Archives for December 16, 2019

As those of you who follow me in the social media may already know, Mrs. T spent Saturday night in the emergency room of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, her transplant center. Our original plan had been to spend the evening at home, watching Gone With the Wind on TCM. Instead, Mrs. T unexpectedly developed acute respiratory difficulties related to pulmonary hypertension, the chronic illness for which she is awaiting a double lung transplant. We called 911, and an ambulance rushed her to the hospital minutes later. Twenty-four hours after that, she was finally transferred from the ER to the intensive-care unit, that being how long it took for an ICU bed to open up. Moral: try not to have a respiratory crisis in upper Manhattan on a Saturday night the week before Christmas!

Mrs. T is still in the ICU as I write these words. The doctors there are endeavoring to figure out exactly what went wrong with her, get it under control, and decide what relevance this current crisis has to her long-term problems. The good news is that her condition now appears to be fairly stable, at least for the present. Earlier this morning she was successfully connected to an ECMO machine, a newish device not unlike a heart-lung machine that oxygenates her blood directly. She is now resting more or less comfortably while we wait for the next step, whatever it may be—perhaps even the transplant that she so desperately needs.

I’ve spent most of the past two days at Mrs. T’s bedside, and can report that while the chairs in the New York-Presbyterian ER are comprehensively uncomfortable, the doctors and nurses there and in the ICU are as good as it gets. Likewise the EMT technicians who transported Mrs. T from our living-room couch to the ER in nothing flat. We are overflowing with gratitude in all possible directions.

Needless to say, things are still up in the air, and I will keep you posted. In the meantime, our thanks to all of you who have reached out on Facebook and Twitter to wish Mrs. T well. I’ve been passing on your messages of love and hope, and they have warmed both of our hearts.

Because of Mrs. T’s illness, I didn’t post quite as much in this space in 2019 as I have in previous years. Nevertheless, I’ve been a reasonably active blogger, and I thought you might be interested in revisiting ten of the postings I liked best from the year just past:

• In 1939, Edward G. Robinson commissioned and sat for a family portrait by Edouard Vuillard. Go here to find out how “La famille d’Edward G. Robinson” came to be—and what ultimately became of it.

• Don Shirley was the first black musician I ever saw perform in public, all the way back in 1969. As I recalled in February, “The ‘Don Shirley’ of Green Book is in many ways very much like the man I saw on the stage of the Smalltown Middle School gymnasium.”

• “It happens that I’d never been in an auto accident before. What surprised me most about the experience was how loud it was. The crunching sound that you hear when another car runs into you is really quite overwhelming ….”

• “It struck me a couple of months ago that Mrs. T’s recent travails had made her even more deserving than usual of a just-because-I-love-you present. Since she now spends most of her time at our farmhouse in Connecticut, I decided to give her a work of art that would not only be pleasing specifically to her (our tastes are not identical, though they overlap widely) but would also be suitable for hanging there….”

• “I was twenty-two when I met Harry Jenks, the first great jazz musician to enter my life. He taught me more than any of my teachers, and meant as much to me as a person as anyone outside my immediate family. Not a week has gone by since his death that I haven’t thought about him….”

• “Eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger now fills me with memories of one of the most joyful parts of a largely happy life….”

• “Ten years ago tonight, the Santa Fe Opera gave the premiere of The Letter, the first of my four collaborations—three operas and a cantata—with Paul Moravec, whose music I loved long before either of us thought of working together. Writing it changed my life utterly and profoundly….”

• “Two weeks ago, Mrs. T’s cellphone, which she keeps turned on around the clock, as I do mine, in the hope of learning that donor lungs have become available, rang at three a.m. The caller, a transplant coordinator from New York-Presbyterian Hospital, told her that the hospital had just received an ‘organ offer’ from UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, for which she was the number-one match on the waiting list….”

• When a friend dies far too young, you’re likely to find yourself reflecting on your own latter end. That’s what happened to me in September.

• “In New York City, where I’ve lived since 1985, family traditions, like family ties, are what you make of them, and I know many people who are content, or at least willing, to make nothing of them at all. Not so, however, in Smalltown, where past and present are as close as the pages of a book….”

Julie Andrews sings “I Could Have Danced All Night,” from My Fair Lady, on an episode of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show originally telecast by NBC on January 12, 1958. Andrews was then appearing in the show on Broadway:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.”

William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality”