Monthly Archive

As I’m confident that my readers have been waiting with baited breath for word from me since my last post, I offer my apology for being so negligent…

With the present post, I will have seemed to have gone full circle, from feeling that it is slightly gauche to carry on about one’s maladies, to putting it all on display.  The accompanying illustration stolen from the Mayo Clinic website shows the procedure I underwent on the twenty-first of this month.

Since my trip to the hospital in January, in spite of several medications, my heart was beating at a constant 130 beats per minute.  It is now beating at +/-50 BPM.  I have a followup this coming Tuesday with the doctor who performed this procedure.

Though one of my readers — a physician himself — described this procedure as “rather ho-hum” (see last post’s ‘Comments’), as I pointed out to him, “All very well and good for y o u to say!  It wasn’t y o u r heart they were cathetering around in;-)”

But enough of that.  I’m going to resume my speed walking tomorrow.

And since tomorrow is Easter Sunday, I include the following text exchange my friend Will W and I engaged in last week, which got started over an incidental mentioning of George Steven’s (Shane, Giant, A Place in the Sun) movie ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ — a movie massively panned in 1965 in part because of cameo-casting of nearly every star in Hollywood at the time.

Including Pat Boone.  I’m serious.

This exchange includes references only two movie buffs — one 65 and the other 71 — would understand.  I simply will not inflict historical explanations upon the junior reader.  Feel free to thank me.

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“Speaking of ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, I saw it in Atlanta in 1965 in Cinerama with my longtime friend Tony, who begged me (well, he floated the idea) to leave at intermission.  Our friendship was on the decline at that juncture as I recall, and this may well have pushed it over the edge.  A major review at the time said the premiere in NY was enlivened only by the souvenir books sliding off laps and hitting the floor with a thud as attendees nodded off.  This remark is right up there with the white corpuscle attacking the mini-sub in ‘Fantastic Voyage’ being described as resembling ‘a large aggressive hominy grit’.  Unsurpassed in movie criticism.  Sadly, ‘TGSET’ has the best art direction in any ‘Biblical epic’ before or since.  And, sadly in a different way, Shelley Winters touching the hem of Max Von Sydow’s garment, and exclaiming “Oi’m healed, oi’m healed!” in perfect Brooklynese.

.   .   .   .   .   .

So did you leave at Intermission or not?

.   .   .   .   .   .

The only two movies I think I’ve ever walked out of are Elvis Presley’s ‘Double Trouble’, and a second feature (which Disney used to pair with reissues of animated features) about the Vienna Boy’s Choir.  What was I doing at ‘Double Trouble’?  I was in basic training in the Air Force seeking any escape, but ‘DT’ proved too much even under those circumstances.  Saw Francis Coppola’s ‘You’re a Big Boy Now‘ at that time, too.  You win some, you lose some…”

Tomorrow I go into the hospital for a procedure called ‘cardiac ablation’.  I’m not entirely sure why, but I feel not just a little peculiar announcing this here on the blog, but there it is.  You can read about it, or not, with the link attached to the term here.  Even though I certainly know what’s about to take place, I myself have kept a safe distance from the nuts and bolts outlined in such an article in order not to induce panic.  That seems sensible, am I right?

So, instead, let’s listen to Stacey Kent and her piano accompanist David Newton, both of whom I’m crazy about.  The little keyboard trills on this track, so nice.

Also on this record is My Heart Stood Still, much more upbeat than Easy to Remember, but let’s face it, a little tacky to consider including at this juncture…

(I’ll save that one for the day after tomorrow.)

And so does my husband Stephen (our house is full), but that’s another story.

To avoid a March vacuum here on Domani Dave, I offer this piece from seven years ago, which several posts back I threatened to recycle.

Sharp-eyed Bare-breasted Boys

March 2, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I began my forth year of walking for exercise, every single day.  I walk a roundtrip distance of two and a quarter miles, the same stretch — from Broad Street, crossing Baxter, to Five Points, and back — and I do it in about twenty-nine minutes.  It would not occur to me to skip this daily routine.  Though I’ve mentioned this walk a couple of times on this blog, you’ll have to take it on faith that I do not stop people on the street to natter on about it.

Why the same strip of sidewalk?  Well, for one thing, it’s flat and it’s predictable, and it’s a block away from the street where we live.  It’s also one of the busiest streets in town, and I’d be less than honest if I said that the fact that people tell me that they see me walking all the time doesn’t give me some kind of validation.  I also see a number of other ‘regulars’ — we don’t know each other, but we wave.  Stephen jokes about how I need to get out there with my ‘peeps’.

I used to wear sunglasses, but I found it isolated me from people walking in the opposite direction.  People smile and acknowledge you if they can make eye contact, not so much with sunglasses.  Which brings me to another aspect of my routine.  The street I walk on is a very popular jogging route.  And this is a college town.  Hello!  I know it’s going to get cold again before this is all over, but recently the weather has gotten almost warm, and the jogger shirts came off.

Admittedly, I get a bit blasé as the Summer rolls on.  On the odd evening that Stephen might ask for a report, I eventually end up describing some youth as ‘standard-issue gorgeous’ because the details get so repetitive.  Only if there is a magic combination of height (six-three, maybe) and shoulder width, for example, will I get into tiresome (!) particulars.  But, back to sunglasses, or the lack thereof.

I read somewhere a long time ago that evolutionarily speaking, one of the refinements the human species acquired for survival is the ability to tell with great accuracy where another pair of eyes are trained, even at a considerable distance.  Let me corroborate.  If I espy an approaching jogger, and closing at thirty feet away I allow my eyes to b r i e f l y drift below his navel, inVARiably there will be some subtle indication that this glance has been detected.  Though I’m well-past caring, it IS somewhere between frustrating and fascinating.

In spite of this post, my handful of readers will know me to be a gentleman of taste and breeding, and nothing like a dirty old man.  Well, old, yes, and maybe a bit dirty, but not dirty and old in combination with each other.  It should also be pointed out that whereas I have great legs, it would never occur to me to display my own bosom while out on the hoof.  I’ve s e e n contemporaries in this state of déshabillé, and the next one that comes along, well, there’s going to be an intervention.