I was fatly pregnant, a few days before my due date, and V and I were madly trying to get our kitchen to a stopping point. We’d just had some cabinetry installed (because after the work we did on this building back in the day of subzero temperatures, lead paint, asbestos, antediluvian linoleum adhesive, frostbite, and strange smells, we’ll be damned if we are going to do any more construction work. By we, I mostly mean me. I, I will be damned if I am going take trowel in hand and apply myself for backbreaking hours only to produce work I’d make anyone else rip out. For example, I know quality concrete work, and mine is not it. These days if I can’t afford to have someone do it right I will live years with it not done at all. Exhibit A: persistent hole in the floor which will eventually contain stairs leading to the basement, but probably not for many years.) and we were trying to do something or other to it that probably involved V simultaneously adjusting the drawers with a screwdriver and wiring for new ceiling lamps and me lumbering around pushing things back and forth excitedly and mopping my brow. Things got more and more frenzied until V, like many imminent first time fathers, met with an accident. He sliced his finger open and bled all over the new kitchen. Because I am the (self-educated) doctor of the house, I decided he needed stitches, and because I was concerned I’d pick up some foul incarnation of MRSA or leprosy in the emergency room right before having a baby, I decided we should call my father first. My father, who despite (or because of) penning fancy medical textbooks and having various degrees from sundry venerable institutions, has always enjoyed a bit of domestic surgery, setting broken bones, spaying pets, stitching on us, and hooking us up to IVs as necessary when we were kids; said to tell the patient to lie down and try not to bleed so much. He gave him fifteen minutes to stop bleeding, and when the patient did not comply, gave him another. Then he gave me directions for stitching the finger up with either thread or SuperGlue. I chose the latter and bounced down to the corner bodega for it, where the owner was a bit surprised to see me out alone with my girth at that hour. Anyhow it turns out that if the edges of the wound are clean, you just squeeze them together and draw a line of sutures perpendicular to the cut. You have to use a real amount of glue and hold it closed for a while, but it works perfectly. The patient sometimes still complains that he has no feeling on one side of that finger, but I point out that no one would have brought him beer in the emergency room, and he concedes that yes, that’s so.