In my writing group yesterday our prompts were to write a gorgeous poem or something from our everyday live during the coronavirus tumult. I picked the later.
Here goes:
To make matters worse than they already are, my husband had a mishap last week that was very worrisome. Last Monday he decided to sweep up some leaves on our front walkway and he fell against the brick wall, scraping his right arm so badly that the skin was hanging off it. He came upstairs to tell me he fell and showed me his injury with blood dripping all over the place. I took him to urgent care with a plastic bag over his arm and after a short wait, they cleaned it and wrapped it in gauze and sent us on our way with a prescription for Tylenol with a bit of codeine in it. They also took x-rays since not only did his arm hurt, he had a bump on his knee and sore ribs. Thankfully nothing was broken. Wish I could say that was the end of it. But by the time we got home blood was already seeping through the bandages. I wrapped his arm up again in a plastic bag and took him back to urgent the next day. This second time he saw a real doctor – not a nurse practitioner – who advised him to stop taking his daily full-strength aspirin – one of his atrial fibrillation remedies – for a few days. It was thinning his blood too much. She also put antibiotic ointment on his arm before bandaging it up again.
This going back and forth to the urgent care went on for two more days, then every two days until yesterday – when finally, the bleeding finally stopped. The bandage is staying clean, the scrape has dried up and the other pains from this fall are all gone.
Of course this whole event was a distraction from the real events in our daily news – the Black Lives Matter protests, Mr. Trumps’ proclamation that we won’t have coronavirus cases if we don’t test, the so-called hanging of two black men in California this week deemed suicides by the authorities but could very well be lynchings by the still uncontrolled bad cops. I was dismayed reading their mother’s say, after their son’s bodies were found hanging from trees near public buildings, black men don’t die in public. And they weren’t depressed, they didn’t have mental illness or COVID 19.
Another incident that has caught my attention this week is the removal of the movie, Gone with the Wind, from the HBO Max lineup. I read the book when I was eleven. I grew up with that movie and was immediately caught up with the costumes, the scenery, the gorgeous people, and their sexy romances. Never did I give a thought to how the black actors were portrayed in the film and how the film glorified the Confederacy. One plus, however, was that Hattie McDaniel who played Scarlet’s Nanny, was the first black actor to receive a best supporting actor Academy Award. I never heard until lately that so many black people protested the book and movie when they came out. What a real dummy I was – and still am where Gone with the Wind is concerned. Even though I own a copy of the book (it belonged to my father) and a video version of the movie, I don’t expect to ever read it or see it again. One other tidbit. Martin Luther King, Jr. sang in a boys’ choir at the movie premier when he was twelve years old. I wonder what he thought of it.
So the thing is, is the news outside my life worse than what’s going on inside of it? I suspect both are equally as bad. Definitely not worthy of a gorgeous poem.
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