A Hospital Visit

Down the hall of the hospital, my mother dragged me, past open doors to rooms where coughing reigned.

“Just sick people,” she said. “They’ll soon be well.” The place stank like all those medicines I despised.

A woman pushing herself forward on some steel contraption said, “What a sweet little boy.” An old man, bent like a Uri Geller spoon,

said much the same, except his red eyes were at my level. We were there to see my grandmother. Instead of flowers she already

had enough of and the sweets she couldn’t eat, my mother brought me along, her last born,

not so much as a gift but a reminder that there were those in the world who’d been waylaid in their lives so far

by nothing more than the mumps and the common cold. She patted my head with a hand that took an age to get there,