But it’s tricky, isn’t it?
The journey through a hospital stay, or my one at least, invariably involves other people. People who are either at their place of work or are
sick. Neither of these noble categories of folk deserve to be splashed too formally
across the virtual pages of a hardly read online log. So therein lies the rub.
To set it down and risk compromising other people’s privacy for your own diversion,
or to leave it alone and lose the kaleidoscopic memories or something that was
periodically funny, sad and painful and which was clearly some kind of a
trauma.
So this one is a little experiment. An attempt to set down
one of the myriad hospital interactions, without over-exposing any of the other
private parties involved. To try to do this, I have changed names to more
famous names, altered ages, and swapped-out musical instruments in the
following paragraphs.
Let’s see how we go.
When Jack Lemmon arrived on the ward, he interrupted an
uneasy peace that had recently descended there. Subsequently found to be 93
years old, he could probably be excused in having some foibles but, still, he
was loud and grumpy and shockingly rude to certain members of the staff and
nobody was immediately endeared to him. But, as the rest of us had to do, he
settled in and calmed down and, although he never stopped being needy and selectively
rude, we grew accustomed to him.
Well, most of us did.
In the bed next to me, James Stewart remained solidly unimpressed.
James, a rangy elderly farmer man, had rather taken against Jack’s belligerent entry
onto the ward and was not backward in hinting at his own latent hostility
towards him.
There were six of us men on the ward. James was on my right
and the TikTok Bishop was on my left. Jack was right across from me. Peter, who
thought my name was Vincent for my entire stay, was over there with Jack, and
Gareth, who had spent years in hospitals and knew everyone and everything (in a
good way), completed the cohort. We got along okay, apart from Jack and James.
James Stewart had no time for Jack Lemmon, as I said, and that would have been fine
except for one little thing. Jack adored James and clearly burned to be his
friend.
Marooned on my bed or in my chair, as I was, I had time to consider this relationship
impasse. This considering, coupled with my customary listening-hard to
everything that went on, gave me the dawning realisation that I had it in me to
bring these two elderly gentlemen together in a positive way. This is the kind
of shit I sometimes do, and I had so much more time to do it in hospital, so
off I went on my little diplomatic mission.
You see I had listened and I knew things about the two
elderly men that they did not know about each other. They each had something in
common. They had each discussed it with their various visitors but never with
each other. While, all the time, little old me, propped in my comfy chair, has listened
and heard everything.
So, when James was wheeled off for a scan, I bent Jack’s ear
a little.
“Hey, Jack, you know James here in the bed beside me. You
know he’s a musician, right? Fiddle, I think, I could be wrong…”
Later, when Jack was safely ensconced in the bathroom, I did
the same with James.
“James, you know Jack over there. I hear he was quite the accordion
player back in the day.”
Seeds duly planted, I sat back and waited to see if anything
would grow.
James passed the foot of Jack’s bed the next afternoon, and
instead of the customary rather cold shoulder, he paused there and ran his
finger over Jack’s chart.
“Did I hear you’re a bit of a box player?”
“Oh, yes, I am.”
“I play the fiddle myself.”
“I think I heard that all right… what’s your name again?”
“James Stewart.”
There was a pause. I watched them over the rim of my book.
A longer pause, and then Jack said hesitantly, “You’re not…
Jimmy Stewart?”
James looked at Jack more carefully. “Yes, I am.”
Jack suddenly addressed the entire ward, as he was
occasionally prone to do.
“Everyone, everyone! This is Jimmy Stewart. Only the best
fiddle player west of the Shannon.”
James/Jimmy blushed, “Oh, well now, I don’t know about..."
“I’m Jackie Lemmon!”
“Not Jackie Lemmon, the accordionist?”
“Yes, yes!”
“But we played together, back in the day.”
“We surely by-God did!”
Thus a warm, brief alliance was born. It turned out that Jimmy Stewart and Jackie
Lemmon, knew lots of mutual people, all traditional musicians. They hurled
names at each other across the ward divide and, for each name mutually
recognised, the same compliment was bestowed.”
“He was a grand player.”
“He was. A grand player.”
One evening, Jackie tuned his transistor radio to the Irish Channel,
Raidió na Gaeltachta, and two hours of traditional Irish music spun out of it. I
don’t know if you know but Traditional Irish music, which are often Reels, Jigs, or
Hornpipes, tend to travel in packs of three. Each tune running seamlessly into
the next so that it is often difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins.
They all have strange evocative names like, Mulholland’s Fancy or The Breeze
through the Byre. I made those two up but that’s not to say they don’t exist
somewhere in the vast pantheon of Irish tuneage. Some of the real tunes I myself had
to learn, when I was a reluctant child accordion player, had names like The
Mason’s Apron, or Merrily Kiss the Quaker, or Drowsy Maggie.
For two hours, Jackie and Jimmy sat on two chairs in the space
between the ends of the beds. They huddled together over the little radio and
they named every obscure tune that came out of its tinny speaker. More than
that, they seemed to know every person who has playing every tune, declaring
them, one more time, to be ‘good players’.
So here’s to Jimmy Stewart and Jackie Lemmon, (not their real
names), who collided briefly in their infirmity and, in doing so, found some
common ground which raised us all up a little.
Here’s to the TikTok Bishop, who turned if off sometimes.
Here’s to Gareth who, in a comradely way, showed me the
ropes of surviving in hospital.
And here's to Peter, over there in the end bed, who
provided me with the words which seem to have
come to define my rather eventful stay in Medical B.
“Watch out everyone, Vincent’s on the floor again.”
‘Til next time…
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