honesty

Tonight at dinner I did my best to imitate the noise our cows make. Little Rat arched his eyebrows at me. No offense Kathy, but Yes offense as well. You need work as a cow.

Get Out of Jail Free Card

I did not intend to go into pediatric nursing. I generally prefer multi-syllabic words to baby talk, hearing the word"potty" makes my skin crawl, and I don't think all babies are cute and sweet. I've met some down right spiteful ones, actually.

But then half way through nursing school I needed a job and the one that fell in my lap, straight out of the sky, was at a pediatrician's office. So I took it, tried hard as I could to be useful and grateful for a job that didn't involve animal fur, and concentrated on not dropping any babies between the exam table and the scale. The doctor is hilarious, brilliant, and kind, the receptionist is hilarious, efficient, and kind. I just try to be kind. And figure out ways to ask the jumping, clutching kids if they need to use the restroom without saying the p word. I've learned a lot --learned to love it, even. So much so that I'll keep working there a few days a week, even after I start my real job.

This past week has been terrible, though. I got kicked in the eye, caught pink eye and then somehow picked up impetigo, even though I washed my hands 45 times on Wednesday. A seven year old girl came in for bed wetting and when I listened to her heart, she wet her pants, the stream of urine trickling off the bench and dripping down on to my foot while her parents screamed at each other about the terms of their divorce, oblivious. It took three grown ups to hold down the screaming five year old boy long enough to vaccinate him and somehow I still ended up with claw marks on my neck. And now, a week after we admitted the four year old in respiratory distress to the hospital, I have the horrible hacking cough and gravelly man voice you'd expect from a 2 pack a day habit.

I was thinking about how much every muscle in my body ached, not the speed limit, when the cop stepped into traffic and motioned me over to the side of the road. 3 months ago, I dropped my drivers license in the parking lot of the hospital and the security guard sitting at the lost and found desk confessed to me that he'd put it in the pocket of his uniform pants and taken my license home instead of logging it in to the system. For two weeks, I wandered around the grounds of the hospital, searching for him, hoping he'd picked the right pants off his bedroom floor that morning. Instead of clearing time in my life to go wait in line at the DMV, I've driven around like a nervous wreck, five miles under the speed limit and practically parking at stop signs. Until I got sick and just wanted to get home.

As the cop approached my car yesterday, I started coughing so hard that I didn't even have time to think about tears (real or fake) or excuses. The officer asked for my license and registration and, in between hacking fits, I told him that I didn't have a license. Well, I have one, but not with me. Well, actually, I don't really have a license but I'm licensed. As in, once I had a license but I don't have it anymore even though I still have a valid license number. And then I started coughing really, really hard into the upper sleeve of my purple dinosaur scrubs, just like I teach the kids. The officer looked at me for a second and then I saw him look over at my stethoscope on the passenger seat. Are you a nurse ma'am? I nodded, so miserable. Well, you're in luck because I never give nurses tickets. You slow down and take care of yourself so you can take care of those kids.

White Rabbit

The summer I was 21, I lived in a guest cottage adjacent to a large house on the side of a hill overlooking the bay. An acquaintance of an acquaintance asked me to stay there with her old, ailing mother for the summer while she went on a three month trip to collect research for her dissertation on tree frogs. This woman knew nothing about me, but handed me the keys to the house, her car, and the instruction manual for the elevator and the pool in the basement. The old woman was both crotchety and funny and, after spending the spring semester of my junior year at home, I was happy for a little space of my own. In the mornings, the old woman and I would take the elevator down to the basement and I would help her climb into the pool and swim against the perpetual current for 30 minutes before sliding down the hill to sit on the beach and write bad poetry or desperate love letters, depending on the day. At night, we'd sit on the porch and the old woman would tell me stories about her childhood and meeting her husband over dinners of fresh tomato salad, cold boiled parsnips, and red wine. After dinner, I'd helped the old lady into the elevator, up to her bedroom, out of her polyester pant suits, and into bed. That was the summer of LSAT and Hail to the Thief, and after the old lady was in bed, I'd sit on the screened in porch and listen to Radiohead, imagining my future as an attorney while summer lightning split the bay in two and rain hammered the tin roof.

One day I came home from work and found the old lady stuck in the elevator. I could hear her talking and she said she'd only been there a few minutes so I called the repair service and after a kind young man came and pried open the doors, we went on with our evening routine. I knew something like this was going to happen she said. I forgot to say White Rabbit this morning! Jefferson Airplane? Alice in Wonderland? She was too old for both so I had to ask what she meant. On the first day of every month, you must say WHITE RABBIT before you say anything else when you wake up. If you do, your wishes for the month will come true but if you forget, everything will go wrong. I forgot to say it today. It's the first time I've forgotten in years.

The rest of the summer passed uneventfully. On the day I took the LSAT, the old lady told me to make us martinis to celebrate the beginning of my future career. After I helped her into bed, I made myself another, went to the porch, and read T.S. Eliot while lightning bugs pricked the inky sky. At the end of August, I said goodbye to the old lady, promised to write, went to see Radiohead play, and then drove up to Boston the next day to finish my last year of school. I moved into my apartment, met a left-handed boy who could talk about science and art, and forgot all about the old lady until the following summer when her daughter emailed me to say she'd died. I meant to send a card, but I don't think I even replied to the email. I was very young. I thought that my whole life was in front of me. Whatever that means. Or I thought it meant.

It's been years since I thought of the old lady, but this morning I sat bolt up-right in bed and said White Rabbit. I don't know why I said it - or what I wish for this month beyond passing the NCLEX- but I spent today marveling at all the funny, strange ways that life unfolds - whether we say those words on the first of the month or not. I spent that summer focused on getting into law school and caring for a frail, old woman on the side. This summer I'm focused on learning to care for people while my time at the law firm grows stranger and more unimaginable by the day.

Jinx

On evenings when he has late meetings, my father often calls me as he drives home. We talk about politics, literature, crazy people we've encountered, our family, my mom (hi mom!) until he pulls up the gravel hill, past the cows, and into the garage.

Tonight I told him about the thing that has been gnawing on me for days and how I can't see the way past it. He listened and told me he understood, compared it to some times in his own life, quoted a good poet. He doesn't really have an answer, you see, because we are built the same way -- mirror images, or maybe more like those stacking Russian dolls -- and any answer lies in a complete reprogramming of the way that we are both hardwired to respond. More and more our conversations go like this: my problems, his parables, no answer. It has taken me awhile to adjust, to realize that the point of these exchanges is not an answer. This has been the crux of growing up for me - the bittersweet exchange of hard, clear answers for a more reciprocal understanding. I understand. I don't know.

I really wanted an answer tonight, though. Something to make it all clear up and go my way. But I let that go somewhere toward the end of the conversation and just listened to his story instead and realized suddenly how much more important it is to have someone say I understand instead of Now, this is what you need to do.

You have to remember this conversation forever, I thought as I hung up, you have to remember to talk to your daughter this way some day. I don't know how I'll remember the particular things my father said tonight, though; how I will hold them distinct in my heart and mind from a life time's worth of conversations about how to be gracious in a difficult world. Who needs answers when you have examples?



(And here's a poem I wrote about my father ten years ago, when we were fighting because I wanted to drop AP Calculus and AP Physics C.)

I Removed Atticus from the LIST today

Don't worry.
The others are still there
and someday
(probably soon)
he'll rejoin F. Scott and
George Washington
among those honorable
and insightful men
laid out on the list which defines
you

for

me.

But Calculus isn't camelias
and I am neither Jem
nor Scout
(It doesn't work both ways;
it is an unfair game,
I acknowledge)
nor am I able to integrate
Physics C into a novel that
you've always told me to read
a word game
a lesson on the Magyars
(your people).

See how truly I am your daughter.
Even now, my anger cannot last
as your genes in me dictate.

Consider Atticus reinstated.

discrete, related

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
- Walker Percy

1. The left-handed captain and I went sailing in the middle of the night, because the wind was right and it seemed the thing to do. Even though I see him maybe once a year, usually at a wedding, we both rank the invention of the keel higher than the ipad on the list of man-made wonders, which means that he gets it, that we speak the same language in this incomprehensible babbling world. We unwrapped our bandaged, stinging hearts to the night air. We watched the grace of the wind in the sails. Let's go to the Bahamas he said and pointed the bow toward a new life. For awhile we sailed as close to the wind as you can, between the longitudinal lines of past and future. He turned the boat around, though. A good captain, a willing first mate, fair seas, good wind, gin, limes, and stars clear enough to guide can not change this fact: so much of where we go is determined by who we've left behind, and what waits for us back on land.

2. I had 4 patients the other day, all men with heart failure, all dying alone. The eldest one told me, as I went through all three of his wallets cataloguing his valuables, that he never trusted anyone enough to get married. The youngest man, only ten years older than me, looked old enough to be my father's father. When I went in to his room to change his IV, he grabbed my hand and said The doctor said it's too late for me to change - you don't think it's too late for me to change do you?

I didn't want to say it to a dying man, but aren't we all dying?

It's never too late, but sometimes it's too late.

3. I run it around and around my mind, like worry beads. People choose what they choose. People choose what they choose. In these words there is an answer, in this truth there is rest.

The Little Things

There are so many things to be thankful for in spring, not the least of which are purple grapes, thunderstorms, and Claritin D.

Easter Vigil

All day I have been reading articles about controlling infection in post-cardiac surgery patients. They have titles like Mediastinitis Following Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery: Pathogenesis, Clinical Presentation, Risks, and Management and Bugs are eating my soul: a case study of sternal abscess, osteomyelitis, and mediastinitis complicating a closed sternal fracture. These articles explain the best medicine has to offer when it comes to treating boggy, calcified, or rotten hearts. We use the strongest antibiotics we have, because once you're heart is infected, it's very hard to root out the blight. Necrotic tissue does not just come back to life.

In a few minutes I will leave for church, where we will have the biggest party of the year. We are celebrating because our hard hearts have been softened and He has washed them white as snow.