Stacy Horn

When I was at the doctor yesterday the subject of the economy came up. We commiserated briefly about what we both had lost and about having to work until the day we died, although for me personally, I never thought otherwise, and then I turned and noticed this view.  This doctor’s office is inside the O’Toole Building, which is part of St. Vincent’s Hospital.

There’s been a big war in the neighborhood about tearing the O’Toole building down to build a bigger, more state-of-the-art hospital something. I have to admit I didn’t really pay attention to the whole thing.  The battle was lost, and the building is going down, and I just don’t care!  I’m sorry.

I always thought this building was ugly (see below) and having newer, fancier facilities sounds like a good thing to me.  But this doctor was saying that due to the economy, the new building probably won’t happen. It’s interesting how this is reverberating, and it’s far from over.  I try not to think about what it’s going to mean to me because I don’t know what I can really do about it.

Hospitals, apparently.  Something bad must have happened to me in one once.  I remember having an anxiety attack while visiting someone in a hospital when I was around 12, and it was caused by nothing more than a smell.  I smelled something familiar and wham.  I locked myself in a bathroom and wouldn’t come out until it passed.  This nurse was yelling at me and pounding on the door and I wanted to scream at her that she was only making it worse, but that wasn’t how I was raised.  So I told her as politely as I could that I was not coming out until I was ready and then tried to calm myself while this nurse continued to yell and pound. (She meant well.)

Here’s my guess about why that happened.  I was born with a hole in my heart, which was an even bigger deal back then.  Open heart surgery was a lot dicier in those days.  Luckily the hole closed, but I was sick all the time my first few years of life and must have had an unpleasant experience in a hospital.  Given all the misconceptions at the time about babies and pain, and how to treat children, I’m not surprised.

Anyway, the whole point of this story is to explain why I have a pin in my foot.  Sometime in my twenties a doctor x-raying my feet found a small pin floating inside my right foot.  “How could someone get a pin of this size stuck in your foot and not go to the doctor,” he asked, amazed. But I could definitely see how child-Stacy might prefer to tough it out and avoid the hospital. Today I got my feet x-rayed again (I have problematic feet) and the doctor very kindly printed out the x-ray of my pin.  It’s a little hard to see, and it looks so tiny because I had to shrink this to fit.

I took a first pass through my closet yesterday, and I just couldn’t be as ruthless as I needed to be.  I’m going to make a second attempt today or tomorrow.

But I did get a great idea!  I was thinking how on the Tim Gunn show they completely alter existing clothes and make almost new garments.  When my mother died I inherited a lot of her clothes and among them this black cashmere coat. It’s too big for me, and too long, but I got the idea that if I shortened it to somewhere around the knee length it might work, and the bigness might be okay.  It’s only a little too big.

When I pinned it to see, it looked great.  The slight bigness works!  I think anyway.  Now I can’t decide if I should have it shortened to just below the knee or just above.  I was thinking below, but if I shorten it to above it would make it a more casual, every day coat that I can wear it with jeans, and I’d love to wear it every day.  It’s so soft and comfy.

No big plans for the day.  Next weekend is my big yearly holiday cleaning and I have to run some errands and pick up some things I’ll need for that, but other than that?  Not much on my plate. I can get back to work tomorrow.  Maybe today I will try to turn my closet into a closet Tim Gunn could love.

I took this yesterday on Perry Street, on my way to the gym.  The leaves are from my beloved, science fiction-y ginkgo trees.  Thank you whoever had the idea to plant the Village with ginkgo trees.

This week’s Bones and Grey’s Anatomy were great!  I also loved and bought the song Trouble is a Friend that played at the end of Grey’s Anatomy.

So, deciding what to do today.  In the meantime, just goofing off.  I took a picture of one of the buildings going up downtown at the WTC site.  This camera is amazing.  Here are two shots, zooming in and not.  Both the building a mile away and the building a block away are sharp.  If I showed you just a detail of the WTC building you’d see.  But here’s zoomed in and below, what it really looks like from my window.  Please notice that it’s still dark and rainy on my freshly cleaned windows.

The camera has a squashed perspective when you zoom in.  Like me!!