study/studying

THERE are research studies out there that say kids perform better at school when they dress up. This is one of the arguments behind school uniforms, the reason why the whole team wears ties on games days, etc.

It better be true. This morning I made an effort to tame my hair & find a shirt with buttons. I put on red shoes and red lipstick. This passes for "dressed up" in nursing school -- and represents the sum total of my preparation for today's public health exam.

hardships

My sweet roommate is the hospital for the foreseeable future. Tim thinks he has a heart defect. My two best friends have started dating each other. I just got home from the hospital and must be back in 8 hours. I haven't slept in days. Today is my brother's 22nd birthday and I haven't seen him in over 2 years. I miss my parents, Little Rat, the cows. I'm scared to sleep in this house alone. My friend's father died Monday. I have so much school work to do and literally no idea how it's going to get done. My ex boyfriend sent me a sad email. No answers to my questions. No money. No time. A two day headache...

I was doing just fine - holding it together like a true champion - until the Visa commercial with the Chinese Olympic ice skaters came on.

true story

The light turned red. Kate wasn't paying attention and slammed on her breaks just in time, avoiding a collision with the back of the fire truck in front of her by just a few feet. Embarrassed by the near miss, she glanced up to see who had witnessed her almost-accident. To her chagrin, the back door of the fire truck was open, and a tall, handsome man was peering down through the windshield of her small blue station wagon. Kate felt color creep up her neck and spread across her face, turning her alabaster skin a deep, rosy pink. The fire man was dressed in soot covered overalls, and his face was smeared in ash, but his dark blue eyes flashed above his sensitive lips and strong, chiseled jaw line. His eyes locked on Kate's and she felt herself melt as he drew her deeper into his gaze. For once in her life, she hoped that the red light would last forever, that time would stop at the intersection of 14th and Columbia Road. He took a step closer and his lips parted into a shy smile that spoke more than any words ever could. As suddenly as it turned red, though, the light changed to green, and the old fire truck roared ahead. The handsome man's blue eyes filled with panic as he lost his balance and pitched toward the open door of the truck. He grabbed for anything he could find to steady himself, but his hands found nothing and Kate watched as his muscular frame flew closer and closer, almost as though he was moving in slow motion, flying toward the hood of her still stationary car...

Kate lives in reality, though, so it was no surprise that the handsome man's buddy grabbed the back of his coveralls at the last possible second, pulled him into truck, and slammed the door shut. For a moment, Kate glanced at the hood of her car, where her true love had almost lain. She could almost feel the warmth of his skin under her hand, which she would've run along his face to immobilize his c-spine and check for pulses. She thought of how his strong chest would've given beneath her palms as she initiated chest compressions, how his flashing blue eyes would've found her face first as he climbed his way back to consciousness. The car behind honked, waking Kate from her reverie. She shifted into drive and turned toward home, where she sat down and immediately began work on her next romance novel Love's Blazing Fire.

Texting

Little Rat: Whatz up, kathy ^_^

Me: Not much. Just at the hospital. How are you?

Little Rat: [blank text]

Me: ?

Little Rat: sorry about that, i purposely pressed send without anything on it at all.

Me: Do you mean accidentally pushed send?

Little Rat: yes, but i couldn't spell such a word, so i had to use another one, ok?

Ash Wednesday

Most Merciful God, we confess

that we have sinned against you

in thought, word, and deed

Yesterday I met a woman with an serious problem. She sat through my presentation on cholesterol (colesterol es tres mal para tu corazon!) and patiently waited while we screened a roomful of people for hypertension, piecing together their symptoms and complaints with only a handful of common words. I'm not trying to wring sympathy from your heart, but you need to know what we were up against: she has a small daughter playing under the table, no money, can't speak English, can't read at all. She has a mass you can feel through her t-shirt; she is in so much pain she has not eaten since Sunday. Outside, snow covers the ground and she is wearing flip flops.

I want to know. What would you do?

We left.

by what we have done

and by what we have left undone.

Back in the classroom, Tim kicked off the discussion on structural discrimination in health care. A couple weeks ago, I led the seminar on disenfranchised populations & the gaps in health care access and quality. This is the part of the course where it's supposed to become clear why it was the right thing to leave that woman and her daughter there, the part where the shame flips off and the light bulbs flip on in our newly educated & enlightened minds. Believe me, I understand the need for sustainable programs and all the reasons we weren't allowed to drop the woman off at the hospital or give her cab fare from our own pockets. I believe in consequences and fear the law of unintended consequences. Dangerous precedents. Greedy & deceitful people. But we talk and talk and talk, myself right along with the best of them, and forget the Golden Rule. It's not partisan, political, theoretical, hypothetical, cultural, parochial. It's everyone. The failing is everywhere.

We have not loved you with our whole hearts.

We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

After class, I went for a run before going to the Ash Wednesday service. Since college, I've found myself anticipating Lent more than Advent. This season of house keeping - the setting of things to right - both stretches me beyond comfort and comforts me beyond reason. The chance to sacrifice small comforts in celebration of our great, incomprehensible reprieve and the anticipation of redemption to keep us afloat. So I walk into the hushed sanctuary, flushed from the fresh air & the endorphins, glowing with commitment, ready for holiness. The minister speaks and I am so convicted, so hopeful & thankful. Yes! I'm so terrible! Yes! I can love my neighbor as myself. Amen! My house is not 2 miles from the church and before I make it through my front door, I'm seething with murderous thoughts, wishing I could take a hammer to his head or tell her what I really think. And if my own private thoughts aren't bad enough, I'm needlessly rude to my dear friend Tim.

For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,

have mercy on us and forgive us;

T. S. Eliot wrote a poem called Ash Wednesday and in it is a line I go back to again and again when I don't know how else to pray. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. Only a handful of words and yet they are strong and broad enough to hold all my questions & inadequacies. I need to be taught to care for my neighbor better - how to love that woman, how to love Tim, how to love people who hurt me. How to love like Christ, because of Christ's love for me. I need to stop caring about the things that don't matter, the voices who really won't have a say in the final count. Thank God for these 40 days to learn to sit still, to turn, to listen, to change. Thank God that His grace is not limited by merit, time nor space.

that we may delight in your will,

and walk in your ways,

to the glory of your name.

Amen.

scientific love notes

I dug out my freshman chemistry

book this morning to look up the

answer to a question my pharm

acology text couldn't handle. It

was chock full of Valentines.

Non Polar Covalent Bonds? Hmm?

Most romantic force in the Universe?

Scientific love notes filling the margins

(my 19 year old hand writing, less angled)

and wreathed in pink hearts.

Give me your love and I

will give you a mole of stars.

Melodramatic, mooning, spacy.

I wore my heart on my sleeve

and tripped over my own feet

with all that gazing at those stars.

Tougher, now, I'm happy to say;

less likely to get lost in the sky

and better able -- or is it willing?

to focus on the actual meaning

of the words on the page.

Still. I'll take a telescope over

a diamond any day. I don't ask

for much. Just give me the rings

of Saturn and I'll promise to be yours

until nuclear fission does us part.

love poem

my love for my sister is fierce and irritable.

my love for my parents is the sympathetic nervous system.

my love for squirrel can't keep secrets.

my love for crazy a is an egg timer that always flips over as the last grains filter down.

my love for my grandmother wears gold shoes.

my love for my husband smells like limes and grapefruit.

my love for little rat keeps me awake at night and brings me tea in the morning.

my love for my brother is an inside joke, too smart for everyone else.

my love for charles rides the rails, surviving on biscuits and ham.

my love for my enemy picks fights just to make peace.

my love for my patients is also a paycheck.

my love for my neighbor hides under the bed.

my love for my bus driver is born of necessity.

my love for norman mourns the rain.

my love for myself is supposed to die.

recycled: dreaming of summer

Summers (June 2006)

6: The window frames the sliver of orange candy moon and insects flap their hard shelled bodies against the screen all night. We lay on top of the covers and wait for a breeze that never stirs. The adults play pinochle around the kitchen table and eat coconut cream pie. The underbellies of our pillows are cool and smooth when flipped. Finally we fall asleep.

10: I find an old Reader's Digest under the guestroom bed at Grahamcracker's house and cry my way through the story of a young girl who dies of leukemia. Cataloging the girl's symptoms -- the purple-blue bruises appearing for no reason, the aching joints -- I notice that my own elbows and knees feel as though someone is banging at them with a wooden mallet and convince myself that I'll be dead by August. Is that a bruise on my arm? The secret weight of my imminent death colors the summer a shade more poignant than usual. This might be the last piece of watermelon I eat. Soon I'll be too sick to go to the waterpark. When I'm gone they'll be sorry they sent me to bed. At the end of the summer I'm a good two inches taller and need new pants for the fall.

14: I give in and read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. For months now my dad has suggested it and I have ignored his suggestion in favor of bb gun wars or eating kakigori in the matchi with Philip. Finally, in a cabin on a mountain by the sea, far away from Tokyo, I pick up a ragged old copy and fall into immediate, desperate love with Jem, Atticus and Scout. A new thing starts to grow inside me as I read. Probably this thing would have emerged on its own one day; but lying there on the top bunk, it was shaped profoundly by Mrs. Dubose's camellias and the pale, wispy courage of Boo Radley. It is a baby ache at the sudden, small understanding of it all--the bigness and smallness of humans, and the way that goodness, courage and tragedy sometimes can't be separated into their own neat, little boxes.

18: Dot's older brother Leighton was a prisoner of war to the Japanese. After his ship was torpedoed in the South Pacific, he drifted in the warm briny waters but it was really my mother's prayers that kept him afloat, Dots says. She would iron and pray and sing hymns and that is what kept skin on his bones when there were more rocks than rice in his bowl. She digs out a picture of a thin, handsome man in a uniform who could be anyone's great uncle. You know, she says, I swore that if I wasn't married by 25, it would never happen. I met Vern the day after my 25th birthday. She still has some of the letters he wrote and a picture of the two of them kissing on a velvet sofa, the skirt of her polkadot dress spread around her. At the end of the summer she gives me this picture and I pack it in with all the other things to take to college.

20: The months stretch out ahead, hot, muggy and lonely. I take a job chasing tough kids around a sweaty gym. On trips to the monuments, my co-workers sneak off for cigarettes and the kids steal hot dogs from the street vendors. They boy who broke my heart emails out of the blue. The days drain by in an uneven rhythm. Somehow, I move forward.

24: Is it better to know or not to know--to labor away under your own silly predictions, pieced together from bits and observations, small flashes of insight that might really be the glare of a mirror? You could drown in these thoughts, even as you lay in the hot sun at the cool water's edge. Throw the weight of suspense off your back. Keep walking. Wait and see. It's going to be okay.

heart monitor

I have spent the past weeks reading about the human heart, cramming my brain with facts about this fist-shaped organ tilting slightly forward & left. I can tell you about the way coronary arteries fill in the space between beats, the danger of watery blood. Did you know that laid out end to end, the vasculature of the human body could spin a thin red line so fine & long you could wrap it twice around the Earth before tying it in a bow? Think of that gallon of milk you carried through the snow 2 miles home from the store this morning. Now say a prayer of gratitude for your uncomplaining heart, which will have pumped 2000 gallons of blood through your strong body by the time you lay your head down to rest. So, drink a glass of red wine. Laugh. And for heaven's sake, lay off the salt! Don't worry if the lights go out, for the heart makes its own electricity. And even lonely hearts have four chambers.

Tonight, I will lay in my bed and feel for new pulses in the dark. Behind the knee, the side of the nose, and if my head is positioned just so, I can actually hear the small scratch of my carotid artery against the cool crispness of the pillowcase. So much happens in a single beat, and yet I'll gather 82 per minute as I rest -- yet another way to measure out life in coffee spoons. When I close my eyes I'll see the mountains and valleys of EKG strips. The peaked T waves of hyperkalemia, the jagged teeth of atrial fibrillation -- or my favorite, the disobedient schoolboy Premature Ventricular Contraction, who jumps to the head of the line in his unruly excitement.

All this science & learning and my mind still can not fathom such a rational, dedicated little machine living in my chest. If the handsome cardiothoracic surgeon spread my ribs he would surely find a crude, red, little bucket coursing with longing, overflowing with love.

roommates

My friends moved back from California and invited me to live in their basement. Josh is thoughtful, quirky, enterprising, and effortlessly smart. Amy is sweet, tough, handy, insightful, capable, wise. Together, they are hospitable, fun, funny, concerned, solid -- all those qualities you'll never find in a craigslist roommate.

We are in flux right now, the three of us -- transitioning into new careers, relationships, phases of life. We ease the way by taking care of each other. Amy buys me a fancy cup with the letter K and nurses me through my cold. Josh takes out the trash & brews coffee in the morning. I dry the dishes and put the kettle on for tea.

The house is old, drafty, slanted, crooked, cold. Our home is warm, open, lovely, ours.