Visiting

I was in the hospital for five weeks when I was ten. My left leg was being lengthened millimeter by monotonous millimeter. There, I met an Amish boy who had been injured in a farm accident. I don’t remember much about him, exactly, but my parents befriended his, and in the following year, we visited their homestead, ate jarred meat, and, when dusk fell, watched their many children put on a play from behind a sheet, illuminated shadows made from an oil lamp. I gave one of the youngest girls my favorite doll because the only dolls they had with were hand-sewn, awkward creatures more monster than toy.

I don’t remember what happened to the boy, if he recovered, or even if I spoke to him during our visit to their farm. My mother soon died and there ended our family’s relationship with anyone who required some effort to visit. But I wonder now if the boy struggled to reconcile his startling introduction to modern pleasures amid the unpleasurable at the hospital, if he ever, while back on his farm, wished he could return to those white rooms, to the dings of the nurses’ call button and the rattle of the IV poles and gurney wheels, just to taste some jello and watch TV again.

More often during my hospital stay, I visited a little boy who had been badly burned. His toddler body was covered in white bandages until they were removed, revealing his brick red skin, shiny as a newly polished floor. He had curly strawberry-blond hair, so sometimes he looked to me like he was still on fire. I was drawn to him, maybe to my own feelings of nobility when I persisted in staying in his room while he cried, which was most of the time. Or maybe I just stayed to witness a pain greater than my own.