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CREATIVE WRITING, FICTION, PUBLISHED WORK

The Road Taken

by Sara F.Leave a Comment on The Road Taken

This essay was awarded an honorable mention in Notre Dame Magazine’s 2021 Young Alumni Essay Contest. It was originally published at magazine.nd.edu.

Photo by Bruno Ticianelli on Pexels.com

The snap of a bone set in motion the next 40 years.

On that Saturday morning in April, the sun coated the road sleepily as my mom and two friends biked down Jericho Turnpike in Long Island. Usually rush-hour cars honked and skidded angrily along this highway, but on weekends it stretched calmly ahead, flat and empty.

With cycling shoes clipped firmly into the pedals of her new red Italian racing bike — the most expensive item she’d ever owned — my mom rode behind her two friends. The wind beat against her back, curls escaping her ponytail and whipping madly across her face. As the trio hit a stretch without any stores, a black cloud loomed suddenly and inexplicably behind them.

Screeech! My mom’s bike skidded left with the car’s impact, sliding below the wheels and breaking into jagged pieces as it tore into the tar below. Her body went right, sailing through the air with her feet still clipped onto the bike, joints twisting and cracking as she fell. She remembers looking down at herself from above and seeing her leg bent in a C-shape and white bone jutting out surreally from her left ankle. She was conscious but felt no pain.

In a way, the day of the accident was the first day of the rest of her life.

***

“We’re not sure we can save your leg,” the doctor said.

My mom, only 17 at the time, was alone in the hospital when she heard that news, realizing for the first time the severity of her injury.

The pain that was mysteriously absent at the time of the accident roared through her body now. As she dozed in and out of morphine-fueled sleep, her body kept bracing for impact, reliving the trauma repeatedly. Medication muted the pain for 30 minutes and then she’d wait three more hours for the next shot. She didn’t know how much more of it she could take.

After she’d spent two weeks in the hospital her orthopedist, Dr. Helou, knew her treatment was at a crossroads. They’d staved off infections but with her ankle crushed, what could they do now? Amputation was a logical option, but here was an athletic teenage girl with an entire life ahead of her. There had to be another way.

Dr. Helou turned to my grandparents. He told them this injury was more than he could handle and he’d been praying. One night after church, he’d returned to his office to see a medical journal spread open to a full-page article by a man named Dr. Howard Rosen — an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Joint Diseases who was performing internal fixation — a new, European method of repairing complicated fractures with plates and screws. The method was rare in the United States at the time, but there was hope.

“I’m going to give you her X-rays,” Dr. Helou said to my grandfather. “You go to the hospital first thing Monday morning and beg to see Dr. Rosen. It’s what I would do if it were my own daughter.”

When my grandpa arrived, the waiting room was already packed. A sympathetic receptionist brought him around back to Dr. Rosen’s office so he’d be the first in line when the doctor got back from surgery.

When Dr. Rosen finally walked in six hours later, he was warm and friendly, with a perfectly manicured handlebar moustache and pristine spectacles that did not reveal that he’d come right from an intense operating room. Hours earlier he’d repaired the ankle of a Long Island woman who’d been in a horrific car accident. He thought my mom’s injury looked similar.  

“I’ll do it,” he said. “I think I can help her walk again.”

With those words, my mom’s long road to healing began.

***

A few years before my mom’s accident, writer and essayist Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”

My mom has traveled between these kingdoms more than once in her 59 years, undergoing the biking accident, breast cancer and a life-threatening tumor on her adrenal gland.

When she returned from the hospital after giving birth to my youngest sister, she opened the New York Times issues she’d missed during a long and arduous last month of pregnancy.

She’d been thinking lately about Dr. Rosen, her very first guide back to the kingdom of the well. Not only did he rebuild her ankle, but she hardly had any pain and could do pretty much any activity other than running. He’d said to her after surgery, “If I buy you 10 years’ time and in 10 years they have better ankle replacement available, I would consider that a success.”

In the years since the accident, she’d gotten married, moved to a new state, bought a house and become a mother. She was going to give him a call and say, “Dr. Rosen, you told me you’d give me 10 years, but I got 20! And look, I have four beautiful children now.” Maybe she’d even send a photograph of the family.

But just as Dr. Helou had fortuitously opened the medical journal so many years earlier to see Dr. Rosen’s article, so did my mom open the New York Times to see Dr. Rosen’s obituary spreading across a full page.

Her heart sank. She wanted to thank him but he was already gone — taken by cancer, an illness that no number of plates and screws could cure.

***

In my childhood backyard, there are two tall pine trees that tower over my bedroom window. During thunderstorms, these trees sway back and forth, branches fluttering about angrily. I used to peer out of my window on stormy nights with worry.

“What if they fall on me?” I asked. “What if they crash through my bedroom?”

My mom would comfort me, saying “Don’t worry, the trees won’t fall. They are strong. And because their trunks can sway, they can take on the wind.”

Some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers have a similar engineering technique. In fact, they can sway inches to the right or left on the windiest days. For me, my mom is that tree, that skyscraper. Perhaps the most important lesson of the many I’ve learned from her is to embrace the hurt, realizing that life ebbs and flows between dark times and bright ones.

My mom’s incredible strength and faith has held steady through illness, loss, financial strain and the stress of the global pandemic. She’s flexible and proactive, staying focused on her core values and the people around her. Though she never got to thank Dr. Rosen in person, I know gratitude guides her actions every day. She’s taught me how to navigate career shifts and lapses in confidence by recognizing that hard times are inevitable. Getting through these hard times with grace while always asking what you can do for others makes good times that much sweeter.

My mom had never missed a day of school before the accident. But in an instant, she lost her school routine, senior year, nights out with friends. She faced a hazy future. She never asked, “why me?” because she was grateful to live, grateful that it was a bike that had gone under the car and not her.

As a teenager, she went through what she calls an “existential crisis,” staying up late at night reading books to figure out her purpose. After the accident her path became clear: she would become a physical therapist and help others recover from difficult injuries. And it was at SUNY Downstate Medical Center that she met a kind and silly fourth year medical student who’d become her husband — my father.

On that empty stretch of Jericho Turnpike, a dreadful accident changed her life trajectory. But just as bone transplanted from her hip over time grew into a new ankle, she took her one life and, with my dad, built four new ones. Forty years later she keeps pedaling ahead with the strength and speed of a 17-year-old, blocking the wind for those of us who came behind.

LIFE

Remember the small things

by Sara F.Leave a Comment on Remember the small things

“How’s life?” they ask.

 “Life is pretty good,” I say. “Nothing to note, really.”

 Usually, everything is just status quo.

The funny thing is, the best things in life often take you by surprise—offering a minute or two of happiness that fades into the rest of the day. Sometimes, these little things don’t get the attention they deserve.

The first snowfall. Free pizza. A $20 bill that survives the wash in your pocket. Running into an old friend in a city of nine million people. Cursing the crowds in the subway, only to look up and see your favorite poem on the wall.

 A couple from college having their first baby. Listening to the rain while you’re cuddled under a blanket, nursing a cup of tea. Driving on an open road with the windows down and music blasting.

When any Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, or Third Eye Blind song plays at the bar.

 A letter from a friend…in the mail.

A brilliant summer sunset that catches you off guard. Going to work on a “bad” hair day but getting more compliments on your hair than ever. Going out for a run and feeling a surge of energy, like your legs aren’t even yours, like you could keep running forever.

A conversation with a younger sibling and feeling overwhelming pride at the person they’ve become.

The realization that someone you like, but never thought you would be with, likes you too.

So often we “create” happiness—planning for vacations, weekends, dinners out with friends. We anticipate exciting things like a new job, an engagement, a move to another city, or other major life events that will lift our spirits for months at a time and change our outlook. But so many of life’s joys are unexpected. They’re threaded right into the fabric of the day along with the stresses and monotony. The smaller moments that happen so fast are among the happiest moments of all. We just didn’t think to take pictures of them or write them down.

 “How’s life?” they ask.

 “Life is good. Life is great,” I’ll say next time. Because I know it’s not always full of dramatic ups and downs that make for great stories on the phone.

Most of life is filled with little details we choose to either remember, or let slip away.

But together, they add up to something incredible.

Together they add up to a pretty good life.

JOURNALISM, LIFE, NOTRE DAME, NYC

Home in the heartland

by Sara F.4 Comments on Home in the heartland

This essay was awarded honorable mention in Notre Dame Magazine’s 2017 Young Alumni Essay Contest. It was originally published at magazine.nd.edu

My final night in Toledo, Ohio, I climbed up to the roof of my apartment building to watch the sunset. Brilliant orange hues silhouetted everything below the horizon a dark, velvety black, and only the banks poked above the skyline. The colors were bright and bold, beckoning me to stay.

Straight in front of me on North Superior Street, I could see the old newspaper building where I’d spent long hours that summer covering everything from robberies to school board meetings to controversial city investments. From above, the streets looked clean and still and silent, but I knew that was far from true. Up on the rooftop, I couldn’t see trash rolling through the roads or crooked “for sale” signs hanging in dusty windows. I couldn’t see the crime, deterioration and poverty, all hidden in plain sight.

I lived that summer in a building that once housed the famous LaSalle & Koch Department Store, and until 1984, one of the largest Macy’s stores outside of New York City. It had since been converted into massive loft apartments, but you could still see the Macy’s sign painted on one side, like a faded tattoo. As I watched the sunset that night on the roof while a couple on the far side clinked Coronas, I thought about my three months in Toledo. I’d been intensely lonely and completely out of my comfort zone, but reporting stories throughout Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan solidified a longer relationship I’d been building with the Midwest as a region, a fascination with the place and its history.

I knew I’d come back. After all, there were more stories to tell.

The first time I connected with the Midwest was through the words of Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser, when I was 16. I picked up one of his collections at a book festival near my home in New Jersey and couldn’t stop reading — the poems were nothing like what I’d read in school. His words were simple, beautiful and timeless. I did not find out until later that Kooser was in fact Poet Laureate of the United States at the time, the first selected from the Great Plains.

Kooser’s poems, with titles like “Dishwater” and “Creamed Corn,” find beauty in the mundane. Kooser takes basic daily occurrences and shows that just beneath the surface of everything and everyone is something extraordinary. He changed my perspective on what constitutes great writing. Now, I believe great writing is found not necessarily in complex plots or exotic settings but in people — their histories, struggles and challenges. And no region in America exemplifies this kind of writing better than the Midwest. Think Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a classic depiction of small-town America, or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. The Midwest, of course, is vast and varied, but a common theme fueling its literature is a strong sense of place and a focus on the people who live there.

Another aspect of the Midwest that makes it ripe for great writing is its relationship with the past. While New York City, my current home, paints over the past as quickly as it can build new skyscrapers, the past seems to linger in the Midwest. When I lived in Toledo, everywhere I went I could see remnants of a time long gone — beautiful Victorian houses slowly decaying, an old theater that sat empty most nights, even hot dog joints that opened in the 1920s and haven’t changed much since. Toledo’s past hovers over every street, over every building that was once grand and isn’t anymore. In Rust Belt cities like Toledo, the past is so present, it’s almost a character in its own right.

I spent my formative years in the Midwest, and only after five years of living in New York City do I understand how much that impacted me — as a writer and as a person. Both sides of my family are from Brooklyn, New York — I have no roots in America’s heartland. But after four years at college at Notre Dame in South Bend, a few weeks in Iowa City in high school and, of course, my summer in Toledo, the Midwest now feels like home.

The region is a crossroads of cultural influences, but I believe it shares some common characteristics. For one, the land is mainly flat, surrounded by the Rockies on the West and Appalachians on the East, giving the region its distinguishing wide-open feel. While the small agricultural towns of the Great Plains differ immensely from the Rust Belt cities of the Great Lakes, I’ve found Midwesterners to be politer and more community-oriented than their counterparts on the East Coast. And while, in New York, most people come from somewhere else to achieve and transform, Midwesterners have a strong sense of identity and pride in their roots.

So which region better reflects me as an individual? The self-assured, quieter Midwest, or the more rushed, aggressive Northeast? Right now, I don’t long to live in the Midwest — I’m happy where I am, in a city that simultaneously excites and exhausts me. But every time I arrive back to Ohio or Indiana or Iowa, a part of me feels at peace. I love the predictability of main streets, the kindness of the people, and the brilliant summer sunsets that soar on for miles into the distance because the topography offers so few disruptions. Being in the Midwest reminds me there’s so much more to America than I know.

One summer morning in New York, I was on a subway train so packed that I couldn’t even put my left foot down — all of the floor space was taken up. After about 10 minutes of this discomfort, a woman in front of me got off the train, revealing one of my favorite poems by Kooser, “A Winter Morning,” on a billboard where advertisements usually go on the subway walls:

A farmhouse window far back from the highway

speaks to the darkness in a sure, small voice.

Against this stillness, only a kettle’s whisper,

and against this starry cold, one small blue ring of flame.

That poem greeted me like the familiar smile of someone you haven’t seen in a long time, and for a moment, the oppressive heat and crush of people vanished. Kooser’s words were a small but comforting reminder of my connection to somewhere else.

I know I’ll travel the long, flat roads back to America’s heartland again, before the future finally steamrolls its lingering past. I want to drive around the region, listen to the stories to be told there, learn more about these cities and where they’re headed. Maybe those wide roads will take me out to the rolling cornfields of Nebraska, or back to my former homes in Toledo or South Bend. But for now, I’ll find my Midwest haven in the worlds of Kooser and Robinson and Anderson, and escape, through their stories, to the places that have become a part of me, while the sirens of New York City wail incessantly outside.