- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Roadside Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
PLACE: CODA
I didn't plan on writing this. But life had its own plans.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, 2024, I was seated at our breakfast table, reading the New York Times on my laptop, when Allyson, who likes to sleep in, walked into the room and said, "My hand and foot are numb." She sat down and tried to bring a cup of coffee to her mouth. She had no problem using her right hand but couldn't hold the cup steady with her left. A half hour later we were at the Emergency Room of the Emory-Decatur Hospital, a 10-minute drive from our home. The staff asked a few quick questions and whisked Allyson away for a CT scan, MRI, electrocardiogram, blood work and God knows what else. Not long afterwards we were in a hospital room. Allyson was hooked up to IV tubes and ECG cables, looking concerned but not panicked. Then the bad news arrived. “Oh, no,” she said.
A stroke.
I am writing this months later. Allyson has completed her physical and occupational therapy. The numbness in her left hand and foot waxes and wanes, but we have our fingers crossed that it's trending in the right direction. We are participating in a long-term stroke study under the auspices of Emory University. Allyson's balance is close to normal, good enough for her to resume a near-daily regimen of hot yoga. The stroke damaged her left peripheral vision, which initially played havoc with her ability to read and watch movies on TV (she is a ferocious reader and an avid movie fan). But as time goes on, the written text and moving images seem less and less prone to trigger weird distortions and flashing lights, thanks to the plasticity of the human brain and her ability to work around the impairment.
Every morning we now sit together at the breakfast table with our laptops. She toggles back and forth between the text on the screen and the audio version when her eyes get tired. There was a breakthrough yesterday, when she went to a play with her book-club girlfriends, her first outing without me since the stroke. We are following up on this success with a movie date for the day after tomorrow, a matinee showing of Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, which will put her vision to the test of the big screen. Driving remains a work in progress, but we are hopeful that she’ll be behind the wheel and back on the road at some point. Allyson equates driving with the independence she used to have and wants desperately to have again.
When people ask me how she is doing, I say, “She's doing well, under the circumstances.” I try to be polite, to keep it positive.
But that’s not the only reason I strike an upbeat note. Having watched both my father and one of my dearest friends laid low by major strokes, I know that things could be far worse. Allyson’s case falls in the "moderate" range on the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale. Her cognitive functions, speech and memory are as sharp as ever. Ditto for her basic motor functions. If you saw her move, heard her speak or observed her thinking through a problem, you would never guess that anything was wrong. Allyson has been mercifully spared the “mush brain” of which Dad used to complain during his rare moments of lucidity, and the aphasia that made the last ten years of my friend’s life so hellishly difficult for both him and his wife.
Guarded optimism is one thing, cynical optimism of the sort peddled by the self-help industry is quite another. Read Barbara Erhenreich's Bright-sided, for a spot-on dissection of the differences between the two. Fear, anxiety, panic, impatience, frustration, anger, regret, remorse, disappointment, sadness, depression are all present and accounted for in our daily life now. These unwelcome house guests seem to enjoy being cooped-up with us at home, where they can count on our undivided attention.
Home is the reason I have decided to add this coda to my essay on place. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Allyson's stroke has given me any new insight into my earlier claim that home is the quintessential place, where the structures, processes and moments of place come together. But it has given me a new appreciation for the healing properties of home.
Allyson feels safe in our home most of the time, as she is shielded from all the bewildering strobe lights and terrifying sonic booms of the world outside. We both feel comforted by the familiarity of this bounded and coherent space, by the meanings that suffuse its materiality, by the couch which is Allyson's home within a home, and on which she can take a quiet nap wrapped up in her favorite afghan. Nothing gives me greater peace of mind than being in this place and watching her sleep, safe and sound.
Allyson at Home. Atlanta. 2025