15,891. POST-OPS EIGHT

POST-OPS EIGHT 

It was in the dead of the night, in that hospital room, when my half-consciousness would take over. Trying to sleep in place, sometimes awkwardly, with the adjustable bed squishing me and having somehow gotten out of my control. The overnight nurse, a wonderful young girl, perhaps 22 or 23, named Maria, would make her deep-night rounds, sometimes quietly awakening me, shyly, for taking blood, blood-pressure, or inserting my nightly groin needle injection. Three or four times a night, and also usually awakening me at daybreak for whatever other reason. It was petty endless, and by daybreak each morning, I was usually so scrunched up that she'd have to level the bed and straighten me out for the next day. I can recall the daybreak, and the sounds of the awakening hum of another hospital day. Glancing to that large window, I'd see out at the awakening sky, the new light, and, occasionally, even hear, yet never see, the roar of what I guessed were a few jets in or out of the Scranton Airport  -  which was somewhere out there. It made me feel a little vulnerable; like a sitting duck for an unseen plane to come crashing in. Truthfully, though, that was the only trepidation I had. Maria left at 8am; Rochelle's day-shift began at 7:15 -  the first half-hour was follow-up, overlap, and record-keeping, each day being pretty much the same. Out my window, Scranton arose  -  light in the east, soon spreading. The shapes and shaded forms of the hills stretched out from here gradually changed their tones, shadings, and colorations. Easy to say it was all the same, but it wasn't.

      Another funny thing (about Scranton, the burgh) was how 'politicians' always suckered Scranton. Back in the 1970's, those were the days of Gov. Bill Scranton, and the old-line 'Scranton' family held real power and grip over the politics of the place. Now one would be hard-pressed to locate a 'Scranton' person in Scranton. Times change, and things fade away. Three or four universities in the city make it a goldmine for that sort of thing  -  books, and intellectual pursuits, I'd guess. I'd dare to say that without the colleges and universities within Scranton  -  even Marywood out at the highway  -  Scranton would be, or could be, just another run-down leftover coal town. And there are plenty of them. But the colleges and universities here, in addition to the exactitude and the precision of the downtown area with its still present railroad vintages, along with the historic and present respect for all that old industrial past (ballistics, trains and engines, ammo, guns and missiles). I haven't scoured the 'bookstore' offerings yet, but hope to in due order someday. Problem is, my 'new books a month' limit needs now to be tightly controlled and probably limited to 2 or 3. In Honesdale, I've been thriving on the 1 and 2 dollar books they sell at the library  -  all sorts of topics, and often of interest to me. History, Memoirs, bios, etc. It's a deal and it's a steal. In Scranton now, you still get the scumbag politicians who blow into town, (I'll name two) and make a claim to this rugged, tough and earnest burgh to be their 'hometown'  -  trying to steal some authenticity, Hillary 'Rodham' Clinton used to do it all the time, tracing her 'Rodham' lineage to those tough, early days. Joe Biden is another one, currently, and often enough bumping into town to take claim of that same tough lineage. In both cases, their infant youth days probably consumed 15 minutes of their time as 'Scrantonites' or 'Scrantonians' or whatever they'd purport to call themselves. (By the way, there's nothing to distinguish a Scranton/Pennsylvanian politician from any other politician anywhere else, by it Joe Vas, McMormac, Eric Adams, or Penelope Potsteamer. They all cut from the same vain mold).

      It's a gruff way to lie, but they do it. These are the same sorts of politicians who do things like make that expressway wraparound by which to AVOID Scranton, and who then go about proclaiming the death of downtown and the need for restorative monies and all that  -  as if they'd had nothing to do with the disaster they themselves created. Dispossessed poor, run down housing stock, suburban flight with loss of jobs. They even have the audacity of renaming Washington Street as 'Joe Biden Expressway.' Washington Street was where his baby-hood house was. I tell my friends that if they turn onto Biden Expressway, don't buy gas there. It instantly rises in price from $4.80 a gallon to $7.35!!

         In those long deads of nights, trying to gain the effort of sleep, I would stare out the window off to my side. Sometimes at first still half in and half out of full and ready consciousness, my mind would need a minute to register where it was, or where it had last been. One foot in each of two consciousness levels got to be strange but normal, and I think the compensatory effort of my own spirit and body kept me from dwelling on all I'd just been through. Pain was pain, yes, and all those monitors and things sticking out of my body, managed to be overlooked  -  in the way that you don't dwell nor are aware of your own blinking or breathing. I had some small transformer unit attached to my chest, and that was the most annoying. The backless hospital gown I had on had one front pocket, and they had managed to put that small unit somehow in there, but with all the wires intact it was still pesky. There was another large insert into my neck beneath my right ear, and between the weight of it itself, and the fact that they'd not shaved my neck area beard there, it kept flopping down  -  which became annoying for me and eventually for them too. They finally sent some nurse-guy in who re-did the entire set-up, but still without shaving my neck. Then, the next day a man came in, a workman, with a long grabber-type pole. He said hi and all that, and said he had to test all sensors, alarms, lights, and batteries  -  which he went ahead to do. He had NO trouble with anything, except the fixture DIRECTLY above my head and bed. He slid my bed aside for access, and replaced something, and put everything back. I said thanks, and then asked if he had to do the entire place? He said, "Yes, the whole floor." I didn't  tell him, but my 'paranoid Gary' alarms were way high. 'Right above my head! Right above my bed?' What was that all about? He came and went, and I just forgot about it all.

        I'm not going to belabor this next point, but it's conjecture and I am going to run with it, at the expense of those of you who may not travel this path with me. In the deep, dark of a night, trailing through the Scranton skies, I got to thinking, or these 'thoughts' got to running through me. What if all this really was illusion. Is that what solipsism would be? As I looked out this great window, it suddenly hit me that I was NOT so much an inmate looking down, but what if, as a recurring experience, I was the outsider, in my craft, looking out through a great, large window sight-glass, to re-enter the immersive and strange atmosphere of this stop-action Earthscape of Scranton. All those bowls and valleys and great circles of land holding all those coals and gases and strata and ores - not to forget to mention the most important thing of all (earlier days, another set-up), water, waterpower, connecting rivers, lakes and ponds and the confluences of falls and cliffs and great rocks and boulders. There was, after all, a time when 'water' was all there was.

        I felt, yes, as if I was driving my craft, back again, inward -  towards a time and place I already had been, and knew. Enough said, and I won't step on toes. It was 3:10 am. I thought of Rochelle, and I thought of all that New Age stuff she detested. I though of those who claimed to 'Actualize' their thoughts and events, and tried to think of ALL  I had just been through. I was still picking picking through the smoking boneyard of my own fears and perceptions, and all the imaginings of the horrible things I'd conjured and faced. In this black molasses of doubt, what did I know, really?  All those people who sent me love and prayers, good wishes and best hopes  -  and there had been, literally, multi-hundreds of them, and I saved them all  -  what really were the differences between theirs hopes and prayers, and the other sense of 'actualizing' things through prayer and attitude? Was it now  -  really  -  all the same in the end?

           I looked above my bed. Straight up. Where that guy had been, earlier, installing something in my ceiling unit, there was now, and not there before, a solitary, lone, blue light on a fixture that looked like 'something' though I knew not what. I closed my eyes, and decided to sleep.