Hospital Chat

Day 76
I spent the day at the hospital with my Dad. We talked about the Debt Crisis, the Nationals' amazing season and the times he made vanilla bean ice cream for 4th of July. 


Sometimes, when I talk to my Dad I think I am the luckiest person in the world. I think to know someone who has lived this long and still yaks lucidly about the world is a gift. I like to listen to him talk, and I think it must be because he seemed so quiet when I was growing up. 

River Girls Soap

Now, when I lie down and try to sleep at night, I think about him telling me he was voted Blue Bird of the class.  It's a story he told my daughter when she was young and came to interview him for a class project. I have heard  it so many times but it is the first one I replay. As a boy, he had a wonderful singing voice and was named class Blue Bird when end of year prizes were awarded. 


I replay the one where his mother gave him a book about the life of Luther Burbank, and it made him love seeds. It led him to grow flowers for her, then leave for college to study botany and horticulture, at least for a while.


And then the one about being a young man working in the Mrs. Smith Pie factory. Yes that one!


The stories I flip through in the dark night have spring colors, hopeful colors 
big fluffy meringue pies 
speckled birds' eggs
and long stem peach roses.


I dream about Dad awash in these colors, 
pushing back the images the doctor shows of 
black corroded cells and carmine blood 
leaking where it has no right to.


Goodnight,
Wanda Eve