BACK to the Main Index
BACK to Miscellaneous Universes
Indian Summer, Revisited
by J.(Channing)Wells
They opened the pavilion deck today at the hospital. Months on months, it's been quite soundly closed, its all-weather "carpeting" covered with a thin, consuming blanket of Iowa snow. The snow is gone now, and the weather is unseasonably warm, at least for March in Iowa. And so, on the presumption that we, the staff members of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, will now feel comfortable relaxing out-of-doors, the management of the Seventh Floor Atrium Dining Room has magnanimously unlocked the rooftop pavilion deck. Inherent in this action is the presumption that none of us would care to be out there during the inclement weathers of the winter months. And for most members of the Allied Health Staff, this would, in all likelihood, be the case.
Not for me.
Give me a key to those doors, baby, and I'd be out there every day. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. The feeling, to me, is like nothing else. Feeling the wind whip across my ungainly hominid form, gazing out at the far-distant horizon and the rolling, forested hills of Parts Northwest, watching the clouds move and shift in patterns incomprehensible to my naked eye. It _hurts_.
I've been higher before, of course. Like any good citizen of the Midwest, I've been to Chicago at least once in my life. I've visited the Sears Tower. I've visited the Sears Tower _at night,_ which was an experience unto itself; watching the humdrum grey world of the endless city fade into sharp, exciting, circuit-board-like contrast at the coming of the dark. But that was a very _human_ experience, with walls of three-inch Plexiglas isolating me from the divine winds. The Seventh Floor Pavilion has nothing on the Sears Tower for raw height, but when it comes to communing with the animals within, it is here that I am at home.
It _hurts_. From here, I can very nearly be free. Only a few slim pipes of metal and a few feet of buffer space insulate me from the place where the roof ends and the sky begins. If I stand upon the lowest of the pipes...
...like so...
...and throw my head and arms back...
I can almost imagine that...
If I were to fall forward now...
And have _faith_...
I would not fall...
But, instead, rise into the soaring Spring skies like any other of the wild birds that sing to my spirit...
It does hurt, sometimes. Because I do not have that faith. Instead, I have faith in the force of Gravity and the principle of Falling Masses. I have faith in terminal velocity and massive internal bleeding. The wry cynic in me comments that, well, if you _Were_ going to go throwing yourself off of buildings, this would be the place to do it. They wouldn't even need an ambulance. Leap gracelessly from the Seventh Floor, plummet to the unyielding concrete below, right to the front doors of the ER. Not that it makes me any more willing to try it.
Feech says that we choose our pains before we are born. That all this is is a constant learning-game for our souls, and our divine spirits have this semi-cosmic agenda that they haven't seen fit to inform us, their mortal selves, about. Sometimes, I have to laugh, because I can just imagine my immortal soul bantering _this_ one about...
"Well." Says my immortal soul. "I think I'm pretty cool with this. I've got a loving family lined up for me, and I'm on the docket for one of the most wonderful soulmates in the known world. I've got relative financial security, the opportunity for a lovely college education, and, God willing, a halfways decent job..."
It is then that my immortal soul is interrupted by his better conscience, which dutifully informs him that he doesn't have _quite enough_ trials lined up for the upcoming life ahead of him. AND THE MOMENT OF CONCEPTION NEARS! Mom and Dad are gonna be making out! (Editor's Note: *shudder*) Better pick out a Hidden Pain, damn chop-chop, or this whole thing is gonna turn out a wash!
And so, with a remarkable lack of foresight, my immortal soul pulls something out of his ethereal ass and comes up with this stupid longing to _be_ something that I quite patently and obviously am not... one of those lovely problems, of course, that _has_ no good solution outside of the cheap Science Fiction novels.
Wa-hoo. Nice going, there, immortal soul.
And so, here I stand, arms outstretched, the warm Indian Summer-like winds whipping through my hair and beneath my eternally-hypothetical wings, and I once again entertain the thought of casting myself forward...
If ye doth have faith of the magnitude of a single grain of mustard seed, whatever ye ask shall be thine...
Faith enough to put my faith and my form into the hands of the Almighty...
As always, my world poises on an unstable brink, and, every time, I know which side I will come back down upon. This side. The safe side. The side of solid ground. The side that somewhat simperingly resolves not to, on the basis of some silly and only vaguely-tenuous spiritual argument such as not suffering to put my God to the test.
The boring side.
The Spring raises strange humours in me, though. Odd, sticky, sparkling hormone clouds that warm my limbs like sap must ancient oaks. I am conscious that it is migratory season. The restless, pilgrim-like spirit in me is stirred and shaken, and I have the desire to travel, to see new places, far-off wilds to the ever-increasing North. And here I sit, tied to a collegiate term and a teaching assistantship and a lease that does not expire until mid-July. And so, in a few minutes, I will satiate and sink my desires into exploring one of the nooks and / or crannies of the labyrinthine Hospital that I have never before seen. And then, I will endeavor to stretch my mind _farther_, and see worlds, and people in these worlds, people and places that I have never before seen and never in quite this way. I _need_ it. To do otherwise...
To do otherwise, in this season of change, means nothing less than stagnation and death.
It is dangerous here on the Seventh Floor. My mind bends and twists and writhes, exhausted from the onrushing spring and the lack of sleep and the omnipresent Clinicum that comes part and parcel with my graduate education. And I almost feel that if I were given just the faintest of shoves...
For instance, if a graceful wedge of my spirit-kin were to make its way across the sky above me, when I am here, like this, in this unbalanced psychological state that I find myself in... If I were to hear them, honking exultantly to one another in crisp, regimented joy as they glide effortlessly through this pseudo-Indian-Summer sky...
And if I were to note to myself that, oh, perhaps, the addition of just _one_ more bird to their magnificent flock couldn't possibly be of any harm...
I very well might lean just one or two inches too far over this impossibly narrow edge.
And then...
God. Who knows. Idly, I chew on the hot millet-roll that I've recently purchased from the Dining Room on the grounds that it was the only thing that the Goose felt like eating at the time.
You know, I _have_ been practicing. The honking. It's not perfect, of course. There's something subtly "off" about my mean rendition of the throaty-bark-rising-to-nasal-ring that serves as a distinct audial marker for the presence of my true spirit animals... but still, it feels good to do it, sometimes...
To sound one's barbaric "Yawp!" over the rooftops of the world... or something like that.
Jesus Christ. What the hell am I saying? Damn lucky that when you write this that you'll be posting it to a group full of sympathetic ears, else you'd be laughed clean off your block. Going around making birdcalls at the top of your lungs for the entire Health Sciences Campus to hear. Feh. Ludicrous. Ludicrous, ludicrous, ludicrous.
Shaking my head to myself, I wander back inside, back to the solid ground of the indoors, well-sheltered from the winds without.
And I am only the faintest bit conscious of something that has, irrevocably, been lost.
* * *
Two days later, I return to the Seventh Floor, intent on completing what was never complete. But the weather has taken a turn for the nasty again, as March in the Midwest will tend to do, and for my own safety and comfort, the doors to the Outer Pavilion are firmly, quietly, locked. For as long as the cold continues.
Indian Summer, come and gone. Except that Indian Summer happens in the Autumn, by definition. I'm not really quite sure _what_ to call it when the warmth of the Spring comes and goes in mid-March, a passing island of hope in the midst of the eternal Winter that is Iowa.
I'm not quite sure what to call it.
It's just one of those things that doesn't really have a name.