Privileged Information - To Read at Poetry Reading This evening

Privileged Information   (photo - from family first aid kit) - Happy Valentine's Day

I always knew my father was in the army.  I knew because my father would tell stories about his life.  
The story of the MP was just one example, this was the story about the M.P.: 

I was so worried about my stomach the rest of the way over that all I ate was some canned milk and a few of those little oyster crackers.  I didn't eat anything of any substance so when we got over to Liverpool I was pretty weak.  I did manage to carry my seventy-pound pack and my duffle bag which probably weighed another sixty-five pounds up out of the ship from C-Deck to B-Deck to A-Deck and over the gang plank down to the dock.

And there I thought I'd take a bit of a rest.  So I sat down and leaned up against a little building there for a few minutes and one of the MP's on the dock came over and said, “What's the idea?  What are you goofing off for, why are you falling out?”

Why I told him what had happened.

So he sez, “Well, wait a minute.”

When I got my breath he took ahold of one end of my duffle bag and I got the other and we  hauled it over to what they call a goods wagon, that's sort of a freight box or freight car on the English railway.  That's where all the rest of them were putting theirs.  That's the last I saw of that till we got to Everley Manor.  But if anybody complains about MP's to me, I always tell em, how, one of em was a friend of mine.

The story about the M.P. was that kind of story:  there are kinds of stories, one kind was a testimony faithfully remembered, “…if anybody complains about MPs to me, I always tell em, how, one of em was a friend of mine.”

There is the story, a kind of story,  about when a person was born. It was a nine-day stay at Tacoma General Hospital.  The doctor told her not to try to have more children.  It would probably kill her, the doctor said. When the Runeberg met at the Valhalla Hall he went over to announce that I was there, that I was a girl.  He must have been at the hospital a lot of the time.

They would tell me, the nurse when I was born was a black woman.  A Negro woman.

From next door above the house, as soon as we were at home, my mother’s family probably walked next door to visit from having Thanksgiving dinner.  We took a taxi to the hospital, my father probably said.   He would tell a story about Lake Whatcom, where he was born in a log cabin, or a story about working his way through pharmacy school, or about the army.  

My mother would say she did not tell a lot of stories the way my father did.  She could chime in, like a tapped tone on a xylophone, that my father told the taxi driver all the way to look out for chuck holes on the road.

He would not talk about patients or about the medical procedures.  Those were restricted information.  He told only one or two stories about working at Northern State Hospital.  Again, he would not talk about the psychiatric patients or about the medical procedures.  These were restricted information.  But he would tell one or two stories about Northern State Hospital.  This was how I always knew my father was in the army.  And how I always knew my father had worked at Northern State Hospital.