PARADISE LOST

The thing about referring to the place you live as “paradise,” is that everyplace else you find yourself… isn’t.

My current locale… far from my joy-filled home on Florida’s Fisher Island… is Southern California. My place of birth, home of the once mighty Trojan football team, the self-proclaimed entertainment capital of the world. Well, anyway, whatever else, it still remains the place of my birth.

I have been here in Los Angeles much longer than I intended or desired because that pain in my abdomen is not just the healing process of my hernia operation of three months ago; it is that self-same surgery gone bad and needing a do-over.

All that poking and prodding because of my complaints of continuing pain, and all those various physicians’ explanations that I would soon be fine, are now in the past. I must have the surgery again. Can you visualize my palms to face? My frustration with the medical establishment?

Of course it is different this time. Now there is scar tissue to deal with, plus the fact of failure the first time. This second surgery is going to take longer… and more fact findings will be required such as CT scans and cardiology clearances. This is not like before with 30 minutes of “twilight.” This is going to be three to four hours of anesthesia on an 87-year-old guy with a pacemaker.

I am easy about all of it. What upsets me is that I am in California and this procedure requires six weeks of inactivity post op; meaning that instead of returning to Miami and my Island Paradise before mid-December, I very likely will not be home until February.

I could go back to Miami and have the same team as before have another whack at my torso, but Fisher Island is under repair… and my building is going through major (read noisy and dirty) work with a resultant loss of privacy on my wrap-around deck and environs until the end of January. That unhappy fact, plus a plethora of funerals, is what brought me to California in the first place.

Is it any wonder that suicide comes to mind? Even as a fleeting thought? My body is betraying me, and at 87, there are naught but prospects drear. Do I really want to spend months of however much time is left on this planet in recuperation? The damp, grey clouds of California in the middle of winter, the all-that-is-left B-list lunches, the traffic, and the fact of everything out here being far away from everything else… including a parking place. It is a lot with which to cope.

Until it isn’t. I do not have a lot of skill sets, but among those I do possess is resiliency. A built-in tendency to bounce back.

It does not mean I don’t hate being out here on the west coast so much longer than I planned … especially at Christmas time. I am a Jewish kid, born in 1937 on December 23. That is 87 years of competing with Baby Jesus for attention at birthday time… something that is particularly tough in this part of the country where half my family are ardent Catholics.

My complexion is not the only thing around here that is green. Everywhere there are wreaths and decorated trees. The only thing that isn’t verdant is garishly crimson. This does not happen as much in The Sunshine State. Probably because the red and green combo clashes with the aqua and orange décor that dominates the neighborhoods of South Florida and my Island Paradise.

All that said, my mood is better. Markedly better. 24 hours of sulking and now my spirits have been revived. You may well ask how that is accomplished. By coming to view this catastrophe as opportunity, that’s how.

It came to me out of the darkness that there is the fact of my latest tome… an autobiography… languishing in my “to-do” file for months. Not a single word written since Spring, not one comma altered. The surgery, the cross-country trip, my general lack of motivation, let alone ambition, have conspired to have the book lie dormant.

My life story without the stuff already written in Cagney & Lacey… and Me (as ever, still available via Amazon or iTunes). It is appropriately enough entitled Life Without Cagney & Lacey and its conceit is that the reader has already devoured the aforementioned memoir and now wants to know what happened before and after that singular success.

It would all be so much easier if I were Steven Spielberg… or even George Lucas. Then, at least, I would figure there was an audience for such a book. I remain just enough of a producer to be concerned about box office receipts and just who this work is for.

What got me started on this opus was realizing that my life has been long enough to be of some interest. The pertinent question is to whom?

I have come to realize the trick is not to give a damn. 87 years later, it is my turn and a terrific way to fill days of recuperation (six weeks of them, to be specific) in a reclining chair with nothing better to do than complete those pages that I have spent a lifetime creating.

A nine-year-old washing dishes at a downtown restaurant, Yell King at the University of Southern California, three marriages, Frank Sinatra, Fess Parker, Daniel Boone, Paul Newman, Lolita, Steve McQueen, Paddy Chayefsky, Marlon Brando, Doris Day, David Wolper, Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett, Spelling/Goldberg, Ned Beatty, Marty Ritt, Jane Seymour, Tony Richardson, East of Eden, Christie, The American Dream, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill…

Just a few hundred pages between me and my Island Paradise.

 

Barney Rosenzweig