Words (and links)

Sometime Monday evening I was lying on the bed trying very hard not to move a muscle for fear of shocks of pain.

In the process of being brought to the ward, somebody had also brought my alarm clock and Jodi Picoult book*. I remember looking at them thinking, now those are two random things to bring me when I can't do much of anything besides stare at the ceiling and try to ignore the entire lower half of my body. And then the pain wasn't so blinding and the hours got long without windows to indicate if it's high noon... or midnight. So then the book and clock made sense and I was thankful.

But before the drugs started working and things started to make sense again, some friends and nurses helped me as I lay there afraid to move.

At one point, Ali reached over and asked if I wanted her to read to me. As a rule, I don't turn down being read to because it's one of the best things in life. This time, though, I couldn't concentrate long enough to remember where I had left off reading last (I developed a habit a few years back of not marking where I stop reading in a book). Besides, I doubt I would have been able to process what was read to me at that point anyway. But just the thought made me happier, and we started talking about how our parents used to read to us.

Listing some of our favorites, I was able to distract myself for at least a few minutes. When I told Ali of one particular poet my dad would read to us, I was sure she wouldn't have heard of Robert Service. See, Service is like James Whitcomb Riley- his works were popular and in demand "back in the day" but have since been relegated to a poem or two in books of classic poetry. For Riley, those poems are usually Little Orphant Annie and Lockerbie Street. For Robert Service, the poem is most notably The Cremation of Sam McGee**.

Anyway.

I prefaced his name saying he's a poet of the Yukon and felt compelled to admit that arguably his most famous poem is also a bit morbid. Ali turned from the medicine cabinet where she was likely drawing up some blessed morphine and said, "I recited that poem for school!" So there we were at night in the bowels of a hospital ship floating off the coast of West Africa- two nurses from Canada and the States. Reciting and looking up Robert Service poetry. Could life be any more random and beautiful?

Quite possibly the only thing nearly as cool would be Hannah coming in the next morning and quoting Brian Regan with me.

* This is another story for another entry...

** For my part, it's hard to choose a favorite of either poet (if you really want to know some of them, you can ask- I fear it would be too dorky to post them all on here).