Newsblog: I Just Needed A Valve Job
Garrison Keillor’s essay in Time mag last week is a perfect Real Joe essay. It’s about his heart surgery, but of course, male pride is the real subject. Here’s one clip:
“The inhalator gizmo was explained to me by a lovely young nurse in a blue uniform with a pager clipped to her collar. She bent down to show me how it works, and the weight of the pager opened a fabulous landscape of tanned young breasts and gleaming white brassiere. I gazed in and realized that my libidinous urge had shrunk to something akin to my urge to play croquet.”
I wonder if public radio would run that on the air if it was written by anyone other than Keillor. Here’s another Real Joeish segment:
“It is rough on a man’s pride to be a patient. Even after you get into your Extremely Late 40s, a life phase that lasts until 70 or so, you maintain a certain manly sense of yourself (He jumps! He shoots! He scores!), but now, taking a slow postoperative stroll down the hall, heading for the lounge with the jigsaw puzzles, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the glass door ahead, a shambling galoot in droopy, pee-stained pajamas. (When they pull out the catheter, it takes you a day or two to get your sphincter reset.) This is not a guy whom any woman longs to have sex with; she would be afraid of killing the old bugger. It’s hard for a man with a strong sense of himself (He’s going deep–deep–deep! And he’s almost to the wall! And he’s got it!) to accept this elemental defeat. “