We returned yesterday evening from our week-long stay in California where I resumed treatments for neuropathy. The treatments that in earlier visits I’d received at the Intraneural Facilitation Treatment clinic affiliated with Loma Linda Hospital differed from the predictions of doom previously pronounced by a top-dollar New York neurologist. In refreshing contrast, the innovative yet finely calibrated methods of Mark Bussell at INF hadn’t included dire predictions and, in the past, actually had helped.

That said, I was not expecting a hopeful outcome from this trip. Why not? Well, both the fine surgeon who’d fixed my hip fracture of last May and the fine physical therapists – who’d checked my exercises for months afterward – had deemed me fully repaired by their lights. And I knew that what they called a successful outcome had left me nowhere near as walkable as I’d been prior to the accident. I didn’t brood about it, but I was not optimistic about our California trip.

Nonetheless, from the first day of our week there, when Mark Bussell characterized my current condition with precision – as well as describing what the previous interventions had left undone – and explained what could now be done to put me back where I’d been before the accident – my expectations underwent steep upgrading. It was his view that, once the injury was fully repaired, I could go back to where I’d been before: healing the neuropathy itself.

What the heck. I’m for fixing whatever can be fixed. I don’t get off on other people’s pity! So we returned to our Pennsylvania home with me in a notably better mood than I’d been in when we’d left it.

     “Any good news this morning?” I said jokingly to Jerry as he joined for brunch. Normally, Jerry catches up on the day’s news first thing in the morning, and then briefs me, since I don’t have the heart to look. 

      “Yes,” Jerry said, in reply to my atypically hopeful question. “Khamenei is dead.” 

The mass murderer of his own people had been killed! It seems there had been an Israeli attack (coordinated with US actions on other fronts) on the entire first-tier Iranian leadership. They had collected in one place, together with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, for a top-secret meeting. Evidently, somebody who was in a position to know didn’t keep the secret, since they were all dead from a single strike.

I thought Jerry must be joking. The analogous moment that came to mind occurred years back, in June of 1976. My philosopher father had telephoned from Maine to say – 

“The Israelis have rescued the hostages!”

He was referring to the Israeli and other Jewish passengers who’d been on an Air France flight when it had been taken over by highjackers. Chillingly, they’d been separated from nonJewish passengers – the latter eventually released to resume their journeys – while the Jewish hostages were being held in Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport. At that time, Uganda was under the dictatorial rule of Idi Amin. The demands of the highjackers had been relayed to the Israeli government with, of course, no assurance that meeting those terms would save the lives of the hostages.

So back then, I had not understood what my father was calling to tell me. Painstakingly, I explained that his so-called news could not possibly be believed since the Jewish captives were at the mercy of forces under the command of a dictator with a reputation for cruelty.

My father simply repeated the “impossible” news till at last I stopped lecturing and started listening.

This time was a lot like that earlier time. I simply could not take in what Jerry was telling me. It was all, as I well knew, impossible.

Okay. It was possible. A lot of highly unlikely occurrences were possible. But it couldn’t be actual. Khamenei was not the kind of mass murderer who could be killed at one of his own top-secret meetings.

*. *. *

As of this writing, we don’t know how it will play out. Perhaps, by the time this column is posted, the situation will have darkened, especially considering its ever-ramifying complexity and the tipping forces of the past.

But still: a flawless operation, the two nations having kept their simultaneous actions a secret even from those who get paid to unearth secrets … .

All of which goes to show that – as my mother used to say –

the unexpected always happens.