laurawhiterivers

I lean against the wall looking down a hallway I have walked at least a thousand times. The walls have changed. They are modern acoustical panels, painted in warm colors with wood grain accents, but the floor is the same cold, white terrazzo tile I remember as a little girl. Today, the hall is full of people, bustling and talking. Patients are wheeled by orderlies. Contractors carry pails and toolbelts. I am unnoticed by doctors discussing procedures and protocol as they rush to the next assignment. Students walk in larger groups. They are all looking down at the cell phones in their hands.

I look down. My memory sees it all perfectly again. This is the exact same floor I walked trying to keep up with my father every day. At 6’7” he towered over everyone in this hallway, and he would naturally clear a path for us as we made our way out to the sunlit parking lot, and eventually the bus stop. My mother worked nights and would bring me to the Respiratory office on the seventh floor. There, she would hand me off to my father who had finished his shift and was going home. I would make a game out of skipping over the joints and cracks in that floor, and I would peer curiously into the space between the elevator car and the floor as we would enter. I always wondered how the elevator worked, and why I could see lights on the wall down the shaft. I imagined gremlins and creatures that lived in the greasy shadows, or Dwarves that pulled a rope over a pully to make the car go up. The stainless-steel dumbwaiters were fascinating, and I wanted so much to open the doors and peer in after the day my father told me I could ride in one someday. My mother would sharply scold me to hurry up because I was always stuck in some thought process that required me to linger and observe the world for just a second longer. She was on the way to work and couldn’t be late. An intercom in the background cuts into the crowd. “Doctor Blair, 9117. Doctor Blair, 9117”. The voice bounces sharply off the mosaic tile walls and silences.

Leaving the hospital with my father was more casual. He was taking the bus, and there was no sense of urgency. After all, there was always another one coming in ten minutes. I would follow him watching my sandals, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, and tripping along. There was a billboard in front of Lombardo’s gas station. It was a bear and moose standing in a rocky Alaskan stream. It was painted, and so much different from every other billboard. I studied the picture every single time we walked by. He didn’t scold me for lingering, he just slowed his pace. When it was time to cross the road, I would reach my little arm all the way up over my head to hold his hand. At the Madison Ave. bus stop across from Ralph’s we would wait.

Today, I wait for my father in that same hallway we walked together decades ago. However, for a few more minutes, I am stuck in the old Hospital. It is 1979 or 1980. Everything in the world is brown and green and orange and smells like cigarettes. I am in the nursing school on Myrtle Avenue sitting on a green vinyl couch and I am watching Wonder Woman on a tiny, grainy, color TV. My pants are corduroy and I watch the toes of my Converse sneakers as I kick my legs and swing my feet. I am so bored. My parents have changed their hours, and I am babysat every day by a rotation of young nursing students. It’s only for about an hour or two until my mother can get me. The nurses go outside to smoke and ask me if I want chocolate from the vending machines. They are like movie stars. They are glamorous, with Farrah Faucett hair, Jordache jeans and stylish clogs on their feet.

I look down at my feet and study my steel-toe work boots against the Terrazo tiles, and for one illogical moment, I wonder if this place remembers me in the same way. Then, I look to the hallway again. He is coming now, smoothly wheeled along in a chair as the discharge orders require.

Before you realize how long it’s been, life just seems to pass us by. We move along, putting distance between ourselves and childhood, only to come full circle as adults and parents. And then it hits you. Suddenly, everything is completely different, and yet, shards of your story remain miraculously, utterly unchanged.

When you glimpse these pieces, you are returned to that moment and time stands still, even as life walks briskly around you, never slowing its pace.