The Mermaid, The Surgery and Frasier Crane

For several years, The Muse and I watched Frasier. Eventually, like most really good TV shows, it stayed on too long and got pretty stupid, so we stopped watching. (Experiences like this make you realize just how incredible a show like Seinfeld was, where it pretty much stayed good until the end. Well, except for the finale in Seinfeld's case. And MASH's.) Anyway, one thing that Frazier himself said one time has stuck with me and became very relevant recently when The Mermaid became sick. Specifically, Frasier was talking to Roz about her in utero child, which she was having unwedlocked and thus worried about the experience, and told her:

"It's not just that you love your children, but that you actually fall in love with them."

Few truer words have ever been spoken and certainly not on TV. Well, maybe "trying to get something off the Internet is like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool" from NewsRadio, but you know what I mean.

The Frasier line popped loudly into my mind recently when The Mermaid got sick. Specifically, after a few miserable days (for The Mermaid) of hiding like a nasty stomach bug, an large ovian cyst decided that it needed to come out of The Mermaid. Right now. The Mermaid had just been talking about how she had never wanted to have surgery and, now, it was basically a health necessity. Once it was explained to her that she would be asleep and would not, as she put it, "feel them cutting me open," she was down with the idea because she wanted to get better. She now appears to be well on her way back to health, although things like parts of the incision popping open are still happening and we are still being quite vigilant about infections and she still doesn't want to look at the thing and neither do we really and we have talked to the on-call surgeon three times in the last two days and she has another appointment tomorrow. (What a fabulous health care system we are.)

The experience, however, has made me realize the truth of the Frasier line.

One oh-so-wonderful aspect of this experience was that, when the surgeons wheeled The Mermaid into surgery, they did not know exactly what they needed to do. The ER docs had thought that it was clearly a "hot appendix" that needed to come out, as they put it, but said that the surgeons wanted a CT scan to make sure before the surgery. For the few hours in the ER that we thought The Mermaid had a "hot appendix," it was oddly comforting. I know I was thinking, "Oh, a hot appendix is bad, but she's in the hospital and they take appendices out all the time and, hey, no one needs an appendix anyway." (We have "appendices" in the law business, so words like that occur to me.) Then the CT scan came back and, no, it wasn't an appendix, but some huge unknown thing inside The Mermaid that had to come out, right now. So, when they wheeled The Mermaid into surgery, they didn't know what they needed to do exactly.

And I don't really know if I have had a lower moment before. It is "please just do that to me because I don't want you to have to do that to her" moment. I will not say that nothing is worse than having your child wheeled into some unknown surgery because I know that there are worse things. I just know that I don't want to experience them because I know that never want to experience that again.

But then things picked up because the surgery went smoothly and, less than 24 hours later, The Mermaid was more or less back to herself, at least emotionally. In fact, the following 24 hours or so were a real eye-opener with The Mermaid.

If you are a loyal reader of this blog -- see that's irony (I think) because I know I haven't written on here for months, so I know that there aren't any loyal readers -- then you know that The Mermaid is high-functioning autistic. She also is 12 1/2. In the last 6 months to a year, she has been pretty withdrawn, keeping to herself a lot. Given her condition, this worried me some. It turns out, however, that she basically is just 12 1/2. While she was sitting there in her hospital bed between she kind got back into her own head and they sent her home (without the meds she needed, but, ah, that's different story), she was kind of a Chatty Kathe. I gave her the local newspaper's real estate section -- which she likes to read because she likes to see what houses go with what addresses, I think -- she said, "Thanks, Dad, that was really nice of you to give that to me." She finished watching whatever TV show she was watching and offered me the remote, saying, "Dad, if you want to watch baseball or basketball, that would be great."

The whole experience has been not just an arthimetic reminder of how much I love The Mermaid, but rather an exponential one, because the highs and the lows multiplied, not added, together.

It's Harry's World and We're Just Living In It

You may have heard that the new Harry Potter book came out. I have read it. It was good. There will be more on that later. Right now, though, I want to talk about the Harry experience.

Besides reading the book itself, I have really enjoyed how this has been A Harry Moment. It is one enjoyable aspect of having a mass media culture that lots and lots of people can live through a fun thing together. I remember reading at some point an article about the release of the Beatles' St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. (I'm pretty sure that I read this in 1987 when, you know, St. Pepper's had been "20 years ago today.") Someone in the article was describing how he had been in college at the time and he and his fraternity brothers were out on their balcony playing the album and he slowly realized that every other fraternity on the street had it playing out of their house, too. That's what the release of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows has been like.

We went to a big release party and stayed up until 12 midnight and watched as kids -- and adults -- gleefully came running out of the bookstore with their copies. We went with friends and, within five minutes of getting the book, their 8-year-old daughter was telling our 8-year-old son Enthusio that, "oooooh, there's a chapter called "The Wedding.'" I sucked up all of the reviews of the book as soon as I finished it. I watched MSNBC before it came out to hear about leaks of it and unauthorized sales and other examples of the Dark Arts that were deployed in the days leading up the release. I read Stephen King's column about how he couldn't wait for it to come out.

And I really enjoyed being a part of all of that. It just doesn't happen that often.

Most phenomena kind of sneak up on you and then are all over. The original Star Wars was kind of like that, as I recall from when I was 6. The Matrix was like that. Nirvana was like that. (I know I had a hard time grasping and enjoying "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when it first came out.) Michael Jackson's Thriller was kind of like that.

There are a lot of possible phenomena that don't become phenomena. Being a Star Wars -- well, "junkie" doesn't seem right, "devotee" or "acolyte," I suppose -- I was all geared up for The Phantom Menace to be freakin' awesome. Ask The Muse, she'll tell you. She taped the trailer off Rosie O'Donnell's show one day and I couldn't stop watching it. But, then, the movie came out and the initial signs weren't encouraging. And, then, I went to see it. And, then, I realized in horror that the movie actually . . . sucked. Sucked a lot. Had some really weird and questionable and borderline-racially-insensitive stuff in it like the trade federation guys who spoke like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Had Jar-Jar Binks. Noooooo! Attempted to explain how you became a Jedi from testing your blood for mitochlorides, I think, though I have tried to black the word out. Aaaaaaah!

So the experience of the last Harry Potter book's release has been great. Everyone was into it and the book was good and you couldn't get away from it in a good way. A fun time together was had by lots and lots of people. No one sang Cumbaya, but we could have.

And The Book Was Really Good, Too

BIG SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this if you are still in the dark about what happens in the last Harry Potter book. I will tell all.

So I read the last Harry Potter book. It took me about a week because The Muse and I were sharing it. She, however, was kind enough to read the whole 759-page thing in about two days, which, given that it came out on a Friday/Saturday, fit nicely with my work schedule. Thanks, Muse.

I thought the book was great. I kind of expected some of the major plots. There was no way in hell J.K. Rowling was going to kill Harry. You don't kill the thing that pulled you up from being a single mom on the dole to being wealthier than the Queen of England. Instead, you love that thing and make sure things work out for it. I had a sense that Snape wasn't evil and that Dumbledore would help Harry at the end. Campbellian mythology predicted these things.

While many of the reviews thus were undoubtedly right that the book was somewhat derivative of mythology and Tolkien and Star Wars and other sources, what you have to give to J.K. Rowling is her commitment to the story. She had set up, lovingly and lengthily, the story that Voldemort was not just mean, but flat-out evil, and that Harry would have to be the one to defeat him. In the words of Bugs Bunny, "of course, you know, this means war." And Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows was war. And Rowling committed to that fact.

Some modern pieces of mythology, much as I love them, shrank from the real meaning of their stories. In short, good guys didn't really die. In the Star Wars movies, there is an awful lot of carnage, but, when you think about it, no one you really cared about died. A lot of "Gold Leaders" and "Red 3's" and "Daxes" became balls o' flame, but none of the main characters died. Obi-Wan gave himself up and came back "more powerful than you can imagine," supposedly. The closest Star Wars came was when Han Solo was frozen in carbonite and, while that set off my personal first existential crisis, Han lived and fought on, smart-mouthed as ever. Similarly, in Tolkein, at least in the movies (got to admit, I haven't read the books), who really dies? Gandalf comes back. Gollum dies, but that was fine with me. The only important good guy who dies is Boromir and he deserved it because he tried to take the ring from Frodo. Hell, even Faramir survives his explicitly suidicial charge at the Orcs.

J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, had the courage to show you what a war against Voldemort meant. Fred Weasley died. We loved Fred. He and George made the magical swamp and gave Harry the Marauders' Map. How can George go on without Fred? Well, he'll have to because Fred died in the war. She killed Lupin?!? Poor tragic Lupin, bit by a werewolf as a child and doomed to be an outcast his whole life, has his great friends the Potters be killed, thinks his friend Sirius may be a mass murderer for 12 years, finds out that, no, his other friend Pettigrew betrayed the Potters, has Sirius be killed, finds happiness very briefly with Tonks and then they both get killed in the Battle of Hogwarts just after their son is born. Wow, that is some potent stuff. Hedwig, Harry's great owl friend. Dead. Madeye Moody, so desperate to fight Voldemort and protect Harry. Dead. Colin Creevey, who loved to take pictures. Dead.

And the one that hit me hardest of all, Dobby. Dobby, who loved Harry and who Harry freed (by tricking Lucius Malfoy into giving Dobby one of Harry's dirty socks), coming to save Harry and the others at the Malfoy's house because only Dobby could do it because he had House-elf magic and could apparate in his old master's house, shaking with fright and then killed by a dagger as they apparated out. Good Lord, what a moment.

These things made the ultimate resolution so much the better. Made it so much the better that it was goofy, forgetful, lame Neville, who found courage, had Gryffindor's sword emerge for him -- a true courageous Gryffindor -- from the Sorting Hat to lop the head off the snake, the last Horcrux. What a moment! Kind, worrying Mrs. Weasley doing in the evil Bellatrix Lestrange (what an evil name, like Scott Farkus) in motherly fury. Freakin' awesome! Snape's back story and horrible end. The Malfoys ultimately caring more about their kid than being evil. All of that, plus the escape from the Ministry, the escape from Gringotts and the fight inside the Room of Requirement. Whoa!

I think it was a great book and think that the series really is an astonishing achievement. I don't know how they are going to get the last book in a movie, but I know that I will go see it.