Pickle jar

At Mt Sinai West, some of the radiology rooms have these sections of beautiful, backlit tiles that hang above the machine. It’s some kind of flowering tree, maybe cherry blossoms, against a blue, blue sky. It seems like a lot of effort to go to for something you are only going to see briefly as you lie there on your back about to be slid into the machine. I know a lot of people get freaked out by scans, especially the claustrophobic MRI so maybe it’s a distraction or a moment of calm. Although the MRI reminds me of the coffins the Starship Enterprise jettisons into deep space when a crew member dies, it doesn’t actually bother me. At this point, I have had so many that sometimes I fall asleep in there. CT scans are faster, so they are not a good napping option despite being much quieter. While I’m in there staring at the beige plastic above me, I think about Kate, who was a frequent visitor to our campus health center. Having grown up without insurance, it never occurred to me to go there but between her asthma and everything else Kate was on a first name basis with the staff. At one point, she decided that they needed a poster above the gyn exam table for people to focus on at an uncomfortable moment. She settled down with her poster board and art supplies and went to work on it. All these years later, I can’t remember what was on it, I just remember her busy cheerfulness whenever she was in the middle of a project. One piece of art she made for me our first year together hangs by my bed. It’s a poem, written by our friend Anne. You can be a late-spring Forest Smiling quiet and new green, earth a damp sponge underfoot. You unroll a tangled rug for me of crisp leaves and roots, slipping needles and the pale sweet uncurling of shoots. You stretch to sky with your adolescent trees- Your branches implore me to choose and climb and my arms answer with a gorgeous ache Your new leaves just-washed salad hides me, sighing In warm wind and cold showers and the cool And shining in your depths - a sudden lake. Kate wrote out the poem in dark green oil pastel, all except the the last three words which are in light blue, and she shaded in the background with a different green. She gave it to me with a note that said, “Anne wrote this, but I love you more.” Even at Hampshire, jamming the pre med requirements into three years was a lot of work, and I had various other things I was working on, plus a work study job- and the tendrils of the darkness that would eventually take Kate down were already surfacing here and there, but we somehow had time for so much colorful laughter and silly projects. I was working on my Div 3, a year long project where I interviewed young people with HIV from all over the country about their experiences with health care and their “ideal clinic,” a paper that would run over 100 pages at the end. As I worked, I ate my way through jar after jar of Vlasic pickles, somehow they focused my mind. Kate made off with one of my empty jars and when she brought it back it was a lamp, the jar filled with green glass pebbles and the shade dotted with little pickle shaped cut outs. She had a gift for turning trash into beauty. But now the lamp is out and a jar is just an empty jar and poems are just words on a page with no one to bring them color.