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Michael Estabrook |
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through the McDonald's window McDonald's is a microcosm, I think, as I'm sitting here, with my four sugars in my coffee, watching the attractive employee with the mussed hair smoking a cigarette, pacing outside the window, watching the two construction workers discussing in simple Beckettesque lines the difficult old lady customer impossible to please with either woodworking or painting, watching the family pulling up with the camping trailer, ordering the biggest breakfasts they can get, the father with two identical copies of himself all with crew cuts and turned up noses trailing along behind, watching (still sipping my flat coffee) my reflection in the window, wondering when it was I got to be so old and stupid looking. "Help me nurse" You can't really sleep in the hospital. First of all, the lights are always on. Secondly, it's a very busy place like the New York subway with plenty of interesting activities going on around you all the time: the night shift nurses and physicians' assistants and cleaning crew carrying on about this and that, patients wandering up and down the hallways plopping along in their walkers peering in to check on how you're doing, the friendly nurses who pop in every couple hours to take a tube of blood, your blood pressure and temperature, a guy a couple doors down coughing up one (or perhaps both) of his smoked-out lungs, in his spare time working on the details of his legal case against Philip Morris for making him smoke all those cigarettes all those years, the bastards! And then there's the old guy with the scruffy beard right next door to my room who keeps yelling out, "Help me nurse, nurse help me, help me nurse!" over and over and over again. When I expressed my concern about what this poor soul could possibly be suffering my nurse said, pursing her pale lips mournfully, "He's confused, poor fellow." And all I could think was, I could be him. Guppy Babies My pretty blue-finned guppy had babies - 22 of them if I got the count right. I only have a five-gallon tank so some have to go or I need to get a ten-gallon tank. Chris, my daughter's fiancée, took eight or nine of them. They are doing fine, I think. If they aren't he isn't telling me. And I gave another eight or nine to my son, David. They died right away, in spite of him carrying them carefully, gingerly, motherly, in a little Tupperware bowl on his lap all the way into his apartment in Boston. He was upset. "It's OK," I said to him, "they are very delicate when they are so little and young. Besides, better to die in a Tupperware bowl on the way into Boston on your caring lap than by getting eaten by their |