wabi sabi

The sky is so blue it hurts.

strangers in a strange land

And when he said the sakura are not the right color here I knew exactly what he meant.

How I Make it Through the Night

It is no small thing to ask someone to watch over you all night. Parents know this, sure. But imagine for a minute that it's not your own soft child in your care, but crusty Uncle Frank, the homeless woman outside Dunkin Donuts, or a man who only only screams in Korean. Maybe you've been caring for a houseful of kids, working your other job, going to school all day, but would you please just buck the strong pull of circadian tides and make sure these people don't die in the next 12 hours?

It helps to think back to the days when we would spend the night dancing after working all day. This is a different kind of club; keep moving to the hum of ventilators, the beat of alarms. Find your rhythm. Keep smiling. All these men, competing for my attention, demanding round after round of liquid & lots of charm. What'll it be this time, Joe? Normal Saline or another 1/2 of Lactated Ringer? As dawn breaks through the window, Squirrel will come find me to say, finally, she's had enough and we will take off our shoes and limp to breakfast through the stirring streets.

If I don't feel like dancing, I think of the last scenes of The Sound of Music and how the poor von Trapp children sang their hearts out at the Saltzberg Festival before climbing through the Alps all night to freedom. Keep climbing this dark mountain and ignore the heaviness of your limbs. Be thankful you are not fleeing for your life, carrying Gretl on your back. I hum Edelweiss to myself and move a little faster, looking over my shoulder just to make sure.

Mostly, though, I think of all the long, sleepless flights I've taken around the world and how they share the same surreal quality of the cardiac transplant unit at night. The dim lighting, the incessant call bells, uncomfortable seats. The processed air drys out your contacts as you glance at your watch again, trying to calculate the time on the ground. My mood is pressurized as I walk the hall checking on my patients. We are all passengers tonight, flying through the night, hanging on the silver balance. Hoping to make it home safely to the comfort of our own beds.

Catherine Barkley would've cried too.

It's not that I've been regretting going to nursing school, exactly. More like profound exhaustion mixed with the healthy admission that reading A Farewell to Arms wasn't the most helpful preparation for starting my new career.

And then today, the old man comes out of surgery and his blood pressure is all over the place. Systolic readings of 190 one moment and then down in the 60's the next. This is not good. The nurse doesn't bother taking her finger off the IV pump, so continuously do his vasopressers need titrating. He is overloaded with fluid, his kidneys are tired, his pale, shaved skin is mottled, which is to say, he looks really bad. Troubling, too, his temperature refuses to come up from 95.1 degrees, even after warmed blankets and a sheet of hot air. We do all sorts of things, all the standard protocols, all the old tricks of the trade, but our man refuses to be stable. No one comes up with much of an explanation beyond Well...the heart doesn't like to be messed with. Thank you. I could've come up with that on my own.

It's not convenient, but we let his wife in around 2:30. She has been in the waiting room since 6:00 am but she still thanks us calmly and repeatedly for taking such good care of her husband. Her headband, like her entire outfit, is purple, and sticking out of her bag I see a large print book of crossword puzzles and half-eaten peanut butter sandwich. She tells us that she was a nurse for 25 years but she gave up working almost 20 years ago. You'll understand then, we tell her, that we are concerned that we can't get his blood pressure stable and his temperature up. He's very cold.

She sets her bag on the floor and walks closer to her husband's bed, tucking the edges of the blankets deeper under his still body. Once she's satisfied, she walks to the head of the bed, leans in close, and cups his face with her hands. I'm here my darling and you're doing just fine. But these kind nurses must be confused, because they say that you're very cold. But that just can't be, can it? You can't be cold because you are the one who always keeps me warm at night. All these years you kept me warm. Show them how warm and good you are, my love.

Love, medicine, a lifetime of taking orders from his wife? I don't know. But our man got warm and got stable while I bawled into the pile of unneeded blankets.

military time, remote controls, you.

Things that confound me.

For the Man in Park Today

In eleventh grade my teacher handed out photocopies of a poem by Victor Hugo. I don't remember her name anymore, though I can tell you that she was fairly short, spoke French with the lockjaw accent of Southern Alabama (her birthplace, not mine) and cried at least once a week.

The poem, however -- the poem stayed with me -- one line in particular. I tucked this handful of french nouns and verbs in my pocket and carried them to a new high school in a different country, then on to college on the East Coast, through boyfriends and break ups and the lessons you learn on how to become an adult in the world, how hope has feathers, what it means to be one of 6 billion people in a galaxy with 100 billion stars (give or take). Sometimes I recite it to myself on the bus while riding to my job that pays the bills and makes me laugh but doesn't fill me up with the things I want or take from me the best things I have to offer.

And now I'll give these words to you, because it seems you speak French (or carry around a dictionary, which is equally charming), because you have your eyes open when you walk through the park, and because you look like you miss her and need them more than I do.

Je sais que tu m'attend.

her name means pastoral settings & simple pleasures

She skipped class to drive me to the airport, on the road that snakes its way up to they city where her ex-boy friend lives. Willowy & golden, she practically glows. She is way smarter than your average bear, but moves like a gazelle. She notices, remembers, analyzes, intuits, laughs, does, thinks. Our friendship, forged the first week of classes, gives the real value to our $80,000 program. He dumped her, though, out of the blue and in the worst way imaginable: without a single attempt at an explanation. The Truly Wonderful Girl & the EMOTIONALLY STUNTED COWARD is the name of the forthcoming book.

Even so, driving me into the holiday weekend and through the rush hour traffic, she looks out the window, toward the city where he lives. It's times like this I really miss him, she says. He was always so good at braking in traffic and I just make myself carsick. We laugh for a minute but quickly turn sad. She gets it you see -- that all we really have to work with are little pieces, moments, and things knitted together, forming people and relationships. Our lives.

knowing

This week my friends - my family - in all the non-scientific, and therefore important, ways - went through something terrible. It is times like this that I wish for more careful and precise use of language in our world. When the nightly newscasters announce that the promising young quarterback’s career has ended with injury, they are not really describing a tragedy.

For a long time now, we have known that something was not right. The doctors did a lot of tests and collected a lot of information, but could never say for certain what was wrong or why. In the face of this uncertainty, my friends took the information they had and made the decisions they could. Mostly they prayed and kept walking.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how much living without going crazy or numb depends on our ability to walk the fine thin tension lines that run through our common experiences, marking out for us what it really means to be human. Individuals have infinite inherent worth yet our single lives are a mere drop in the bucket of human history. All the frailty, gravity, fleetingness held up against the body’s drive to survive, the brain’s ability to compensate, hearts that go on. I know my beginning, my undeserved resurrection, the ending. But it is the moments, days, years between that can drive me to distraction. Say it to yourself, Kate: There are things we can know and things we should not hope to know. Now mean it, believe it. Proclaim it.

This is what I know. Their baby was beautiful and loved by so many people. She looked like her dad. She could not have had a better mother. She changed all of our lives and now we are heartbroken & somehow still grateful. The rest? Why? When and if it will ever make sense? I don’t know.

On Monday, I stood in the rain and told a man I’ve known for a long time that we can’t be paralyzed by what don’t know for sure, that we have to move forward and trust that it will all become clear in time. I was trying to convince him of something that I need reminding of on a daily basis. The time for knowing will come. In the meantime, let’s hold hands. We’ll keep walking. It is in our unknowing that we are delivered; our salvation comes from belief.

15

I talked to a friend on the phone the other day for the first time in over a decade. Her husband dialed her up, half way around the world, and hit the speakerphone button, and all of sudden, her voice filled the car - so essentially her - that I could not believe that a single thing has changed. That's not true, though. Everything has changed since we were 15. Well, almost everything. State of Love & Trust is still my favorite Pearl Jam song. I still don't like walnuts in chocolate chip cookies. Even now I'll fall for a boy wearing Adidas Sambas at the drop of a hat.

*

We do a pretty good job of being adults. We file our taxes, buy nutritious food, take care of our babies, get good reviews at work. We get to our doctors' appointments on time, meet our hard deadlines, and take bottles of good wine to dinner parties. We brush & floss and mostly pick up after ourselves. We plan and pay for vacations, packing our own suitcases and carrying them through the lobbies of hotels where we have rooms waiting for us in our own names. We get from here to there without help. We take responsibility for our own actions and don't shy away from hard conversations.

On Monday night I got home from work and found my sweet roommate's sweet parents sitting in the living room. All my tiredness, stress, sadness, anxiety, exhaustion was lessened somehow by simply having real adults -- even someone else's good & wise parents -- under our roof, carrying some of the weight, showing us how its done.