November's not for sissies

How to cram the last 5 weeks in one blog post? Halloween weekend was a celebration of the last weekend of freedom before my return to being a slave to my pager, to TFM and to the needs of patients, colleagues and administration. I enjoyed it fully with a weekend in Seattle, playing a remarkable concert with RCB to a sold out house. Our concert theme was TV Land, complete with a LGBT and Ally friendly Brady Bunch video and sing along (below!!).

I dressed as a mad scientist last year. This year I was daddy Warbucks, complete with a bald head, three piece tux and pocket watch. I also had with me a pretty convincing Orphan Annie!

November rolled in like a steam truck and plowed pretty quickly over the peace and balance I had spent most of October carefully cultivating. My grandfather, not a month after his 99^th birthday, died. It feels like one minute he’s doing his morning calisthenics, shoving 5-dollar bills in my hand, telling the same jokes he told me last time I visited. Then, the next minute, my mother calls to tell me he’s dying. In a way, it was a good way to go, relatively quickly with people you love by your side. His funeral was in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida in a plot adjacent to my Grandmother, Minna. My mother and her sister, their two children, and the five of us cousins were able to make it. A pretty amazing event. I can’t even recall the last time all five cousins were in one place. I think it would have made Grandpa very happy to see us all.

The most riotous part of the funeral (yes, we put the fun in funeral) is hard to pick out. Getting lost in a minivan with family had its charms. Mother’s quirks were particularly funny – in that van adventure she must’ve called her sister 2 dozen times announcing each intersection as we passed it to make sure she knew we were finally going the right way. Self-depreciating humor was rampant and the men poked fun at the suggestion of their submission to the powerful Jewish women in my family. We Detroiters had stories of being held up at gunpoint, Black Panther and police evasion, and mayoral corruption (circa 1970’s and 80’s – how retro! Funny how little things have changed). Somehow, even the darkest jokes coaxed everyone into laugher at one point or another. The resident Catholic even managed to get a few colorful nun jokes in there.

From the funeral I basically went right back to work, where I found my fellow residents falling out here and there, felled by the flu or other family emergency. I worked twice as hard as I had anticipated, filling in on extra clinics, working as back up on the weekends, working on my elective at an HIV clinic in Tacoma. Not to mention a number of presentations I’ve done over the month: formal, informal, at meetings, teaching sessions and the like. In fact, instead of writing this blog post, I should be preparing a presentation on the culturally competent care of transgender patients and a quick overview on hormone therapy and standards of care. But, I’m not! Or, rather I should be working on my research for my 3^rd year project. But, obviously, I’m not.

Thanksgiving 2 years ago I was on call at the hospital, getting pimped in the morning by ruthless (er, invested) teachers and feeding my sorrows in the afternoon with 12-hour-old, 3,000-calorie cinnamon rolls listening to cheerful voicemails from my family’s respective celebrations. Last year was a huge improvement. While I still had to work too much to travel, I did find some time to enjoy Thanksgiving Seattle-style with sushi and salmon at my cousin’s place surrounded by a number of relatives from around Washington State. I also had the immense joy of busting my chops Christmas Caroling with Renegayde.

This year traveling far was out of the question as the time off was not guaranteed, and the two days of traveling it would take to get to anything in the Central or Eastern time zone would make the trip essentially futile (and maybe more stress than its worth). So, Karin and I opted to hit up a beach on the Oregon coast. We were pleased to have some sunlight and enjoyed the hotel hot tub and in-room fireplace. Always non-conformists, we walked the beaches on the windy day and flew a kite on the calm and sunny day (pic at left). We visited bookstores and toy stores and tried to whale watch, however, as I lifted the binoculars to my face to try and spot a spouting behemoth the woman working at the whale watching center mentioned to another employee that "there's nothing out there this time of year". No whales. Maybe in a few weeks. Alas, before I could even focus the binoculars, I put them back on the table. They were probably teeming with bacteria anyway, and we were much better off eating bagfuls of salt-water taffy driving up Highway 101 admiring the view.