spring

This is the first day this year that I've felt my socks--you know? That feeling that they are just one layer too much. And its not like they are heavy socks. Just light little things, but my feet were ready to feel dirt. It is so warm. Some Portlander's are worried, but I suppose it'll work out. It'll be wet before we know it. Hard to say. Maybe I drug the dry south up when I came. Anyway...

I met a woman at work today. I was sitting at my desk, drinking the third cup of coffee, arriving like I do at the butt-crack of dawn. The phone was ringing and ringing, but from a distance. I walked up to the front lobby and answered it. She had called from her room. She asked if I was missing a patient. She didn't know who she was calling -- thought she had made an outside call. She asked, "Are you missing a patient by the name of (we'll call her) Ruby Miles?" Well, it was early, and to tell you the truth, I never really know whether somebody may have made a break for it during the night, so I took the cautious route--my least favorite, but most useful when liability is at issue. I said, "Well, anything's possible. Who's calling?"

"Ruby Miles," she answered, her voice crackling like paper through the line.

Ah. My critical assessment skills spring into action. "She's nuts," I tell myself.

"Hi, Ruby," I say. "Where do you think you are?"

California. And I've got to get back to Gresham."

Oh. okay. I tell her I will find her. She tells me I couldn't possibly because she is somewhere in California. Trust me, I tell her.

I walked down the hall and around the corner and into Ruby's room. I introduced myself as the person she had been talking to on the phone. She was just lost. "But I'm in California," she insisted. "Well, I'm in Portland," I said, ever observant. "How do you explain that?"

She couldn't. But she tried. It was a long story, beginning in childhood with a mother who wouldn't be happy. Wouldn't have dinner out. Would rather wait at home for a husband on a three-day drunk who would come home with bargain jewelery, a handful of magic beans, hoping to secure forgiveness, which we all know is free, but damned hard to come by.

She said, and kepy saying, "I have a good education. I'm not like some of them. I love to go out to dinner." And she told me her story as she fiddled with the remote-- a strange creature to the elderly-- with bent fingers like tree roots.