Midnights in the garden of convalescence

June 15, 2025

In the flow, (2016)

It takes a family to heal a writer

Before I (gingerly) set foot in my post-surgery update, I’d like to wish all the fathers out there a splendid Father’s Day. I’ve had my Father’s Day(s) in advance (Audrey and Devin were both here, in the days following my surgery), and I’ve enjoyed it as much as I hope you’re enjoy yours.

With my father in 1986, when he showed up at the office to take my picture for Pacific Northwest Magazine

I’ll be blunt. I’m physically hurting. My knee replacement surgery was two weeks ago and, suffice to say, an inherent part of the process involves a cheek-by-jowl negotiation with pain. It turns out that such intimate pain has bad breath, which makes it even worse.

In order to reap the benefits of the procedure—to restore range of motion to the joint— you have to be active almost from the minute you wake up in the recovery room. If not, the biological rigging entwined with the metal and plastic components will ossify in scar tissue, negating the purpose of the procedure. So, I’m told.

My surgeon and his PA drilled that point home as the date for the procedure (June 2nd) approached. I’ve done my best to get my head around it. I think it helps to have endured something like this before. I had open shoulder surgery (from a fall from a chairlift) when I was in my early forties. The shoulder is fine, now, but I was unprepared for the slow, painful recovery and the misery that came with it. I wasn’t much fun to be with in that stretch. When my shoulder recovered I got back on skis and promptly broke my leg. That’s all I have to say about skiing.

Otherwise, what I know about living with pain comes mostly from my mother. A school-girl athlete with a powerful throwing arm, she was crippled by arthritis in her early twenties. I have no memory of her being able to bend either of her legs. In the last years of her life she broke both her hips in falls at home. I was with her during her rehab sessions after the first (and most severe) break. She was so tough—grimacing and fighting the pain with all her might and grace. She was amazing. She never complained. At her first session, post-surgery, her physical therapist noticed her grimace and her effort, and the therapist began to cry. My mom noticed her tears. She stopped, and actually apologized to the young woman.

“Are you okay?” mom then asked her—which, as you might expect, brought even more tears from her therapist.

I am not nearly as tough as my mother. Having a knee replaced is not something you can do by yourself. You need kind people (besides the doctors, the nurses, and the physical therapists) to take care of you before, between and after your appointments. Blessedly, my ex-wife, Connie, and my two children traveled to Spokane to help get me through the most intense phase of it, post-surgery. They are each so dear to me, and my main concern was that the pain would slice into the joy of having them within reach. Fortunately, it hasn’t. It’s such a gift to be among them.

With Audrey along the Yellowstone River in Wyoming, 1995; with Devin on the back porch in 1999.

The other plank of consternation is trying to predict when I’ll be able to write regularly again. The problem is not with my fingers but with my lucidity. I wasn’t sure how much pain I’d be in, and how long it would last. It is one of life’s ironies that the medication I take to control the inflammations of rheumatoid arthritis had to be suspended pre-surgery because it suppresses the immune system. The major risk of knee replacement surgery is post-op infection.

To be sure, it’s not that I can’t write when I’m in pain. There are times when pain helps me focus.

But this is an unusual time. There have been days when I’ve been too shocked and angry to process rage; days that I’ve had to sit with the wash of emotion and try to get a grip on which direction(s) it is coming from. For example, I was infuriated when JD Vance willfully promoted the lie, last fall, that immigrant Haitians in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets. It was Vance’s all-too-willing contribution to the despicable fear campaign that Donald Trump has waged for over a decade. His clear purpose was, and is, to build a movement that denigrates all peoples of color, and casts them as criminals. But it’s an open question as to who, among the accomplices, are most to blame for the plague.

Is it the liars? Is it the enablers who spread the propaganda? Is it the media that pass along baseless accusations without verification or anything resembling balance? Or is it the audience in the MAGA hats that demands nothing less than story lines that demonize people unlike themselves?

In short, accounting for the open corruptions and cruelties of the 2nd Trump regime can be like reckoning with a cloud of hornets. I’d like to be as clear-headed as I can be, to not come into this space, feeling beleaguered, angrier than is necessary, and swatting aimlessly.

It’s not easy.

I was on-line, Thursday, when U.S. Senator Alex Padilla was forcefully removed, tossed to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents after he identified himself and tried to ask a question of Trump’s Duchess of Depravity—Homeland Security director Kristi Noem—as Noem spoke at a press conference.

The leading Trump 2.0 narrative—already offered to skeptical federal judges as justification for the abduction, detainment and relocations of hundreds of immigrants—is that our nation is being overrun by criminal gangs of Latinos, such that the Marines are needed in Los Angeles to quell the invasion.

In the moments before Sen. Padilla was thrown to the floor and cuffed, Noem elaborated on the threat, adding the elected leaders of California to the enemies list: “We [the federal government] are not going away,”she insisted. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In short, Noem was saying Los Angeles needed to be liberated from democracy. So much for state’s rights.

Granted, I’m presently escorting misery and taking more medication than I would like, but this looks and sounds as though Noem and her boss are quite serious about reconstructing America through the illusions they’ve sold to the MAGA faithful, and that the role for the rest of us is to comply, or else. Senator Padilla’s take-down was part of that message. (Can you imagine the outrage from the choir at Fox News if a white, Republican Senator had been shackled like this for questioning a Democrat?)

It made me angry, angrier than my knee seems to be.

As I’ve been writing, my son and daughter have checked in. Devin asks if I’m up to speed on my meds. Audrey says she’ll be back tomorrow, to pick me up from a physical therapy appointment on the South Hill.

I may be a battered writer. But I’m a happy father. I have wonderful children and a remarkable ex-wife to boot.

Blessings to you all. I’ll try to be back soon.

—tjc

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