East Coast Ramble - Part 3 - Bury My Wounded Heart at Blue Heaven

My turn to get into a hospital gurney. Time for knee surgery. My doctor is a top-class orthopedic surgeon who has patched up many pro football players, soccer players, and other athletes. He has described my knee problem as a “pretty good’’ lateral meniscus tear. I could let it go, but it would haunt me. Better to let him use his tiny video-camera-on-a-stick and buzzing alligator-jaw implement to remove it. “Your meniscus is like an o-ring,’’ he said. “Take the bad piece off and the rest of it still works.’’ Manfully, I pretended to understand what an o-ring was, imagining it has something to do with car engines. The doctor and I have had a few chats about Africa, because he volunteers for Doctors Without Borders when he’s not repairing bones in the Keys. He has been to Haiti already three times since the earthquake. He has been to Africa before, and they are sending him to Somalia, next.

The girls and Uncle Brent, who arrived safely for his visit in Key West from Phoenix last night, all stayed home when I went to the hospital. Who cares about a middle-aged guy getting elective arthroscopic knee surgery for a soccer injury, even though I could have died?

But I didn’t. In fact I was home a few hours later and felt well enough to hobble around without crutches, even though my left knee had three small, sutured holes in it and my leg was swaddled in white muslin from ankle to thigh. Now it was time to finish packing up the house. With a bad knee, two over-excited children and a still-recuperating Tahra.

Uncle Brent to the rescue! This guy -- this sensitive hunky deep-thinking adrenaline-junky doctor-of-physics Grand Canyon hiking landscape photographing Ultimate Frisbee all-star uncle, who parachutes out of planes every weekend and plays kickass guitar licks, who once starred in a band called The Revolvers who opened a Tucson show for The MONKS OF DOOM (Camper van Beethoven, anyone?), who drives a fast BMW and makes a lot of money doing something complicated on computers, who once took a U-haul filled with all of MY old junk from our parents’ basement in Virginia all the way to Key West, by himself – had come down to help us out with moving stuff once again, and to see the girls and see us off. The reasons this man is still single are as hard to fathom as the elusive Fifth Quark*. Girls: he won’t last another year. Book your tickets to Scottsdale, quickly, but walk softly when you get there. Hunters have had more luck snaring snow leopards in the Himalayas, though outdoorsy supermodels from Stanford might fare ok.

Anyway, last week in Key West. Tahra and I packed up the house, with much assistance from Brent, who knows I don’t get much time with Tahra and tried hard not to be in the way while simultaneously maximizing his helpfulness. The girls helped, too, by thoroughly taping shut completely empty boxes, making fully-furnished houses (for themselves) out of large boxes while we were trying to pack them, decorating boxes and the floor with Sharpies, popping costly bubblewrap and thwarting us in the midst of trying to give away a small fraction of some their never-used toys.

Five days and a lot of packed boxes later, we reluctantly said goodbye to Brent, put him on a plane back to Phoenix and hired our fantastic babysitter, Kelsey, from down the block to watch the kids for a few hours so we could go out to dinner on our last night in Key West. Kelsey showed up for the job with her live pet duck, Prissy, in a stroller. Is it any wonder the kids love her?

Fitting that our last dinner out in Key West should be at Blue Heaven, site of my first dinner out in Key West, more than ten years ago, when I was a lonely wounded man incapable of experiencing love -- until I met Tahra at the restaurant a week or two later. On this, our final night in town, we sat under the boughs of the great Spanish lime tree and enjoyed the company of friends Liv, Will, Hanrow and Ashley with lobster, snapper and scallops, hand-picked bottles of excellent wine and a lot of funny stories. Richard and Suanne, our good-hearted friends and owners of this famous, iconic and for us – intimately historic – restaurant, showed up at the end of our meal, stole the bill and gave us hugs, and wished us luck. “You’re off on a new adventure!” said Suanne.

* Editor's Note: For anyone interested, I believe the Fifth Quark is/was something important that may or may not be real, and which after great effort by Nobel Prize winners was actually discovered at Fermilab, a giant underground particle accelerator where Brent once worked as a research physicist trying to discover how the universe was created. Brent can (and will) correct me if I'm wrong.

* New Editor's Note: Brent May clarifies that it was actually the SIXTH Quark, also known as the Top Quark, that was such a big deal. It was "postulated and then observed'' at Fermilab (DOE lab outside Chicago.) Kinda scary that he knows what this means.

Above: Ursula meets Prissy on our front porch steps in Key West