The Curve

It's a white balloon that floats from place to place through time and space.  The string remains firmly tied to my corporeal self, but my memory goes where it will, buoyed by the lightness of immaterial thoughts.  At present there is a name scrawled in blue marker on the balloon, "Angela."  She is my older sister by two years, two years that might as well have been twenty years in terms of maturity when we were growing up.  The balloon with her name on it descends on a hospital in Southern Indiana and winds its way through well lit corridors to find a particular exam room.  A doctor is entering that room and the balloon bobs down under the door frame brushing his crew cut as he shuts the door behind him.

She is twelve, maybe thirteen, wearing pants and a hospital gown partially open in the back.  I am ten, maybe eleven, and I am there with her and my mother listening to the doctor explain what concerns him.  He has my sister bend over while standing so that her arms dangle below her.  The gown is tied at the bottom and her bare back rounds up out of it like a smooth-shelled sea turtle.  It makes me a little uncomfortable, but things like this are possible in a doctor's office where body parts take on a peculiar significance.

He uncaps a blue ink pen and does something remarkable. Starting at her neck he draws a line on her skin straight down her spine, only it doesn't quite work out that way.  Somewhere around the top of her shoulder blades the pen travels out and away from the center a good little ways before eventually making its way back to center, crossing the line again slightly, and then back to the middle.  It is a visible gesture so that even I understand that something is not as it should be.  As it soaks in, the friction that exists between the siblings doesn't seem quite so tangible as it did just a moment ago.  The balloon floats out through an open window and heads South, forward into the future a bit, drawn on by a stream of thoughts and emotions.  

She has moved on to Louisville, an hour or two from home, to stay at Kosair Children's hospital, by herself, off and on for weeks at a time, for an entire year.  It is an old and sprawling building, built at a time when some thought was given to aesthetics and not just pure practicality.  From a ten year old's perspective it appears to be a giant castle with wide verandas,  stonework, wooden beams, and sharply angled eaves.  As an adult I would recognize it as resembling a very large Swiss chalet.  The front grounds are expanses of grass dotted with towering trees.  I flew a kite on those lawns, played tag, and even set off fireworks with a cousin who came along with us on the Fourth of July that year.  I see myself crawl under a pine tree and hide on a soft bed of needles.

The balloon floats through the front doors and bounces along the high ceilings.  Below are children wearing contraptions on their arms, legs, or torsos, some shuffling along with the help of crutches and others in wheelchairs.  It is a place unto itself, where things have gone terribly wrong and need to be made right. The balloon finds my sister lying in a hospital bed rigged up to what appears to be some kind of medieval torture device. Surrounding her ankles are leather straps connected to a pulley at the foot of the bed off of which hang weights dangling in space.  Around her head and under her chin are more leather straps connected to more weights hanging off the back of the bed.  She is being stretched, a week at a time, and body-casted intermittently throughout the course of a year.

When she is able to be free of these constraints she joins us on a second story veranda where I see myself running with a large soap-saturated ring making elongated bubbles.  The balloon enters the ring and makes its way down the bubble's interior.  Floating down this thin walled tube it passes my father, my mother, my four year old sister, and Angela, all comically distorted through the warped surface.  I feel it pop and watch tiny droplets spatter over my freckled face.

She has a roommate named Wendy, like in Peter Pan.  They pass the time sharing stories while staring at the ceiling, strapped as they are, only able to see the other through the corner of the eye.  Their chins are always chafed and red from the pressure of the straps.  These markings leave my young self with a sense of disquiet tinged with awe.  It is a concrete sign of what my immature brain cannot really even imagine and makes me shudder even now thinking about it.  The balloon hovers over Wendy's bed as she is telling a story, a story of when Baryshnikov was in Louisville for a performance and she acquired a beer bottle that he'd drunk from, fished from a trashcan if I remember correctly.  She treasured it as a sacred souvenir, having touched the lips of one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time.  She herself went on to become one of the greats in dance, this preadolescent girl who is better known today as the recently retired Wendy Whelan.

The balloon floats forward in time to a scene in my early married years as a Medical Student before kids have come into the picture.  My young wife and I are watching a program on PBS.  I am intrigued because it includes jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis in the process of creating music in collaboration with a choreographer. I am a lover of jazz music; my Father and I both played trumpet.  My wife is intrigued with the dancer because she had danced when she was younger and knew this particular ballerina from the dance magazines she had consumed as a teenager.  The dancer on the TV screen with Wynton Marsalis is Wendy, though I don't make the connection until some time later.

Time flashes forward again and now I see myself as a young psychiatrist at a conference in downtown Louisville.  Nearby is Kosair Children's Hospital and out of curiosity I wander down the street and into the front lobby.  It has long since moved out of its old building on the outskirts of town and instead inhabits this glass and steel structure amongst other glass and steel structures.  Inside there are brightly colored banners and large stuffed animals to make it more child friendly.  The balloon fits right in, but there is not a single blade of grass or even a solitary tree here. Practicality has won out.  This is a place to fix the human machine, a realization that makes me feel blue.

The balloon labeled "Angela" finds its way back to me sitting here at the dining room table typing these words, back curved over the keyboard, touched by what I've seen, finding it hard to believe I was ever the age my son is now or that my sister had to go through such a thing as a young girl.  Life threw her a curve, as it were.  I should call her.