The Simplest of Surgical Procedures!

Nothing is simple. Everything means something. At least in my life , it does.

About six months ago I went in to get my eyes checked. It was my first appointment with Dr. Tran, who had given Evan his first eye exam a few weeks prior. I liked him, so I made an appointment. Dr. Tran is a cute, young Asian guy with a pleasant, sincere demeanor. He is gentle, and from what I saw of him very professional in his treatment of his patients and staff. He is calm. Calm is good.

During that appointment he dilated my eyes and noted the appearance of what could be glaucoma. He established a baseline with a couple of tests and I made an appointment to be checked again in six months. He also told me that he could remove the wart from my eyelid.

"The what?!" I asked. "You mean the mole, right?" He informed me that what I had lovingly referred to most of my life as "my eye-mole" was a wart. This news slightly agitated me, but I took the six months between appointments to adjust myself to the idea of life without what he more gently called "the bump" today. Thursday, after receiving the great news that I do not have glaucoma (!!!!!) I made an appointment to go in today and have it removed.

You see, the eye-mole-wart-bump used to be cute. It was a small brown mole near the outer corner of my right eye, on my lower lid. I can't remember a time that it was not there. Most of my boyfriends liked it. I liked it. When I was twenty-one and in college, one boy in particular liked it. He was generally enthralled with my moles. I had a couple on my belly, a couple on the back of my neck, a sprinkling on my back, one under my left breast and a smaller, flat one on my posterior. "God, they are so sexy" he said, every time he got a chance to visit them. He said he liked the one by my eye because it reminded him of the others.

I have more moles, or skin tags as the doctor calls them, than I used to. Tiny ones have sprouted in the moist places under my breasts, in my armpits and in the creases where my thighs meet my groin. I don't appreciate them the way I did the originals, which have been on my body since my age was in single digits, at least. The new ones are a pain. I associate them with the age spots that are showing up on the backs of my hands, and the changing texture of my skin. These tiny flaps of skin sometimes get rubbed by the underwires of my bra and feel raw and sore. Once I cut one off with a razor blade because it had gotten caught on my bra so many times it was hanging on by a thread.

A few years ago, I don't know how many, I noticed that the eye-mole-wart-bump had gotten larger. It was no longer an adorable little bump. It had started to take on miniature cauliflower-like properties. It had lost its symmetry and started to hang down a little. It looked blobby upon close inspection. It wasn't something anyone else would really notice, since I had to put my nose an inch from the mirror to see the changes, but it bothered me. At some point it started to irritate me even when I could not see it, and it was visibly larger than it was when I was young. I could feel it sometimes, hanging there. It was especially a bother when I ran, or jumped. The shaking motion made it tickle and itch. Putting eyeliner on was more of a pain that it had ever been.

Today I watched with my one uncovered eye as the needle gave my lower eyelid two numbing shots. I saw Dr. Tran's latex gloved hands moving around so close to my eye that they were blurry as he cut the eye-mole-wart-bump off. I didn't actually realize he had removed it until he told me. The base was larger than he had initially thought, so he put two tiny stitches in. I kept watching as the yellowish-white suture thread moved around in his hands, twanging slightly like a tight-wire as he tugged the stitches securely. He was focused and careful. He scratched my nose for me with a q-tip when it itched, so I would not contaminate the area with my fingers.

As silly as it may sound, I feel a loss. This cosmetic feature, that has been on my face, and been a part of my identity for most of my life, is now in a small plastic jar of preservative, next to my typing fingers. It floated at first, but has now sunk to the bottom. I can see the bloody spot where it was attached to my body.

It hurts a little. It hurts physically, but mostly it hurts my psyche. It reminds me of a time that the men I chose to spend time with thought I was sexy. On the other side of that, it reminds me of how I used to need men to think I was sexy, because I really didn't. It reminds me of my grandmother- the one who gave me this genetic predisposition toward sprouting bumps. I don't think I would be here today if it were not for how much she loved me. I can't think about her without thinking about how I will always miss her. It reminds me that I am getting older, and the parts that were an asset at one time, are starting to become a potential liability. This day, during which I allowed the severance of a small part of my body, has come right after a weekend with good friends, during which I talked through more layers of letting go of my almost non-existent marriage. A little part of my identity is gone with the eye-mole-wart-bump, as is a bigger part of my identity as a wife and partner. Healing is happening. In place of both will be a bit of scar tissue, and a spot of normalcy and freedom.

My Life In Beds

Haha! You don't really think this is going to be about my sex life, do you? I would be happy to talk about it, but there really isn't much to tell. Well, I might mention parts of it, since it is relevant.

The semester ended the other day, and I have over a month of break. A month! Usually I take intercession classes. For those of you who don't know what that is, imagine taking a class that crams a whole semester into a two week (or so) period. It pretty much obliterates any real breaks between semesters, but it gets things done.

This time, there are none that I can take, and I am so glad.

So, I have been thinking about bed, and beds. I love being in bed, and most of the things that happen in bed. I remember the bed I had when I was little. It was a cheap, lumpy twin mattress. I could feel the springs. Little kids can handle things like that though.

When we moved to the house my father owns now, my mother refinished a beautiful wrought iron double bed in a slightly metallic rose color. She took it to a place that makes headstones and they sandblasted the rust and old paint off of it for her. I loved that bed. Somehow it found its way to Texas with me, but it just sat in our garage for years. It has flowers on it. I have boys. They were not interested. A few years ago, my friend Susan was looking for a bed. It was perfect for her.

Back when I slept in the bed, it had an elderly mattress that sagged so much it was almost like a hammock. I loved it because I had dreams in that bed like no other I have slept in. Every night, curled into my favorite modified fetal position, I had crazy, vivid, colorful dreams. I lived in mansions and flew around. I got chased by a hag in a hot air balloon. Here's the sex part... When I was in college, I had my first being-tied-up experience in that bed. Nothing too wild. My wrists looped lightly with some old panty-hose to the curving bars of the headboard. It wasn't that exciting, so we never did it again.

I moved in with my grandparents when I was in junior high. The bed itself- nothing too memorable. The memorable parts are the atmosphere. It was a completely unremarkable double bed in a room that was right by all of the noise. The bathroom door across the hall from my broken-doored room was a woven, accordion-pleated thing through which I could hear everything. My grandmother got up and banged pans every morning at 5:30 without fail. Every time someone walked through the house to get a drink of water or a pill in the kitchen, it woke me up. I am, and always have been, a light sleeper. My bedroom closet was full of Grandma's old coats, so my grandpa installed a long dowel near the ceiling over my bed and I stood on the bed to hang my clothes... when I bothered to hang up my clothes. Usually they were all over the tiny room. There was a window at the head of the bed. When I was in college, my friend Sean, who liked to be referred to as "Smud" often knocked on the window and startled the daylights out of me. I don't know how long he stood there and watched me before he knocked. He would never tell me.

After that bed came the king sized bed that my friend Lea and I slept in. For a summer it was in the garage of her sister and brother-in-laws house. We made a shelf out of a scrap of lumber and some chains to put candles on. Every now and then one of us would get the surprise of hot wax dripping off of the shelf and on to us and the bed. We never were able to get the wax out of the sheets. In Illinois you can't sleep in such a garagey sort of garage during the winter, so we got an apartment together for a year.

After that I slept in a series of short-lived beds that were not mine. I stayed with my boyfriend and his mom, in a room separate from his, and we all pretended that I didn't spend most of my time in his bed. After we broke up I came to Texas and slept for a short time in an extra bed in his grandmother's house in Abilene. Her neighborhood seemed to consist entirely of old people. Her next door neighbor collected cats. He bought huge bags of cheap cat food and dumped it on the ground to watch cats swarm from everywhere. People dumped them off at his house, and they bred. There were a few deformed ones. The whole neighborhood stunk of cat urine.

I quickly went from that bed to Terrell to stay for a couple of weeks with my ex's aunt and uncle. They were very sweet people. He managed a restaurant in a truck stop complex, and she did the accounting for the complex. They were poor, partly due to his health problems, I think. The house they lived in was tiny and hot. The room I was staying in contained a twin bed and a lot of boxes of stored belongings. My suitcase was perched on top of the stacked boxes and the door would not open all the way. I had to squeeze in and climb over the bed to get my feet on the small area of floor next to it. I could hear gun shots going off almost every night I was there.

I found a job as a nanny. The woman who hired me... that is another story to be told. I left her one day, after being woke up by men shouting outside my bedroom door and peeking out to see my employer's boyfriend and two of his buddies watching porn, in a cloud of pot smoke. Almost immediately I went to work for some people who were, by my small-town standards, rich. They were also insane, but in a completely different way. I got fired from that job. It was a relief. From there I went to a bed I had already been in. I met my husband when I was working in the first nanny position, and I met his bed on the same day. Together we have been through a few mattresses, most of them hand-me-downs from his brother and sister-in-law. They would buy them and decide they didn't like them. We would have a new mattress.

The one we have now is, as far as sleeping goes, the best bed I have ever had. It has a thick pad of memory foam over it, so my hips no longer feel bruised when I wake up in the morning. It is a king-sized bed, but I sleep here with my dog. Walter and I get along fine, and I barely mind the dog hair all over everything.