MaineCourse

Voice of Experience

by Adam S. Kibbe, guest blogger

“See, eyeglasses weren’t unbreakable back then, so they wouldn’t let Charlie enlist for combat.” The name delivered in a high-register version of that Nu-Yahwk drawl, to me usually fingernails on a chalkboard, but dismissable for the conversation we were having. “But he was determined, so he went into the medical corp and was stationed in Virginia Beach for the rest of the Korean War -- excuse me, “police action”. It really wasn’t supposed to be called a war, you know.”

I was speaking with Cathy, the mother of a good friend. Her husband, Charlie (Chahw-lee), had died some years back, and we’d attended his funeral on Long Island, along with various of the CT band. I was struck at the time by how well-regarded he was in his community there, how many people knew him, both currently and for decades, and could speak well of him and his many contributions. For several Thansgivings now we have invited our friend and her husband and mother to our house, as her only other sibling, Gary, lives far away, and theirs has become a quite small gathering. With ghosts.

“I know. A U.N. action, wasn’t it? And how long was he there?” I asked.

“Two years, I think -- the rest of the war. I had just had Gary, and I know we didn’t have Lynn until he got out.” Distant memories are often not set, but calculated against larger wayfaring milestones.

“Wasn’t that hard, raising a child alone, and wondering how your husband was doing?”

“Oh, sure, but my mother was great -- I wouldn’t have made it without her.” Shoo-wah. Mu-thuh. Maiyd........... “It was harder on Charlie, though -- he saw all the guys who came back, not just wounded, but really badly affected by what they saw. Some things you can’t fix with medicine. I know he’d rather have been able to actually go over there, but I think it’s lucky he didn’t.”

“My father was in that conflict, too. He was in the Air Force there -- a mechanic, repairing..... some kind of airplanes. I always thought B-29’s, but he told me I had that part wrong. I’ve often wondered what being there was like for him.”

“Well, if you want to know more about it, you should ask him.”

“I’ve started to before, but I didn’t want to push it. I don’t know how private it is for him.”

“Well, the telephone’s right there -- I bet they’re home. Take it from me, you won’t always have the chance.”

And while I wrestle with the obvious, adult sense of her suggestion, “Hey, you guys, it’s ready. Come and sit down!” Tricia says, sticking her head out of he kitchen to summon us to Thanksgiving dinner.

And we go.

Our Thanksgiving houseguest, Cathy, helps Ivan try on the new mittens she knitted for him.

Thanksgiving

I didn’t do it intentionally. I mean It was intentional, but it wasn’t intentionally done for Thanksgiving. Matt and I went food shopping (How is that for being absorbed into the culture? Soon, I’ll be asking for bags.) last Tuesday night, and when we cruised through the frozen section, I bought, as I always do, whatever ice cream is on sale. This time, two half gallons of chocolate for him and two half gallons for me, both reduced fat. One butter toffee and one vanilla.

On Wednesday, when Diane was about to make her last Thanksgiving trip to Roche Bros., she, like the Hardy Boys queried, “Do we have any vanilla ice cream?”

To which I proudly replied, “I bought some last night. For the pies, right?”
Except, the pies had only that moment crossed my mind, but being the duplicitous snake in the grass (Diane’s sobriquet of endearment, subsequently adopted by all the sisters), I saw the brownie points and grabbed them.

After a long and festive Thanksgiving dinner, and the requisite amount of digesting time, I brought out my vanilla ice cream to accompany those pies: the pecan that John Lewis bakes and delivers every year, a mince meat pie Diane makes for Bob, a pumpkin pecan cheese cake brought by Katherine, and lastly, a traditional apple pie. That’s when Charlie Hopkins, aka MR. VANILLA ICE CREAM CONNOISSEUR, walked into the kitchen, took one look at the carton, and shouted” Light ice cream! Light ice cream! Why did you buy light ice cream? This is Thanksgiving; we’re supposed to get fat!”

His wholly unreasonable outburst caught me by surprise. I fumbled “Come on, you’ll never taste the difference.” As if one could pass arsenic past the King’s designated taster. The guy drops dead or he doesn’t. I thought, If I leave the lid open all the way, no one will read the label, and no one else will know.

About a minute later, Kate waltzes into the kitchen. “Light ice cream?! Why are we having LIGHT ICE CREAM?” Loud enough to wake the dead in not so nearby Mt. Hope Cemetery. It was then that I knew it was time to flee.

Friday, I opened the vanilla ice cream container to see how much had been eaten, proving my point that no one would mind, and what did I find? Half scoops of ice cream nestled in a shallow pit of off- white. As though they had been scooped out, plopped beside the pie, tasted, then tossed back.

---

This year, I did not walk around with my camera glued to my right hand. I took a few pics, mostly without the camera’s worthless flash, and then stopped. Therefore, I don’t want anyone living in Minnesota to holler, “Where are my two nieces?”

Gallery

Shadows in sunlight

Adam Kibbe

From a roughed-out clearing in the scumbled chaos whose colors are of mud and rage, a small, ominous crow lurks inertly. A scrap of aged newsprint bearing headlines of the occupation of Palestine looms up through the same thick, foreboding colors, its words tantalizingly obscured. Even the headline is incomplete, the publication’s dates invisible. Dried rivulets of vermillion are halted in their trickles down from a horizontal row of three widely-spaced wrought-iron nails driven into the canvas. Two cryptic letters hover at either side of the square, unframed piece, and several simple circles are scribed into the almost monochromatic millieu.

There is a new gallery just opened in Sudbury. It is on the second floor of an obscure, faux-Victorian retail building heavy with the ghosts of many failed businesses. But on this sunny November Saturday, Tricia and I find the space generously buoyed by light streaming in from leaded glass windows, the works well displayed in straightforward style without artifice. There is a distinct air of optimism, the owner bounding up and down stairs with cordless drill in hand, affixing yet more works to the walls of the not-quite-open third floor, pausing to greet the few visitors and encourage them to sign the guest book. No hint of sales pressure, just a love for what is on view, the pride evident.

We’ve made the rounds. It is not a large space, though the breadth of work is exciting and engrossing. The pieces include small and large sculpture, but are mostly oils or guaches, with a few quilts and giclee prints thrown in (no photographs, I note with ambiguous lack of reaction). Prices from tempting reaches to humiliatingly unobtainable. Many I like, one or two I quite love, and some, predictably, leave me mystified and unmoved. But I find myself once again standing before this one work and wondering what it is that draws me.

At the moment I can only remember the name of the piece, but not that of the artist. And I find this fitting -- my experience of the gallery is certainly not this one artist, even this one piece, and should a reader find their way there, it would interest me to know if they would also find this piece, and find it notable. Thus I’ll leave even its title unannounced. The artist’s other works are less compelling, more contrived. Some of the elements I find powerful in this piece -- newsprint, the scribed circles, and random letters -- are found less successfully in other pieces, their power diminished by repetition. But this piece works, and it speaks of strong, dark emotion.

I am not alone in singling it out. In a writeup I found afterwards in townonline.com, the reviewer fleetingly describes a few pieces to give some of the flavor of what a visitor might experience, and they passingly refer to this work as “a collage where red paint bleeds from three nails embedded in the canvas”. Perhaps the salient hallmark, but not even a whiff of the whole. There is a cautionary tale here about the consequence of hatred and anger, and the almost monolithic use of excremental color seems to me a sentence of doom, of damnation. The red -- perhaps deliberately not realistically the hue of blood -- standing in as agony cutting through mute despair. Purest violence.

I don’t know that I seriously considered buying it, as I passed minute after minute thoughtfully before it, though I noticed its price and deemed it almost affordable. Would I want such a weighty, sombre piece malingering about my bright and beautiful home? It is too starkly dull to clash in any constant, superficial way, but its energy would stand out, its evocation of evil unwelcome in the sheltered vantage of denial we arguably foster by surrounding ourselves with our particular senses of beauty. A dangerous guest.

And here we are about to celebrate Thanksgiving in America. A now secular holiday debateably contrived and hyper-marketed, but ostensibly one celebrating nothing more than kinship and gratitude, with little in the way of retail subversion. But celebrated in a land so blinded by its riches that the concept of societal gratitude feels feigned. On a personal level, one does still muster sincere gratitude, though its expression may be scant in our daily lives. And so such a holiday welcomely puts us back in contact with some basic, humane touchstones. But in the scope of what this artwork addresses, it seems such gratitude may have gone missing.

No wonder, in lands where current horrors are wreaked nearly perpetually on brutalized souls as alluded to in the artwork. But here amongst the milk and honey, it’s an absence I find puzzling. And perhaps therein lies the value of such a work, and a reason for inviting it in to stand among the expressions of hope and exaltation. A contrast, but a complement; not in opposition.

It’s still hanging there as far as I know, and I don’t think I’m going back for it. Not that I think my ability to write about its effect on me passes for awareness or prophylaxia. Perhaps it is that age-old hesitance that something so stylized and “intentional” may only grate with time. Or that a second viewing might not find me open to its energy and it be judged more like its companion pieces -- or worse, contrived and crude. Or maybe I’m just too attached to my comfy tower and its lambent ivoryness. Who’s to say?

There’s a new gallery in Sudbury. I look forward to the next exhibit -- we signed the guest book. Maybe that piece will be waiting. Or maybe another admirer will find meaning or energy in that on which I lingered and buy it, take it home. Or maybe it’ll just get rotated out. Regardless, it’s a good gallery. It’s got heart, and it got to mine.

P.S. No way could I take a picture there, and I couldn’t think of a suitable placeholder, but I apologize for the graphic inadequacy of this entry......... Adam

Half Pepperoni

At the dinner table:

Diane - “Matt.....whatz up?”

Matt, after a pregnant pause, “Don’t ever do that again.”

After I changed the battery in my remote starter (the key ring end of things) , at about 10:30 last night, just as I was falling in Neverland, Matt walks into the bedroom and announces that my truck has just started itself. I muttered, “My keys are on my desk, press both buttons at the same time and it will shut off.”

On our was home from the supermarket today, I said to Matt. “Wait a minute, you were downstairs, and the truck starts up, and you didn’t simply turn it off without bothering me?”

“Lets see if you can figure it out. It’s late, it’s cold and dark out, and all of a sudden I hear the truck turn on, and you’re asking me why I didn’t go outside to see what was up?”

My reliable remote starter had never exhibited signs of consciousness before, but after it started itself at 10:30, Diane woke me at about 2 AM to say that she just heard the truck start up. This time I was so thoroughly ensconced in Neverland, that I couldn’t rouse the brain cells to do more than stumble downstairs, turn the truck off from my remote, and then remove the battery. I’m pretty sure it didn’t start itself after that.

View Cartoon

Wizard of Id

Dear shinydome,
This bench is about a hundred and twenty feet beyond what one would be able to walk, had the land owners not created, and then steadfastly maintained for the last twenty years, a bridge of sticks and leaves. The purpose? A better view?
More photos.

Pennslyvania

“Michael, I need to show you something.”

I was cutting through the yard of my elderly neighbor, Dolly, on my way to the protected wetlands project, and listening to her slapping her hands together, shouting, “Pumpkin, Pumpkin, here Pumpkin.” The neighborhood chuckles when it hears her calling her cat, but Dolly swears Pumpkin comes. Diane swears, it’s not often right away. Incidentally, her cat had a crush on Skunk (our cat) and even now, over a year since he died, Pumpkin will sit in the yard staring, waiting for Skunk to come out and play.

“Sure, Dolly, what’s up?”

“You asked what Smitty did for a living and I want to show you.”

I walked up the three worn steps of her porch, and into her kitchen, which other than wear, looks just as it did when the house was built in the early fifties. Pink Formica counters, banded in Desoto-like chrome, impossibly soft vinyl on the floor, that gives back to your footfall. Dolly continued into her living room where we both sat, next to a coffee table with photos of her blonde, stunningly attractive daughter, Debbie, and Debbie’s daughter, Tory. No pictures of Smitty, her husband.

“Smitty painted story boards,” Dolly said as she reached into a shopping bag full of foam core backed, watercolor illustrations.. She handed me one, then, pushed the entire bag at my feet. “You can have as many as you want. Take them all.”

I was still trying to remember what a story board was as I looked at the same hand that had drawn the picture of Matt, Tulum and me. Oh, yeah, advertising. His illustrated themes were then translated into glossy magazine advertisements.

“You don’t want to give them all to me.”

“Sure, I don’t need them.”

“Dolly, I’d love to have these three.” I held them up so she could see which ones, “but I can’t take them all. They’ll get lost in my attic and no one will see them.”

“No one sees them here, either.”

After posting Smitty's illustration of Matt climbing the ladder, I tried to remember the exact date he died. Not out of morbid curiosity, but to help me determine how old Matt was. So I asked Dolly,

“Dolly, when did Smitty die?”

“Seven years ago?”

“Seven...no, Dolly, it was longer ago than that. It must have been eleven,
maybe twelve.”

“It wasn’t that long ago, was it.?”

“Dolly, you don’t know when Smitty died?”

Kind of a cruel question, I realized too late, but I’m perhaps too accustomed to my mother’s impeccable memory. Besides, I thought widows marked their lives by the passing of their husbands’.

“No, honest and truly, I don’t.” Dolly uses “honest and truly ,” as often as Flo, “Oh, dear God.” Dolly stood up and walked upstairs, perhaps to the same room she keeps the story boards, and returned with Smitty’s newspaper obit, sealed in plastic.

Dolly handed it to me and said, “You read it, I don’t have my glasses.”

July 3rd, 1993

“Ten years ago, Dolly.”

“It was that long ago?”

---

On my last day in the wetlands, after which I could return to wearing colors that didn’t match the marsh grasses, I was again taking a short cut through Dolly’s yard when she came out of her house to ask:

“Michael, I might be going to Pennsylvania, can you watch my basement? I don’t like to go that far, but I should see my granddaughter.” She meant great granddaughter.

“Sure, you mean your sump pump.” Dolly keeps close track of the water in her sump pump hole, no matter how often I tell her the pump will do its job.

“No, the basement.”

“Sure, when are you going?”

“The end of the month. Or next month. I hate going that far, six hours on the plane.”

“Pennsylvania?”

“Phoenix. It wasn’t so bad when they lived in Pennsylvania. And Michael, you know I do think about Smitty.”

I didn’t have time to apologize, or tell her I wasn’t suggesting that she didn’t think about her husband.

“Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep in front of the TV, I’ll call out, ‘Smitty, tell those men to go home!’ “

Maybe I keep Dolly on her toes, but she does the same for me. I didn’t want to sound like I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I answered, “Like his card playing friends were staying too late.”

Dolly looked at me quizzically. “No, you know,” and she put her fingers to lips, feeling the bump her doctor told her not to worry about, "I’ll be falling asleep and shout, 'Smitty, tell those men to go home. ' ”

---

Diane and I were talking about Dolly, and she was wondering why I would expect her to remember when Smitty died. I again said, because I thought that would become some kind of milestone. Women would count the years their spouse had been gone. I told her Ms Cass didn’t know how long she had been married before her husband had died. In the hall, after class, she had said “Forty-seven, or forty-four.” Then she began to do the addition from the wedding date.

Diane - “How long have we been married?”

Me - “How long? That’s not the point, I’m a guy.” Flustered, I continued, “But, I could figure it out. We were married in 1983, so that’s twenty years. Look, I don’t know why I assume women keep track of these things, I just know they do, and when I hear otherwise, it confounds me.” I continued to blab on, and Diane sat patiently in the cane chair in front of our sliding kitchen doors, until finally she interrupted,

“We weren’t married in 1983.”

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Feedback

Update on both recent stories.

Turn the Page (nee Dust Jacket), the instructor wrote: “With only a few revisions, this would be an absolutely first-class piece.” She wanted the point, that it was a weekend and therefore without well-trained staff, made more clearly, and a bit more information about John’s duties. Otherwise, she got the dust jacket presaging the events and every other point I tried to make. There were many sentences underlined in red, with words like, “fantastic, great and good.”

Sirens. “This is great.”
She liked the title (thanks to Adam who suggested it), she loved the phantom bear sentence (thanks to Adam for changing it from black bear), and “the sounds of this factory closing.” The big quibble was the last line, “When he says “I’m all alone at last,” doesn’t at last connote relief? As in “free at last.”

I’d have to say, “Yep, what was I thinking?”




From the Vineyard, last summer.
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Sirens

Jim O’Brien had offered to help paint his son Francis’s house. As they walked together, brushes in hand, wide-brimmed hats shielding their eyes from the morning sun, a phantom bear came to sit on Jim’s chest. Squeezing the breath out of him.

“Dad, you look awful, what’s up?”

“Don’t know, but I feel like I’m breathing through a straw, and the pains in my chest... . Look, son, this isn’t my way of weaseling out of helping you paint your house, but I think we’d better get to the hospital.”

Though the emergency room was crowded, Jim was whisked into the sterile white room with crash cart, IV poles and bright lights. Nervously, Francis chided his father. “Okay, forget the heart attack, I’ll do the ladder work.” And as Jim was about to reply, his heart stopped.

The room instantly filled with hospital staff. Francis dropped to his knees beside his father, while those around him struggled to coax another beat from his heart.

Francis’s lips almost touched the still, white lobe of his father’s ear, as if, like the enchanting song of the Sirens, he could lure his father back.

“Dad, I love you.”
“Dad, don’t go, stay here, we need you.”
“Daddy, please stay, please come back, please.”
Francis pleaded with his father to return as the room filled with other sounds:
the mattress heaving under chest compressions, feet shuffling, orders barked, life-giving oxygen squeezed from the Ambu bag. Rhythmic, factory sounds.

“Back away,” the cardiologist shouted.

Francis stood, as his father convulsed under the defibrillator paddles. But then he was right back at his father’s ear, this time with song. Neil Young’s Old Man, but remastered.

Dad take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through

Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Words from a son to a father, just as the son had heard from his father. Long ago. Songs, lullabies, made up stories.

“Dad, I love you, you know I love you, mom loves you. You’re helping paint my house, remember? Platinum gray with the red shutters. You come back and I’ll do the ladder work. I promise."

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past.

But Jim wasn’t coming back. Francis felt the rhythm around him slow, voices reduced to murmurs, the sounds of this factory closing.

With his arms extended, hands touching his father’s face, Francis dropped his head between his elbows and cried.

But I'm all alone at last.

Digital Improvement

Update on Adam's injury by Adam:

As many have asked.......

After getting lost and arriving a half an hour late to the surgeon, I sat in the front waiting room for another half an hour, then 45 minutes in the exam room (all supplied with interesting magazines). Finally the surgeon breezed in.

He said he was amazed at how well it was doing, asked my permission to remove the stitches, then, in fits and starts over 15 minutes, caused me some of the most minutely excruciating pain I can remember (something like 21 stitches, perhaps 7 of which were especially memorable). Afterwards, he apologized, and thanked me for my forbearance (my word), saying that people having stitches removed from fingertips and faces often pass out........ Ouch, I say, ouch. Right, Mike?

Various gruesome milestones to which to look forward, but fervently thankful for all the good fortune and good wishes thus far.

But why no novocaine?

I love that you thought of that. I've been thinking about it since yesterday. But he never offered. I think if I had asked....... But honor bound by age and gender to grit and bear, I didn't. And running almost two hours late, with 15 minute onset for such potions, I can imagine he was reluctant. Kinda taps into Mike's dentistry story -- now I know what they mean by "nothing".......

Jeff

I’m writing my next assignment and I’d be done by now if it weren’t for my editor. She took the first version I handed to her, folded it twice to form more or less a square, tore it in two, then she handed it back. That was Monday. Monday night I began the second iteration of the same story and instead of tearing it to shreds, she said, “What’s wrong with sounding authentic?”

Now I’ve got to write the third version of this story and send it off by Wednesday night, whether it gets the in house seal of approval or not




One of my all time favorites.

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Swamped II

Many years ago, I was paid to build a tree house. This job, a bench supported by a small platform surrounded by marsh grasses and water,has a similar, serendipitous feeling. Except the tree house was on private property, not smack dab in the middle of the most highly protected land in the state.
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Snow In Vietnam

Rea Killeen

When I am nine, we pray all the time because Sister Patricia Anne says somewhere on the other side of the earth “our boys are dying in the jungles.”
St. Pius X Church is my family’s new church after we move into a fancy neighborhood away from downtown Albany. It’s shaped like a cross and has an orange wall-to-wall rug that muffles our steps. I don’t like this church. It doesn’t have a railing or kneeling pads at the altar and there’s no Jesus hanging on the cross suspended high over the altar, way out of reach.

One night we all go to church. Snow falls under the streetlights, like white whispers.

“Draw the seasons,” says Sister Patricia Anne. I draw the spring in tulips, yellow and red. The summer in green. The fall in a waxy mat of layered reds, yellows and orange. And here is winter. I draw a gray sky with branches, black and thin. See my winter? I hold my paper up to Sister. See my grove of birch trees? See the snowflakes neatly trimming the top edge of my paper? See?
“All the snowflakes are different,” she says.
“Yes Sister,” I say.
“They’re beautiful,” says Sister.
“Thanks Sister.”

Someone drops a missile on the pew; someone else coughs. A mother hushes her children and a young child cries like a foghorn. Tittering, chatting, yipping and yapping. Our whole school is here. All the parents are here too. I genuflect and then scoot as far away from everyone as I can. I think that God can hear me better if I pray away from the other voices. We pray for peace in Vietnam. We are praying for peace in America. Our parish priest, Father Durgin, tells us that if we pray together, God will hear us.
Doesn’t he hear us all the time? Sister says he knows what we think. Sister says we don’t even need to speak our thoughts. God knows all our thoughts, she says. I bow my head anyway. I pray with all the other voices in the church shaped like Jesus’s cross with the orange rug beneath us.

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.

Sister says there is hope in the seasons. “Every season has its own color. Every season has its own shape and time. Every season returns to us.”

I pray as hard as I can because Jimmy Tucker is in Vietnam and even though none of the adults like him because he was always lighting off firecrackers in the mailboxes, I like him. He called me “Sprout.” “Hey Sprout,” he’d say and mess up my hair with his hand that smelled like the sulfur of a newly lit match. “Hey Sprout,” he’d say, like he knew me. Like I was his little sister or something.
I pray as hard as I can because Jimmy Tucker is wearing army boots instead of his sneakers, which dangle on the telephone wire in front of his house. I can see them when I pull up my bedroom shades in the morning. I think, “It’s night where Jimmy is.” I wonder if Vietnam has seasons. I try to picture snowflakes in Vietnam. I try to picture maple leaves. I cannot.

“Hi Sprout,” he says to me. I can hear his voice in the cross- shaped church.
Dear God, bring us peace. Keep our boys safe. Bring Jimmy home. End war and poverty and suffering and sickness. Amen.

Sister says waiting is a winter thing.
I wait for God to hear me, to hear all these voices.
I look for a sign.
The snow falls sideways. Is the earth spinning faster? Will the seasons happen sooner?

I lift my head and listen to the winter. And I wonder if God hears us in the muffled brightness of St. Pius Church, if Jimmy knows I prayed for him.
And I wonder if Jimmy is scared, all alone, taken from everything he knew and put someplace where he knows nothing at all.

Swamped

Matt and I are replacing this bench that sits at the edge of wetlands behind a neighbor's house. Somewhat daunting, because we have to wear hip waders and pound posts into a mucky bottom, but also a fun challenge. The new bench will sit on a five by eight foot platform, and because we can't stake it out to square it, placing the four posts (we did that yesterday) is sketchy at best. But with Matt's keen sense of geometry, and from his vantage point on dry leaves, not dry land, we did a pretty fair job.

This same neighbor, who lives on the other side of Mary and Dolly, told me yesterday how upset Mary was that she didn't get a single trick or treater on Halloween. She did say, however, that she had to shoo some kids away who came on the wrong night.

Thanks to all those who offered editing ideas. I implemented many but I couldn't add more dialogue. I'm all dialogued out. If the story lives past this Thursday, I'll add more to it.

Turn The Page

---

I followed the advice of two people, Henry for one, who suggested that I not continue to edit old stuff, but instead, write something new. I did that, following this prompt from my instructor: “ The assignment for the class to be held on November 13th: In whatever you hand in for feedback, please try to include one or more descriptive passages.”

Here is the work in progress, which I have to send off by Wednesday. I'd appreciate editing comments.

---

TURN THE PAGE

“If you get a chance, I’d like you to read my book.”

His book, John thought. The guy is a resident, moonlighting in the emergency room, and he’s training to be an ophthalmologist - how could he have time to write a book?

“What’s the title?” John shouted to Dr. Benton, as he walked up the first flight of stairs, moving away from John, who had stopped at the bottom. Information had to be passed quickly.

“The life of an Intern.” The lanky physician reached into his black shoulder bag and retrieved a dog-eared copy with the price clipped from the inside of the dust jacket. He was near the top of the stairs when he tossed the book, underhanded, over the railing. It landed with back cover, Dr. Robert Benton’s face up, in John’s hands. From a distance John heard, ‘You can read my copy, but you have to give it back.”

Ambling to the cafeteria, he flipped the book over, opened the hard cover and read the introductory blurb: “Dr. Walker, in his first weeks of internship, is tired and a little afraid. He has forgotten when he last slept, but knows in the coming hours he’ll have to make life and death decisions, deal with nurses who often know more than he, cope with worried relatives, and pretend to be what he has yet to become - a qualified doctor.”

*******************
Diane, sixteen years and a few hours old, ran to keep up with her friends as they squeezed through the silver chain-link fence cut from the tarnished metal post. This fence was built to keep everyone from taking shortcuts to shops and restaurants on Somerville Ave, but enterprising teenagers had long ago cut through the diamond shaped links, creating this path across the high speed rails to the street on the other side.

Diane followed, always, but not because she was slower than her classmates. She was a track and field star with promise of State records in the quarter mile, but as the oldest in her family of five, she looked out for others. This time, though, she snagged her letter jacket on the fence and worked to free herself. She heard the clack, clack, clack of the train, the shrill of the whistle, and saw the backs of her friends as they sprinted across the tracks. She pulled away from the last link, ran down the embankment, but lost the race, the first of her sophomore year, to the west bound commuter rail.

************************

John was sitting at his desk in the Respiratory Therapy office, chin on one palm, gazing out the window when the ambulance arrived. It bounced off the asphalt at the bottom of the ramp, sparks flying, and screeched up the short hill to the emergency room’s automatic, buffed steel and glass, doors. Not waiting for the Stat call to his office, John hurried to the trauma room and winced when he saw a deliberate pattern of red drops crossing the black and white scrubbed linoleum. Blood, he thought, is usually confined: to the stretcher, to the trauma room. It almost never leads to the patient like bread crumbs.

He pushed through the single swinging door, walked to Diane’s side and slipped his left hand under her unblemished chin, replacing the ambulance driver’s right hand with his, on the Ambu bag.

“What happened?” John turned to Mel, the nurse dressed in pleated white pants and blue top, struggling to find a vein for the IV.

“Hit by a train.”

Dr. Benton stood at the foot of the stretcher, stethoscope around his neck, but without his proper, dust jacket pose. He was flustered and trying hard not to show it.

“We better call an Orthopod for that foot,” Mel urged.

“Okay, okay, let’s do that now,” Dr Benton responded.

“And her BP is falling, may have a flail chest, how about the Thoracic Team? I think Phillips is on call”

John has the observing position in these situations. He maintains the airway, but besides relieving whomever might be doing chest compressions, he stands, and watches. It upset him to see the physician in charge, not in charge. He had been to many failed resuscitations but this one he was desperate not to lose. Diane was so young, so pretty and other than her foot dangling off the stretcher, she didn’t look like she’d been hit by a train. But, she needed skillful care to survive and Dr. Benton, the ophthalmologist to be, knew it.

“What about blood gases?” John asked. The test was as basic as monitoring heart rate, why wasn’t Dr Benton shouting these orders?

With the exception of a piercing scream when the orthopedic surgeon snapped her foot back on her ankle, Diane was mostly unresponsive. Nothing to needle sticks, and only moans when the chest tube was inserted. Soon after her scream, her blood pressure began to fall, her pulse rate slowed and it was evident that her internal injuries might take her life.

John compressed the Ambu bag, and continued to hope Diane would recover. When Dr Phillips, the chest surgeon moved close to his side, John turned and asked.

“What do we do now?”

“Pray,” Dr. Phillips responded without hesitation, as though he knew the question in advance.

“Pray,” John looked backed quizzically.

“Pray that she doesn’t live.”

*******************************

The waiting room, long and narrow, with one wall of windows had uncomfortable, rigid chairs with metal frames. If you followed the black and white linoleum tiles that covered the trauma room you would find yourself in this room. Far in the back, huddled in a group, some holding hands, others crying, were Diane’s friends; those who made it across the tracks in front of the train, and others summoned after the ambulance whisked her away.

Bill, his full name William Jennings Brown, labored in the emergency room for almost three years, ever since his tour of duty in Vietnam ended. He stood ramrod straight, his reddish brown hair a trifle longer than he’d worn it as a medic. His training was thorough,his battlefield experiences brutal, his bedside manner, unflinching. He shouldn’t be standing here, bearer of news, this wasn’t his role. But Dr Benton was nowhere to be found.

Bill looked down at all the faces in the waiting room and asked in loud, firm voice, “Who is here for Diane Reed?”

Heads raised, hands clenched tightly, young, unlined faces turned: expectantly, hopefully, tearfully.

“She’s dead.”

And Mel walked away.

Tripod

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Kicking Back

I can't remember, but I think I was chopping wood, cleaning the
inside of the canoes, preparing meals, doing jumping jacks, and
practicing knife throwing while Mark and Adam were laying about.

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After two hours, Mark summons the strength to lift his left arm.

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Nothing

This is the visit to my dentist, Dr. P, before Pian NO NO NOOO. The molar first has to be ground and shaped to accept the crown.

“Would you like gas and Novocaine?”

“Gas and Novocaine? What, are you joking? Some people want both?”

“Don’t judge, I have many patients who need the relaxing effect of gas. It depends on how traumatized they were in the past”

“Oh, come on, I grew up with reusable needles that resembled harpoons and drills that rotated as fast as my food mixer, and I wouldn’t ask for both. Novocain is plenty.”

“But some do need both and that’s why I offer it. And there are some that use nothing.”

“Nothing, what do you mean nothing.”

“Nothing means nothing.”

“Wait a minute. You get in there with your drill like a construction worker jackhammering pavement, without Novocaine?

“That’s right, they don’t want their lips numb afterwards. I guess it’s their tradeoff.”

I realized I had grabbed a swinging vine and was touching both shores, but I continued.

“And how did they ever get to the point where they knew they could tolerate it? I mean, you start chipping away and then they scream? Or not?”

“I couldn’t do it, but that’s what I mean about judging others. You should avoid it."

Dr P then raised his needle, grabbed my cheek with his thumb and forefinger and did that pulling, shaking, distracting thing while jabbing and filling my gum with Novocain, after which, he left the room. Gotta give Novocaine time to take effect. I put my glasses back on and flipped through the latest People Magazine. I get pop cultured in both the dentists’ chair and when Chris drops off her latest Vanity Fair.

He was gone about five minutes and when he returned I probed with my tongue and detected some sensation near my soon to be hacked off molar, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to be jabbed again, I too hate that numbing, drooling sensation and besides, he always over does it with the pain killer.

Amy lowered my chair and as I stared into the three dimensional Alice in Wonderland artwork above, Dr P went to work with his drill. The enamel began to fly and that awful burning smell filled my nostrils which is okay, but what wasn’t so okay, is that I could feel everything. I kept thinking, This can’t be, it’s my imagination.

I must have grimaced because Dr. P asked,

“Are you doing okay?”

I nodded my head.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded again.

This office could be a federally designated Pain Free Zone. I always feel better after the visit than before, but not this time. I felt every chip, not just flying off my tooth, but as it ricocheted against my pink cheeks. When he used the air gun to dry the stump, I had Frankensteinian images of directed lightning bolts, but the worst was the rope that he stuffs into the gums around the stump that confines the mold for the temporary crown. I saw Anthony Bates plunging his hunting knife in again and again.

You might wonder why I didn’t complain. I would reply, how could I? I had made fun of the gas and Novocaine wimps, and in a backwards, only a guy, could twist a conversation this way, Dr. P had implied I was a sissy for using anything. And, I kept believing, given all the Novocainehe injected, that I was making it up.

Finally, mercifully it was all over and Amy was raising my chair. Dr P had picked up on my discomfort because he looked at me and said, “You felt it, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

‘Guess what? You now know what I meant by nothing.



Stolen from Steven's New Yorker

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Posted by Michael at 11:38 AM | Comments (6)