Really not the Lady With the Lamp...

The Flinty Bitch

In the second grade, when the subpar Bluebird Reading Group, the hamster sickening in it's pinched lousy cage, our wilting bean plants jammed into dented Dixie cups, or the paste eaters in the corner all conspired to send me into a depressive tailspin, I coped by conjuring up some lie potent enough to get me outa there and to the library.

It was a pisspoor library even as kiddy libraries go, but it had a shelf of bright Orange Books that became my earliest addiction. For whatever bad reasons, they had no pictures, these books, only prissy silhouettes, but I could overlook that for the tender meat within. These were all highly digestible bio's of Famous People's childhoods and not entrancing People at that. Besides the obvious nominees like George Washington et. al. there were lots of the uncharismatic like Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison, who were geeky way before geeky got hot. But despite their awful syntax and suspect scholarship, I fell in love with the Orange Books because of two of them were about Clara Barton and Amelia Earhart, actual girl heroes! a grouping that was thin on the ground during the dark atomic '50's.

My two Orange Books awakened some flickers of what I later identified as ambition, but at the time only felt like a novel disquiet. I loved Amelia Earhart but I absolutely didn't want to do Amelia Earhart-type things like sail into cloud banks (Jesus, no!), never to be seen again. So, that left Clara Barton, The Lady With the Lamp who, despite her sweet sobriquet, was clearly such a flinty bitch that even the Orange Book's weasely prose couldn't disguise her. Well, she'd have to be, what with disinfecting the entire Crimean War and inventing modern nursing. And, in fact, I would later learn that St. Theresa, George Sand, and Marie Curie all had something of the flinty bitch in them, a quality I've deeply envied in others. A bitch I may be, but I'm the chaotic distracted kind, a bitch who flips someone off in traffic about 20 seconds too late.

I find that in my slog through this Valley of Despond, I've garnered a bit of entirely undeserved admiration because of my boy's travails. This makes me jumpy, since I know I'm the proud owner of a really bad attitude about nearly everything, especially those things involving official forms, adult diapers, and wan expectations, all of which I have in spades. Right now, in fact. But a certain amount of stress is beginning to tell. I know all the signs, and one is my quickening desire to get a tattoo.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday carefully examining flash, trying to choose one, so I could head over to Suffer City that same night and get it hammered into my bicep. Something, probably the thought of pain I'd actually have to pay for, plus a few bleached grains of sanity kept me from it. But I 'fessed up to my boy. He's been readmitted to Baylor after a really fearful asthma attack, and I walked in just as the doctor was telling him he also had a MRSA staph infection, a particularly resistant kind.

"Well, they'll take care of it, right?" he asked once the doctor left. I stared at the floor trying to think. My medical knowledge tends to conclude somewhere around the early '70's, and what I knew of staph was that it was a real mofo. In fact, I didn't know how I could be in his room without being scrubbed and gowned. An airy glob of handcleaner didn't seem to cut it. "So whatchoo been up to?" he asked.

"I nearly got a tattoo," I said dully. "And I watched a Charles Manson documentary around 1 AM."

"You have absolutely no bottom," he told me. "Jeez. What is it with you and Charles Manson? Plus, the only tattoo you're allowed to have is a panda bear on your ankle."

"Really?" I asked. "That is such shit. I hate pandas. You're just saying that because you know I hate pandas. Their babies are the size of baked potatoes and pandas never know what to do with them. They just sit and stare until some zookeeper goes, Alright already and takes the kid off to their two room apartment."

"They don't know how to fuck either," my husband pointed out. "Most animals seem to know how, but pandas just get confused."

"Well, it's hard to tell a boy panda from a girl panda," I said reasonably. "I mean how do they know what they're getting? I can see their side on that one."

"You're not sleeping," my boy said, suddenly alert as a whippet. "You always want a tattoo when you have insomnia."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Plus I'm sleepwalking. I haven't done that since I was little. What I'm doing now is leaping up, grabbing the wheelchair and banging from room to room looking for you." (Then I'll suddenly come to, in the dining room holding the handles in a death grip, or I find the chair hulking in the hall like an Alfred Hitchcock title graphic.) "Anyway I'm going to the doctor tomorrow," I said, "We'll see what he thinks." (I didn't tell my boy that I hide the car keys every night. Whipping around with a wheelchair is benign enough, but I really don't want to wake up in my ancient Benz, rattling off to Galveston, zooming towards the shrimp boats and other mischief.)

So I spent the day watching snatches of football, massaging his feet and hands. "I just hate that you're going through this," I said, getting weepy, feeling angry too. "You're suffering so much and I'm so sorry."

"I was an athlete," he told me, eyes still fixed on the Tampa game. "I learned when it's something you really hate, you just go moment to moment."

"Yeah," I said absently. Now I was thinking of my undeserved back pats. What was I supposed to do after his stroke? Leave? Ride the Dog to Albequerque and start anew? Go to Home Depo where guys huddle up, hoping for a day's construction gig, and pay the first joker to say he'll change a catheter?

Q: So how do you get to be long-time married?

A: You don't leave.

Q: But what do you do when everything turns to shit?

A. You don't leave.

Or something like that.