Our summer house in Woods Hole is old in every sense - the warped wooden floor, the uncomfortable mattresses, the district lack of many electric outlets. Perhaps this is on purpose because it forces you outside to take advantage of the wooden porch, the rolling lawn with perfect trees for climbing or hammocks, and the small beach next to a stone pier with sea life both rich and interesting enough that three different scientific research organizations a quarter of a mile away study it.
Or perhaps my family has been historically cheap.
For a hundred and fifty years, we have clung to the place. One generation after another has stayed there. A lifetime is going from making sea castles on the beach to sitting in the large green Adirondack chairs and watching your grandchildren playing capture the flag where you did with a cocktail in your hand.
A hundred and fifty years is a long time. Our time next to the small cool cove predates the iPhone, penicillin, and the forward pass. Abraham Lincoln had uttered the phrase "the mystic chords of memory" only a few years earlier than our arrival.
And like any place for that long a time, not all of the memories are pleasant. There are, of course, minor accidents - a big wheel driven into a rose bush, the slip and slide taken from soft grass to the tennis court.
But there are the larger ones. My grandfather had a heart attack in the kitchen when he was carrying in groceries, and that was it. The summer before, he was lifting rowboats out of the water, and now a bag with perhaps Eggo waffles, hamburger meat, and orange juice was too much.
The nearby episcopal church has a few of our tombstones. And the portraits of the departed are strung through the house. They are placed up high on the wall and look down upon us. Each generation is less impressed with the next.
We were ending our three-week stay, and it hadn't rained. The effect is like being a lobster - each day slightly more dehydrated than the last, each night another lump in the mattress - that you are being broiled unaware. Nostalgia is memory mixed with humidity.
I knew it was important that Louise got a break of a few days away. The universal opinion of in-laws is that the place is half mad. There is a wide world of vacations; why have a Sisyphus summer? She was back from Nantucket, and we had one last set of cousins to entertain. Our boys were exhausted, too, having taken classes from bird watching to archery (and thankfully not at the same time).
I was on a phone call, and my jaw and my ear started to hurt. Minor aches are part of the scenery. With so many details, like both my sons and my father wanting me to troubleshoot their iPads, I wasn't really in a time where I could be sick.
The disease thought otherwise.
Summer tightened.
That night I could hardly sleep with the pain.
It was uncomfortable enough that I thought a dentist could give just a little something for the airplane the next day. The jaw was tight enough that he couldn't x-ray. A year-round resident, he gave what most do to tourists - well wishes and thanks for staying on the cape. The only thing missing was the t-shirt.
I started having a hard time swallowing. And then it was speaking.
My father called his great friend, Dr. Schindler, who said I needed medical treatment immediately. So Louise and I went off to get it.
The medical system in America operates at two speeds fast and slow. Neither is much fun. There is a dullness of the waiting in a room where Wheel of Fortune is being close captioned, and two car salesmen talk about their quotas. Children do get seen first, and if during the triage process they hear the words "sore throat," you will wait a long time.
Fast medicine is fear. When I was finally admitted to a room, a twenty-ish man bounced in and said, "I am Matt, and I am a doctor" (in a few years, when the heavy eyes of E.R. work arrive, he won't need the second part). He immediately got someone very senior, who immediately sent me to cat scan, and the results were back. Quick. Quick Quick.
The toggle between slow and fast is the difference between "sore throat" and "the swelling hasn't yet blocked his airway." Hope that you get to stick to slow.
Fast medicine is the skill of avoiding downside scenarios. Not being able to breathe is one of those. Fast medicine is machines that beep and sirens that flash. Flood the system with some combination of antibiotics, steroids, and morphine since the two days when the lab results come back to find out what it might be are the two days you don't have.
Fast medicine, to quote the movie "Jaws," is knowing when you need a bigger boat. The hospital I was at didn't have an E.N.T. in case of intubation, so I needed to be transferred to the bigger one at Hyannis. Speilberg's mythical shark was filmed only a few miles away.
I arrived by ambulance in the middle of the night, and we waited gradually letting things creep back to slow. It took a few days of streaming Apple T.V., drinking from an iv, and sampling a rainbow of pills at the I.C.U.
My extended family waited back at the summer house. And in between games of pickleball they speculated what I had ( maybe a wisdom tooth, Ludwig's something) with the same insight that they have when picking teams for the women's World Cup soccer pool or the lawn Olympics they play against each other. My mom and her sister looked after my boys. Life at the house still had a cool breeze.
There still isn't a clear diagnosis. Soft tissue infection is what is written. There is a whole round of tests ahead, and I will, for now, enjoy the leisurely pace of waiting rooms while trying to guess answers to Wheel of Fortune.
I am grateful that my portrait is not up on the house just yet. That while my ancestors had much better facial hair, that I got the antibiotics. That my wife was my champion. That my boys are at a magical age where every tree can seem like a fortress, every cousin a hero. That not every conversation is about Star Wars. And mostly that those who look up to you matter way more than those that look down.
When they are older, the boys will feel the pull to return to the place. Their children could play at the shore. The flickers of the past holding to their feet, like the dried summer grass of a month without rain.
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