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| With a sketchbook, even the Emergency Room is tolerably interesting. This, from last month’s visit. |
Yesterday morning I struggled up out of sleep to the sound of my phone ringing. My second oldest child was taking her turn with the collywobbles-sans-merci and needed a doctor. Without thinking much about it, I threw my clothes on my back, my backpack in my car, and slipped down the Thruway to Buffalo.
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| Any place people are sitting, there’s a drawing waiting to happen. |
I drill into my kids that they should carry a scraper, candle, matches, chocolate or energy bar, small folding shovel, and an extra jacket or blanket in their car. The deaths in Buffalo last month should be a reminder that this is not just motherly paranoia, but a reality for America’s snow belt.
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| You will never be bored, or at least not impossibly bored. |
I’m going to add one thing to my own list: a sketchbook. Even though I’m an old pro at hospitals, the before-dawn phone call rattled me, and I didn’t check to be sure it was in my backpack. I spent nine hours in waiting rooms, and all I could find to draw on was my own eyeglasses prescription.
Neither waiting room had magazines, which were, in my day, the last refuge of the terminally-bored person. They’ve apparently been replaced by large television sets. Daytime TV is shockingly bad. I might have already known this except that when I’m in waiting rooms, my practice is to burrow in with my pencil, drawing the passing parade.
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| And occasionally, waiting rooms contain delightful surprises, like this elegant skeleton. |
Let that be a lesson to me. Be prepared. Make sure my sketchbook is always in my backpack where it belongs.
Oh, and my daughter is doing fine, thanks.
I remember the blizzard of 66 in Otisco, south of Syracuse… when we got caught in the bus in the middle of a blizzard on our way home from school at noon, (they let us out early, but not early enough). We were in the bus which was stuck (as were the snowplows) with snow climbing up the sides of the bus (5 feet or so) for hours on end… Just waiting to get unplugged and able to go home. I HAD MY SKETCHBOOK WITH ME (I was even then a blooming artist)..so I entertained the little kids by sketching portraits and boy was that a lifesaver for the kids and me! Eventually we did get unstuck and the bus made it up and down many more hills to our country home, by dinnertime!
Great story, Corinne! You once took me by your childhood home, and I'm amazed that a bus would try that even in summer!
But what a purgatory being stuck on a school bus must have been! I hope they let the girls in your school wear pants. You must have gotten cold after that many hours.
Merry Christmas and many blessings, friend!
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