absit iniuria verbis

Nursing school has made my hands useful and I am thankful for this. In college, I hopped around between disciplines, trying to find the right balance of poetic & practical, a way to meld an inclination toward language with a compulsion to make a tangible difference. Chemistry was too academic, English too indulgent, so I settled on politics and its implicit room for negotiation. After college, I slowly drifted back towards words, burying myself in paper. I could look beyond my computer screen and see how the sentences might rise off the page, walk up the Hill, and maybe someday change things for someone somewhere. It never seemed immediate enough, though, and left me fidgety and empty handed at the end of the day.

Now, I can walk into a hospital room, right into the very heart of it, up to the rawest parts of people and their problems and do something. Even when it's only adjusting a machine or changing a bandage (which it often is, in these early days), the situation changes and it's usually for the better, if only marginally. I walk in and wash my hands. And then I put them to work.

I have high hopes for this last semester of nursing school. There is still so much too learn about the human body, about the ways to manage illness and tend the sick, how to size up both small and gaping needs and then meet them. Tonight, though, I hang up the phone and then sit still for a long while. My friend -- my lovely, kind, funny friend -- is in terrible pain. And there is nothing for me to do, no words to speak that might make it better.

***

She is allowed to call me Katie because she's known me since I was born and because there are some battles that aren't worth fighting. There are ten of us cousins, like stair steps, a jumble of comings and goings, laughing, eating, fighting and jostling, so it's always you kids or Meggie, Andrea, I mean Katie when she needs just me. I don't mind, even when one of the boy's names gets thrown in: Hannah, Ethan, what's your name...Katie! But today when she hollered for me from her bedroom Sherri, Ellie, Kathy! I almost, but not quite, threw my tightly held respect for elders out the window so I could set my grandmother straight about my name.

***

When you don't know what to say
how to string the words together
and then match them up
with your own roiled thoughts

if too much time has passed, sorry
sticks in your throat, or the nervous
syllables shrink and retreat
back down to the safety of your belly

sometimes it's best, the only
way really, to go with that
tried and true old standby

hello