I'm sitting in the X-Ray Clinic & St. Martin (I don't know who St. Martin is) Center in St. Mike's (oh, I guess that ought to be St. Michael's) Hospital. I have waited so long for this appointment, I barely remember why it was made.
Most of the staff look cranky. Too early in the day (7:30 AM), I suppose. Not enough coffee. I hate coffee, actually. It gives me diarrhea. I'd wonder if this were a Freudian anomaly, except that I have reacted this way since my teens, long before I met the Coffey that I wed. Hey, maybe I'm psychic!
The hallway in the X-Ray Clinic is long, and the floors are shiny. People clatter up and down in various forms of footwear, a heel worn down here and there, the front of the shoe creased according to its wearer. Some people struggle moderately well with leg braces, others walk with canes. I have seen two people in wheelchairs.
The few minutes I have been here I have not spied one pair of high heels, thank God, and I wonder how many of these clinicians have foot trials of their own (...which is why I'm here: a three-year-old foot problem/appointment). Anyway, you know how that goes -- dentists' children: bad teeth (although in this age of vastly improved dental care, this is probably no more than an outmoded cliché).
Nothing like post-dawn digression, yes?
It occurs to me now as I wait for the foot specialist that a) I am lucky, especially next to the feet I am looking at here, and b) I write everywhere: in bedrooms, libraries, restaurants, doctors' offices, bus shelters, trains, streetcars, subways, sitting on the toilet -- even here, on this gurney. It's not as if I have a choice, either. The whole thing happens automatically. Kind of like Kathryn Kuhlman. Do you remember her? She was a particularly scaaaaaary woman, channelling through her hands to her pen and paper, from the dead, she claimed, her pinny eyes fluttering like a summer moth.
This all reminds me of when I first knew Don and he said to me (in my ripe twenties), "Little lamb of God, you have more miles on your tongue than most people in their eighties," and then he laughed. And now I wonder: if I had to compare tongue, fingers, and feet, which would win? Which would I want to win?
Anyway, it's now 8:15, and I have been interrupted by x-rays, a second waiting room, a consulting room, a lovely intern, and an orthopaedic surgeon who seems to have about as much compassion for the foot owner as I have for, say, drywall. In fact, he is just about to draw on the bottoms of my feet -- it's some kind of nerve test -- which might save him a whole lot of time having to explain anything to me.
Until tomorrow, then -- here's to all the lost and lonely soles.
And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen?
