DELIVERIES

Miami Herald, The (FL)
April 30, 1989
Author: TOM SHRODER Herald Tropic Editor

They had just started the Pitocin in the IV. Friends had told us to fear Pitocin, warned that the contractions brought on by the uterus-stimulating drug were far more painful and frequent than in ordinary labor. The nurse, who had been wonderfully reassuring in the six frustrating hours we had been in the labor room, was trying to reassure us again. Lisa looked pale and frightened, but she lay back on the table and waited for whatever was to come. The blood-pressure cuff automatically inflated in its 10-minute cycle. The liquid dripped from the IV bag. The baby's heart blipped on the monitor. I bent down to kiss my wife's shoulder. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" the nurse said softly.

I looked at her blankly. I could not imagine anything more personal than the services she had already performed so ably.

She paused, embarrassed, then . . .

"What is T.M. Shine really like?"

While my daughter was struggling to be born that day, I should have been writing this column. I had briefly sketched out an essay on the subject of pizza, in honor of today's cover story by one of my favorite writers, Terry Michael Shine. I was going to talk about the intimacy of pizza. The heat of it. You eat it barehanded right out of the box, cheese stringing from your mouth as you pull the crust away from each bite.

Pizza was what Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep ordered out for late at night in that memorable scene from Heartburn when she told him she was pregnant and they sat on the couch with their mouths full singing songs with the word "baby" in it. Pizza is what was delivered on our wedding night when we were finally home in comfortable clothes and just happy to be married.

It was the intimate place of pizza in our lives, I was going to argue, that made it such a perfect vehicle for T.M. Shine, because whatever Shine is writing about, the subject is always intimacy -- that personal space where we live, hidden behind all the faces we present to the world. We pretend that what is important in our lives are the great issues of war and peace and politics, the intensely fought battles of the work place, the courtroom and the market. But Shine has the gift of seeing through all the suits, all the armor of status and convention, to the naked human truth that underlies it all.

Shine is quiet, unremarkable in a crowd. He can seem naive, innocent of the complications of the world. But his eyes are always open.

As Shine points out in the story that begins on Page 8, delivering pizzas was not a gimmick for getting a story. It was a gimmick for making some extra money. Free-lance writing is rarely a lucrative enterprise.

I tried to explain some of this to the nurse, but I was distracted by my life. It was happening before my eyes as I held a wet cloth to my wife's forehead and fed ice chips onto her coated tongue. The peaks that were etching themselves on the unspooling graph paper were carrying her into agony spaced a minute and 50 seconds apart. Her hand gripped mine, her fingernails digging into my flesh against her pain. After climbing each mountain there was only another to climb. Writers and writing didn't seem particularly important for the moment.

When the baby finally emerged into the doctor's gloved hands, she cried for a moment as he suctioned out her mouth and nostrils, then she stopped and opened her eyes. They were steel blue and they moved around the bright, cramped delivery room as I held her in the crook of my arm. She was perfectly quiet, perfectly innocent, watching.

After the baby had gone to the nursery, I sat beside my wife's bed and waited for her eyes to close with exhaustion. Then I stumbled out to the parking lot too tired and too wired to go home. Instead I drove into the Grove.

There were five new restaurants since I'd been there last, and at 11 on a Wednesday night, the streets were swarming, the outdoor tables filled. Live music filtered out onto the street.

I ate pizza.

Memo: FROM THE EDITOR
Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1989 The Miami Herald