Tag Archives: smart friends

The Box That Holds Everything

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Each month I meet, at a rent-controlled apartment complex in Norton, Virginia, friends who are doctors and professors, along with a bunch of our collective students. The professors grill burgers, the medical students do an educational activity–how your lungs work using paper bags and straws, germ glow wash your hands hygiene, teeth brushing 101–and the undergraduate students (mostly pre-med or pre-dental) create a craft that accompanies the activity.

It’s fun. People eat, they talk, they think we’re a church and they laugh when they find out we’re a bunch of academics and doctors. “Really? Not a church. Well, all the same, this is fun.”

We started at a new location in July of this year, which meant we had to build trust all over again. This is a population that doesn’t have a lot of reason to trust people who take a “benevolent interest” in them. Usually that ends up with them getting scammed. So we approached slowly, with school supplies.

In August, we went back to grill burgers, make emotional thermometers, and craft stress balls. The playground and picnic shelter where we going to meet was a mess. We found rubber gloves and big black plastic sacks, and hauled off a broken crib mattress and sheet set left by the trash can. The medical students ran to the grocery store and came back with bleach when they found the single trash can had become infested with undesirables.

None of the kids we played with after, making the stress balls and talking about anger management, said anything about this. None of the students said anything derogatory about the mess. We all had fun.

Next month, when I got there five minutes ahead of my fellow professor, four kids were at the picnic pavilion, lining the picnic tables up at one side. A little boy about the same size as the tree branch he wielded was using it to sweep the concrete pad clean. Two other boys had a small cardboard box they were filling with trash from the playground, dumping it into the single can and racing off to fill it again.

“We wanted it to look nice when you got here, so you’d know we were glad you were here,” said the oldest of the kids, Noah. Noah is transitioning. Two of the professors are also transitioning, and Noah spent a long time talking to them last month.

The picnic tables had been specially lined up, explained Skylar (a year or two younger than Noah, and the girl whose birthday we had celebrated in sudden made-up ways when we found she was alone for the evening, accompanied by two older friends who felt sorry for her because her parents wouldn’t be home that day to give her any party. The med students ran and found a candle for a cupcake and we all sang).

“We know you didn’t need them in a line, but my brother is autistic and he was helping and he needs things to be perfect and straight and all so we did it that way.” Skylar said with pride.

My fellow professors and doctors arrived, taking in the boy still sweeping with the branch, the kids busy picking up the last small bits of debris. Tori, the chemistry professor, smiled and produced a large tub of sidewalk chalk. Five minutes later the medical and pre-med students were studiously admiring artwork from the kids as they turned the basketball court all the colors of the rainbow.

That box, that box is everything. The kids were waiting for us, not passively, but with intent to make us feel welcome. Little kids who think we’re from a church and want to know how lungs work. Little kids who are teaching future doctors that poverty is not sin, nor passivity, nor a reason to dismiss anyone’s contribution to their own well-being.

The world can be beautiful.

Cruising, Seeing the Scenes, and Reading

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It is with some trepidation that I embark on my first long cruise, ever. Jack and I have done overnight from Scotland to Belgium. I sailed once from Ireland to France as a student. But this is our first time on a floating city tour boat.

We wouldn’t normally want to do a cruise, especially as COVID rates are on the rise again, but this is the Alaskan fjords. Of all the things I have wanted to see in the world, only Alaska and Finland’s fjords remain—well that and hiking the W in southern Chile, and my friend Cami and I are doing that for our sixtieth birthdays.

I have sought advice from many friends who have lived in Alaska or gone on a cruise with Royal Caribbean. They have poo-pooed the need for waterproof clothing unless we plan to do serious hiking (we don’t).  They told us to book the Skagway scenic rail adventure (we did). And they said pay extra for a balcony room and don’t buy the internet package.

My friends are very smart people. I plan to spend the seven days of sailing and port-hopping sitting on said balcony, low-alcohol cocktail in one hand, book in the other. I will be writing or reading books all week long on the balcony, happy as a clam, emerging only to visit the heated adults-only pool at the far end of the ship, or hit up those famous buffets I keep hearing about.

Five books are packed in my bag, and one is on my computer: Immune is the story of how our body’s defense systems work, and while it came out at the time of all-COVID all-the-time it’s about viruses and bacteria. I like the way the author writes (having started the book twice and gotten interrupted by life and other circumstances). He was describing sizes of a defense cell and an attacking virus once, and he said, “Picture an average height person staring at a bunny.” That makes it accessible.

I have Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Nope, never read it. (That’s probably grounds to revoke my Appalachian card.) And I have a collection of short stories from a local author under the charming title of The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms. That’s fun because I’ve started mushroom foraging of late, and because my first story for West Virginia Public Radio as an Inside Appalachia reporter is on the recent rise in popularity of mushrooms.

Then I have my friend Janelle Bailey’s debut, An Invitation to Read, in manuscript form on my computer. I’m looking forward to returning the favor she did for me during my NYT Short Story Contest rounds (made it through Round 3!). Janelle did a LOT of reading and content editing on the fly. (The deadlines go down to 24 hours by round 4.)

All in all, between the waves and the words, I am looking forward to forgetting I am on a floating city and cozying up in my fleecy sweatshirt to some non-stop writing and reading time. And of course gawping endlessly at the scenery, weather permitting. Sail by, mad world.