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For 5 Years I Kept The Same 7:15 Appointment, And Then A 6 Year Old Ruined It. The appointment was at Mount Alder Cemetery, up the hill past the water tower, on the north side of Kerrick. I never wrote it down anywhere. The gate man pulled the chain off at 7:15, and I liked being first through it. On the way I stopped at Fairlane Market and bought daisies out of the cooler by the register, the cheap ones in the wet plastic sleeve. My wife June liked flowers she could see from the sink. She never used the word arrangement in her whole life. So I brought her grocery store daisies, and I brought them dripping, and I put them in the little iron ring set into the base of the stone. Then I talked. I told her what the weather was doing, which she could see fine without me. I told her what I'd had for breakfast, which was coffee. I told her the Ferguson kid finally came and dragged his truck off my lot after 14 months. I told her the drip in the shop sink was back and that I'd get to it. Then I wiped the bird mess off the top of the stone with my thumb, the same corner every time. In 5 years it never occurred to me to bring a rag. That's a lot of nothing, said out loud, at 7:15 in the morning, to a piece of granite. I knew exactly what it was. I just don't stop doing it. She's been gone 6 years. I've been going for 5. In the missing year I wasn't somebody you'd hand anything to. I've got a 2 bay garage on Delmore Street with my name painted on the glass, and most days I don't open it. There's a lift in the second bay with nothing on it. There's a work order clipped to the board that was written before she died and never finished. I'll take a job if a man drives up and knocks. I stopped chasing them a long time ago. My bike sat in the corner under a cover so long the cover went stiff and cracked when I finally moved it. I drive a truck now. Bench seat, a lot of miles. That was the whole deal. 20 minutes on the hill, then a day I had to get through to earn the next 20. If you'd asked me what I was doing with the rest of it, I'd have said I was fine, and I'd have meant it. The first Tuesday in October the fog came off the reservoir and sat on that hill so heavy the water tower wasn't there anymore. I almost drove past the gate. I came up the row with the daisies and I heard a sound I'd never heard in that place. A little grinding noise. Plastic dragging on gravel. There was a boy sitting in the dirt at the foot of June's stone. He had a yellow toy excavator and he was working the boom back and forth, digging a hole about the size of a coffee cup. Blue coat, hood down, hair sticking straight up in the back. I said, "Son, you can't dig there." He didn't look up. He said, "It's okay." He said, "She's my mom." I want to tell you I said something. I stood in the fog holding wet daisies and I didn't say one word. Behind him a woman came up the row in a tan coat, walking fast, and she stopped dead when she saw who was standing there. Vivian. June's mother. I hadn't been within 20 feet of that woman since the funeral. She looked at me a long time. Then she said, "Well." Then she said, "I picked a bad morning." His name is Micah. He was 6 in August. He was born 40 minutes after his mother died, in a room I wasn't in, in a building I couldn't make myself walk into. June was 2 weeks from her due date the morning she went off Barrow Road. The baby lived. The boy with the toy excavator digging at his mother's stone was my son. You're going to ask how I didn't know that for 6 years. I asked, once. I asked Vivian in the parking lot that night and she said, "There's nothing in there for you, Gil, go home." And I went home. I never made myself find out whether the baby had lived, and after the first year not finding out was something I was doing on purpose. And by the time I was in any shape to ask a second question, she'd taken him to her sister's place over in Delford for a while, 2 hours off. I had a suspended license and a court date and no ground under me anywhere. She never said the words. She just let a night go by, and then a week, and then it got too big to say. I asked her about it later in her own kitchen, once we were speaking again. She said, "I told myself I'd tell you when you were fit to hear it." She said, "Then I got used to not telling you." That's the answer I got and I've decided it's the true one. There's one more thing about that morning, and it's mine, not hers. That morning June said, "Drive me to my appointment." I said, "The lift's full." She said, "It's always full." I said, "Go on then, I'm not chasing you." She went out the door at 7:15 and she never came back through it. That's why 7:15. Love was maybe half of what took me up that hill. The rest was clocking in. Vivian set the terms that same week and she set them cold. She said, "Saturdays." She said, "My house." She said, "I stay in the room." She said, "Nobody tells the boy anything until I say so." I said yes to every one of them before she finished the list, and I'd have said yes to worse. She never apologized and I never asked her to. She wasn't wrong about the man she was looking at. She was just wrong about how long he was going to stay that man. I think about this at 3 in the morning. Vivian brought him up that hill that Tuesday because the fog meant nobody would be there. If she'd picked any other Tuesday in October, I'd still be a man with 20 good minutes and nothing on the other end of them. I had a perfect attendance record with a piece of granite and not one appointment with anybody who might've looked at me. Nobody had asked me a question about myself in 5 years, because I hadn't given anybody a reason to ask one. The rest of this started with a boy digging a hole in the fog with a toy excavator. The third Saturday I carried him in. We'd been to the park and he fell asleep in the truck on the way back with the excavator in his lap. Vivian's drive is flat gravel and then a concrete walk, maybe 60 feet of it, straight to the door. I got about half of it done. Something came down across my chest like a hand pressing flat and my arms went to water. I had to set him down in the grass, on his feet, and hold him up by the shoulders while he swayed there half awake. He said, "Mister Gil," and went back under. I stood in Vivian's yard breathing like I'd run somewhere and I picked him back up and finished the 30 feet and put him on the couch, and I was fine. Vivian was in the doorway the entire time. She didn't say anything until I was walking back out to the truck. Then she said, "Gil." She said, "I buried my daughter." She said, "I am not doing that to him." And then she shut the door on it. I got in with Dr. Ambrose at Kerrick Family Medicine the last week of October. He's a brisk man. He's not unkind, he's just working a list, and I was 66 and hadn't been in the building since before the funeral so I was a whole afternoon of catching up in a 12 minute slot. I didn't mention the yard. They took blood. A week later a woman called and read me a number off a screen. LDL, 194. I said, "Okay." She said, "The doctor would like to see you." Dr. Ambrose put the paper on the desk between us and turned it around so it faced me. He said, "194 is high." He said, "We'll start with food, cut the obvious things, come back in 3 months, and if it hasn't moved we'll talk about a pill." I asked him what the number meant. He said, "It means there's too much of it." I said, "Too much of what?" He looked at the clock over my shoulder and said, "Cholesterol, Gil." That was the conversation and I don't hold it against him. I went home and threw out the bacon. Then I put it up on the shop board, the same as any job that's going to run longer than a day. Oatmeal every morning, in a cylinder like my mother used to buy. Fish twice a week that I didn't want. The block after supper, most nights, in the dark, past houses with people in them. A tally mark for every day I held all 3, chalked in the corner under the work order that never got finished. 3 months of marks and no gaps in them. The bench at Mount Alder sits in section C between 2 rows, and I'd been sitting on it 5 years, and there'd been a man on the other end of it for probably 4 of those years. Hollis. He's 69, retired, taught history at the middle school for 34 years and still says things like now hold on there when you get ahead of him. He comes for his brother. Wade's stone is 2 rows over from June's, close enough that when the grass is cut you can read it from the bench. Hollis always had a dented green thermos with him. He'd set it on the bench between us like a third person sitting down. For 4 years we'd traded maybe 300 words total. Then one morning in November I sat down with Dr. Ambrose's paper folded in my shirt pocket and he watched me take it out and put it back twice. He said, "Is that a lab slip?" I said it was. He said, "What'd they hit you with?" I said, "194." He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "Wade's was better than that." I said, "What?" He said, "My brother's number was better than yours and better than most people's, and his doctor wrote the word excellent on it, and Wade told everybody at Thanksgiving." I asked what happened to him. Hollis said he was 61. He said Wade went out for his morning walk and a neighbor found him on the sidewalk about an hour later. He said, "The paperwork afterward used a lot of words and none of them explained how a man with a sheet like that doesn't come back from a walk." He said, "Wade walked that same route every morning for 11 years, and Wade was the one who used to get on me about my eating." I said I was sorry. He said, "Everybody is." Then he unscrewed the lid of that thermos and poured some into it and said, so I went and found out. He'd never brought it up in 4 years of sitting there. He spent about 2 years on it. He said, "I did it because the alternative was sitting in the house." He said, "I'm going to tell you what I found, and you're going to argue with me, and that's fine." In January I went back to Dr. Ambrose and they took blood again. 3 months. Every morning, oatmeal. The number came back 188. 6 points. I worked the arithmetic out on the shop board that afternoon and came out with about 10 more of these 3-month waits in front of me. I said that out loud to Dr. Ambrose and he didn't laugh. He said, "6 is 6, and it's going the right way, and we can talk about the pill now if you want." I said, "Give me until the next one." He shrugged. I drove up the hill the next morning with that paper in my pocket and put it on the bench and said, all right, tell me the thing. Hollis picked it up, read it, handed it back. He said, "You know what 188 actually is?" I said, "Bad, less than before." He said, "It's a count." I said, "A count of what?" He said, "How many." He held up his hand and made a little box with his fingers. He said, "You've got millions of tiny packages floating around in there hauling fat from one place to another." He said, "That number is how many of them the machine counted in a drop of you." I said, "So it's a traffic counter." He said, "Go on." I said, "There's one out on Route 9 by the tire place, that rubber hose laying across the road." He said, "That's it exactly." He said, "It counts how many cars went over it." He said, "It has no idea whose brakes are shot." I said, "So what's wrong with mine?" He said, "Maybe nothing, maybe a lot, depends what shape they're in." I said, "What do you mean shape?" He said, "Every one of those packages is fat on the inside with one big protein wrapped all the way around the outside holding the whole thing together." He said, "The wrapper's got a name, ApoB-100, and it's the same one on every single package." He said, "Now." He said, "There are things floating around in your blood looking for something to react with, and when they find one of these packages they go after the fat inside and they go after the wrapper." I said, "So this is antioxidants." I said, "June's sister used to talk about antioxidants until you wanted to leave the room." Hollis made a face. He said, "That word's a mood." He said, "Nobody who uses it ever has to say what got damaged or how anybody knows." He said, "That's why it means nothing, and it's why I nearly quit reading twice." Down at the entrance the gate man dropped his chain against the post and neither of us looked up. Then he said, "Here's what got me off the couch." He said, "The damage leaves marks." I said, "Marks." He said, "They can measure the burnt fat." He said, "And they can look at that wrapper protein directly." I said, "So you'd see pieces broken off of it." He said, "That's one." I said, "And scoring on it where something got at it." He said, "Scarred is the word they use, and that's two." He said, "And the third is bits of it tagged, like you'd tag a part in a bin so you know later which one it was." I said, "Tagged how?" He said, "The chemistry changes and they can name the change and count it." He said, "That's the whole thing, Gil." The green cart came down the row about then with its bad wheel, and the caretaker raised one hand off the handle, and we both raised one back. Then Hollis said, "Come back tomorrow, I'll do the next part." The next morning he was already on the bench when I came up the row. I'd been clearing out the kitchen cupboard the night before and found June's green tea behind the baking soda. She bought it one time and neither of us ever got through it, and it had been sitting back there since. He said, "You drink any of that?" I said, "Some, 8 years ago." I said, "It tasted like a lawn." He laughed at that, which he doesn't do much. He said, "Green tea's got one they all talk about." He said, "EGCG." He said, "That's the famous one, it's on the front of every box in America." He said, "Oolong is the same plant." I said, "The same plant." He said, "The same leaf off the same bush." He said, "The difference is what a person does to it after it's picked." He said, "With green tea they stop it fast." He said, "With oolong they let it sit and oxidize on purpose, out in the air, and somebody stands there and decides when it's had enough, and then they dry it." I said, "Hold on there." I said, "You spent 2 mornings telling me the whole problem is things getting oxidized inside me." I said, "Now you're telling me the good stuff is the leaf they oxidized on purpose." He said, "That's the right question and it cost me about a month." He said, "When they oxidize that leaf, the EGCG doesn't just sit there and wait." He said, "Two of them get welded into one bigger molecule." He said, "Green tea doesn't have it, because green tea never gets oxidized, so it never gets built." He said, "And that bigger one is the one they tested against the wrecking." I said, "What's it called?" He said a word I made him repeat 3 times and then spell. Oolonghomobisflavan A. I copied it onto the back of a receipt in the truck. Hollis said, "I'll tell you why I trust that name." He said, "You cannot make a word like that up." He said, "You'd get caught inside a day." He said, "So the joke of the whole business is this." He said, "Oxidizing the leaf on purpose is what builds the thing that stands up to oxidizing in you." He said, "Same word, opposite ends of it." He poured out of that thermos into the lid and drank it and I didn't ask him one thing about it. The third morning he didn't wait for me to sit all the way down. He had every bit of it by heart. I said, "Who says any of this?" He said, "A lab in Japan wrote it up in 2017." I said, "And?" He said, "They took human LDL." He said, "Actual human, out of people, into a dish." He said, "Then they attacked it on purpose 3 separate ways." I said, "Why 3?" He said, "So nobody could turn around and say they picked a friendly one." He said, "Peroxyl radicals was the first." He said, "Then peroxynitrite, which is a mouthful for something your own body makes when it's inflamed." He said, "And then plain copper, which is the standard way you rust a sample in a dish when you want it rusted." I said, "Then what?" He said, "Then they put the oolong molecule in and went looking for those marks I told you about." He said, "Less burnt fat." He said, "And the wrapper protein held together." He said, "Every one of the 3 ways, same answer." He stopped there and let it sit. Then he said, "A dish is not a body." I waited him out. He didn't add anything to it. He handed me the argument against his own case without me asking for it, and then poured more out of the thermos. That's when I started actually listening. I said, "So it's a lab trick." He said, "It's a floor." He said, "You can't build anything without one, and most of what's on television never had one to begin with." My phone went off on the bench between us. Vivian, sending the spring rec schedule, and a picture of Micah in a jersey down past his knees with the excavator held up in one hand. I showed Hollis. He looked at it for a while. He said, "Well, there you go." Somewhere in the middle of all that I did a stupid thing. In early February I got impatient with all of this and I went into the drugstore on Route 9 and stood in the aisle where they keep the bottles with hearts on the label and I bought the one that said it was for cholesterol. I took it every day for 5 weeks. I felt nothing. No difference in the morning, no difference in the yard, nothing. In March I went back to Dr. Ambrose and they took blood and the number came back 191. Up 3 from January. I paid for that bottle with money I have and 5 weeks I don't. Hollis, when I told him, didn't say I told you so. He said, "What was in it?" I said, "I don't know, a list." He said, "That's the whole industry." Then he said, "All right, last part, and this is the one that took me longest." I said, "Go." He said, "Has anybody put it in a person?" I said, "I was about to ask you that." He said, "They did." He said, "60 adults, 12 weeks." He said, "Half of them got the real thing and half got something that looked and tasted the same, and nobody in the room knew which was which until the end." I said, "And?" He said, "The damage measures moved the right way." He said, "The same ones we've been sitting here talking about." Then he put his hand up like he was stopping traffic. He said, "They didn't hand those people a teabag out of a supermarket box." He said, "They used a drink they'd loaded up on purpose so they could actually get the dose into somebody." I said, "So it's rigged." He said, "It means a regular cup of the wrong tea won't get you anywhere near there." He said, "And that's a different problem and it's the one that matters to you standing in a store." Then he said, "And here's the last hole." He said, "None of that proves the bag in your cupboard has any of it in it." I said, "Why not?" He said, "Because the molecule doesn't grow on the plant." He said, "It gets made." He said, "Air and time and a person standing there deciding when to stop." He said, "Do it wrong or do it cheap and you've got a bag of leaves that makes brown water and nothing else." That one I understood before he finished saying it. I've had my hands inside more engines than I could count and most of my working life has been explaining to a man in my doorway why the cheap part is cheap. Same box, same picture on it. Different thing entirely inside. I said, "All right." I said, "Then how would I ever know?" And that's when he told me about the test. He said, "There's a test for the damage." He said, "You don't need Dr. Ambrose to order it." I said, "Since when?" He said, "Since always, it's a walk in." He said, "Vantage, out on Route 9 past the tire place." He said, "You sit down, they take your blood, they mail you a number." I said, "What number?" He said, "Oxidized LDL." He said, "That's the wrecked ones specifically." He said, "It's a different question than how many, and you have never been asked it." I said, "Dr. Ambrose has never." He said, "Dr. Ambrose has never." Nobody has to authorize a man to get the hood up on his own engine and look at what's in there. I drove out there on a Thursday in March and sat in a plastic chair with 2 other people and a woman took blood out of my arm in about 90 seconds and told me it'd come in the mail. It took 9 days. Oxidized LDL, 74. Reference range on the sheet, under 60. I took it up the hill unopened and read it on the bench in section C with a fresh sleeve of daisies across my lap. For 5 months I had been arguing with a number that counted how many. Here was one that had gone and looked at them. The next morning I put that sheet on the bench between us. Hollis read it and handed it back and didn't say a word for a good while. Then he unscrewed the lid off that thermos and poured, and I finally asked the question I should have asked him in November. I said, "What is that?" He said, "Tea." I said, "Since when do you drink tea?" He said, "Since about a year after Wade." I said, "You have been sitting on this bench for 5 months teaching me chemistry and you never once mentioned you drink the stuff." He said, "If I'd led with that, you'd have heard a salesman." He said the name and I got a receipt out and put it down myself. PiPi Tea. Then he did the teacher thing where he makes you say it back. He said, "Whole leaf, in a bag, 4 grams of actual leaf in there." He said, "One cup, every morning, before anything else." He said, "Hot water, not boiling." I said, "Hot water." He said, "Not boiling." He said, "3 to 5 minutes and then get the bag out." He said, "Now the numbers." He said, "They get it tested by an outside outfit." He said, "187 milligrams of EGCG in a cup." He said, "340 milligrams of polyphenols total." He said, "The amount they were working with in the research is somewhere around 150 milligrams a day." He said, "You can't weld what isn't in the bag." I said, "And what's in the box in my cupboard." He said, "About 12." He said, "A supermarket bag, roughly 12 milligrams, which is under 8 percent of what you'd need." He said, "The one with the gold writing that calls itself premium, about 25." He said, "A decent whole leaf one, about 44, and that's a real bag doing a real job and it's still less than a third of the way there." He said, "And none of that's a scandal, it's just dust." He said, "The good leaf gets graded out and sold, and the dust left on the floor gets swept into a bag with a string on it, and it makes brown water and everybody's happy." He said, "You can't oxidize dust on purpose in any careful way." He said, "That molecule is made by the handling, so the handling is the entire thing you're paying for." He said, "It's grown high up where the leaf takes its time." Then he screwed the lid back on and said, that's everything I know, I've got nothing else, don't ask me again. I ordered it that night on the phone sitting in the truck outside my own house. I started the last week of March. Kettle on before I open the bay. Water hot, not roaring. Bag in, and I stand there and watch the clock on the microwave for 4 minutes. I drink it standing up, looking at that empty lift and that work order I still haven't done. Then I go up the hill. Somewhere around the third week I started waking up before the alarm went off. I'm not going to make anything out of that and neither should you. I've felt fine on days I was doing myself harm and rotten on days I was doing everything right. I'd already decided months earlier that the only thing I was going to believe was a piece of paper with a number on it. The second Saturday in May I took him to the park and he fell asleep in the truck on the way back, same as always, excavator in his lap. Flat gravel, then the concrete walk, then the door. I carried him the whole way. I didn't notice I'd done it until I was standing at the door with him on my shoulder and Vivian was already holding it open. 60 feet of it, and I never set him down. She moved back out of the way and neither of us said a word about it. After 3 months on the tea I went and got both. Dr. Ambrose first, because I was due anyway. The oatmeal never stopped, and neither did the walking. LDL, 166. Down 25 from March, down 28 from where I started in October. Then out to Vantage on Route 9, plastic chair, 90 seconds, mail. Oxidized LDL, 56. Under the 60 line on their own sheet for the first time. Those came out of 2 different buildings on 2 different days, and they answer questions that have nothing to do with each other. The 166 is a count of how many. The 56 is a report on what shape they're in. There's no arithmetic that gets you one from the other. Dr. Ambrose looked at the 166 for a while. He said, "Well." He said, "Something's working." I said, "You want to know what?" He glanced at the clock over my shoulder. I said, "Tea." Then he went on to the next thing on his list. He didn't write it down. That's fine. I needed him to run the test, and he ran the test, and the test said what it said. The last Saturday in July I carried him in again and he was heavier than he was in May. He was about half awake at the door with his face in my collar. He said, "Bye, Grandpa Gil." He'd been calling me Mister Gil since October, because that's what Vivian told him to call me, and I never asked her to change it. Grandpa was the wrong word by a whole generation, and I'd have answered to anything he called me. She was standing right there holding the door. She heard it the same time I did. She didn't correct him. She looked at the doorframe for a second and then she took him off my shoulder and carried him inside and shut the door normal. Through the door I heard her say something to him in a voice I hadn't heard her use since June was alive. I sat in her driveway a while before I started the truck. I've got a boy who went ahead and named me without asking anybody. And I've got a piece of paper that says the ones in me are in better shape now than they were in March. I know I wouldn't have gotten either one of them if Vivian had picked a different Tuesday in October to walk up that hill. I still go. I go on Sundays now, and I still bring the cheap daisies, and I still tell her about the drip in the sink. Saturdays at 7:15 I'm out on Route 9 headed the other direction with a booster seat belted into a truck that never had one in it. She'd have plenty to say about that booster seat. Somebody has already decided you're going to be there. They probably haven't told you. It might be a woman who quit saying so a long time ago and just watches you now. It might be somebody who hasn't been born yet. You don't get to pick who it is, and nobody tells you what day it started. You only get to decide whether they were right about you. I kept every appointment with a piece of granite for 5 years and not one with anybody who could have told me what was going on inside me. The only reason that changed is a 6 year old with a toy excavator got to that stone before I did. You can't count on that. Mine showed up in a blue coat with a hole to dig. Yours is probably somebody already standing in a doorway, watching you walk across a yard, deciding whether to say anything. If you want the one I drink, it's here. https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp-nm Order it, put it where your coffee is, and drink a cup every morning before you do anything else. Then in about 3 months walk into a lab and get the oxidized number. That order matters. The tea first, the paper after. You have to ask for that number by name. P.S. They give you 90 days to get your money back if you want it. I have priced parts my whole life, so let me price this one the same way. Finding out runs you 3 months and nothing else, because if the number sits where it is you ask for the money back. Not finding out runs you another 3-month wait, and I did 2 of those before anybody told me there was a second question. Drink it every morning, go get the number, and then decide with a piece of paper in your hand instead of a feeling. https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp-nm P.P.S. Here's something you can do today for free. Go dig out your last lab sheet, the one in the drawer with the insurance junk. Run your finger down the list and look for anything with the word oxidized on it. It isn't on there. It's never been on there, on yours or on anybody's. Every line on that page is a count, and how many is the only question that building has ever asked about you. P.P.P.S. Dr. Ambrose offered me a pill in January and I asked him for one more draw before we did that, and he gave it to me. Whatever you and your own doctor have worked out between you, that's yours to keep working out, and I'm not going to tell you how. A pill brings the count down and it does that job. It was never built to answer the other question, which is the one I finally went out and got a number for. P.P.P.P.S. You already know if this one is yours. The man in your house won't. Hollis found out every single thing in this letter, and all of it showed up after they'd already put his brother in the ground. Wade was 61 and his doctor used the word excellent and he went down on an ordinary morning walk. Order it yourself and set it next to the coffee maker where he'll find it. P.P.P.P.P.S. They run a buy 2, get 1 on it, and if you're going to test this on yourself you want the third box anyway. 3 weeks of anything proves nothing. You want the whole 3 months sitting there before you start, same as parts on the bench before I start a job. https://shop.pipitea.com/ppch/sp-nm