end of second semester the professor of my last required English course, Modern American Literature, found my lack of focus distasteful. “I am very sorry to see you go so much down-hill, Sylvia. You did show some promise early on, but I must have been mistaken. Your work seems, well, undisciplined,” he said during a short conference. His brow was furled into deep wrinkles between his eyes, and his mouth and nose looked as if he’d smelled something rather putrid. He continued, “I’m afraid that going into a Master’s program is not for you. It’s just as well,” he finished standing from his high-back wooden chair and dismissing me quickly, “You haven’t really learned much and as a woman you don’t have much to offer in the world of literature.” He slammed his office door behind me. In truth my work was not up to my own standards. But later that night his words echoed like the banging door in that old, brick English Department building, pounding—it seemed—at the scars on my legs, my arms, my mind. And the anger and frustration and fear of the past year seemed to well up inside my chest—a balloon filled too full—too ready to burst at any minute. I drove the three hours back to my home for the weekend. And while my parents were busily trying to sell our three-storey home and move to the more practical—more manageable for my mom—one level house, I began two projects of my own. “Why are you up here in the attic? It’s after midnight. What are you doing?” my father called up to me as he ascended the creaky steps. “Oh, I see,” he said, kissed the top of my head and left. I was at my sewing machine, having found those bags of fabric from last summer that had somehow gotten shoved into a dark corner under the eaves. The parts that were blood-stained—rust-colored now—I cut away. I still had enough for a pink skirt and a white top. I sewed much of the night and into the next day. Exhausted, I drove back to campus. Days later I wrote my final English paper with renewed enthusiasm and reimagined focus. My professor was not impressed. I had chosen what he considered to be a minor Hemingway novel, The Old Man and the Sea. And my focus he called, “awkward”. But I realized that while he was a scholar in his field, perhaps I had been too narrow in my own thinking. And now I began to feel that I had begun to cast off all manner of constraints. I had learned a great deal, but it was time to determine how I would fashion my life. And I chose. That paper and that novel is all that I truly remember from the foggy haze that surrounded my school-work that year. And I carry the memory to this day. In the book, the main character, Santiago, a poor, old fisherman by trade, tries, one last time, to catch the giant fish which has eluded him his whole life. As we read on we watch his struggles form into a bond of understanding between man and fish. None-the-less, struggles they are. In the end he catches it, but in transporting the fish boat-side in the water toward his home, fate takes an unexpected turn and sharks eat it. But this was and is a story of triumph not tragedy. Santiago battled the fear and pain and isolation within himself and ultimately he overcame it. The fish was not the prize. His transcendence was. That June, under my formal robes for my graduation I wore my self-made skirt and top. And my mother, balancing on her crutches and beaming with pride, took my picture. Comments are closed.
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