I brought reading material with me to the ER. All my life I’ve habitually brought reading material—usually an excess of reading material—no matter where I’m going. I can’t even run a simple errand without having at least one book and two or maybe three magazines on me. It’s something I learned to do as a child, back when we lived in a small house in the woods in Upstate New York. Living in “The Woods” meant that I spent a significant portion of my childhood—maybe 20 or 30 percent of it—in the boring backseats of cars as my parents drove us to nearby cities—either Rome (20 minutes), Utica (45 minutes) or…
Going back to St. Paul’s Hospital now is sort of like going to a college for an alumni weekend. As soon as I walk in the door, people start saying hello to me. I see a lot of faces that look familiar but that I don’t recognize. I nod at those faces. Those faces nod back. I engage in perfunctory catch-ups with the faces that I do actually recognize. Hey, how have you been? What’s new? You don’t say! We display a shared admiration and awe for the facility that we are standing in. Oh sure, this is an old hospital, but it’s still…
