Dear July, twenty four to twenty seven: here and up and down and there

Dear July,

I don't particularly like hospitals. They're tight-packed spaces with low ceilings and beeping machines. They have square yellow lights that squint down from grey tiles; they give you a headache after a while, if you didn’t have one before you arrived. Hospitals are lined with alarming signs. (Germs! Germs! Now go wash your hands!) They have windowless corridors. They smell of things you can’t place. Hospitals are places you don’t know what to say. Do you chat about ordinary things (last night’s dinner, the TV last week)? Or keep conversations limited to clinical matters (symptoms, and fluids, and test results, and bruises)? How can you be sure what you’re saying is helpful? How can you make sure your words aren't lost?

We visited my Grandpa in hospital this weekend and when the hour was up, after we’d said goodbye – squeezing his hand, waving to him through the window as we left the ward – we went down to the café on the ground floor to get a cup of tea before driving home through the rain. Looking round at the other café-goers – all sipping paper cups or sharing crisps and ham sandwiches out of paper triangles – it struck me how we were all there for the same reason. To visit. We were there on a ‘have to be’ rather than ‘want to be’ basis.

‘I mean – you wouldn’t just come in here because the coffee’s good,’ I said to my parents, fiddling with the Twix wrapper on the table. ‘No one really wants to be here. Everyone here’s only in this space because they need to be...’

Somewhere in the midst of the troubled air, though, hospitals hold potential for great kindnesses to happen. They’re where people feel at their worst, and where others have to step up and become the best version of themselves to be a support. Growing up with a mother and sister who are both nurses, there has always been much talk in our house around ideas like ‘caring for the whole person’, around 'being with’, and 'intentional presence’, and good communication skills, and how listening is so much more than just 'hearing'.

I wish I’d seen more of that while we were at the hospital this weekend. What I saw was not unkindness. No one was unkind. It wasn’t quite that. Just – there was a definite absence. Of communication. Of warmth. Opportunities were missed. 

I found myself wanting to say: listen, I know it’s busy and late at night and the guy two beds along just swore at you when all you were trying to do was check his blood pressure. I know you’re completely shattered because this is your fourth nightshift in a row and you didn’t manage to get any sleep before you came to work because the flashing clock by your bed kept reminding you how little time you had left till the alarm went off and the kids were crying and then the neighbour decided it would be a good idea to strim the hedge outside your bedroom window and you couldn’t block it out. I get that. I’m not judging. But it would it be too difficult to say hello to the 'patient' you’ve just come up to with your clipboard? Would it take more than a minute just to tell him your name and what you’re doing before you start poking and prodding and plugging him into that machine on the wall? Could you maybe take two seconds to look him in the eye and actually see him? Because he’s not having a very good day either. He doesn’t want to be here either, lying in the middle of this high-up hospital bed feeling very exposed and frightened, though he might not say that out loud. He likes to joke. But if you looked at him, you’d see it. Could you at least, please, could you at least say your name?

I didn’t say that, obviously. But I came away thinking this: the small things we do are not insignificant. Saying hello. Touching hands. They’re not insignificant. So we mustn’t forget to do them. And this:

Lord God, let me never become so busy or distracted, or so rooted in routine, or harassed, that I forget to acknowledge the ‘personhood’ of another. That I make them feel less than human. Let me always be attentive. Being present is a choice. Help me to choose it. Help me to remember it. And to do no harm when I forget.

‘It is important that awake people be awake,’ writes Stafford in the poem I posted a few weeks ago. ‘The darkness around us is deep.’

♥

Notes: 

Post-script: I hope this doesn’t come across as judgmental. Thank-goodness for hospitals, and thank goodness for the staff that work there, and the people – like my sister and my mum – who intentionally practice good care. I know they’re in the majority. They work hard. And it’s a thankless job at times. I don't know - the staff at other points in the day may have been very attentive. But when you see someone you care about being talked over, and looked past – it can be quite unsettling. (And makes you quite determined to never get sick yourself.) 

(Today’s poem: ‘Little Summer Poem Touching on the Subject of Faith’ by Mary Oliver. Today’s title: from Norman MacCaig’s 'Visiting Hour'. 

Pictures by: the quite lovely Julianna Swaney. You should look her up.)

Dear July, twenty one to three: linking.

Dear July,

I’m trying to finish up a chapter of the novel today. I always feel slightly self-conscious calling it that. ‘The novel’. It feels a bit presumptuous on my part. ‘Whadda you think you’re doing, bozo? You think you can just “write a novel”? Get real. Go do something your own size.’ (Because apparently my inner-critic sounds like Danny DeVito.) But: that is what I’m writing, I guess. A novel. So I should call it what it is.

Anyway – I mention this because today (and yesterday and the day before) I've been focused on writing the chapter. Thus the quietness on here. I don't have a thought-filled letter today. But in the absence of that, I will direct you to three things I’ve been enjoying the past three days:

[One.] The light-filled photographs in the 'My Month of Sundays' project on Netherleigh’s blog: here. Bit of context: two bloggers (with very beautiful Instagram feeds here and here) have started up a hashtag for people to capture and share Sunday moments. I kind of came upon it by accident (as I do most things on the internet...) and the pictures made me quite happy, so I might try and take part in the project, should any of my Sundays in the coming weeks be spent doing things other than typing away at my laptop.

[Two.] This article by Hallie Cantor in the New Yorker: ‘Everything I’m Afraid Might Happen If I Ask New Acquaintances to Get Coffee’. It made me laugh. (The trials of being an over-thinker.)

[Three.] This song by The Oh Hello's, found over the weekend. I’m always looking for new music, so if you have any recommendations, send ‘em my way.

Enjoy.

♥

(Oh, and also two poems from recently: 'Mirrors at 4am' by Charles Simic and Mrs Midas by Carol Ann Duffy.

The pictures: from recently. The view from my train window, a feather on the street, blogging about the sun on the train in the rain.)

Dear July, seventeen to twenty: Budapest heat.

Dear July,

Today, a rather dark rainy heat-up-some-chicken-soup-to-make-yourself-feel-better kind of Monday, I’ve been thinking about Hungary.

The year I turned twelve, my family spent the summer in Budapest. My Dad was working over there for a few months, so we went to be with him. It was hot. The hottest it had been in years, apparently. We watched a lot of BBC World in our little apartment (the only TV channel in English and we grew thirsty for words we recognised) and there were continual cries of ‘Heat wave! Heat wave!’ on the news. On the days we went into the city – our feet clapping in flip flops, collecting dust from the streets – we’d practically sprint from one café to the next, buying bottles of cold water or Lipton’s lemon iced tea to gulp down. We spent all of our days in shorts or swimming costumes, jumping and splashing into the blue pool outside, diving for coins with goggles sucked onto to our faces. We had to sleep with the fan on full and windows cracked open – the sound of crickets and dogs barking and the opera singer next door practicing scales echoing long into the night.

We wiped watermelon juice from our chins, and licked peach juice off our wrists. We ate lemon sorbet ice-cream every other day. We put ketchup on pizza like the locals. We ate the best thing I've ever eaten - a big deep-fried fritter-type thing topped with sour cream and grated cheese called 'Lángos' - and have never found again since. Almost every time we went out for dinner, we’d order 'cucumber salad' as a side: cucumbers soaked in a vinaigrette dressing. One time we ordered ‘Grandma’s special cucumber salad’ because the name made us laugh, but when it arrived, it was just a plate of fat dill pickles (which forevermore made us suspicious of food described as ‘special’). They had bizarre translations for things on the menus. ‘Diced curd with graves’ was one option on the desert menu (literally no idea). ‘Chicken throat shaped pasta’ was another.

We went to the circus while we were there – silver clad trapeze artists, cats jumping from great heights onto red cushions. We visited a park full of old communist statues. We went to Lake Balaton and felt the mud squelching between our toes. We went into supermarkets so big the staff had to roller-skate from one end to the next. We bought vegetables that came straight from the fields, meaning they hadn’t been prettified, meaning the closer you got to the produce stalls, the stronger the smell got, meaning sometimes you’d pick up a nectarine and it would look deliciously juicy face up, but when you turned it over the reverse side would be crawling with flies. 

♥

Living in a country where we were constantly faced with things we didn’t know – food, words, buildings, customs – could have been a small disaster. The three of us – my brother, my sister, me – were still quite young so were prone to whining, as children sometimes are (‘Whatsthat?’ ‘Idontlikeit.’ ‘Idontwantit’ ‘Whatsthat?’). But that summer knocked it out of us, I think. We had so much fun, and my Mum taught us to think of everything as "an experience".

‘We might not like it,’ she said. ‘But it’s all an experience, so we’ll just give it a go.’

‘It’s an experience,’ has now became short-hand for: ‘That was weird, but strangely wonderful’. By the end of the summer, we’d all grown a few inches; our hair had turned a few shades lighter, our skin had turned a few shades darker, and we’d stopped complaining as much. We spent the last few weeks laughing our heads off at things that no one seemed to find as funny as us when we got back home – ‘Well, you just had to be there, I guess.’ – but that was okay. We didn’t mind (#heatstroke).

♥

I came across Anya Silver’s poem 'Doing Laundry in Budapest' today, which set me off on this path of reminiscing. (Forgive me. I hope this post isn't too long or self-indulgently nostalgic to read.) We have no photographs of it – they all got lost – but it’s a summer I remember in warm bursts of colour. Orange and browns and reds.

Silver (the poet I was reading today) writes about pickles, and covering her shoulders to get into churches, and the begging ladies on the street who sold half-dead flowers to passers-by and I recognised the images in her words: I’ve been there, I thought. I’ve seen those things. I’ve eaten those pickles. I bought those flowers. 

♥

(Pictures - letters of the Hungarian alphabet - by: Anna Kövecses. 

Also: this song by reminds me so much of being there - it was 2003, after all. My sister and I listened to Delta Goodrem's album on repeat the first night we were there. We'd somehow managed to convince ourselves that there were terrorists running about outside our hotel so were trying to distract ourselves. Like I said, we were pretty young and had poor geographical knowledge so we had no idea where in the world Hungary actually was. Ha.)

Dear July, fourteen, fifteen & sixteen: entangled with mysteries.

Dear July,

I'll say goodnight to you with a song, a picture, and some words. The song: Promise by Ben Howard. I've been playing it a lot since the Spring, and it still makes me pause. It sounds like a number of things to me: the dipping sun, and the hush of morning before the day's routine has taken over yet. Like the softness and ache and uncertainty that comes with loving people, like the stillness of the mountains, like that space between happiness and wanting to cry, like rain starting to fall. Evan, my good-taste-in-all-things brother, found it first. He told me to listen to it, with my earphones in, first thing before getting out of bed, to wake myself up. I'd recommend you do the same (or just before falling asleep). 

The picture: taken at home last night during the golden hour. I was heading down the stairs when this patch of gold yawned onto the wall. I had to run to get my phone so I could catch a sun portrait. 

The words: a paragraph that struck me from Starbook by Ben Okri. I've only just started it, but so far is quite lyrically lovely. (Bit of context: 'he' is a prince that is running away from overly watchful eyes...)

'If they hadn't worried over him so much, and made him seek escape, what happened would never have happened; and, mysteriously, the world would have been smaller for it. Destiny conceals strange illuminations in the suffering life visits on us. The tale of fate is entangled with mysteries. Dare one say such and such shouldn't have happened? History is replete with monstrosities that shouldn't have happened. But they did. And we are what we are because they did. And history's bizarre seeding has not yet yielded all of its harvest. Who knows what events will mean in the fullness of time?'

♥

Yesterday's poem: Ode to my Socks by Pablo Neruda (probably one of my favourite ones so far). Today passed without a poem... so I'll need to read two tomorrow.