Still find it hard to believe you had this problem. You don't seem like the type! Thirty years a vegetarian ... yoga ... ???
Makes me think of my Uncle Jan Cerno, who, while interrupted in his lunch of smoked pig fat and raw hot peppers, said, "Your great grandfather ate this for lunch everyday, and lived to be 92 years old!"
The process of coming back from open heart surgery is pretty much a roller coaster.
I was great yesterday--walked around the house 3 times for about 6 minutes each time, but then the night was terrible. Couldn't sleep, couldn't lie on my back, lots of pain. I ended up giving up around 3 am and going to my study to read Paul Theroux's Iron Rooster book, travels in China. I drank tea and read till about 7 when it was time for 10 pills. The pills almost knocked me out. I started sweating and couldn't stop it. Linda helped me to an easy chair and I lay there for an hour till I stopped sweating.
I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica, 2017) and True Confessions (Darkhouse Books, 2019).
5 comments:
Yay!
hoorah!!
Looking forward to the next update.
Still find it hard to believe you had this problem. You don't seem like the type! Thirty years a vegetarian ... yoga ... ???
Makes me think of my Uncle Jan Cerno, who, while interrupted in his lunch of smoked pig fat and raw hot peppers, said, "Your great grandfather ate this for lunch everyday, and lived to be 92 years old!"
I think it was the slivovice.
Hi, Danusha, thanks for the note.
The process of coming back from open heart surgery is pretty much a roller coaster.
I was great yesterday--walked around the house 3 times for about 6 minutes each time, but then the night was terrible. Couldn't sleep, couldn't lie on my back, lots of pain. I ended up giving up around 3 am and going to my study to read Paul Theroux's Iron Rooster book, travels in China. I drank tea and read till about 7 when it was time for 10 pills. The pills almost knocked me out. I started sweating and couldn't stop it. Linda helped me to an easy chair and I lay there for an hour till I stopped sweating.
Yikes. About this recovery business.
Amazing how many ways the human body can malfunction and experience pain.
Prayers!
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