The further misadventures of me
Today started like yesterday, awakened before the sun, given a good country breakfast with plenty of fresh strawberries and quick as a wink we're back on the road to Wilmington again.
Again I took my place in the waiting room far from the phone, under the watchful gaze of a reproduction, water color that was more old and faded than the people around me. In times like this, reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust (thanks Kimi) and listening to Celtic and Celtic Rock on ye ole MP3 player, that I see things in perhaps a different way. At least I think and hope it was a different way.
A woman in her 40's came down, with a big smile on her face, and a low cut blouse. I don't know which of those three odd things actually caught my attention first, but she managed to keep my attention the rest of the time I was alone there. Not alone in the only her and I in the waiting room sort of way, alone in the way of not being surrounded by every aunt and uncle on my father's side not currently a patient.
Her smile was out of place in the ICU waiting room, her low cut blouse was out of place in a hospital...or a school (unless she were a 17 year old student I suppose). Her age was odd, in that before she arrived I was the infant surrounded by the ancients. She was the only other person in the room under fifty. She grabbed a chair and dragged it over to within three feet of the TV, where she quickly changed channels, and I went back to my book.
It was the movement at the edge of my vision over the pages of Stardust that put her back into my mind. She was sitting about three feet from a fairly sizable TV and her arms were in the air, while she waved them like she just didn't care. I naturally thought she was following along with an exercise show until I looked at what was actually on the TV. On the TV a whole bunch of people were standing around a table covered with stacks of paper. Their hands weren't in the air at all, but laying on the stacks of paper and they were swaying while a man, their apparent leader was speaking. At first I thought the stacks were money, but I noticed that the color was wrong. All this got my curiosity up, and I paused the song I was listening to. The song I was listening to was a happy little jig about honoring the memories of the dead. What? I'm of Irish descent. The man on the TV was leading a prayer, and apparently the at home audience was invited to participate.
Mystery solved I went back to my music, and back to my book, but I kept glancing up wondering if something else would happen. Eventually something did happen. A second woman in her 50's came in and asked to join the woman who, at this point was smiling, but keeping her hands to her self. They were strangers but they had the same smile on their faces and the new woman brought over a chair and took the other corner three feet from the TV. Neither would sit directly in front of the TV, perhaps they thought others were watching the show too.
Occasionally I would catch a man in his 50's sitting near by feigning sleep, open one eye at them and chuckle quietly to himself. That made three of them smiling, two politely ignoring, one truly asleep, and myself quietly taking it all in and trying to remain inconspicuous. OK, as inconspicuous as possible with a lemon yellow T-Shirt green button up over shirt and spiked hair will allow. I was VERY quiet.
Later I met a woman who came with one of my aunts who I pretended to know for the rest of the day. On the ride home I learned she was my aunt's daughter-in-law. She had married one of my cousins. Cousin-in-law? I don't know? She apparently knew me by reputation alone, and I had only managed to learn her name the whole day. She said an awful lot over all, just not useful clues about herself. The reason I had never met her is that up until this week I had never been near Duplin County during the week, and she always works weekends in a hospital.
I wonder if that makes one of us long lost? At any rate, I now know with some certainty that even though I am the furthest flung of my clan from our American source land, I am not the black sheep.
Oh yeah, the bolt broken off in the block of the Saturn! I was supposed to get one of those today. Saturn could have had me one by Tuesday. The junk yard didn't have any Saturn engines at all. WWMD? I'll tell you Monday when I've had a chance to figure it out for myself.
