On the last night of my son’s 14-day leave from the Marine Corps for the holidays, we took him out to eat and then saw a family movie together. It was the Pixar movie Coco. And what a perfect movie it was! First of all, it is about family. It is about the connections we have to those who’ve come before us. Grandparents and Great Grandparents and Great Great Grandparents… the greatness just keeps flowing back into the past. And this movie connected living family members to those who came before.
We spent a lot of our time over the holiday visit talking about the past and those who came before us. My kids didn’t really get much of a chance to know great grandparents in real life, and great great grandparents were long gone. My son only knows about Great Great Grandpa Raymond through my stories about Sunday afternoon baseball, listening to Harmon Killebrew and the Twins playing on the radio with Grandpa Raymond. Great Grandma Beyer got to hold Number One Son and Number Two Son, but only Number One was old enough to remember her at all, and that only in the vaguest possible ways. I try to keep them alive with family stories and anecdotes. Much in the same fashion the movie did, although the main character Miguel (ironically the Spanish version of Michael) actually visits the land of the dead. I haven’t personally gone quite that far.
The movie also expresses a deep genetic love of music, especially guitar music. My kids are all musical, and both of my sons play guitar. Number Two Son is particularly gifted in a Spanish-style ability to pick out complex tunes by ear and by sheet music. The movie’s music is without question the thing that makes it the best movie we have seen this year.
And the movie is filled to the brim with bright and appealing artwork, being an animated movie filled with Mexican art, even having a guest cameo appearance by the incomparable Frida Kahlo. This is easily the best movie she has been in since she died in 1954. The comedy of this whole extended skeleton dance of a movie is laugh-out-loud gorgeous. And artwork is also something I share a love for with my three children.
So I put him on an airplane in DFW today, and he is now back at his base. But I had him here for a precious little while and we capped it off with a precious little movie. Now, I have to admit, this post is not entirely a movie review. It is more about how my family made use of it and interacted with it. It is more of a family story that I needed to tell to keep the goodness of it alive and vibrant, painted in bright colors. But if you really want to know what I think of the movie, then I will shout at you, “YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE!!!” With three exclamation marks and everything. It is simply that good.
I saw a woman and her two kids getting breakfast at QT this morning. The kids, a boy and a girl, were both wearing jackets and pajama pants. They were both cute, and happy, and speaking Korean to each other. And I realized after smiling at them with my goofy old coot grin, that I am not prejudiced in any way when it comes to other people. They were Asian. I notice details. But that was an afterthought. It really wouldn’t have mattered if they were black, white, purple, brown, or yellow. (Though I have to admit I might’ve been slightly more fascinated by purple.) Not being prejudiced is a precious thing. It comes from a lifetime of working with kids of all kinds, and learning to love them while you’re trying to teach them to also have no prejudices.
Catch a Falling Star 
Weekend Fun with Heart Attacks
I’m not sure why I decided to have a heart attack over the holiday, but my body decided it was time and didn’t really give me a chance for input. I should qualify it a little bit. I didn’t have an actual heart attack according to the final tests, but the preliminary tests were all red flags and shouting.
So, I woke up in the middle of the night on Wednesday night with a pain in the left side of my chest. My left arm was hurting and tingling with numbness.
Now, it is not something new. I have arthritis in my rib cage and I tend to sleep on my left side. So, although the pain was concerning, it was not reason to make a middle-of-the-night dash to the emergency room. I eventually got back to sleep on my right side. I was sluggish and ill the next morning, but I got a lot of house cleaning done and the chest pains were gone.
Thursday night the pains returned, but still not different than the arthritis pains that sent me to the cardiologist before, and not nearly as harsh and painful as the night before. Again the pain went away in the day.
Friday night I picked up my son the Marine at the airport. He was home on holiday leave. We talked about my chest pains over a meal at I-hop. He pulled rank on me and vowed to take me to the ER. I talked him down to Primacare because it’s cheaper, still not believing it was real heart pain.
The next morning Primacare didn’t go so well. The EKG machine there predicted a major earthquake… or a typhoon, or something… and the Prima-doctor got all serious in the face. “Do you want me to call an ambulance? We are required to make the offer in these situations.”
“No, no. My son is with me and can drive me to the Emergency Room. I promise I will go.”
And so I did.
At the ER they are very concerned that you don’t have anything in your pockets. They quickly dressed me in a hospital gown and then surgically removed $200 (due to the wondrous way my insurance company has of not paying their portion of the bill). So, lighter by that amount, they immediately hooked me up to their own EKG machine. I had so many patches attached to the hair on my chest that I was guaranteed to be bald-chested when it came time to rip them all off again. Then they repeated the EKG testing done earlier in the day. I swear, the same squirrel that was visiting Primacare when I was there earlier, sneaked into their EKG machine too and vigorously jumped up and down. So, there it was. The proof they needed that I had too much money left in my bank account. And so they put me inside the hospital.
Once inside, they rigged me up so one arm could be crushed by a BP sleeve every two hours, or more if they felt like it, and the other arm could be drained of blood so that they could tell if there was any further money in my bank account.
Three days later, the enzymes in my blood said that what I had was mysterious and not a heart attack. The stress test I had on Monday nearly killed me, and told them that I didn’t have enough money left in my bank account to keep in the hospital any longer. I got out still wearing my arm band and allergy warning band as reminders that I really, really didn’t want to go back, but life is like that, and I still don’t know what caused it all, or if I will have to return to deal with it later on.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, healing, health, humor, illness, Paffooney