My cousin Marty Godsick had a heart attack last Wednesday. They brought him into the ER at Mt. Sinai and they told him he had two blocked valves. They penciled him in for surgery that afternoon and I’ve been to see him every day since. Marty’s a good man but he’s as fat as a Friday morning goose. For years I told him to watch his diet but he listens like I sing. We’re both unmarried men in our sixties and without wives we would be lost to the world if not for our friendship. We live together, we eat together, when we belch it’s a symphony and when we snore it’s a chorus. We daven at the same shul and if one of us gives to charity he does it in both our names. I’m seven years older than Marty but he’s fatter than I am, so health-wise we’re even.
First time I got to the hospital I asked at the desk where my cousin was. The girl gave me back an answer so long that half of it I ignored. Finally I took any elevator and pressed the seventh floor because that was the least of the things I didn’t remember.
When I stepped off I looked in vain for the nurses’ station but all I found was a maze of rooms. I poked my head in somewhere and an alter kakerwith an entire Pennsylvania Railroad of tubes going in and out his body was lying on the bed, saying to a woman who was either a daughter or a second wife, “At my age, who needs speedy? A recovery is a recovery, all the same.”
Fool, I thought, and I spit three times. When I turned around a nurse was waiting, arms crossed over her chest,...
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