Little Birds

No one reads this blog but me. And I don't read it, at least not more than the sentence preceding the one I'm typing right now. There's something sort of lovely about this, but also something sort of lonely.

Talen is back from Brooklyn. I didn't ask him why... or what happened...he just gave me a hug and asked me "#3? With raisin toast?"

I didn't even know I missed him.

Wow, I'm lonely.

Today I got sent home on call (hooray). It's funny, you know, the hospital forgot to put my overtime in my last paycheck (nice) and that was a loss of something like $2500--and I am facing the last three days of the month with exactly 92 cents in my checking account--and $11.88 in outstanding checks--and I'd still rather have the time. Money be damned. You can never get a day back.

I'm worried about my patient, though. A little old lady. I've been taking care of her for the last month. Little old ladies always get under my skin. Farmer's lung. She has a year to live.
Husband's a trucker. He just loves her, loves her. She's tiny and funny and cranky. True what my grandmother said--no one loves you for being easy. She's getting stronger. I told them not to accept this prognosis--I think if she got home and got happy she might live a lot longer. I don't know how to be kind to people, really. I get so scared and stiff. How do you be as good to people as they deserve without visiting your own crap on them? Without your ego and your need for approval tainting your interactions?

No one will ever love me that way. I want it too much.

Wiz loves her, too. He's usually really hard assed with patients--good--but kind of hard. But he treats her like a little child. He picked her up in his arms to move her to the chair and called her 'pumpkin.' Sometimes, I really love Wiz. And sometimes he's just repulsive, like when he's walking around with shit on his scrubs and eating graham crackers off the ICU floor just to gross me out. "Ummm--nothing like the taste of acinetobacter in the morning...breakfast of champions..."

She apparently takes in strays--wild animals find their way to her door, her family tells me. I was running with Lilly in the cool spring twilight, thinking about this, when I noticed a bird sitting at the side of the road. It didn't fly off as we ran by it.
"Do you think it's sick?" Lilly asked.
It was a sparrow. A girl sparrow. I couldn't see anything wrong with her, but her head looked a little funny, and when I put my hand next to her, she hopped onto my finger. I cupped my hand around her and stood up. The sparrow remained on my finger, peeping and trembling.
We began to walk home. I felt strangely gifted, as if I were holding a star instead of a bird, or as if the trembling hand of an ancient god was holding mine, some rare faery spirit, reaching out from their world. Everything seemed to still and come into an almost painful focus, the way it does sometimes when you are making love with someone you really love. Lilly ran on ahead back to the house to get a box. I kept walking with the little bird cupped in my hand.
As I passed under my neighbor's big pine tree--funny how some trees somehow have their own little world around them, isn't it? I mean, I'm walking on the chattahoochee in my street, past the magnolias and crabapples and forsythia, and then I'm under this pine, and all the sudden, there's this green shadow and sense of the black forest, and I'm thinking--wow--six feet of a completely different planet under this tree--and the sparrow suddenly takes flight, as if she could do it all along, and flies up into the pine.
Thinking she might be sick and fall out of the tree, I stood there underneath it, looking up into the dense green branches for the bird. I could hear her, but I couldn't see her. Lilly found me this way, when she came running back with the shoebox.
"What are you doing?"
I told her, not taking me gaze from the tree, still looking up. "I'm just waiting to see if she's okay."
Then a big splat of bird poop hit me on the shoulder.
Deadpan, Lilly says:"I think she's probably okay."
"Right."
I can't believe how quickly things can go from the sublime to Three Stooges in this world.
I told my patient this story, thinking she'd laugh, but she just looked at me and started weeping inconsolably.
Then, after about 5 minutes, she held out her little club fingered hands and mimed squishing the bird. She shood a finger at me as if to say, "That's what you should have done."
There and back again.
That's my 1/2 hour.