It’s 1990 again. If just for tonight. I am sitting in a Cancer treatment center hospital waiting room on the 8th floor, strumming a guitar and singing to my barely two year old cousin who has leukemia. He’s sitting wide-eyed on the floor, watching me intensely, probably thinking I’m eating candy or chewing gum and just not sharing any with him. The sun is setting in the smoggy sky, creating a panoramic of orange, pink, yellow and blue behind me. Busy streets buzz as if the night is not coming. Above the orange sky, stars struggle to shine in the pale sky.
Suddenly, another toddler comes stumbling into the waiting room. He’s carrying two cookies, and is wearing a diaper three sizes too big. It falls down around his ankles, he trips and falls, the cookies tumble from his hands.
I stop playing and singing, looking up to see that I have an audience.
A chubby teenage boy, and an adult male patient of the hospital, holding a second toddler, are standing just inside the area. I am suddenly quiet. The toddler who has fallen, gets up, steps out of his diaper, picks up both cookies, and toddles over to my cousin, handing him a cookie that has been on the floor.
“Don’t stop singing. I want to hear how it ends,” the teenager says.
Quietly, I finish the song, as the patient takes the cookies away from the toddlers, and puts his son’s diaper back on.
That’s how I met Dennis. The toddler who raced into the waiting room was Jess. I was there for Micah’s second birthday because his mother was convinced he wouldn’t live to see his second birthday. I talked with Dennis for more than four hours that night. I met him in the 5pm hour and we talked until 9pm. It became a ritual for us to meet up at the waiting room. That night he gave me the bookmark you see in this entry. Of course, that’s a really bad scan and I wasn’t in the mood for cleaning it up in Photoshop because I was under the impression that we were going to go out for a dinner tonight, but I guess I was wrong about that too. Here I sit, dressed up, waiting for our friend from the west coast to come and pick me up because he’s been waiting at the resort since 5pm and no one is there. I was supposed to sing the same song I was singing when we met: The Morning After.
No, I’m not bitter. Just disappointed. At least I get to meet the man I’ve been talking to on and off for the past ten years.