It was early spring, but the earth seemed oblivious. Snow still blanketed the ground. On roads the whiteness was sullied by the brown and gray of dirt, gravel, and sand, admixed by motor vehicles and a few trudging pedestrians.
My father still used winter tires or chains on the car and, when he adjusted the latter, thought wistfully of Tennessee, from whence they had come, where winters were milder.
A man of many interests and talents, and one of the first autodidacts I knew, Father for a time took elementary Russian from a man in the town whose surname ended in ‘–chuk.’ Sadly, the Russian, an affable burly man with a bushy moustache and comely daughter, would later succumb as he clutched his chest while shoveling snow in his driveway, bringing truth to his prediction: ‘This white stuff will be the death of me yet.’
Both flora and fauna retreated for the winter, which was not yet ready to leave. Birds seemed a relative exception. They — tanagers, sparrows, finches, chickadees, and cedar waxwings — congregated in numbers, flitting and fluttering, noisy in their efforts at primacy, at the feeder just outside the north facing ground floor window of the house my family occupied.
Where we lived was a small town (which would have been smaller without the schools), and there was no hospital. The nearest was two miles away, but that was not the preferred facility.
Instead, my mother, great with child number 6, was taken to the New England Sanitarium & Hospital in Stoneham, north of Boston, a place over 40 miles east, to be delivered.
It is here that I entered the world, bawling at the sudden change of temperature and startled by the bright light and loss of comfort of my former confines.
However, my first vivid recollection of the place was when I was a preschooler, and an older brother and sister and I had our tonsils removed. The indications for such action may have been weak, but times, and medical practice, change. I do not try to second guess, but secretly wonder if the otolaryngologist may have given my parents a cut rate.
Ether was the general anesthetic du jour. It has since been supplanted.
Once in the operatory, an unending linear series of metallic gold spheres collided in my head. I tried, without success, to escape them.
The next thing I knew I’d returned to the land of consciousness, but my throat was so very sore. The pain — a fire behind my teeth, razorblades in the back of my mouth; something new and not at all wonderful — was barely tolerable at rest. Swallowing was excruciating. Talking above a whisper was like swallowing.
It was scant comfort that my brother and sister — all of us in the same room — felt the same. We whispered to each other, as if we were in church, or a library or cemetery at night.
We were not alone — not that three children can be construed to be alone. There was a fourth bed, and, in that bed, a boy named Eddie.
I do not remember why Eddie was there. He may have had a bad leg. But I do recall he could talk.
At that time we didn’t have a signaling device by our beds to summon healthcare personnel. That was to come later. We didn’t even have an audible, like a whistle or bell.
So I’m forever grateful to Eddie for yelling, “Nurse! Nurse!” for us (and maybe for himself).
When she arrived, Eddie said, “They need ice cream.” He pointed to us.
The nurse brought each of us some in cups.
Never did ice cream taste so good. Even though the relief from the searing pain in our throats was temporary, the ice cream did provide some relief, and any was better than none. The Spanish acknowledge this in a proverb: ‘Mas vale algo que nada.’
I’ve been partial to vanilla ice cream ever since.
I don’t recall if we ever thanked Eddie properly before we parted ways, never to see one another again. I hope his leg healed.
My next memory of the place in Middlesex County was when I was 14. I had developed a condition which, while not life-threatening, was uncomfortable and bound to become worse if ignored. Correctible, it required a surgery from which it would take most of that summer to recover.
The surgeon was the same one who would not long after remove my mother’s gallbladder.
My mother went to 5 Woodland Road at least a couple times after my birth, once for the cholecystectomy and, earlier, for back trouble which was precipitated or exacerbated by retrieving a beanbag I had succeeded in landing in a lamp that hung from the middle of the downstairs ceiling of our house. When I visited her in the hospital, I tried to assuage my guilt by whispering that I was sorry.
Her words of forgiveness lingered long after she was discharged and the pain had abated.
It was only a place, some buildings, beds, offices, wards, and the things and people that went with it — a hospital. There were many like it; some were better in many ways. So why did I feel a sense of loss when I learned that, in 1999, it had gone bankrupt?
Some of us form attachments to inanimate objects: an old pair of comfortable shoes, a teddy bear, a car that has serviced us for years. Or, as cartoonist Charles Schulz of ‘Peanuts’ reminds, if we’re like Linus van Pelt, a blanket.
One of my young grandson’s favorite stuffed animals is a multicolored caterpillar, its many segments each a different hue. He has several of these endearing toys, of varying size and age, but the one he loves most is one of the oldest. It’s worn, with faded colors, and is less appealing to me than some of the others. Its stuffing is uneven; one segment has almost none.
But that is the one for which his father drove 15 minutes from their house to mine to retrieve, after a sleepover, because he missed it so much. It was only after intense searching, including a favorite hiding area, a secluded spot behind a couch, that it was located and he was consoled.
My fondness for the hospital in Middlesex County didn’t approach that of my grandson for his ‘catapee,’ but neither was it just another place. Perhaps it was something in between.
E G White, one of the church co-founders, was instrumental in the acquisition of the hospital.
For a time, before it became defunct, it was named the Boston Regional Medical Center.
For those of you who like this sort of thing (I admit to a certain fascination myself, but then I sometimes count steps between cross dividers in a concrete sidewalk), it was founded in 1899 and went under almost a century later, in 1999.
I won’t get into reasons for its closure. They may have been multiple and diverse. Some articles written about the history of New England Sanitarium and Hospital, later (1967) New England Memorial Hospital, invoke the specter of malfeasance, which I have no way of verifying, so I will refrain from further comment. It may have lost its sense of mission, whatever that was construed to be.
Suffice it to say, I don’t think E G White would have been happy at this end to an institution which she envisioned as a sort of a Battle Creek Sanitarium East.
In addition to being born there, many patients doubtless spent their last days on earth in the hospital.
Who would have guessed that it would have its time in the sun, only to, at the last, sink below the horizon into obscurity and all that really kept it alive was memory?
