At long last, the year I've been dreaming of . . . I've finished my term teaching position and will return to being a substitute this fall, with no worries about getting another term or even how many days of work I'll get. I'm jumping off the cliffs of creativity for real this time . . . with the safety net of a Canada Council Grant lying solidly below me. Yippee!
Yesterday I cleaned my office like a knife-juggler searching for a contact lens five minutes before the show. It's clean and I'm ready!
In the cleaning, I found many things that I'd forgotten. Unfinished stories, essays, projects, ideas . . . I know what I need to do first, but then what? The grant project seems the furthest from my mind right now. I am excited about other things. I have moth-belly. Last night I was so excited about getting a good night's sleep and getting to my computer this morning, that I couldn't sleep.
The last time I had to make the adjustment from teacher-brain to writer-brain, I went house-sitting and had a three-week workshop with a one-eyed dachshund-terrier named Doug. And no offense to Doug, but it took all three weeks to really get my pen moving.
This time, I was lucky enough to have Ivan Coyote coming to my little island to do a writing/storytelling workshop two days after school finished. And luckier still, my dear friend was planning to take it as well. And then, because cosmic good fortune apparently does come in threes, I really liked every member of the group in my workshop and felt completely at ease . . . and free to write. Ivan's teaching style was a perfect match for my learning style and we made good use of every minute of our five days. On Thursday night, Ivan performed and I sat and listened, transfixed.
I'm still processing all the learning. Little dragonflies of wisdom fly through my dreams and land one at a time in my conscious mind. I look forward to discovering each one and applying it to my practice.
I'm sharing a piece here that came out of a list of watershed moments in my life, and hospital waiting rooms played a role in several of mine.
So, with a heart full of gratitude for an amazing week of writing and listening, I'd like to share a piece that is the result of my workshop experience. Thank you to Ivan and the rest of the pack!
Waiting Room
I’m 14 years old, and the walls of this waiting
room are so ugly, I can smell them. My cousin Carla and I are eating mojos and
throwing the wrappers at my other cousin, Brenda – 10 points for cleavage. Jerry
and Brian are having wheelchair races down the only hallway
without a nurse’s station.
When Carla and I celebrate a banana mojo bullseye a little
too exuberantly, Brenda stomps off in a huff, digging mini paper wads out of
her cleavage and muttering about disrespect.
Carla climbs onto a chair to turn the TV to the other
channel. She plops back down, looks at me and sees that I’ve left again – my
mind drifting down the hallway to Dad’s room, where Mom sits beside him on
a hard plastic chair. She won’t be talking to Auntie Elsie or Uncle Bill. I
know she’s just sitting there, hollow. Waiting.
Every room in a hospital is a waiting room.
Carla smacks my corduroyed thigh with the back of her hand.
“Hey.”
“What?” I ask, coming back, seeing a table of magazines
materialize in front of me; a TV; a cousin.
She frowns at me – we have the same frown but different
smiles. “He’s gonna be okay, you know.”
Everything in me shifts infinitesimally backward, as though
her words have reached out and shoved me, and for the first time, I see clearly
that he will not be okay.
Carla is from the heathen branch of the family. She doesn’t
speak Christian. She doesn’t say, “God will heal him,” or “You just have to
have faith.”
Her words are not stirred up by murky images of God. The mud
settles to the bottom and I see clearly that he will not be okay. He will die.
My heart sinks into the mud along with my feet but there is
some relief in knowing that I can finally stop swimming.
I’m 29 years old and we’re lined up along the hallway
outside of ICU – a makeshift waiting room - a gaggle of dykes lining the wall
like geese on a log. We lean against the wall and each other, taking turns on a
bench the colour of caramel pudding forgotten in the back of the fridge.
The group has been here for 12 hours - the culmination of
many days of coming in shifts, one or two at a time. Wiping Janet’s face and
wetting her mouth, keeping vigil as she made her peace somewhere deep in the
coma. She should have been gone by now, according to the “experts”, but they
don’t know Janet. Remember that double overtime ball-hockey game? When it was
over, every one of us collapsed where we were, gasping for air, and Janet . . .
Janet, did a victory lap. Always the smallest, but the strongest. In every way.
But Lymphoma was too much for our sinewy friend. She faced
it head on, chose the risky bone marrow transplant to “try and get her life
back.” That’s how she put it in the letter she wrote to us all -- just in case.
Her partner Beth delivered it to our house one day a month or so after the
funeral.
I shift from one sitting bone to the other and glance across
the hall at Janet’s parents on the other bench; they look black and white in
the dim light of this narrow enclosure with no windows, no air, no hope.
They
are still as winter birds, these Mennonite parents who keep losing their girl –
first to agnosticism, then to “the gays”, and now to cancer. I can’t look at Janet’s
mom – the pain in her face makes my chest ache. She is thin, like Janet, and
she clutches her husband’s hand like it’s the tiller of a boat headed for the
falls. His plaid shirt is a tartan of despair. Grey on darker grey.
We should be comforting them, but they don’t want us.
They tolerate our presence because they understand that we
are Janet’s family, too, this group of women; a hockey team, a touch football
team, a spongee team, and once a year for the gay bar’s tournament, a softball
team. But always a family.
Two families here in this hall, and every heart breaking.
I straighten my shoulders and look at Janet’s mom. Her eyes
stop flitting back and forth between the air vent and the emergency light and
fall to mine. How can I tell her how sorry I am when she doesn’t want to talk
to me?
I picture Janet in my mind, her smile like sunlight sparks
on a lake and I feel my love for her – let it shine through my eyes. Then, I
multiply it by a mother’s million and for a fraction of a second I feel what I
see in her mom’s eyes and it is almost unbearable. Simultaneously, we each
surrender a tear. She nods at me. I nod back.
We will go our separate ways.
I’m 45 years old and I’ve been in this waiting room since
7:30 a.m. It’s 3:00 p.m. now and all I have to report is that the number of
bicycles in the brick courtyard below the hallway windows has dropped from 48
to 41. I’m expecting a Tour de France outa here around 3:30 or 4:00 at the
shift change . . . but I’ll still be here.
The health-conscious sector of the St. Paul’s Hospital staff
will get on those bikes and whip past their colleagues who are lighting up –
and there are plenty of those – I’ve
seen the smoking courtyard, too – it’s
on the far end of my pacing route. They’ll get on those bikes and zoom
frantically away from this place where time drags, crawls on its knees, stops,
and does u-turns.
And I’ll still be here.
Waiting for my partner, who, in 25 years together has almost
never made me wait; is always ready first, sitting in the car when I get there,
early riser, early to the airport, zip, zip, zip.
But she’s sure taking our time now.
And when I’m done with this waiting room, there’ll be others.
Maybe another surgery, or more chemo, MRI’s, CT scans, the offices of every
ologist you ever heard of including an oncology dentist. Who knew?
And eventually, inevitably, the transplant.
I’ll wait, and I’ll find things to count, and I’ll talk to the
god I decided many years ago did not exist. I’ll propose deals and negotiate in
business-like terms that bear no resemblance to the lyrical pleas of my youth.
I’ll pace. I’ll worry.
I’ll sit. I’ll doubt. I’ll rail.
I’ll wait.
