Freddogg Off The Chain

I limped through the main door of Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Northeast Philly last Wednesday looking like Cabana Boy from the movie “Cocoon.” A community band was practicing in a big room, lots of brass and an audience on wheels and balancing on walkers. The were playing the Irish anti war song “Johnny I hardly Knew Ya” and somewhere is a lyric “you’re an armless boneless chickenless egg soon to be armed with a bowl to beg” and I thought “at least it’s not “My Way.”
We were visiting my wife’s aunt, Sister Martina 91, who had been unceremoniously tossed from the mother house of the gray nuns, an order she entered at 14 years old to play out her remaining days plagued by a sharp mind all senses on overdrive who must look up everyday and think ”How did I end up in this mother fucker?”
The lobby looked like a convention of Homo Semi Erectus Sapiens with all styles of walkers. Once every 10 minutes and alarm would go off when a patient tried to ‘steal away or slip slid away as Paul Simon wrote “the nearer your destination the more you'rE slip sliding away.”
The walkers had paste on sensors to nab those who would rather take their chances in the ghetto than on a floor with 24 patients and one nurse's aid with a bad attitude.
There was bent over old Joe standing in the middle of the room looking at his shoe tops. Joe had been in the men’s room and came out and halfway across the lobby before he realized he forgot his walker. Inside the men’s room is a bolted to the wall urinal. A big puddle is underneath it that glistens and teems with super mutated micro organisms.
Sliders to sofas traffic everywhere and a room of false starters those who try to get up behind the walker but it just ain’t happening so the room rocks and pops like the ballroom of an ocean cruise to the end of the earth as REM sang “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”
We drove home touring the North Philly ghetto streets where my great and no so great grandparents lived. And my parents and my smart ass. I remembered houses and corner stores and fat-ssed aunts and half ball games. “Who owns the ghetto, “I wondered?
My wife asked me,”If you get stashed in late life would you prefer Saint Joseph’s or a ghetto front porch.
“Not even close and hopefully next door to a crack house,”I said. “But I must be alone I can’t worry about protecting your bag lady self.”
I’ve said this before but I think everyone on Medicaid should get free street drugs including Balco cream. Shit I’ll be making balloon animals out of walkers and laughing my ass off behind McDonald’s food.

And that was “My Summer Vacation”

freddogg