run on sentences

Note : I wrote this a few years ago but it never made it to my blog. It's a long time (12 years) since I worked in the ER but some patients have stayed with me. Maybe all of the sad things are melded into this one memory, this one little boy. This child didn't get a chance to make his mark in the world. This child, and many others who suffer by those who should protect them. Unfortunately child abuse is still all too common. I looked up from my stationary bike at the gym and noticed a woman in a squatting position, her back leaning against the wall - an exercise meant to strengthen one’s core, hamstrings and quads.  I remember hating this exercise in gym class in high school.   Watching her, I had a flashback to an incident that happened somewhere in the early 80’s during a shift I was working as a pediatric ER nurse.   This memory came to me so clearly that I almost felt panicky as I began to pedal faster on the bike.  I felt cold and hot and like I cou...

The old house where I grew up is abandoned now, weathered, and leaning to one side.  It seems to be held in place by a cable connecting it to the power line on the corner.  For some reason, I think of the 1000 piece puzzle,  hanging in a frame  at the top of the stairs outside the bedrooms.   One piece is missing. It had always been missing, this bright blue odd shaped piece that would fit right in the middle of Lake of the C louds, a lake in  northern Michigan nestled between the Porcupine mountains,  near where I grew up.   Ernie, a man who had lived with my family, had finished that puzzle  a few years before he died. “Did you ever sleep with Ernie?” I asked my mom once when she was in her late 70’s and was willing to talk about anything. “No,”   she answered.  “I married your father for better or for worse”.   There probably was a a fair amount of “worse”.  My dad had had an affair with one of her  friends...

The big shiny black/brown cockroach was in the same place as it was the day before in Olive's basement. I wasn't sure if it was dead, alive, or plastic. I was in her basement in the house where she had lived for almost 60 years with her husband Les. I had been down there many times over the years and never saw cockroaches. I am not a fan of them but I was hoping it was alive. I wanted something to be alive in Olive's soon to be empty house. The auction company was coming soon to get rid of all of house's contents, once Olive and Les' treasured, collected over their 70+ years of marriage. "It’s dead", I thought.    I waited for it to move but it didn’t, not even when I turned the light on.  Wasn’t it supposed to scurry off when a light was turned on?  I couldn’t bring myself to poke it or squish it.  So I let it be.  It wasn’t going to bother anyone.  The house would soon be empty and it would find a new home. If my friend Olive wasn’t already ...

  I could  be angry at my brother  for stuffing his life into tallboy cans of beer and drinking them down, one year after another.   In the year since he died, I  have tried to write about my brother Ray without making him sound like a Saint or like the stereotypical alcoholic.  I wrote his obituary and highlighted all of the best parts of him like one always does in an obituary.    I cannot deny the pain he caused his friends and family because he loved beer more than anything else.  But it would serve no purpose for me to write about that.  My brother above everything else, was a good person. Ray and I  went to church when I visited my little hometown, once or twice a year.  It was the only time he went to church and I always looked forward to that time with him.   During my last visit before he died,  he didn’t  meet me at the usual time.   He wasn’t always reliable but this was the first time he did...

My "friend" Jennifer has been around since I was a young girl.  She was everything that I wasn't.  Her hair was curly, sometimes long and sometimes short and wavy.  She was tall and slender and had matching sweater sets and cool shoes.   Her bedroom was pink and she had a bed with a canopy over it and a pink princess phone.   In high school she was a cheerleader and the prom queen.  She could do the splits and oddly I envied that most since it was the one thing that kept me from being a cheerleader  Jennifer took advantage of my lack of confidence especially with "the popular girls".  She made me feel that I was not good enough.  I didn't measure up to their standards.  Or hers. Jennifer was my imaginary friend and biggest critic.  Sometimes I let her into my head too much and she would try to run my life. Jennifer is the woman that we all  try to be or at least that society tells us we should be.  She is the you...

  It seemed ironic that the Christmas before, I bought him a cookbook titled “How not to die”.  I thought about this as we drove to Ogden after my daughter had just called us and said simply “He’s dead”.  Buying gifts for E was not easy.  My daughter’s boyfriend of several years loved to cook and to read.  He loved dogs and had two of them that he pampered.  He related better to dogs than people but then dogs don’t judge or make demands.   He was a guy of plaid shirts with understated colors and jeans which endeared him to me as that is how my people in northern Michigan dressed.  He was originally from Wisconsin but he didn’t like cheese except when it was on pizza,  which I could never understand. He always wore comfortable but expensive looking shoes.   He was picky about all of his clothes and I knew it was a mistake when I knitted him a pair of socks for one birthday in a muted color that I thought would be acceptable. I ...

I love telling my grandsons about the snow in my hometown when I was growing up.  Looking back it seems magical.  The snow, and the room by the stove. The snow was deeper than anywhere I have ever been since or at least that is how I remember it.  My memories are probably better than reality and no doubt exaggerated     I have romanticized winters in my hometown - winters that currently do not exist for me here in Utah or even back in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I grew up.   Those winters were long and cold, but always cozy because I was safe in that old house, in the room by the stove.   Safe with my parents, my older sister and younger brother and sometimes baby chickens and a dog and a cat.  Sometimes several cats.  "I walked to school in the snow, sometimes it was 40 below zero and my nose and mouth had to be covered", I tell my grandkids.  "When I breathed in the cold air, my nostrils stuck together.  T...