After my eye operation, I was shut up for a week in a friend's apartment (no stairs) where she made me meals while I lay around trying to keep my head parallel to the floor for fourteen hours a day. It was exhausting work. Anyone who has ever had intrusive eye surgery or cared for someone who did knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Apparently I didn't do it well. Or maybe the operation didn't go well. It's hard to tell, and it's water under the bridge, it ain't comin' back again.
I listened to The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne on tape. I have no idea what went on in that book as characters came and went confusingly over the generations but there was at least one very bad man in it, or perhaps several, and justified revenge was exacted. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which I had read previously a long time ago in ninth grade, went down easier because the action was more straightforward and there was one very good man, or perhaps several, in it although no justice was achieved.
Towards the end of my week in a coma I did take two walks outside for about 20 minutes each, delighting in handling cool packages of cold cuts in a store I stumbled around in for a few minutes. I tried to use Apple Pay, newly installed in the "wallet" on my new I-phone, to pay for some pasta but I was incapable of successfully negotiating that transaction and paid with cash as the people on line behind me started staring hard at me as the bumbling minute turned into three or four minutes lost forever to all of us. At the end of the week I went back home for the night, halfway back to the Kaiser Permanente facility in Northern Virginia where the surgery a week before had been performed, so I could present myself the next morning for my one week eye exam.
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