Part Two: Miami to Michigan — Are You Crazy?
I think there are moments in our lives when somehow we sense big changes are on the horizon. I sensed this but put thoughts of it aside as I boarded a plane on December 6, 2006 to fly to Belgium. My youngest child and only daughter, Sarah, lives there with her Flemish husband and my granddaughter Ayla. I fly there each Christmas season, but this trip was different. Sarah had not only a slipped disk — the lowest one on her spine — but all fluid was gone between it and the disk above it, which was also showing signs of damage as a result. Her pain and inability to move normally needed the skill of an expert surgeon and a relatively new procedure in which a prosthesis disk with a gel-like substance is inserted to replace the damaged disk. My child was to be cut open through her lower abdomen, have her various organs moved aside in order for the prosthesis to be inserted, and would take a few months to recover. As mothers do, I put aside everything to go mother my daughter and run her house, cleaning, cooking, shopping, entertaining visitors, and, of course, caring for Ayla along with caring for Sarah. Hopefully,the operation would prove successful, and my daughter could live a normal life once again.
I was in the middle of writing my book, “Rudolph, Frosty, And Captain Kangaroo,” and I had a deadline with my publisher. The first week upon my arrival was spent in preparation for the operation. I wondered when I would find time to write – certainly not that week. Then, Tom, Ayla, and I took Sarah to the hospital. Children are allowed to visit their parents in Belgian hospitals, young as they might be, and Ayla was seven. I couldn’t believe the ease with which Sarah was admitted. She simply gave her name and was told by a smiling office worker where to go and that we could all go with her: No questions about, “And what insurance do you have?” No forms to fill out. All had been done, and the government would pay so that my daughter would not become a cripple. This was one moment when I was happy that, in spite of the thousands of miles between us, my daughter had moved to Europe. Even with medical coverage, in the U.S. the costs that still lay upon the insured would have put her into debt for life.
The operation took place a couple of days later. We were asked not to remain at the hospital. We would be called when we could see Sarah and, if God forbid, anything required our presence. All went well. The doctor said the surgery was a success, but only time would tell if her body agreed, the prosthesis would be accepted by her immune system, and if no nerves were permanently affected, as sometimes they were, causing pain in the legs permanently.
The second week, we were at the hospital each and every day. Sarah was having all sorts of reactions to anesthesia, which she’d never responded well to as witnessed in an appendectomy and a cesarean section prior to this operation. Finally, the doctor felt she could be sent home. Her right leg ached, and it would be weeks until we knew for sure that no nerve had been damaged. My massage muscles increased in strength as nightly they worked on that leg.
A few weeks had passed and my publisher’s deadline was nearing — February 1st. I was nearly halfway through, but with less than two months to go, could I possibly complete all that remained to be written? I heard Sarah’s voice calling from the room off of the living room where the government paid for a hospital bed while she recovered. It is a quaint room where Tom’s hundreds of CDs sit upon thin wooden shelves, where a television of modest size and a DVD player stand upon a little tea-cart-looking stand, and where their new sofa allowed me to stretch out and relax as Sarah and I stayed up late each night watching the series “Six Feet Under,” to which we had become addicted. It was our nightly mother/daughter-everyone’s asleep-forget pain-become absorbed activity.
Yes, Sarah called to me as I was in the adjoining living room and said, “You better start writing that book, Mom. Here’s what I suggest. Tom will take Ayla to school. When she leaves, you can bring me breakfast, you eat, get dressed and sit down in your room or up in the living room and write. We’ll take a lunch break, and then you write until you have to pick Ayla up.”
I had gotten an international license and once again drove a stick shift car, and being directionally challenged or directionally dyslexic or both, I managed to find my way to Ayla’s school and a few other places around town, scooting in and out of cobblestone, narrow roads and wondering just where to go on these roads as the bus turned onto the street and appeared to be aimed directly at the car’s front end. Amidst this, shopping in Delhaize, their supermarket which I love but must find things in and then figure out the Euros to pay with, and generally becoming a full-time mom after years of an empty nest, I thought of Sarah’s words: “You better start writing that book, Mom.” And so I took my daughter’s advice. She is great at organizing.
About one week after I’d sprawled my papers, father’s collections, hand-written notes, books and laptop plugged into a transformer, Sarah perked up. Her leg still needed daily massages, but she actually showered and shampooed her own hair again, and she said she would now like some visitors. With the table in the dining area of the living room filled with my book paraphernalia, people began to come over. In Belgium, one serves coffee and cake always. I managed to make room on the coffee table for the array of people eager to see Sarah. As her and Tom’s friends have become friends or like family to me, it was very hard not to socialize along with serving the delectable Belgian cakes and, of course, chocolates; delicious because the government regulates the ratio of the amount of sugar to cocoa, and the latter wins out. Hence, nothing is sickeningly sweet, and Belgians, for all the goodies they eat, are not fat.
It took time, but I finally said my hellos and explained that I had to get back to writing. Growing up in a household bustling with conversation and activities, I’d learned how to concentrate with noise and commotion around me, so I sat at the table and wrote while the guests and Sarah chatted, and I’d get up periodically to make another pot of coffee. The dash of cinnamon that I added to the percolator seemed to do the trick, and my coffee was much appreciated.
Ayla came into my room each morning and asked, “How many chapters have you written, Ami?” The “Ami” came from the time she was 14 months old and in my arms in the pool in Miami. The moon could be seen in the daytime sky, and she kept pointing and saying “Mewn, Mewn,” and I sang her the song “Moon Over Miami.” Her response was to say, “Ami’s Mewn. My Ami has Mewn.” So Ami I am, and each morning my granddaughter asked which chapter I would write today or how many days would it take me to finish a chapter. When I picked her up at school, she would ask before anything else, “Did you finish that chapter, Ami?” If I didn’t, I would be told that I had better finish it the next day. Tom, too, would check up on me, and I was touched and grateful for his insistence upon washing the dishes many a night, or doing the shopping if I gave him a list. He is a journalist, and he respects the art of writing. Between the three of them, I began to believe I would make the publisher’s deadline. I remember crying out to Sarah when I’d edited and re-edited the last chapter several times and now, called the book finished. By then she was mobile, even going out of the house once again. She came over and hugged me, and I cried like a baby. I had ten days left before returning to Miami and sending off the manuscript, and I intended to put all signs of the writing gear away and have a little holiday.
Remember, in the beginning of this tale, I said that there are times in life when we sense big changes are about to happen. While in Belgium, I felt a bit like Moses: like I’d gone up to the top of the mountain, and a message was coming through from somewhere loud and clear. The message was that when I returned, I was going to have to look seriously at how I could manage to remain the owner of a lovely townhouse in a beautifully kept Association in Miami, Florida.
The Home Equity loan I had taken out initially to supplement performance income so I could write my book had been to the tune of $20,000 at 2.3% interest. Prior to my leaving for Belgium, the interest had soared to 9.5%. I knew I needed more cash to pay the bills, and I knew that nearly $10,000 of my annual income had abruptly ended when the Florida state government, under Jeb Bush, cut funding drastically to the Arts. The Humanities Council and the State Touring Roster, sources of decent pay for me, were now at half-mast, and the Humanities Council soon became no-mast as the Speakers Bureau ended. So, before leaving for Belgium, I luckily found a partial mortgage at 6.3% interest, leaving me with $811 per month to pay. I knew, upon my mountaintop in Belgium, that the only way I might even be able to keep my house was if there were no payments upon it but maintenance, or if I took Social Security to pay the monthly mortgage. That would work, but I’d have to work full-time for the rest of my life unless my book became a best seller: not likely. Callings are callings. What they bring is satisfaction, “following your bliss,” to quote Joseph Campbell.
I enjoyed my ten day holiday with a growing sense of anxiety at the thought of leaving the haven of the loving home of my daughter, the charming country of Belgium, the ivory tower of writing each day, and returning to stare reality right in the face. The morning after I’d come home having experienced a six hour plane delay in New York, the phone rang at 9:03 AM. It was State Farm Insurance with whom I’d done business for 25 years. I had paid over $1,000 prior to leaving the country, paid three months worth of insurance ahead of time. Yet, I was told that, “If you don’t come in today and give us $850, we will cancel your insurance. You can’t have a mortgage without insurance, so the bank will take over your house, and you will be out on the street!” Welcome home!
Katrina and Wilma, those witches of hurricanes, had caused the rates to triple while I was away and I owed up what I didn’t even know was coming before I had left. My monthly payment would now be $547 per month for homeowners insurance. A storyteller and author whose funding has dried up to the tune of $10,000 per year and who didn’t earn even $40,000 when it was a bit more moist, can’t survive paying $547 per month for homeowner’s insurance, then $95 per month for auto insurance on a six-year old car. Hello reality! I already had no medical coverage. But back to homeowner’s insurance.
I had a $500 deductible. In order to bring the monthly rate down a bit — to $426 per month, I had to raise the deductible to $5,000. No sooner had I done this than my roof sprung leaks in four places for under $5,000. My roofer, a kind, trustworthy man who had put an entirely new roof on after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, informed me that he gave my roof maybe two, at most three years until it would need total replacement. I walked out on the wooden terrace off the kitchen, and the boards were rotting. My foot fell through one of them, and another nearly hit a friend in the head when she stepped on one end of it, sort of like a seesaw flying upward while only one person sits on one end.
How would I ever do justice to my beautiful townhouse? I paid the roofer with the money from the mortgage, paid the insurance company the $850 with the same, and saw that time was running out. I loved my home, but what good is it to sit in beauty that is fading with no hope of financing the plastic surgery needed to perk up the facade? My beautiful townhouse was feeling like the weight of the world upon my shoulders. Gas prices were rising, and I wasn’t driving anywhere I didn’t have to — performances yes, pleasure no.
I saw the writing on the wall. I knew big changes were in order, but what, where, how?
The answers came in a strange way, as answers to life’s big changes most often do. Tune in for the next episode.