All this heavy life stuff is happening and I want to write about it, but it just doesn’t feel right. You want to write things down so you remember how you feel and how things are, but it feels like voyeurism. Like life is too real to turn it into a story.
But, I do want to remember because I forget. What really matters. The truth of things.
Random stuff:
1. I ran into my best friend from 5th grade, Sheldon. He is a technician in the ICU. I hadn’t seen him since 1995. He recognized my brother before he recognized me. Maybe because I had a beard, but maybe because I just don’t look the same. He has an iPhone. He remembered a lot of things I had forgotten, like the time our dachshund, Ginger, bit my brother in the nuts. It’s funny how other people remember things you don’t, even though you were there, too.
2. The surgeon who fixed my dad’s face with titanium bands is a Merryman. She has to be related. I have never run into a Merryman before who was not related. She has the pale, heavy-lidded Merryman eyes.
3. In the hospital lobby, there was an issue of National Geographic from 1970 with Hutterites on the cover. That magazine was 38 years old and it was just sitting there like some joke about waiting rooms. Where did it come from?
4. I found a good restaurant near the hospital, Blanco Cafe. Lupe, the nurse that beeps people in during visiting hours, turned us on to it. I had to revise my tex-mex list to put it in the top 3, just after Mi Tierra. Breakfast all day. Sweet tea. Cheap and awesome. My favorite meal: beef enchiladas with a glass of Red Flash (I prefer Big Red with my tex-mex, but it’ll do in a pinch.) In the last three weeks, I’ve probably eaten there 6-7 times. The tortillas are fresh. You can tell because they are just slightly crisp and papery and you can feel the flour dusted on them. Bakery tortillas are moist from being packed into plastic bags after they come steaming off the griddle. It’s just not the same.