Waves, Volume 6, Number 1

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

To Pass Through Honey

Some history. I was an only child. My own father never had much use for me. Our relationship was strictly functional. I was a necessary nuisance for the perpetuation of the family line. And I never had any respect for my mother; she was detached with me and just happened to be a pathological liar. We lived together very loosely.

Martin, to paraphrase Ben Jonson, is Mine First borne Sonne. He's in great shape, mind and body, for a seventeen-year old. Every night he does his forty push-ups and forty sit-ups and he's developed quite a build, a good set of muscles for a lanky kid. And he's casual and accepting about the nuisance (a mild word that) of watching himself so carefully.

Valerie, my wife, doesn't believe in ying and yang. Everything has to be seen in absolutes of startling black and white. So when we left him, that first night, at the hospital, and I had to stop the car because I couldn't see the road, I knew I had disappointed her again. I was supposed to be in control, the reliable, strong male.

She had made the appointment for Martin to see Dr. Kale, but she didn't go with him. It happened I got home early and decided to go along to the doctor's office, after him. Not that we really thought there was anything wrong. But he was thirsty all the time, and seemed tired, lethargic. the thirst we attributed to the unusually hot weather, but Valerie mentioned a peculiar odour on his breath, one she remembered from when he was a baby. He'd have that same sweetish-milky smell when he was ill, as a baby.

Dr. Kale smiled when he told us that I'd have to take Marty right over to the hospital. He smiled because he's always smiling, not because he had good news for us. I couldn't believe him at first, so he took a dipstick, explained the colour code to us, and we watched while he dipped it in Marty's urine sample. In his beautifully modulated voice he said: "I've never seen such a positive test before". Almost admiringly. "Take him right in. You have to; he may go into a coma. I'll call the hospital and get in touch with a colleague, a nephrologist. He's a good doctor. He'll look after Martin."

An intern at the hospital examined him, took a medical history, explained to us skimpily, about juvenile-onset diabetes. Juvenile Diabetes Mellitus. Marty was hooked up to an intravenous unit. He looked a little shaky, but not frightened. He listened intently to everything the doctor said.

Watching him undress there, I realized with a shock that he had lost weight; his ribcage looked prominent. It never had been, before.

They took blood tests, the lab technicians. Before we left the hospital, Valerie and I, the intern, a young good-looking guy in the pink of health, chewing crushed ice out of a paper cup, had a talk with us, at the nurses' station. "His state of mind can be crucial to the development of complications", he said. And he also said - it sounded almost insouciant: "His life expectancy will be shortened, of course". Of course. My face felt like cardboard. I had to resist the urge to smash the paper cup into his bland, helpful face.

Then, in the car, I put the windshield wipers on. It was raining. There didn't seem to be anything for us to say. The huge maple in the hospital driveway was just getting its summer leaves. The road was glistening wet. Val offered to drive. She wasn't crying. It was I who had sat at the edge of the bed holding his hand, talking to him. I kissed him goodnight.

He'd call me at work, during those three weeks in the hospital. "Dad, you wouldn't mind getting me some sheet music, would you? I've got a short list of pieces I'd like to have." It was a gentle blackmail, but so what. He had his viola and his recorders with him, there. After the third day, he was off intravenous and they let him sign out to play his music in a small lecture room, just outside the ward. They had to keep coming to get him. For his blood tests, his sugar-urine readings, discussions with the dietitian, the doctors, an examination by an ophthalmologist. (His condition temporarily reversed his eyesight from near-sighted to far.)

He still tired easily, but he insisted on playing his music. When I'd step off the elevator, first thing I'd do was check the little room. If he was there, the light would be on and the strain of a Vivaldi, Haydn, Cimerosa piece might come wafting along the air currents in the corridor.

I spent my lunch hours, not eating, but prowling around in record shops, picking up Medieval and Renaissance music for him. Or I'd go to the public library and get him reading material. Benvenuto Cellini's memoirs, Elizabethan and Chaucerian England, the era of Frederick the Great, the Great Houses of Europe. Not my choices, but his.

We were on staggered work hours, so I left the house earlier in the morning, cut my lunch time short, and left work early to go right down to the hospital. Valerie looked after the other kids, at home.

Once, when she did come to the hospital with me, we had a conference with Dr. MacBeth and several of his assistants. "Why?" I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the case history he was holding. Marty was being used to further orient his assistants.

Macbeth inspired confidence, if only because we saw everyone, his assistants, the nurses, our family doctor, deferring to him. It was the first time we'd met him, despite that we'd repeatedly asked for an interview. We'd be told in hushed tones that Dr. MacBeth was down in the clinic, or the lab doing a biopsy, or he was in conference.

The great man smiled and said "Mr. Grantly, when we know that, we'll know a great deal. However, I can tell you that Juvenile Diabetes is a genetically-disposed disease. Right now, we think that something like an infection, a virus, might trigger an auto-immunological response, accidentally destroying vital beta cells in the pancreas, but as yet, it's only an educated hypothesis."

Outside the room I tried to corner him about complications. About the possibility of retinopathy, kidney disease, gangrene, hardening of the arteries, heart disease; everything that I'd been reading about. He brushed me aside brusquely. "Forget all that", he said. "Right now our only concern is to get your son operating on an even keel. The future will look after itself."

In the afternoons, we'd sit and talk, me and Marty, or I'd follow him into the little room, where we'd lock the door, if it hadn't been pre-empted, and he'd play. He becomes completely absorbed in the music. His face is serene, it's anguished, living the music he plays.

I had to call to explain his absence at school, at orchestra practise. Some of his friends began dropping in to visit with him. One girl brought him a stuffed toy. Others brought bright little get-well cards. Another friend, a boy, lugged his bassoon over and they played duets. A girl brought her violin and they played duets. The bassoon player talked a friend of his into bringing over an electronic harpsichord. They played well together, until the hospital staff discovered the plugged-in harpsichord and someone took the machine away. Downstairs, one of the hospital electricians put a different plug on it, compatible with the hospital's electric current. After that they left the harpsichord in Marty's room, with the bassoon, and they came over regularly, to play with him. I was grateful to them, but I also felt jealous. Stupid.

I felt other things too. when I'd come home and see the neighbourhood alive with kids, playing street hockey, whatever, I'd wonder why it wasn't one of them.

He was never a particularly active boy, never participated in games, group sports. But we used to go hiking, him and me, in the Gatineau Hills. We'd climb quite steep rock faces. The same thing in the summer, on the Appalachian Trail. the first time I took him climbing again, about two months after his hospital stay, we took extra food for him, to make up for the extra energy expended. We were quarter of the way up a dry creek bed. "Please Dad, let's stop. I don't want to go any further", he said. His face was ashen, he was visibly trembling. I was angry. I didn't want us to stop. I didn't want him to let himself think he was any different than he had been. And exercise was good for him. But we had to go back.

A week later, he was nimbling those hills like a moufflon.

At the hospital, he taught me what the nurses taught him. I had to know how to take his urine tests, to interpret them. Tests for sugar, for ketones. He learned to fill the syringe with the exact amount of insulin, and to administer the dosage to himself. Two kinds of insulin, one fast-acting, the other slower, to tide him over each day. Every day.

"I'd love to have lived during the Renaissance", he said often. If he had, he'd have been dead a few weeks after the first symptoms of diabetes manifested themselves. The ancient Greeks described it well: "The flesh melteth down into sweet urine". But he knew that. I thought it was his way of transcending reality.

He was given an orange to practise on at first. It's what he used to teach me the method too. Then came the time when I had to inject him, not the orange. I had watched him swab his stomach and inject himself with the insulin. His stomach. I couldn't imagine what strength of mind he must have. I knew I had to be as matter-of-fact about the procedure as he was. My mind flinched from the act of piercing his skin, but I performed. At home, I would do him occasionally, in inaccessible places. He had to avoid injecting himself in the same place repeatedly, had to rotate the sites, to avoid skin complications.

It was a mixed ward, the one Marty was in. There was a little girl with a grossly swollen head; leukemia. Another boy who often lay in the corridor on his bed, for company. His problem was attenuated tendons. His pain was quite obviously unbearable; I'd sometimes see him crying to himself. Another little girl sat in a wheelchair in the corridor. For company too, but it was debatable whether she knew what was going on around her. Her head lolled to one side, her eyes were glazed. An atrophying brain, one of the nurses told me. Apparently, she came from a family of four other children; underprivileged background. Two of her siblings had already died the same way.

There were other kids too, not so badly off. Asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, broken limbs, other things. Some of them ran around the corridors, throwing balls, pedalling plastic cars; happy and boisterous, fooling around, making noise; they weren't feeling noticeably ill. Others sat glued, every minute of the day, to the tiny television sets suspended above their beds. There were a few other parents wandering around the halls too, people you got to recognize, to nod amiably, at.

One afternoon, the little leukemic girl asked Marty to play something for her. He promised her he'd give her a concert soon. He did, he set his music stand up in the corridor. Some of the active kids began to wheel the incapacitated ones on their hospital beds out into the corridor, until the hallway was full of beds, of kids lying, sitting on the floor listening. I stood in the doorway of Marty's room listening, watching what he was doing, pied piping Telemann's water music, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto.

Valerie didn't want to discuss it. I could think of no one on my side of the family who had diabetes. But the pamphlets said that although five percent of the population had diagnosed diabetes, another estimated two percent were walking around, not aware that they had it. I recalled how her father used to get infections that wouldn't heal, that once it was thought he'd have to have several toes amputated, they seemed gangrenous. And how he'd finally died of a heart attack.

"No" she snapped at me. "He wasn't diabetic as far as I know. don't go looking for things. You'd like to blame me, no doubt, but there's no more evidence of diabetes on my side of the family than there is on yours." I didn't mean to infer that at all, but I didn't bother objecting. Maybe after all, it was what I'd meant, I don't know. I guess it hasn't been easy for her either, having to prepare his diet.

Valerie's mother means well, but she drives me to distraction. She simply cannot get it through her head that bananas are no cure. Bananas. "Why don't you give him bananas to eat? I know bananas are very good for diabetics." And whenever she sees Marty, she tells him reassuringly, that before long he'll be able to go off insulin, just take pills. He suffers her stupidities sweetly, perhaps knowing as I do, that there is also no cure for congenital ignorance.

First thing I do, when I get up in the mornings, is look in on him. He sleeps without pajamas, even in the winter. He looks vulnerable, lying there, his arms spread out around his head. He wears his hair long and it's naturally curly. He never shaves, so he's grown a beard, a mustache. I wake him about six-fifteen to void for the first time; to get ready for his urine test. "Hi Dad", he invariably murmurs and smiles, then turns over. I hate to prod him, but he's got to get up.

Yesterday, in the mail, we got the latest booklet from the Canadian Diabetes Association. An article on retinopathy; new surgical procedures utilizing laser beams; hope for the future.

I always considered him to be different, a rare human being. It was confirmed in a way I wouldn't have thought of, in the literature. While five percent of the population is diabetic, I read, eighty-five percent are adults, not the brittle type of diabetic that a child is. One in twenty thousand children are afflicted, the same percentage as multiple sclerosis. And I read that juvenile diabetics have a thirty-percent shorter life expectancy than normal. Marty, of course, read the literature too.

"Thirty percent. That's a lot, eh Dad?"
"Yes."
"I didn't think it was that much. Did you?"
"No ... but ..."

Of course statistics always look bad, eh Dad? I know that I've got it under control, that's the main thing. A lot of people don't bother." He looks at me for confirmation. I agree. Control is the key.

He was only sick once this past winter. His sugar readings went wacky, a warning. We thought he was going into a hyperglycemic condition, a diabetic coma; he had some of the right symptoms. I panicked and couldn't get in touch with Dr. MacBeth. He's always busy, you've got to leave a message and hope that he'll get back to you. At that point, he was out of town. I was more familiar with him, by then.

Marty has regular three-month check-ups at the hospital, at Dr. MacBeth's clinic. "Everything all right?" the doctor invariably asks; pure routine. "Sure", Marty always replies. He had quickly discovered that he knew more about his personal metabolism than the doctor did, so he'd stopped asking questions MacBeth couldn't find the answers for. But now, when I wanted him, I couldn't get him. The violence of the ague-like symptoms unnerved me.

"Dad, I can't breathe", he said, the first night. "My throat is burning, it's constricted. And I feel like vomiting." Now he was frightened too. Three more days of that, then he began to come around. Small, regular insulin injections throughout the day; a liquid diet. "That wasn't so bad after all" he said, later. Cocky then, but he had been shaken.

The insulin reactions are easier to deal with. "I had another reaction at school" he'd tell me blithely. "Nothing to it, Dad. It's like being high, I guess. I just take some direct sugar and relax a couple of minutes." He smiles to reassure me; he knows I want to be informed about everything. And I'm glad he wears a medic-alert bracelet so if he were ever in trouble and he couldn't handle himself, no one might mistake his condition.

Yesterday evening, we were both in the living room, listening to one of his records. He had just finished doing his exercises, was lying on the floor, his arms flung out, breathing deeply. Naked, except for his undershorts, his chest rose and fell with his laboured breathing, the ribcage prominent with the indrawing of air. Light glanced off his auburn beard, his curly hair. I thought how like Christ he looked. He seemed to be absorbed in some private revelation only his eyes discerned, on the ceiling.

"Sometimes I feel so sad" he said quietly. "I don't know why I feel like that" he smiled at me. "I have nothing to be sad about. I've got everything I could possibly want, haven't I?" The music moved the air gently around our heads and I nodded. It wasn't the diabetes; I knew he wasn't thinking about that. "It must be my age", he continued. "A stage I'm going through. Maybe most kids do. What I mean is, listen to those words, Dad."

I began to listen carefully to the words the tenor was articulating, soft and sweetly melancholy. Marty reached the jacket cover of the record over to me, so I could read the words while they were being sung. The cover quoted Shakespeare: "Musick With Her Silver Sounde". And the tenor was singing: "Away delights/go seek some other dwelling/for I will die;/farewell false hope;/thy tongue is ever telling/lie after lie..."

"Sometimes" he said dreamily, lying back on the floor, looking again at that unseen panorama, hands clasped now at the back of his head, "sometimes I feel just like that."

I stared at him, uncomprehending. He glanced over at me and laughed softly. "It's a love song, Dad. Unrequited love. I think about it, a lot. Funny. It's funny to think about myself in love with someone."

I felt relief at his silly sentimentality. "You'll go through a stage of puppy love", I said, permitting my voice to scoff slightly, "to prepare you for the final indignity, the real ignominy of becoming some female's helpless puppet."

"No, Dad" he said gravely, still smiling. "I've seen the way kids hang around each other, because it's the accepted social norm. That's not what I want. Mine will be different; my love."

So it's only now that the light begins to dawn. Now I realize that his diabetes is no handicap to him. He sees his life, his future clearly. Bitterness and doubt are simply not an integral part of his makeup. He's a more complete human being than I ever was. I see myself in an inherent caul of disaffection. I can't help but wonder of his inheritance; where does he come from, this pure soul?

Hell, the analogy of shining goodness is not entirely appropriate. Ying and yang again. "I intend to immortalize myself" he said just recently. I just lifted my eyebrows; it's the lazy man's or the coward's way.

"I intend to be an outstanding musicologist. there is absolutely no reason why I can't compose music as good as any done by the masters. And be a recorder virtuoso as well." Off-handedly, he told me the story behind Tartini's "Devil's Trill", a musical perfection that was supposed to transcend human endeavour.

"Guiseppe Tartini claimed to have made a covenant with the devil in one of his dreams" he said fondly.

And I looked at his mischievous, yet enigmatic face. My son.

c. 1977 Rita Rosenfeld
Published in Waves, Volume 6, No. 1, Autumn, 1977.