Leaving Grant

Tomorrow the photos on the bulletin board at Grant Medical Center come down after spending the month of February on display.  During that time I have flip-flopped week by week from Riverside to Grant, Grant to Riverside, and back over the past few months in transition.  April will see the end of that and I’ll be full time at Riverside after a fifteen year run at Grant.

Those photos are a glimpse of my time there.  They are the beauty that I saw in the people and the environs day by day, season by season, year by year.  It’s appropriate that so many of them are funny and quirky alternating with images that are beautiful and melancholy.  They really are a visual summation of my time at a place I’ve looked forward to going to every single day.

Today was special in that four different people from four different parts of the hospital stopped me and specifically mentioned the board and what photo most spoke to them.  They included an ICU nurse, an elderly maintenance man, a Trauma NP, and a clerk all of whom I’ve known for years.  There was a kind of sparkle in their eyes as they described what they saw.

The maintenance man was particularly moving.  We’ve had brief moments of interacting over the years in the hallways and he always radiates kindness.  He stopped me and told me how special those photos were and his favorite was the one with “rain drops on the window”.  He said he wished he could do something like that and I had the “eye of an artist”.

I think it hit me so deeply and unexpectedly because that is exactly what my godson Kevin had said to me years ago before he’d passed.  He was an actual artist and it had shook me up then and even more so now.  This sweet man had seen something of what I’d tried to convey through creative outlets: expressing feelings of beauty, kindness, sadness, and love.

And tomorrow those photos come down and a little more than a month from now I will no longer be going to Grant as my day to day job.  At this very moment it is like nothing is different  or has changed because I am still doing the same things and talking to the same people this week enjoying their company until that day when it is not pictures going away, but me.  

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Shattered Personae

Dreams of the shattered personae

Attracting

Repelling

Melding

Looking for a longed for unity 

Exclusive

Obtrusive

Elusive

The struggle continues in earnest.

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Painting of Idu Ikadabu

 

Idu Ikadabu was one of those people that others would say about him, “Everybody loves that guy!” And it was true.  He was a soccer player from Nigeria attending my college and good friends with a fellow Nigerian soccer player who happened to be my roommate, Jacob Isang.  Both of them were well known personalities at my school in the few years I was there.

Idu was a very tall and imposing figure except he always had a huge smile on his face and a booming voice with a laugh that would energize the room.  In this regard you always knew where he was if he was anywhere in your vicinity.  I can still hear his African accent that carried the brilliance of the sun and echoes of a faraway culture.

While I was away from college serving time as an infantryman in Korea my friend and future godson, Kevin McCarty, had Idu sit for a painting.  Idu was quite enthusiastic about it per Kevin and wore his traditional Nigerian garb.  They were both gifted gabbers and unique human beings.  I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall while this painting was being created!

When I returned to college from my two year stint in the Army I was greeted by Idu’s painting leaning against the wall in Kevin’s studio apartment.  I loved its arms extending into branch-like fingers.  Because of his extremely poor eye sight Kevin was a very slow painter and Idu was not known to be someone who could sit around for very long.  He was too dynamic.

So the painting was unfinished but magnificent nonetheless.  Idu’s imposing figure comes through, though it is a bit weird to see his expression so serious.  Kevin didn’t know what to do with it and considered reclaiming it for another painting, but I talked him into a barter instead.  I had a cheap jangly guitar that Kevin decided he wanted and a swap was proposed.

The painting went with me to Indianapolis for 4 years of medical school and then out to  Washington DC for 4 years of residency.  When we finally moved to an actual house in 2006 Idu went into storage in the attic.  Two more moves later he continued on sealed in a box until today when I finally busted him free and put him in my new larger office at the hospital.

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Candy in the House

There is candy in the house.  I know it is there.  

Sitting in the lower living room staring at the wall.  Thinking melancholy thoughts that need an infusion of sugar to take off the edge, a wedge, the sadness to stall.

Why does she not acknowledge the intensity of my interest?  Does she not sense my deep appreciation of all things her?  I want things as they were or easily attained on Pinterest.

There is candy in the house.  I know it is there.

The cure for despair is chocolate melting on the tongue.  Coffee is good too, but it can sometimes simply energize the negativity.  Stimulant selectivity.  Sing what is sung.

I am a broken man looking for a quick fix, maybe a Blow Pop with thirty licks.  Would that do it?  Screw it!  I need to get up and look for it.  Detective Dicks, at your service.

There is candy in the house.  I know it is there.

Maybe under a chair?  I look through the cabinets but find only fragments.  My nose seeks out a fruity aroma, traveling about like the Roma.  Hard candies turn out to be magnets.

It is such a strange and superficial addiction.  Most things worth eating are found in the kitchen, but I feel I must look outward, northward, southward… a fiction.

There is candy in the house.  I know it is there.  But where?

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