I could remember the difficulties we had then, trying to keep our doors open…. People brought chickens in and meat to pay their bills. They would paint or do work around the hospital of some kind…. Nurses would come in and beg us to give them a job without pay, for room and board, because they were starving.

- Odon Anderson, hospital executive and future Blue Cross executive. 

heroin-e:

Days yet to come stretch out before us
like a row of candles, burning brightly ―
vivacious candles, golden and warm.

The days that have passed fall behind us,
burned-out candles in a dismal row:
those closest at hand still smoking;
cold candles, melted and deformed.

I don’t want to look; their state saddens me;
it saddens me to remember their initial glow.
I look ahead, instead, to my lighted candles.

I don’t want to turn back to see, with horror,
how quickly the dark row of candles has lengthened,
how rapidly the number of dead candles has grown.

must have C.P. Cavafy book. yes? yes!

The God Abandons Antony

by Constantine P. Cavafy

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

fireland:

My daughter says, “We need to talk.” I sit down and fold my arms and sigh.

She says: “Dad, you know how we got a bunch of peaches yesterday?” I say yeah I guess so, it’s not like I monitor the comings and goings of all the groceries (not true). She whispers: “OK well I ate three peaches.”

I start to get up, assuming this will go the way most of her stories go, i.e., a half-hour plotless stream-of-consciousness Woolf-esque yawnfest. She sits me back down and says: “I mean three whole peaches. Every part.”

My eyes widen in horror. You ate three peach pits, didn’t you! She nods and here come the waterworks. “What’s going to happen to me, Daddy?” she cries.

I tear away from her sweaty little grip. I ask the question.

“Yes!” she shrieks. “Yes I did just drink some water!”

I can’t bear to look at her as I tell her it’s too late, she already watered the seeds. Even now the baby trees are unfurling their tiny leaves in her belly. An hour from now, two at the most, they will burst forth in the grossest, goriest way imaginable. But at least she can die knowing that she’ll be providing her family with fresh, delicious peaches for years to come—absolutely free of charge.

“There must be something we can do!” she wails.

“All we can do is wait,” I say, picking Entertainment Weekly back up and flipping through the pages, pausing for a moment to examine a photograph of Rashida Jones.

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New Yorker Article