Family Saga: Flying Debris
“I was hit in the head,” he shouts, “by flying debris!” His voice escalates at the end of the sentence, an adrenalined but very characteristic bit of word painting. The triage nurse stares at him, wide-eyed, and then looks at me. She hands me a clipboard, asks him to please have a seat, calls him “sir” as people always call my Dad.
We sit in the waiting room of the Dobbs Ferry Hospital and I start filling out the forms with what I know: he was born on April 3rd, 1941; they live in Hastings-on-Hudson, usually a scant, gentle, rolling 10-minute drive from here, but on this night – wind so fierce that it almost picked me up, cello and all, as I crossed a New York City street not two hours ago – it took closer to twenty, with huge felled trees blocking tender suburban one-ways and a ferocious power outage leaving us – me, my Dad, and Laurie – inching down side streets while my Dad alternated between electric retellings of the accident and grumbling insistences that we go home, that his head is fine, that he washed it out with water and anyway the dogs are all alone. The first of these insistences happened only a few hundred feet from my parents’ doorstep, their sprawling 30-degree driveway blocked by a fallen pine tree, and I crossed the property line from next door, and my Dad swung open the front entrance with high theater, emerging with wild eyes and a Russian shapka atop his head, ear flaps folded up, looking in the pitch-black drama of the night storm like one of our ancestors.
“I don’t know about this,” he says, complainingly, settling into the front seat of Laurie’s car, which is here because I don’t know how to drive yet and I was at Laurie’s house, where she was giving us a coaching on the Tchaikovsky trio from which I emerged, in a kind of safe and cozy fog, to fourteen missed calls and eleven voice messages from my Dad, increasing in pitch, in feverishness, in him-ness. My mother, the only voice of sanity on a good day, is stuck on the Acela Express from Washington, D.C., power out, phone dying, soaking wet socks, and Laurie tells me to get my rain boots, which are tall and lavender, and now here we are.
“I don’t think we need to go to the hospital,” he goes on. “I mean…I washed it out, and the doggies shouldn’t be all alone with the power out!” Laurie has the lights on in the car and he pulls the shapka off to prove it and there, mixed with his wild curls – which I always think are still black, like when I was a kid, but are actually a tangled, foresty shock of grey and white – his curls, his whole head, is a watercolored mess of blood and hair. Laurie gives me a very quiet but very distinct raised eyebrow and starts to drive.
At the hospital he rants and raves, a glorious caricature of himself that could as easily be passionately lecturing to a thousand-seat concert hall about tonight’s program or deep in ecstasy, evangelizing a Beethoven quartet climax to a group of riveted students. But now, to a group of doctors that appear both entranced by this charismatic wild man and alarmed by this clearly traumatized nut bag they have to treat, he recounts the simple facts of the evening, albeit with all the dramatic timing and riveting delivery of a Shakespearean actor playing Hamlet.
“I was hit in the head,” he half-yells, half-stage whispers, “by flying debris!” He was at home, practicing, he recounts, because he has an enormous recital in just a few days, as much my Dad as a recital can be, all huge ferocious solo cello pieces, a greatest-hits theater of the insane: Schuller Fantasy in all its romantic virtuosity, Martino Parisonatina where he drums against the side of his cello like a wild magician, Babbitt in all his endless and impossible pointillism, to name but a few. “The power went out,” my Dad yells, “but when I looked outside, they still had power next door!” He went out to investigate – here our brows furrow, mine and the doctors’; but a truly great thespian is not deterred by his audience’s reactions but, in fact, spurred ahead by them.
“That’s when I heard a tremendous crack,” he shouts, pauses, just long enough, “And then, I was hit in the head – by flying debris!!!” The doctors nod and admit after a moment that they can’t reach the CT tech – a byproduct of the storm – at which point my father with his gigantic head injury tries to con them into stapling his skull shut and sending us home. The doctors politely decline – they call him “sir,” too – and the night meanders on, a cacophony of beeps and stapling sounds and a harrowing ambulance ride to the neighboring hospital for a thankfully-clean CT scan, which was – for how many hours? Five? Six? – the one time all night, into the darkest hours of the morning, that my Dad stopped talking – stopped his brilliant stream-of-consciousness monologue, the lecture on his impressions of the latest in his chronological reread of the complete Dickens; the discoveries he had made only just now about the Babbitt piece: “It’s called More Melismata,” he cries, “and I realized – it’s MORE Melis-MA-TA!!”
In the CT machine he suddenly goes silent, and now it is I who am screaming. “Dad!!!??” I yell.
“Oh,” he says, and chuckles. “I fell asleep.”
– Gwen Krosnick, February 2023