The Hospital Room

Delivering the same setting through different eyes & different circumstances

It had been hard to break away from the nursery. He could have stood there forever looking at his perfect daughter through the glass. Yet he also wanted to be here looking at the woman who somehow pulled off a miracle. She was sleeping now. The fluorescent lights of the room turned off, which helped it look less like a hospital room. He had never had doubts about their marriage, had never had that impulse to run screaming from the room that Dave had so comically described at lunch the day after his son was born. He stood now looking down at his sleeping wife, a cup with a bendable straw sat on the table near her face. It was a like a badge, a bendable straw for an exhausted miraculous woman. The strongest smile came to him with no hesitation at all. He was a lucky man.

It had been hard to push the button for the elevator. He could have stood there forever putting off the moment and then a blond woman had come and had pushed it herself with a sigh. He needed to be with the woman who had ushered him in this life, who was now hovering at the end of it. It couldn’t be held off, this moment or the next, the moments that would march them both to the end. They would pass either way, whether he was there or not. The door to the room was open. He passed through the threshold and stared at the cup with its plastic straw. The bendable type of straw so the weak and dying didn’t have to exert too much effort to drink. He dropped his coat on the chair next to the bed. She was truly dying.

The Door

Today’s exercise it a bit tough. I’m not sure that I get it. It’s about leaving your mental editor behind but the description of how to do it leaves me feeling like I’m in a horror movie. It’s supposed to be me going into the basement of my childhood home and finding an old door and opening it. This just brings to mind images worthy of a Stephen King novel and doesn’t really help me shed my working inhibitions. Well, I’ll try it anyway.

The door knob feels gritty as though it hasn’t been used in a long time nor has it seen a dust rag. I turn the knob and feel a grinding click as the latch releases from the frame. The door itself is heavy, but the hinges swing freely as if they are well maintained and oiled. When I open the door I am looking into the conference room where Paul and Nathan sit. They are both glaring at each other. And I see that I am in the scene where I have been stuck for some time now. I want Nathan to turn the screw. He needs Paul to do his English assignment for him. Paul doesn’t want to waste his own time doing the assignment, he doesn’t want to tutor Nathan at all yet he doesn’t want to imperil his life either.

Gee, I'm still stuck.

family myth

It isn’t a myth. It’s really how it happened. I stood on the machine shop floor and listened to the super tell us that there was no more work. They were closing, for the summer, possibly forever, but most certainly for the summer and we could check back in the fall to see if there would be more work. But for now, we were to clear out our tools and go home. America, the dream, ock. I started packing it all up, just like every night and then again, not like every night because this time, I wouldn’t be back in the morning. I walked home to Else who was standing in the doorway waiting for me. She knew but she was waiting for me. But to open my mouth would be to let too much out. I nodded at her and took my tools to the shed. I was longer with the tools today, wiping each one down before putting it away. It would be some time before I would handle them again. Else didn’t follow me into the tool shed, she waited for me in the kitchen. Perhaps she had seen in my nod that I didn’t want company. When the last tool was away I stepped back from the shelves and looked them over. Was there work somewhere else? Another city, another state, back in Germany? But no, that wasn’t the way of it. There wasn’t work anywhere. I left the shed, locking it, and came to the back steps, carefully wiping my feet before walking into Else’s kitchen. I stood inside the doorway watching her as she stirred the soup. She brought it to the table and we sat. I dipped my spoon into my bowl of soup and held it near the opposite rim letting it cool.
“It’s for the summer, we can either lose the house or the car.” Else nodded looking around her kitchen. “I’ve decided it’s to be the house.” I said. She looked up at me, her eyes wide with the surprise of it. “We’ll keep the car.” I said. “There’s freedom with the car. We can go.” I paused and then finished, “if need be.”

thrill of entering this bigger world

So this week I’m going to try to juggle two things at once – should be easy – I’m a woman after all… insert wry smile here.

First will be to list two specific things one that made me smile and one that made me wince.

Next will be the normal exercise.

First off… Jay woke up this morning and is cuddling with me on the couch while I do my writing, which is making me smile. Dinner last night, I cooked spaghetti, sauce, and cheesy bread, very few of the children ate it, they insisted on making their own dinners and that made me wince.

Now the exercise, which is to take an event from life, write two sentences about the event. List the facts you know, list the facts you don’t know, then write a paragraph that uses both. This is to alleviate the need to stay too close to the facts when writing about things that are close to truth.

When I was about five years old I was climbing a tree with my brother and he fell out of the tree and broke his arm.

What I remember: the Brownells were there, we were in the woods near the house, the older kids called the tree the elevator tree because you could climb one tree, grab another tree and float down to the ground, I was in the tree, Tracey holding me after getting out of the tree, Mrs Brownell not wearing her shoes and driving

What I don’t remember: who else was there, climbing the tree, Steve falling, Getting out of the tree, needing help when I was in the tree, what time of year it was, if the fathers were there, the Brownell boy’s name. How we got to the woods. How we decided to go to the woods.

We had already finished our lunch of sloppy joes and mac-n-cheese. Mrs. Brownell and Mom were sitting with their coffee. Steve, Em, and Tracey were gunning for adventure. We called him Em, his name was Emory, but it never really seemed to fit that way. They were going to leave Robin and I behind. I’m sure they would have taken Robin if I hadn’t been there but I think they thought they were doing me a favor by leaving her behind for me to play with. Nothing doing. I wanted to go too. So did the moms, get us all outside and gone, out of their hair. So we left, Steve grumbling. He was leading us to a secret place and he didn’t want his kid sister along. There I was though, a permanent thorn in his side and destined today to become a bigger pain for him.

We trooped like a parade down the block, past the proud lawns of our Midwestern suburban neighborhood. Steve was in the lead, followed by Tracey, who was wearing the combined look of interest in this reportedly secret place while also quite obviously above all this adventure as the mature oldest of the group. Em was doing his best to be as determined about this adventure as Steve but he didn’t have the same enthusiasm, his was a more distracted sort of guy. Robin and I trotted after them, having to hop and jump a few times to keep up with the older ones bigger steps.

Then we were off the block, this wasn’t something I did much of, my world pretty much consisted of a five house diameter starting at my house, ending at my best friends house and including two of my arch rivals houses. Steve, however, ranged much further in the neighborhood, and the delicious thrill of entering this bigger world swelled in me. We continued our journey onto Sussex Street which was bordered on the east side by woods. We stole through a quiet looking house’s yard to the woods beyond and soon were tromping through the trees…

Time’s up and pencils down folks. Sorry but I’ve got to get to work…

What is on the other side of the veil?

More writing with no assignment – I’ve sent Jay for the book but I don’t know if that will actually work. We’ll see. What an odd time right now. I feel my mood swinging around at the whim of the wind it seems. Like a flag when the wind is swirling. It is disconcerting when I can detach myself enough to see that it is happening. I have noticed in the past week and a half that being indoors is a bit of a trap. Each time I have gone out of doors I’ve felt better. Once to watch the kids play in the snow and dig out the car and again to ski with Ana. Both times I felt better for it. I can’t tell if it was the physical activity or if it was the sun that did it but I know I’m not imagining the surge. Another thing that seemed to make a difference was yesterday I was able to turn my music pretty loud in the car. I liked that too. Okay on to the assignment – Jay actually found the book. I have also flipped two fried eggs while doing this. The assignment is more about journaling. Keeping a journal and accounting for things in different ways. Experimenting with POV, sentence length, nouns, avoiding the forms of be. In the example there was an entry about getting a letter. And of course we have been getting letters lately. It is Christmas and letter writing has descended to that hasn’t it? We all just write letters at Christmas anymore, except for Betty, whom I write more often than that. Letters of note this year are the handwritten variety. I’ve always known this about Christmas letters. I’ve always known that I liked the ones with a note scrawled across the back of them. The note from John sticks in my memory most I think possibly because it came fairly recently compared to the others. It was newsy and contained a picture of him on the deck of a cruise ship near Oslo. He is getting his MBA at Madison right now which I didn’t realize until Su emailed a few weeks ago. So I tracked him down and we emailed a few times and I nailed down the address so I could send him a Christmas card. Seems like he is happy. I think perhaps the real reason that his letter sticks with me is because his life has turned out so different from mine. He is not married. He does not have kids. He doesn’t even have a career that obsesses him. He seems to float around from place to place, job to job in what appears to be an aimless fashion. This is from the outside looking in with little information to go on. And it makes me wonder and fires my imagination. What would it be like to be John? What does John think about and worry about, if not the things that I think about and worry about? I asked Michael this fall if I had created this life in order to distract me from the things that I wanted that scared me. This is not a complaint, this is me wondering what is on the other side of the veil. This is me comprehending that I’ll never know. The choices that I have made are permanent ones and don’t misunderstand me. I don’t regret them. This isn’t about regret. This is about imagination. I really can’t imagine a solitary life with so little attachment and it makes me wonder. So I’ve described a letter to you and how it made me feel and I think I’ve avoided the forms of be but I’d have to know more about the forms of be to be able to avoid them.

losing Molly

Free Writing 12/18/06

The exercise is a story from childhood that made you laugh or made you cry. Tapping into strong emotions is the point. I’m not sure I have a good childhood story that I can dreg up here. Childhood feels so far away sometimes for me now and well my childhood was rather unremarkable. It was easy. It’s funny to look back at my life and determine that the things I felt emotional about were typically not connected to me. Strong emotion doesn’t always get all that close; I always cry when the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pronounces that Tiny Tim will die. Typically I don’t cry in the day to day operations of my life. But the exercise is the exercise. The last time I cried, really hard, emotional, couldn’t stop crying, cried was when we lost Molly. If Eric was sitting here he would correct me and say Marina. If we hadn’t truly settled on the name, that was only because she wasn’t home yet. In my heart and in my life she had already been ours. Her picture was all over the house, the count down calendar was on the refrigerator, the court date was set and we were moving forward. It was a plan; every detail of that adoption was under control and was going so smoothly. And then I got the phone call from Amy. Our coordinator’s name was Amy, she had guided us through the adoption of Henry and now was guiding us to Molly. She called, it was a Friday night, and I was at work. She wanted me to call her when I got home but I couldn’t. I knew something was wrong and I wasn’t going to let her off of the phone. So she told me. And the whole world crashed around me. Molly had been adopted by a Russian couple. They had precedence, if a Russian family wanted a child there was nothing that anyone could do. It didn’t matter how close you were to the adoption. I knew this. I knew it but hadn’t believed. Had pretended that it couldn’t happen that way. We were three weeks from Molly, just three weeks. And if it had been four weeks or two weeks I would be standing here railing those times. But it doesn’t matter how close or how far, the reality was that she was already my child and it felt like someone was ripping her from my arms. My head crashed down onto my desk and I squalled. I didn’t weep, I didn’t cry but I squalled like a child who hasn’t had a nap and just had her favorite toy taken away. My nose ran, my hands shook, and I cried. I honestly couldn’t put anything together. Even though I was supposed to pick up Henry and take him home I felt that I couldn’t move. I had never been frozen like that before. I don’t know that I have ever been like that since. It was frightening that I lost all my will. Will had always pushed me through every hardship in life but for those moments that day my will had deserted me.

Fictional Ramblings

She doesn’t know how it came to this. Perhaps it was just that today was too much, with the dog, the cell phone, and the stupid meeting with the ridiculous Mr. Booth. Perhaps it took that much annoyance to make everything else come to clarity. But somewhere between the trip to the vet hospital and Booth ranting about bird flu she realized that she just didn’t like the sex. The meeting went on around her but she was no longer listening. Instead she was trying to determine how she had come to understand the extent of the problem so fully, so suddenly. It wasn’t like she had a lot to compare. She hadn’t had sex with many men and the baselines were old. She’d been having sex with him for just over twenty two years, before that there had been others but those memories were the dim recollections of desperate young sex. Stolen moments mostly without the possibility of a longer relaxed encounter. On the contrary they had had many long moments. Opportunities to stretch it out, time to plan, time to relax and had that brought visions of God, spasms of ecstasy, screams of delight? Well, no. The flat answer was no, in fact, it hadn’t brought so much as a smile much of the time. Rather, just an exhausted sort of deflation. She dreamt of it too. Dreamt of the same deafening vacuum. The anticipation followed by the disappointment.
And today she knew that she couldn’t stand it, not one more night of it. She was 48 years old and she was going to have good sex while she still had some life left.
Sometimes she had played a game, sat in meetings and looked at the men in the room, watching their lips move while they talked, imagining those same lips on her. Wondering what those lips would feel like. Always assuming that everyone did that sometimes. And maybe there were those that did, but she didn’t want to be one of those any more.

Reoccurring Dream

Free Writing December 11, 2006

I had this reoccurring dream as a child, it was a nightmare really. In the nightmare I was at the house in Greendale. On the floor of the house were giant glass milk bottles lined up in rows laying down. Each milk bottle had an alligator in it. I can only remember contemplating the scene; I don’t remember interacting with the bottles or the alligators. In this dream I was a small child and I believe I was a small child when I had these dreams. I do remember there being adults in the dream as well, my parents, my brother, perhaps my grandfather. All of these people were unconcerned about the situation and I felt the overwhelming burden of having to enlighten them.

What word comes next?

Free Writing December 7, 2006

It was a dark and stormy night. It was a dark and stormy life. But a stormy life was better than Rupert’s situation. Rupert was that lumpy pile in the dark corner. And the dark lumpy pile was dead. Dead was definitely not the way to go. I looked toward the door. The door was the way to go. And now was the time to go through the door. The trouble was these chains, it was a dark and stormy night to be in chains. And it would be hard to go through the door into the dark and stormy night in these chains.

Opposite pairs

Free Writing December 6, 2006

Back to sentence pairs

Her child, the very first flesh and blood relative that she would ever touch was before her. With the first touch a swift possession engulfed her, this child was hers. Just as quick, anger rose and tore at her. Her birth mother had held her this way before turning away forever. How?

The girl sat before her. Her nose ran, clothes disordered around her bulging stomach. There was a wild eyed look of desperation combined with the terror there. “I can’t be pregnant!” The words were a wail and a plea.

Well, time’s up and pencils down. I’m not sure if that’s an opposite pair or not.

vehemently opposed

Free writing December 4th, 2006

I read another writing exercise last night when I was cruising the web. The purpose was to write a piece from a viewpoint that you don’t hold. Pick something that you are vehemently opposed to and write the other side. As typical I was having trouble imagining what this was but thought it would help me in writing Nathan. So here goes. I’m going to write this as a piece that is pro-cheating on homework.

It was a stupid requirement. I was a football player. Writing essays on Shakespeare had nothing to do with me. They were of no use to me and never would be. What was I going to learn from this? Nothing that would help me in life. Life was about making money. I was going to make it playing football. They said, well what if you get injured man? What if football doesn’t work out? But you can’t think that way, you can’t play to lose. You gotta give it your all. And this English class is a distraction. I can’t be worried about some essay when I should be focused on the play. I got to give this my all, on hundred percent. So you gotta write it. This is how the big dogs do it. They don’t take care of everything themselves, they have other people who do stuff for ‘em. They got a guy to do the finances, they got a guy to drive, they got a guy to cook. Well, I’m not there yet but this English paper thing. I can’t do it. If I flunk the class I can’t play. Which ain’t right. I gotta play, it’s what I was made to do. This English class won’t help me play. It has nothing to do with my life. Nothing. You, you’re a writer, English makes sense for you. We don’t make you play football.

Don’t Stand So Close To Me

Free Writing 12/1/06

The first time NAME heard SPECIFIC SONG TITLE by SPECIFIC ARTIST , NAME was down/up/over at PLACE and we were doing ACTION.

The first time Paul heard Don’t Stand So Close To Me by the Police, he was up with Char at the layout table and they were working on the paper. The words came out of the tinny radio that was propped on a shelf in the corner. Garen was the only teacher in the school who had a radio in the classroom and let them use it. The words of the song, being words, registered. All words registered. His brain turned over the story of the song, Sting, the songwriter, had been a English major. A story teller. He had also been a teacher. The implication of the song was damning. Paul’s hand brushed Char’s as he positioned a story on the page. The scent of rubber cement twitched his nose and his smile went grim, Char would die to be the girl in the song with Garen as the teacher. Sting obviously couldn’t resist the girl in the song, why should he expect Garen to do better?

in media res

Free Writing 11/29/06

Either that or it is inaccurate. Dad, Henry has no socks. Henry has no socks. Why don’t you turn on the lights Jay? Thank you. It’s a snapshot of my morning.

The exercise is starting a story "in media res" – or in the middle of something. The first line of the story is, “Where were you last night?”

“Where were you last night?”
Paul continued pulling socks from the mound of clean clothes on his bed not looking up at his mother. He shrugged to let her know that he heard her. He found two white socks that matched and folded them together.
“Paul, what’s going on?” his mother’s voice warbled slightly with worry.
“Leave him alone Molly,” came his father’s voice, “Sometimes a boy has things he has to do. His mother don’t need to know everything.”
Paul continued to work the clothes in the pile, methodically pulling out socks. A blue pair this time. He folded them together. He could feel his mother watching him from the door, his father was gone now, he could feel that too. There was no tension in the air just the warm breeze of concern and love radiating from her. He wanted to turn from the clothes and blurt it all out to her just take all the ugliness that was wrapped around his middle suffocating him and dump it at her feet. To curl up in a ball at her feet and feel her cool hand on the back of his neck soothing the fire away. Like she had when he was sick with the chicken pox. But he was older now, he should tend to this himself, and he wasn’t sure that she would be sympathetic to him. This, she might not understand.