Archive for November, 2008

My daughter and I were slogging through the Hulen Walmart last night, trying to get everything we needed for the week despite the fact that we forgot the list, and by the time we found our way to a checkout line, I was tired.  I felt, as I always do at this store, like a bona fide martyr of shopping discomfort, but Walmart is about ten percent cheaper than any other grocery, and I feel compeled to be careful with the grocery budget no matter how much I hate this store. Notwithstanding my overall discomfiture, as I always do I greeted the checkout lady, an older woman who moved purposefully, if not particularly quickly by checkerly standards, thorugh our order, adding as a friendly aside, “I’m sure tired.”

“Yeah me, too, I can’t wait for Monday and all this to be over.”

“Has it been busy?” I asked.

“Yeah, it has. I’m just glad I didn’t have to work yesterday. I’ve been working here so long, I don’t have to work the Fridays anymore. Thank God. I’m never working it again.”

“What exactly are they doing, that makes people show up so early to the store?” I ask.

“Oh, special sales, stuff that’s really cheap. People just go crazy. It gets worse every year, they just get crazier and crazier.”

“What do you think is making it worse?”

“I don’t know, they learn it, they did it last year, they’re ready for this year, they get keyed up. They stand out there waiting for hours before it opens. You know, they stomped that guy to death at that one store.” I acknolweged that I had heard this. “Yeah, the store said they were going to try to find out who’s responsible, using the video cameras, so they can press charges. I think they should. People should be punished for that, pushing so hard just to save a couple of dollars.”

“It’s very sad,” I agreed. I paid for the order, thanked her and left. We past a Fort Worth police officer stationed by the door. Too little too late, I thought to myself.

My daughter asked me if they could really blame the people who had pushed so hard. I had to admit that I don’t know. After all, in a mob, it’s the ones way in back who are pushing, and they can’t see what’s happening. But then again, an hour later, I think it does seem awful that no one would have to account for this. Because whether the store, for riling people up, or the people, for being riled, it does seem that the thing has been going too far.

What: A place to hang out with your dog. But more than that, a place where your dog can hang out with a lot of other dogs, and you can meet other dog owners. Not to mention it’s just about the only place in the city where you can legally let your dog run off-leash.

Dogs play at last month's "Barktoberfest," an annual festival at the East Fort Worth dog park.

There are two separate enclosures of 4-foot high chain link, one for canines under 40 pounds and one for larger animals. A few tubes and jumps are set out for the dogs, and there are shaded benches and tables for owners.

Yes, “doggie bags” for picking up after your dog are provided and must be used.

Where: At Gateway Park, just east of downtown Fort Worth. Take the 30 towards Dallas and get off on Beach. Travel 1/4 mile north and turn right at the large sign into the park. At the end of the road, a couple hundred yards away is a parking lot and a dog park, easily visible because of the chain link fence. At a recent visit, banners were promoting the park’s selection as one of America’s top ten dog parks, according to Dog Fancy magazine, as well as the election of the mayor of Fort Woof, Tsunami, a Chinese Crested. The dog-mayoral election is a fundraiser for the park that raised $4800 this year.

When:

Gateway park is open from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. each day. The dog park is lighted for evening visits. On Thursday evenings, the park hosts Fort Woof after dark, and boosters strive to make sure there is always a fun-loving group of dogs and owners at that time.

According to observers, weekends when the weather is fair are the busiest and generally best times to visit, although at peak hours it can get crazy.

Why: Because dogs just want to be free! And they love it the most when there are other dogs around to enjoy the freedom.

How: Make sure your dog has rabies tags and all vaccinations, as well as a licence, and observe rules which you can read at the park’s website.

Woodpeckers in Fort Worth? I just didn’t know we had them; I had to try to see this bird. As it turned out, it wasn’t diffiult. I just followed the sounds, and there he was, about fifteen feet up near the sawed-off top of a dead tree. He tapped a few more times, jumping quickly around the trunk, allowing me to see his read head and checkered back, then took off.

It’s nice to know that we are not without wild animals, even in the city. I assembled some notes on this bird to begin a new category for this blog: Fort Worth Fauna, a catalogue of our local wildlife.

Red-Bellied Woodpecker Details

Description: With a red stripe over most of the head, a checkered back and a white front, the red mark on the belly which gives the bird its name is not generally visible.

Size: About 9′ long, or the size of a robin.

 Range: Covers most of the eastern United States. Dallas/Fort Worth is about as far west at the bird is seen. 

Diet: “Primarily insectivourous” (that was a new word for me) according to Cavity-Nesting Birds of North American Forests, a US Park service on-line publication. The Red-Bellied eats beetles, grasshoppers, nuts of various types and will also visit birdfeeders if it gets the chance. 

Habitat: Southeastern forests. Prefers larger expanses of trees. 

Population status: Currently increasing. 

Listen: Red-Bellied Woodpecker song and pecking sound:

by Antonia Jacob

This Tuesday evening I volunteered at the H-E-B Feast of Sharing in Austin, an event put on by the eponymous grocery store chain, which offers a free Thanksgiving meal – turkey, potatoes, gravy, cranberries, pumpkin pie, the works – to anyone who shows up. In Austin, over ten thousand people came for the four hours it was open. Staged in a huge convention center, with hundreds of people seated at once, it was a massive example of local philanthropy.

The Feast of Sharing happens in 22 communities in Texas and Mexico, serves over 250,000 meals every holiday season, and has been going on since 1998. My experience was hardly on such a large scale, but there were things I was struck by – and, as happens so often, the things I least expected.

My job was to carry trays of plates out to people who were waiting, and at one point when the trays were slow to come out of the kitchen, to hand out rolls to those waiting to tide them over. I recognized when I first entered the huge hall that, despite a band playing, it was relatively quiet. Any elementary cafeteria, which would house just as many youngsters as were at the tables in the room, not to mention the adults, echoes far more than that room did. The people were not chattering and yelling over the music, in fact, they were for the most part quietly eating or quietly waiting. Do not think they were a stony bunch, but, in its own way, it was a serious affair.

Some, of course, made noise when not fed. Despite the fact that this was a free meal, there were a few complainers, and I did get the idea that some people in the room felt this was somehow owed to them, and perhaps as a community we do owe this to the less fortunate. But what struck me most was who was there.

Now, a free dinner, and, let us not mince words, one of the quality expected when ten thousand meals are churned out of an assembly line, offered in the downtown of a substantial city, should appeal most to those you would expect to see at, say, a soup kitchen: vagrants, the homeless, and the obviously down and out.

However, most of the people in the room I could not peg immediately as destitute. Many, if walking down the street, I would not take a second glance at. In fact, the group of volunteers, from ostensible demographics, did not look all that different from those waiting patiently for the free meal they had come to receive.

I often got the volunteers and the needy confused! This is bizarre, seeing as, having been someone on the receiving end of help at times in my life, I was astounded to find myself on the opposite side of exchange, giving instead of receiving.

It was so effortless for me to wander the tables and hand out bread, smiling all the while – that was my role. The people receiving were in the opposite role: accepting help with gratitude. It seemed to me as I worked the event that, our general perceptions notwithstanding, the line between these two positions is slim.

This is first of all because with a flick of the eye of Fate we could be in that room, stomachs grumbling. Wealth can be evanescent. But, secondly it’s because there was as much joy on the giving end that evening as there was on the receiving. We should not begrudge those who take handouts, as, if we can find a place where we can give, and it is often effortlessly, we can receive just as much in return.

More on H-E-B Feast of Sharing

Back when I was a bride, I was very proud to say that I had been cooking since grade school. I could make cakes, cookies, and brownies. I was surprised when my husband asked if could makes pies.

“You prefer pies to cakes?”

He shrugged. “It’s a guy thing,” he said. I went around and asked every man I came across, cakes or pies? And they all prefered pies.

Clearly I had to expand my cooking skills. How hard could it be to make a pie, anyway?

Well, it could be hard. Crusts crumbled and broke, the filling was like water and spilled out over the seams, sticking the pie in the plate, a crystalized sugar slick coated the bottom of the finished product.

Finally, one Thanksgiving when we were visiting his folks, who lived out in a rural area of Northern California, in a big rambling cold farmhouse that his father made by hand, the pie issue came up again. I asked my mother-in-law for help. Now this was a woman who resented me with the resentment only availalbe to an older woman when she sees a young woman getting too much attention. Notwithstanding that the very sight of me enraged her, I was family, and she gave me some advice.

With the crust, mix up the flour and shortening well until it forms a kind of heavy dust, then add the cold water just until it clumps, put it in the fridge, cool it for no less than half an hour. With the filling, don’t stop baking the pie until the filling is like jelly. Check it with a knife inserted through a slat in the crust, when it’s set into a jell, you can remove the pie. It takes longer to bake a fruit pie than you think. Usually over an hour at 350 degrees.

“Keep trying, you’ll get there,” she said, rather grimly. I never did understand her lack of delight in the life she lived, out there on the land, a farm wife, being what I always wanted to be. But there were many questions I couldn’t ask; we were reserved people. Instead of asking, I made a lot of pies.

Now it’s thanksgiving again, and the kids are planning our pies. I can make them all now; custard, fruit, chiffon, mousse. But the best pie is maybe the cherry pie. In the city, you buy the cherries in a can, although back at the farm in Northern California, there was a sour cherry tree, and my best ever cherry pies I made from those. So here, in memory of those days, is the recipe for the cherry pie, one of the best and easiest, with notations for the beginning cook.

CHERRY PIE

Crust:

Use 2/3 cups shortening, 1 tsp salt, 2 cups flour. Mix together in bowl, using fork or mixer. Get a cup of ice water in a pyrex measuring cup. Using a fork, pour the water slowly into the flour mixture, using only enough water until the mixture forms a soft ball. Put in the fridge, covered, for at least half an hour. Take out, divide in uneven halves: the larger half goes for the bottom of the pie . Use a 8″ or 9″ dish, as a 10″ dish will be too big. Spread out plenty of flour to roll out the dough, or put it between two pieces of waxed paper if you find the rolling out difficult.

Filling:

Use 4 cups (2 cans) of sour cherries, – do not use sweet cherries or canned cherry filling – 1 cup sugar, and 2 tbsp tapioca. Put together in a bowl. The tapioca is the thickening agent, and when cooked, it’s completely clear, unlike flour and corn starch. Once mixed, pour the mixture into the pie crust, and dot with butter. The butter is to protect the top crust from soaking with filling. If you skip it there may be wet spots on the top. Now roll out the top crust. It’s traditional here to make the cherry pie top a lattice, but that’s up to you. The simple way to make the decorative heat vents in the top is to fold the top crust into quarters, cut through the four thicknesses at the edge, and then open it up, like the snowflake art we used to make in school.

Bake

Bake the pie for about 1 hour at 350 degrees. It may take longer, so use the knife test to make sure the filling has gelled. If the edges are getting too brown, you can put tinfoil over them to to protect them. But don’t take the pie out until the filling is gelled. Trust me on that.

The pie needs to cool at least half an hour before you eat it (though we sometimes break that rule). Best served with ice cream. It is my experience the cherry pie gets eaten the fastest, but your results may, of course, differ – especially if it’s competing with the lemon meringue.

Fair Park Music Hall, November 14, 16, 19, and 22, 2008

By Dean Cassella

The Dallas Opera has launched its final season at the Music Hall with as much punch and verve as one could hope for.  Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is Italian opera buffa (comic opera) at its best, and this latest production delivers beautiful singing, attractive sets, and belly-laughs galore.  Stage director John Copley wisely chose to stick with ponytails and breeches for this production and play it straight (i.e. as librettist Lorenzo da Ponte intended it).  Judging from the enthusiastic audience response, this will be a production to remember, which also bodes well for the rest of the Dallas Opera season. 

For those who are unfamiliar with the work, it is a bedroom comedy that revolves around the libido of Count Almaviva, who wishes to have his way with Susanna, one of the Countess’ handmaidens, who is about to marry Figaro, the castle barber. There are no less than four couples involved in various romantic entanglements and jealous imbroglios, both real and imagined, each of which weaves in and out of the others with hilarious consequences. There is even a bit of slapstick thrown in for good measure.

The real star of this production is the Russian Lyubov Petrova, whose large, sweet voice carries well throughout the Music Hall, in itself no small feat. Petrova sings with a warmth that perfectly suits the role of Susanna, who I always thought should be the very embodiment of the desirable young bride, petite and delicate, yet also shrewd and capable of protecting herself and her abiding interests in Figaro.

Jennifer Holloway also leaves an impression in the ‘trouser’ role of Cherubino, the star-crossed adolescent boy, whose puppy-love for the Countess serves as a foil to the Count. Besides a resonant voice, Holloway manages perfectly to convince us that she is a boy awkwardly walking around in drag. Even a 12 year old from the balcony (my son) could point ‘him’ out amidst the large chorus of maidens in Act III.

Daniel Okulitch also did a fine job in the title, role, although I feel that his voice is a bit too dark for the role. 

Graeme Jenkins warm and sonorous musical direction is always a treat; and this production we also get to hear his harpsichord accompaniment to the recitative (sung dialog scenes).

The audience’s overwhelmingly positive reaction to the production proves that opera can be a viable art form, provided that accessible works are chosen and appropriate production values are respected by those responsible for such things.

Next up on the Dallas Opera palette in December: Johann Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat).

Today I wanted to head for the Amon Carter Museum, which is located in the Cultural District just in back of the Kimbell and Modern, and has long been recognized for western art. Given my mood, some cowboys and Indians were just what the doctor ordered. Besides, unlike the Kimbell, whose permanent exhibit space is pretty small, with most of the room going to traveling exhibits, the Amon Carter has a large and credible collection on display all the time, of which a group of Remington bronzes are central.

I decided to take my 12 year old son on this jaunt, because he was getting out of school at noon on this particuar day, and because he has been having some trouble with his grades. I reasoned a trip to the art museum might refocus his attention, which I knew from phone and personal conversations with his teachers, was pretty unfocussed.

We entered the museum and looked first at a painting of post-2000 vintage of the patron of this establishment, Amon Carter, who died in 1955. He is pictured extending his business card, painted in near-photorealism, a smile in his eyes, white hair crowning the lined and weathered face of a salesman who started by developing the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and finished a nationally-known businessman. The painting shows a person who seems the epitome of someone you’d like to do business with. But my son is more interested in the material of which the wall behind the portrait is made. “Look at this,” he said. “They’ve pressed seashells into the wall to make shapes.”

Well, I can see that the rock is natural stone, but he doesn’t believe me. We go on into the central gallery of the first floor, which is dominated by lithographs made by British pop-artists of the Taramind Institute. The lithos were printed around 1966, the year I was born, and some of the more abstract of them remind me of something I might have made in nursery school not too long after. My son is unimpressed. “I could have made these,” he tells me.

Again and again, he touches the walls, gets too close to the paintings, asks irreverent questions, and gives me over and over the feeling that his teachers are right when they tell me he doesn’t pay any attention. Perhaps taking him to the museum was a bad idea. He shows a little more interest in bronzesof Indians at the stairway landing of the first floor, sculpted by Dallin, Proctor, Calder, and Huntington. They are quite fine. He looks at them for a moment, then asks when we’re going to the gift shop.

The influence of New Mexico artists, including Georgia O’Keefe, is seen again and again here; an image she painted of a pink adobe church, and another of the pink sky of New Mexico, invoke a world of fantastic beauty scarcely touchable on earth but ever real in the mind. These are still, of course, abstractions. And my son is still unfocussed. I take some notes and go on. We wind our way through the upper level, past painting of trappers and rivermen, revolutionary war heros, landscapes and portraits including one by John Singer Sergeant that appears in their museum brochure, of a drummer boy not much older than my son. 

I stop a docent and ask about the stone of the walls. He explains that they are made of Austin Shale limeston, mined in Austin, and that yes, the fossilized sea creatures were real, their bodies have dissolved and washed away thorugh the porous stone, leaving only their outlines. 

Where were those Remingtons? I finally get directly above the entrance, and here they are:  four-horse bronzes, horses in full running motion, of cowboys and Indians at war and play. My son goes forward. He walkd around the glassed-in sculptures, peering in with avid eyes. He studies the bridles, the saddles, the minute details of each horse and rider. “Look at this!” he tells me. “The cowboys have shoes on their horses, the Indians don’t! Look at this saddle! What is that? Is it on fire?”

“It’s a sheepskin saddle cover,” I inform him.

“Where’s the cowboy whose horse this was?” He’s referring to the riderless horse in the set.

“I guess he fell or got shot.” He goes on to another bronze. He has changed, at the first sight of that Remingtons, from a bored kid to an active learner. How has that happened? Perhaps it’s just that he understands the language of the statue. Even he, who never watches cowboy movies, instantly “gets” the thrill of mortal combat, the grace of running horses, the facination of intricately rendered 19^th century armament and gear.

This brings up a discussion I had with my husband recently. I suggested that the finest art shows high levels of technical mastery and also demonstrates universal ideas in a medium that is as understandable as possible to the greatest number of people. Perhaps it was not an accident that the finger-painting like pop art did not interest us. It had no intelligible story for us. It offered no new information. But the Remingtons were different. That master of western art was able to bring an idea of the life of a cowboy into sharp revief, and bring a middle school boy from indifferent to interest. When I realized that, I knew the art of the Amon Carter had been vindicated, and it was worth coming just to see those Remington bronzes.

The Amon Carter Museum  

Running from Buck Swanson Park in the north to Lake Benbrook in the southwest, the Trinity Trails is an amazing network of paved and dirt trails where savvy Fort Worthians go for a ride or walk in the country, all the while staying inside the city limits.

There’s something peaceful and liberating about riding a bicycle along this 40-mile long bike trail network. In a world where bicyclists are stopped continually in order to allow auto traffic the right of way, or simply to keep  safe from cars, the Trinity Trails offers a vision of what a two-wheeler’s universe would look like – wide green swards, narrow asphalt trails interspersed by bridges and tunnels, and relative quiet, broken only by the rush of water going over an occasional spillway on the river or another bicycle swishing by in the opposite direction.

The paved trails run predominantly along the West and Clear Forks of the Trinity River, where long, sloping grassy banks give some memory of the bucolic cow-town history of Fort worth. Bicyclists rule the roost, although joggers, pedestrians and dog walkers, plus horses on certain sections of the trail, can travel.

The Trinity is a wide, slow moving river bordered by long, green banks in many areas near the trails.

 When: Open twenty-four hours; use caution after dark.

 How: Enter and park at major parking areas at Lake Benbrook, Heritage Park downtown, Trinity Park, Gateway Park, Rockwood Park, and Cobb Park. Other parking areas listed on trail map.

 

 

 

Rules

for safe transit from the Trinity Trails trailmap:

 

1. Be courteous
2. Yield to slower users (that means pedestrians and horsemen)
3. Keep right.
4. Pass cautiously on the left.
5. Give an audible signal when passing (a shouted “on your left” is more common than any other)
6. Yield when entering and crossing trails
7. Use lights at night.
8. Please don’t litter.

Map: Pick up a free paper map at Fort Worth Visitor Center inside the Will Rogers Center at 3401 W. Lancaster or go here for Trinity Trails map.

 

A bicyclist stops for a snack at Panera on University Blvd., just a few yards from the trail

 

 

I hate to say this, but this is that harbinger of real hard times: when you have to pay more money for used stuff.

Years ago we experienced it in Canada, where the consumer spending power is, I would guess on average, half or less of the spending here. You had to pay $15 for a used coat in Canada, they wouldn’t just give it to you for a couple bucks. I mean, moms would be out at the thrift store hunting for the things, also for the Sorel boots for children, which almost no one could afford new because they were $150.  To lay hands on that kind of money up there, you had to belong to the professional class. 

In the last few weeks, here in Fort Worth, I’ve been feeling like the same thing is happening as I go garage saling. I go out and look around and I get this strange feeling from the proprietors, a feeling I’ve never gotten from them so strongly and so consistently, like they’re watching the money coming in.  Like they feel they need it. 

The estate sale my 12-year-old and I attended yesterday in Tanglewood was the worst. Although the street sign was huge, the savings were not. An arcrylic music box which played Moon River and Fur Elise looked like fun. But not at $25. A pyrex casarole dish was $5; you could get it at Walmart for $7. A bowtie and cumberbund set was $10. A mink coat at $700 was, to my mind, more understandable, but then, perhaps that’s because I would never buy a mink coat and I don’t have a fix on its value.  Small hand-held mixer, $10. My son tried to show me that.

“We have a Kitchen Aid,” I reminded him. “There is nothing you need this for if you’ve got a stand mixer.” He shrugged. He just wanted to buy something. Towels were $2, but they weren’t exspecially new or nice. 

Many monogrammed items were for sale, even items with the deceased’s name on them, which I will not repeat, even though it would increase the poignance of the story. The proprietor at the front gave us the wether eye as we thanked her and left empty-handed. I noticed others leaving the same way. I thought of bending down, looking her in the eye, and saying “your prices are too high, you’re going to have to cut them in half if you want this stuff to move at all,” but it wasn’t my business and I knew she was angry about the situation already.

We walked away. “Why couldn’t we buy something?” my son asked.  I shrugged. The cool air of winter blew over us, promising early morning freezes, ice rain, heaters cranked up. I was grateful our heater is gas. It’s cheaper and it feels better too.

“We’ve got to shop really carefully now,” I told him. “Times are tough.”

It’s a hard day when your child goes into the operating room, even for something routine, like removal of pins in a broken femur during recovery from a football injury, even if he’s pre-admitted, even if you’ve been though something much worse (the original break) just four weeks before.

The morning was off to an inauspicious start when we arrived at Cooks Children’s hospital to find valet parking $5 at the front door. I don’t pay for valet parking, at a restaurant or a hospital and didn’t have time to go to the administration and read them the riot act about the impropriety of making people pay for the privedlege of letting their kids off on the curb instead of in the middle of the driveway. My son, on crutches, had to navigate from the outside lane, and hurry about it because other cars were waiting due to the valets plying their trade. You’d think the almost-incapacitated would have a few minutes to get out of their vehicles. 

We showed up in the surgery waiting room at 7 a.m. as directed, and were hurried into an exam room. Nurses asked, for the fourth or fifth time since we started working on this surgery yesterday afternoon at pre-admission, “allergic to anything?” They put on numbing cream on the back of his hand and got the IV installed, and though they tried their best to make it painless, he said it still hurt. Soon after this the anesthesiologist came in, took down some details about my son’s diabetes, and asked us if we had any questions. The one I wanted answered, “How many times in a case like this does someone fail to come back out of anesthesia?” was impossible to ask. I was grateful to see that the anesthesiologist was not the one I already know, who is that dad of my daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Life is made of such small mercies. 

The bright spot in my morning was when the “real” doctor, the orthapedist who was doing the operating, came in, just before my son went to surgery. The orthapedist looks a little like Russel Crowe, although he has less hair, and his “assistant” a resident, looks like… maybe Ben Stiller. These two also have the most personality of anyone we talked to during the ordeal. Long sigh. I told the orthapedist that I hoped no prayer-for-when-you’re-at-death’s-door was necessary for something routine like this. He smiled, said of course not, and I went out to the waiting room.

I tried to write a post about the Trinity Trails (I have since finished it at home.) But despite the fact that Cooks has free wi-fi for research, despite the fact that I had a simple fill-in-the-blanks format for my story, I couldn’t get anywhere. The letters I had planned to write sat unwritten. I checked my email, searched again for info for my story. Called my husband. He didn’t pick up. Tried to write some more. Talked to a kid, maybe 18, who wore cornroaws with clear beads on the ends of each braid , who had a copy of the Star-Telegram and was talking to a woman I assume was his mom about the jobs in the classified.  “Waiter,” he said, circling an ad. “That would be good.”

I was the only person who didn’t manage to get a family member to come along for the surgery waiting room, I realized. At least the only one I see. I made it anyway. After an hour, the doctors came out, and announced my son’s surgery a success, that he was in recovery and I would see him in a few mnutes.  For some reason I was starving, so I asked them if I had time to get breakfast, and they said sure, go ahead. I went down and ordered an omelette from Sir Eatsalot Grill on the first floor, with bacon and ham, and cheese. It looked so good. But before I could sit down I was being paged. Apparently they were ready for my to sit by my son’s bedside and help him wake up. I rushed into an elevator behind a man wearing Star Wars scrubs. “Fifth floor,” he told me as we started to go up. 

“Do you work here?” I asked, indicating the outfit.

“No, I’m here for my son. He’s got vomiting, diarrhea, they don’t know what’s wrong, it’s a mess, so I borrowed these scrubs from my dad,” he said. I looked at him. The marks of stress and worry were on his face. Somehow I knew, by his demeanor, by the symptoms, that the child is young, perhaps younger than two years … he is one of the many babies I’ve seen being cared for here. In the surgical area, I watched children barely old enough to walk, in gowns and diapers. A gurney went by with a tiny child on it, IV pole swinging the the rolling motion.

They don’t even know what is wrong with this child! I thought.Sympathy flooded my heart.“I’ll keep him in my prayers,” I said.

“God bless you,” the dad told me ,visibly grateful for the support.

I went back up, my head spinning. Probably the little boy will be fine. But not knowing, that’s so hard for him and for his parents. I got my son, the football player, back from the nurses, with a fresh black and red cast, and my husband showed up to drive us home. The second half of the day winds up fraught with distractions and distress, perhaps because I am exhausted by the ordeal.  But every time I feel it’s all too much, I remember to pray for the boy on the 5^th floor, who was so sick and whose parents don’t know what is wrong. I am grateful that I remember them, and somehow I trust that for him and for all of us, everything will be all right.