Monday, April 30

A Day Trip

My oldest relative, my great aunt, is in the hospital with an as yet unknown ailment. I went to visit her today and was happy to see that she basically looked okay and was completely lucid. She had a lot of visitors at one point and everyone was engaging her in conversation even though she was not supposed to talk. They kept telling her not to answer the phone when it rang, but they kept asking her questions. This made me irritated. The hospital was on Staten Island and I had almost forgotten the speech pattern of the natives which seems to be louder, more exaggerated and with the accent that makes every word ending in "er" sound like it ends in "ah".

The people visiting the woman in the bed next to my aunt had it cranked up to full volume. Even though the curtain was drawn between the two beds, I knew one of them was reading an entertainment magazine as she loudly proclaimed, "why she gotta name her daughtah Bluebell?"

"It's because the celebrities got low self-esteem, they got all that money, but they gotta do stuff to stick out," another analyzed.

I decided it was time to visit the cafeteria. My mother joined me after lunch and had a tiff with a hospital guard after he told her she couldn't smoke directly outside the rotating doors. "That's not fair!" my mother said as the guard pointed us to an alley about half a block away. "I have to walk all the way down there?" she whined.

I returned home exhausted.

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