Graucho On the Wall

I don’t suppose there is anything anyone could do about it.  Westchester County will always have primal centrality for me.  It is forever familiar.  I grew up here.  And I haven’t lived here since, what?  1980 or so, when I moved (reluctantly) up to Poughkeepsie, into my maternal grandmother’s place.  Any friends I had have long since left and I don’t know anyone who still lives here.  My dad and stepmom moved up to Ulster County a few years back.  They were last hold outs. 

 

Driving down 684, I approach Bedford Hills, where my dad, my stepmom, my brother used to live.  Memories of driving from his house, to his house, around his house to some place near his house.  The rocks, the trees, the underpass, everything is familiar.  The GPS says to get off 684 in Goldens Bridge.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen this hamlet before, beyond the drive past the Metro North Station. I skirt along a side road that approximately hugs 684, passed farm houses that have long since been redone into posh chateaus and mentally I compare them to the farmhouses of Ulster County, further north that haven’t yet been gentrified.  All along the way I am convinced that I’ll see a sign for Armonk any moment now, but soon I’m swearing as the GPS is now leading me back on to 684 going south.  This means I’ve idiotically wasted my time for the last twelve minutes, pointlessly pursuing side roads.  Anger then, at the inanimate, artificial intelligence. 

The Doc I’m seeing had tended to my ex-brother-in-law, who had in-turn recommended him to my father.  An osteopath, he’d offered my dad a few simple suggestions that, to hear my pop speak had changed his life. I’d been born without a hip socket and had one built from other bones of mine and it grew and held and miraculously it has worked fine for the last 55 years.  But for the last decade or so I’ve increasingly had pain on my left foot that can cause me to limp.  More recently a pain which I’d mistakenly self-diagnosed as one-too-many bottles of Gruner Veltliner inflaming my kidney or my liver, turned out to be a muscular ache, tied to the same physiological ache in my left foot.

 

I liked Dr. Erner from the get-go.  He had a mirthful photo of Graucho on the wall, as the fearless Captain Spaulding sitting next to an outraged Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Rittenhouse from “Animal Crackers.”  He had me stand, sit, bend over, and press one raised knee inward and then do the same with the second and with that he seemed to grok my body’s imbalance.  The insoles I had?  Useless.  He wants me to see his recommended podiatrist and to get a back exam and return. 

He wrote up a prescription as we looked down on the cherry blossoms that lined the parking lot of the office park down below.  I mentioned the sakura of Tokyo and he rushed me into his office to show me the work his son had produced during a program he had attended in Tokyo, to learn to draw manga.  And I told him that my little one is now obsessed with the same aesthetic. 

 

It will be remarkable if this consultation really does lead to the resolution of my foot pain, my back pain.  Odd that I waited this long to do something about this. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 04/13/21