My husband and I sit side by side at the dinner table in the North Parlor of the Carolina Inn. We have driven here after a full day’s work in Danville, Virginia for a dinner lecture about kidney transplantation. We have been served a fine meal of filet mignon, smoked turkey and roasted potatoes. I am listing to the left slightly, in part because my full stomach tends that way and in part because I am tired. It is nine o’clock at night and I am worn out from a busy day that began at 6 am.
I lean a hair more to the left and begin a whining whisper into my husband’s ear, “We are going to be so late getting home. I am getting tired now. I’ve learned a lot and now I have had it. I think that they could have cut the cocktail hour by 30 minutes and planned the talk for one hour instead of 90 minutes. Don’t they know we have a long ride home? We can’t just leave, I guess. Surely they’ll be done soon.”
As I finish my diatribe I look up to find Frank’s gaze over my right shoulder. He leans back down and whispers to me, “Look, the waitress has collected all the leftover food for the puppies.”
He turns back to the lecturer, but I look over my right shoulder at the tray by the wall. The waitress has indeed collected a big plate of steak scraps, roll pieces, leftover broccoli and potato chunks. I have to smile when I think about our house and how we save our leftovers for our two outside dogs. The waitress at the Carolina Inn has, of course, consolidated the food so that she can stack 15 dinner plates and a similar number of bread plates on the tray. This few minutes of distraction from the lecture, however, cheers me up and I am able to relax through creme brulee and the final 10 minutes of the transplant talk.
The next day Frank and I are walking one block from our clinic to the hospital for morning rounds. For August it is a pleasant, sunny morning, a beautiful day. I am complaining again. From the curb to the elevator I bend Frank’s ear about the schedule changes I don’t like, the irritable people I have already encountered this morning, the busy day that is ahead. We step into the hospital elevator and Frank pushes the 3rd and 4th floor buttons, then plasters himself against the elevator wall. “What if the walls were a magnet and you were metal?” he muses.
I look at him on his tiptoes, backed up against the elevator wall, arms spread wide, so that his finger tips touch the corners, and I have to smile.
“I guess you’d be stuck on the elevator,” I reply with a chuckle.
Some of us are born for confinement and some of us think outside the box. “You only live once,” he tells me.