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| The things you do Remember |
| by Timothy Gager |
| I’m rounding the bend on my quest for the perfect cherry
vanilla. Then there’s a grill from a Chevy coming in too fast, right there, and then--nothing. I have a quick sense that I am on the ground my face against black top. I’m standing. A nurse walks me back to a bed. “Where’s my ice cream?” I see the pillow and I disappear again. I hurt. I click the button for the pain medication. There’s a window to click it. Have I clicked too much? Not enough? My entire world is clicking the button and doses of medication. It’s tiring. The television sound is in bed with me. It is Chuck Woolery “two and two” too loud. Click-click again. I remember a cold washcloth washing my torso. I think it was here yesterday. When I was a boy learning to curse, my mother used to shove a soapy washcloth in my mouth. Damn my mother for that. My mother has been dead for years. Died right here maybe in this bed. The window is closed but the white curtains still blow. Glasses of water appear then are gone when I want them. My car is gone too. There are no visitors. I measure my life and I realize I am alone. The ice cream here is not very good. The hospital has only the kind in thin cardboard cups. The vanilla-chocolate mixture reminds me of the Yin-Yang symbol, which somehow makes me want to yell something, anything, at the top of my lungs. I don’t. I buzz the nurse but she refuses to feed me. She asks me if there is any feeling in my legs and I tell her there suddenly is below my belt. Next shift I have a male nurse. He reminds me I’m not wearing a belt. It takes awhile before I put two and two together. I feel better thanks to little things. I think of a song by The Dead Milkman, the one where the lyrics are, I don’t piss, I don’t shit, I’m getting no relief…then I realize it’s a stupid song because I can piss and sometimes I can shit, I just need a bedpan. Today’s flowers aren’t looking too well. “Can you do anything?” I ask the nurse. “We’re too busy saving patients,” she smiles. It’s not a real smile, more like the shared knowledge that she is as bored as I am. When my mother was in this hospital, they all smiled exactly like that but not to her, only each other. They only stopped smiling the morning she left. After much to-do they pick out a shiny metal walker for me. It takes a long time and it reminds me of when I bought the car that no longer exists. I always wanted a convertible and it practically revolved in slow motion in the showroom. I can see myself grinning in the fender of that beauty. Then, I see the Chevy. I’d forgotten until right this moment that it was blue. The blue sky is crystal clear out my window. It is as if God had spread water color over a pane of glass. Everything else is suddenly clear to me too: what happened to on the highway and where I need to go. I have many things I need to settle in order to move on. I have these thoughts. I need to get them all in order. Today is moving day. I’ve packed my walker and ride a wheelchair. The van taking me to the rehab has a lift on the side. I feel cold but there is a drop of sweat rolling down my spine. I am very afraid that the chair is going to fall off the lift and I will be placed back in the room I’ve been in for the past three months. I take in a cleansing breath and breathe it out through my mouth. “You know where you’re going?” I ask the driver. He nods yes, but I tell him anyway. “There’s this place after you make a left called Bart’s Homemade Ice Cream…” All he does is nod when he drives past. The world is that unfair. |
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| Feb. 2008 |
| 101 |