The Boogey Man of the Woods

 Some of my earliest memories go back to bedtimes.

My oldest sister, six years ahead of me, shared my bedroom.
When the day’s light retreated in the evening hours, darkness would fall on our bedroom too, the time when sister would sometimes raise the specter of the Boogey Man by scratching a nail on the metal surface of her bed.
“Listen!” she would exclaim in a frightened whisper, “You hear the Boogey Man scratch inside the corner cabinet?  Maybe he’s coming to get you!”
Part of me knew it wasn’t so, but the too easily quickened irrational part of the young (do we ever outgrow it entirely?) felt haunted by a demon.
Maybe it was my sister’s way of exercising (and, perhaps, thereby exorcising) her own demons, but the memory of that awful scratching sound in the dark has stuck with me.

Did it prepare me for the encounter with the Boogey Man in the woods?

And WWII, the most monstrous Boogey Man of all?
Perhaps it did – to intensify, not allay the fear.
                        
                                                         *-*

Once upon a time there was a little boy …

The little boy had a big sister and brother, but they were too old to play with him.
He also had a younger sister, but she was too little.
So he played with a cousin who lived next door and was only a year older.
She would come over, and they would play pretend games or walk to the woods together that lay way at the back of the farm.
They would walk through the fields, climb over the gates that divided the fields, and cross the little bridge over the stream that ran through the fields.
Sometimes the two would pick a bouquet of buttercups from the back field next to the woods and take it as a surprise present to Mama.
That made Mama so happy that she would treat the little playmates to a cookie or candy.

To the little boy and his cousin, the woods were scary and therefore exciting.
Rabbits and hares lived there and other creatures of the wild.
Inside the woods the sun did not shine.

The children would enter the woods down a narrow path.
The deeper the path would lead them into the woods, the more hesitantly they walked.
“Ssshh,” they would whisper, “don’t let the Boogey Man hear us!”
Then, scaring themselves, they would soon turn around and hurry back to the sunshine and the view of their home in the distance, just to feel safe again.

 But one day they didn’t feel safe at all.
They had gone farther into the woods than usual, holding each other by the hand, moving slowly and very quietly.
The path had become narrower now and overgrown in places with brushwood.
They had never gone this far; they felt surrounded by the darkness of danger.
Then, just off to the right of their path, they saw it: a wild hare, almost perfectly blending into the dry dust-colored underbrush.
They stopped dead in their tracks.
It looked like the hare did too, because it was not moving.
They stood and stared open-mouthed: why wasn’t the hare moving?

Then they heard the snapping sound of twigs: someone or something was coming their way!
“Let’s run,” gasped the little boy to his cousin, and he tugged her hand to rush back toward the sunlight.
Instead she pulled him off the path into the trees, then crouched down behind a thicket.
“Don’t move and don’t make a sound,” she hissed into his ear.
The little boy bit his lip; he was scared and he wanted to cry.  His heart hammered in his chest and his body shook.
But the two watched through the tangle of twisted scrub brush that hid them from view.

And then they saw the Boogey Man, a large man in a blue farm jacket.
He stopped where they had seen the hare.  They saw him bend down with his back toward them.  They heard him growl, “Gotcha!”  When he straightened up again, they saw that he held the dead hare and dropped it into the burlap sack he had been carrying.  He swung the sack over his shoulder and disappeared in the same direction he had come.

 On the way home, the little boy and girl did not stop to pluck flowers for their mama.
And for a long time they did not go back to the darkness of the woods.
They did not know about poachers then; but they had seen that the Boogey Man was real, and that was more than they had wanted.

Back at home, they would play church or school, until the girl cousin had to go to the real school, a year before the little boy did.
Now he had to play by himself.
He missed his cousin who had also been his best friend.
And he looked forward to his 6^th birthday, when he too could be in a real classroom.

But when the little boy had his 6^th birthday, something very frightening happened….
            [see “When War Came,” the blog entry for April 30, 2011]

 

Angels of Mercy

Some people go to work each morning to pursue the sullen craft of bullying others into submission.

Others, less able or interested in making the world revolve around self, simply re-enter their appointed niche each day for un-heroic but faithful service.
Perhaps most find themselves in this latter group.
There may be no trophies at the end of a day and not even a eulogy at the end of a life, but the value of life for some does not lie in fancy trophies or in fine testimonies.

Yet I would give both to those who in times of need have been angels of mercy to me and to so many others among us in this family of mortals for whom sometimes the routine of a hospital becomes more familiar than that of home and job.

As I think back now, I would give both to Mrs. Sobota, LPN, who often functioned as a mother substitute. 

A civilian nurse in an Army hospital, Mrs. Sobota would greet me cheerfully each morning, place a caring cool hand on my forehead, and begin to transfer her jovial mood to me. 
I still remember the tenderness and love with which she held me at those times when I was feverish and anxious and in pain as doctors probed and squeezed and performed their sometimes unwelcome medical services.
To most who knew her, Mrs. Sobota may have seemed a very ordinary human; to me she was an angel of mercy.

And I will always remember Lt. Pat Philips, RN, who would on those nights when sleep would not come take time for a personal chat.

I don’t remember what we talked about.
But I know that her human kindness proved invariably conducive to sleep; and even when it did not, the reassurance blessed me that to a young Army officer I was not merely Pvt. US 56227916 but cared for and cared about as a real person who felt a bit lonely and fearful now and again.

There have been others: in isolation wards, recovery wards, and ambulatory wards: in military, VA, and private hospitals – God’s angels of mercy are needed and found everywhere. 

I’m grateful still for their special touch and spirit, for they were surely as vital to me as all the medicine prescribed to make me well.

Of course, as anyone who’s been hospitalized knows all too well, there’s another kind:  one who makes the rounds, delivers the medicine, jabs in the needle, takes pulse and temperature with icy efficiency and indifference.

They chill the room and leave the patient feeling guilty for being so burdensome.
At best they’re the competent mechanics of medicine; at worst they’re the cruel compounders of human misery.
In either case, they chose the wrong profession.

That may not be fair.

A hospital isn’t exactly a country club.
The pressure is enormous, the human pain and grief everywhere, and the work emotionally and physically exhausting.
In that environment day after day, year after year, many may become rather grim if not calloused human beings who impose on self a degree of insensitivity in order to preserve some inner resources.
Outside of a hospital, one can understand that.
Inside, as a patient, one will never appreciate it.
And that makes the angels of mercy so special.

Most of us will need hospitalization sometime in life.

Nearly all of us will spend our dying hours inside a hospital or hospice room.
At such times, when we confront the fact of our frailty and mortality, when we feel utterly vulnerable and dependent, when we are frightened for ourselves and our dear ones – then the soft touch of a doctor’s or nurse’s hand and an encouraging word minister to us as a balm in Gilead.

Praise God for the gift of caring, of compassion and empathy.

Praise God for the angels of mercy among us.
And though there may be no trophies or eulogies, all of us remember the words of Christ himself:
“Blessed are the merciful.”

“Emergency”

All of us have memories.

Some are so smashingly good, they still have the power to induce goose bumps.

Some are so grindingly painful, they nearly stop the heart.
For very different reasons, it’s good to revisit both kinds now and then.
 

The memory of this “emergency” partakes of a bit of both dimensions.

 
Pain, like an alarm clock inside the stomach, early in the morning. 
Nauseating pain.  Can’t be up.  Call in sick.  Go to Med Center.
Back home again, sleepy from the pills, but the pain still stabbing the insides, somewhere.
Where?
Why?

 Late afternoon now.

        The pain is getting worse.
Back to the Med Center.  This time a referral to own doctor.  Meet him at Emergency in an hour.
We go, vexed more with the inconvenience of it all than worried about some pending doom. 
After all, what could go wrong so suddenly?  It must be some minor thing the doctor will soon be able to fix.

We reach the hospital’s Emergency Department.

By the time we get to the nurse’s desk, my wife needs it to lean on.
She’s “getting sick”; the nurse quickly escorts her away from the desk and into the waiting room, then goes for the barf tray.
It’s too late; Ruth empties her stomach on the waiting room floor.
Now I know why they don’t carpet those floors.

They take her somewhere now. 

I stay in the waiting room, waiting.
Not much happening.
One little boy, looking like a miniature doctor with glasses, tie, and sport jacket, walks around, holding a bandaged hand slightly away from his body.  He makes the rounds, stopping here and there and asking what’s wrong.
I tell him my wife is sick.

During the next few minutes the activity picks up a bit.

A couple walks in.  He’s a skinny guy in a leather jacket, a scrubby beard, and a look as if he hasn’t washed in a while.
He takes a 10-inch knife from a holster in his belt that was hidden by his jacket.
I watch him grab the woman’s hand and make a light cut in the band aid on her finger.
She cringes.
He says loudly: “Nobody said it wasn’t going to hurt.”
She turns away from him.
He’s put his surgeon’s knife back.  He sounds angry now: “You act like you’ve been hit by a grenade or sumpin’.”

A mother comes in with a howling girl of about 12, holding a bloody towel to her mouth.

The mother hops around the screaming girl, shouting that she has to control herself.
She tries to shake her into calmness and says: “You better cooperate or they’ll put you in a straightjacket again just like last time!”

They’re taking my wife’s pulse and blood pressure.

I fill out the usual forms.
Then they put her to bed in a room not far away.
They’ll be doing x-rays and a battery of tests.
It’s going to take a while.

I go back to the waiting room.

An Hispanic couple has come in with a baby, but it seems to be nothing urgent.
The little doctor boy with the sore hand comes back to me.
I find out his name.
Bobby asks me why I have a gray beard; he says his dad’s is dark.
I say, “That’s nice.”

The woman’s finger is examined now.

It looks like an ordinary cut to me.
The man with the knife hovers close, more threatening than concerned, it seems.
They take the woman’s pulse and blood pressure too.

The girl with the bloody mouth is calm now.  Maybe they gave her something – a sedative rather than a straightjacket.

Her mouth injury looks like nothing more serious than a cut lip.
Her mother walks to the payphone and in a hushed, emergency tone talks to someone.

The Hispanic couple is still walking their baby girl.

Everybody is waiting for something, for someone, but the emergency nature of many things tends to dissipate in an emergency waiting room.

I go to see if my wife’s been wheeled back down again.

         I find out they want her to stay.

They need to do more testing, maybe even exploratory surgery to find out the cause of the pain.

         The doctors are obviously concerned.
Now, for the first time, I am too.
Sometimes an emergency turns out to be real.

I walk back to the car.

Must go home to arrange for another baby sitter who can stay late into the night.
I call my college student daughter.
I call our pastor.
Then I drive back to the hospital.
         I feel scared.
I worry what God might have in mind for us.
I pray, but my thoughts won’t focus; not yet.
There’s too much uncertainty now.

Back in the hospital I discover the doctors have decided that exploratory surgery is necessary.  Apparently something is constricting the bowel, but they have no idea what they’ll find; it may or it may not be serious.

Ruth is calm, even serene.
She doesn’t feel the pain now; they’ve taken care of that.
She says she’s ready for whatever may happen.
Both sedation and faith enable her to say that.
But I’m not ready.
And I know that I won’t be until I have to.
Or even then.

I watch her as she’s wheeled to OR.

          Then I’m alone.

Almost time for surgery now.

Our daughter comes, and then our pastor too.
I’m glad to have both there.
Psalm 103 is read, and then we pray together, placing this emergency into God’s caring and healing hands.
But my heart keeps pleading.

The three of us sit in another waiting room now, close to surgery.

It’s past midnight.
I think of the line “take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.”
I try, and discover how hard that is.
I still feel part of the weight myself and can’t let go.
We try to talk a little, make the time pass.
But mostly we wait.
And wonder.
And worry.
And pray, deep inside ourselves.

Waiting for a possible life-or-death verdict is a fearful thing.

Shortly after one o’clock, the doctor comes.

            He has good news: the surgery went well.
Scar tissue had put its squeeze on the bowel; fairly simple to correct.
She should be fine.

Prayers of thanks flow freely on the ride back into the night.

But I remember keenly how frail is our life, how vulnerable to emergencies of every kind.
And remember, too, with profound gratitude, that the Lord is near to all those who call on him, and that he has us not only but the whole world in his hands.