traverse – Life In A Word

Like many towns these days, my own hosts an annual festival featuring a series of running races; the 5k on up to the marathon. My choice of those is the 10k, about six miles start to finish. Those miles give me a good tour of everything our town has to offer, including Civil War-era buildings and landmarks. But even better, the middle miles of the run go down a street I consider utterly unforgettable. After all, the street is named after my mother.

Okay, it’s safe to say Marion Street is not named after my mother because it was added to the map almost a hundred years before she was born. But the name grabs my attention because of the spelling. My mother is “Marion”, not “Marian” or “Maryann” (or however else you choose to spell it). Besides, when our town’s other streets default to standards like “Second”, and “Park”, a woman’s name smack dab in the middle of them all certainly stands out.

I ran the town 10k for the fourth time lasts April, so it was another chance to blow a kiss to my mother as I huffed/puffed down her street. But this topic never would’ve become a blog post without broadening the search a little. Which brings me to “David Street”, a discovery I made just this past weekend. Driving down a road I rarely traverse, the street sign popped up just after a curve, causing a double-take and a tap on the brakes. Marion Street and now David Street? What’s going on here?

Believe it or not, the study of streets (like we’re doing today) has a name: odonymy. “Odonyms” in U.S. cities go with numbers, trees, and landscape elements for the most part. There’s a good chance your town has a Second Street, Elm Street, and/or a Park Avenue. If you do have a street named after someone, that person was likely a U.S. president or a prominent figure in American history. And the person is most assuredly dead, because tradition says we don’t name our streets for the living.

Odonymy trivia: “Second” is the most common street name in the United States (there are over 11,000 of them), followed by “Third”, followed by “First”. Why is “First” in third place? Because “First” is often replaced by “Main” (for a town’s most prominent street) or “Front” (if that street fronts something noteworthy like a river).

Streets used to be named for the trades you could find located on them.

If a town’s grid is big enough the street names can be part of a group. In San Diego, the city chose trees in alphabetical order (e.g. “Ash”, “Beech”, “Cedar”) intersected by numbered streets, so your location at say, “Fourth and Elm” is very easy to find. Austin, TX named its streets after Texas rivers. Palo Alto, CA went with distinguished colleges and universities. And even though Tucson, AZ didn’t go with a group of names at all, they still get points for calling their streets on the diagonal “Stravenues”.

Because I can’t resist a good treasure hunt, I looked up the rest of my family on Google Maps. Guess what? Of my four brothers, two are on street signs right here in town, while the other two are less than thirty minutes away. My three children are in the neighborhood as well. As for my father? Well, the nearest “Bob Street” is over two hours away, yet that seems apropos. After all, my dad was always one to endeavor far beyond his immediate surroundings.

To bring us back to where this all started, the mystery of Marion Street is really no mystery at all. My town chose South Carolina counties for its street names and Marion County is one of those, just off the Atlantic coast. The name “Marion” honors Francis Marion, a brigadier general who served in the Revolutionary War. But I prefer to honor a certain someone else instead. So every chance I get, I’ll run down her street, give a little wave to her sign as I pass by and say, “Hi Mom!”

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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LEGO Neuschwanstein Castle – Update #7 (read about the start of this project in Fit for a (Fairy Tale) King

King Ludwig’s castle is determined to be the most difficult LEGO build I’ve undertaken, even if the construction has been fairly straightforward so far. Bags 13 and 14 (of 23 bags of pieces) returned to the Bavarian Alps below the structure, working to close in the far end of the castle’s earthly foundation. Today was effectively ninety minutes of adding more of the green, grey, and beige pieces you see in the surround of the model. And the build was going just swimmingly… until it wasn’t.

To the far right, well below that skewed hollow rectangle… a missing piece was not-so-missing after all.

LEGO left another piece out of the box (or so I thought). As I wrapped up construction of the contents of Bag 13, I realized the little bugger simply wasn’t there – and it was an important little bugger. I looked everywhere to no avail. So clever me improvised by replacing the piece with a fairly similar one from my pile of leftovers. It wasn’t until I was well into the build of Bag 14 that I noticed the missing piece staring up at me from the remaining parts. Which begs several questions. 1) Did LEGO put the piece into the wrong bag? 2) Did I somehow mix up the pieces from both bags (since I emptied them out together)? Or most probably, 3) Did the piece simply not want to be held captive in the model and was trying to make a run for it?

Despite what you might think, this section is constructed correctly.

Whatever actually happened, I managed to install little bugger where he originally belonged, but not before having to take apart a good chunk of the angled area you see here to gain access to his rightful location. You can’t even see this missing piece when all’s said and done, but it does serve as an anchor for the pieces above it so it’s kind of necessary. I’m happy to report, our little runaway is now officially captive inside of the model. Forever.

Running build time: 6:41.

Total leftover pieces: 41.

Accompanying movie soundtrack: On Golden Pond (1981). After last week’s barrage of Italian opera solos from Breaking Away I was ready for something calmer. And it doesn’t get much calmer than the music from On Golden Pond. The story itself is not a walk in the woods (by design) but who among us baby boomers wouldn’t jump at the chance to see Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn in the same film? Both won Academy Awards for their performances. The soundtrack, as it turns out, isn’t much more than the movie’s theme song, a beautiful wandering piano solo with a little flute (and a few loons). So I just put Spotify on repeat and hung out on Golden Pond (over and over) for awhile. Listen to the melody here.

Most days, we leave our homes to spend time in other kinds of buildings. We park our cars in the front lot, approach the doors, pass over the threshold, and join the unique subculture within the structure before us. If we work in an office building, we navigate a maze of hallways and elevators before our final destination. If we traverse an airport, we draw on the stress and frenzy of countless others. If we worship in church, we assume the quiet reverence of the congregation. And if we enter a hospital for surgery, as I did last Thursday, we expect… we expect… well, we don’t know what to expect in a hospital, do we?

My recent hospital visit deserves a few words. After all, the only other time I donned the peek-a-boo gown was a-way back in my teens. This time around (and with medicine advanced another forty years), I was keenly interested in the start-to-finish experience. My surgery – a routine out-patient procedure – took less than an hour, during which I was entirely unconscious. You’ll be spared the details since I can’t remember a single one of them. Let’s just say I’m beyond (the) repair now and recovering nicely.

The hospital experience itself actually began at the doctor’s office, a week prior. In that “consult”, not only did I learn what I didn’t want to know about my procedure (i.e. worst-case scenarios), I also learned I’d be checking into the hospital at 6am. Cock-a-doodle-doo, that meant the alarm clock buzzed at 5am. Remarkably, I wasn’t my surgeon’s first procedure of the morning. Call me grateful – he warmed up on somebody else instead.

I almost forgot to mention the hospital’s “pre-surgery phone call”, which they calendar between the consult and the surgery. I thought this conversation was going to be a financial beat-down (as in, “You are able to pay what your insurance doesn’t, yes?”). Instead the nurse went through a list of do’s and don’t’s in the forty-eight hours leading up to my hospital visit. Mostly don’t’s. Don’t use anything in the shower besides antibacterial soap. Don’t take your vitamins. No more nightly ~~bottle~~ glass of wine. No food or water after 10pm the night before. She might as well have said, “Just come to the hospital now; you can wait in the lobby for the next three days”.

Colorado Springs’ stylish UCHealth Memorial Hospital North

Emergency rooms aside, hospitals are surprisingly low-key at 6am. My wife and I staggered down the dark sidewalk into the main lobby (after finally locating a parking space not labelled, “For Doctors Only”). The only movement in the vast space was a couple of bleary-eyed attendants at the registration desk and the barista getting the coffee stand warmed up. Thanks to the “pre” phone call, registration was a breeze. The guy didn’t even ask for ID (though who would “steal” an out-patient procedure?). He just confirmed why I was there, slapped on the plastic bracelet, and sent me down the elevator to the “surgery reception area” one floor below. For the record, I’d like all my future surgeries to be above ground. The basement is way too close to the morgue.

“Surgery reception” is where things get interesting. After they scan your bracelet (my every move now tracked) they escort you to the pre-op room where you receive the following: 1) A surprisingly comfortable and non-peek-a-boo hospital gown, 2) A stack of six antibacterial wipes each the size of a paper towel, 3) A laminated card with a diagram of the body, 4) A plastic bag for clothes/valuables, 5) A disposable shower cap, 6) A “blanket” (basically a large square of space-age tin foil), and – brace yourself – 7) Two oversized cotton swabs with a generous gob of red goo on each.

The wipes serve as a do-it-yourself bath without the water. The laminated card points each wipe to a different part of your body. The shower cap ensures you look your Sunday-best for surgery (photo below). Finally, the swabs are for your nostrils. Who knew – your best chance of infection comes from the nose? The red goo creates a barrier, and… right… too much information.

Thanks to a generous dose of the happy gas (a beautiful thing), the remainder of my start-to-finish hospital experience is hazy recollections. I remember a quick visit from the surgeon, and the tattoo he drew on my arm. (I never thought I’d be thankful for a tattoo. That check mark and initials remind Doc which side of me he’s cutting into!) Soon after I was wheeled into surgery and shifted onto the table beneath the white lights. As for the happy gas, it went into my IV (no mask), so I never saw it coming. One instant I’m lobbing a few questions at the anesthesiologist, and the next it’s, “nighty-night, Dave”. I may remember chatting up the nurse in the recovery room. I may remember fresh coffee and a scone (I love my wife). I definitely don’t remember getting dressed, heading down the corridor in a nurse-powered wheelchair, and dropping into the passenger seat of my car. Mission – er, surgery – accomplished.

If this were a Yelp review, I’d give my hospital visit five stars. I can’t come up with criticisms but then again, the happy gas conveniently dissolved a good chunk of the experience. Let me just say this instead. I now have a small, high-tech mesh installed, making me better, stronger, and faster the rest of my days. The hospital bill won’t be six million dollars, but my new body just might. In other words, Steve Austin reborn.

Tag: traverse

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Beyond Repair