A Modest Proposal on Adulthood

     It is difficult to recognize the moment that you leave adolescence and attain adulthood in modern America.  In traditional societies, women are welcomed into adulthood upon the onset of first menses, just as menopause and the eventual cessation of fertility signals the arrival of old age.  But here in the States, there is no single, universal rite that announces, “You are now an adult.”   Passing a driving test, registering to vote or for selective service are just bureaucratic processes.   And as for the legal drinking age, why allow a vice that leaves you puking in the streets the first few times to be the moment that announces maturity?  I propose that we adopt as the symbol of adulthood a ritual that is considered taboo in open discussion and virtually unknown to most teens:  one’s first colonoscopy. 

     In my case, adolescence dragged through my twenties.  I was invulnerable, jogging braless and barefoot at night on the asphalt and concrete streets near Syracuse University.  My career was still undecided and I would chase will-o-the-wisps for another decade.  AND there was no likely marriage material on the immediate horizon . . . I had obviously blown the chance to earn my "Mrs" degree as a profligate and utterly neurotic undergraduate.

     I took a dreadful job as a legal secretary (this was before everyone became “administrative assistants” to make secretaries feel more important without requiring a pay upgrade).   The law firm paid each legal secretary almost nothing, and got what they paid for.  I worked for a boozy corporate litigator, who arose from his stupor only when I nudged him off the office couch with a large cup of fresh brewed coffee each morning.  In return, he provided me with regular exercise when he would call me because he had forgotten his briefcase.   I ran in heels over to the courthouse, up two flights of stairs carrying his briefs while he stalled and covered the smell of bourbon on his breath.  The other attorney was the son of a well-known local politician.  It was rumored that the firm allowed him only to fix traffic tickets with supervision for a long, long time.  Today, I smile with grim satisfaction as he advertises on radio and television as a litigious ambulance chaser.   

     Our secretarial pool was run by the daughter of a friend of the head of the firm who cracked the whip like an overseer on a plantation.  She was defensive about her youth and hostile to suggestions.   The younger secretaries feared her.   When I ignored the inflexibility of her rules, she began to time my visits to the ladies; room.  It was in my fourth month confined to my cushion-less office chair that I began to notice a new discomfort DOWN THERE.   No, not DOWN THERE – the OTHER SIDE.  

     I thought it might be my first acquaintance with a yeast infection or worse.  I had no health insurance until I had six months in.  I saved to visit my GP, who sent me to a specialist: a very old and relatively inexpensive proctologist.  My first visit was terrifying although he and his nurse explained everything in a kindly manner.  He had an old-school table that I have never seen since.  It was clear that most of his clients were men – no woman would have put up with this device.  It reminded me of what transpired at the end of weekly church suppers.  Each of the tables would fold in half to be neatly put away.  Except on this particular table, I was told “bend over”.   ANDDD, church suppers are more relaxing -- of course, this was long before proctologists and gastroenterologists made wide use of anesthetics for “small” procedures.  

     I asked for permission to leave the law office for my second visit, red faced and unable to tell my teen mutant supervisor why I needed a day off.  I went to my apartment and began to prep, a process which involved drinking two gallons of a nauseating, foul substance that no amount of ice could make palatable.  When I hear patients today complain about the new prep -- two coke can sized drinks with a choice of three flavors, I want to send them back to the deep dark 1970s and see how entire families suffered through the agony of monopolization of the single toilet household. 

     The next day, drawn and pale, I visited Dr. K’s table of darkness and submitted to a procedure in a part of my body that I rarely thought about.   Determined not to miss work, I spent precious dollars to purchase the so-called "doughnut hole" cushion and thought I had brought it unobtrusively into the office.  Asked the nosy teen supervisor without blinking, “Will that help you stay seated and work longer?”  I decided to seek work elsewhere and within two months found yet another dreadful but temporary position.  

     A few years later, my first husband invited me to the home of a college friend, Tom, who lived in a a local trailer park with his wife and kids.  His extended family lived in the trailers to the right and left of him.  Despite some degree of poverty, they worked hard for their pay and enjoyed life and family to the fullest, not unlike the loveable characters in the dated but still watchable sci-fi film, “The Last Starfighter”.  Tom’s father stood in the kitchen as we told stories and drank beer.  He refused a second beer, stating openly “It aggravates my hemorrhoids and I don’t want THAT experience again!”    It dawned on me that was with a fellow traveler.   

     I sidled up to him and said “You mean you’ve had that procedure?”  

     Without skipping a beat, he replied:  “That bend over the table experience!”

    “Did they blow up your intestines like a balloon?” 

    “Hell, they humiliated me as all that air loudly departed my body!"

     We began to compare probes and doctors with great laughter.  Long before celebrities urged the public not to ignore rectal bleeding, we discussed, gesticulated, and made human the procedure that forever separates the innocent from the knowing, as we face the recognition that our bodies will one day fail us in ways unfathomable in our youth.  

      Years later, I watched a “King of the Hill” episode in which Hank received the first cartoon colonoscopy – yep, the first animated portrayal of a cartoon rectal exam, with the animated doctor expertly racing through the animated large intestine projected on an animated  monitor in all its plump, pink animated detail.  I laughed with all the audience members across America who have eaten of that tree of knowledge.  

     I now more openly share my experiences with those whom I feel would benefit or are feeling a little nervous about this medical procedure.  At my last colonoscopy, a younger and profit-driven doctor had a group of us lined up in hospital beds on our sides.  As one of the male nurses placed an IV in my vein that was quite uncomfortable, I saw that they were used to terrified, complaining patients.  During a long delay I shared with them the story of one of my father’s last surgeries.  

My dad’s heart operation was delayed by complications of another patient already in the OR.  The minutes dragged on until my father slipped his hand under the sheets and pulled out a small harmonica.  For the next hour, he entertained the nurses and technicians with “Red River Valley” and various Irish tunes.  When it was his turn, he had endured and laughed. . . and when he awoke in intensive care, he was spoiled by every nurse on the floor who had heard of the miraculously good-natured patient who smuggled his harmonica into the operating room.  

     The two male nurses smile appreciatively, and I dryly add, “Of course, I guess all you get around here are a lot of assholes.”  The joke genie is out of the bottle, and these young men know that I will give and take a lot of ribbing as we deal with nervous stress.  After quite a few corny and obvious jokes, they ask if I need anything.  I admit that I am cold and the IV in my hand hurts.  Suddenly they rush to bring extra pillows and blankets and readjust the IV to make me as comfortable as a princess.    

     At least. . . as comfortable as a mature, adult, butt up in the air princess can be. 

The Sweetest Memory

   If I follow the driveway past what was once my parents’ farmhouse, there is a path along a small steep field that burrows into a line of woods dotted by sugar maples, the occasional oak, and battered pine trees on the edge of a vast wetland.   Other paths, less well maintained, lead to large fields once used for baling hay or pasture for our Holsteins.   As a child, I felt great power picking up a stick and shepherding forty placid black and white beasts through the woods, across the road, and into the barn for milking.  Today I can only return to those woods in my ever fading memories.

       I imagine that the disused path is badly in need of clearing.  Many bramble bushes and small saplings have by now sprung up to create a barrier.  Just beyond the hilltop's rocky out-croppings grow old sugar maples that protect the wildflowers of early spring.  If you peer carefully into the thick undergrowth, you will see a faint sign that long ago stood a building used to produce maple syrup.   My father allowed himself to show no sadness when the sugar house, which provided a small income each February, collapsed from age and harsh elements.   Instead, he re-purposed the stones of the crumbling foundation into a retaining wall surrounded by flowers, bushes, and a smoke tree.  These are now enjoyed by the new owners of the home that was in my family for over a century.  Remembering these woods in winter is the ointment I apply each year to a heart that does not easily come to terms with change and loss. 

          As a child of five or six, I experienced some of the deepest lake effect snowfalls in New York history.   By the sixties my father's old but reliable tractor had completely replaced the draft horses that once plowed a route from the sugar house to the mature maples throughout the woods.  The path had to be cleared regardless of weather conditions.  After  a tediously long time, the deep snow was plowed and the sugar house was officially re-opened.  

     Profit margins were too small to waste a penny, so the old tools, buckets  and machinery were checked for damage and repaired if possible.  My father and several hired hands would then drill  small spouts into each sugar maple.   My father carefully supervised the placement of each tap, for if the new holes were drilled too close to old ones, large sections of the wood would be damaged and the tree slowly die.  Only then did the workers hang a bucket on each tap, in readiness for those days in late January or early February when sunny days were followed by nights of bitter cold.  On these days, the sweet watery sap flowed upward and out be emptied by hand into a large vat.  The tractor pulled the vat through the woods until full.  The vat was then brought up the hill that nestled against the sugar house and the precious liquid emptied into a holding bin.  From the bin, the sap flowed downhill into silvery evapor-ating pans deep in the sugar house. 

       In an image reminiscent of salmon working their way upstream through man made ladders, the sap was heated and evaporated through a series of parallel pans.  The process was monitored as long as the season lasted.  If the temperature was too high, the sap would boil over dangerously.  Small pats of butter were ready to be tossed in to lower the bubbling syrup back to a safe level.  Wood that had been cut and stacked all summer was now used in a  roaring fire until forty-six gallons of sap boiled down to produce a single gallon of pure maple syrup.  As it entered the final pan, a small amount was poured into a vial and its color  com-pared to vials of different gradation.  Only the light amber grade A syrup commanded the public’s top dollar – the darker syrup was kept for home use or to make maple sugar.  We felt ourselves the luckier consumers because the dark grade tasted stronger and sweeter.   

      Unless he was milking cows in the barn, my father stayed in the woods in the uninsulated sugar shack until all that day’s sap was boiled into syrup, sometimes not finishing until four in the morning.   The lonely, tedious job was relieved only by the rare visitor to give him respite.  Few tackled the bone-chilling elements to see syrup made in these snowy woods.      

        I now imagine myself at age five or six being dressed at the farmhouse in so many layers of pants, sweaters and coats that if I fall down, I may never rise again.  My hands are covered by warm, if unmatching mittens, my feet in layers of socks and stuffed into somewhat waterproof boots.  My mother opens the door, entrusting me with sandwiches and a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar filled with warm milk and a generous dollop of Hershey’s chocolate syrup.  I begin the slow walk up the hill, fighting the snow that has again drifted across the trail. 

      As I struggle through the beautiful but often hip-deep snow, my breath turns into the whitest fog.  There is no social worker to accuse my parents of child endangerment.  But I know these woods well, and confidently conquer the crest of the hill using the sweetly scented thick smoke rising out of the rooftop chimney as my reassuring guidepost.  

        I round the bend past the enormous pile of wood and enter a door on the far side.  My dad greets me in a wool cap, ear flaps down, his twinkling blue Irish eyes warming me more than the hot chocolate I bring in my hands.  We greet each other and then I sit patiently as he wolfs down his supper.   I assist here and there, bringing in a small piece of wood, funneling out the imperfections like sugar sand or dropping a big pat of butter into the evaporation pans to see the magical lowering of the boiling liquid.  But more often, I try to steal a bit of the thick nectar and wait for it to cool enough that I can sip its delicately fragrant sweetness.  

       I must leave to walk home alone before dusk.  But if I wait for my father to close up, the sun will have set and the black silhouettes of the trees will be lit only by a sparkling blanket of deep snow.   He will place his large work glove covered hand over my small one, and walk us slowly and deliberately over the hill and out into the field that overlooks our home.  

            As we cross the field, his boots sink deep into the snow but mine float on a thick crust formed only on the chilliest winter nights.   The first stars appear above us in radiant assur-ance of happiness and security.  Although this promise cannot be kept, it will remain in the memory palace of a young girl’s heart.