All posts by Iris
My Cousin
I catch myself daydreaming these days. I’ll look up from my keyboard, where my hands will have gone still for seconds or minutes or an entire week in summer when I was 10, and feel the same pang under my ribs that I did then, the summer I first saw my cousin inject himself with insulin. He was so proud of the power he had to hold the entire crowd of cousins enthralled as he drew up the dosage. He giggled with glee as we all gasped, surprised that he’d chosen his stomach as this time’s injection site. We’d all had vaccinations, and we knew that shots went into upper arms, not stomachs. And I remember sitting there long after he’d run out to climb trees or jump in the lake or dig for worms or whatever else all the young cousins were doing. I sat there and was grateful that I didn’t have to break my skin multiple times every day, or learn how large a smear of blood would be sufficient for testing, or have my mother check on me in the night to see if I had miscalculated my evening balance of food and medication. I wondered if he’d been boasting when he said the needle didn’t hurt. I wondered if he worried about his little vials of insulin breaking in his travel bag.
Walking across town these days, I’ll realize with a jolt that I’ve walked a block and a half rather than back from my grandma’s house to the gazebo, carrying orange juice that he forgotten he needed near him in the night, stepping carefully over boys wrapped in sleeping bags and having flashlight wars on the gazeebo ceiling.
Or I’ll look into the mirror in the bathroom and be surprised not to see my 13-year-old face laughing back, having just marked off the two full minutes of tooth-brushing his dentist required. He hated it that his mother had enlisted us all to mark off the time with him as we brushed. How embarrassing to have cousins check up on you. Rather like having them ask if you’d washed your hands. And yet there we all were, brushing and laughing and planning our next swimming expedition to the lagoon.
Getting ready for work in the morning, I’ll put down the brush that’s been hovering inches above the vanity, inches above the arm of hospital room’s chair, inches from the sheet that covers his burns. Blinking, I’ll remind myself that I’m not there, that I haven’t seen this, that I don’t know what it looks like, what it sounds like. I’ve never seen deep burns. I’ve never heard a ventilator (at least, not while I was awake to understand what I was hearing). I don’t even know if there is a sheet. All I know is what comes to me in the daily email updates. All I wonder is how anyone can endure this.
Jimbob’s
If you’re ever driving through Middle Of Nowhere Midwest and see a pizza joint named Jimbob’s, there’s nothing for it, you have to stop and eat there. I mean, really, it’ll either be great pizza that Jimbob’s family has been perfecting for generations, or it’ll be greasy, tasteless, and possibly deep-fried, which would be an equally good story to tell. As we drove up, I had an image of it’s interior in woody shades of brown, tan, and yellow. It also seemed like it should be dark inside, and possibly dirty.
We were rather disappointed that is was attached to a gas station. Something about looking through a glass door and seeing the inside of the station detracted from it’s potential charm. But the decor was both better and worse than we had imagined it. It was shabbily clean and very bright inside, with sunlight catapulting off the warring stripes of fuschia, teal, and daffodil yellow painted in varying lengths along the mottled white tables, walls, and chairs. Think a small herd of My Little Ponies melted down and then extruded over marbled linoleum.
My sister was fighting back disappointment at the cleanliness and lightness of the place until I sat down and my chair wobbled and creaked crazily. Looking down, we realized that a piece of particle board had been wedged under the chair’s seat to keep the whole contraption functional. Unfortunately, neither the chair nor it’s makeshift support were happy with this arrangement, and both complained loudly whenever I shifted.
Then we noticed that all the pictures on the wall were made by printing out 8.5×11 segments of the picture on a color printer, and then cobbling the segments together and taping them to the wall.
Jimbob’s was beginning to live up to our expectations after all.
Free Thrills
It’s been a good month. My sister’s been visiting the entire time (she leaves tomorrow, but I’m not thinking about that now, nosirrybob) and we’ve done a lot of quality sitting around together. Then, this past week, life got a little more exciting. I caught a cold. But not just any cold. This one decided to take up residence in my inner ear.
You know that there’s-nothing-stable-holding-me-up feeling you get just as a roller coaster tips over the edge of the first drop? Fun stuff. I’d be sitting in my chair at work and have to remind myself that if I could still feel the chair, that meant I wasn’t tilting. I walked into a couple of door frames. Walking a straight line was just about as attainable as becoming concert master at the New York Philharmonic. Well… maybe it was a little easier than that, but my point is that it was hilariously hard.
I’ve heard of several other people who’ve battled this balance-killing virus recently, and some have had it far worse off than I did. I never fell over, and the worst of it only lasted 4 or 5 days. Today I only got a couple of free roller coaster ride moments. I hope nobody gets hurt as this one makes its rounds!
In Search of a Car
A good friend is in town for a conference, so we decided to meet for lunch. Sounds easy. Sounds normal. Until you realize that this lunch was in a complex of buildings spanning several city blocks and connected by enclosed walking bridges. And even that sounds kind of nice and comfy (shelter from the crazy end-of-April winter we’re having, and all) until you realize that my friend and I were chattering about everything that’s happened since we saw each other last (which was in grad school, by the way), and had never stepped into this maze of shops and offices and restaurants before, and were mostly unsure of where we were going in the first place.
I’d made a mental note of the parking level we were on (Level B), and was pretty proud of myself for remembering that. I also remembered how many of the bridge things we’d crossed, and even what shops would indicate we were in the same building as the parking ramp. But the one crucial piece of information I’d neglected to remember was exactly how we got from dear old Level B to those landmark shops. So after a pleasant lunch of excellent sushi (man, I wish there was a good sushi place in my town) we wended our merry ways back to the landmark shops and then drew a complete blank. She remembered riding elevators. I didn’t. I remembered an escalator, but there weren’t any right there. So we tried the elevators, but there was no Level B listed. There was C, D, E, F, and G, but no B. So we got out of the elevator and took the stairs down. … E, D, C…. Level 2… EXIT. No Level B in sight. And when we asked a shop keeper how to get to Level B, she looked blank and pointed toward the elevators.
At this point, we went outside and I pointed my friend toward her conference hotel, which was only about 6 blocks away, so that she’d make it in time for her opening keynote. Then I returned to the mysterious elevators and punched the button for Level E. If I’d misread the sign, an E looks more like a B than any of the other possible letters do.
The elevator dinged and ejected me into the gloom, the ever-present roar of the exhaust fans, and row upon row of unfamiliar cars.
In my mind, I mentally drove into the parking ramp and parked, remembering the angle of the ramp and of my parking space and the placement of nearby columns. Then, taking a deep, calming breath, I began walking downwards through the parking structure, circling and descending, circling and descending, reminding myself that I was lucky not to be out in the 30-degree weather and the lacerating wind. Whenever I arrived on a ramp with the correct slant to the floor, column structure, and parking angles, I’d press the “unlock” button on my key fob and look around expectantly for flashing lights.
E… D… C… B! There WAS a Level B. It simply wasn’t included on any of the stairwell door markers or elevator buttons!! And then the moment of truth as the parking ramp’s floor tilted downwards to the next lower level, the columns took on a familiar formation, and the parking spaces slanted off to the left just so. I pressed “unlock,” and nearly sprinted to the flashing yellow lights that greeted me cheerily. “We’ve been here the whole time!” they seemed to tell me. “We’re so glad you’re back.”
And I thought navigating the one-way streets was going to be the biggest adventure of the day…