little ones

It's been sprinkling or pouring with a spurt of sun after stretches of gray since I've been back in Connecticut. The weekend before orientation we went to the beach at Lighthouse Point and shielded ourselves from water splinters underneath a large warm blanket Ali carries in his car, along with a portable bench of sorts and lawn chairs. We smiled at A. and B. sitting past the shore in the ocean, their chairs in wet sand, few inches deep in salt water. Then we went on the swings; I’d never swung on a beach before, and just like flying a kite in the sea in Puerto Rico, these whimsies are made magic by the blue or bluish gray of the beach. Swinging back, you’re immersed in a jar of lighweight sand, grains you separate like the beaded curtains you find in hippie homes, and swinging forward, you burst through the sand, crash lightly through glass to see water seamlessly meeting sky. We were also laughing hard.

Moving from this to my pediatrics rotation required less destitching and sewing up than I anticipated. Two weeks into working on the schoolage-adolescent team (5-18 year olds), I feel ablur. I know as little as I suspected, and the pace is fast and learning wide. My stethoscope heard its first wheeze and crackles. A little one shields her hand and says, I’m too afraid. Video games make his face light up one day, less so as the days pass. I press the fingernails of a ten year old who has been through too much, to see if they blanch in the right amount of time, but they’re painted red and I can’t see underneath. A girl, whose words spill forth from her mouth like water, sees Ali bid farewell and drive away on his scooter and proclaims “Niiiiiiiiiiice” with vehement approval and tells me she’s going to get him and me both Hannah Montana shoes. We taste different medicines, some of them tolerable, many gross but started to blend together as I had one after another, and the last left a long long aftertaste of rotten eggs that made us gag. We also had our lungs uncomfortably scrambled by vibrating vests and pseudomassagers, which are used to disrupt the mucus in patients with cystic fibrosis and bronchiectasis. The boy in a red wagon calls for help from his room, and I sit him on his chair and place his new red shoes on his feet. It’s hard to understand what he says, but he doesn’t give up until you give some sign that you get it, taking the shoe and mimicking several times before I know to tie the laces twice. He points outside, wraps his arms around his chest and shivers, and shakes his head until I ask, you want to know if it’s cold outside? He’s overcome with glee when I tell him it’s warm, and when I look at a picture of a truck he’s colored and notes that it looks like his wagon, he pats my back excitedly, and somewhere in the subsequent pride that I feel for figuring it out, I realize again I’m as much kid in all this as the one who colors.

When I come home, some days I cook dinner with J. and most days we talk a little about our days and those are good moments. Last night was the first I didn’t have to sleep early, and A. and B. cooked a delicious, delicious dinner of a tuna noodle salad, cornish hen, red cabbage and rice textured with potato. Most of their meals can’t be duplicated, because they make it up as they go and add innumerable amounts of spices and sauces they can’t recall afterwards. We ate on their balcony in the cool summer night, then closed the sliding door when it got cold and listened to them make music the same way they make food, while the girls listened and laughed. He strummed Michael’s Song from the Godfather, and sang acappella the Italian one from Part III, sung by Michael’s opera-singing son. When J. asked him to sing about fruits, he sang, some girls are like bananas, others like strawberries, I want to make a smoothie. He sang a silly tune about mom, sister and wife that earned him a hug. B. controlled mood and speed with the guitar and chimed in, carrying the last words of A’s phrases, like “louder,” with impressive timing. I love music and these people. The room was dim, it was raining sleet black outside (we caught a flash of lightning), and I fell asleep.

Today we were outdoors again, driving beneath a canopy of green trees to rest beneath the waterfall at West Rock, climbing what was called a cave and what was more like some rocks with crevices that went in one way and went out another, and grabbing a view of the city before rain splattered down. We shared red bean & jelly popsicles, nectarines, and strawberry jam and nutella sandwiches in the car, and smelled over and over some honeysuckle that Ali found.

At night, I did another thing I've never done on the beach: watch fireworks. West Haven is a small town, and the beach is a popular place to celebrate July 4. We parked a good ten-minute walk away from the beach and walked through the residential area to get to the sand, and summer was palpable. The streets were packed with families, and the beach densely peppered with the same. People were selling cotton candy, people were carrying lawn chairs and towels. We arrived just as the fireworks began, and we could see them shoot from their source up to their destination; we were close and they felt huge. At some points there would be a steady stream shooting a short distance up while others sporadically went higher, and at the end they were insanely bright like snaps of lightning. The sounds were louder too, than I've heard in the past, and some had distinct sounds, just as their colors and trajectories and lifetimes are distinct. A small group of small girls frolicked with glow in the dark sticks, singing "land of the free, for you and for me," attempting cartwheels and screaming "fireworks!" while generally paying no attention to the lights underneath which they were dancing. Afterwards we walked to the shore's edge, and Allison mentioned it reminded her of Puerto Rico, the last time she saw the water at night. That time the bay lit up as your brushed your hand through the water or dipped your oar into it, from the light of microorganisms. The first time I moved through water at night.

As we stood people continued to set off fireworks, in all corners, such that standing in one spot you felt the sparks in every direction and couldn't see them all at once. Families set them off in the sand and water, and the ocean picked up the colors and melted them. We walked away as the fireworks kept going, and drove home with the windows down to keep the cool summer air.

One thing I've yet to do at the beach is swim. I do as I do in the hospital--I wade, I move with the waves, I jump the waves, I sink into the waters and gaze up and down, but I don't know how to swim. I'm scared to learn, but I want to and have to, and when I do it, I trust that the ocean will again make the sensations of what's commonplace as strong and sharp as those that little ones feel.