Street Seens: Thanks for Nothing
The song lyric that ran through my mind as I typed today’s title was “Things are seldom what they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream…..etc., etc.” Can’t remember the origins of the lyric, but it was a sort of signal that it would be important to warn you that if you expect to read a tirade of sarcasm that will help you vent whatever outrage you may be feeling, you won’t find it here.
So let’s just start with the spoiler alert and tell you that the “Nothing” to which the title refers is on my forehead. Or perhaps more accurately is the absence of the scar that has every right to have been there, for decades but has not been. And the “Thanks” is the heartfelt admiration and gratitude I will always owe to Joseph Duffy, MD., amazing general practitioner, husband of the gentle and beautiful Madeline Dailey Duffy; father of 6 including Catherine/Kay who seemed to have inherited the best qualities of her parents and was and will always be the person who appears over and again in my list of answers to the security question, ‘”Who was your childhood best friend?”
Kay Duffy O’Leary has never stopped qualifying for that title, even when our paths took one of us to an urban village here in Manhattan and the other to a home in Rockford, Illinois. In this past year, I got the gift of Kay’s High School Graduation photo with a long, typically generous dedication to her friend Annette. And though it came to me in the poignant context of the staging of my late sister’s home and the more recent effort to rationalize the masses of papers and keepsakes that have built up in my typically small Upper East Side apartment, it was here, where niece Meagen’s “find” came to rest this summer.
But before I stretch the bounds of credibility to their breaking point, let me get back to Dr. Duffy and the “Nothing” mentioned in today’s title. It should not have been surprising that in this week when we feasted on the consolation of observing the last honors paid to a Naval hero, Joseph Duffy would have come to mind. I feel sure he would have “gotten” the late Senator John McCain. They were cut, at very different times, from a similar bolt of Navy Blue and Dress White. They were both men who when no reasonable way forward was evident, invented one. Because that was the right thing to do. And because they recognized the dignity and value of the people who looked to them for help.
Dr. Joe left his family to serve in the US Navy in World War II. He rose to the rank of Commander and put his considerable skills to work for grievously wounded comrades. I never really knew much of where he served, but I can surely guess that it was not always in the pristine environments of today’s state of the art hospitals. Which brings us back to the “Nothing” for which I will always be indebted to this gentle healer.
Sometimes I forget about his near magical skill. He was defined as a general practitioner. But in my case he accomplished a sort of magic the most honored plastic surgeon would have reason to envy. Here is how it happened. In the week just before Christmas, Kay and I were passengers in a friend’s car being given a ride home from St. Francis Academy along seemingly unthreatening neighborhood streets. That was when the UPS truck struck the car. I will never know precisely what delivered the long wound that ran from high in my hairline to somewhere near the eyebrows. Fortunately for the frightened high school seniors, the accident happened at the doorstep of our classmate, Joanie Whelan.
“Hello Mrs. Whelan,” I murmured as we half-walked into her home. “I have a bit of a headache,” I seem to remember saying as I instinctively held the wound in place. Cut to the chase and know that by the time the wounded crew was delivered to the Emergency Room of St. Joseph’s (no coincidence!) Hospital, Dr. Duffy was already there awaiting us. With the skill, imagination and profound affection of a father, naval veteran of theaters of war and gifted healer, he closed my wound using very few stitches. (Part one of his astounding formula.)
Then, I will never know how, he created a sort of two lane highway of tape on each side of the wound, through which he had inserted tiny hooks that resembled the hangers one uses to suspend fragile Christmas tree ornaments on the tree. Then, the clincher. He found and used the tiniest rubber bands I had ever seen to connect the two “lanes” of hooks. And so, the healing began.
This week I was called to remember the “Nothing” when the eagle-eye of a skilled hair stylist looked quizzically at the forehead I was looking at in a mirror. I guessed that he might have wondered whether a thread had made its way to my hairline. And so, in the week of wonder at a hero’s accomplishments generated by the death and honoring of John McCain I was moved to provide my stylist, Ecko Kahil, with the story of how I came to owe Naval Commander and astounding physician Joseph Duffy, Sr., “Thanks for Nothing.”
Photo: Bigstock
