Don't Break Your Foot in New Jersey

I broke my fifth metatarsal on December 31, 2001. On January 1, 2002, I had it x-rayed and set, and I spent that semester, until my Spring Break in Paris, in a cast cleverly painted with orange flames by my artistic roommate, Lori. It was a pain, but I managed, with the help of the roomies and the USC shuttle bus, the drivers of which knew me by name within a few weeks. I relaxed on the couch with my fire-engine red hair and my casted leg propped up on the armrest, typing on my laptop. I finagled a bookbag that rested on the small of my back so as not to throw me off balance. I got my shower time down to ten minutes: garbage bag, blue artist's tape, plastic bench to sit on in the tub, leg propped up on the side.

Walking with crutches is sort of like riding a bike. I suspect that once you've learned how to maneuver, you never really forget, so when you have to do it again, you pick it up easier, get stronger faster, and don't have to try as hard to figure out how to go up steps or carry your purse.

--

Saturday night. 11:15 PM. Lower East Side of Manhattan. Walking across a small street on our way to a milonga. Two sets of dance shoes in purse. Pothole.

The pain that I felt when I first felt myself falling from twisting my foot on the pothole I don't really remember. I remember not being able to feel my foot and not being able to really breathe. I remember grabbing Sasan's arm, sort of, and knowing that I couldn't put weight on my foot as he helped me to the curb. I sat on the planter under the streetlight and he took off my espadrilles, and I gasped for air. I looked down and saw the purple bump on my left foot, growing bigger and purpler with every minute. The more I sat, the more I could feel the pain, until I knew that this wasn't a bruise. 'Do you want me to call a cab and go to a hosptial?" "Yes," I said weakly.

Sasan carried me to the side of the road and the cab pulled up and drove us a few blocks to New York Downtown Hospital. The staff put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me down the hall to the ER. My foot was swollen and bruised, shaking from the strain of keeping it elevated. A man and a woman approached me, took my blood pressure, temperature, and got my statistics: name, birthdate, date of last menstrual period...the man tied an ice pack onto my foot, which felt instantly relieved. Both nurses talked to me at once, but slowly, as if in a leisurely conversation, and I couldn't see straight to answer both of them. "What medications are you on?" "Ortho tricyclen-lo" The elderly nurse offered me a tablet to write the name down. "It's birth control," I said, puzzled. "Oh, well, I don't need any of that, so that's why I don't know what it is."

They wheeled me into a room with a bed and turned me around. I gave them more information, signed a release, gave them my Aetna card. It took forever, and I sat there in the curtained room, crying, looking at my iced foot, holding Sasan's hand. "Maybe it's not broken! It's probably just twisted or something," he offered optimistically. I looked at my foot dully and shook my head. I've broken it before. I had a hunch it wasn't just bruised.

The wheeled me into the x-ray room. The man gestured to the table with a pillow at one end. "Should I sit up there?" "Yeah," he said, "Your head..." "My head goes there or my foot goes there?" "Your head." "On the pillow?" "Yeah." It seemed like a lot of effort just to find out which way to lay on the bed. He didn't wheel the chair over to the bad, so I got up and hopped on the bed. My foot--still raw and throbbing, still without painkillers, rested on the x-ray film. The technicion ripped the ice pack off; I cringed. For each x-ray, he moved my knee abruptly, causing me to gasp and cringe, clearly ina lot of pain. "I need you to put this side on the film" he said. "That side HURTSSSS" I gasped. He looked at me as if this had not occured to him. "Oh...sorry."

When that was done, he tried to put the ice pack back on, but didn't have any tape. So he wheeled me, sans ice, back to the waiting room. "Hey, this girl needs an ice pack, I didn't have any tape to re-tape this one back on." Nothing. I looked at Sasan. "Where's my ice pack?" "I have no idea..." He got up and asked the nurse, "Um, she needs an ice pack for her foot..they took it off..." The didn't exactly jump to attention, but they did hand him an ice pack, which he held onto my foot with two paper towels. I sobbed quietly in my wheelchair. At some pointthey gave me some percocet, but I don't remember when. The doctor approached. "You do have a fracture..." I sobbed more. Sasan droped his head and looked at the floor. I don't recall what other information she gave me, but it wasn't much. we had to ask what kind of fracture, what the next step was, who should I call in DC, what medication should I take, will it take long to heal, will I need a cast, should I keep it elevated...

She left to get some painkillers and I sat there crying in my wheelchair. I cried because it hurt and because a fractured metatarsal means no tango, no salsa, no swimming...for three months or hot, sticky, DC summer. Our weekend in New York was shot, we were going to be up all night figuring out hotels and cabs and prescriptions and busses and pharmacies. The doctor returned. "Mrs. Range!" she looked alarmed, "why are you crying?" I didn't answer, just looked at her, dumbfounded. I'll give you three guesses why I'm crying...

They wouldn't give me a percocet to go, although they did give me two and told me to take one or two every six hours. By this time it was 1 AM. Where is a 24 hour pharmacy? At 14th and 4th. But if we go there, we'll miss the bus to our hotel, which is in New Jersey. The man at the hospital desk called a cab, which came, but wasn't announced to us. He drove us to Port Authority, where we did get our bus. The bus driver was the same that had dropped us off that afternoon. His eyes widened: "What happened to you!" "She broke her foot..." He shook his head in utter sympathy.

The bus dropped us off, with all his condolences, at Hasbrouck Heights. We called the Hilton. "Could you please send a cab? One of us is on crutches." We waited, and waited, and waited, kept company by a wasted young man in a baseball cap who thought he should tell us all about where he was from and what he was doing in Jersey. I sat on the curb. Sasan looked at the pharmacy hours. We waited. We called the Hilton again. We waited. We called the Hilton again. Finally, a cab came, a big black car with a tall accented driver. Could we plase go to a pharmacy first and then to the Hilton? He seemed confused by our request, but obliged, looking up pharmaciies on his GPS. The CVS that was nearest to us was closed, opening at 10 AM on Sunday. He drove us to the Hilton. It was nearing 3 AM.

Now, the prospect of waking up the next morning without painkillers was unappealling. Sasan approached the concierge again. "Corey, my man, do you have any idea if there's another pharmacy near here open 24 hours?" There was! 6 miles away, he'd call a cab. We called the pharmacy, we called the cab, we waited. We waited. We waited. Sitting in the matte beige lobby at 3 AM, drugged up, sleepy, foot throbbing, sitting on the square, boring ottomans looking out the revolving doors into the blackness. Easy pop songs played over the speakers...2 am and she calls me cause I'm still awake...the revolving door thump thump thumps every time someone comes in. The cab approaches. Finally.

The driver was Persian, or his mother is Persian. He and Sasan exchanged pleasantries and he drove us past the previous CVS...two blocks. On our right hand side there's a RiteAid. It's open. Five blocks from our hotel is a 24 hour RiteAid.

The lady at the pharmacy slumped in her chair and raised her eyebrows, "On Sundays from 2 to 4 AM the computer doesn't work...so..." Sasan and I stare. "The computers don't work? We need some percocet...she just broke her foot...it's kind of important..." She sighs and says, "Well, I guess I could TRY the computers..." They worked. She filled the prescription. Ten bucks for Percocet, 2.50 for granola for the morning. $25 for the ride back to our hotel, five blocks.

At 6 AM I take two percocet and fall dead asleep, foot elevated on two of the Hilton's fluffy pillows, sheets wrapped around my body leaving my foot exposed. I would wake up thinking, "Where am I....Why does my foot hurt...Wait...Why is my foot broken?..." and fall back into a fitful sleep.

Don't break your foot in New Jersey.

Books.

The Five Most Recent Books I’ve Read

White Teeth, Zadie Smith
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (sort of.)
Passage to India, E.M. Forster
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Cuban Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana, Isadora Tattlin

Five Books I Could Read Over and Over

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
The Harafish, Naguib Mahfouz

Five Books That Blew My Mind and Would Be On My Syllabus If I Were a Teacher

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Five Authors With Whom I Would Like to Have Drinks

Rudyard Kipling
Naguib Mahfouz
Azar Nafisi
G. K. Chesterton
CS Lewis

Five Books That Make Me Want to Have Kids Just For The Books

Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark, Jill Tomlinson. Actually, ALL of the books in this series are fantastic.
The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis

Five Books the Rest of the World Loved and I Sort of Hated

Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

Five Books I Just Could Not Finish, No Matter What

Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Emma, Jane Austen (I think I'll give this one another go, though.)
The Brothers Karamazov, Fydor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

Five Books That I Am In Awe Of and Are Pretty Much Perfect Pieces of Writing

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell

Five Books That Made Me Weep Buckets

Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Five Books Set in Africa That I Love

The #1 Ladies Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith
Out of Africa, Isak Dineson
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence (well, it's sort of Africa)

...I think that's all I've read that's set in Africa, although in my defense, I've read TWO of the #1 Ladies Detective series, so that's something.

Five Things That Turn Me Off of a Book, However Unfair
The feeling that it would Not Be That Hard to Turn This Into a Movie and What's Up With the Lame Dialogue?
Science fiction
A big sticker on the front that says it is now a major motion picture
Chick lit
Slippery pages

Five Things I am a Sucker For in a Book
Plotlines that span generations
Magical realism
Conniving protagonists
Fashionable women
Exotic locales

Maybe it's to show off your fancy cell phone.

InStyle.com says this is one of this season's Hot Trends:

That, my friends, is a clear purse. Chanel. $895.

I would just like to point out that I don't have to spend $895 to show the world that the inside of my purse may or may not contain a combination of: lip balm, pens, old grocery lists, last week's receipts, as assortment of plastic utensils, tampons, mascara, credit cards, picture IDs, a cell phone, a blackberry, keys, hand sanitizer, Neosporin, Lipton tea bags, hair bands, yesterday's earrings, candy wrappers, $1.43 worth of spare change, and, occasionally, my dance shoes.

On Luxury

After much, much deliberation with Qatar Airways, I finally got a ticket to go to Doha on Saturday night, March 17, at 11 PM. What they didn't understand, obviously, was that by flying on Saturday night, I was going to miss the all-night milonga at the tango marathon. This, clearly, was a major inconvenience to me and are you SURE that there aren't any LATER flights? Really? Because it would be really great if I could leave on like, say, Sunday morning...

There were no later flights, and it was just as well, because I was still fighting a cold on Saturday, March 17th. Sasan and I bundled up, drove through the unexpected snow, and took the lessons, all three of them, back-to-back; I looked at the tango shoes, which didn't fit; and I embarrassed myself with my weak abs that could hardly support my volcadas. And then I went to the airport and flew business class to Frankfurt, then Doha.

---

Doha, Qatar, is up the ways from Dubai. Talk on the street is that Doha is where Dubai was a few years ago, and is catching up steadily. I've never been to Dubai, but I can tell you this much: Doha is boring. Boring. Y'all know how I feel about Cairo: it's filthy and chaotic, and even the 5-stars feel a tad dingy. But when you walk down the street in Cairo, it's happening. There are people everywhere, all hours of the night. In Doha, the street feels clean and empty, everyone stays in their lanes, and the cars are smooth and powerful. No one walks, there are no corner stores, no kiosks selling bananas and mango juice and the daily paper. Maybe it's too sandy. There's no Nile or Bosphorous acting as a natural gathering place to keep cool in the hot, hot sun. There's just cement and glass, skyscrapers that light up the clear night with their brilliant lights, manicured gardens and heated pools.

The luxury of Doha is not the luxury I imagine when I hear the word "luxury." The word luxury to me inspires images of feather beds and exotic fruits in mahogany bowls, sunlight streaming through sheer curtains, rich plants spilling over balconies, fruit fresh off the trees, the thick smell of vanilla and moist soil. It means thick, saturated pillows and colorful, bejewelled slippers, a wall of books, papaya marmalade on fresh croissants, strong coffee with warm, frothy milk. It means groomed gardens with scented flowers that permeate the evening air. It means an reliable, old house that creaks a little with age, but not with weakness, crown molding, fresh paint, wide porches that cradle you in the landscape, and appliances that are just as beautiful as they are functional. It means space to separate work from play, bills that don't pile up, and room enough to leave projects unfinished for a while.

Doha's luxury is all business. Sure, there are featherbeds and sunlight, pillows and valet parking. There are new mobile phones, clean leather interiors and heated pools. There are doormen who smile and make small talk, there are cheerful waitresses who attend to your needs, there is room service and busines service and laundry service. It all feels new and modern and streamlined, but it feels impersonal. The luxury I imagine-the luxury I want - is not modern and chrome. It's old wood and good design, the smell of breakfast and fresh linen not in a skyscraper, but in your own home, with your own family and people you love. Of course it involves money. Private jets are really nice. Hired help is fantastic. More importantly, though, is the feeling of your home as a haven, a place the outside can't invade, a place full of magic and peace and extra touches: a bouquet left for you on the side of your bed, fresh blueberries in your pancakes, lavendar sachets left on your sheets to make them smell nice when you get in bed after your shower, because lavendar is your favorite.

Luxury at the Doha Ritz is nice, for a week or so. Waking up in your own bed, seeing someone you love, and finding ways to make them feel pampered, that's better.

---

That being said, flying business class on Qatar Airways? Is fantastic.

So sorry I couldn't make it; I was weekending in St. Barth's.

There is something extremely satusfying about being able to truthfully say those words:

Random co-worker: "Hey there, good morning."
Me, sunnily: "Morning!"
RCW: "...are you ok? Your face is sort of red."
Me, nonchalantly: "What? Oh, that. It's sunburn."
RCW: "...from what? Were you outside a lot?"
Me, carelessly: "Hm, yeah, I spent the weekend in the Caribbean."
RCW: "..."
Me: "Well, I mean, I was working. But yeah, I guess I got a little sun."
RCW: "...What were you doing in the Caribbean?"
Me: "I was babysitting."
RCW: "In the Caribbean?"
Me: "In St. Barth's."
RCW: "What? How?"
Me: "This family I babysit for, they travel a lot and take their kids. They needed a travel nanny this weekend."
RCW: "Wow. So did you fly out of Reagan or what?"
Me: "No, they own a private jet. We flew out of Dulles."
RCW: "You flew their private jet to St. Barth's?"
Me: "Yeah, we landed in St. Martin and then took the boat to St. Barth's."
RCW: "So...three days in St. Barths, and you got paid?"
Me: "Six hundred bucks."
RCW: "...Nice work if you can get it."

And it's true, that's exactly what happened. I, the travel nanny, flew in the private jet to St. Martin, took the waiting van to the boat, which took us to the waiting van on St. Barth's, which took us directly to the resort hotel on the beach. The babies and I stayed in our own villa, and the parents stayed in their own villa. It was three days of putting sunscreen on babies on the beach, feeding them pain au chocolat, dressing them in a multitude of pink sundresses, changing diapers, and putting on and taking off various swimsuits. It involved occasionally dog-sitting, nap-supervising, and snack-making, but this all dressed in nothing but flip flops, wet hair, and un maillot in the airy, 85 degree, white-linen-and-dark-wood St. Barths, , where Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were, incidentally, also weekending. It was a 24/7 job. But it was in St. Barth's.

I mean, really. Nice work if you can get it.