May 13, 2005 – What the Fortuneteller Forgot to Mention

May 13, 2005 – What the Fortuneteller Forgot to Mention

Yesterday, I got this call on my cell phone during lunch. I missed it because I was walking through Border’s books on University Avenue in Palo Alto looking for a CD that I knew probably wasn’t in stock. Sure enough a check of their computer system showed that it had to be ordered. I left, reasoning that it was easier for me to order from the Internet than to have them do it. Exiting the rear entrance of Borders I cross the parking lot and end up on Hamilton Avenue and walk the half-block to Waverly where I had parked my car. The phone makes its missed call noise as I drive south on Waverly toward Embarcadero. I punch the call back function on the phone and after a couple of rings my sister VY picks up.

I ask her what’s up and she says our dad fell and broke his leg: talk about being shocked. I asked her how it happened and she said he was walking from the Veterans Administration to the main part of Beaumont Hospital, which sits at the top of Pierce Avenue between North Piedras Street and Alabama Street. From the parking lot you can see Mexico spread out below in the distance to the south. The Hospital sits on the rise that leads up to the Franklin Mountains to the north. As my father was walking down a slight grade, he slipped on a round rock lost his balance and began to fall. He grabbed an adjacent chain link fence to break his fall but caught his leg in an awkward position and gravity did the damage, cracking the left leg in two places.

My father has had a string of bad luck with his legs in the past three years. Several years back he had a hip replacement operation. After the operation was completed and he was lying in recovery, he woke from his drug-induced slumber, thought he was at home, and proceeded to get up from bed and make his way to the bathroom. The new socket popped out as he put weight on the leg and the doctors had to cut him open and reinsert the new ball into its socket. A year and a half later, on the same right leg, his knee had become so painful that he relented and went in again for a knee replacement. Almost two years later, he has still to regain full freedom of motion for the knee, though there were encouraging signs of late. Then this fall broke the left leg between hip and knee, with the knee being badly bruised but not broken. VY says he got fixated on the bruise left knee fearing he would have to have a knee replacement on his one good leg.

What’s bothersome about all this is that my father has always read omens into things that befell him in life. The trouble with his legs must not be boding well in that mind of his. He gets this from his illegitimate German father who for all the time my dad could remember took counsel from a fortuneteller in Augusta, Mississippi, where he lived and was a pillar of the community—sheriff of the county for a number of years, wealthy businessman, etc. He owned a sawmill and my grandmother worked for him, a 16-year teenager, cooking for the wealthy owner. She was an attractive young woman from the pictures I saw of her when I was a child, a mix of Creole and black, like her mother.

She got in family way and my father was the result, a light-skinned, blonde-haired baby from his café-au-lait mother. Growing up my father knew his dad, and spent time with him throughout the time he was at home, and that’s when he got to know his father’s fortuneteller. Before going off to war, he visited her and had a reading. He wanted to know whether or not he would make it through the war. She told him he would, then to his horror she told him he would be banged up pretty bad in a car accident some time after the war. He said, “how can I avoid it?” She said, “you can’t but it won’t kill you.” With the Second World War taking up much of his time, he forgot about the accident that he would live through and concentrated on making sure the fortuneteller wasn’t having him on about not dying in the war.

The military moved my dad around quite a bit and he ended up in Germany in the early 1950s. My mom, my two sisters, and I were living in Mississippi with my grandmother at the time. In Germany my father often went on trips off base to different parts of Germany—this was the land of his father after all. On one such trip, he was traveling in the back seat with another soldier the driver and another passenger in the front. The four were returning to base after a day trip and driving along a high-speed stretch of road late at night. The road abruptly ended in a concrete barrier, which the driver saw too late to stop. He attempted to evade the block and ended up rolling the car off to right of the highway. All four were injured badly but survived. My father immediately recalled what the fortuneteller had predicted.

The right leg was broken badly between the hip and knee. The Army transferred him to William Beaumont for the long recovery, where my mother and sisters joined him, setting up housekeeping in a rented house near the hospital. I remained in Mississippi with my grandmother, but that’s another story. The Army had offered to discharge him with full disability but my father decided to let the leg heal and stick it out for his twenty years in the Army. His doctor back then predicted the leg would give him trouble in his old age, which it did, becoming so painful that he reluctantly submitted to the hip replacement that started his recent string of trouble with his legs.

I spoke with my dad by phone today and found him in good spirits, but feeling a bit foolish that he had fallen. I told him that during my 25 years plus of running, I had a couple of times fallen face first after tripping over an obstacle I had avoided for years. The law of averages dictates that if something unfortunate can happen over the long run, it will. The hospital staff fixed his leg without putting him into a leg cast and discharged him to the civilian rehab center where he recuperated from his hip and knee replacements—I know my dad will be thrilled about that. Nevertheless, that’s where he’s spending the night tonight and for a few more nights I’m sure.