Wednesday morning at 7:15 a.m. found me in the ambulatory surgery center on the third floor of the Bensley Pavilion at Summit Health’s Berkeley Heights campus.
I was there for that procedure gastroenterologists suggest you have every few years — the one no one wants to discuss but comedians have built entire careers around. A kind but matter-of-fact nurse deposited me in Bay 17. After confirming I was who I claimed to be, she left me to disrobe, seal my clothes and belongings into plastic bags, and step into one of those hospital gowns — the kind that makes you wonder why, with all the advances in modern medicine, we still submit to such ridiculous garments.
All gowned up, lying on the hospital bed, covered in a heated blanket the nurse had tucked around me before departing, I was left to wait. With my phone sealed into one of those plastic bags, there would be no doomscrolling to dissolve time and rot my brain. I was forced (don’t tell anyone) to think.
The first thing I focused on was the ceiling tile. Instead of a standard acoustic tile, the design team at Summit Health had installed an opaque plastic panel with an image of the sky and lovely fluffy clouds. It was certainly better to look at than a plain tile, but in no way could it be mistaken for the actual outdoors. It made me wonder about a few things. First, did someone conduct an expensive and far-reaching study showing that looking at a fake sky reduces the stress of patients waiting for a procedure? Or was this a marketing ploy by “big tile” to sell more expensive products to “big medicine”?
My mind did not stay there long. I am sure some Eastern mystic could have found much to contemplate in that tile, but I lack the depth to do that. Instead, my mind drifted to my childhood — not surprising, since the first ten years of my life were spent in this neighborhood, just a few blocks from where I lay.
In front of where Summit Health now stands is literally where the sidewalk ended. On occasion, my brother and I would wait there for my father when he walked home from his job at Bell Telephone Laboratories, only a stone’s throw away.
Across the street was Bishoff’s Farm — an actual working farm, one of the last holdouts from the days when New Jersey had truly earned the name “The Garden State.” David and I loved it, not for the produce but for the nickel our parents would sometimes press into our hands so we could buy a bottle — yes, a glass bottle — from the wonderfully complicated vending machine. You had to guide the bottle through a little maze to free it from the cooler, which somehow made the drink taste better before you even opened it.
Directly adjacent to where I now lay was a large apple orchard. Every autumn we eagerly awaited the owner’s hanging of a large apple on the ancient oak bordering Mountain Avenue, announcing that freshly pressed apple cider and newly picked apples were available. I remember being amazed by the huge manual apple press that used cheesecloth as a filter — and drinking so much cider my stomach ached.
Just then, a new patient was brought into the bay next to mine. It was an extremely young child, perhaps two or three, and she was not happy — at the top of her lungs. Shrieking, crying, exclaiming, and kicking, she actively conveyed her displeasure with her situation to the rest of us awaiting our procedures.
Needless to say, the warm and misty palace of memories I had so carefully constructed to shield me from reality came crashing down. Instead, I now had to deal with the vocal emotions of a toddler whose screams were giving voice to all the fears I had locked behind some steel-gated door in my subconscious. It was perturbing.
I didn’t want to be upset with the child. Who could blame a toddler for screaming when they are scared? But I am human, and this child was hitting every exposed nerve — somewhere between fingernails on a blackboard and hearing Nappy Don speak. Not good. So I took a beat, then a deep breath, and tried to focus on something else.
Oddly, for this Jewish guy, the first thing that came to mind was that it was Ash Wednesday. Which reminded me of my friend Fran Farrell, a devout Catholic in the same way Stephen Colbert practices his faith — always trying to do the right thing with humor and grace. Fran died a few years ago after a long battle with ALS, a disease he refused to let defeat him. I often think of him in difficult situations (he always had better angels than I did) and imagine the advice he would have given me. No doubt he would have reminded me the child was terrified and expressing it the only way she knew how — that my sympathy should lie with her, not my fragile state of mind. I had the tools to feel compassion, despite the fact that someone was about to take a picture of me from the inside out using a portal meant for exiting as an entrance.
It made me recall a phone conversation I once had with my sister during a period in my life when I spent more time in airplane seats than in my own recliner. I had called her from my seat while we were at the gate when an infant in the row behind me decided to demonstrate how loudly her vocal cords could resonate. I may have made some disparaging remark about infants on airplanes when my much younger sister schooled me. She said, “You have no idea what it’s like to travel with small children. Do you know how frustrating and embarrassing it is for a parent to have a venting, cranky child on an airplane? Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you should have a little compassion for the mom.”
Just then Dr. Propofol (not his real name) showed up and asked if I was ready for some “milk of amnesia.” Okay, he didn’t say that exactly, but it was the implication — and before I knew it, I didn’t.
Later that day I was doomscrolling. Please don’t judge me. I had learned from previous experiences with anesthesia that doing anything requiring thought or reflection is ill-advised afterward. (I still have not been able to unload that timeshare in Chechnya.) Doomscrolling was practically designed for post-amnesia behavior.
Anyway, I came across a video of Stephen Colbert being interviewed by Dua Lipa. I know — weird — but she asked him an exceptional question: how his faith informed his comedy. He said:
“Sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it. Because the laughter keeps you from having fear of it. And fear is the thing that keeps you turning to evil devices to save you from the sadness. So if there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity, and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”
Perhaps it was because I was still high from the Jackson juice that I seemed to have an epiphany at that point.
Donald Trump is that terribly unhappy child who does not have the skills to express himself except to bellow, whine, cry, and stamp his cankled feet. We have the tools to ignore his imagined demons and hissy fits. We should not let him occupy our thoughts but instead focus on those who are really suffering: the undocumented and documented who feel ICE has put a target on their back; the people of color whose culture, history, and place within our society he seems hell-bent on undermining; the transgender and LGBTQ communities he seeks to marginalize and demonize; the economically challenged whose safety net he seeks to dismantle to provide tax breaks for the rich and powerful.
And how do we confront a man who never smiles, has no sense of humor, and seems preternaturally incapable of laughter? Humor and joy. He can never defeat us if we keep our sense of humor and use it as a cudgel against him. Here is an example:
Q: How many Donald Trumps does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One — he just holds the bulb still and insists the world revolves around him.
Fear demands attention. It always has. Some express it in tears, some in anger, some in power. But laughter is the one response fear cannot survive, because it refuses to grant fear authority over the moment. We cannot stop people from shouting, but we can refuse to become people who shout back in kind. If we keep our humanity — and our sense of humor — then the noise becomes just noise, and the frightened child, whether in a hospital bay or on a much larger stage, no longer gets to decide who we are.
Blame it on Rio 