Just a clip from a story I wrote 9 years ago.
music is mark knoppler, hope its not too loud.
if you like, I’ll do more.
testing to see where it ends up.
I’d draw the scenes that you can infer from this snippet of conversation:
“Really Rich? Really? “Marmots come out of the sky and they stand there?” That’s what you heard all these years?” Marmots!?
er… Roundabout. Classic Yes tune. I blame the cheezy cheap radio I had growing up. Never experienced High Fidelity till the synapses were hard-wired.
heh.
Our language just doesn’t make that much sense, being made up out of all those other ones like it is. Let alone when its spoken.
Synonyms, synantonyms, contranyms, chiasmus, palindromes, its a wonder we aren’t causing fights all the time. Btw: I didn’t make those up, but I did have to google them to get the spelling right.
I remember asking someone why Marmosets weren’t baby Maromets?
Just in case you don’t know, these are marmots:
Marmots
and these are marmosets:
These don't grow up to be Marmots
I argue that it only matters that you’re understood. Like all those islanders we taught pidgin English to during World War II. Long as the airstrip gets built we don’t care what you call it. Its all in the context baby.
A funny attitude to find in someone who is aspiring to be a writer, eh? I blame my lackadaisical grammar instruction back in West Virginia. We moved around a lot, sometimes even within the same county. In Wayne county, there were two or three courses they split up between summer and fall semesters. A cost cutting measure no doubt. Which probably explains why they rank 49th out of the top 50 states in education.
One half of the tenth grade was Biology and the second half Chemistry. In the ninth grade you were given half Literature and half Grammar. So as a result I attended two biology semesters, and two Literature semesters.
I still can’t claim to have read many of those books we were assigned in Lit. I think there were 100 titles we were to ‘become familiar’ with. Which meant buying Cliff notes from the local book store I think. I borrowed what I could or just read the dust covers books in the library.
Some of it rubbed off on me though. Here’s an example:
Outside my office are several whiteboards, you know the type, that use those ‘write on, wipe off’ markers and smell strongly of artificalness? Well sometimes we use them for announcements, and sometimes for fun.
One of the ladies down the hall named Corrie tries to put an inspirational message on the board each morning. Today it reads “Speak with a soft voice and treat each other with kindness.”
I think she gets most of them from Dove bars or fortune cookies. We tease her about it a lot, but mostly about how she’ll share the wisdom of the Dove bar, but not the actual chocolate of said Dove bar.
I brought in a couple chocolate coins in a mesh bag from home earlier this week and bizarrely enough, decided I didn’t want to eat them. I wanted to give them away, but instead of just leaving them in the conference room for someone to randomly eat them, I taped them to the whiteboard and put beneath them a quote from Moby Dick:
Ahab's bounty on the White Whale
It says “”Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
Whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke–look ye!
Whosoever of you raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
-Cap’n Ahab, “Moby Dick”
Corrie stopped in and asked if I was the one who had put them there? “Are you Captain Ahab?”
I couldn’t deny it so I just shrugged and said “I’m nothing if not Old School.”
She left commenting that they may disappear without a white whale showing up. To date there are no takers. I think I’ll eat them after all and go hunting for my own whales. I know enough about the story to know that being capn Ahab isn’t a good thing. I think I heard it secribed as a “Pedantic tale of Obsession.” I don’t know exact definitions, but I think pendantic and obsessive are closely related. I wonder if there’s a name for using two words that mean the same thing to describe a thing.
Doesn’t sound like me, really.
4 story chocolate fountain ftw!!
(this reads like so much psychotherapy but I wanted to write it down after reading a chapter in our assignment about dreaming.)
the victorian house of my dreams...sorta
I don’t recall many reoccurring dreams, but there is one that keeps coming back to me. I can recall having it when I was a still a child no more than 9 or 10 at the time. And I had a dream involving the same house just a few weeks ago. The thing is, it isn’t really the same dream, but the same house.
The house is a multi-story Virginia farm house with a large living room divided into two sections by french doors. There was a bay window on one side that I recall let in a lot of light. Beyond the living room was a bathroom and master bedroom on one side and a dining room on the other. Behind this was a kitchen and pantry where the back door was. Upstairs there was another bathroom and a large bedroom that took up most of the second floor. There was a smaller bedroom and bath where the stairs started, and the rest of the second floor was unfinished attic. There was no basement under the house, it was set up on blocks several feet off the ground. It had a deep front porch made of wood and several buildings around it. The property it sat on must have been several acres’ worth.
In my mind, thinking about the house in the waking world, I realize that it is a mix of the house where we lived during the snake bite incident, and the house we moved to a few years later. Both are in the same area of Virginia (or was.) I can’t tell them apart after so many years. The point being, that it was this house, or this style of house that keeps showing up in my dreams.
I remember the first one very clearly:
I was playing on one side of the house while my mother hung washing up to dry on a line in the back. It was very warm and windy and I think our dog Sparky was there too. I was trying to coax him out of the shade to play in the sun with me when I noticed a flying saucer go over the house. I was just like the ones in the movies. Pie-pan shaped and all shiny with no windows or lights. I watched it scared into silence, not able to move or even breathe. I just stood there watching as it disappeared out of site behind my house.
I ran to the backyard to warn Mom, but she wouldn’t even stop what she was doing to look at it. I was very excited, jumping around and pointing behind her “Look! Look! There’s another one!” But she just kept doing the laundry. ”There are flyin’ saucers all the time son, they land at the air force base.” I looked around and now there were dozens of flying ships of all designs in the air. I remember thinking that the warm air on my face might have been exhaust from so many air craft. I turned to ask her why everyone had let me think flying saucers weren’t real before, but she was gone. I wanted to go see where they landed, but the land behind the house was swampy, and I needed someone to take me. I awoke still watching the skies for more flying saucers to go over.
There was another one in the same house where I kept finding doors I hadn’t noticed before. Not the dream imagery of the endless hallways with doors repeated ad infinitum off into the distance, but more like there was a door to the pantry off the kitchen in real life, but in my dream there was a further door that led to another unused pantry or closet beyond that. They were always darker, unkempt rooms, as if no one else in the house knew about them. Clearly my mother hadn’t noticed that they were there, or she would have cleaned and brightened the room. Let in some natural light as she would say. I remember finding an extra attic door, an extra bedroom, and even a basement that the real house didn’t even have. It was the same house though, from the look of the exterior and mainly the Feel. I knew it was the same house as before.
The air seems a bit more clear in these dreams, with everything sharply defined. I seem to be more lucid there than I am in most of my dreams. I don’t mean lucid as in sane, but lucid as in aware that I am dreaming, participating instead of observing. With other dreams I wake up right after I realize I’m dreaming, but in this series of dreams I have free will. What usually wakes me up from them is thinking too hard that I don’t want to wake up. Then I drift into consciousness wondering why the dreams are so mundane – except for the flying saucer bit, when there could be so much more interesting things to dream about. Or why I never got to see the space ships up close.
In other dreams the house had been split into two apartments, but I still had free access to all the former rooms. I remember being offered a chance to sleep in my old bedroom in one of them, even though some cousins of mine were sleeping there at the time. Many of the dreams in this period picked up within moments of where the last one left off despite being months apart in the real world..
For example, in one dream there was now a radio station’s studio in the big living room area, and I had been sent to the basement to get some old vinyl records. I remember going down stairs and being surprised to find another family living in the basement, it was a full apartment down there now, and that new feature woke me.
Some time later, months or even years later, I picked up the dream at the bottom of the stair, asking someone there where the records were kept and being directed to a room lined with wooden shelves full of music. There was a hispanic woman in this series of dreams, though I was unsure how she was related to me thru the cousins still living there.
In one dream I found the basement had flooded several feet deep and we — the cousins, their dad and their hispanic mother– walked on wide boards they had put across till the water went down. I should point out at this point that I’m using the term cousin very loosely. It was habit to refer to any adult friends of my parents as ‘Uncle Soandso, or Auntie Thisandthat.’ So its very likely these other kids weren’t related to me at all, but were part of the extended family around me.
Once in a related dream I was in one of those grand old buildings like you see in movies featuring a private school of some sort. The type with 100 rooms and huge grounds all about. A Stately Home. At the start of the dream I was in a classroom or meeting room when the power went out. I was heading home to get a fuse and someone told me to go thru the basement of the building to the tunnels. Apparently all the buildings connected together. I met several students along the way who all knew the way to the tunnels. I didn’t, so I must have been new at my job. The tunnels quickly led to some natural caves, each larger and longer than the first. There was even a hot spring and some sort of animal playing in it, but I recall being afraid of it and giving it a wide berth. In that dream I never made it to The House.
I can remember being lucid enough in a few of them to try and discover where I was. I would leave the house and try to walk to school, or into a town where I might see a sign with the town’s name on it. I remember several times I tried to do this and never got out of sight of the house. The road always seemed to become unpaved and overgrown and more than once dogs would jump out at me and bark viciously, or force a standoff preventing me from going any further. Once I even asked someone if flying saucers were real, and they said yes, but everyone calls them UFOs now. Pronounced “You-foes” by the way. It seemed like an important point to the person I was talking to that flying saucers were everyday things, but no one mentioned aliens. That seemed like a whole different subject.
There was even a dream in which I was driving on an elaborate cloverleaf highway that had been built in route to the House. Sometimes I was driving, sometimes I wasn’t, but we couldn’t find our way there. After trying several different exits I determined to try each one in order. Then I noticed the exits were no longer numbered so I couldn’t tell where I had started so I turned to the person in the passenger seat and said “Ok, This is just too ridiculous.” and woke up.
These dreams span 20 or 30 years, and at one point I had almost convinced myself I was contacting an alternate timeline where “Everything was exactly the same, except now there were UFOs.” I tried to will myself to have these dreams, but I don’t recall it ever working that way. I found I had the dreams more often if I slept on my side with one arm under my head and my hand touching the headboard or the wall beyond it. Maybe the constant firing of the nerves in that arm when it went to sleep under me was triggering this particular dream state. I don’t know enough about dream research to do more than guess.
I’ll expect I’ll have these dreams all my life. I don’t mind really, except for the dogs.
I’ll keep the spoilers to myself.
In ten words or less:
Star Trek was fun. Something for everyone.
In ten words or less:
Star Trek was fun. Something for everyone.
Got a Geocache , the first in ages. Aided by a new iphone app from geocaching.com. Very nice to have all that info in my hand, and not need to bring a laptop out into the field with me.
Saw a lot of turkey buzzards flying about, including two nesting in a dead tree ( what else?) and tried to get a pic, but unsure if it’ll come out. No telephoto on iPhone yet.
need a telephoto on my iphone
Weather was nice, though I was still uncomfortably cold in my bedroom. I’ve closed the vent (its in the ceiling over the bed) and may move the bed again to avoid having it blow on me.
Did some noblegarden quests in Warcraft, played some Magic with Nick, and had an awesome chicken curry made by JJ. Just hot enough!
I spent another night without food in that place. Roger and I tried to play cards after he was chased out of Sherri’s room by the nurses. That didn’t last long cause he got tired of flipping the cards over for me since I was real slow doing it myself. Late at night I woke to find my stomach was chewing on my liver. It was that or it was a nurse coming around to see if we were asleep. I still hadn’t worked out how that was supposed to help since opening the door to see if we were asleep always woke me. I got up quietly and looked out the window again. There were very few cars out there and no sign of anyone bringing food up to my floor. I remembered the Jello dish on the shelf and determined to eat it, I was at the end of my endurance and 8 more hours from now wouldn’t make that much difference. I slid back the curtain to get the dish and pulled it out triumphantly only to find it was empty. There wasn’t even any dried coolwhip on the dish, it had been licked clean. I glared at Roger in the dark and went back to bed, if he hadn’t eaten it his brother had. I began to think all this bad luck was because I’d lied about Kelly pushing me down the stairs and determined to come clean once my arm had healed, even if it meant getting it broke again when my Dad found out. No amount of deal making or promissory oaths to the higher powers made food magically appear before me, so I fell back to sleep wondering if you could eat your shoes like I’d read about, and whether they actually had to be made from leather?
A doctor did see me the next day, and said the backlog from the power outage should be caught up by 3pm, and I could eat anything I wanted then. After the operation. Roger’s family didn’t visit him that day, which was all well and good cause they would have found him across the hall in Sherri’s room. I admit I was in there too, though I felt a bit predatory about it. Roger however, was in his element.
A man came in to take a blood sample from Sherri and she turned to Roger and said “Distract me from the pain please.” He leaned in like he was gonna kiss her and just hovered above her face, whispering “Should I do it? Should I not? Do you want me to kiss you?” Damn that boy was smooth beyond his age, and it did have the desired effect of distracting her, it was distracting me too. Part of me wished I’d thought of that, but the best I could do was keep watch at the door in case this was when her husband came back.
I cannot tell you whether Roger kissed his so-called cousin or not, though he would want me to say he did. The intern finished taking his sample and looked at us both a bit sternly saying “You boys should behave yourselves.” Then he left. I heard the food lady coming down the hall and decided I’d go stand at the opposite end of the hall till she left. I couldn’t even look at food at that point it hurt too much to know I couldn’t have it. When she got to the end of the hall, she told me she’d sneaked an extra tray out of the kitchen just for me. I told her I knew for sure I was due in surgery in a few hours and dared not eat it. I asked her to leave it by my bed and told Roger to leave it the hell alone. He knew what I was on about cause he said “Hell son, it was just Jello.” I started to say “It wasn’t just the Jello…” when we were both distracted by loud voices and something being thrown in Sherri’s room. We stuck our heads out and nurses were dashing in to see what had happened. The head nurse pushed us back in our room and closed our door. “Stay in here till we see what’s what.”
I thought gossip about Roger’s escapades across the hall had gotten back to her husband and I said so to Roger. He looked scared and uncertain for the first time since I’d met him and he slipped his jeans and shoes on under his gown and got ready to make a run for it. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would be helpful so I shared one of my dad’s ol’ say-ins: “Don’t coon-dog what’s already been tree’d Roger, don’t coon-dog what’s already been tree’d.”
I was prepped for surgery shortly after that and wheeled down to a part of the hospital I hadn’t seen before. A nurse injected something into my IV and someone else coached me to count backwards when the mask was put on my face. I was worried that there would be another power outage and said so, and the doc said “Don’t worry about that, the surgery and the gallery above are on separate power.” I was trying to sort out how this jivved with my earlier info and my 3 day stay at the hospital when they came with the mask.
I remember my friend Hatfield telling me once about being put under and how he’d seen a white rotating light passing before his eyes. He said that before it made 3 revolutions it was suddenly hours later and he was in Recovery. I started counting backwards, closed my eyes and waited for the white lights to come. I counted back to the lower 90’s and I still had no light. I gave up on that and thought it might be a good time to test Astral Projection. I determined to try and contact my friend Tripplett using just the power of my mind. Of all my friends he was the most into such things and would be the most likely to receive a visit from my astral form without too much shock. And I could count on him to swear it had happened…once it actually had that is. I pictured his house across the river from mine and tried to will myself free of my earthly bonds. Someone out there asked “Are you still counting?” I said “Yes, 89…80….” and then I was out.
I woke with no white lights, no successful separation of body and soul, and no clear idea where I was. Someone was calling my name and rubbing my good arm. I tried to focus and found a beautiful blonde candy striper leaning over me and smiling a big smile with her perfect white teeth. I was half convinced this was an angel come to take me away, but it was Roger’s favorite volunteer, Helen. I grinned like a fool and said “It must be Thursday, can I have a sponge bath before I die?”
Unfortunately I never got the sponge bath, or the chance to lord it over Roger that I had spent quality time with his dream girl while he was hiding from an angry husband. As soon as I recovered they put me in a room identical to the first exam room I’d been in days before, and my stepmother was there. She told me to get dressed soon as I could and stepped outside to grab a smoke. She added thru the door: “Ray is outside waiting in the car.”
I managed to get dressed quickly despite a fresh cast on my left arm, and Jean finished her cigarette and led me out out of the hospital and into the car. I got into the back seat and my Dad immediately drove off in his usual breakneck fashion. He didn’t say a word and I couldn’t tell right away if he was mad with me or not. Jean turned around and asked how was it? I said everything was fine except for the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since I was sent upstairs. My dad thought I was lying to try and get more Burger King food from my Stepmother, so I just shut up. The comment about Burger King started up another argument so I sat back and leaned to the side so I couldn’t be seen in the rear view mirror. My dad’s steel blue eyes were just as hard to meet in reflection as they were straight on. Eventually I was asked for details and why exactly it took 3 days? I worked in the bit about not getting to eat with the fact that I was low priority due to the power outage. My stepmother said “Well I won’t be bringing anyone Burger King anyway soon that’s for damned sure!” My Dad just said it looked like it hadn’t hurt me none, I was fat enough as it was. I was starting to have a real dislike for TV endings, they were so far from any reality I knew. My reality was waiting for me back on Airport road and I hoped someone had remembered to get in some groceries.
I was taken upstairs and weighed and made to change into a hospital gown. I was left on the children’s ward, but put in a section meant for kids who had to stay a while for one reason or another. There was a big age gap between the really young kids at one end who were barely out of the crib, and the other end that held me, the guy I was gonna share a room with, and a girl about our age across the hall.
My roommate was a boy a year or two older than me named Roger. He had been badly burned somehow and the doctors had just grafted skin onto his neck and chin. He watched while the nurse got me settled in the bed and gave me a big plastic tumbler with shaved ice in it. He said “Hey…my name’s Roger, what’s yours?” I told him Richard. ( I didn’t know how far to carry the ruse of being Jean’s son, so I didn’t answer with his name, which was Ricky. ) I waved from my bed and asked what happened, gesturing to the gauze bandages around his neck. He seemed to be in a good mood and wasn’t in any pain that I could tell. “Let just say that if you’re ever tempted to light a cigarette from a gas stove, don’t do it. They’ll graft skin from your butt onto your neck!”
That was an impressive summation of his problem, and I replied back best I could: “And if you’re ever told that monkey’s have the strenght of 10 men, believe’em, or you’ll end up like me.” I gestured to the arm now supported by a gauze sling and shrugged. I could tell he half believed me, or at least wasn’t going to question what I said in front of the grown ups. I immediately took a liking to him.
Roger had been there a week already, and he let me know what was what. He knew about the power outage, he knew which nurses to ask for treats or ‘cigs’, and especiaally when his favorite volunteers came on. He had a likin’ for a buxom little candy striper named Helen. He told me if I was in long enough, I could ask for a sponge bath on Thursdays, and she’d be the one that had to do it. I remembered he fell back on the bed sighing and squirming a bit “I’m pitching a tent just thinking about it!”
Well I had no idea what a sponge bath was, why I’d want a mere volunteer to do it, or what it had to do with camping at all. But I wasn’t going to let on like I wasn’t just as clued in as he was. I said “Yeah? That good is it?” which was about all I could safely contribute to the conversation. Fortunately that didn’t slow Roger down at all, he was full of advice and tidbits of trivia, mostly about girls, and sexual positions neither of us had actually tried. Apparently he had access to the dark materials that I had only heard rumor of. He described his accident in great detail and how he couldn’t wait to get back to his girlfriend in Kentucky cause he was shore itching to give it to her doggy style. I was just nodding and saying “Hell yeah” at what I thought were the appropriate moments in his speech, but apparently at some point I admitted to being a big fan of doggie style too. He got all serious for a second and said “That’s not why you’re in here is it? How you hurt your arm? Oh man I’m sorry!” He paused for half a second to let me to tell my story, but I never even got close to the whole swing and concrete stair thing before he was off again. He talked nonstop till the nurses came around and made us go to sleep, admonishing us that it was 3:00 am and other patients needed to sleep.
I realized I was very tired soon as it got quiet, but startled awake every time the nurses came in to check on us. I don’t know why I had to be wakened every 2 hours and asked about my pain. I’d had enough adventure for one day and just wanted to sleep. Come 7:00 am or so, a huge black lady pushing a cart full of food came in. She gave Roger a tray with a metal lid on it. She was surprised to see me and said “I don’t have an order or nuthin’ for you honey, but I’ll go check at the desk.” Roger started eating right away and when he noticed me watching, he offered me his dessert. It was yellow Jello, and had a small dollop of whipped cream on top. “Its supposed to be diet, so you can have it.” he said leaning over in bed to reach my table. He slid it across to me and it stopped against my beaker of ice shavings, which was now just lukewarm water.
Thanks I said and had it half way to my mouth before I remembered what the doc had said the night before. I didn’t want to be here another 8 hours, even in good company, and I certainly didn’t want to face my dad when he found out I had screwed up again and cost him another day’s stay in the hospital.
So I sat it on the windowsill, where it would stay cool though I was very reluctant to give it up. “I’ll wait till the food lady comes back, and when they tell me I can eat, I’ll have it then. If she brings me a different kind, you can pick which dessert you want.” Roger said I was alright between mouthfuls and I looked around for something to read or look at for a while.
I didn’t have much luck finding reading material and the food lady didn’t come back anytime soon. About 10:00 am another doctor came by to talk to Roger. I sat up on the bed, waiting expectantly for him to come over and ask how I was and to tell me I could eat something. That Burger King meal was a long lost memory, and I hardly regretted it at all by now.
The Doc looked at me and checked his watch “Someone from the nurse’s station should come by and check on you.” He said, then left. Right behind him was two members of Roger’s family: His mom, who was a big roly-poly woman barely my height and his younger brother John who reminded me of my brother Kelly, but perhaps not so evil. His dad was down the hallway with his sister, cause she was too young to be allowed on the wing where sick people were. Children carried more diseases I was told. It didn’t seem logical to me that more germs would stick to a child than a grownup with a larger body, so I filed this info away for later consideration.
Roger’s mom had brought him some home cooking. A big pot of slow cooked cube steak simmering in gravy with onions and potatoes all around it. It smelled wonderful. His mom introduced herself to me, told Roger to share it with me, and slapped John’s hands as he tried to dip into the pot and take a lick. This was easily the closest, messiest, loudest, friendliest bunch of people I’d ever met. I think to this day I have a soft spot for Kentuckians as a result.
Roger’s dad came in to see him once his mom was done visiting. He was a tall thin man with big thick glasses that gave him an owlish demeanor. He offered to shake my hand and I shook it back weakly in surprise. Grown ups didn’t shake hands with children in my neck of the woods. This seemed to disappoint him on some level and he asked what trouble I’d been into to break my arm? I told him I fell out of a swing, for some reason unwilling to lie to him. Roger looked at me over his shoulder and I could tell from the look on his fast that the news that I hadn’t actually been arm wrestling with a gorilla was a complete and total surprise to him.
After his family left I could still hear them down the hall chatting with nurses and even other patients. His mom had a loud easy laugh that I found both surprising and comforting. She sent John back around to our room and he stuck just his head in: “Mom says the girl across the hall is the daughter of one of her cousins, so you’d better go over and say hello.” Then he grinned and said “Bring a pillow case with you, you’ll want to cover her head before you jump her bones, she’s as ugly as 4 miles of bad road!”
Roger told his brother to get the hell out, and apologized for his coarseness. Still, I got the impression this was important news to him. His younger brother John was even more girl obsessed than he was, or maybe Roger just hid it better, thinking that a touch of suave might improve his chances. I could see the door across the hall from my bed, but both doors were never open at the same time. Roger asked me to keep a look out just the same and gave out a mock sigh “Its a shame you can’t eat, my dad fixes the best cube steak you ever had…” Then he proceeded to tuck in and had everything eaten and cleaned up before the noon time meal came around.
A candy striper by and filled our water jugs with shaved ice. Roger chatted her up though she was clearly several years older than he was and had little to no chance of getting anywhere. My odds were less than zero. He used my plight to prolong her visit, leaning over close to her and trying to sound all confidential like. “Rich over there hasn’t eaten in days, someone out there should sign a form. I understand he’s taken to hoarding jello against the forced dieting policy they have here…”
My ears reddened and eyes got big and the girl asked if that was right? I said in all honestly I hadn’t eaten yet that day and could not tell her the exact hour of my last meal. Roger nodded encouragingly behind her but I didn’t have anything else to say. She promised to ask the head nurse what was going on and left. Roger said “Man, you should have said something, anything! Tell her what your favorite position is, girls love doin’ it on all fours.” I looked at him crooked and pointed out he hadn’t mentioned anything about sex either. He assured me that was only because she would probably know Helen and he was saving himself for her and her sponge.
The food lady pushed open the door right then and I sat bolt upright in the bed. “Finally!” I cried out. “Uh Oh!” cried out the food lady and she backed out again, taking the cart with her. Even Roger was surprised. She held the door open and shouted down the hall “Does 13-B get food?” “He doesn’t?” “Sure smells like food in there, you sure?” She looked back in at us and Roger was pretending to read a newspaper his dad had left, and I was leaning forward like a hound waiting for his master to throw him a bone. My ears were pricked up and I had the scent, just let me at it!
Food lady came back in, carrying only one tray, which she sat on Roger’s table. “I’m sorry honey, they have an order from the doctor not to give you any food, but the nurse is going to call down and see if you can have an IV.”
I said “OK…thank you.” though it was done half heartily, I had already watched Roger eat two meals that day, and I wasn’t looking forward to round three. I looked out the window at the parking lot, wondering which direction the Burger King was from there. I was formulating a plan to get my clothes and escape that I’d put into action if this IV thing wasn’t tasty and filling. I turned the dish with the jello in it and licked my finger, it was lemon, and artificial, but it tasted great. I had to get up and stand looking out the door of the room to avoid eating it, and to diminish the sounds of Roger eating whatever passed for hospital food back then.
The door to the room across the hall was open and I saw a young man about 20 or so holding the hand of someone in the bed. He was talking quietly to her and all I could make out was a spill of long blonde hair. He looked up at me, reached over and pulled the privacy curtain across and sat back down. I could see his arm moving in the shadows on the curtain, he was stroking her hair slowly, over and over as he talked.
I looked down the hall at the nurse’s station, It was circular and looked like it could have been a library reference desk if it weren’t for all the women in uniform standing around it. Our school librarian Mrs Justice didn’t have a uniform, but she did wear the same green sweater every day, hot or cold.
I went down there keeping my backside tight against the hallway wall to avoid breezing my gown open and said very softly “Excuse me, I think I’m supposed to get an IV? I haven’t eaten since yesterday and I’m very hungry.” The nurse i spoke to asked another nurse and she looked up and asked my name? “Jervis” I said, and pivoted as a group of visitors walked by, I would have liked to sit down so my butt wasn’t in danger of sticking out but there wasn’t anything on this side of the desk for people to sit on.
“You mean Burns?” she asked, looking at me over her glasses. “Yes I think so.” “You can’t have anything to eat cause we don’t know when the power will come back on. They’ll want to take you into surgery right away.” She paused as if she had more to say but could tell the talk of surgery had upset me. Then she said “Did your parents visit today?” I couldn’t answer right away. I wondered if anyone at home knew I was gone, if someone at school might miss me, or even that one of my friends would have thought to ask my brother why I wasn’t on the bus? Wasn’t it normal to be visited in a hospital? Wasn’t it normal to eat? “No.” I said trying to hide my confusion and sadness, “That was someone else’s family.”
She waved me back to my room with a metal clipboard “Well I’ll try to find out who your family doctor is, and see if he can authorize an IV. You go back to your room now and wait, hear?” I went back down the hall muttering under my breath. “Family doctor?” I haven’t seen a doctor in 5 years, my family doctor’s back in Virginia.”
I almost walked past Roger’s bed before I noticed it was empty. I looked up and down the hall and couldn’t see him. I didn’t think he’d gotten past me while I was at the nurse’s station, but maybe he had. I inspected his tray and found there wasn’t so much as a crumb left over. That didn’t help my mood, not that I would have eaten it anyway. I turned to go back out and heard laughter from across the hall. I stood outside the door for a while until I heard Roger’s voice clearly over the other. I opened the door and he was leaning over the bed, showing the girl lying there his newly grafted skin around his neck. It was bright pink and looked tighter than the rest of his neck. He looked up at me, winked and looked back down. I followed his gaze and could see he had a great vantage point for staring down the girl’s gown from where he was. I blushed and walked over noisily, bemoaning the fact that I still hadn’t eaten.
“This here’s Rich. Say hello to Sherri, Rich!” Sherri was frail, and the palest person I’d ever seen at that, but she wasn’t ugly. She had wide blue eyes and a firm chin. And there was a calmness about her I wasn’t old enough to even fathom. I smiled and made a mental note to never listen to John’s opinion on what a girl looked like ever again. I said hello and she asked what was wrong with me? I said I had a broke arm, and she waved a hand weakly in my direction “Oh, they don’t admit people to the hospital for a broken arm, they just put a cast on it and send them home.”
This was the same thing I’d heard Roger’s mother say, and it embarrassed me not to have something more dire wrong with me. Before I could return the question in a kindly manner, Roger piped in “She’s got blood poisoning Rich, real dire stuff.” Then he looked back down at her with a solemn look on his face, but unable to keep her gaze his eyes rolled down to her chest. She caught on this time and tutt tutted at him, tugging the woolen blanket up around her neck. “And Roger was showing me how he has ass skin on his neck!” She laughed at his distress at being made fun of in front of me, and I laughed too, served him right I thought.
“Is she your…cousin?” I asked, not sure what relation she was to Roger, if any. He said “Shoot no, I could kiss her or anything.” He grinned at her shocked look and said in way of explanation “We don’t really kiss on our cousins back in Kentucky, despite what the rest of the world thinks.”
Sherri tried to sit up in bed, gave an exhausted sigh and pushed the buttons to raise her up instead. I was surprised by this and stepped closer “Your bed folds up?”
“Yours does too silly, they all do in hospitals!”
“Mine doesn’t have a thing with buttons like that on it. I don’t think it moves.”
“Well….” Roger started, trying his luck on the other side of the bed. “That’s partly my fault. When they put me in that room I played with the controls so much it quit working. So I moved to the other bed and some guys took the broken bits away with them. Sorry.”
I gave him a look that said “Well that’s just great!” Not only do I have a broken arm, and I’m admitted into a hospital instead of getting a cast and being sent home, which aparently never happens, and all the while I’m not allowed to eat, and now I have a broken bed. I turned to go back to my room and sulk when Sherri said “Don’t go yet, I think y’all are funny.” then she paused and said softly “They’re gonna come get me for some more tests in a bit. Please stay till they do, my husband had to go back to work after his lunch hour.”
Needless to say my eyes got as big as saucers when I heard that, and I looked down and noticed a small thin ring on the correct finger. That guy I saw holding her hand must have been her husband. I looked over at Roger, who seemed unphased by the revelation. He’d probably noticed the ring right away, and maybe he’d come over there before Sherri’s husband had left. I pictured him bumming a cig and trading knives right there in the hospital while all the while ogling another man’s wife. I was so out of my depth I didn’t know what to do. I was pretty sure Roger was 110% BS, but he was fearless and entertaining. I sat down across the room and listened to Roger re-tell his story of using an old mobile home as a hangout and lighting up stolen cigarettes from the propane stove only to have it blow up in his face. Sherri laughed softly at all the right places, and I did too, despite having seen his ‘eyebrows blown off’ look 6 or 7 times by then.
I got my first IV later that day, and I can’t possibly communicate to you the dis-appointment. I had envisioned some sort of space age diet, something like astronaut food, maybe even whole meals in a pill or a blender like on the Jetsons. What I got was a stab in the good arm, and a drip of saline water. I pointed out to the nurse hooking it up, that if all I was getting was water, I could drink it faster from the jug they’ve gave me. Especially if I could use my good right hand. This had as much impact as you’d imagine it would, and she told me it was Doctor’s orders. I hadn’t even seen a doctor yet, and I was sure I wasn’t going to like him when I did.