If I took my cue from the journalists I most admire I would
seize the occasion to write a proper New Year’s essay lamenting the follies and
fatuities of 2013 or assessing the likely perils and pitfalls of 2014, but that
really isn’t my style. I do wish
all my readers all the best for 2014, and I do pray for the relief of our
troubled land and our needy world.
But for better or worse my modest muse, when we get to the crossroads,
generally nudges me in the direction of the humorous or the absurd rather than
that of the profound. So I will
relate my curious experience in ringing out the old year.
Our
recent trip to Geneva was delightful, but it included one awkward moment. On the third morning, I woke up with a
sore and slightly swollen finger—the ring finger on my left hand. What we often call “denial” is the
human mind’s eagerness to avoid unpleasantness by finding “rational” solutions,
however implausible, to the little emergencies of daily life. I persuaded myself that I had somehow
all unconsciously banged my knuckle on the bedside table during the night. We had things to do and places to go,
and so went there and did them.
But by midafternoon my finger was really bothering me, and by day’s end
the knuckle practically glowed in the waning light. It was hot to the touch, half again its normal girth, and
throbbing with pain.
My
son Luke was sufficiently alarmed to suggest an immediate trip to the
hospital. Still in denial, I
assured him a drug store with some “Icy Hot” would be sufficient; but the
pharmacist’s assistant practically fainted when she saw my finger. This was a case for the
“Permanence”—which, I deduced, was an off-hours walk-in clinic. Luckily for me there was supposed to be
a Permanence only four blocks away.
We
actually found it, and less than an hour later I was in the office of the
doctor on duty, an animated Italian woman, approximately four and a half feet
tall. We met on neutral linguistic
ground. I have often explained to
my students that the social genius of medieval Latin was that it was nobody’s
mother tongue and therefore the common domain of all. There is a reason that French was the lingua franca of the Swedish Crusaders. Admittedly limited experience with small female doctors has
led me to hypothesize that small female doctors enjoy having large male
patients at their mercy. I tried
to engage in spirited repartee in French, but she immediately established her
authority
She
took one look at the finger and instantly offered two hypotheses. The
first was an acute attack of inflammatory osteo-arthritis, but this in her view
was unlikely. (In fact I think
that hypothesis primo was mainly to
scare me.) Her second
hypothesis, which rapidly moved from probability to certainty as she talked,
was la goutte. This caught
me doubly by surprise. I was not
prepared to suffer from gout. Even
less prepared was I for the French word for gout to be goutte.
Gout
was an ailment of aging eighteenth-century aristocrats who drank too much port. (What an insult to teetotalers that
fruit juice is apparently even worse!)
In later ages its victims were the caricature plutocrats of Monopoly
board iconography, who are likewise the objects of cruel mirth in old Punch and New Yorker cartoons.
Let me tell you that outside the pages of humor magazines, gout is no
joke. Furthermore, gout was
supposed to attack the joints of the toes,
not those of the fingers. There
was the additional linguistic insult.
I thought I actually knew the French word goutte: a drop, as in a drop of rain. I even knew the special fancy meaning in medieval heraldry, in
which a goutte is one of those little
globs roughly in the shape of teardrops that feature on many coats of arms. This was a painful way to expand my
vocabulary.
With
confidence later vindicated by speedy results Dr. Colitta was sure she could
fix me up in a matter of hours with prescribed anti-inflammatories. In the meantime, she told me, I faced
an immediate crisis. My wedding
ring was about to strangulate my finger; it must be removed immediately. I hope that captures the linguistic
ambiguity I experienced, as it was not at first clear to me whether it was the
ring or the finger that faced imminent removal.
It
was the former. Digital goutte might be news to me, but it is
apparently so common that your ordinary Swiss Permanence keeps not merely a
machine to do the job but a highly qualified professional to operate the
machine. The operator was a lively
lass. I judged from her
name—Svetlana—that she must have sprung from one of the eastern-most cantons of
the Helvetic Confederation. She
took an immediate interest in my son, who is a great deal younger than I and,
truth forces me to admit, even better looking.
The
ring-cutting device seems to work on the principle of a can-opener. The operation took quite a while, and
it hurt like hell; but a good deal of life is dealing with lesser evils, and
the only alternatives on offer appeared to be amputation or forcing the ring
over the inflamed knuckle.
Very
soon we were back on the streets on our way, first, to the all-night pharmacy
with its anti-inflammatories and then to another splendid supper. We were also chuckling over Svetlana’s
parting shot to Luke. With a
wicked wink she had asked him if he didn’t want her to remove his ring as well.
