Laying trays soothes the activity of the body, and the mind works softly.
I meditate on love. I say to myself that Mr. Pettitt is to be envied. I am still the wonder of the unknown to him: I exist, walk, talk, every day beneath the beam of his eye, impenetrable.
He fell down again yesterday, and his foot won't heal. He has time before him.
But in a hospital one has never time, one is never sure. He has perhaps been here long enough to learn that—to feel the insecurity, the impermanency.
At any moment he may be forced to disappear into the secondary stage of convalescent homes.
Yes, the impermanency of life in a hospital! An everlasting dislocation of combinations.
Like nuns, one must learn to do with no nearer friend than God.
Bolts, in the shape of sudden, whimsical orders, are flung by an Almighty whom one does not see.
The Sister who is over me, the only Sister who can laugh at things other than jokes, is going in the first week of next month. Why? Where? She doesn't know, but only smiles at my impatience. She knows life—hospital life.
It unsettles me as I lay my spoons and forks. Sixty-five trays. It takes an hour to do. Thirteen pieces on each tray. Thirteen times sixty-five ... eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements—taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have left them.