Waiting Rooms

I've spent a lot of my life in waiting rooms.

Waiting rooms are afforded the same design aesthetic of college residences, for what I imagine are the same general reason: to inspire no particular emotional reaction in any way. A waiting room won't keep you calm, it just won't make you upset.

I have become a frequenter of waiting rooms. A regular at the white washed walls of emotional absence. I've come to recognize some of the regulars; not specific people, but archetypes. I've noticed my own place in the pantheon.  There's the friendly middle-aged man who knows all of the receptionists and hands out bad jokes about his middle-aged wife and twenty-something children. "She put me in here, didn't she?" one man laughed, his mirth interrupted by a cigarette-smoke fueled cough. He fishes in his pockets for his wallet and pulls out a ten for the copay, unfolds it on the reception desk and sinks his hands back into his pockets in a ritual as practiced as tying his shoes. Not that this man ties his shoes anymore, he's moved onto the single motion loafers in an early bid for the retirement lifestyle, even though he's still twenty more years of laboring away for his last kid's college education. He turns around and returns to his seat, grabbing a magazine that looks as old as his youngest daughter. He buries his face into the magazine as he sits one seat past the comfort zone between myself and anyone else. 

There's the elderly woman who shuffles along in her slippers and looks like she should be using a walker but is too stubborn to admit it. Her snow-white hair has streaks of gray that seem to, remarkably, represent a sign of youth. She, too, knows the receptionists and chats with them. Too old now for the banter, she goes through the motions of the sign-in process with mechanized efficiency, but all the while still as polite and warm as your grandmother. She walks to a seat near the middle aged man, and all the while I want to sit up and take her by the hand to make sure she doesn't fall, but I'm too busy trying not to be noticed. The middle aged man politely strikes up conversation, his bald head iridescent in the fluorescent light. They chat about their now-adult children.

Then there's the ten year old girl who is even more out of place in this room than I am, but she is trailed by her mother, younger than the middle aged man, colder than the old woman, but on her way to being as versed in the art of waiting room expediency.  The daughter is bitter she has to come here, taken away from the much more productive act of watching the Disney Channel show reruns of the same five shows all afternoon. The mother whispers just loud enough for everyone else in the waiting room to know that she spoke, but just below the ability for any meaning to be taken from this noise. She walks to the reception desk with a hurried dispassion, pulling the strap of her purse over her shoulder where it had begun to slip from bending over to speak with her daughter. Her hair is taught in a ponytail, but fraying at the front and a few stray single strands bounce before her forehead. She is as brutally efficient as the old woman, but in a hurry. No doubt she just came from work to pick her daughter up from school to get her into the office on time. "Traffic was unbelievable," she says, and the receptionist smiles and pretends to take in this woman's complaints. The mother has no qualms with burdening others with her first world woes of minor inconvenience, and as she scribbles the copay into her checkbook, her whole body seems tense enough to snap like a rubber band stretched too far when a child tried to shoot it across the room.

A waiting room has no life of its own and inspires no emotion, but it takes on the attributes of those within. Maybe the receptionists can tell, with their too-polite-to-ignore-your-complaints continence  acting as a counterbalance to the strange, hollow, mechanized ritual and stilted conversation brought on by waiting room regulars.

Because the middle-aged man, despite the fulfilled life of family and career, is still sick and needs to wait for a doctor. The old woman knows that she has spent more time in a waiting room than she has seen her grandchildren in the last two months. The mother fears that her daughter is going to be the twenty-something sitting awkwardly aloof and out of place, staring at a phone that doesn't actually have anything on the screen, trying to pretend that he does not exist.  When my name is called to sign in and present all of my information I do it with a fumbled practice that is purposefully ignorant. Because admitting that I am as practiced at this as the middle-aged man is a disheartening realization. To think that I was once the ten year old child who just wanted to watch TV is heart-breaking. And then there's the old woman who is the only one that truly belongs in this waiting room, and it  fills me with a sweeping joy for her that maybe, just maybe, she was never any of us.

Random Memory: West Virginia, Project Appalachia, March 2011

Wednesday I was sick. Violently ill. I left the work sight after lunch following some awful stomach pains and, yes, I'll admit it, vomiting. I spent an hour in the car trying to recuperate, thinking that I'd be OK if I could just lie down. It wasn't the case and Fr. Carl and Katie drove me back to the church we were staying in.

I had some lovely conversations with Katie that day through the bathroom door as I was too sick to stay in bed and had to get up every time my stomach needed to rebel. Eventually, I was able to settle down and fall asleep. I tossed and turned for a while as my stomach did summersaults. I've never had that kind of stomach bug before. I've had lots of stomach problems but never such a crippling 24-hour virus. I still don't know what caused it--I was the only one who got sick.

The next day, Thursday, was our field trip day. I was worried that I was going to have to miss this. But I woke up early that morning 2-3 AM, I guess, feeling a world better. It was wonderful. I wasn't tired anymore, after having slept the day away, but I stayed in bed. There were three other guys in the room (this was the first year there were enough men to get our own room!) and I didn't want to disturb them. 

I woke up the next morning, and got dressed.

"How are you feeling?" from just about everyone. Fine, fine, totally better.

We hiked New River Gorge that day. A couple miles. Beautiful scenery. A couple times we stopped at lookouts and looked down at New River and the cliffs from high above on the mountain. There was one particular clearing that was breathtaking that only myself, Rick and Katie were able to find. I noticed it through some spare trees and wandered over. The three of us were in the back, so they wandered over when I did. Trying to capture such an expanse in words is a futile effort. Capturing it in a photo was a poor enough substitute. I stood on the edge of a mountain and looked at the River below and for that moment, I was overcome with calm.

 After spending some time taking in the primal beauty of a land untouched by the horrors of modern life (which was hard to believe, considering how close we were to such squalor and poverty) we caught up with the rest of the group, who were settling down for lunch.

I don't know that it really was, but as far as I was concerned, this was the top of the mountain. The breeze on top of a mountain is like the breath of God Himself. A calming serenity comes with that wind. But strangely in this natural splendor, there was a cutout on the rockface, and through this narrow passage was a ladder descending downward into some kind of gorge below. When we arrived, three people had already made their way down. 

Rick had no hesitation in going for it. I am somewhat scared of heights and ladders, so I had made the decision not to go. "Come on, man, when will you get the chance to do this again?" Rick asked. I shrugged and laughed. It looked scary. 

As Rick readied himself to go down he turned to me and said, "You should do it. Sick one day and climbing mountains the next." Again, I simply laughed it off.

Rick went down and Katie followed, bolstered by Rick's fearlesness. She later admitted that she was initially scared, but couldn't let Rick show her up. The rest of the group that had already been there awhile had not gone down and had no plans to.

As I watched both Rick and Katie go down the ladder, what Rick said ate away at me. "Sick one day, and climbing mountains the next." That was a  damn good story. I remember my inner debate being longer, but it could not have been more than a few seconds because the two were still on the ladder. I hollered down that I was on my way and descended to join them.

The climb was longer than it appeared. The ladder was only the first stop. There was a short rocky slant that led to a thin, metal bridge, connected to another, even steeper ladder. I felt my way through that slant,  grabbing the rope that lined the rock wall with all the strength I could muster. I somehow managed to keep my legs from trembling,  perhaps by sending that nervous energy into my grip and through the rope. I came to the end of the bridge, which was only a few feet and turned precariously. All in all this whole process took seconds, and when I set my foot onto that second ladder's first rung it was still trembling. As I took another step the fear disappeared in a single instant, as if it never existed.

I descended the ladder and reached the bottom victorious. Rick and I exchanged high fives. 

Suddenly, everyone that had stayed up was coming down the ladder. We gave each new adventurer cheers and support as they screamed down about how scared they were. We were a team, suddenly, a community. That ladder brought to our week-long family a uniting force of support and camaraderie. It was a surreal moment that seemed to come from nowhere, like many things about this last trip to West Virginia. But it fit so perfectly. It made sense and brought us together. We all overcame something there in that strange, carved out descent. We explored this new area for a time, and then went back up and there I unwrapped my sandwich and breathed in the fresh air. Just yesterday I had been too sick to get out of bed. Today, I was eating lunch on top of a mountain.