The back stairway offers an expansive view of the east side of the city. Across the river, on top of a hill sits Mercy Capitol. It was known as Des Moines General when my dad was hospitalized there after his bout with colon cancer, then it was bought out by Mercy, the hospital where I work now, the very hospital from which I'm noticing this view. Dad was there twenty years ago. Jesus. Twenty years.
It was Mercy Capitol when the woman I was living with had surgery following complications from a simple kidney stone removal procedure. That was in the fall of 2005, following the weird summer of Mom's mystery illness, and the revelation of her cancer, but after she had been sent home and seemed to be doing fine.
Directly across from Mercy is the huge central post office. My brother Keith worked there in 1975, the same year he took me to the River Hills theater to see 2001. The River Hills was an old Cinerama theater, and it was located just down the street. It's gone now.
So is Keith, so is Mom, so is Dad. So, for that matter, is the woman I lived with in 2005, not gone in a corporeal sense, but still someone who mattered to me, then disappeared. So much of my life I see through this window, a crazy mirror of things that were and might have been. The temptation to stand here is overwhelming, to relive my life, to wallow in nostalgia.
But I have work to do, so I hurry down the stairs without looking back.
