Necessary Eye Roll

When I make my necessary gas station or grocery store visit, I’ve seen some people with their masks so loosely tied that there are gaps around their cheeks or, those with somehow acquired medical masks with the top line of the mask sitting dainty on their nose.  ( Like,Lord forbid you bend the soft underwire threaded through the top edge and cause a potential indent to your delicate skin.)

 I don’t know if my episodes have been caffeine related or what, but a few times I couldn’t , even with my mask on, keep my mouth shut.

I introduce  myself from six feet away, quickly give my professional credentials so they don’t think I’m some cuckoo bird and hopefully understand I only want to help. I give a quick pointer on how to make their mask more occlusive. It’s gone over okay. ( However,  I don’t stick around, so who knows, maybe there is a brief exchange about ‘ the crazy lady at the gas station’.)

But then, there are the handful of twenty-somethings walking around with their masks slung around their necks, whether in a building or not.

I want to smack them upside the head, but like my mother taught me… I keep my hands to myself.

And do the best eye roll possible.

The best laid plans…

My two months off from blogging to work on rehabbing my right knee from a fall last October –

Ha!

Yep, the photo below…it’s my left knee. Sandals, kind of wet concrete, and Boom !

You know how the sprinters jump the hurdles, one leg stretched in front, the other tucked under…that was me…somehow on my back. But I stood, assisted by a sister and friendly passers by.

________________________

Xray negative – Yay!

Road rash taking weeks to heal…blah

Where is my Hemingway?

Feeling a twinge of guilt for my Saturday visits to Starbucks for mocha lattes, I developed the habit of perusing the newspapers while waiting for my drink. My thought was, well, this is kind of an intellectual outing, I mean, why look, there’s the Wall Street Journal. So, on my last visit, as I always do, I rifled through the papers in the rack. A column in the opinion section caught my eye.

A Lost Love Gave Us Hemingway’s Spare Prose

 Even better, in larger font after the second paragraph:

___________________

A mortar burst and a              

Nurse transferred an ambulance driver

into a great author.

____________________

Professor Robert Garnett of Gettysburg College does a great job of giving a well-articulated head nod to Hemingway and summarizing his humble beginnings as an ambulance driver in Italy during WWI.

What drew me in was the explanation of Hemingway’s unrequited love for nurse Agnes von Kurowsky and how his hopeless affection is braided into his first two novels.

Where was this columnist’s essay going? I wasn’t sure I cared.

I’d love to be given credit for inspiring great writing. My patients recognize my sincerity. Leadership sends me warm fuzzies via certificate of appreciation. (They call them Applause Certificates). A world renowned writer inspired by me — now I’d be close to sitting on my laurels after that. Any nurse would!

I read on.

Alas, the essay tapers to the true point in the last paragraph.

“But the taught restraint style of his early fiction still influences writers today – or it should. To get started, Hemingway told himself, ‘write one true sentence.’ In an era of massive ubiquitous verbiage, from a single year’s 96,000 pages Federal Register to the daily inundation of tweeted banality, the principle still tolls like a deep voiced bell over a million shrilling cicadas. For that we can thank the fortuitous conjunction, 100 years ago, of a mortar burst and a pretty nurse.”

One true sentence.

The need for this in media is strong right now, very strong.