October 22, 2012

Today is the girl who used to be my best friend but left me behind when I was no longer useful’s birthday. (This is a fairly common theme in my life. I love people and then they leave me.)

I would have been melancholy anyway; today it rained, really rained, for the first time this season, and then turned into the gray, misty sort of day that always makes me cry, because the first time I registered a day like this as something beautiful was the day the first boy I ever loved moved away. And now this sort of day is like a knife between my ribs, sweet and painful and still beautiful.

It’s still raining.

October 21, 2012

Like most hospitals, Kaiser Permanente is huge. Like most hospitals, it’s also extremely poorly labled, as such things go, and we were late for my sister’s appointment ten minutes ago. It really shouldn’t be that hard to find Urgent Care, given the nature of the station, but we’ve wandered through three buildings and across the campus twice and so far we haven’t found it.

Fortunately, it’s in the next building we walk into.

Unfortunately, that’s adult Urgent Care, and we need pediatrics.

Pediatrics is back in the building we started in, the one we were told, ‘oh, not here, try building D’ in. The one that’s all the way back across the campus.

The elevators in building C aren’t obvious, or labeled, but my mother can’t use the stairs right now, so we go hunting anyway. She’s freaking out because at this point we’re twenty minutes late and she’s worried we won’t make it.

I’m leaning against a rail, tuning her out because this is Kaiser, they’re always 30 minutes behind, at least, when the doors close an a eerily pleasant, feminine voice says, right in my ear

‘Going up. Second floor.’

I jump about a foot in the air. My sister, whose arm is still stuck in the cast, falls over. My mother whips around, looking for the speaker. It’s the elevator. The elevator talks.

I practically run out when the door opens and the voice speaks again

‘Going down. First floor’. My sister’s right behind me.

So we finally get to pediatrics Urgent Care where, surprise, surprise, they aren’t ready for us yet. So we wait. And wait. And wait. There are no magazines, not even seven year old issues of ‘Yachting World’. Nothing is playing on the television. Nobody else is in the waiting room with us. It’s actually slightly disturbing.

When we’re finally admitted, the nurse looks at my sister’s cast and says

‘I can’t take that off with my scissors. You’re going to have to go somewhere else. I’ll go see if I can find the right brace.’

My sister, in response, despite a severely strained thumb (extreme clarinet accident. It’s the funniest injury any of us have ever received), Hulk Smash!es the thing open with her bare hands.

October 20, 2012

So I walked down the hill today, just at dusk. It’s later than I normally walk, so I’m keeping an eye out on the sun, still not really recognizing just how dark it’s getting, but the lights at the bottom of the neighbor’s driveway are starting to come on so I figure I probably shouldn’t go farther than where the creek splits off.

The neighbors, whose very strange permanent decorating has a Mediteranian/Northern European feel, complete with rose bushes and emaciated resin lions, added a couple of really poorly made scarecrows in honor of the season, tacked to our fence because they’re honestly terrible people. I haven’t really thought much about them, other than they’re really, really tacky and this is really, really not Las Vegas, so I’m not expecting anything when I get close enough to see our driveway even in the gloom.

On a scale of one to Freddy Kreuger, the sudden appearance of goulish red LED lights in the scarecrows’ eyes was about an ‘Evil Dead’ the terrible 80’s movie.