Day 84 of Nat'l Emergency: Bell's Palsy, Eight Minutes 46 Seconds of Terror, a Quizzical Coincidence

I’m wearing a crooked smile these days. Not by choice, mind you. Seems I have a mild case of Bell’s palsy.

Almost three weeks ago, on Wednesday, May 13 to be precise, as I was walking in our neighborhood, I felt a slight muscle cramp under the left side of my jaw. It quickly disappeared. Over the years I’ve had similar passing sensations, so I thought nothing of the current cramp. The next day, coincidentally around the same location on my walk, another fleeting cramp in the same spot under my jaw. 

As I continued my promenade my mouth felt as it does when recovering from a shot of novocaine from a dentist. I lost the ability to fully protrude the bottom of my jaw. My left cheek lacked sensation. No pain. Just a feeling of not quite numbness.

When I returned home Thursday, I looked in a mirror. No visible drooping. I smiled. My right side lips rose up in a smile. My left side stayed put. A classic crooked smile. 

To see me, one would not know anything was amiss. Lots of people have uneven smiles. I normally do not. 

Because of weakness in the muscles on the left side of my face I cannot suck up liquid with a straw unless it is positioned totally on the right side of my mouth. I’m sloppy when rinsing out toothpaste after brushing. It is easier to drink from a small juice glass than a standard width tumbler. 

My neurologist confirmed a mild case of Bell’s palsy. An MRI revealed no underlying reasons why my seventh cranial nerve acted up. 

There’s no treatment for my Bell’s palsy. It will self-correct, usually within six months. I already have seen improvements in my smile. 

Eight Minutes, 46 Seconds: I have no silver bullet, no magic formula to solve the continuing bias black Americans experience. How hard, how exhausting it must be to live a life of constant fear not just outside one’s home but even inside it should police come a-knocking.

I’ve been driving a car more than 50 years. During that more than half a century of driving I have received three tickets for a moving violation. Yet, each time I spot a police car a nerve receptacle in my brain tingles. I immediately check the speedometer. At night I check that my headlights are on. If turning or changing lanes I check if my blinker lights are on. I look in the rear view mirror to check if the police car has begun following me.

Am I paranoid? To some degree, for sure. But no doubt nowhere near the anxiety any black motorist must feel any time, anywhere, they are behind the wheel in their own cars or while delivering packages in a white neighborhood. 

Sadly, tragically, we have witnessed once again deadly, brutal, racist treatment black Americans receive from law enforcement. George Floyd did not commit a violent assault. Police were called because he was suspected of passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. He did not threaten anyone. 

Moreover, as a video recapitulation by The New York Times of the distressing incident shows, even though Floyd says he is willing to get up and get into a squad car, he is restrained from doing so by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and possibly two other officers. Chauvin has his left knee on Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the ground (https://nyti.ms/2XMtUMa). 

Floyd’s death might not have been premeditated, but it clearly was murder.

Quizzical Coincidence: In its online page Sunday and in its print edition Monday, The Times ran an obituary of Herb Stempel whose death was not known when he expired April 7. The headline Monday was “Herb Stempel, 93, Contestant Who Admitted Quiz Show Was Fake, Dies” (https://nyti.ms/3doDc7C).

How ironic that his obituary coincided with the first installment Sunday of a three-part British series, aptly named “Quiz” on AMC, dramatizing a near 20-year-old cheating scandal surrounding British ITV’s hit show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.”

Though they dispute their guilt, the perpetrators in “Quiz” are found to have passed information through strategic coughs from an audience member to a contestant. Stempel, on the other hand, was provided questions and answers for his appearances on “Twenty-One” in late 1956. He never denied his involvement in duping the public. Indeed, he asserted he was simply an “actor” following a script, for which he received $25,000. 

From Ottynia to Perth

I had fully intended to finish up my tax returns today but two early morning emails derailed that plan. By “early morning” I mean shortly after midnight, not that I was awake to read them when they descended from the cloud into my mailbox.

I got up at a reasonable hour this morning, slightly before 8. That is, my eyes opened for good, though I did not get out of bed for good for nearly another two hours. I blame email. As most of you probably do, I check email first thing in the A.M. Never know when Linda the Realtor might have an ASAP project for me to complete (which she did just past noon which deferred my writing this post until evening). 

In quick succession I read two emails that opened up links with my past. The first was from Lisa, a Denver resident searching for family roots in Ottynia, the hometown village of my father in what is now western Ukraine. She had found me several days earlier after googling Ottynia. My blog came up at the top of her Google search. As she wrote, “Now that’s optimization.”

After reading and responding to her second email this morning, we communicated the old fashioned way, by phone for half an hour. Just prior to that call I answered the other email that jolted me this morning, from a distant cousin in Minneapolis who I had last seen about 20 to 25 years ago when I was making annual visits to the Twin Cities. A year ago I wrote about his father’s surreptitious entry into the United States in the early 1920s and his subsequent flight to Minnesota to evade being picked up as an illegal alien. Like Lisa, David had read about Ottynia in my blog.

So I began reading old posts about Ottynia, thrust forward also by reports of wreckage from Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 possibly being spotted some 1,500 miles west of Perth, Australia. There in one of the blogs from October 2009 was a promise to relate a story about my father and mother’s visit to Perth.

One of the hallmarks of my parents’ 53-year marriage was their open expression. In other words, they argued, sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest. My father never let my mother forget that his first love was Dora, a woman he met in Danzig prior to World War II. Though he asked her to come with him to America in 1939, as an only child she chose to go with her parents to Australia. Sadly, within six months of arriving Down Under, her parents died. She tried to reconnect with my father, but could not. 

My father married my mother in 1942. Whenever my father would tease her about his first love, she would respond she was ready to buy him a one-way ticket to Australia. 

My father had many friends who left Poland in 1939. They were spread around the world. They agreed to meet in Israel in 1989, but one of them, a doctor in Sydney, Australia, had cataract surgery and could not travel. So my parents decided to visit him. As could be expected, before the trip they argued about something, my father mentioned Dora and my mother decided to call his bluff. Why don’t you put an ad in the Australian version of The Jewish Week and see if she responds, she suggested.

He had his doctor friend place an ad, asking anyone who knows a Dora who came to Australia in 1939 to contact him. A few days later, a friend sitting in Dora’s kitchen in Perth saw the ad. When Dora’s letter reached our home, it was hard to say who was more startled. Dora had married, had two sons, but was widowed in 1955. Hardly a day goes by, she wrote, that she did not think of my father.

Suddenly, a “simple” trip to Sydney was transformed into a romantic adventure. Her bluff called, my mother had no choice but to accompany her husband on his transcontinental trip back down lover’s lane in Perth. Indeed, whenever Dora was alone with him, she wrapped her arms around my father and said she would be there for him if he ever were single again. 

Ah, but my dad’s innate conservative morals thwarted any thoughts of seduction. Dora had told him she had boyfriends after her husband’s death. His ardor cooled, he returned to America never again threatening to run off to Australia.